"I'll spend the last dollar of the fortune my father left me, if needful, in finding that man and hanging him!"

The Taming of Red Butte Western

by Francis Lynde

Illustrated

Charles Scribner's Sons
New York, 1916

1910, BY
Charles Scribner's Sons
Published April, 1910

To

Mr. Charles Augustine Stickle

My brother—in deed, though not by blood—this
tale of his birthland is affectionately inscribed.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I

COLLARS-AND-CUFFS

The windows of the division head-quarters of the Pacific Southwestern at Copah look northward over bald, brown mesas, and across the Pannikin to the eroded cliffs of the Uintah Hills. The prospect, lacking vegetation, artistic atmosphere, and color, is crude and rather harshly aggressive; and to Lidgerwood, glooming thoughtfully out upon it through the weather-worn panes scratched and bedimmed by many desert sandstorms, it was peculiarly depressing.

"No, Ford; I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not the man you are looking for," he said, turning back to things present and in suspense, and speaking as one who would add a reason to unqualified refusal. "I've been looking over the ground while you were coming on from New York. It isn't in me to flog the Red Butte Western into a well-behaved division of the P. S-W."

The grave-eyed man who had borrowed Superintendent Leckhard's pivot-chair nodded intelligence.

"That is what you have been saying, with variations, for the last half-hour. Why?"

"Because the job asks for gifts that I don't possess. At the present moment the Red Butte Western is the most hopelessly demoralized three hundred miles of railroad west of the Rockies. There is no system, no discipline, no respect for authority. The men run the road as if it were a huge joke. Add to these conditions the fact that the Red Desert is a country where the large-calibred revolver is——"

"Yes, I know all that," interrupted the man in the chair. "The road and the region need civilizing—need it badly. That is one of the reasons why I am trying to persuade you to take hold. You are long on civilization, Howard."

"Not on the kind which has to be inculcated by main strength and a cheerful disregard for consequences. I'm no scrapper."

To the eye of appraisal, Lidgerwood's personal appearance bore out the peaceable assertion to the final well-groomed detail. Compactly built and neatly, brawn and bulk were conspicuously lacking; and the thin, intellectual face was made to appear still thinner by the pointed cut of the closely trimmed brown beard. The eyes were alert and not wanting in steadfastness; but they had a trick of seeming to look beyond, rather than directly at, the visual object. A physiognomist would have classified him as a man of studious habit with the leisure to indulge it, and unconsciously he dressed the part.

In his outspoken moments, which were rare, he was given to railing against the fate which had made him a round peg in a square hole; a technical engineer and a man of action, when his earlier tastes and inclinations had drawn him in other directions. But the temperamental qualities; the niceties, the exactness, the thoroughness, which, finding no outlet in an artistic calling, had made him a master in his unchosen profession, were well known to Mr. Stuart Ford, first vice-president of the Pacific Southwestern System. And, it was largely for the sake of these qualities that Ford locked his hands over one knee and spoke as a man and a comrade.

"Let me tell you, Howard—you've no idea what a savage fight we've had in New York, absorbing these same demoralized three hundred miles. You know why we were obliged to have them. If the Transcontinental had beaten us, it meant that our competitor would build over here from Jack's Canyon, divide the Copah business with us, and have a line three hundred miles nearer to the Nevada gold-fields than ours."

"I understand," said Lidgerwood; and the vice-president went on.

"Since the failure of the Red Butte 'pocket' mines, the road and the country it traverses have been practically given over to the cowmen, the gulch miners, the rustlers, and the drift from the big camps elsewhere. In New York and on the Street, Red Butte Western was regarded as an exploded cartridge—a kite without a tail. It was only a few weeks ago that it dawned upon our executive committee that this particular kite without a tail offered us a ready-made jump of three hundred miles toward Tonopah and Goldfield. We began buying quietly for the control with the stock at nineteen. Naturally the Transcontinental people caught on, and in twenty-four hours we were at it, hammer and tongs."

Lidgerwood nodded. "I kept up with it in the newspapers," he cut in.

"The newspapers didn't print the whole story; not by many chapters," was the qualifying rejoinder. "When the stock had gone to par and beyond, our own crowd went back on us; and after it had passed the two-hundred mark, Adair and I were fighting it practically alone. Even President Brewster lost his nerve. He wanted to make a hedging compromise with the Transcontinental brokers just before we swung over the summit with the final five hundred shares we needed."

Again Lidgerwood made the sign of assent.

"Mr. Brewster is a level-headed Westerner. He doubtless knew, to the dotting of an 'i,' the particular brand of trouble you two expansionists were so eager to acquire."

"He did. He has a copper property somewhere in the vicinity of Angels, and he knows the road. He contended that we were buying two streaks of rust and a right-of-way in the Red Desert. More than that, he asserted that the executive officer didn't live who could bring order out of the chaos into which bad management and a peculiarly tough environment had plunged the Red Butte Western. That's where I had him bested, Howard. All through the hot fight I kept saying over and over to myself that I knew the man."

"But you don't know him, Stuart; that is the weak link in the chain."

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.

"I know I am. Hear me through, and then judge for yourself. What I am going to tell you I have never told to any living man; but it is your right to hear it.... I have had the symptoms all my life, Stuart. You have spoken of the schoolboy days: you may remember how you used to fight my battles for me. You thought I took the bullying of the bigger boys because I wasn't strong enough physically to hold up my end. That wasn't it: it was fear, pure and simple. Are you listening?"

The man in the chair nodded and said, "Go on." He was of those to whom fear, the fear of what other men might do to him, was as yet a thing unlearned, and he was trying to attain the point of view of one to whom it seemed very real.

"It followed me up to manhood, and after a time I found myself constantly and consciously deferring to it. It was easy enough after the habit was formed. Twentieth-century civilization is decently peaceable, and it isn't especially difficult to dodge the personal collisions. I have succeeded in dodging them, for the greater part, paying the price in humiliation and self-abasement as I went along. God, Stuart, you don't know what that means!—the degradation; the hot and cold chills of self-loathing; the sickening misery of having your own soul turn upon you to rend and tear you like a rabid dog!"

"No, I don't know what it means," said the other man, moved more than he cared to admit by the abject confession.

"Of course you don't. Nobody else can know. I am alone in my pit of wretchedness, Ford ... as one born out of time; apprehending, as well as you or any one, what is required of a man and a gentleman, and yet unable to answer when my name is called. I said I had been paying the price; I am paying it here and now. This is the fourth time I have had to refuse a good offer that carried with it the fighting chance."

The vice-president's heavy eyebrows slanted in questioning surprise.

"You knew in advance that you were going to turn me down? Yet you came a thousand miles to meet me here; and you admit that you have gone the length of looking the ground over."

Lidgerwood's smile was mirthless.

"A regular recurring phase of the disease. It manifests itself in a determination to break away and do or die in the effort to win a little self-respect. I can't take the plunge. I know beforehand that I can't ... which brings us down to Copah, the present exigency, and the fact that you'll have to look farther along for your Red Butte Western man-queller. The blood isn't in my veins, Stuart. It was left out in the assembling."

The vice-president was still a young man and he was confronting a problem that annoyed him. He had been calling himself, and not without reason, a fair judge of men. Yet here was a man whom he had known intimately from boyhood, who was but just now revealing a totally unsuspected quality.

"You say you have been dodging the collisions. How do you know you wouldn't buck up when the real pinch comes?" he demanded.

"Because the pinch came once—and I didn't buck up. It was over a year ago, and to this good day I can't think calmly about it. You will understand when I say that it cost me the love of the one woman in the world."

The vice-president did understand. Being a married lover himself, he could measure the depth of the abyss into which Lidgerwood was looking. His voice was as sympathetic as a woman's when he said: "Go ahead and ease your mind; tell me about it, if you can, Howard. It's barely possible that you are not the best judge of your own act."

There was something approaching the abandonment of the shameless in Lidgerwood's manner when he went on.

"It was in the Montana mountains. I was going in to do a bit of expert engineering for her father. Incidentally, I was escorting her and her mother from the railroad terminus to the summer camp in the hills, where they were to join a coaching party of their friends for the Yellowstone tour. We had to drive forty miles in a stage, and there were six of us—the two women and four men. On the way the talk turned upon stage-robbings and hold-ups. With the chance of the real thing as remote as a visit from Mars, I could be an ass and a braggart. One of the men, a salesman for a powder company, gave me the rope wherewith to hang myself. He argued for non-resistance, and I remember that I grew sarcastic over the spectacle afforded by a grown man, armed and in possession of his five senses, permitting himself to be robbed without attempting to resist. You can guess what followed?"

"I'd rather hear you tell it," said the listener at Superintendent Leckhard's desk. "Go on."

Lidgerwood waited until the switching-engine, with its pop-valve open and screaming like a liberated devil of the noise pit, had passed.

"Three miles beyond the supper station we had our hold-up; the cut-and-dried, melodramatic sort of thing you read about, or used to read about, in the early days, with a couple of Winchesters poking through the scrub pines to represent the gang in hiding, and one lone, crippled desperado to come down to the footlights in the speaking part. You get the picture?"

"Yes; I've seen the original."

"Of course, it struck every soul of us with the shock of the incredible—the totally unexpected. It was a rank anachronism, twenty-five years out of date in that particular locality. Before anybody realized what was happening, the cripple had us lined up in a row beside the stage, and I was reaching for the stars quite as anxiously as the little Jew hat salesman, who was swearing by all the patriarchs that the twenty-dollar bill in his right-hand pocket was his entire fortune."

"Naturally," Ford commented. "You needn't rawhide yourself for that. You've been West often enough and long enough at a time to know the rules of the game—not to be frivolous when the other fellow has the drop on you."

"Wait," said Lidgerwood. "One minute later the cripple had sized us up for what we were. The other three men were not armed. I was, and Miss El—the young woman knew it. Also the cripple knew it. He tapped the gun bulging in my pocket and said, in good-natured contempt, 'Watch out that thing don't go off and hurt you some time when you ain't lookin', stranger.' Ford, I think I must have been hypnotized. I stood there like a frozen image, and let that crippled cow-rustler rob those two women—take the rings from their fingers!"

"Oh, hold on; there's another side to all that, and you know it," the vice-president began; but Lidgerwood would not listen.

"No," he protested; "don't try to find excuses for me; there were none. The fellow gave me every chance; turned his back on me as an absolutely negligible factor while he was going through the others. I'm quick enough when the crisis doesn't involve a fighting man's chance; and I can handle a gun, too, when the thing to be shot at isn't a human being. But to save my soul from everlasting torments I couldn't go through the simple motions of pulling the pistol from my pocket and dropping that fellow in his tracks; couldn't and didn't."

"Why, of course you couldn't, after it had got that far along," asserted Ford. "I doubt if any one could. That little remark about the gun in your pocket did you up. When a man gets you pacified to the condition in which he can safely josh you, he has got you going and he knows it—and knows you know it. You may be twice as hot and bloodthirsty as you were before, but you are just that much less able to strike back. It's not a theory; it is a psychological demonstration."

"But the fact remained," said Lidgerwood, sparing himself not at all. "I was weighed and found wanting; that is the only point worth considering."

"Well?" queried Ford, when the self-condemned culprit turned again to the dusk-darkened window, "what came of it?"

"That which was due to come. I was told many times and in many different ways what the one woman thought of me. For the few days during which she and her mother waited at her father's mine for the coming of the Yellowstone party, she used me for a door-mat, as I deserved. That was a year ago last spring. I haven't seen her since; haven't tried to."

The vice-president reached up and snapped the key of the electric bulb over the desk, and the lurking shadows in the corners of the room fled away.

"Sit down," he said shortly; and when Lidgerwood had found a chair: "You treat it as an incident closed, Howard. Do you mean to go on leaving it up in the air like that?"

"It was left in the air a year ago last spring. I can't pull it down now."

"Yes, you can. You haven't exaggerated the conditions on the Red Butte line an atom. As you say, the operating force is as godless a lot of outlaws as ever ran trains or ditched them. They all know that the road has been bought and sold, and that pretty sweeping changes are impending. They are looking for trouble, and are quite ready to help make it. If you could discharge them in a body, you couldn't replace them—the Red Desert having nothing to offer as a dwelling-place for civilized men; and this they know, too. Howard, I'm telling you right now that it will require a higher brand of courage to go over to Angels and manhandle the Red Butte Western as a division of the P. S-W. than it would to face a dozen highwaymen, if every individual one of the dozen had the drop on you!"

Lidgerwood left his chair and began to pace the narrow limits of the private office, five steps and a turn. The noisy switching-engine had gone clattering and shrieking down the yard again before he said, "You mean that you are still giving me the chance to make good over yonder in the Red Desert—after what I have told you?"

"I do; only I'll make it more binding. It was optional with you before; it's a sheer necessity now. You've got to go."

Again Lidgerwood took time to reflect, tramping the floor, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of the correct coat. In the end he yielded, as the vice-president's subjects commonly did.

"I'll go, if you still insist upon it," was the slowly spoken decision. "There will doubtless be plenty of trouble, and I shall probably show the yellow streak—for the last time, perhaps. It's the kind of an outfit to kill a coward for the pure pleasure of it, if I'm not mistaken."

"Well," said the man in the swing-chair, calmly, "maybe you need a little killing, Howard. Had you ever thought of that?"

A gray look came into Lidgerwood's face.

"Maybe I do."

A little silence supervened. Then Ford plunged into detail.

"Now that you are fairly committed, sit down and let me give you an idea of what you'll find at Angels in the way of a head-quarters outfit. Draw up here and we'll go over the lay-out together."

A busy hour had elapsed, and the gong of the station dining-room below was adding its raucous clamor to the drumming thunder of the incoming train from Green Butte, when the vice-president concluded his outline sketch of the Red Butte Western conditions.

"Of course, you know that you will have a free hand. We have already cleared the decks for you. As an independent road, the Red Butte line had the usual executive organization in miniature: Cumberley had the title of general superintendent, but his authority, when he cared to assert it, was really that of general manager. Under him, in the head-quarters staff at Angels, there was an auditor—who also acted as paymaster, a general freight and passenger agent, and a superintendent of motive power. Operating the line as a branch of the P. S-W System, we can simplify the organization. We have consolidated the auditing and traffic departments with our Colorado-lines head-quarters at Denver. This will leave you with only the operating, telegraph, train-service, and engineering departments to handle from Angels. With one exception, your authority will be absolute; you will hire and discharge as you see fit, and there will be no appeal from your decision."

"That applies to my own departments—the operating, telegraph, train-service, and engineering; but how about the motive power?" asked the new incumbent.

Ford threw down the desk-knife, with which he had been sharpening a pencil, with a little gesture indicative of displeasure.

"There lies the exception, and I wish it didn't. Gridley, the master-mechanic, will be nominally under your orders, of course; but if it should come to blows between you, you couldn't fire him. In the regular routine he will report to the Colorado-lines superintendent of motive power at Denver. But in a quarrel with you he could make a still longer arm and reach the P. S-W. board of directors in New York."

"How is that?" inquired Lidgerwood.

"It's a family affair. He is a widower, and his wife was a sister of the Van Kensingtons. He got his job through the family influence, and he'll hold it in the same way. But you are not likely to have any trouble with him. He is a brute in his own peculiar fashion; but when it comes to handling shopmen and keeping the engines in service, he can't be beat."

"That is all I shall ask of him," said the new superintendent. "Anything else?" looking at his watch.

"Yes, there is one other thing. I spoke of Hallock, the man you will find holding down the head-quarters office at Angels. He was Cumberley's chief clerk, and long before Cumberley resigned he was the real superintendent of the Red Butte Western in everything but the title, and the place on the pay-roll. Naturally he thought he ought to be considered when we climbed into the saddle, and he has already written to President Brewster, asking for the promotion in fact. He happens to be a New Yorker—like Gridley; and, again like Gridley, he has a friend at court. Magnus knows him, and he recommended him for the superintendency when Mr. Brewster referred the application to me. I couldn't agree, and I had to turn him down. I am telling you this so you'll be easy with him—as easy as you can. I don't know him personally, but if you can keep him on——"

"I shall be only too glad to keep him, if he knows his business and will stay," was Lidgerwood's reply. Then, with another glance at his watch, "Shall we go up-town and get dinner? Afterward you can give me your notion in the large about the future extension of the road across the second Timanyoni, and I'll order out the service-car and an engine and go to my place. A man can die but once; and maybe I shall contrive to live long enough to set a few stakes for some better fellow to drive. Let's go."

At ten o'clock that night Engine 266, Williams, engineer, and Blackmar, fireman, was chalked up on the Red Butte Western roundhouse bulletin-board to go west at midnight with the new superintendent's service-car, running as a special train.

Svenson, the caller, who brought the order from the Copah sub-despatcher's office, unloaded his news upon the circle of R.B.W. engineers, firemen, and roundhouse roustabouts lounging on the benches in the tool-room and speculating morosely upon the probable changes which the new management would bring to pass.

"Ve bane got dem new boss, Ay vant to tal you fallers," he drawled.

"Who is he?" demanded Williams, who had been looking on sourly while the engine-despatcher chalked his name on the board for the night run with the service-car.

"Ay couldn't tal you his name. Bote he is dem young faller bane goin' 'round hare dees two, t'ree days, lukin' lak preacher out of a yob. Vouldn'd dat yar you?"

Williams rose up to his full height of six-feet-two, and flung his hands upward in a gesture that was more expressive than many oaths.

"Collars-and-Cuffs, by God!" he said.

II

THE RED DESERT

In the beginning the Red Desert, figuring unpronounceably under its Navajo name of Tse-nastci—Circle-of-Red-Stones—was shunned alike by man and beast, and the bravest of the gold-hunters, seeking to penetrate to the placer ground in the hill gulches between the twin Timanyoni ranges, made a hundred-mile détour to avoid it.

Later, the discoveries of rich "pocket" deposits in the Red Butte district lifted the intermontane hill country temporarily to the high plane of a bonanza field. In the rush that followed, a few prudent ones chose the longer détour; others, hardier and more temerarious, outfitted at Copah, and assaulting the hill barrier of the Little Piñons at Crosswater Gap, faced the jornada through the Land of Thirst.

Of these earliest of the desert caravans, the railroad builders, following the same trail and pointing toward the same destination in the gold gulches, found dismal reminders. In the longest of the thirsty stretches there were clean-picked skeletons, and they were not always the relics of the patient pack-animals. In which event Chandler, chief of the Red Butte Western construction, proclaimed himself Eastern-bred and a tenderfoot by compelling the grade contractors to stop and bury them.

Why the railroad builders, with Copah for a starting-point and Red Butte for a terminus, had elected to pitch their head-quarters camp in the western edge of the desert, no later comer could ever determine. Lost, also, is the identity of the camp's sponsor who, visioning the things that were to be, borrowed from the California pioneers and named the halting-place on the desert's edge "Angels." But for the more material details Chandler was responsible. It was he who laid out the division yards on the bald plain at the foot of the first mesa, planting the "Crow's Nest" head-quarters building on the mesa side of the gridironing tracks, and scattering the shops and repair plant along the opposite boundary of the wide right-of-way.

The town had followed the shops, as a sheer necessity. First and always the railroad nucleus, Angels became in turn, and in addition, the forwarding station for a copper-mining district in the Timanyoni foot-hills, and a little later, when a few adventurous cattlemen had discovered that the sun-cured herbage of the desert borders was nutritious and fattening, a stock-shipping point. But even in the day of promise, when the railroad building was at its height and a handful of promoters were plotting streets and town lots on the second mesa, and printing glowing tributes—for strictly Eastern distribution—to the dry atmosphere and the unfailing sunshine, the desert leaven was silently at work. A few of the railroad men transplanted their families; but apart from these, Angels was a man's town with elemental appetites, and with only the coarse fare of the frontier fighting line to satisfy them.

