The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and hauled Delaroo home with him. If there was no hospital, Martie had said, no pest-house, no nothing, just bring him home. They had all had the smallpox up at Sampson's except the baby, and the doctor had said lately the baby appeared to need something. They had really everything up at Sampson's sooner or later: measles, diphtheria, croup, everything on earth except money. And Martie Sampson, with the washing and mending and scrubbing and cooking, nursed the outcast wiper through his smallpox. The baby took it, of course, and Martie nursed the baby through and went on just the same as before--washing, mending, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when he got well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a kind of consolation prize; and he went to firing on the 264 for Maje Sampson.
It was then that Maje took Delaroo fairly in hand and showed him the unspeakable folly of trying to get through the world without the comradeship and benefits of the B. S. L.'s of U., and the fraters of the order of the double-barrelled star of MacDuff. Delaroo caught a good deal of it on the sidings, where they lay most of their time dodging first-class trains; and evenings when they got in from their runs Delaroo, having nowhere else to go, used to wander, after supper, up to Sampson's. At Sampson's he would sit in the shade of the lamp and smoke while Maje, in his shirt-sleeves, held forth on the benevolent orders, and one boy crawled through the bowels of the organ and another pulled off the tablecloth--Delaroo always saving the lamp--and a third harassed the dog, and a fourth stuck pins in a fifth--and Martie, sitting on the dim side of the shade, so the operation would not appear too glaring, mended at Maje's mammoth trousers.
Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch the heave of the organ with the boy, and the current of the tablecloth with the lamp, and the quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, and watch Martie's perpetual-motion fingers for a whole evening, and go back to the boarding-house without passing a word with anybody on earth, he was that silent.
In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually worked Delaroo into all the secret benevolent orders in Medicine Bend--that meant pretty much every one on earth. There arose always, however, in connection with the initiations of Delaroo one hitch: he never seemed quite to know whom he wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could go the most complicated catechism without a hitch every time, for Maje spent weeks on the sidings drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficiary; there he stuck. Nobody could get out of him to whom he wanted his money to go.