The doctor smiled sympathetically at Regan.
"He's delirious, you know," he explained kindly. "What he says doesn't mean anything."
Regan looked up with a kind of a grim smile.
"Don't it?" inquired Regan softly. Then he cleared his throat, and tugged at his scraggly brown mustache—both ends of it. "That's what I used to think myself," said the fat little master mechanic, sort of as though he were apostrophizing the distant peaks across the cañon, and not as though he were talking to the doctor at all. "But I guess—I guess I know Sammy Durgan better than I did. H'm?"
IV
THE WRECKING BOSS
Opinions, right or wrong, on any subject are a matter of individuality—there have been different opinions about Flannagan on the Hill Division. But the story is straight enough—from car-tink to superintendent, there has never been any difference of opinion about that.
Flannagan was the wrecking boss.
Tommy Regan said the job fitted Flannagan, for it took a hard man for the job, and Flannagan, bar none, was the hardest man on the payroll; hardest at crooking elbows in MacGuire's Blazing Star Saloon, hardest with his fists, and hardest of all when it came to getting at the heart of some scalding, mangled horror of death and ruin that a man wouldn't be called a coward to turn from—sick.