Lidgerwood turned away to the scratched window-panes and the crude prospect, blurred now by the gathering shadows of the early evening. In the yards below, a long freight-train was pulling in from the west, with a switching-engine chasing it to begin the cutting out of the Copah locals. Over in the Red Butte yard a road-locomotive, turning on the table, swept a wide arc with the beam of its electric headlight in the graying dusk. Through the half-opened door in the despatcher's room came the diminished chattering of the telegraph instruments; this, with the outer clamor of trains and engines, made the silence in the private office more insistent.
When Lidgerwood faced about again after the interval of abstraction there were fine lines of harassment between his eyes, and his words came as if speech were costing him a conscious effort.
"If it were merely a matter of technical fitness, I suppose I might go over to Angels and do what you want done with the three hundred miles of demoralization. But the Red Butte proposition asks for more; for something that I can't give it. Stuart, there is a yellow streak in me that you seem never to have discovered. I am a coward."
The ghost of an incredulous smile wrinkled about the tired eyes of the big man in the pivot-chair.
"You put it with your usual exactitude," he assented slowly; "I hadn't discovered it." Then: "You forget that I have known you pretty much all your life, Howard."
"You haven't known me at all," was the sober reply.
"Oh, yes, I have! Let me recall one of the boyhood pictures that has never faded. It was just after school, one hot day, in the Illinois September. Our crowd had gone down to the pond back of the school-house, and two of us were paddling around on a raft made of sawmill slabs. One of the two—who always had more dare-deviltry than sense under his skull thatch—was silly enough to 'rock the boat,' and it went to pieces. You couldn't swim, Howard, but if you hadn't forgotten that trifling handicap and wallowed in to pull poor Billy Mimms ashore, I should have been a murderer."
Lidgerwood shook his head.
"You think you have made your case, but you haven't. What you say is true enough; I wasn't afraid of drowning—didn't think much about it, either way, I guess. But what I say is true, also. There are many kinds of courage, and quite as many kinds of cowardice. I am a coward of men."
"Oh, no, you're not: you only think you are," protested the one who thought he knew. But Lidgerwood would not let that stand.