Nor did they. The division and Big Cloud kept the secret for those two weeks—and they kept it for long after that. The little old lady in the lace cap never knew—they ranked her high, those pioneering women kind of hers in that little mountain town, those rough-and-ready toilers who had been her husband's mates—she never knew.
But everybody else knew, and they watched old Dan as the days went by, watched him somehow with a tight feeling in their throats, and kept aloof a little—because they didn't know what to say—kept aloof a little awkwardly, as it were. Not that there seemed much of any difference in the old engineer; it was more a something that they sensed. Old Dan came down to the roundhouse in the late afternoon an hour before train time, just as he always did, puttered and oiled around and coddled the 304 for an hour, just as he always did, just as though he was always going to do it, took his train out, came back on the early morning run, backed the 304 into the roundhouse, and trudged up Main Street to where it began to straggle into the buttes, to where his cottage and the little old lady were—just as he always did. And the little old lady, with the debt paid, went about the town for those two weeks happier-looking, younger-looking than Big Cloud had ever seen her before. That was all.
But Regan, worrying, pulling at his mustache, put it up to little Billy Dawes, old Dan's fireman, one day in the roundhouse near the end of the two weeks.
"How's Dan take it in the cab, Billy?" he asked.
The little fireman rolled the hunk of greasy waste in his hands, and swabbed at his fingers with it for a moment before he answered; then he sent a stream of blackstrap juice viciously into the pit, and with a savage jerk hurled the hunk of waste after it.
"By God!" he said fiercely.
Regan blinked—and waited.
"Just the same as ever he was," said Billy Dawes huskily, after a silence. "Just the same—when he thinks you're not looking. I've seen him sometimes when he didn't know I was looking."
Regan said: "H'm!"—kind of coughed it out, reached for his plug, as was usual with him in times of stress, bit into it deeply, sputtered something hurriedly about new piston rings for the left-hand head, and, muttering to himself, left the roundhouse.
And that night old Dan MacCaffery took out the 304 and the local passenger for the run west and the run back east—just as he always did. And the next night, and for two nights after that he did the same.