Farther along, the desert came more definitely to its own. The rich Red Butte "pockets" began to show signs of exhaustion, and the gulch and ore mining afforded but a precarious alternative to the thousands who had gone in on the crest of the bonanza wave. Almost as tumultuously as it had swept into the hill country, the tide of population swept out. For the gulch hamlets between the Timanyonis there was still an industrial reason for being; but the railroad languished, and Angels became the weir to catch and retain many of the leavings, the driftwood stranded in the slack water of the outgoing tide. With the railroad, the Copperette Mine, and the "X-bar-Z" pay-days to bring regularly recurring moments of flushness, and with every alternate door in Mesa Avenue the entrance to a bar, a dance-hall, a gambling den, or the three in combination, the elemental appetites grew avid, and the hot breath of the desert fanned slow fires of brutality that ate the deeper when they penetrated to the punk heart of the driftwood.

It was during this period of deflagration and dry rot that the Eastern owners of the railroad lost heart. Since the year of the Red Butte inrush there had been no dividends; and Chandler, summoned from another battle with the canyons in the far Northwest, was sent in to make an expert report on the property. "Sell it for what it will bring," was the substance of Chandler's advice; but there were no bidders, and from this time on a masterless railroad was added to the spoils of war—the inexpiable war of the Red Desert upon its invaders.

At the moment of the moribund railroad's purchase by the Pacific Southwestern, the desert was encroaching more and more upon the town planted in its western border. In the height of Angels's prosperity there had been electric lights and a one-car street tramway, a bank, and a Building and Loan Association attesting its presence in rows of ornate cottages on the second mesa—alluring bait thrown out to catch the potential savings of the railroad colonists.

But now only the railroad plant was electric-lighted; the single ramshackle street-car had been turned into a chile-con-carne stand; the bank, unable to compete with the faro games and the roulette wheels, had gone into liquidation; the Building and Loan directors had long since looted the treasury and sought fresh fields, and the cottages were chiefly empty shells.

Of the charter members of the Building and Loan Association, shrewdest of the many boom-time schemes for the separation of the pay-roll man from his money, only two remained as residents of Angels the decadent. One of these was Gridley, the master-mechanic, and the other was Hallock, chief clerk for a diminishing series of imported superintendents, and now for the third time the disappointed applicant for the headship of the Red Butte Western.

Associated for some brief time in the real-estate venture, and hailing from the same far-away Eastern State and city, these two had been at first yoke-fellows, and afterward, as if by tacit consent, inert enemies. As widely separated as the poles in characteristics, habits, and in their outlook upon life, they had little in common, and many antipathies.

Gridley was a large man, virile of face and figure, and he marched in the ranks of the full-fed and the self-indulgent. Hallock was big-boned and cadaverous of face, but otherwise a fair physical match for the master-mechanic; a dark man with gloomy eyes and a permanent frown. Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. Hallock's smile was bitter, and if he had a social side no one in Angels had ever discovered it. In a region where fellowship in some sort, if it were only that of the bottle and the card-table, was any man's for the taking, he was a hermit, an ascetic; and his attitude toward others, all others, so far as Angels knew, was that of silent and morose ferocity.

It was in an upper room of the "Crow's Nest" head-quarters building that these two, the master-mechanic and the acting superintendent, met late in the evening of the day when Vice-President Ford had kept his appointment in Copah with Lidgerwood.

Gridley, clad like a gentleman, and tilting comfortably in his chair as he smoked a cigar that neither love nor money could have bought in Angels, was jocosely sarcastic. Hallock, shirt-sleeved, unkempt, and with the permanent frown deepening the furrow between his eyes, neither tilted nor smoked.

"They tell me you have missed the step up again, Hallock," said the smoker lazily, when the purely technical matter that had brought him to Hallock's office had been settled.

"Who tells you?" demanded the other; and a listener, knowing neither, would have remarked the curious similarity of the grating note in both voices as infallibly as a student of human nature would have contrasted the two men in every other personal characteristic.

"I don't remember," said Gridley, good-naturedly refusing to commit his informant, "but it's on the wires. Vice-President Ford is in Copah, and the new superintendent is with him."

Hallock leaned forward in his chair.

"Who is the new man?" he asked.

"Nobody seems to know him by name. But he is a friend of Ford's all right. That is how he gets the job."

Hallock took a plug of black tobacco from his pocket, and cut a small sliver from it for a chew. It was his one concession to appetite, and he made it grudgingly.

"A college man, I suppose," he commented. "Otherwise Ford wouldn't be backing him."

"Oh, yes, I guess it's safe to count on that."

"And a man who will carry out the Ford policy?"

Gridley's eyes smiled, but lower down on his face the smile became a cynical baring of the strong teeth.

"A man who may try to carry out the Ford idea," he qualified; adding, "The desert will get hold of him and eat him alive, as it has the others."

"Maybe," said Hallock thoughtfully. Then, with sudden heat, "It's hell, Gridley! I've hung on and waited and done the work for their figure-heads, one after another. The job belongs to me!"

This time Gridley's smile was a thinly veiled sneer.

"What makes you so keen for it, Hallock?" he asked. "You have no use for the money, and still less for the title."

"How do you know I don't want the salary?" snapped the other. "Because I don't have my clothes made in New York, or blow myself across the tables in Mesa Avenue, does it go without saying that I have no use for money?"

"But you haven't, you know you haven't," was the taunting rejoinder. "And the title, when you have, and have always had, the real authority, means still less to you."

"Authority!" scoffed the chief clerk, his gloomy eyes lighting up with slow fire, "this maverick railroad don't know the meaning of the word. By God! Gridley, if I had the club in my hands for a few months I'd show 'em!"

"Oh, I guess not," said the cigar-smoker easily. "You're not built right for it, Hallock; the desert would give you the horse-laugh."

"Would it? Not before I had squared off a few old debts, Gridley; don't you forget that."

There was a menace in the harsh retort, and the chief clerk made no attempt to conceal it.

"Threatening, are you?" jeered the full-fed one, still good-naturedly sarcastic. "What would you do, if you had the chance, Rankin?"

"I'd kill out some of the waste and recklessness, if it took the last man off the pay-rolls; and I'd break even with at least one man over in the Timanyoni, if I had to use the whole Red Butte Western to pry him loose!"

"Flemister again?" queried the master-mechanic. And then, in mild deprecation, "You are a bad loser, Hallock, a damned bad loser. But I suppose that is one of your limitations."

A silence settled down upon the upper room, but Gridley made no move to go. Out in the yards the night men were making up a westbound freight, and the crashing of box-cars carelessly "kicked" into place added its note to the discord of inefficiency and destructive breakage.

Over in the town a dance-hall piano was jangling, and the raucous voice of the dance-master calling the figures came across to the Crow's Nest curiously like the barking of a distant dog. Suddenly the barking voice stopped, and the piano clamor ended futilely in an aimless tinkling. For climax a pistol-shot rang out, followed by a scattering volley. It was a precise commentary on the time and the place that neither of the two men in the head-quarters upper room gave heed to the pistol-shots, or to the yelling uproar that accompanied them.

It was after the shouting had died away in a confused clatter of hoofs, and the pistol cracklings were coming only at intervals and from an increasing distance, that the corridor door opened and the night despatcher's off-trick man came in with a message for Hallock.

It was a mere routine notification from the line-end operator at Copah, and the chief clerk read it sullenly to the master-mechanic.

"Engine 266, Williams, engineer, and Blackmar, fireman, with service-car Naught-One, Bradford, conductor, will leave Copah at 12:01 A.M., and run special to Angels. By order of Howard Lidgerwood, General Superintendent."

Gridley's pivot-chair righted itself with a snap. But he waited until the off-trick man was gone before he said, "Lidgerwood! Well, by all the gods!" then, with a laugh that was more than half a snarl, "There is a chance for you yet, Rankin."

"Why, do you know him?"

"No, but I know something about him. I've got a line on New York, the same as you have, and I get a hint now and then. I knew that Lidgerwood had been considered for the place, but I was given to understand that he would refuse the job if it were offered to him."

"Why should he refuse?" demanded Hallock.

"That is where my wire-tapper fell down; he couldn't tell."

"Then why do you say there is still a chance for me?"

"Oh, on general principles, I guess. If it was an even break that he would refuse, it is still more likely that he won't stay after he has seen what he is up against, don't you think?"

Hallock did not say what he thought. He rarely did.

"Of course, you made inquiries about him when you found out he was a possible; I'd trust you to do that, Gridley. What do you know?"

"Not much that you can use. He is out of the Middle West; a young man and a graduate of Purdue. He took the Civil degree, but stayed two years longer and romped through the Mechanical. He ought to be pretty well up on theory, you'd say."

"Theory be damned!" snapped the chief clerk. "What he'll need in the Red Desert will be nerve and a good gun. If he has the nerve, he can buy the gun."

"But having the gun he couldn't always be sure of buying the nerve, eh? I guess you are right, Rankin; you usually are when you can forget to be vindictive. And that brings us around to the jumping-off place again. Of course, you will stay on with the new man—if he wants you to?"

"I don't know. That is my business, and none of yours."

It was a bid for a renewal of the quarrel which was never more than half veiled between these two. But Gridley did not lift the challenge.

"Let it go at that," he said placably. "But if you should decide to stay, I want you to let up on Flemister."

The morose antagonism died out of Hallock's eyes, and in its place came craft.

"I'd kill Flemister on sight, if I had the sand; you know that, Gridley. Some day it may come to that. But in the meantime——"

"In the meantime you have been snapping at his heels like a fice-dog, Hallock; holding out ore-cars on him, delaying his coal supplies, stirring up trouble with his miners. That was all right, up to yesterday. But now it has got to stop."

"Not for any orders that you can give," retorted the chief clerk, once more opening the door for the quarrel.

The master-mechanic got up and flicked the cigar ash from his coat-sleeve with a handkerchief that was fine enough to be a woman's.

"I am not going to come to blows with you. Rankin—not if I can help it," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "But what I have said will have to go as it lies. Shoot Flemister out of hand, if you feel like it, but quit hampering his business."

Hallock stood up, and when he was on his feet his big frame made him look still more a fair match physically for the handsome master-mechanic.

"Why?" The single word shot out of the loose-lipped mouth like an explosive bullet.

Gridley opened the door and turned upon the threshold.

"I might borrow the word from you and say that Flemister's business and mine are none of yours. But I won't do that. I'll merely say that Flemister may need a little Red Butte Western nursing in the Ute Valley irrigation scheme he is promoting, and I want you to see that he gets it. You may take that as a word to the wise, or as a kicked-in hint to a blind mule; whichever you please. You can't afford to fight me, Hallock, and you know it. Sleep on it a few hours, and you'll see it in that way, I'm sure. Good-night."

III

A LITTLE BROTHER OF THE COWS

Crosswater Gap, so named because the high pass over which the railroad finds its way is anything but a gap, and, save when the winter snows are melting, there is no water within a day's march, was in sight from the loopings of the eastern approach. Lidgerwood, scanning the grades as the service-car swung from tangent to curve and curve to tangent up the steep inclines, was beginning to think of breakfast. The morning air was crisp and bracing, and he had been getting the full benefit of it for an hour or more, sitting under the umbrella roof at the observation end of the car.

With the breakfast thought came the thing itself, or the invitation to it. As a parting kindness the night before, Ford had transferred one of the cooks from his own private car to Lidgerwood's service, and the little man, Tadasu Matsuwari by name, and a subject of the Mikado by race and birth, came to the car door to call his new employer to the table.

It was an attractive table, well appointed and well served; but Lidgerwood, temperamentally single-eyed in all things, was diverted from his reorganization problem for the moment only. Since early dawn he had been up and out on the observation platform, noting, this time with the eye of mastership, the physical condition of the road; the bridges, the embankments, the cross-ties, the miles of steel unreeling under the drumming trucks, and the object-lesson was still fresh in his mind.

To a disheartening extent, the Red Butte demoralization had involved the permanent way. Originally a good track, with heavy steel, easy grades compensated for the curves, and a mathematical alignment, the roadbed and equipment had been allowed to fall into disrepair under indifferent supervision and the short-handing of the section gangs—always an impractical directory's first retrenchment when the dividends begin to fail. Lidgerwood had seen how the ballast had been suffered to sink at the rail-joints, and he had read the record of careless supervision at each fresh swing of the train, since it is the section foreman's weakness to spoil the geometrical curve by working it back, little by little, into the adjoining tangent.

Reflecting upon these things, Lidgerwood's comment fell into speech over his cup of coffee and crisp breakfast bacon.

"About the first man we need is an engineer who won't be too exalted to get down and squint curves with the section bosses," he mused, and from that on he was searching patiently through the memory card-index for the right man.

At the summit station, where the line leaves the Pannikin basin to plunge into the western desert, there was a delay. Lidgerwood was still at the breakfast-table when Bradford, the conductor, black-shirted and looking, in his slouch hat and riding-leggings, more like a horse-wrangler than a captain of railroad trains, lounged in to explain that there was a hot box under the 266's tender. Bradford was not of any faction of discontent, but the spirit of morose insubordination, born of the late change in management, was in the air, and he spoke gruffly. Hence, with the flint and steel thus provided, the spark was promptly evoked.

"Were the boxes properly overhauled before you left Copah?" demanded the new boss.

Bradford did not know, and the manner of his answer implied that he did not care. And for good measure he threw in an intimation that roundhouse dope kettles were not in his line.

Lidgerwood passed over the large impudence and held to the matter in hand.

"How much time have we on 201?" he asked, Train 201 being the westbound passenger overtaken and left behind in the small hours of the morning by the lighter and faster special.

"Thirty minutes, here," growled the little brother of the cows; after which he took himself off as if he considered the incident sufficiently closed.

Fifteen minutes later Lidgerwood finished his breakfast and went back to his camp-chair on the observation platform of the service-car. A glance over the side rail showed him his train crew still working on the heated axle-bearing. Another to the rear picked up the passenger-train storming around the climbing curves of the eastern approach to the summit. There was a small problem impending for the division despatcher at Angels, and the new superintendent held aloof to see how it would be handled.

It was handled rather indifferently. The passenger-train was pulling in over the summit switches when Bradford, sauntering into the telegraph office as if haste were the last thing in the world to be considered, asked for his clearance card, got it, and gave Williams the signal to go.

Lidgerwood got up and went into the car to consult the time-table hanging in the office compartment. Train 201 had no dead time at Crosswater; hence, if the ten-minute interval between trains of the same class moving in the same direction was to be preserved, the passenger would have to be held.

The assumption that the passenger-train would be held aroused all the railroad martinet's fury in the new superintendent. In Lidgerwood's calendar, time-killing on regular trains stood next to an infringement of the rules providing for the safety of life and property. His hand was on the signal-cord when, chancing to look back, he saw that the passenger-train had made only the momentary time-card stop at the summit station, and was coming on.

This turned the high crime into a mere breach of discipline, common enough even on well-managed railroads when the leading train can be trusted to increase the distance interval. But again the martinet in Lidgerwood protested. It was his theory that rules were made to be observed, and his experience had proved that little infractions paved the way for great ones. In the present instance, however, it was too late to interfere; so he drew a chair out in line with one of the rear observation windows and sat down to mark the event.

Pitching over the hilltop summit, within a minute of each other, the two trains raced down the first few curving inclines almost as one. Mile after mile was covered, and still the perilous situation remained unchanged. Down the short tangents and around the constantly recurring curves the special seemed to be towing the passenger at the end of an invisible but dangerously short drag-rope.

Lidgerwood began to grow uneasy. On the straight-line stretches the following train appeared to be rushing onward to an inevitable rear-end collision with the one-car special; and where the track swerved to right or left around the hills, the pursuing smoke trail rose above the intervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of a great machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction, a small accident to a single cog may spell disaster.

Lidgerwood left his chair and went again to consult the time-table. A brief comparison of miles with minutes explained the effect without excusing the cause. Train 201's schedule from the summit station to the desert level was very fast; and Williams, nursing his hot box, either could not, or would not, increase his lead.

At first, Lidgerwood, anticipating rebellion, was inclined to charge the hazardous situation to intention on the part of his own train crew. Having a good chance to lie out of it if they were accused, Williams and Bradford might be deliberately trying the nerve of the new boss. The presumption did not breed fear; it bred wrath, hot and vindictive. Two sharp tugs at the signal-cord brought Bradford from the engine. The memory of the conductor's gruff replies and easy impudence was fresh enough to make Lidgerwood's reprimand harsh.

"Do you call this railroading?" he rasped, pointing backward to the menace. "Don't you know that we are on 201's time?"

Bradford scowled in surly antagonism.

"That blamed hot box—" he began, but Lidgerwood cut him off short.

"The hot box has nothing to do with the case. You are not hired to take chances, or to hold out regular trains. Go forward and tell your engineer to speed up and get out of the way."

"I got my clearance at the summit, and I ain't despatchin' trains on this jerk-water railroad," observed the conductor coolly. Then he added, with a shade less of the belligerent disinterest: "Williams can't speed up. That housin' under the tender is about ready to blaze up and set the woods afire again, right now."

Once more Lidgerwood turned to the time-card. It was twenty miles farther along to the next telegraph station, and he heaped up wrath against the day of wrath in store for a despatcher who would recklessly turn two trains loose and out of his reach under such critical conditions, for thirty hazardous mountain miles.

Bradford, looking on sullenly, mistook the new boss's frown for more to follow, with himself for the target, and was moving away. Lidgerwood pointed to a chair with a curt, "Sit down!" and the conductor obeyed reluctantly.

"You say you have your clearance card, and that you are not despatching trains," he went on evenly, "but neither fact relieves you of your responsibility. It was your duty to make sure that the despatcher fully understood the situation at Crosswater, and to refuse to pull out ahead of the passenger without something more definite than a formal permit. Weren't you taught that? Where did you learn to run trains?"

It was an opening for hard words, but the conductor let it pass. Something in the steady, business-like tone, or in the shrewdly appraisive eyes, turned Bradford the potential mutineer into Bradford the possible partisan.

"I reckon we are needing a rodeo over here on this jerk-water mighty bad, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, half humorously. "Take us coming and going, about half of us never had the sure-enough railroad brand put onto us, nohow. But, Lord love you! this little pasear we're making down this hill ain't anything! That's the old 210 chasin' us with the passenger, and she couldn't catch Bat Williams and the '66 in a month o' Sundays if we didn't have that doggoned spavined leg under the tender. She sure couldn't."

Lidgerwood smiled in spite of his annoyance, and wondered at what page in the railroad primer he would have to begin in teaching these men of the camps and the round-ups.

"But it isn't railroading," he insisted, meeting his first pupil half-way, and as man to man. "You might do this thing ninety-nine times without paying for it, and the hundredth time something would turn up to slow or to stop the leading train, and there you are."

"Sure!" said the ex-cowboy, quite heartily.

"Now, if there should happen to be——"

The sentence was never finished. The special, lagging a little now in deference to the smoking hot box, was rounding one of the long hill curves to the left. Suddenly the air-brakes ground sharply upon the wheels, shrill whistlings from the 266 sounded the stop signal, and past the end of the slowing service-car a trackman ran frantically up the line toward the following passenger, yelling and swinging his stripped coat like a madman.

Lidgerwood caught a fleeting glimpse of a section gang's green "slow" flag lying toppled over between the rails a hundred feet to the rear. Measuring the distance of the onrushing passenger-train against the life-saving seconds remaining, he called to Bradford to jump, and then ran forward to drag the Japanese cook out of his galley.

