"Get out of here!" he said between his teeth.
"Carleton," cried Flannagan again, and his arms went out in supplication toward the super, "Carleton, give me back my job—give it back to me for to-night—just for to-night."
"No!" the single word came from Carleton's lips like a thunder clap.
Flannagan shivered a little and shrank back.
"Just for to-night," he mumbled hoarsely. "Just for——"
"No!" Carleton's voice rang hard as flint. "I tell you, no! Get out of here!"
Harvey moved suddenly, threateningly, toward Flannagan—and, as suddenly, Flannagan, roused by the act, brushed the division engineer aside like a plaything, sprang forward, and, with a quick, fierce grip, caught Carleton's arms and pinioned them, vise-like, to his sides.
"And I tell you, yes!" his voice rose dominant with the power, the will that shook him now to the depths of his turbulent soul. As a man who knows no law, no obstacle, no restraint, as a man who would batter down the gates of hell itself to gain his end, so then was Flannagan. "I tell you, yes! I tell you, yes! My wife and baby's in that wreck to-night?"
Turmoil, shouts, the short, quick intermittent hiss of steam as the 1014, her cylinder cocks open, backed down to the platform, the clash of coupling cars, a jumbled medley of sounds, floated up from the yard without—but within the little room, the chattering sounder for the moment stilled, there fell a silence as of death, and no man among them moved or spoke.
Flannagan, gray-faced, gasping, his mighty grip still on Carleton, his head thrown forward close to the other's, stared into the super's face—and, for a long minute, in the twitching muscles of the big wrecker's face, in the look that man reads seldom in his fellows' eyes, Carleton drew the fearful picture, lived the awful story that the babbling wire had told. "Royal" Carleton, square man and big of heart, his voice broke.