“You might have killed the man,” said Carleton sternly, at the end of an unsatisfactory twenty minutes.
“You can thank your Maker you haven’t his blood on your hands—it’s a miracle you haven’t. Don’t you know your own strength? We can’t have that sort of thing around here.”
Marley’s face seemed to grow even whiter than before and he shivered a little, though the afternoon was dripping wet with the heat and the thermometer was sizzling well up in the nineties—he shivered but his lips were hard shut and he didn’t say a word.
Carleton, for once in his life when it came to handling men, didn’t seem to be altogether sure of himself. An ordinary fight was one thing, and, generally speaking, strictly the men’s own business; but everything about Marley, from his arrival at Big Cloud to the sudden beastlike ferocity he had displayed that morning, put a little different complexion on the matter. A puzzled look settled on the super’s face as he glanced from Marley to the master mechanic, while his fingers drummed a tattoo on the edge of his desk.
“You had some provocation, Marley,” he said slowly, “I don’t want you to think I’m not taking that into consideration—but not enough to work up any such deviltry as you exhibited. You’ll never get on with the men here after this. They’ll make things pretty hard for you. I think you’d better go—for your own sake.”
There was dead silence in the super’s room for a half minute, then Regan, who had been sitting with his chair tilted back and his feet up on the window-sill, dropped the chair legs to the floor and swung around.
“I put Logan up firing yesterday,” said he. “There’s a night job wiping in the roundhouse. What do you say about it, Carleton?”
It was Marley who answered.
“Yes!” he said fiercely.
Carleton jabbed at the bowl of his pipe with his forefinger and his eyebrows went up at Marley’s sudden animation. Marley’s eyes met his with a single quick glance, and then the eyelids fluttered down covering them. There was something in the look that caught the super, something he couldn’t define. There was a plea, but there was something more—like a pledge, almost, it seemed.