It was all over in a moment. There was time enough for Lidgerwood to rush the little Tadasu to the forward vestibule, to fling him into space, and to make his own flying leap for safety before the crisis came. Happily there was no wreck, though the margin of escape was the narrowest. Williams stuck to his post in the cab of the 266, applying and releasing the brakes, and running as far ahead as he dared upon the loosened timbers of the culvert, for which the section gang's slowflag was out. Carter, the engineer on the passenger-train, jumped; but his fireman was of better mettle and stayed with the machine, sliding the wheels with the driver-jams, and pumping sand on the rails up to the moment when the shuddering mass of iron and steel thrust its pilot under the trucks of Lidgerwood's car, lifted them, dropped them, and drew back sullenly in obedience to the pull of the reverse and the recoil of the brake mechanism.

It was an excellent opportunity for eloquence of the explosive sort, and when the dust had settled the track and trainmen were evidently expecting the well-deserved tongue-lashing. But in crises like this the new superintendent was at his self-contained best. Instead of swearing at the men, he gave his orders quietly and with the brisk certainty of one who knows his trade. The passenger-train was to keep ten minutes behind its own time until the next siding was passed, making up beyond that point if its running orders permitted. The special was to proceed on 201's time to the siding in question, at which point it would side-track and let the passenger precede it.

Bradford was in the cab of 266 when Williams eased his engine and the service-car over the unsafe culvert, and inched the throttle open for the speeding race down the hill curves toward the wide valley plain of the Red Desert.

"Turn it loose, Andy," said the big engineman, when the requisite number of miles of silence had been ticked off by the space-devouring wheels. "What-all do you think of Mister Collars-and-Cuffs by this time?"

Bradford took a leisurely minute to whittle a chewing cube from his pocket plug of hard-times tobacco.

"Well, first dash out o' the box, I allowed he was some locoed; he jumped me like a jack-rabbit for takin' a clearance right under Jim Carter's nose that-a-way. Then we got down to business, and I was just beginning to get onto his gait a little when the green flag butted in."

"Gait fits the laundry part of him?" suggested Williams.

"It does and it don't. I ain't much on systems and sure things, Bat, but I can make out to guess a guess, once in a while, when I have to. If that little tailor-made man don't get his finger mashed, or something, and have to go home and get somebody to poultice it, things are goin' to have a spell of happenings on this little old cow-trail of a railroad. That's my ante."

"What sort of things?" demanded Williams.

"When it comes to that, your guess is as good as mine, but they'll spell trouble for the amatoors and the trouble-makers, I reckon. I ain't placin' any bets yet, but that's about the way it stacks up to me."

Williams let the 266 out another notch, hung out of his window to look back at the smoking hot box, and, in the complete fulness of time, said, "Think he's got the sand, Andy?"

"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.

It was past noon when the bowl-like basin, in which the train seemed to circle helplessly without gaining upon the terrifying horizons, began to lose its harshest features. Little by little, the tumbled hills drew nearer, and the red-sand dust of the road-bed gave place to broken lava. Patches of gray, sun-dried mountain grass appeared on the passing hill slopes, and in the arroyos trickling threads of water glistened, or, if the water were hidden, there were at least paths of damp sand to hint at the blessed moisture underneath.

Lidgerwood began to breathe again; and when the shrill whistle of the locomotive signalled the approach to the division head-quarters, he was thankful that the builders of Angels had pitched their tents and driven their stakes in the desert's edge, rather than in its heart.

Truly, Angels was not much to be thankful for, as the exile from the East regretfully admitted when he looked out upon it from the windows of his office in the second story of the Crow's Nest. A many-tracked railroad yard, flanked on one side by the repair shops, roundhouse, and coal-chutes; and on the other by a straggling town of bare and commonplace exteriors, unpainted, unfenced, treeless, and wind-swept: Angels stood baldly for what it was—a mere stopping-place in transit for the Red Butte Western.

The new superintendent turned his back upon the depressing outlook and laid his hand upon the latch of the door opening into the adjoining room. There was a thing to be said about the reckless bunching of trains out of reach of the wires, and it might as well be said now as later, he determined. But at the moment of door-opening he was made to realize that a tall, box-like contrivance in one corner of the office was a desk, and that it was inhabited.

The man who rose up to greet him was bearded, heavy-shouldered, and hollow-eyed, and he was past middle age. Green cardboard cones protecting his shirt-sleeves, and a shade of the same material visoring the sunken eyes, were the only clerkly suggestions about him. Since he merely stood up and ran his fingers through his thick black hair, with no more than an abstracted "Good-afternoon" for speech, Lidgerwood was left to guess at his identity.

"You are Mr. Hallock?" Lidgerwood made the guess without offering to shake hands, the high, box-like desk forbidding the attempt.

"Yes." The answer was neither antagonistic nor placatory; it was merely colorless.

"My name is Lidgerwood. You have heard of my appointment?"

Again the colorless "Yes."

Lidgerwood saw no good end to be subserved by postponing the inevitable.

"Mr. Ford spoke to me about you last night. He told me that you had been Mr. Cumberley's chief clerk, and that since Cumberley's resignation you have been acting superintendent of the Red Butte Western. Do you want to stay on as my lieutenant?"

For the long minute that Hallock took before replying, the loose-lipped mouth under the shaggy mustache seemed to have lost the power of speech. But when the words finally came, they were shorn of all euphemism.

"I suppose I ought to tell you to go straight to hell, Mr. Lidgerwood, put on my coat and walk out," said this most singular of all railway subordinates. "By all the rules of the game, this job belongs to me. What I've gone through to earn it, you nor any other man will ever know. If I stay, I'll wish I hadn't; and so will you. You'd better give me a time-check and let me go."

Lidgerwood walked to the window and once more stared out upon the dreary prospect, bounded by the bluffs of the second mesa. A horseman was ambling down the single street of the town, weaving in his saddle, and giving vent to a series of Indian war-whoops. Lidgerwood saw the drunken cowboy only with the outward eye. And when he turned back to the man in the rifle-pit desk, he could not have told why the words of regret and dismissal which he had made up his mind to say, refused to come. But they did refuse, and what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.

"If I can't quite match your frankness, Mr. Hallock, it is because my early education was neglected. But I'll say this: I appreciate your disappointment; I know what it means to a man situated as you are. Notwithstanding, I want you to stay with me. I'll say more; I shall take it as a personal favor if you will stay."

"You'll be sorry for it if I do," was the ungracious rejoinder.

"Not because you will do anything to make me sorry, I am sure," said the new superintendent, in his evenest tone. And then, as if the matter were definitely settled: "I'd like to have a word with the trainmaster, Mr. McCloskey. May I trouble you to tell me which is his office?"

Hallock waved a hand toward the door which Lidgerwood had been about to open a few minutes earlier.

"You'll find him in there," he said briefly, adding, with his altogether remarkable disregard for the official proprieties: "If he gives you the same chance that I did, don't take him up. He is the one man in this outfit worth more than the powder it would take to blow him to the devil."

IV

AT THE RIO GLORIA

The matter to be taken up with McCloskey, master of trains and chief of the telegraph department, was not altogether disciplinary. In the summarizing conference at Copah, Vice-President Ford had spoken favorably of the trainmaster, recommending him to mercy in the event of a general beheading in the Angels head-quarters. "A lame duck, like most of the desert exiles, and the homeliest man west of the Missouri River," was Ford's characterization. "He is as stubborn as a mule, but he is honest and outspoken. If you can win him over to your side, you will have at least one lieutenant whom you can trust—and who will, I think, be duly grateful for small favors. Mac couldn't get a job east of the Crosswater Hills, I'm afraid."

Lidgerwood had not inquired the reason for the eastern disability. He had lived in the West long enough to know that it is an ill thing to pry too curiously into any man's past. So there should be present efficiency, no man in the service should be called upon to recite in ancient history, much less one for whom Ford had spoken a good word.

Like all the other offices in the Crow's Nest, that of the trainmaster was bare and uninviting. Lidgerwood, passing beyond the door of communication, found himself in a dingy room, with cobwebs festooning the ceiling and a pair of unwashed windows looking out upon the open square called, in the past and gone day of the Angelic promoters, the "railroad plaza." Two chairs, a cheap desk, and a pine table backed by the "string-board" working model of the current time-table, did duty as the furnishings, serving rather to emphasize than to relieve the dreariness of the place.

McCloskey was at his desk at the moment of door-opening, and Lidgerwood instantly paid tribute to Vice-President Ford's powers of characterization. The trainmaster was undeniably homely—and more; his hard-featured face was a study in grotesques. There was fearless honesty in the shrewd gray eyes, and a good promise of capability in the strong Scotch jaw and long upper lip, but the grotesque note was the one which persisted, and the trainmaster seemed wilfully to accentuate it. His coat, in a region where shirt-sleeves predominated, was a close-buttoned gambler's frock, and his hat, in the country of the sombrero and the soft Stetson, was a derby.

Lidgerwood was striving to estimate the man beneath these outward eccentricities when McCloskey rose and thrust out a hand, great-jointed and knobbed like a laborer's.

"You're Mr. Lidgerwood, I take it?" said he, tilting the derby to the back of his head. "Come to tell me to pack my kit and get out?"

"Not yet, Mr. McCloskey," laughed Lidgerwood, getting his first real measure of the man in the hearty hand-grip. "On the contrary, I've come to thank you for not dropping things and running away before the new management could get on the ground."

The trainmaster's rejoinder was outspokenly blunt. "I've nowhere to run to, Mr. Lidgerwood, and that's no joke. Some of the backcappers will be telling you presently that I was a train despatcher over in God's country, and that I put two trains together. It's your right to know that it's true."

"Thank you, Mr. McCloskey," said Lidgerwood simply; "that sounds good to me. And take this for yourself: the man who has done that once won't do it again. That is one thing, and another is this: we start with a clean slate on the Red Butte Western. No man in the service who will turn in and help us make a real railroad out of the R.B.W. need worry about his past record: it won't be dug up against him."

"That's fair—more than fair," said the trainmaster, mouthing the words as if the mere effort of speech were painful, "and I wish I could promise you that the rank and file will meet you halfway. But I can't. You'll find a plucked pigeon, Mr. Lidgerwood—with plenty of hawks left to pick the bones. The road has been running itself for the past two years and more."

"I understand," said Lidgerwood; and then he spoke of the careless despatching.

"That will be Callahan, the day man," McCloskey broke in wrathfully. "But that's the way of it. When we get through the twenty-four hours without killing somebody or smashing something, I thank God, and put a red mark on that calendar over my desk."

"Well, we won't go back of the returns," declared Lidgerwood, meaning to be as just as he could to his predecessors in office. "But from now on——"

The door leading into the room beyond the trainmaster's office opened squeakily on dry hinges, and a chattering of telegraph instruments heralded the incoming of a disreputable-looking office-man, with a green patch over one eye and a blackened cob-pipe between his teeth. Seeing Lidgerwood, he ducked and turned to McCloskey. Bradley, reporting in, had given his own paraphrase of the new superintendent's strictures on Red Butte Western despatching and the criticism had lost nothing in the recasting.

"Seventy-one's in the ditch at Gloria Siding," he said, speaking pointedly to the trainmaster. "Goodloe reports it from Little Butte; says both enginemen are in the mix-up, but he doesn't know whether they are killed or not."

"There you are!" snarled McCloskey, wheeling upon Lidgerwood. "They couldn't let you get your chair warmed the first day!"

With the long run from Copah to Angels to his credit, and with all the head-quarters loose ends still to be gathered up, Lidgerwood might blamelessly have turned over the trouble call to his trainmaster. But a wreck was as good a starting-point as any, and he took command at once.

"Go and clear for the wrecking-train, and have some one in your office notify the shops and the yard," he said briskly, compelling the attention of the one-eyed despatcher; and when Callahan was gone: "Now, Mac, get out your map and post me. I'm a little lame on geography yet. Where is Gloria Siding?"

McCloskey found a blue-print map of the line and traced the course of the western division among the foot-hills to the base of the Great Timanyonis, and through the Timanyoni Canyon to a park-like valley, shut in by the great range on the east and north, and by the Little Timanyonis and the Hophras on the west and south. At a point midway of the valley his stubby forefinger rested.

"That's Gloria," he said, "and here's Little Butte, twelve miles beyond."

"Good ground?" queried Lidgerwood.

"As pretty a stretch as there is anywhere west of the desert; reminds you of a Missouri bottom, with the river on one side and the hills a mile away on the other. I don't know what excuse those hoboes could find for piling a train in the ditch there."

"We'll hear the excuse later," said Lidgerwood. "Now, tell me what sort of a wrecking-plant we have?"

"The best in the bunch," asserted the trainmaster. "Gridley's is the one department that has been kept up to date and in good fighting trim. We have one wrecking-crane that will pick up any of the big freight-pullers, and a lighter one that isn't half bad."

"Who is your wrecking-boss?"

"Gridley—when he feels like going out. He can clear a main line quicker than any man we've ever had."

"He will go with us to-day?"

"I suppose so. He is in town and he's—sober."

The new superintendent caught at the hesitant word.

"Drinks, does he?"

"Not much while he is on the job. But he disappears periodically and comes back looking something the worse for wear. They tell tough stories about him over in Copah."

Lidgerwood dropped the master-mechanic as he had dropped the offending trainmen who had put Train 71 in the ditch at Gloria where, according to McCloskey, there should be no ditch.

"I'll go and run through my desk mail and fill Hallock up while you are making ready," he said. "Call me when the train is made up."

Passing through the corridor on the way to his private office back of Hallock's room, Lidgerwood saw that the wreck call had already reached the shops. A big, bearded man with a soft hat pulled over his eyes was directing the make-up of a train on the repair track, and the yard engine was pulling an enormous crane down from its spur beyond the coal-chutes. Around the man in the soft hat the wrecking-crew was gathering: shopmen for the greater part, as a crew of a master mechanic's choosing would be.

As the event proved, there was little time for the doing of the preliminary work which Lidgerwood had meant to do. In the midst of the letter-sorting, McCloskey put his head in at the door of the private office.

"We're ready when you are, Mr. Lidgerwood," he interrupted; and with a few hurried directions to Hallock, Lidgerwood joined the trainmaster on the Crow's Nest platform. The train was backing up to get its clear-track orders, and on the tool-car platform stood the big man whom Lidgerwood had already identified presumptively as Gridley.

McCloskey would have introduced the new superintendent when the train paused for the signal from the despatcher's window, but Gridley did not wait for the formalities.

"Come aboard, Mr. Lidgerwood," he called, genially. "It's too bad we have to give you a sweat-box welcome. If there are any of Seventy-one's crew left alive, you ought to give them thirty days for calling you out before you could shake hands with yourself."

Being by nature deliberate in forming friendships, and proportionally tenacious of them when they were formed, Lidgerwood's impulse was to hold all men at arm's length until he was reasonably assured of sincerity and a common ground. But the genial master-mechanic refused to be put on probation. Lidgerwood made the effort while the rescue train was whipping around the hill shoulders and plunging deeper into the afternoon shadows of the great mountain range. The tool-car was comfortably filled with men and working tackle, and for seats there were only the blocking timbers, the tool-boxes, and the coils of rope and chain cables. Sharing a tool-box with Gridley and smoking a cigar out of Gridley's pocket-case, Lidgerwood found it difficult to be less than friendly.

It was to little purpose that he recalled Ford's qualified recommendation of the man who had New York backing and who, in Ford's phrase, was a "brute after his own peculiar fashion." Brute or human, the big master-mechanic had the manners of a gentleman, and his easy good-nature broke down all the barriers of reserve that his somewhat reticent companion could interpose.

"You smoke good cigars, Mr. Gridley," said Lidgerwood, trying, as he had tried before, to wrench the talk aside from the personal channel into which it seemed naturally to drift.

"Good tobacco is one of the few luxuries the desert leaves a man capable of enjoying. You haven't come to that yet, but you will. It is a savage life, Mr. Lidgerwood, and if a man hasn't a good bit of the blood of his stone-age ancestors in him, the desert will either kill him or make a beast of him. There doesn't seem to be any medium."

The talk was back again in the personal channel, and this time Lidgerwood met the issue fairly.

"You have been saying that, in one form or another, ever since we left Angels: are you trying to scare me off, Mr. Gridley, or are you only giving me a friendly warning?" he asked.

The master-mechanic laughed easily.

"I hope I wouldn't be impudent enough to do either, on such short acquaintance," he protested. "But now that you have opened the door, perhaps a little man-to-man frankness won't be amiss. You have tackled a pretty hard proposition, Mr. Lidgerwood."

"Technically, you mean?"

"No, I didn't mean that, because, if your friends tell the truth about you, you can come as near to making bricks without straw as the next man. But the Red Butte Western reorganization asks for something more than a good railroad officer."

"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.

"The inadequacy of the law, or of its machinery, hardly excuses a lapse into barbarism," he protested. "The discharged employee, in the case you are supposing, might hold himself justified in shooting at me; but if I should shoot back and happen to kill him, it would be murder. We've got to stand for something, Mr. Gridley, you and I who know the difference between civilization and savagery."

Gridley's strong teeth came together with a little snap.

"Certainly," he agreed, without a shade of hesitation; adding, "I've never carried a gun and have never had to." Then he changed the subject abruptly, and when the train had swung around the last of the hills and was threading its tortuous way through the great canyon, he proposed a change of base to the rear platform from which Chandler's marvel of engineering skill could be better seen and appreciated.

The wreck at Gloria Siding proved to be a very mild one, as railway wrecks go. A broken flange under a box-car had derailed the engine and a dozen cars, and there were no casualties—the report about the involvement of the two enginemen being due to the imagination of the excited flagman who had propelled himself on a hand-car back to Little Butte to send in the call for help.

Since Gridley was on the ground, Lidgerwood and McCloskey stood aside and let the master-mechanic organize the attack. Though the problem of track-clearing, on level ground and with a convenient siding at hand for the sorting and shifting, was a simple one, there was still a chance for an exhibition of time-saving and speed, and Gridley gave it. There was never a false move made or a tentative one, and when the huge lifting-crane went into action, Lidgerwood grew warmly enthusiastic.

"Gridley certainly knows his business," he said to McCloskey. "The Red Butte Western doesn't need any better wrecking-boss than it has right now."

"He can do the job, when he feels like it," admitted the trainmaster sourly.

"But he doesn't often feel like it? You can't blame him for that. Picking up wrecks isn't fairly a part of a master-mechanic's duty."

"That is what he says, and he doesn't trouble himself to go when it isn't convenient. I have a notion he wouldn't be here to-day if you weren't."

It was plainly evident that McCloskey meant more than he said, but once again Lidgerwood refused to go behind the returns. He felt that he had been prejudiced against Gridley at the outset, unduly so, he was beginning to think, and even-handed fairness to all must be the watchword in the campaign of reorganization.

"Since we seem to be more ornamental than useful on this job, you might give me another lesson in Red Butte geography, Mac," he said, purposely changing the subject. "Where are the gulch mines?"

The trainmaster explained painstakingly, squatting to trace a rude map in the sand at the track-side. Hereaway, twelve miles to the westward, lay Little Butte, where the line swept a great curve to the north and so continued on to Red Butte. Along the northward stretch, and in the foot-hills of the Little Timanyonis, were the placers, most of them productive, but none of them rich enough to stimulate a rush.

