After all what was Donnegan to him?  What was Donnegan but a worthless tramp?  Without any answer to that last monosyllabic query, the brakie hunched forward, and began to work his way up the train.

The tramp watched him go with laughter.  It was silent laughter.  In the most quiet room it would not have sounded louder than a continual, light hissing noise.  Then he, in turn, moved from his place, and worked his way along the train in the opposite direction to that in which the brakie had disappeared.

He went expertly, swinging from car to car with apelike clumsiness—­and surety.  Two cars back.  It was not so easy to reach the sliding side door of that empty car.  Considering the fact that it was night, that the train was bucking furiously over the old roadbed, Lefty had a not altogether simple task before him.  But he managed it with the same apelike adroitness.  He could climb with his feet as well as his hands.  He would trust a ledge as well as he would trust the rung of a ladder.

Under his discreet manipulations from above the door loosened and it became possible to work it back.  But even this the tramp did with considerable care.  He took advantage of the lurching of the train, and every time the car jerked he forced the door to roll a little, so that it might seem for all the world as though the motion of the train alone were operating it.

For suppose that Donnegan wakened out of his sound sleep and observed the motion of the door; he would be suspicious if the door opened in a single continued motion; but if it worked in these degrees he would be hypersuspicious if he dreamed of danger.  So the tramp gave five whole minutes to that work.

When it was done he waited for a time, another five minutes, perhaps, to see if the door would be moved back.  And when it was not disturbed, but allowed to stand open, he knew that Donnegan still slept.

It was time then for action, and Lefty Joe prepared for the descent into the home of the enemy.  Let it not be thought that he approached this moment with a fallen heart, and with a cringing, snaky feeling as a man might be expected to feel when he approached to murder a sleeping foeman.  For that was not Lefty’s emotion at all.  Rather he was overcome by a tremendous happiness.  He could have sung with joy at the thought that he was about to rid himself of this pest.

True, the gang was broken up.  But it might rise again.  Donnegan had fallen upon it like a blight.  But with Donnegan out of the way would not Suds come back to him instantly?  And would not Kennebec Lou himself return in admiration of a man who had done what he, Kennebec, could not do?  With those two as a nucleus, how greatly might he not build!

Justice must be done to Lefty Joe.  He approached this murder as a statesman approaches the removal of a foe from the path of public prosperity.  There was no more rancor in his attitude.  It was rather the blissful largeness of the heart that comes to the politician when he unearths the scandal which will blight the race of his rival.