There are some men they remember on the Hill Division—Marley is one of them; and his story goes back to the days before the fire wiped out what the strike had left of the old rambling shops at the western end of the Big Cloud yards, back to the time when “Royal” Carleton was young in the superintendency of the division, when Tommy Regan, squat, fat and paunchy was master mechanic, and Harvey, was division engineer, and Spence was chief dispatcher, when the Big Fellows, as they were called, wrestled with the rough of it, shaking the steel down into a permanent right of way, shackling the Rockies, welding the West and the East.

Marley was not a “Big Fellow” in either sense of the word.

Officially, when he started in, he wasn’t anything—that is, anything in particular. Sort of general assistant, assistant section hand, assistant boiler washer, assistant anything you like to everybody—Marley’s duties, if nothing else, were multifarious.

Physically, he was a queer card. He was built on plans that gave you the impression Dame Nature had been doing a little something herself along the lines of original research and experimentation—and wasn’t well enough satisfied with the result to duplicate it! Anyway, as far as any one ever knew, there wasn’t but one Marley produced. Maybe nature, even, isn’t infallible; maybe she made a mistake, maybe she didn’t. You couldn’t call him deformed—and yet you could! That’s Marley exactly—when you get to describing him you get contradictory. It must have been his neck. That lopped off two or three inches from his stature—because he hadn’t any! But if that shortened him down to, say, five feet five, which isn’t so short after all—there’s the contradiction again, you see—the length of his arms at least was something to marvel at, they made up for the neck. Regan used to say Marley could stand on the floor of the roundhouse and clean out an engine pit without leaning over. The master mechanic was more or less gifted with imagination, but he wasn’t so far out, not more than a couple of feet or so, at that. Marley’s hair, more than anything else that comes handy by way of comparison, was like the stuff, in color and texture, the fellows on the stage light and put in their mouths so as to blow out smoke like a belching stack under forced draft—tow, they call it. Eyes—no woman ever had any like them—big and round and wide, with a peculiar violet tinge to them, and lids that had a trick of closing down with a little hesitating flutter like a girl trying to flirt with you.

But what’s the use! Marley, piecemeal, would never look like the short-stepping, springy-walked, foreshortened, arms-flopping Marley with the greasy black peaked cap pulled over his forehead, the greasy jumper tucked into greasier overalls who sold his hybrid services to the Transcontinental for the munificent sum of a dollar ten a day.

Marley’s arrival and introduction to Big Cloud was, like Marley himself, decidedly out of the ordinary and by no manner of means commonplace. Marley arrived “‘boing it” in a refrigerator car.

They ice the cars at Big Cloud and, luckily for Marley, the particular one he had, in some unexplained way, managed to appropriate required a little something more than icing. They pulled him out in about as flabby a condition as a sack of flour. He didn’t say anything for himself mainly because he was pretty nearly past ever saying anything for himself or anybody else. The boys who found him cursed fluently because he wasn’t a pleasant sight, and then carried him up Main Street on the door of a box-car with the hazy notion that MacGuire’s Blazing Star Saloon was the most fitting Mecca available.

Marley continued to play in luck. Mrs. Coogan, the mother of Chick Coogan, that is, who went out in the Fall blizzard on the Devil’s Slide some years before, spotted the procession as it passed her little shack, halted it, made a hasty, but none the less comprehensive, examination, amplified it by a few scathing remarks on discovering the proposed destination, peremptorily ordered them into her bit of a cottage and installed Marley therein.

He was pretty far gone, pretty far—and he hung on the ragged edge for weeks. Nobody knows what Mrs. Coogan did for him except Marley himself; but it was generally conceded that she did more than she could afford for anybody, let alone doing it for a stray hobo.

Marley got well in time, of course, for, than old, motherly Mrs. Coogan there was no better nurse, even if she had few comforts and dainties and less money to buy them with; and then Marley got a job—or rather Mrs. Coogan got one for him.

There wasn’t anything Mrs. Coogan could have asked for and not got that was within their power to give her—she was Chick’s mother, and with Carleton or Regan or any of the rest of them that was enough. But Mrs. Coogan never asked anything for herself—she had the Coogan pride.

“The good Lord be praised,” she would say—Mrs. Coogan was sincerely devout. “I’m able to worrk, so I am, an’ fwhy should I?”