Here, where the river made a quick turn, was the butte from which the station of Little Butte took its name—the superintendent might see its wooded summit rising above the lower hills intervening. It was a long, narrow ridge, more like a hogback than a true mountain, and it held a silver mine, Flemister's, which was a moderately heavy shipper. The vein had been followed completely through the ridge, and the spur track in the eastern gulch, which had originally served it, had been abandoned and a new spur built up along the western foot of the butte, with a main line connection at Little Butte. Up here, ten miles above Little Butte, was a bauxite mine, with a spur; and here....

McCloskey went on, industriously drawing lines in the sand, and Lidgerwood sat on a cross-tie end and conned his lesson. Below the siding the big crane was heaving the derailed cars into line with methodical precision, but now it was Gridley's shop foreman who was giving the orders. The master-mechanic had gone aside to hold converse with a man who had driven up in a buckboard, coming from the direction in which Little Butte lay.

"Goodloe told me the wreck-wagons were here, and I thought you would probably be along," the buckboard driver was saying. "How are things shaping up? I haven't cared to risk the wires since Bigsby leaked on us."

Gridley put a foot on the hub of the buckboard wheel and began to whittle a match with a penknife that was as keen as a razor.

"The new chum is in the saddle; look over your shoulder to the left and you'll see him sitting on a cross-tie beside McCloskey," he said.

"I've seen him before. He was over the road last week, and I happened to be in Goodloe's office at Little Butte when he got off to look around," was the curt rejoinder. "But that doesn't help any. What do you know?"

"He is a gentleman," said Gridley slowly.

"Oh, the devil! what do I care about——"

"And a scholar," the master-mechanic went on imperturbably.

The buckboard driver's black eyes snapped. "Can you add the rest of it—'and he isn't very bright'?"

"No," was the sober reply.

"Well, what are we up against?"

Gridley snapped the penknife shut and began to chew the sharpened end of the match.

"Your pop-valve is set too light; you blow off too easily, Flemister," he commented. "So far we—or rather you—are up against nothing worse than the old proposition. Lidgerwood is going to try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, beginning with the pay-roll contingent. If I have sized him up right, he'll be kept busy; too busy to remember your name—or mine."

"What do you mean? in just so many words."

"Nothing more than I have said. Mr. Lidgerwood is a gentleman and a scholar."

"Ha!" said the man in the buckboard seat. "I believe I'm catching on, after so long a time. You mean he hasn't the sand."

Gridley neither denied nor affirmed. He had taken out his penknife again and was resharpening the match.

"Hallock is the man to look to," he said. "If we could get him interested ..."

"That's up to you, damn it; I've told you a hundred times that I can't touch him!"

"I know; he doesn't seem to love you very much. The last time I talked to him he mentioned something about shooting you off-hand, but I guess he didn't mean, it. You've got to interest him in some way, Flemister."

"Perhaps you can tell me how," was the sarcastic retort.

"I think perhaps I can, now. Do you remember anything about the sky-rocketing finish of the Mesa Building and Loan Association, or is that too much of a back number for a busy man like you?"

"I remember it," said Flemister.

"Hallock was the treasurer," put in Gridley smoothly.

"Yes, but——"

"Wait a minute. A treasurer is supposed to treasure something, isn't he? There are possibly twenty-five or thirty men still left in the Red Butte Western service who have never wholly quit trying to find out why Hallock, the treasurer, failed so signally to treasure anything."

"Yah! that's an old sore."

"I know, but old sores may become suddenly troublesome—or useful—as the case may be. For some reason best known to himself, Hallock has decided to stay and continue playing second fiddle."

"How do you know?"

The genial smile was wrinkling at the corners of Gridley's eyes.

"There isn't very much going on under the sheet-iron roof of the Crow's Nest that I don't know, Flemister, and usually pretty soon after it happens. Hallock will stay on as chief clerk, and, naturally, he is anxious to stand well with his new boss. Are you beginning to see daylight?"

"Not yet."

"Well, we'll open the shutters a little wider. One of the first things Lidgerwood will have to wrestle with will be this Loan Association business. The kickers will put it up to him, as they have put it up to every new man who has come out here. Ferguson refused to dig into anybody's old graveyard, and so did Cumberley. But Lidgerwood won't refuse. He is going to be the just judge, if not the very terrible."

"Still, I don't see," persisted Flemister.

"Don't you? Hallock will be obliged to justify himself to Lidgerwood, and he can't. In fact, there is only one man living to-day who could fully justify him."

"And that man is——"

"—Pennington Flemister, ex-president of the defunct Building and Loan. You know where the money went, Flemister."

"Maybe I do. What of that?"

"I can only offer a suggestion, of course. You are a pretty smooth liar, Pennington; it wouldn't be much trouble for you to fix up a story that would satisfy Lidgerwood. You might even show up a few documents, if it came to the worst."

"Well?"

"That's all. If you get a good, firm grip on that club, you'll have Hallock, coming and going. It's a dead open and shut. If he falls in line, you'll agree to pacify Lidgerwood; otherwise the law will have to take its course."

The man in the buckboard was silent for a long minute before he said: "It won't work, Gridley. Hallock's grudge against me is too bitter. You know part of it, and part of it you don't know. He'd hang himself in a minute if he could get my neck in the same noose."

The master-mechanic threw the whittled match away, as if the argument were closed.

"That is where you are lame, Flemister: you don't know your man. Put it up to Hallock barehanded: if he comes in, all right; if not, you'll put him where he'll wear stripes. That will fetch him."

The men of the derrick gang were righting the last of the derailed box-cars, and the crew of the wrecking-train was shifting the cripples into line for the return run to Angels.

"We'll be going in a few minutes," said the master-mechanic, taking his foot from the wheel-hub. "Do you want to meet Lidgerwood?"

"Not here—or with you," said the owner of the Wire-Silver; and he had turned his team and was driving away when Gridley's shop foreman came up to say that the wrecking-train was ready to leave.

Lidgerwood found a seat for himself in the tool-car on the way back to Angels, and put in the time smoking a short pipe and reviewing the events of his first day in the new field.

The outlook was not wholly discouraging, and but for the talk with Gridley he might have smoked and dozed quite peacefully on his coiled hawser, in the corner of the car. But, try as he would, the importunate demon of distrust, distrust of himself, awakened by the master-mechanic's warning, refused to be quieted; and when, after the three hours of the slow return journey were out-worn, McCloskey came to tell him that the train was pulling into the Angels yard, the explosion of a track torpedo under the wheels made him start like a nervous woman.

V

THE OUTLAWS

For the first few weeks after the change in ownership and the arrival of the new superintendent, the Red Butte Western and its nerve-centre, Angels, seemed disposed to take Mr. Howard Lidgerwood as a rather ill-timed joke, perpetrated upon a primitive West and its people by some one of the Pacific Southwestern magnates who owned a broad sense of humor.

During this period the sardonic laugh was heard in the land, and the chuckling appreciation of the joke by the Red Butte rank and file, and by the Angelic soldiers of fortune who, though not upon the company's pay-rolls, still throve indirectly upon the company's bounty, lacked nothing of completeness. The Red Desert grinned like the famed Cheshire cat when an incoming train from the East brought sundry boxes and trunks, said to contain the new boss's wardrobe. Its guffaws were long and uproarious when it began to be noised about that the company carpenters and fitters were installing a bath and other civilizing and softening appliances in the alcove opening out of the superintendent's sleeping-room in the head-quarters building.

Lidgerwood slept in the Crow's Nest, not so much from choice as for the reason that there seemed to be no alternative save a room in the town tavern, appropriately named "The Hotel Celestial." Between his sleeping-apartment and his private office there was only a thin board partition; but even this gave him more privacy than the Celestial could offer, where many of the partitions were of building-paper, muslin covered.

It is a railroad proverb that the properly inoculated railroad man eats and sleeps with his business; Lidgerwood exemplified the saying by having a wire cut into the despatcher's office, with the terminals on a little table at his bed's head, and with a tiny telegraph relay instrument mounted on the stand. Through the relay, tapping softly in the darkness, came the news of the line, and often, after the strenuous day was ended, Lidgerwood would lie awake listening.

Sometimes the wire gossiped, and echoes of Homeric laughter trickled through the relay in the small hours; as when Ruby Creek asked the night despatcher if it were true that the new boss slept in what translated itself in the laborious Morse of the Ruby Creek operator as "pijjimmies"; or when Navajo, tapping the same source of information, wished to be informed if the "Chink"—doubtless referring to Tadasu Matsuwari—ran a laundry on the side and thus kept His Royal Highness in collars and cuffs.

At the tar-paper-covered, iron-roofed Celestial, where he took his meals, Lidgerwood had a table to himself, which he shared at times with McCloskey, and at other times with breezy Jack Benson, the young engineer whom Vice-President Ford had sent, upon Lidgerwood's request and recommendation, to put new life into the track force, and to make the preliminary surveys for a possible western extension of the road.

When the superintendent had guests, the long table on the opposite side of the dining-room restrained itself. When he ate alone, Maggie Donovan, the fiery-eyed, heavy-handed table-girl who ringed his plate with the semicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal.

On the line, and in the roundhouse and repair-shops, the joke was far too good to be muzzled. The nickname, "Collars-and-Cuffs," became classical; and once, when Brannagan and the 117 were ordered out on the service-car, the Irishman wore the highest celluloid collar he could find in Angels, rounding out the clownery with a pair of huge wickerware cuffs, which had once seen service as the coverings of a pair of Maraschino bottles.

No official notice having been taken of Brannagan's fooling, Buck Tryon, ordered out on the same duty, went the little Irishman one better, decorating his engine headlight and handrails with festoonings of colored calico, the decoration figuring as a caricature of Lidgerwood's college colors, and calico being the nearest approach to bunting obtainable at Jake Schleisinger's emporium, two doors north of Red-Light Sammy's house of call.

All of which was harmless enough, one would say, however subversive of dignified discipline it might be. Lidgerwood knew. The jests were too broad to be missed. But he ignored them good-naturedly, rather thankful for the playful interlude which gave him a breathing-space and time to study the field before the real battle should begin.

That a battle would have to be fought was evident enough. As yet, the demoralization had been scarcely checked, and sooner or later the necessary radical reforms would have to begin. Gridley, whose attitude toward the new superintendent continued to be that of a disinterested adviser, assured Lidgerwood that he was losing ground by not opening the campaign of severity at once.

"You'll have to take a club to these hoboes before you can ever hope to make railroad men out of them," was Gridley's oft-repeated assertion; and the fact that the master-mechanic was continually urging the warfare made Lidgerwood delay it.

Just why Gridley's counsel should have produced such a contrary effect, Lidgerwood could not have explained. The advice was sound, and the man who gave it was friendly and apparently ingenuous. But prejudices, like prepossessions, are sometimes as strong as they are inexplicable, and while Lidgerwood freely accused himself of injustice toward the master-mechanic, a certain feeling of distrust and repulsion, dating back to his first impressions of the man, died hard.

Oddly enough, on the other hand, there was a prepossession, quite as unreasoning, for Hallock. There was absolutely nothing in the chief clerk to inspire liking, or even common business confidence; on the contrary, while Hallock attended to his duties and carried out his superior's instructions with the exactness of an automaton, his attitude was distinctly antagonistic. As the chief subaltern on Lidgerwood's small staff he was efficient and well-nigh invaluable. But as a man, Lidgerwood felt that he might easily be regarded as an enemy whose designs could never be fathomed or prefigured.

In spite of Hallock's singular manner, which was an abrupt challenge to all comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chief clerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth—of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood could find.

McCloskey, who had served under Hallock for a number of months before the change in management, confessed that he knew the gloomy chief clerk only as a man in authority, and exceedingly hard to please. Questioned more particularly by Lidgerwood, McCloskey added that Hallock was married; that after the first few months in Angels his wife, a strikingly beautiful young woman, had disappeared, and that since her departure Hallock had lived alone in two rooms over the freight station, rooms which no one, save himself, ever entered.

These, and similar bits of local history, were mere gatherings by the way for the superintendent, picked up while the Red Desert was having its laugh at the new bath-room, the pajamas, and the clean linen. They weighed lightly, because the principal problem was, as yet, untouched. For while the laugh endured, Lidgerwood had not found it possible to breach many of the strongholds of lawlessness.

Orders, regarded by disciplined railroad men as having the immutability of the laws of the Medes and Persians, were still interpreted as loosely as if they were but the casual suggestions of a bystander. Rules were formulated and given black-letter emphasis in their postings on the bulletin boards, only to be coolly ignored when they chanced to conflict with some train crew's desire to make up time or to kill it. Directed to account for fuel and oil consumed, the enginemen good-naturedly forged reports and the storekeepers blandly O.K.'d them. Instructed to keep an accurate record of all material used, the trackmen jocosely scattered more spikes than they drove, made fire-wood of the stock cross-ties, and were not above underpinning the section-houses with new dimension timbers.

In countless other ways the waste was prodigious and often mysteriously unexplainable. The company supplies had a curious fashion of disappearing in transit. Two car-loads of building lumber sent to repair the station at Red Butte vanished somewhere between the Angels shipping-yards and their billing destination. Lime, cement, and paint were exceedingly volatile. House hardware, purchased in quantities for company repairs, figured in the monthly requisition sheet as regularly as coal and oil; and the lost-tool account roughly balanced the pay-roll of the company carpenters and bridge-builders.

In such a chaotic state of affairs, track and train troubles were the rule rather than the exception, and it was a Red Butte Western boast that the fire was never drawn under the wrecking-train engine. For the first few weeks Lidgerwood let McCloskey answer the "hurry calls" to the various scenes of disaster, but when three sections of an eastbound cattle special, ignoring the ten-minute-interval rule, were piled up in the Piñon Hills, he went out and took personal command of the track-clearers.

This happened when the joke was at flood-tide, and the men of the wrecking-crew took a ten-gallon keg of whiskey along wherewith to celebrate the first appearance of the new superintendent in character as a practical wrecking-boss. The outcome was rather astonishing. For one thing, Lidgerwood's first executive act was to knock in the head of the ten-gallon celebration with a striking-hammer, before it was even spiggoted; and for another he quickly proved that he was Gridley's equal, if not his master, in the gentle art of track-clearing; lastly, and this was the most astonishing thing of all, he demonstrated that clean linen and correct garmentings do not necessarily make for softness and effeminacy in the wearer. Through the long day and the still longer night of toil and stress the new boss was able to endure hardship with the best man on the ground.

This was excellent, as far as it went. But later, with the offending cattle-train crews before him for trial and punishment, Lidgerwood lost all he had gained by being too easy.

"We've got him chasin' his feet," said Tryon, one of the rule-breaking engineers, making his report to the roundhouse contingent at the close of the "sweat-box" interview. "It's just as I've been tellin' you mugs all along, he hain't got sand enough to fire anybody."

Likewise Jack Benson, though from a friendlier point of view. The "sweat-box" was Lidgerwood's private office in the Crow's Nest, and Benson happened to be present when the reckless trainmen were told to go and sin no more.

"I'm not running your job, Lidgerwood, and you may fire the inkstand at me if the spirit moves you to, but I've got to butt in. You can't handle the Red Desert with kid gloves on. Those fellows needed an artistic cussing-out and a thirty-day hang-up at the very lightest. You can't hold 'em down with Sunday-school talk."

Lidgerwood was frowning at his blotting-pad and pencilling idle little squares on it—a habit which was insensibly growing upon him.

"Where would I get the two extra train-crews to fill in the thirty-day lay-off, Jack? Had you thought of that?"

"I had only the one think, and I gave you that one," rejoined Benson carelessly. "I suppose it is different in your department. When I go up against a thing like that on the sections, I fire the whole bunch and import a few more Italians. Which reminds me, as old Dunkenfeld used to say when there wasn't either a link or a coupling-pin anywhere within the four horizons: what do you know about Fred Dawson, Gridley's shop draftsman?"

"Next to nothing, personally," replied Lidgerwood, taking Benson's abrupt change of topic as a matter of course. "He seems a fine fellow; much too fine a fellow to be wasting himself out here in the desert. Why?"

"Oh, I just wanted to know. Ever met his mother and sister?"

"No."

"Well, you ought to. The mother is one of the only two angels in Angels, and the sister is the other. Dawson, himself, is a ghastly monomaniac."

Lidgerwood's brows lifted, though his query was unspoken.

"Haven't you heard his story?" asked Benson; "but of course you haven't. He is a lame duck, you know—like every other man this side of Crosswater Summit, present company excepted."

"A lame duck?" repeated Lidgerwood.

"Yes, a man with a past. Don't tell me you haven't caught onto the hall-mark of the Red Desert. It's notorious. The blacklegs and tin-horns and sure-shots go without saying, of course, but they haven't a monopoly on the broken records. Over in the ranch country beyond the Timanyonis they lump us all together and call us the outlaws."

"Not without reason," said Lidgerwood.

"Not any," asserted Benson with cheerful pessimism. "The entire Red Butte Western outfit is tarred with the same stick. You haven't a dozen operators, all told, who haven't been discharged for incompetence, or worse, somewhere else; or a dozen conductors or engineers who weren't good and comfortably blacklisted before they climbed Crosswater. Take McCloskey: you swear by him, don't you? He was a chief despatcher back East, and he put two passenger-trains together in a head-on collision the day he resigned and came West to grow up with the Red Desert."

"I know," said Lidgerwood, "and I did not have to learn it at second-hand. Mac was man enough to tell me himself, before I had known him five minutes." Then he suggested mildly, "But you were speaking of Dawson, weren't you?"

"Yes, and that's what makes me say what I'm saying; he is one of them, though he needn't be if he weren't such a hopelessly sensitive ass. He's a B.S. in M.E., or he would have been if he had stayed out his senior year in Carnegie, but also he happened to be a foot-ball fiend, and in the last intercollegiate game of his last season he had the horrible luck to kill a man—and the man was the brother of the girl Dawson was going to marry."

"Heavens and earth!" exclaimed Lidgerwood. "Is he that Dawson?"

"The same," said the young engineer laconically. "It was the sheerest accident, and everybody knew it was, and nobody blamed Dawson. I happen to know, because I was a junior in Carnegie at the time. But Fred took it hard; let it spoil his life. He threw up everything, left college between two days, and came to bury himself out here. For two years he never let his mother and sister know where he was; made remittances to them through a bank in Omaha, so they shouldn't be able to trace him. Care to hear any more?"

"Yes, go on," said the superintendent.

"I found him," chuckled Benson, "and I took the liberty of piping his little game off to the harrowed women. Next thing he knew they dropped in on him; and he is just crazy enough to stay here, and to keep them here. That wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for Gridley, Fred's boss and your peach of a master-mechanic."

"Why 'peach'? Gridley is a pretty decent sort of a man-driver, isn't he?" said Lidgerwood, doing premeditated and intentional violence to what he had come to call his unjust prejudice against the handsome master-mechanic.

"You won't believe it," said Benson hotly, "but he has actually got the nerve to make love to Dawson's sister! and he a widow-man, old enough to be her father!"

Lidgerwood smiled. It is the privilege of youth to be intolerant of age in its rival. Gridley was, possibly, forty-two or three, but Benson was still on the sunny slope of twenty-five. "You are prejudiced, Jack," he criticized. "Gridley is still young enough to marry again, if he wants to—and to live long enough to spoil his grandchildren."

"But he doesn't begin to be good enough for Faith Dawson," countered the young engineer, stubbornly.

"Isn't he? or is that another bit of your personal grudge? What do you know against him?"

Pressed thus sharply against the unyielding fact, Benson was obliged to confess that he knew nothing at all against the master-mechanic, nothing that could be pinned down to day and date. If Gridley had the weaknesses common to Red-Desert mankind, he did not parade them in Angels. As the head of his department he was well known to be a hard hitter; and now and then, when the blows fell rather mercilessly, the railroad colony called him a tyrant, and hinted that he, too, had a past that would not bear inspection. But even Benson admitted that this was mere gossip.

