"This time you've got me goin'," was the slow reply. "Sizing him up one side and down the other when he called me back to pull my ear, I said, 'No, my young bronco-buster; you're a bluffer—the kind that'll put up both hands right quick when the bluff is called.' Afterward, I wasn't so blamed sure. One kind o' sand he's got, to a dead moral certainty. When he saw what was due to happen back yonder at the culvert, he told me '23,' all right, but he took time to hike up ahead and yank that Jap cook out o' the car-kitchen before he turned his own little handspring into the ditch."
The big engineer nodded, but he was still unconvinced when he made the stop for the siding at Last Chance. After the fireman had dropped off to set the switch for the following train, Williams put the unconvincement into words.
"That kind of sand is all right in God's country, Andy, but out here in the nearer edges of hell you got to know how to fight with pitchforks and such other tools as come handy. The new boss may be that kind of a scrapper, but he sure don't look it. You know as well as I do that men like Rufford and 'Cat' Biggs and Red-Light Sammy'll eat him alive, just for the fun of it, if he can't make out to throw lead quicker'n they can. And that ain't saying anything about the hobo outfit he'll have to go up against on this make-b'lieve railroad."
"No," agreed Bradford, ruminating thoughtfully. And then, by way of rounding out the subject: "Here's hopin' his nerve is as good as his clothes. I don't love a Mongolian any better'n you do, Bat, but the way he hustled to save that little brown man's skin sort o' got next to me; it sure did. Says I, 'A man that'll do that won't go round hunting a chance to kick a fice-dog just because the fice don't happen to be a blooded bull-terrier.'"
Williams, brawny and broad-chested, leaned against his box, his bare arms folded and his short pipe at the disputatious angle.
"He'd better have nerve, or get some," he commented. "T'otherways it's him for an early wooden overcoat and a trip back home in the express-car. After which, let me tell you, Andy, that man Ford'll sift this cussed country through a flour-shaker but what he'll cinch the outfit that does it. You write that out in your car-report."
Back in the service-car Lidgerwood was sitting quietly in the doorway, smoking his delayed after-breakfast cigar, and timing the up-coming passenger-train, watch in hand. Carter was ten minutes, to the exact second, behind his schedule time when the train thundered past on the main track, and Lidgerwood pocketed his watch with a smile of satisfaction. It was the first small victory in the campaign for reform.
Later, however, when the special was once more in motion westward, the desert laid hold upon him with the grip which first benumbs, then breeds dull rage, and finally makes men mad. Mile after mile the glistening rails sped backward into a shimmering haze of red dust. The glow of the breathless forenoon was like the blinding brightness of a forge-fire. To right and left the great treeless plain rose to bare buttes, backed by still barer mountains. Let the train speed as it would, there was always the same wearying prospect, devoid of interest, empty of human landmarks. Only the blazing sun swung from side to side with the slow veerings of the track: what answered for a horizon seemed never to change, never to move.
At long intervals a siding, sometimes with its waiting train, but oftener empty and deserted, slid into view and out again. Still less frequently a telegraph station, with its red, iron-roofed office, its water-tank cars and pumping machinery, and its high-fenced corral and loading chute, moved up out of the distorting heat haze ahead, and was lost in the dusty mirages to the rear. But apart from the crews of the waiting trains, and now and then the desert-sobered face of some telegraph operator staring from his window at the passing special, there were no signs of life: no cattle upon the distant hills, no loungers on the station platforms.
Lidgerwood had crossed this arid, lifeless plain twice within the week on his preliminary tour of inspection, but both times he had been in the Pullman, with fellow-passengers to fill the nearer field of vision and to temper the awful loneliness of the waste. Now, however, the desert with its heat, its stillness, its vacancy, its pitiless barrenness, claimed him as its own. He wondered that he had been impatient with the men it bred. The wonder now was that human virtue of any temper could long withstand the blasting touch of so great and awful a desolation.