"THE DEVIL AND ALL HIS WORKS"
Maguire was a little, washed-out, kind of toil-bent hostler in the roundhouse—and he married old. How old? Nobody knew—not even old Bill himself—fifty something. Mrs. Maguire presented him with a son in due course, and the son's name was Patrick Burke Maguire—but the Hill Division, being both terse and graphic by nature and education, called him "Noodles."
Noodles wasn't even a pretty baby. Tommy Regan, who was roped in to line up at the baptismal font and act as godfather because old Bill was a boiler-washer in the roundhouse, which was reason enough for the big-hearted master mechanic, said that Noodles was the ugliest and most forbidding looking specimen of progeny he had ever seen outside a zoological garden. Of course, be it understood, Regan wasn't a family man, and god-fathering wasn't a job in Regan's line, so when he got outside the church and the perspiration had stopped trickling nervously down the small of his back and he'd got a piece of blackstrap clamped firmly home between his teeth, he told old Bill, by way of a grim sort of revenge for the unhappy position his good nature had led him into, that the offspring was the dead spit of its father—and he congratulated Noodles.
The irony, of course, was lost. The boiler-washer walked on air for a week. He told the roundhouse what Regan had said—and the roundhouse laughed. Bill thought the roundhouse thought he was lying, but that didn't dampen his spirits any. It wasn't everybody could get the master mechanic of the division to stand up with their kids! Everybody was happy—except Noodles. Noodles, just about then, developed colic.
Noodles got over the colic, got over the measles, the mumps, the whooping cough, and the scarlet fever—that may not have been the order of their coming or their going, but he got over them all. And when he was twelve he got over the smallpox; but he never got over his ugliness—the smallpox kind of put a stop-order on any lurking tendency there might have been in that direction. Also, when he was twelve, he got over all the schooling the boiler-washer's limited means would span, which wasn't a university course; and he started in railroading as a call boy.
There was nothing organically bad about Noodles, except his exterior—which wasn't his fault. One can't be blamed for hair of a motley red, ubiquitous freckles wherever the smallpox had left room for them, no particular colored eyes, a little round knob of uptilted nose, and a mouth that made even the calloused Dutchy at the lunch counter feel a little mean inwardly when he compared it with the mathematically cut slab of contract pie, eight slabs to the pie plate, and so much so that he went to the extent of—no, he never gave Noodles an extra piece—but he went to the extent of surreptitiously pocketing Noodles' nickel as though he were obtaining money under false pretenses—which was a good deal for Dutchy to do—and just shows.
There was nothing organically bad about Noodles—not a thing. Noodles' troubles, and they came thick and fast with the inauguration of his railroad career, lay in quite another direction—his irrepressible tendency to practical jokes, coupled with a lack of the sense of the general fitness of things, consequences and results, and an absence of even a bowing acquaintance with responsibility that was appalling.
The first night Noodles went on duty as call boy, armed with a nickel thriller—that being only half the price of a regular dime novel—and visions of the presidency of the road being offered him before he was much older, Spence was sitting in on the early night trick. There was a lot of stuff moving through the mountains that night, and the train sheet was heavy. And even Spence, counted one of the best despatchers that ever held down a key on the Hill Division, was hard put to it, both to keep his crowding sections from treading on each other's heels, and to jockey the east and westbounds past each other without letting their pilots get tangled up head-on. It was no night or no place for foolishness—a despatcher's office never is, for that matter.
Noodles curled himself up in a chair behind the despatcher—and started in on the thriller. His first call was for the crews of No. 72, the local freight east, at 8.35, and there was nothing to do until then unless Spence should happen to want him for something. The thriller was quite up to the mark, even "thriller" than usual, but Noodles left the hero at the end of the first chapter securely bound to the mill-wheel with the villain rushing to open the gate in the dam—and his eyes strayed around the room.
It wasn't altogether the novelty of his surroundings—no phase of railroading was altogether a novelty to any Big Cloud youngster—there was just a sort of newness in his own position that interfered with any protracted or serious effort along literary lines. From a circuit of the room, his eyes went to the fly-specked, green-shaded lamp on the despatcher's table, then from the lamp to the despatcher's back—and fixed on the despatcher's back.