Lidgerwood laughed at the engineer's failure to make his case, and asked quizzically, "Where do I come in on all this, Jack? You have an axe to grind, I take it."

"I have. Mrs. Dawson wants me to take my meals at the house. I'm inclined to believe that she is a bit shy of Gridley, and maybe she thinks I could do the buffer act. But as a get-between I'd be chiefly conspicuous by my absence."

"Sorry I can't give you an office job," said the superintendent in mock sympathy.

"So am I, but you can do the next best thing. Get Fred to take you home with him some of these fine evenings, and you'll never go back to Maggie Donovan and the Celestial's individual hash-holders; not if you can persuade Mrs. Dawson to feed you. The alternative is to fire Gridley out of his job."

"This time you are trying to make the tail wag the dog," said Lidgerwood. "Gridley has twice my backing in the P. S-W. board of directors. Besides, he is a good fellow; and if I go up on the mesa and try to stand him off for you, it will be only because I hope you are a better fellow."

"Prop it up on any leg you like, only go," said Benson simply. "I'll take it as a personal favor, and do as much for you, some time. I suppose I don't have to warn you not to fall in love with Faith Dawson yourself—or, on second thought, perhaps I had better."

This time Lidgerwood's laugh was mirthless.

"No, you don't have to, Jack. Like Gridley, I am older than I look, and I have had my little turn at that wheel; or rather, perhaps I should say that the wheel has had its little turn at me. You can safely deputize me, I guess."

"All right, and many thanks. Here's 202 coming in, and I'm going over to Navajo on it. Don't wait too long before you make up to Dawson. You'll find him well worth while, after you've broken through his shell."

The merry jest on the Red Butte Western ran its course for another week after the three-train wreck in the Piñons—for a week and a day. Then Lidgerwood began the drawing of the net. A new time-card was strung with McCloskey's cooperation, and when it went into effect a notice on all bulletin boards announced the adoption of the standard "Book of Rules," and promised penalties in a rising scale for unauthorized departure therefrom.

Promptly the horse-laugh died away and the trouble storm was evoked. Grievance committees haunted the Crow's Nest, and the insurrectionary faction, starting with the trainmen and spreading to the track force, threatened to involve the telegraph operators—threatened to become a protest unanimous and in the mass. Worse than this, the service, haphazard enough before, now became a maddening chaos. Orders were misunderstood, whether wilfully or not no court of inquiry could determine; wrecks were of almost daily occurrence, and the shop track was speedily filled to the switches with crippled engines and cars.

In such a storm of disaster and disorder the captain in command soon finds and learns to distinguish his loyal supporters, if any such there be. In the pandemonium of untoward events, McCloskey was Lidgerwood's right hand, toiling, smiting, striving, and otherwise approving himself a good soldier. But close behind him came Gridley; always suave and good-natured, making no complaints, not even when the repair work made necessary by the innumerable wrecks grew mountain-high, and always counselling firmness and more discipline.

"This is just what we have been needing for years, Mr. Lidgerwood," he took frequent occasion to say. "Of course, we have now to pay the penalty for the sins of our predecessors; but if you will persevere, we'll pull through and be a railroad in fact when the clouds roll by. Don't give in an inch. Show these muckers that you mean business, and mean it all the time, and you'll win out all right."

Thus the master-mechanic; and McCloskey, with more at stake and a less insulated point of view, took it out in good, hard blows, backing his superior like a man. Indeed, in the small head-quarters staff, Hallock was the only non-combatant. From the beginning of hostilities he seemed to have made a pact with himself not to let it be known by any act or word of his that he was aware of the suddenly precipitated conflict. The routine duties of a chief clerk's desk are never light; Hallock's became so exacting that he rarely left his office, or the pen-like contrivance in which he entrenched himself and did his work.

When the fight began, Lidgerwood observed Hallock closely, trying to discover if there were any secret signs of the satisfaction which the revolt of the rank and file might be supposed to awaken in an unsuccessful candidate for the official headship of the Red Butte Western. There were none. Hallock's gaunt face, with the loose lips and the straggling, unkempt beard, was a blank; and the worst wreck of the three which promptly followed the introduction of the new rules, was noted in his reports with the calm indifference with which he might have jotted down the breakage of a section foreman's spike-maul.

McCloskey, being of Scottish blood and desert-seasoned, was a cool in-fighter who could take punishment without wincing overmuch. But at the end of the first fortnight of the new time-card, he cornered his chief in the private office and freed his mind.

"It's no use, Mr. Lidgerwood; we can't make these reforms stick with the outfit we've got," he asserted, in sharp discouragement. "The next thing on the docket will be a strike, and you know what that will mean, in a country where the whiskey is bad and nine men out of every ten go fixed for trouble."

"I know; nevertheless the reforms have got to stick," returned Lidgerwood definitively. "We are going to run this railroad as it should be run, or hang it up in the air. Did you discharge that operator at Crow Canyon? the fellow who let Train 76 get by him without orders night before last?"

"Dick Rufford? Oh yes, I fired him, and he came in on 202 to-day lugging a piece of artillery and shooting off his mouth about what he was going to do to me ... and to you. I suppose you know that his brother Bart, they call him 'the killer', is the lookout at Red-Light Sammy Faro's game, and the meanest devil this side of the Timanyonis?"

"I didn't know it, but that cuts no figure." Lidgerwood forced himself to say it, though his lips were curiously dry. "We are going to have discipline on this railroad while we stay here, Mac; there are no two ways about that."

McCloskey tilted his hat to the bridge of his nose, his characteristic gesture of displeasure.

"I promised myself that I wouldn't join the gun-toters when I came out here," he said, half musingly, "but I've weakened on that. Yesterday, when I was calling Jeff Cummings down for dropping that new shifting-engine out of an open switch in broad daylight, he pulled on me out of his cab window. What I had to take while he had me 'hands up' is more than I'll take from any living man again."

As in other moments of stress and perplexity, Lidgerwood was absently marking little pencil squares on his desk blotter.

"I wouldn't get down to the desert level, if I were you, Mac," he said thoughtfully.

"I'm down there right now, in self-defence," was the sober rejoinder. "And if you'll take a hint from me you'll heel yourself, too, Mr. Lidgerwood. I know this country better than you do, and the men in it. I don't say they'll come after you deliberately, but as things are now you can't open your face to one of them without taking the chance of a quarrel, and a quarrel in a gun-country——"

"I know," said Lidgerwood patiently, and the trainmaster gave it up.

It was an hour or two later in the same day when McCloskey came into the private office again, hat tilted to nose, and the gargoyle face portraying fresh soul agonies.

"They've taken to pillaging now!" he burst out. "The 316, that new saddle-tank shifting-engine, has disappeared. I saw Broderick using the '95, and when I asked him why, he said he couldn't find the '16."

"Couldn't find it?" echoed Lidgerwood.

"No; nor I can't, either. It's nowhere in the yards, the roundhouse, or back shop, and none of Gridley's foremen know anything about it. I've had Callahan wire east and west, and if they're all telling the truth, nobody has seen it or heard of it."

"Where was it, at last accounts?"

"Standing on the coal track under chute number three, where the night crew left it at midnight, or thereabouts."

"But certainly somebody must know where it has gone," said Lidgerwood.

"Yes; and by grapples! I think I know who the somebody is."

"Who is it?"

"If I should tell you, you wouldn't believe it, and besides I haven't got the proof. But I'm going to get the proof," shaking a menacing forefinger, "and when I do——"

The interruption was the entrance of Hallock, coming in with the pay-rolls for the superintendent's approval. McCloskey broke off short and turned to the door, but Lidgerwood gave him a parting command.

"Come in again, Mac, in about half an hour. There is another matter that I want to take up with you, and to-day is as good a time as any."

The trainmaster nodded and went out, muttering curses to the tilted hat brim.

VI

EVERYMAN'S SHARE

"This switching-engine mystery opens up a field that I've been trying to get into for some little time, Mac," the superintendent began, after the half-hour had elapsed and the trainmaster had returned to the private office. "Sit down and we'll thresh it out. Here are some figures showing loss and expense in the general maintenance account. Look them over and tell me what you think."

"Wastage, you mean?" queried the trainmaster, glancing at the totals in the auditor's statement.

"That is what I have been calling it; a reckless disregard for the value of anything and everything that can be included in a requisition. There is a good deal of that, I know; the right-of-way is littered from end to end with good material thrown aside. But I'm afraid that isn't the worst of it."

The trainmaster was nursing a knee and screwing his face into the reflective scheme of distortion.

"Those things are always hard to prove. Short of a military guard, for instance, you couldn't prevent Angels from raiding the company's coal-yard for its cook-stoves. That's one leak, and the others are pretty much like it. If a company employee wants to steal, and there isn't enough common honesty among his fellow-employees to hold him down, he can steal fast enough and get away with it."

"By littles, yes, but not in quantity," pursued Lidgerwood.

"'Mony a little makes a mickle,' as my old grandfather used to say," McCloskey went on. "If everybody gets his fingers into the sugar-bowl——"

Lidgerwood swung his chair to face McCloskey.

"We'll pass up the petty thieveries, for the present, and look a little higher," he said gravely. "Have you found any trace of those two car-loads of company lumber lost in transit between here and Red Butte two weeks ago?"

"No, nor of the cars themselves. They were reported as two Transcontinental flats, initials and numbers plainly given in the car-record. They seem to have disappeared with the lumber."

"Which means?" queried the superintendent.

"That the numbers, or the initials, or both, were wrongly reported. It means that it was a put-up job to steal the lumber."

"Exactly. And there was a mixed car-load of lime and cement lost at about the same time, wasn't there?"

"Yes."

Lidgerwood's swing-chair "righted itself to the perpendicular with a snap."

"Mac, the Red Butte mines are looking up a little, and there is a good bit of house-building going on in the camp just now: tell me, what man or men in the company's service would be likely to be taking a flyer in Red Butte real estate?"

"I don't know of anybody. Gridley used to be interested in the camp. He went in pretty heavily on the boom, and lost out—so they all say. So did your man out there in the pig-pen desk," with a jerk of his thumb to indicate the outer office.

"They are both out of it," said Lidgerwood shortly. Then: "How about Sullivan, the west-end supervisor of track? He has property in Red Butte, I am told."

"Sullivan is a thief, all right, but he does it openly and brags about it; carries off a set of bridge-timbers, now and then, for house-sills, and makes a joke of it with anybody who will listen."

Lidgerwood dismissed Sullivan abruptly.

"It is an organized gang, and it must have its members pretty well scattered through the departments—and have a good many members, too," he said conclusively. "That brings us to the disappearance of the switching-engine again. No one man made off with that, single-handed, Mac."

"Hardly."

"It was this gang we are presupposing—the gang that has been stealing lumber and lime and other material by the car-load."

"Well?"

"I believe we'll get to the bottom of all the looting on this switching-engine business. They have overdone it this time. You can't put a locomotive in your pocket and walk off with it. You say you've wired Copah?"

"Yes."

"Who was at the Copah key—Mr. Leckhard?"

"No. I didn't want to advertise our troubles to a main-line official. I got the day-despatcher, Crandall, and told him to keep his mouth shut until he heard of it some other way."

"Good. And what did Crandall say?"

"He said that the '16 had never gone out through the Copah yards; that it couldn't get anywhere if it had without everybody knowing about it."

Lidgerwood's abstracted gaze out of the office window became a frown of concentration.

"But the object, McCloskey—what possible profit could there be in the theft of a locomotive that can neither be carried away nor converted into salable junk?"

The trainmaster shook his head. "I've stewed over that till I'm threatened with softening of the brain," he confessed.

"Never mind, you have a comparatively easy job," Lidgerwood went on. "That engine is somewhere this side of the Crosswater Hills. It is too big to be hidden under a bushel basket. Find it, and you'll be hot on the trail of the car-load robbers."

McCloskey got upon his feet as if he were going at once to begin the search, but Lidgerwood detained him.

"Hold on; I'm not quite through yet. Sit down again and have a smoke."

The trainmaster squinted sourly at the extended cigar-case. "I guess not," he demurred. "I cut it out, along with the toddies, the day I put on my coat and hat and walked out of the old F. & P.M. offices without my time-check."

"If it had to be both or neither, you were wise; whiskey and railroading don't go together very well. But about this other matter. Some years ago there was a building and loan association started here in Angels, the ostensible object being to help the railroad men to own their homes. Ever hear of it?"

"Yes, but it was dead and buried before my time."

"Dead, but not buried," corrected Lidgerwood. "As I understand it, the railroad company fathered it, or at all events, some of the officials took stock in it. When it died there was a considerable deficit, together with a failure on the part of the executive committee to account for a pretty liberal cash balance."

"I've heard that much," said the trainmaster.

"Then we'll bring it down to date," Lidgerwood resumed. "It appears that there are twenty-five or thirty of the losers still in the employ of this company, and they have sent a committee to me to ask for an investigation, basing the demand on the assertion that they were coerced into giving up their money to the building and loan people."

"I've heard that, too," McCloskey admitted. "The story goes that the house-building scheme was promoted by the old Red Butte Western bosses, and if a man didn't take stock he got himself disliked. If he did take it, the premiums were held out on the pay-rolls. It smells like a good, old-fashioned graft, with the lid nailed on."

"There wouldn't seem to be any reasonable doubt about the graft," said the superintendent. "But my duty is clear. Of course, the Pacific Southwestern Company isn't responsible for the side-issue schemes of the old Red Butte Western officials. But I want to do strict justice. These men charge the officials of the building and loan company with open dishonesty. There was a balance of several thousand dollars in the treasury when the explosion came, and it disappeared."

"Well?" said the trainmaster.

"The losers contend that somebody ought to make good to them. They also call attention to the fact that the building and loan treasurer, who was never able satisfactorily to explain the disappearance of the cash balance, is still on the railroad company's pay-rolls."

McCloskey sat up and tilted the derby to the back of his head. "Gridley?" he asked.

"No; for some reasons I wish it were Gridley. He is able to fight his own battles. It comes nearer home, Mac. The treasurer was Hallock."

McCloskey rose noiselessly, tiptoed to the door of communication with the outer office, and opened it with a quick jerk. There was no one there.

"I thought I heard something," he said. "Didn't you think you did?"

Lidgerwood shook his head.

"Hallock has gone over to the storekeeper's office to check up the time-rolls. He won't be back to-day."

McCloskey closed the door and returned to his chair.

"If I say what I think, you'll be asking me for proofs, Mr. Lidgerwood, and I have none. Besides, I'm a prejudiced witness. I don't like Hallock."

Quite unconsciously Lidgerwood picked up a pencil and began adding more squares to the miniature checker-board on his desk blotter. It was altogether subversive of his own idea of fitness to be discussing his chief clerk with his trainmaster, but McCloskey had proved himself an honest partisan and a fearless one, and Lidgerwood was at a pass where the good counsel of even a subordinate was not to be despised.

"I don't want to do Hallock an injustice," he went on, after a hesitant pause, "neither do I wish to dig up the past, for him or for anybody. I was hoping that you might know some of the inside details, and so make it easier for me to get at the truth. I can't believe that Hallock was culpably responsible for the disappearance of the money."

By this time McCloskey had his hat tilted to the belligerent angle.

"I'm not a fair witness," he reiterated. "There's been gossip, and I've listened to it."

"About this building and loan mess?"

"No; about the wife."

"To Hallock's discredit, you mean?"

"You'd think so: there was a scandal of some sort; I don't know what it was—never wanted to know. But there are men here in Angels who hint that Hallock killed the woman and sunk her body in the Timanyoni."

"Heavens!" exclaimed Lidgerwood, under his breath. "I can't believe that, Mac."

"I don't know as I do, but I can tell you a thing that I do know, Mr. Lidgerwood: Hallock is a devil out of hell when it comes to paying a grudge. There was a freight-conductor named Jackson that he had a shindy with in Mr. Ferguson's time, and it came to blows. Hallock got the worst of the fist-fight, but Ferguson made a joke of it and wouldn't fire Jackson. Hallock bided his time like an Indian, and worked it around so that Jackson got promoted to a passenger run. After that it was easy."

"How so?"

"It was the devil's own game. Jackson was a handsome young fellow, and Hallock set a woman on him—a woman out of Cat Biggs's dance-hall. From that to holding out fares to get more money to squander was only a step for the young fool, and he took it. Having baited the trap and set it, Hallock sprung it. One fine day Jackson was caught red-handed and turned over to the company lawyers. There had been a good bit of talk and they made an example of him. He's got a couple of years to serve yet, I believe."

Lidgerwood was listening thoughtfully. The story which had ended so disastrously for the young conductor threw a rather lurid sidelight upon Jackson's accuser. Fairness was the superintendent's fetish, and the revenge which would sleep on its wrongs and go about deliberately and painstakingly to strike a deadly blow in the dark was revolting to him. Yet he was just enough to distinguish between gross vindictiveness and an evil which bore no relation to the vengeful one.

"A financially honest man might still have a weakness for playing even in a personal quarrel," he commented. "Your story proves nothing more than that."

"I know it."

"But I am going to run the other thing down, too," Lidgerwood insisted. "Hallock shall have a chance to clear himself, but if he can't do it, he can't stay with me."

At this the trainmaster changed front so suddenly that Lidgerwood began to wonder if his estimate of the man's courage was at fault.

"Don't do that, Mr. Lidgerwood, for God's sake don't stir up the devil in that long-haired knife-fighter at such a time as this!" he begged. "The Lord knows you've got trouble enough on hand as it is, without digging up something that belongs to the has-beens."

"I know, but justice is justice," was the decisive rejoinder. "The question is still a live one, as the complaint of the grievance committee proves. If I dodge, my refusal to investigate will be used against us in the labor trouble which you say is brewing. I'm not going to dodge, McCloskey."

The contortions of the trainmaster's homely features indicated an inward struggle of the last-resort nature. When he had reached a conclusion he spat it out.

"You haven't asked my advice, Mr. Lidgerwood, but here it is anyway. Flemister, the owner of the Wire-Silver mine over in Timanyoni Park, was the president of that building and loan outfit. He and Hallock are at daggers drawn, for some reason that I've never understood. If you could get them together, perhaps they could make some sort of a statement that would quiet the kickers for the time being, at any rate."

Lidgerwood looked up quickly. "That's odd," he said. "No longer ago than yesterday, Gridley suggested precisely the same thing."

McCloskey was on his feet again and fumbling behind him for the door-knob.

"I'm all in," he grimaced. "When it comes to figuring with Gridley and Flemister and Hallock all in the same breath, I'm done."

Lidgerwood made a memorandum on his desk calendar to take the building and loan matter up with Hallock the following day. But another wreck intervened, and after the wreck a conference with the Red Butte mine-owners postponed all office business for an additional twenty-four hours. It was late in the evening of the third day when the superintendent's special steamed home from the west, and Lidgerwood, who had dined in his car, went directly to his office in the Crow's Nest.

He had scarcely settled himself at his desk for an attack upon the accumulation of mail when Benson came in. It was a trouble call, and the young engineer's face advertised it.

"It's no use talking, Lidgerwood," he began, "I can't do business on this railroad until you have killed off some of the thugs and highbinders."

Lidgerwood flung the paper-knife aside and whirled his chair to face the new complaint.

"What is the matter now, Jack?" he snapped.

"Oh, nothing much—when you're used to it; only about a thousand dollars' worth of dimension timber gone glimmering. That's all."

