A few, very few, took a more charitable view, basing it on the shy, slow flutter of Marley’s eyelids—they charged it up to an acute sensitiveness of his grotesque and abnormal appearance. That isn’t the way they put it, though.
“Looks like hell, an’ he knows it,” said they judicially. “Let the beggar alone.”
It was good advice, whether their analysis was or wasn’t—Pete Boileau, the baggage master, can vouch for that. As the time-worn saying has it, it came like a bolt from the blue, and—but just a minute, we’re overrunning our targets and that means trouble.
Things had gone along, as far as Marley was concerned, without anything very startling or out of the way happening for quite a spell, and Regan, who had stood closer to Chick Coogan than any other man on the division before the young engineer died, had begun to look on Marley with a little more interest—as a sort of deus ex machina for Mrs. Coogan. It seemed to afford the big-hearted master mechanic a good deal of relief. He got to talking about it to Carleton one morning about a month after Marley’s advent to the Hill Division.
“No, of course, I don’t know anything about him,” he said. “Nobody does, I guess they don’t. But he minds his own business and does what he has to do well enough, h’m? The old lady’s been getting a little feeble lately—kind of wearing out, I guess she is. I was thinking Marley was worth a little more than a dollar ten a day, what?”
They were sitting in the super’s office, and Carle-ton’s glance, straying out through the window from where he sat at his desk, fastened on Marley’s clumsy, ungainly figure hopping across the yard tracks from the roundhouse toward the station platform. He smiled a little and looked back at Regan.
“I guess so, Tommy—if it will do her any good. I wouldn’t bank on it, though. He’s a queer card. Impresses you with the feeling that there’s something you ought to know about him—and don’t. I’ve a notion, somehow, I’ve seen him before.”
“Have you?” said Regan. “That’s funny. I’ve thought I had myself once or twice, but I guess it’s imagination more than anything else. Anyway, he seems to remember what Mrs. Coogan did for him. I dunno what she’d do even now without the board money, little as it is, to help out. There’s no use borrowing trouble I suppose, but later on I dunno what on earth she’ll do. She’s prouder than a sceptered queen—and she won’t be able to wash much longer, nor take a boarder either, what?”
Carleton sucked at his briar for a moment in silence. “We’ve all got to face the possibility of the scrap heap some day, Tommy,” he said soberly. “But it’s harder for a woman, I’ll admit—bitter hard. Sometimes things don’t seem just right. If you want to give Marley a small raise, go ahead.”
The master mechanic nodded his head.