Why should she? They smiled at her as men smile when something touches them under the vest, and they want to say the proper thing—and can’t. They smiled—and gave her their washing.

Mrs. Coogan tackled Regan on Marley’s behalf.

The master mechanic scratched his head in perplexity, but his reply was prompt and hearty enough.

“Sure. Sure thing, Mrs. Coogan,” he said. “Send him down to me. I’ll find him something to do.”

To Marley he talked a little differently.

“I ain’t quite sure I like the looks of you,” he flung out bluntly enough, taking in the new man from head to toe. “There’s no job for you, but I’ll give you a chance.”

Marley’s eyes came down in a flutter.

“Thanks, sir,” he mumbled nervously.

Tommy Regan wasn’t used to being “sir” ed—the Hill Division did its business with few handles and it wasn’t long on the amenities.

“Humph!” he ejaculated with a snort, and a stream of black-strap laid the dust on a good few inches of engine cinders. “You can hand any thanks you’ve got coming over to Mother Coogan. And say”—the master mechanic wriggled his fat forefinger under Marley’s nose—“thanks are all right as far as they go, but I figure you owe her something over and above that, what?”

A faint flush came into Marley’s cheeks and he darted a quick look at Regan. His eyes were on the ground and his hands had suddenly disappeared in his pockets before he answered.

“I’m going to board with her a spell,” he said in a slow way, as though he was measuring every word before it was uttered.

“Are, eh?” grunted Regan, but the grunt carried a grudging note of approval. “Well, maybe that’ll help some. You can report at noon, Marley, and make yourself generally handy around. I reckon you’ll find enough to do.”

“Thanks, sir,” said Marley again, as he turned away.

Regan, leaning on the turntable push-bar in front of the roundhouse, followed with his eyes as the other crossed the tracks in the direction of the town, then he spat profoundly again.

“Queerest looking specimen that ever blew into the mountains, and we’ve had some before that were in a whole class by themselves at that,” he remarked, screwing up his eyebrows. “Makes you think of a blasted gorilla the way he’s laid out, what? Well, we’ll give him a try anyway,” and, with a final glance in the direction of the retreating figure, the master mechanic went into the roundhouse for his morning inspection of the big moguls on the pits.

It took the division and Big Cloud some time to size up the new man, and then just about when they thought they had they found they hadn’t.

Marley, if he was nothing else, was a contradictory specimen.

Mrs. Coogan said it was like the good Lord was kind of paying her special attention, kind of giving her another son—“so quiet an’ accommodatin’ an’ handy to have around. A good bhoy was Marley—a foine lad.” One hand would rest on her hip, and the other would smooth the thin white hair over her ear with quick, nervous, little pats as she talked, and the gray Irish eyes, a little dim now, would light up happily. “Yes, ut’s more than I deserve; but I always knew the Lord wud provide.‘tain’t so easy to move the tubs around as it uster be. I guess I knew it, but I wasn’t willin’ to admit it till I had somebody to do it for me. Sivinty-wan I was last birthday.‘tain’t old for a man, but a woman—indade he’s a foine lad, an’ ‘tis myself that ses ut.”

Down at headquarters Mrs. Coogan’s praise went a long way, and after Carleton and Regan and the others in the office got accustomed to seeing him around they came to accept him in a passive, indifferent sort of a way. He was a curious case, if you like, but inoffensive—they let it go at that.

The men had their view-point. Marley didn’t talk much, didn’t draw out the way a new hand was expected to in order to establish his footing with the fraternity. Least of all did he make any overtures tending to anything like an intimate relationship with any of his new associates. Marley was never one of the group behind the storekeeper’s office that had stolen out from the shops for a drag at their pipes and a breath of air; never on the platform to exchange a word of banter with the crews of the incoming trains; never amongst the wipers and hostlers in the roundhouse who lounged in idle moments in the lee of a ten-wheeler with an eye out across the yards against the possible intrusion of Regan or some other embodiment of authority. He was civil enough and quick enough to answer when he was spoken to, but his words were few—no more than a simple negative or affirmative if he could help it. And when he himself was in question there was not even that—Marley became dumb.

All this did not help him any—he wasn’t what you’d call exactly popular! So, if he had little to say for himself, the men had plenty, and the general opinion was that he was a surly brute that by no possible chance was any credit to the Hill Division and by no manner of means an acquisition to Big Cloud.