"Tell it out," rasped the superintendent. The mine-owners' conference, from which he had just returned, had been called to protest against the poor service given by the railroad, and knowing his present inability to give better service, he had temporized until it needed but this one more touch of the lash to make him lose his temper hopelessly.

"It's the Gloria bridge," said Benson. "We had the timbers all ready to pull out the old and put in the new, and the shift was to be made to-day between trains. Last night every stick of the new stock disappeared."

Lidgerwood was not a profane man, but what he said to Benson in the coruscating minute or two which followed resolved itself into a very fair imitation of profanity, inclusive and world-embracing.

"And you didn't have wit enough to leave a watchman on the job!" he chafed—this by way of putting an apex to the pyramid of objurgation. "By heavens! this thing has got to stop, Benson. And it's going to stop, if we have to call out the State militia and picket every cursed mile of this rotten railroad!"

"Do it," said Benson gruffly, "and when it's done you notify me and I'll come back to work." And with that he tramped out, and was too angry to remember to close the door.

Lidgerwood turned back to his desk, savagely out of humor with Benson and with himself, and raging inwardly at the mysterious thieves who were looting the company as boldly as an invading army might. At this, the most inauspicious moment possible, his eye fell upon the calendar memorandum, "See Hallock about B/L.," and his finger was on the chief clerk's bell-push before he remembered that it was late, and that there had been no light in Hallock's room when he had come down the corridor to his own door.

The touch of the push-button was only a touch, and there was no answering skirl of the bell in the adjoining room. But, as if the intention had evoked it, a shadow crossed behind the superintendent's chair and came to rest at the end of the roll-top desk. Lidgerwood looked up with his eyes aflame. It was Hallock who was standing at the desk's end, and he was pointing to the memorandum on the calendar pad.

"You made that note three days ago," he said abruptly. "I saw your train come in and your light go on. What bill of lading was it you wanted to see me about?"

For an instant Lidgerwood failed to understand. Then he saw that in abbreviating he had unconsciously used the familiar sign, "B/L," the common abbreviation of "bill of lading." At another time he would have turned Hallock's very natural mistake into an easy introduction to a rather delicate subject. But now he was angry.

"Sit down," he rapped out. "That isn't 'bill of lading'; it's 'building and loan.'"

Hallock dragged the one vacant chair into the circle illuminated by the shaded desk-electric, and sat on the edge of it, with his hands on his knees. "Well?" he said, in the grating voice that was so curiously like the master-mechanic's.

"We can cut out the details," this from the man who, under other conditions, would have gone diplomatically into the smallest details. "Some years ago you were the treasurer of the Mesa Building and Loan Association. When the association went out of business, its books showed a cash balance in the treasury. What became of the money?"

Hallock sat as rigid as a carved figure flanking an Egyptian propylon, which his attitude suggested. He was silent for a time, so long a time that Lidgerwood burst out impatiently, "Why don't you answer me?"

"I was just wondering if it is worth while for you to throw me overboard," said the chief clerk, speaking slowly and quite without heat. "You are needing friends pretty badly just now, if you only knew it, Mr. Lidgerwood."

The cool retort, as from an equal in rank, added fresh fuel to the fire.

"I'm not buying friends with concessions to injustice and crooked dealing," Lidgerwood exploded. "You were in the railroad service when the money was paid over to you, and you are in the railroad service now. I want to know where the money went."

"It is none of your business, Mr. Lidgerwood," said the carved figure with the gloomy eyes that never blinked.

"By heavens! I'm making it my business, Hallock! These men who were robbed say that you are an embezzler, a thief. If you are not, you've got to clear yourself. If you are, you can't stay in the Red Butte service another day: that's all."

Again there was a silence surcharged with electric possibilities. Lidgerwood bit the end from a cigar and lost three matches before he succeeded in lighting it. Hallock sat perfectly still, but the sallow tinge in his gaunt face had given place to a stony pallor. When he spoke, it was still without anger.

"I don't care a damn for your chief clerkship," he said calmly, "but for reasons of my own I am not ready to quit on such short notice. When I am ready, you won't have to discharge me. Upon what terms can I stay?"

"I've stated them," said the one who was angry. "Discharge your trust; make good in dollars and cents, or show cause why you were caught with an empty cash-box."

For the first time in the interview the chief clerk switched the stare of the gloomy eyes from the memorandum desk calendar, and fixed it upon his accuser.

"You seem to take it for granted that I was the only grafter in the building and loan business," he objected. "I wasn't; on the contrary, I was only a necessary cog in the wheel. Somebody had to make the deductions from the pay-rolls, and——"

"I'm not asking you to make excuses," stormed Lidgerwood. "I'm telling you that you've got to make good! If the money was used legitimately, you, or some of your fellow-officers in the company, should be able to show it. If the others left you to hold the bag, it is due to yourself, to the men who were held up, and to me, that you set yourself straight. Go to Flemister—he was your president, wasn't he?—and get him to make a statement that I can show to the grievance committee. That will let you out, and me, too."

Hallock stood up and leaned over the desk end. His saturnine face was a mask of cold rage, but his eyes were burning.

"If I thought you knew what you're saying," he began in the grating voice, "but you don't—you can't know!" Then, with a sudden break in the fierce tone: "Don't send me to Flemister for my clearance—don't do it, Mr. Lidgerwood. It's playing with fire. I didn't steal the money; I'll swear it on a stack of Bibles a mile high. Flemister will tell you so if he is paid his price. But you don't want me to pay the price. If I do——"

"Go on," said Lidgerwood, frowning, "if you do, what then?"

Hallock leaned still farther over the desk end.

"If I do, you'll get what you are after—and a good deal more. Again I am going to ask you if it is worth while to throw me overboard."

Lidgerwood was still angry enough to resent this advance into the field of the personalities.

"You've had my last word, Hallock, and all this talk about consequences that you don't explain is beside the mark. Get me that statement from Flemister, and do it soon. I am not going to have it said that we are fighting graft in one place and covering it up in another."

Hallock straightened up and buttoned his coat.

"I'll get you the statement," he said, quietly; "and the consequences won't need any explaining." His hand was on the door-knob when he finished saying it, and Lidgerwood had risen from his chair. There was a pause, while one might count five.

"Well?" said the superintendent.

"I was thinking again," said the man at the door. "By all the rules of the game—the game as it is played here in the desert—I ought to be giving you twenty-four hours to get out of gunshot, Mr. Lidgerwood. Instead of that I am going to do you a service. You remember that operator, Rufford, that you discharged a few days ago?"

"Yes."

"Bart Rufford, his brother, the 'lookout' at Red Light's place, has invited a few of his friends to take notice that he intends to kill you. You can take it straight. He means it. And that was what brought me up here to-night—not that memorandum on your desk calendar."

For a long time after the door had jarred to its shutting behind Hallock, Lidgerwood sat at his desk, idle and abstractedly thoughtful. Twice within the interval he pulled out a small drawer under the roll-top and made as if he would take up the weapon it contained, and each time he closed the drawer to break with the temptation to put the pistol into his pocket.

Later, after he had forced himself to go to work, a door slammed somewhere in the despatcher's end of the building, and automatically his hand shot out to the closed drawer. Then he made his decision and carried it out. Taking the nickel-plated thing from its hiding-place, and breaking it to eject the cartridges, he went to the end door of the corridor, which opened into the unused space under the rafters, and flung the weapon to the farthest corner of the dark loft.

VII

THE KILLER

Lidgerwood had found little difficulty in getting on the companionable side of Dawson, so far as the heavy-muscled, silent young draftsman had a companionable side; and an invitation to the family dinner-table at the Dawson cottage on the low mesa above the town had followed, as a matter of course.

Once within the home circle, with Benson to plead his cause with the meek little woman whose brown eyes held the shadow of a deep trouble, Lidgerwood had still less difficulty in arranging to share Benson's permanent table welcome. Though Martha Dawson never admitted it, even to her daughter, she stood in constant terror of the Red Desert and its representative town of Angels, and the presence of the superintendent as the member of the household promised to be an added guaranty of protection.

Lidgerwood's acceptance as a table boarder in the cottage on the mesa being hospitably prompt, he was coming and going as regularly as his oversight of the three hundred miles of demoralization permitted before the buffoonery of the Red Butte Western suddenly laughed itself out, and war was declared. In the interval he had come to concur very heartily in Benson's estimate of the family, and to share—without Benson's excuse, and without any reason that could be set in words—the young engineer's opposition to Gridley as Miss Faith's possible choice.

There was little to be done in this field, however. Gridley came and went, not too often, figuring always as a friend of the family, and usurping no more of Miss Dawson's time and attention than she seemed willing to bestow upon him. Lidgerwood saw no chance to obstruct and no good reason for obstructing. At all events, Gridley did not furnish the reason. And the first time Lidgerwood found himself sitting out the sunset hour after dinner on the tiny porch of the mesa cottage, with Faith Dawson as his companion—this while the joke was still running its course—his talk was not of Gridley, nor yet of Benson; it was of himself.

"How long is it going to be before you are able to forget that I am constructively your brother's boss, Miss Faith?" he asked, when she had brought him a cushion for the back of the hard veranda chair in which he was trying to be luxuriously lazy.

"Oh, do I remember it?—disagreeably?" she laughed. And then, with charming naïveté: "I am sure I try not to."

"I am beginning to wish you would try a little harder," he ventured, endeavoring to put her securely upon the plane of companionship. "It is pretty lonesome sometimes, up here on the top round of the Red-Butte-Western ladder of authority."

"You mean that you would like to leave your official dignity behind you when you come to us here on the mesa?" she asked.

"That's the idea precisely. You have no conception how strenuous it is, wearing the halo all the time, or perhaps I should say, the cap and bells."

She smiled. Frederic Dawson, the reticent, had never spoken of the attitude of the Red Butte Western toward its new boss, but Gridley had referred to it quite frequently and had made a joke of it. Without knowing just why, she had resented Gridley's attitude; this notwithstanding the master-mechanic's genial affability whenever Lidgerwood and his difficulties were the object of discussion.

"They are still refusing to take you seriously?" she said. "I hope you don't mind it too much."

"Personally, I don't mind it at all," he assured her—which was sufficiently true at the moment. "The men are acting like a lot of foolish schoolboys bent on discouraging the new teacher. I am hoping they will settle down to a sensible basis after a bit, and take me and the new order of things for granted."

Miss Dawson had something on her mind; a thing not gathered from Gridley or from any one else in particular, but which seemed to take shape of itself. The effect of setting it in speech asked for a complete effacement of Lidgerwood the superintendent, and that was rather difficult. But she compassed it.

"I don't think you ought to take them so much for granted—the men, I mean," she cautioned. "I can't help feeling afraid that some of the joking is not quite good-natured."

"I fancy very little of it is what you would call good-natured," he rejoined evenly. "Very much of it is thinly disguised contempt."

"For your authority?"

"For me, personally, first; and for my authority as a close second."

"Then you are anticipating trouble when the laugh is over?"

He shook his head. "I'm hoping No, as I said a moment ago, but I'm expecting Yes."

"And you are not afraid?"

It would have been worth a great deal to him if he could have looked fearlessly into the clear gray eyes of questioning, giving her a brave man's denial. But instead, his gaze went beyond her and he said: "You surely wouldn't expect me to confess it if I were afraid, would you? Don't you despise a coward, Miss Dawson?"

The sun was sinking behind the Timanyonis, and the soft glow of the western sky suffused her face, illuminating it with rare radiance. It was not, in the last analysis, a beautiful face, he told himself, comparing it with another whose outlines were bitten deeply and beyond all hope of erasure into the memory page. Yet the face warming softly in the sunset glow was sweet and winsome, attractive in the best sense of the overworked word. At the moment Lidgerwood rather envied Benson—or Gridley, whichever one of the two it was for whom Miss Dawson cared the most.

"There are so many different kinds of cowards," she said, after the reflective interval.

"But they are all equally despicable?" he suggested.

"The real ones are, perhaps. But our definitions are often careless. My grandfather, who was a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, used to say that real cowardice is either a psychological condition or a soul disease, and that what we call the physical symptoms of it are often misleading."

"For example?" said Lidgerwood.

"Grandfather used to be fond of contrasting the camp-fire bully and braggart, as one extreme, with the soldier who was frankly afraid of getting killed, as the other. It was his theory that the man who dodged the first few bullets in a battle was quite likely to turn out to be the real hero."

Lidgerwood could not resist the temptation to probe the old wound.

"Suppose, under some sudden stress, some totally unexpected trial, a man who was very much afraid of being afraid found himself morally and physically unable to do the courageous thing. Wouldn't he be, to all intents and purposes, a real coward?"

She took time to think.

"No," she said finally, "I wouldn't say that. I should wait until I had seen the same man tried under conditions that would give him time, to think first and to act afterward."

"Would you really do that?" he asked doubtfully.

"Yes, I should. A trial of the kind you describe isn't quite fair. Acute presence of mind in an emergency is not a supreme test of anything except of itself; least of all, perhaps, is it a test of courage—I mean courage of that quality which endures to-day and faces without flinching the threatening to-morrow."

"And you think the man who might be surprised into doing something very disgraceful on the spur of the moment might still have that other kind of courage, Miss Faith?"

"Certainly." She was far enough from making any personal application of the test case suggested by the superintendent. But in a world which took its keynote from the harsh discords of the Red Desert, these little thoughtful talks with a man who was most emphatically not of the Red Desert were refreshing. And she could scarcely have been Martha Dawson's daughter or Frederic Dawson's sister without having a thoughtful cast of mind.

Lidgerwood rose and felt in his pockets for his after-dinner cigar.

"You are much more charitable than most women, Miss Dawson," he said gravely; after which he left abruptly, and went back to his desk in the Crow's Nest.

As we have seen, this bit of confidential talk between the superintendent and Faith Dawson fell in the period of the jesting horse-laugh; fell, as it chanced, on a day when the horse-laugh was at its height. Later, after the storm broke, there were no more quiet evenings on the cottage porch for a harassed superintendent. Lidgerwood came and went as before, when the rapidly recurring wrecks did not keep him out on the line, but he scrupulously left his troubles behind him when he climbed to the cottage on the mesa.

Quite naturally, his silence on the one topic which was stirring the Red Desert from the Crosswater Hills to Timanyoni Canyon was a poor mask. The increasing gravity of the situation wrote itself plainly enough in his face, and Faith Dawson was sorry for him, giving him silent sympathy, unasked, if not wholly unexpected. The town talk of Angels, what little of it reached the cottage, was harshly condemnatory of the new superintendent; and public opinion, standing for what it was worth, feared no denial when it asserted that Lidgerwood was doing what he could to earn his newer reputation.

After the mysterious disappearance of the switching-engine, mystery still unsolved and apparently unsolvable, he struck fast and hard, searching painstakingly for the leaders in the rebellion, reprimanding, suspending, and discharging until McCloskey warned him that, in addition to the evil of short-handing the road, he was filling Angels with a growing army of ex-employees, desperate and ripe for anything.

"I can't help it, Mac," was his invariable reply. "Unless they put me out of the fight I shall go on as I have begun, staying with it until we have a railroad in fact, or a forfeited charter. Do the best you can, but let it be plainly and distinctly understood that the man who isn't with us is against us, and the man who is against us is going to get a chance to hunt for a new job every time."

Whereupon the trainmaster's homely face would take on added furrowings of distress.

"That's all right, Mr. Lidgerwood; that is stout, two-fisted talk all right; and I'm not doubting that you mean every word of it. But, they'll murder you."

"That is neither here nor there, what they will do to me. I handled them with gloves at first, but they wanted the bare fist. They've got it now, and as I have said before, we are going to fight this thing through to a complete and artistic finish. Who goes east on 202 to-day?"

"It is Judson's run, but he is laying off."

"What is the matter with him, sick?"

"No; just plain drunk."

"Fire him. I won't have a single solitary man in the train service who gets drunk. Tell him so."

"All right; one more stick of dynamite, with a cap and fuse in it, turned loose under foot," prophesied McCloskey gloomily. "Judson goes."

"Never mind the dynamite. Now, what has been done with Johnston, that conductor who turned in three dollars as the total cash collections for a hundred-and-fifty-mile run?"

"I've had him up. He grinned and said that that was all the money there was, everybody had tickets."

"You don't believe it?"

"No; Grantby, the superintendent of the Ruby Mine, came in on Johnston's train that morning and he registered a kick because the Ruby Gulch station agent wasn't out of bed in time to sell him a ticket. He paid Johnston on the train, and that one fare alone was five dollars and sixty cents."

Lidgerwood was adding another minute square to the pencilled checker-board on his desk blotter.

"Discharge Johnston and hold back his time-check. Then have him arrested for stealing, and wire the legal department at Denver that I want him prosecuted."

Again McCloskey's rough-cast face became the outward presentment of a soul in anxious trouble.

"Call it done—and another stick of dynamite turned loose," he acquiesced. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes. What have you found out about that missing switch-engine?" This had come to be the stereotyped query, vocalizing itself every time the trainmaster showed his face in the superintendent's room.

"Nothing, yet. I'm hunting for proof."

"Against the men you suspect? Who are they, and what did they do with the engine?"

McCloskey became dumb.

"I don't dare to say part of it till I can say it all, Mr. Lidgerwood. You hit too quick and too hard. But tell me one thing: have you had to report the loss of that engine to anybody higher up?"

"I shall have to report it to General Manager Frisbie, of course, if we don't find it."

"But haven't you already reported it?"

"No; that is, I guess not. Wait a minute."

A touch of the bell-push brought Hallock to the door of the inner office. The green shade was pulled low over his eyes, and he held the pen he had been using as if it were a dagger.

"Hallock, have you reported the disappearance of that switching-engine to Mr. Frisbie?" asked the superintendent.

The answer seemed reluctant, and it was given in the single word of assent.

"When?" asked Lidgerwood.

"In the weekly summary for last week; you signed it," said the chief clerk.

"Did I tell you to include that particular item in the report?" Lidgerwood did not mean to give the inquiry the tang of an implied reproof, but the fight with the outlaws was beginning to make his manner incisive.

"You didn't need to tell me; I know my business," said Hallock, and his tone matched his superior's.

Lidgerwood looked at McCloskey, and, at the trainmaster's almost imperceptible nod, said, "That's all," and Hallock disappeared and closed the door.

"Well?" queried Lidgerwood sharply, when they had privacy again.

McCloskey was shifting uneasily from one foot to the other.

"My name's Scotch, and they tell me I've got Scotch blood in me," he began. "I don't like to shoot my mouth off till I know what I'm doing. I suppose I quarrelled with Hallock once a day, regular, before you came on the job, Mr. Lidgerwood, and I'll say again that I don't like him—never did. That's what makes me careful about throwing it into him now."

"Go on," said Lidgerwood.

"Well, you know he wanted to be superintendent of this road. He kept the wires to New York hot for a week after he found out that the P. S-W. was in control. He missed it, and you naturally took it over his head—at least, maybe that's the way he looks at it."

"Take it for granted and get to the point," urged Lidgerwood, always impatient of preliminary bush-beating.

"There isn't any point, if you don't see any," said McCloskey stubbornly. "But I can tell you how it would strike me, if I had to be wearing your shoes just now. You've got a man for your chief clerk who has kept this whole town guessing for two years. Some say he isn't all to the bad; some say he is a woman-killer; but they all agree that he's as spiteful as an Indian. He wanted your job: supposing he still wants it."

"Stick to the facts, Mac," said the superintendent. "You're theorizing now, you know."

