"I'm listening," said Lidgerwood.
Gridley laughed again.
"What will you do when a conductor or an engineer whom you have called on the carpet curses you out and invites you to go to hell?"
"I shall fire him," was the prompt rejoinder.
"Naturally and properly, but afterward? Four out of five men in this human scrap-heap you've inherited will lay for you with a gun to play even for the discharge. What then?"
It was just here that Lidgerwood, staring absently at the passing panorama of shifting hill shoulders framing itself in the open side-door of the tool-car, missed a point. If he had been less absorbed in the personal problem he could scarcely have failed to mark the searching scrutiny in the shrewd eyes shaded by Gridley's soft hat.
"I don't know," he said, half hesitantly. "Civilization means something—or it should mean something—even in the Red Desert, Mr. Gridley. I suppose there is some semblance of legal protection in Angels, as elsewhere, isn't there?"
The master-mechanic's smile was tolerant.
"Surely. We have a town marshal, and a justice of the peace; one is a blacksmith and the other the keeper of the general store."
The good-natured irony in Gridley's reply was not thrown away upon his listener, but Lidgerwood held tenaciously to his own contention.