t in
that room that night they only looked from father to son, the oaths
gone from their lips, sobered, their faces sort of gray and stunned.

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?"

Bradley? Yes; this is Martin Bradley's story--not Reddy MacQuigan's.
But Reddy had his part in it--had running orders to make one more