"You blamed idiot!" he exploded. "I thought I told you to go home!"
"I'm feeling better," said P. Walton. "I haven't got those night orders out yet for the roundhouse. There's three specials from the East to-night."
"Well, Halstead can attend to them," said Carleton, a kindliness creeping into the tones that he tried to make gruff. "What are you trying to do—commit suicide?"
"No," said P. Walton, with a steady smile, "just my work. It was a little too violent exercise trying to hold the crowd, that was all. But I'm all right now."
"You blamed idiot!" grunted Carleton again. "Why didn't you say so? I never thought of it, or I wouldn't have let——"
"It doesn't matter," said P. Walton brightly. "I'm all right now"—and he passed on into his own room.
When he left his desk again it was ten minutes of six, and Carleton had already gone. P. Walton, with his neatly written order sheets, walked across the tracks to the roundhouse, handed them over to Clarihue, the night turner, who had just come in, and then hung around, toying in an apparently aimless fashion with the various tools on the workbenches till the whistle blew, while the fitters, wipers and day gang generally washed up. After that he plodded across the fields to the Polack quarters on the other side of the tracks from the town proper, stumbled into the filthy, garlic smelling interior of one of the shacks, and flung himself down on the bunk that was his bedroom.
"Lord!" he muttered. "I'm pretty bad to-night. Guess I'll have to postpone it. Might be as well, anyway."
He lay there for an hour, his bright eyes fastened now on the dirty, squalling brood of children upon the floor, now on the heavy, slatternly figure of their mother, and now on the tin bowl of boiled sheep's head that awaited the arrival of Ivan Peloff, the master of the house—and then, with abhorrent disgust, he turned his eyes to the wall.
"Thank God, I get into a decent place soon!" he mumbled once. "It's the roughest month I ever spent. I'd rather be back where"—he smiled sort of cryptically to himself—"where I came from." A moment later he spoke again in a queer, kind of argumentative, kind of self-extenuating way—in broken sentences. "Maybe I put it on a little too thick boarding here so's to stand in with Carleton and pay that ten back quick—but, my God, I was scared—I've got to stand in with somebody, or go to the wall."