A few, very few, took a more charitable view, basing it on the shy, slow flutter of Marley’s eyelids—they charged it up to an acute sensitiveness of his grotesque and abnormal appearance. That isn’t the way they put it, though.

“Looks like hell, an’ he knows it,” said they judicially. “Let the beggar alone.”

It was good advice, whether their analysis was or wasn’t—Pete Boileau, the baggage master, can vouch for that. As the time-worn saying has it, it came like a bolt from the blue, and—but just a minute, we’re overrunning our targets and that means trouble.

Things had gone along, as far as Marley was concerned, without anything very startling or out of the way happening for quite a spell, and Regan, who had stood closer to Chick Coogan than any other man on the division before the young engineer died, had begun to look on Marley with a little more interest—as a sort of deus ex machina for Mrs. Coogan. It seemed to afford the big-hearted master mechanic a good deal of relief. He got to talking about it to Carleton one morning about a month after Marley’s advent to the Hill Division.

“No, of course, I don’t know anything about him,” he said. “Nobody does, I guess they don’t. But he minds his own business and does what he has to do well enough, h’m? The old lady’s been getting a little feeble lately—kind of wearing out, I guess she is. I was thinking Marley was worth a little more than a dollar ten a day, what?”

They were sitting in the super’s office, and Carle-ton’s glance, straying out through the window from where he sat at his desk, fastened on Marley’s clumsy, ungainly figure hopping across the yard tracks from the roundhouse toward the station platform. He smiled a little and looked back at Regan.

“I guess so, Tommy—if it will do her any good. I wouldn’t bank on it, though. He’s a queer card. Impresses you with the feeling that there’s something you ought to know about him—and don’t. I’ve a notion, somehow, I’ve seen him before.”

“Have you?” said Regan. “That’s funny. I’ve thought I had myself once or twice, but I guess it’s imagination more than anything else. Anyway, he seems to remember what Mrs. Coogan did for him. I dunno what she’d do even now without the board money, little as it is, to help out. There’s no use borrowing trouble I suppose, but later on I dunno what on earth she’ll do. She’s prouder than a sceptered queen—and she won’t be able to wash much longer, nor take a boarder either, what?”

Carleton sucked at his briar for a moment in silence. “We’ve all got to face the possibility of the scrap heap some day, Tommy,” he said soberly. “But it’s harder for a woman, I’ll admit—bitter hard. Sometimes things don’t seem just right. If you want to give Marley a small raise, go ahead.”

The master mechanic nodded his head.

“I think I will,” he announced. “He’s queer if you like, but that’s his own business. Never a word out of him nor a bit of trouble since——”

Regan’s words stopped as though they had been chopped off with a knife. Both men, as though actuated by a single impulse, had leaped to their feet. Behind them their chairs toppled unheeded with a crash to the floor, and for an instant, as their eyes met each other’s, the color faded in their cheeks. It had come and gone like a flash—a wild, hoarse scream of rage, a brute scream, horrid, blood curdling, like the jungle howl of some maddened beast plunged in a savage, blind, all-possessing paroxysm of fury.

Themselves again in a second, the master mechanic and superintendent sprang to the window.

On the platform, up at the far end, the great form of Pete Boileau rocked and swayed like a drunken man, and clinging to him, his legs twined around the other’s knees, his arms locked around the baggage-master’s body just above the elbows—was Marley!

Regan and Carleton gazed spellbound. There was something uncanny, inhuman about the scene—like a rabid dog that had leaped, snarling, for the throat hold.

Suddenly, Marley’s legs with a quick, wriggling slide, released their hold, his whole form appeared to shrink, grow smaller, he seemed to crouch on his knees at the other’s feet, then his body jerked itself erect to its full stature with a movement swift as a loosed bowstring, his arms flew up carrying a great burden, and over his shoulders, over his head, a sprawling form hurtled through the air.

“Merciful God! He’s killed him!” gasped Carleton, dashing for the door. “Come on, Tommy Quick!”

Both men were down the stairs in a space of time that Regan, at least, chunky and fat, has never duplicated before or since. Carleton, hard-faced and tightlipped, led the way, with the picture beating into his brain of Boileau’s senseless form on the ground and the other above tearing like a beast at its prey. He wrenched the door of the station open, sprang out on to the platform, stopped involuntarily, and then ran forward again.