"Well, by gravels, I will!" rasped McCloskey, pushed over the cautionary edge by Lidgerwood's indifference to the main question at issue. "What I know don't amount to much yet, but it all leans one way. Hallock puts in his daytime scratching away at his desk out there, and you'd think he didn't know it was this year. But when that desk is shut up, you'll find him at the roundhouse, over in the freight yard, round the switch shanties, or up at Biggs's—anywhere he can get half a dozen of the men together. I haven't found a man yet that I could trust to keep tab on him, and I don't know what he's doing; but I can guess."

"Is that all?" said Lidgerwood quietly.

"No, it isn't! That switch-engine dropped out two weeks ago last Tuesday night. I've been prying into this locked-up puzzle-box every way I could think of ever since. Hallock knows where that engine went!"

"What makes you think so?"

"I'll tell you. Robinson, the night-crew engineer, was a little late leaving her that night. His fireman had gone home, and so had the yardmen. After he had crossed the yard coming out, he saw a man sneaking toward the shifter, keeping in the shadow of the coal-chutes. He was just curious enough to want to know who it was, and he made a little sneak of his own. When he found it was Hallock, he went home and thought no more about it till I got him to talk."

Lidgerwood had gone back to the pencil and the blotting-pad and the making of squares.

"But the motive, Mac?" he questioned, without looking up. "How could the theft or the destruction of a locomotive serve any purpose that Hallock might have in view?"

McCloskey did not mean any disrespect to his superior officer when he retorted: "I'm no 'cyclopædia. There are lots of things I don't know. But unless you call it off, I'm going to know a few more of them before I quit."

"I don't call it off, Mac; find out what you can. But I can't believe that Hallock is heading this organized robbery and rebellion."

"Somebody is heading it, to a dead moral certainty, Mr. Lidgerwood; the licks are coming too straight and too well-timed."

"Find the man if you can, and we'll eliminate him. And, by the way, if it comes to the worst, how will Hepburn, the town marshal, stand?"

The trainmaster shook his head.

"I don't know. Jack's got plenty of sand, but he was elected out of the shops, and by the railroad vote. If it comes to a show-down against the men who elected him——"

"That is what I mean," nodded Lidgerwood. "It will come to a show-down sooner or later, if we can't nip the ringleaders. Young Rufford and a dozen more of the dropped employees are threatening to get even. That means train-wrecking, misplaced switches, arson—anything you like. At the first break there are going to be some very striking examples made of all the wreckers and looters we can land on."

McCloskey's chair faced the window, and he was scowling and mouthing at the tall chimney of the shop power-plant across the tracks. Where had he fallen upon the idea that this carefully laundered gentleman, who never missed his daily plunge and scrub, and still wore immaculate linen, lacked the confidence of his opinions and convictions? The trainmaster knew, and he thought Lidgerwood must also know, that the first blow of the vengeful ones would be directed at the man rather than at the company's property.

"I guess maybe Hepburn will do his duty when it comes to the pinch," he said finally. And the subject having apparently exhausted itself, he went about his business, which was to call up the telegraph operator at Timanyoni to ask why he had broken the rule requiring the conductor and engineer, both of them, to sign train orders in his presence.

Thereupon, quite in keeping with the militant state of affairs on a harassed Red Butte Western, ensued a sharp and abusive wire quarrel at long range; and when it was over, Timanyoni was temporarily stricken from the list of night telegraph stations pending the hastening forward of a relief operator, to take the place of the one who, with many profane objurgations curiously clipped in rattling Morse, had wired his opinion of McCloskey and the new superintendent, closely interwoven with his resignation.

It was after dark that evening when Lidgerwood closed his desk on the pencilled blotting-pad and groped his way down the unlighted stair to the Crow's Nest platform.

The day passenger from the east was in, and the hostler had just coupled Engine 266 to the train for the night run to Red Butte. Lidgerwood marked the engine's number, and saw Dawson talking to Williams, the engineer, as he turned the corner at the passenger-station end of the building. Later, when he was crossing the open plaza separating the railroad yard from the town, he thought he heard the draftsman's step behind him, and waited for Dawson to come up.

His hand was on the latch of the door-yard gate when a man rose out of the gloom.

The rearward darkness, made blacker by contrast with the white beam of the 266's headlight, yielding no one and no further sounds, he went on, past the tar-paper-covered hotel, past the flanking of saloons and the false-fronted shops, past the "Arcade" with its crimson sidewalk eye setting the danger signal for all who should enter Red-Light Sammy's, and so up to the mesa and to the cottage of seven-o'clock dinners.

His hand was on the latch of the dooryard gate when a man rose out of the gloom—out of the ground at his feet, as it appeared to Lidgerwood—and in the twinkling of an eye the night and the starry dome of it were effaced for the superintendent in a flash of red lightning and a thunder-clap louder than the crash of worlds.

When he began to realize again, Dawson was helping him to his feet, and the draftsman's mother was calling anxiously from the door.

"What was it?" Lidgerwood asked, still dazed and half blinded.

"A man tried to kill you," said Dawson in his most matter-of-fact tone. "I happened along just in time to joggle his arm. That, and your quick drop, did the business. Not hurt, are you?"

Lidgerwood was gripping the gate and trying to steady himself. A chill, like a violent attack of ague, was shaking him to the bone.

"No," he returned, mastering the chattering teeth by the supremest effort of will. "Thanks to you, I guess—I'm—not hurt. Who w-was the man?"

"It was Rufford. He followed you from the Crow's Nest. Williams saw him and put me on, so I followed him."

"Williams? Then he isn't——"

"No," said Dawson, anticipating the query. "He is with us, and he is swinging the best of the engineers into line. But come into the house and let me give you a drop of whiskey. This thing has got on your nerves a bit—and no wonder."

But Lidgerwood clung to the gate-palings for yet another steadying moment.

"Rufford, you said: you mean the discharged telegraph operator?"

"Worse luck," said Dawson. "It was his brother Bart, the 'lookout' at Red-Light Sammy's; the fellow they call 'The Killer'."

VIII

BENSON'S BRIDGE-TIMBERS

It was on the morning following the startling episode at the Dawsons' gate that Benson, lately arrived from the west on train 204, came into the superintendent's office with the light of discovery in his eye. But the discovery, if any there were, was made to wait upon a word of friendly solicitude.

"What's this they were telling me down at the lunch-counter just now—about somebody taking a pot-shot at you last night?" he asked. "Dougherty said it was Bart Rufford; was it?"

Lidgerwood confirmed the gossip with a nod. "Yes, it was Rufford, so Dawson says. I didn't recognize him, though; it was too dark."

"Well, I'm mighty glad to see that he didn't get you. What was the row?"

"I don't know, definitely; I suppose it was because I told McCloskey to discharge his brother a while back. The brother has been hanging about town and making threats ever since he was dropped from the pay-rolls, but no one has paid any attention to him."

"A pretty close call, wasn't it?—or was Dougherty only putting on a few frills to go with my cup of coffee?"

"It was close enough," admitted Lidgerwood half absently. He was thinking not so much of the narrow escape as of the fresh and humiliating evidence it had afforded of his own wretched unreadiness.

"All right; you'll come around to my way of thinking after a while. I tell you, Lidgerwood, you've got to heel yourself when you live in a gun country. I said I wouldn't do it, but I have done it, and I'll tell you right now, when anybody in this blasted desert makes monkey-motions at me, I'm going to blow the top of his head off, quick."

Lidgerwood's gaze was resting on the little drawer in his desk which now contained nothing but a handful of loose cartridges.

"Hasn't it ever occurred to you, Jack, that I am the one man in the desert who cannot afford to go armed? I am supposed to stand for law and order. What would my example be worth if it should be noised around that I, too, had become a 'gun-toter'?"

"Oh, I'm not going to argue with you," laughed Benson. "You'll go your own way and do as you please, and probably get yourself comfortably shot up before you get through. But I didn't come up here to wrangle with you about your theoretical notions of law and order. I came to tell you that I have been hunting for those bridge-timbers of mine."

"Well?" queried Lidgerwood; "have you found them?"

"No, and I don't believe anybody will ever find them. It's going to be another case of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not."

"But you have discovered something?"

"Partly yes, and partly no. I think I told you at the time that they vanished between two days like a puff of smoke, leaving no trace behind them. How it was done I couldn't imagine. There is a wagon-road paralleling the river over there at the Siding, as you know, and the first thing I did the next morning was to look for wagon-tracks. No set of wheels carrying anything as heavy as those twelve-by-twelve twenty-fours had gone over the road."

"How were they taken, then? They couldn't have been floated off down the river, could they?"

"It was possible, but not at all probable," said the engineer. "My theory was that they were taken away on somebody's railroad car. There were only two sources of information, at first—the night operator at Little Butte twelve miles west, and the track-walker at Point-of-Rocks, whose boat goes down to within two or three miles of the Gloria bridge. Goodloe, at Little Butte, reports that there was nothing moving on the main line after the passing of the midnight freight east; and Shaughnessy, the track-walker, is just a plain, unvarnished liar: he knows a lot more than he will tell."

"Still, you are looking a good bit more cheerful than you were last week," was Lidgerwood's suggestion.

"Yes; after I got the work started again with a new set of timbers, I spent three or four days on the ground digging for information like a dog after a woodchuck. There are some prospectors panning on the bar three miles up the Gloria, but they knew nothing—or if they knew they wouldn't tell. That was the case with every man I talked to on our side of the river. But over across the Timanyoni, nearly opposite the mouth of the Gloria, there is a little creek coming in from the north, and on this creek I found a lone prospector—a queer old chap who hails from my neck of woods up in Michigan."

"Go on," said Lidgerwood, when the engineer stopped to light his pipe.

"The old man told me a fairy tale, all right," Benson went on. "He was as full of fancies as a fig is of seeds. I have been trying to believe that what he told me isn't altogether a pipe-dream, but it sounds mightily like one. He says that about two o'clock in the morning of Saturday, two weeks ago, an engine and a single car backed down from the west to the Gloria bridge, and a crowd of men swarmed off the train, loaded those bridge-timbers, and ran away with them, going back up the line to the west. He tells it all very circumstantially, though he neglected to explain how he happened to be awake and on guard at any such unearthly hour."

"Where was he when he saw all this?"

"On his own side of the river, of course. It was a dark night, and the engine had no headlight. But the loading gang had plenty of lanterns, and he says they made plenty of noise."

"You didn't let it rest at that?" said the superintendent.

"Oh, no, indeed! I put in the entire afternoon that day on a hand-car with four of my men to pump it for me, and if there is a foot of the main line, side-tracks, or spurs, west of the Gloria bridge, that I haven't gone over, I don't know where it is. The next night I crossed the Timanyoni and tackled the old prospector again. I wanted to check him up—see if he had forgotten any of the little frills and details. He hadn't. On the contrary, he was able to add what seems to me a very important detail. About an hour after the disappearance of the one-car train with my bridge-timbers, he heard something that he had heard many times before. He says it was the high-pitched song of a circular saw. I asked him if he was sure. He grinned and said he hadn't been brought up in the Michigan woods without being able to recognize that song wherever he might hear it."

"Whereupon you went hunting for saw-mills?" asked Lidgerwood.

"That is just what I did, and if there is one within hearing distance of that old man's cabin on Quartz Creek, I couldn't find it. But I am confident that there is one, and that the thieves, whoever they were, lost no time in sawing my bridge-timbers up into board-lumber, and I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars against a no-account yellow dog that I have seen those boards a dozen times within the last twenty-four hours, without knowing it."

"Didn't see anything of our switch-engine while you were looking for your bridge-timbers and saw-mills and other things, did you?" queried Lidgerwood.

"No," was the quick reply, "no, but I have a think coming on that, too. My old prospector says he couldn't make out very well in the dark, but it seemed to him as if the engine which hauled away our bridge-timbers didn't have any tender. How does that strike you?"

Lidgerwood grew thoughtful. The missing engine was of the "saddle-tank" type, and it had no tender. It was hard to believe that it could be hidden anywhere on so small a part of the Red Butte Western system as that covered by the comparatively short mileage in Timanyoni Park. Yet if it had not been dumped into some deep pot-hole in the river, it was unquestionably hidden somewhere.

"Benson, are you sure you went over all the line lying west of the Gloria bridge?" he asked pointedly.

"Every foot of it, up one side and down the other ... No, hold on, there is that old spur running up on the eastern side of Little Butte; it's the one that used to serve Flemister's mine when the workings were on the eastern slope of the butte. I didn't go over that spur. It hasn't been used for years; as I remember it, the switch connections with the main line have been taken out."

"You're wrong about that," said Lidgerwood definitely. "McCloskey thought so too, and told me that the frogs and point-rails had been taken out at Silver Switch—at both of the main-line ends of the 'Y',—but the last time I was over the line I noticed that the old switch stands were there, and that the split rails were still in place."

Benson had been tilting comfortably in his chair, smoking his pipe, but at this he got up quickly and looked at his watch.

"Say, Lidgerwood, I'm going back to the Park on Extra 71, which ought to leave in about five minutes," he said hurriedly. "Tell me half a dozen things in just about as many seconds. Has Flemister used that spur since you took charge of the road?"

"No."

"Have you ever suspected him of being mixed up in the looting?"

"I haven't known enough about him to form an opinion."

Benson stepped to the door communicating with the outer office, and closed it quietly.

"Your man Hallock out there; how is he mixed up with Flemister?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Because, the day before yesterday, when I was on the Little Butte station platform, talking with Goodloe, I saw Flemister and Hallock walking down the new spur together. When they saw me, they turned around and began to walk back toward the mine."

"Hallock had business with Flemister, I know that much, and he took half a day off Thursday to go and see him," said the superintendent.

"Do you happen to know what the business was?"

"Yes, I do. He went at my request."

"H'm," said Benson, "another string broken. Never mind; I've got to catch that train."

"Still after those bridge-timbers?"

"Still after the boards they have probably been sawed into. And before I get back I am going to know what's at the upper end of that old Silver Switch 'Y' spur."

The young engineer had been gone less than half an hour, and Lidgerwood had scarcely finished reading his mail, when McCloskey opened the door. Like Benson, the trainmaster also had the light of discovery in his eye.

"More thievery," he announced gloomily. "This time they have been looting my department. I had ten or twelve thousand feet of high-priced, insulated copper wire, and a dozen or more telephone sets, in the store-room. Mr. Cumberley had a notion of connecting up all the Angels departments by telephone, and it got as far as the purchasing of the material. The wire and all those telephone sets are gone."

"Well?" said Lidgerwood, evenly. The temptation to take it out upon the nearest man was still as strong as ever, but he was growing better able to resist it.

"I've done what I could," snapped McCloskey, seeming to know what was expected of him, "but nobody knows anything, of course. So far as I could find out, no one of my men has had occasion to go to the store-room for a week."

"Who has the keys?"

"I have one, and Spurlock, the line-chief, has one. Hallock has the third."

"Always Hallock!" was the half-impatient comment. "I hope you don't suspect him of stealing your wire."

McCloskey tilted his hat over his eyes, and looked truculent enough to fight an entire cavalry troop.

"That's just what I do," he gritted. "I've got him dead to rights this time. He was in that store-room day before yesterday, or rather night before last. Callahan saw him coming out of there."

Lidgerwood sat back in his chair and smiled. "I don't blame you much, Mac; this thing is getting to be pretty binding upon all of us. But I think you are mistaken in your conclusion, I mean. Hallock has been making an inventory of material on hand for the past week or more, and now that I think of it, I remember having seen your wire and the telephone sets included in his last sheet of telegraph supplies."

"There it goes again," said the trainmaster sourly. "Every time I get a half-hitch on that fellow, something turns up to make it slip. But if I had my way about twenty minutes I'd go and choke him till he'd tell me what he has done with that wire."

Lidgerwood was smiling again.

"Try to be as fair to him as you can," he advised good-naturedly. "I know you dislike him, and probably you have good reasons. But have you stopped to ask yourself what possible use he could make of the stolen material?"

Again McCloskey's hat went to the pugnacious angle. "I don't know anything any more; you couldn't prove it by me what day of the week it is. But I can tell you one thing, Mr. Lidgerwood"—shaking an emphatic finger—"Flemister has just put a complete system of wiring and telephones in his mine, and if he had the stuff for the system shipped in over our railroad, the agent at Little Butte doesn't know anything about it. I asked Goodloe, by grapples!"

But even this was unconvincing to the superintendent.

"That proves nothing against Hallock, Mac, as you will see when you cool down a little," he said.

"I know it doesn't," wrathfully; "nothing proves anything any more. I suppose I've got to say it again: I'm all in, down and out." And he went away, growling to his hat-brim.

Late in the evening of the same day, Benson returned from the west, coming in on a light engine that was deadheading from Red Butte to the Angels shops. He sought out Lidgerwood at once, and flinging himself wearily into a chair at the superintendent's elbow, made his report of the day's doings.

"I have, and I haven't," he said, beginning in the midst of things, as his habit was. "You were right about the track connection at Silver Switch. It is in; Flemister put it in himself a month ago when he had a car-load of coal taken up to the back door of his mine."

"Did you go up over the spur?"

"Yes; and I had my trouble for my pains. Before I go any further, Lidgerwood, I'd like to ask you one question: can we afford to quarrel with Mr. Pennington Flemister?"

"Benson, we sha'n't hesitate a single moment to quarrel with the biggest mine-owner or freight-shipper this side of the Crosswater Hills if we have the right on our side. Spread it out. What did you find?"

Benson sank a little lower in his chair. "The first thing I found was a couple of armed guards—a pair of tough-looking citizens with guns sagging at their hips, lounging around the Wire-Silver back door. There is quite a little nest of buildings at the old entrance to the Wire-Silver, and a stockade has been built to enclose them. The old spur runs through a gate in the stockade, and the gate was open; but the two toughs wouldn't let me go inside. I wrangled with them first, and tried to bribe them afterward, but it was no go. Then I started to walk around the outside of the stockade, which is only a high board fence, and they objected to that. Thereupon I told them to go straight to blazes, and walked away down the spur, but when I got out of sight around the first curve I took to the timber on the butte slope and climbed to a point from which I could look over into Flemister's carefully built enclosure."

"Well, what did you see?"

"Much or little, just as you happen to look at it. There are half a dozen buildings in the yard, and two of them are new and unpainted. Sizing them up from a distance, I said to myself that the lumber in them hadn't been very long out of the mill. One of them is evidently the power-house; it has an iron chimney set in the roof, and the power-plant was running."

For a little time after Benson had finished his report there was silence, and Lidgerwood had added many squares to the pencillings on his desk blotter before he spoke again.

"You say two of the buildings are new; did you make any inquiries about recent lumber shipments to the Wire-Silver?"

"I did," said the young engineer soberly. "So far as our station records show, Flemister has had no material, save coal, shipped in over either the eastern or the western spur for several months."

"Then you believe that he took your bridge-timbers and sawed them up into lumber?"

"I do—as firmly as I believe that the sun will rise to-morrow. And that isn't all of it, Lidgerwood. He is the man who has your switch-engine. As I have said, the power-plant was running while I was up there to-day. The power is a steam engine, and if you'd stand off and listen to it you'd swear it was a locomotive pulling a light train up an easy grade. Of course, I'm only guessing at that, but I think you will agree with me that the burden of proof lies upon Flemister."

Lidgerwood was nodding slowly. "Yes, on Flemister and some others. Who are the others, Benson?"

"I have no more guesses coming, and I am too tired to invent any. Suppose we drop it until to-morrow. I'm afraid it means a fight or a funeral, and I am not quite equal to either to-night."

For a long time after Benson had gone, Lidgerwood sat staring out of his office window at the masthead electrics in the railroad yard. Benson's news had merely confirmed his own and McCloskey's conclusion that some one in authority was in collusion with the thieves who were raiding the company. Sooner or later it must come to a grapple, and he dreaded it.

