Bradley, from bending over the dead man, straightened up.
Reddy MacQuigan, with little jabs of his tongue, wet his lips.
"The old man's gone, ain't he?" he said in a queer, lifeless way.
"Yes," said Bradley simply.
MacQuigan looked around the circle sort of mechanically, sort of unseeingly—then at the form on the floor. Then he spoke again, almost as though he were talking to himself.
"Might just as well have been me that fired the shot," he whispered, nodding his head. "I'm to blame—ain't I? An' I guess—I guess I've finished the old lady, too." He looked around the circle again, then his hands kind of wriggled up to his temples—and before Bradley could spring to catch him, he went down in a heap on the floor.
MacQuigan wasn't much more than a boy, not much more than that—but old enough in another way. What he went through that night and in the days that followed was between MacQuigan and his God. Life makes strange meeting points sometimes, and sometimes the running orders are hard to understand, and sometimes it looks like disaster quick and absolute, with everything in the ditch, and the right of way a tangled ruin—and yet when morning breaks there is no call for the wrecking crew, and it comes to you deep down inside somewhere that it's the Great Despatcher who's been sitting in on the night trick.
Reddy MacQuigan went back to the roundhouse a different MacQuigan than he had left it—sort of older, quieter, more serious—and the days went by, a month or two of them.
Regan, with a sort of inward satisfaction and some complacency, tugged at his scraggly brown mustache, and summed it up pretty well.
"Did I not say," said Regan, "that the only decent thing old John would ever do would be to die? H'm? Well, then, I was right, wasn't I? Look at young Reddy! Straight as a string—and taking care of the old lady now. No; I ain't getting my shirts starched the way Mrs. MacQuigan used to starch them—but no matter. Mrs. MacQuigan isn't taking in washing any more, God bless her! I guess Reddy got it handed to him pretty straight on the carpet that night. I'll have him pulling a throttle one of these days—what?"