Carleton smiled. Moved by the same motive perhaps, he had gone into the Cash Grocery Store on the corner the day before and found that Maguire's credit was re-established—thanks to Regan—though Timmons, the proprietor, had been sworn to secrecy.
"One of you two will have to capitulate before very long," he said, with a side glance at Regan. "And I don't think it will be Maguire."
"Don't you!" Regan flung out. "You think it will be me?"
"Yes," laughed Carleton.
"When I'm dead," said Regan shortly. "Had any word from those Westinghouse fittings yet? I'm waiting for them now."
"I'll see about them," said Carleton. "I'm going East this afternoon."
And there wasn't any more said about Maguire.
Meanwhile, if Regan's rancor against Noodles had reached a stage that was acute, Noodles had reached a stage of reciprocative hatred that was positively deadly. So far as elemental passion and savagery had developed in twelve years, and Noodles was not a backward boy, just so far had he developed his malevolence against Regan. Things were in a pretty strained condition in the environment of the Maguire shack; Noodles was unhappy all the time, and hungry most of the time. He heard a good deal about Regan and the depths a man could sink to, and enough about the immutable inviolability of church tenets and ordinances to satisfy the most fanatic disciple of orthodoxy—to say nothing of the deep-seated conviction of the wrath of God that must inevitably fall upon one who had the sacrilegious temerity to profane those tenets.
Mostly, Noodles imbibed this at twilight over the sparsely set table, and when the twilight faded and it grew dark—they weren't using kerosene any more at the Maguires—he could still sense the look on his mother's face that mingled anxiety and gentle reproof; and he edged back his chair out of reach of his father's cuffs, which he could dodge in the daylight and couldn't in the dark—for on one point Regan and the old hostler were in perfect accord.
"An' yez are the cause av ut!" old Bill would shout, swinging the flat of his hand in the direction of Noodles' ear every time his violent oratory reached a climacteric height where a period became a physical necessity.