The baggage-master’s form was on the ground lying in a curled-up, huddled heap, and he was senseless all right—if he wasn’t something more than that. But the rest of Carleton’s mental picture was wrong, dead wrong. Right beside where the fight, if fight it could be called, had taken place was a baggage truck, and over this, his head down, his two great arms wound round his face, shoulders heaving in convulsive sobs, Marley was crying like a broken-hearted child.

Take him any way you like, look at him any way you like, Marley, whatever else he was, was a contradictory specimen.

Any other man with a skull a shade less tender than Boileau’s—it must have been made of boiler plate—would never have drawn another pay check. And even granting the boiler plate part of it, it was something to wonder at. He had gone through the air like a rocket, and his head had caught the full of it when he landed. How far? Carleton never said. He measured it—twice. But he never gave out the figures of Boileau’s aerial flight. Pete was a big man, six feet something, and heavy for his height. The strength of four ordinary men concentrated in one pair of arms might have done it perhaps; mathematically it wouldn’t figure out any other way. Carleton never said. But what’s the use! The division did some tall thinking over it—and Marley cried!

They picked up Pete Boileau and carried him into the station, and the contents of a fire bucket over his head opened his eyes. But it was a good fifteen minutes before he could talk, and by that time when they got over their scare and thought of Marley the baggage truck was deserted.

“What started it!” growled Boileau, repeating Carleton’s inquiry. “I’m hanged if I know. I was jossing him a little—nothing to make anybody sore. I was only funning anyhow, and laughing when I said it.”

“Said what?” demanded Regan, cutting in.

“Why, nothing much. He looked so queer hopping across the tracks like a monkey on a stick that I just asked him why he didn’t cut out railroading and hit up a museum for a job, and then before I knew it he let out a screech and was on me like a blasted catamount.”

“Serves you right,” said the master mechanic gruffly. “I guess you won’t nag him again, I guess you won’t. And none of the other men won’t neither if they’ve had any notion that way.”

“He’s a wicked little devil,” snarled Boileau. “And the strength of him”—the baggage-master shivered—“he ain’t human. He’ll kill somebody yet, that’s what he’ll do!”

Pete’s summing up was a popular one—the men promptly ticketed and carded Marley as per Boileau’s bill of lading. There wasn’t any more doubt about him, no discussions, no anything. They knew Marley at last, and they liked him less than ever; but, also, they imbibed a very wholesome respect for the welfare of their own skins. A man with arms whose strength is the strength of derrick booms is to be approached with some degree of caution.

Marley himself said nothing. Carleton and Regan got him on the carpet and tried to get his version of the story, but for all they got out of him they might as well have saved their time.

A pathetic enough looking figure, in a way, he was, as he stood in the superb office the afternoon of the fight. The shoulders were drooping giving the arms an even longer appearance than usual, no color in his face, the violet eyes almost black, with a dead, hunted look in them. Sorrow, remorse, dread—neither Regan nor Carleton knew. They couldn’t understand him—then. Marley offered no explanation, volunteered nothing. Boileau’s story was right—that was all.

“You might have killed the man,” said Carleton sternly, at the end of an unsatisfactory twenty minutes.

“You can thank your Maker you haven’t his blood on your hands—it’s a miracle you haven’t. Don’t you know your own strength? We can’t have that sort of thing around here.”

Marley’s face seemed to grow even whiter than before and he shivered a little, though the afternoon was dripping wet with the heat and the thermometer was sizzling well up in the nineties—he shivered but his lips were hard shut and he didn’t say a word.

Carleton, for once in his life when it came to handling men, didn’t seem to be altogether sure of himself. An ordinary fight was one thing, and, generally speaking, strictly the men’s own business; but everything about Marley, from his arrival at Big Cloud to the sudden beastlike ferocity he had displayed that morning, put a little different complexion on the matter. A puzzled look settled on the super’s face as he glanced from Marley to the master mechanic, while his fingers drummed a tattoo on the edge of his desk.

“You had some provocation, Marley,” he said slowly, “I don’t want you to think I’m not taking that into consideration—but not enough to work up any such deviltry as you exhibited. You’ll never get on with the men here after this. They’ll make things pretty hard for you. I think you’d better go—for your own sake.”

Ther............