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.

Flannagan looked it. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and his
chest and shoulders were like the front-end view you'd get looking at a
sturdy, well-grown ox. He wasn't pretty. His face was scarred with
cuts and burns enough to stall any German duelling student on a siding
till the rails rusted, and the beard he grew to hide these
multitudinous disfigurements just naturally came out in tussocks; he
had black eyes that could go _coal_ black and lose their pupils, and a
shock of black hair that fell into them half the time; also, he had a
tongue that wasn't elegant. That was Flannagan--Flannagan, the
wrecking boss.

There's no accounting for the way some things come about--and it's
pretty hard to call the turn of the card when Dame Fortune deals the
bank. It's a trite enough saying that it is the unexpected that
happens in life, but the reason it's trite is because it's immeasurably
true. Flannagan growled and swore and cursed one night, coming back
from a bit of a spill up the line, because they stalled him and his
wrecking outfit for an hour about half a mile west of Big Cloud--the
reason being that, like the straw that broke the camel's back, a circus
train in from the East, billed for a three days' lay-off at Big Cloud,
had, seeking siding, temporarily choked the yards, already glutted with
traffic, until the mix-up Gleeson, the yardmaster, had to wrestle with
would have put a problem in differential calculus into the kindergarten
class.

Flannagan was very dirty, and withal very tired, and when, finally,
they gave him the "clear" and his flat and caboose and his staggering
derrick rumbled sullenly down toward the round