It was deep in the night when he closed his desk and went to the little room partitioned off in the rear of the private office as a sleeping-apartment. When he was preparing to go to bed, he noticed that the tiny relay on the stand at his bed's head was silent. Afterward, when he tried to adjust the instrument, he found it ruined beyond repair. Some one had connected its wiring with the electric lighting circuit, and the tiny coils were fused and burned into solid little cylinders of copper.

IX

JUDSON'S JOKE

Barton Rufford, ex-distiller of illicit whiskey in the Tennessee mountains, ex-welsher turned informer and betraying his neighbor law-breakers to the United States revenue officers, ex-everything which made his continued stay in the Cumberlands impossible, was a man of distinction in the Red Desert.

In the wider field of the West he had been successively a claim-jumper, a rustler of unbranded cattle, a telegraph operator in collusion with a gang of train-robbers, and finally a faro "lookout": the armed guard who sits at the head of the gaming-table in the untamed regions to kill and kill quickly if a dispute arises.

Angels acknowledged his citizenship without joy. A cold-blooded murderer, with an appalling record; and a man with a temper like smoking tow, an itching trigger-finger, the eye of a duck-hawk, and cat-like swiftness of movement, he tyrannized the town when the humor was on him; and as yet no counter-bully had come to chase him into oblivion.

For Lidgerwood to have earned the enmity of this man was considered equivalent to one of three things: the superintendent would throw up his job and leave the Red Desert, preferably by the first train; or Rufford would kill him; or he must kill Rufford. Red Butte Western opinion was somewhat divided as to which horn of the trilemma the victim of Rufford's displeasure would choose, all admitting that, for the moment, the choice lay with the superintendent. Would Lidgerwood fight, or run, or sit still and be slain? In the Angels roundhouse, on the second morning following the attempt upon Lidgerwood's life at the gate of the Dawson cottage, the discussion was spirited, not to say acrimonious.

"I'm telling you hyenas that Collars-and-Cuffs ain't going to run away," insisted Williams, who was just in from the all-night trip to Red Butte and return. "He ain't built that way."

Lester, the roundhouse foreman, himself a man-queller of no mean repute, thought differently. Lidgerwood would, most likely, take to the high grass and the tall timber. The alternative was to "pack a gun" for Rufford—an alternative quite inconceivable to Lester when it was predicated of the superintendent.

"I don't know about that," said Judson, the discharged—and consequently momentarily sobered—engineer of the 271. "He's fooled everybody more than once since he lit down in the Red Desert. First crack everybody said he didn't know his business, 'cause he wore b'iled shirts: he does know it. Next, you could put your ear to the ground and hear that he didn't have the sand to round up the maverick R.B.W. He's doing it. I don't know but he might even run a bluff on Bart Rufford, if he felt like it."

"Come off, John!" growled the big foreman. "You needn't be afraid to talk straight over here. He hit you when you was down, and we all know you're only waitin' for a chance to hit back."

Judson was a red-headed man, effusively good-natured when he was in liquor, and a quick-tempered fighter of battles when he was not.

"Don't you make any such mistake!" he snapped. "That's what McCloskey said when he handed me the 'good-by.' 'You'll be one more to go round feelin' for Mr. Lidgerwood's throat, I suppose,' says he. By cripes! what I said to Mac I'm sayin' to you, Bob Lester. I know good and well a-plenty when I've earned my blue envelope. If I'd been in the super's place, the 271 would have had a new runner a long time ago!"

"Oh, hell! I say he'll chase his feet," puffed Broadbent, the fat machinist who was truing off the valve-seats of the 195. "If Rufford doesn't make him, there's some others that will."

Judson flared up again.

"Who you quotin' now, Fatty? One o' the shop 'prentices? Or maybe it's Rank Hallock? Say, what's he doin' monkeyin' round the back shop so much lately? I'm goin' to stay round here till I get a chance to lick that scrub."

Broadbent snorted his derision of all mere enginemen.

"You rail-pounders'd better get next to Rankin Hallock," he warned. "He's the next sup'rintendent of the R.B.W. You'll see the 'pointment circular the next day after that jim-dandy over in the Crow's Nest gets moved off'n the map."

"Well, I'm some afeared Bart Rufford's likely to move him," drawled Clay, the six-foot Kentuckian who was filing the 195's brasses at the bench. "Which the same I ain't rejoicin' about, neither. That little cuss is shore a mighty good railroad man. And when you ain't rubbin' his fur the wrong way, he treats you white."

"For instance?" snapped Hodges, a freight engineer who had been thrice "on the carpet" in Lidgerwood's office for over-running his orders.

"Oh, they ain't so blame' hard to find," Clay retorted. "Last week, when we was out on the Navajo wreck, me and the boy didn't have no dinner-buckets. Bradford was runnin' the super's car, and when Andy just sort o' happened to mention the famine up along, the little man made that Jap cook o' his'n get us up a dinner that'd made your hair frizzle. He shore did."

"Why don't you go and take up for him with Bart Rufford?" sneered Broadbent, stopping his facing machine to set in a new cut on the valve-seat.

"Not me. I've got cold feet," laughed the Kentuckian. "I'm like the little kid's daddy in the Sunday-school song: I ain't got time to die yet—got too much to do."

It was Williams's innings, and what he said was cautionary.

"Dry up, you fellows; here comes Gridley."

The master-mechanic was walking down the planked track from the back shop, carrying his years, which showed only in the graying mustache and chin beard, and his hundred and eighty pounds of well-set-up bone and muscle, jauntily. Now, as always, he was the beau ideal of the industrial field-officer; handsome in a clean-cut masculine way, a type of vigor—but also, if the signs of the full face and the eager eyes were to be regarded, of the elemental passions.

Angelic rumor hinted that he was a periodic drunkard: he was both more and less than that. Like many another man, Henry Gridley lived a double life; or, perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that there were two Henry Gridleys. Lidgerwood, the Dawsons, the little world of Angels at large, knew the virile, accomplished mechanical engineer and master of men, which was his normal personality. What time the other personality, the elemental barbarian, yawned, stretched itself, and came awake, the unspeakable dens of the Copah lower quarter engulfed him until the nether-man had gorged himself on degradation.

To his men, Gridley was a tyrant, exacting, but just; ruling them, as the men of the desert could only be ruled, with the mailed fist. Yet there was a human hand inside of the steel gauntlet, as all men knew. Having once beaten a bullying gang-boss into the hospital at Denver, he had promptly charged himself with the support of the man's family. Other generous roughnesses were recorded of him, and if the attitude of the men was somewhat tempered by wholesome fear, it was none the less loyal.

Hence, when he entered the roundhouse, industrious silence supplanted the discussion of the superintendent's case. Glancing at the group of enginemen, and snapping out a curt criticism of Broadbent's slowness on the valve-seats, he beckoned to Judson. When the discharged engineer had followed him across the turn-table, he faced about and said, not too crisply, "So your sins have found you out one more time, have they, John?"

Judson nodded.

"What is it this time, thirty days?"

Judson shook his head gloomily. "No, I'm down and out."

"Lidgerwood made it final, did he? Well, you can't blame him."

"You hain't heard me sayin' anything, have you?" was the surly rejoinder.

"No, but it isn't in human nature to forget these little things." Then, suddenly: "Where were you day before yesterday between noon and one o'clock, about the time you should have been taking your train out?"

Judson had a needle-like mind when the alcohol was out of it, and the sudden query made him dissemble.

"About ten o'clock I was playin' pool in Rafferty's place with the butt end of the cue. After that, things got kind o'hazy."

"Well, I want you to buckle down and think hard. Don't you remember going over to Cat Biggs's about noon, and sitting down at one of the empty card-tables to drink yourself stiff?"

Judson could not have told, under the thumbscrews, why he was prompted to tell Gridley a plain lie. But he did it.

"I can't remember," he denied. Then then needle-pointed brain got in its word, and he added, "Why?"

"I saw you there when I was going up to dinner. You called me in to tell me what you were going to do to Lidgerwood if he slated you for getting drunk. Don't you remember it?"

Judson was looking the master-mechanic fairly in the eyes when he said, "No, I don't remember a thing about that."

"Try again," said Gridley, and now the shrewd gray eyes under the brim of the soft-rolled felt hat held the engineer helpless.

"I guess—I do—remember it—now," said Judson, slowly, trying, still ineffectually, to break Gridley's masterful eyehold upon him.

"I thought you would," said the master-mechanic, without releasing him. "And you probably remember, also, that I took you out into the street and started you home."

"Yes," said Judson, this time without hesitation.

"Well, keep on remembering it; you went home to Maggie, and she put you to bed. That is what you are to keep in mind."

Judson had broken the curious eye-grip at last, and again he said, "Why?"

Gridley hooked his finger absently in the engineer's buttonhole.

"Because, if you don't, a man named Rufford says he'll start a lead mine in you. I heard him say it last night—overheard him, I should say. That's all."

The master-mechanic passed on, going out by the great door which opened for the locomotive entering-track. Judson hung upon his heel for a moment, and then went slowly out through the tool-room and across the yard tracks to the Crow's Nest.

He found McCloskey in his office above stairs, mouthing and grimacing over the string-board of the new time-table.

"Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying."

"Well?" growled the trainmaster, when he saw who had opened and closed the door. "Come back to tell me you've sworn off? That won't go down with Mr. Lidgerwood. When he fires, he means it."

"You wait till I ask you for my job back again, won't you, Jim McCloskey?" said the disgraced one hotly. "I hain't asked it yet; and what's more, I'm sober."

"Sure you are," muttered McCloskey. "You'd be better-natured with a drink or two in you. What's doing?"

"That's what I came over here to find out," said Judson steadily. "What is the boss going to do about this flare-up with Bart Rufford?"

The trainmaster shrugged.

"You've got just as many guesses as anybody, John. What you can bet on is that he will do something different."

Judson had slouched to the window. When he spoke, it was without turning his head.

"You said something yesterday morning about me feeling for the boss's throat along with that gang up-town that's trying to drink itself up to the point of hitting him back. It don't strike me that way, Mac."

"How does it strike you?"

Judson turned slowly, crossed the room, and sat down in the only vacant chair.

"You know what's due to happen, Mac. Rufford won't try it on again the way he tried it night before last. I heard up-town that he has posted his de-fi: Mr. Lidgerwood shoots him on sight or he shoots Mr. Lidgerwood on sight. You can figure that out, can't you?"

"Not knowing Mr. Lidgerwood much better than you do, John, I'm not sure that I can."

"Well, it's easy. Bart'll walk up to the boss in broad daylight, drop him, and then fill him full o'lead after he's down. I've seen him—saw him do it to Bixby, Mr. Brewster's foreman at the Copperette."

"Say the rest of it," commanded McCloskey.

"I've been thinking. While I'm laying round with nothing much to do, I believe I'll keep tab on Bart for a little spell. I don't love him much, nohow."

McCloskey's face contortion was intended to figure as a derisive smile. "Pshaw, John!" he commented, "he'd skin you alive. Why, even Jack Hepburn is afraid of him!"

"Jack is? How do you know that?"

McCloskey shrugged again.

"Are you with us, John?" he asked cautiously.

"I ain't with Bart Rufford and the tin-horns," said Judson negatively.

"Then I'll tell you a fairy tale," said the trainmaster, lowering his voice. "I gave you notice that Mr. Lidgerwood would do something different: he did it, bright and early this morning; went to Jake Schleisinger, who had to try twice before he could remember that he was a justice of the peace, and swore out a warrant for Rufford's arrest, on a charge of assault with intent to kill."

"Sure," said Judson, "that's what any man would do in a civilized country, ain't it?"

"Yes, but not here, John—not in the red-colored desert, with Bart Rufford's name in the body of the warrant."

"I don't know why not," insisted the engineer stubbornly. "But go on with the story; it ain't any fairy tale, so far."

"When he'd got the warrant, Schleisinger protesting all the while that Bart'd kill him for issuing it, Mr. Lidgerwood took it to Hepburn and told him to serve it. Jack backed down so fast that he fell over his feet. Said to ask him anything else under God's heavens and he'd do it—anything but that."

"Huh!" said Judson. "If I'd took an oath to serve warrants I'd serve 'em, if it did make me sick at my stomach." Then he got up and shuffled away to the window again, and when next he spoke his voice was the voice of a broken man.

"I lied to you a minute ago, Mac. I did want my job back. I came over here hopin' that you and Mr. Lidgerwood might be seein' things a little different by this time. I've quit the whiskey."

McCloskey wagged his shaggy head.

"So you've said before, John, and not once or twice either."

"I know, but every man gets to the bottom, some time. I've hit bed-rock, and I've just barely got sense enough to know it. Let me tell you, Mac, I've pulled trains on mighty near every railroad in this country—and then some. The Red Butte is my last ditch. With my record I couldn't get an engine anywhere else in the United States. Can't you see what I'm up against?"

The trainmaster nodded. He was human.

"Well, it's Maggie and the babies now," Judson went on. "They don't starve, Mac, not while I'm on top of earth. Don't you reckon you could make some sort of a play for me with the boss, Jim? He's got bowels."

McCloskey did not resent the familiarity of the Christian name, neither did he hold out any hope of reinstatement.

"No, John. One or two things I've learned about Mr. Lidgerwood: he doesn't often hit when he's mad, and he doesn't take back anything he says in cold blood. I'm afraid you've cooked your last goose."

"Let me go in and see him. He ain't half as hard-hearted as you are, Jim."

The trainmaster shook his head. "No, it won't do any good. I heard him tell Hallock not to let anybody in on him this morning."

"Hallock be—Say, Mac, what makes him keep that—" Judson broke off abruptly, pulled his hat over his eyes, and said, "Reckon it's worth while to shove me over to the other side, Jim McCloskey?"

"What other side?" demanded McCloskey.

Judson scoffed openly. "You ain't making out like you don't know, are you? Who was behind that break of Rufford's last night?"

"There didn't need to be anybody behind it. Bart thinks he has a kick coming because his brother was discharged."

"But there was somebody behind it. Tell me, Mac, did you ever see me too drunk to read my orders and take my signals?"

"No, don't know as I have."

"Well, I never was. And I don't often get too drunk to hear straight, either, even if I do look and act like the biggest fool God ever let live. I was in Cat Biggs's day before yesterday noon, when I ought to have been down here taking 202 east. There were two men in the back room putting their heads together. I don't know whether they knew I was on the other side of the partition or not. If they did, they probably didn't pay any attention to a drivellin' idiot that couldn't wrap his tongue around an order for more whiskey."

"Go on!" snapped McCloskey, almost viciously.

"They were talking about 'fixing' the boss. One of 'em was for the slow and safe way: small bets and a good many of 'em. The other was for pulling a straight flush on Mr. Lidgerwood, right now. Number One said no, that things were moving along all right, and it wasn't worth while to rush. Then something was said about a woman; I didn't catch her name or just what the hurry man said about her, only it was something about Mr. Lidgerwood's bein' in shape to mix up in it. At that Number One flopped over. 'Pull it off whenever you like!' says he, savage-like."

McCloskey sprang from his chair and towered over the smaller man.

"One of those men was Bart Rufford: who was the other one, Judson?"

Judson was apparently unmoved. "You're forgettin' that I was plum' fool drunk, Jim. I didn't see either one of 'em."

"But you heard?"

"Yes, one of 'em was Rufford, as you say, and up to a little bit ago I'd 'a' been ready to swear to the voice of the one you haven't guessed. But now I can't."

"Why can't you do it now?"

"Sit down and I'll tell you. I've been jarred. Everything I've told you so far, I can remember, or it seems as if I can, but right where I broke off a cog slipped. I must 'a' been drunker than I thought I was. Gridley says he was going by and he says I called him in and told him, fool-wise, all the things I was going to do to Mr. Lidgerwood. He says he hushed me up, called me out to the sidewalk, and started me home. Mac, I don't remember a single wheel-turn of all that, and it makes me scary about the other part."

McCloskey relapsed into his swing-chair.

"You said you thought you recognized the other man by his voice. It sounds like a drunken pipe-dream, the whole of it; but who did you think it was?"

Judson rose up, jerked his thumb toward the door of the superintendent's business office, and said, "Mac, if the whiskey didn't fake the whole business for me—the man who was mumblin' with Bart Rufford was—Hallock!"

"Hallock?" said McCloskey; "and you said there was a woman in it? That fits down to the ground, John. Mr. Lidgerwood has found out something about Hallock's family tear-up, or he's likely to find out. That's what that means!"

What more McCloskey said was said to an otherwise empty room. Judson had opened the door and closed it, and was gone.

Summing up the astounding thing afterward, those who could recall the details and piece them together traced Judson thus:

It was ten-forty when he came down from McCloskey's office, and for perhaps twenty minutes he had been seen lounging at the lunch-counter in the station end of the Crow's Nest. At about eleven one witness had seen him striking at the anvil in Hepburn's shop, the town marshal being the town blacksmith in the intervals of official duty.

Still later, he had apparently forgotten the good resolution declared to McCloskey, and all Angels saw him staggering up and down Mesa Avenue, stumbling into and out of the many saloons, and growing, to all appearances, more hopelessly irresponsible with every fresh stumble. This was his condition when he tripped over the doorstep into the "Arcade," and fell full length on the floor of the bar-room. Grimsby, the barkeeper, picked him up and tried to send him home, but with good-natured and maudlin pertinacity he insisted on going on to the gambling-room in the rear.

The room was darkened, as befitted its use, and a lighted lamp hung over the centre of the oval faro table as if the time were midnight instead of midday. Eight men, five of them miners from the Brewster copper mine, and three of them discharged employees of the Red Butte Western, were the bettors; Red-Light himself, in sombrero and shirt-sleeves, was dealing, and Rufford, sitting on a stool at the table's end, was the "lookout."

When Judson reeled in there was a pause, and a movement to put him out. One of the miners covered his table stakes and rose to obey Rufford's nod. But at this conjuncture the railroad men interfered. Judson was a fellow craftsman, and everybody knew that he was harmless in his cups. Let him stay—and play, if he wanted to.

So Judson stayed, and stumbled round the table, losing his money and dribbling foolishness. Now faro is a silent game, and more than once an angry voice commanded the foolish one to choose his place and to shut his mouth. But the ex-engineer seemed quite incapable of doing either. Twice he made the wavering circuit of the oval table, and when he finally gripped an empty chair it was the one nearest to Rufford on the right, and diagonally opposite to the dealer.

What followed seemed to have no connecting sequence for the other players. Too restless to lose more than one bet in the place he had chosen, Judson tried to rise, tangled his feet in the chair, and fell down, laughing uproariously. When he struggled to the perpendicular again, after two or three ineffectual attempts, he was fairly behind Rufford's stool.

One man, who chanced to be looking, saw the "lookout" start and stiffen rigidly in his place, staring straight ahead into vacancy. A moment later the entire circle of witnesses saw him take a revolver from the holster on his hip and lay it upon the table, with another from the breast pocket of his coat to keep it company. Then his hands went quickly behind him, and they all heard the click of the handcuffs.

The man in the sombrero and shirt-sleeves was first to come alive.

"Duck, Bart!" he shouted, whipping a weapon from its convenient shelf under the table's edge. But Judson, trained to the swift handling of many mechanisms in the moment of respite before a wreck or a derailment, was ready for him.

"Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying," he said grimly, screening himself behind his captive. Then to the others, in the same unhasting tone: "Some of you fellows just quiet Sammy down till I get out of here with this peach of mine. I've got the papers, and I know what I'm doin'; if this thing I'm holdin' against Bart's back should happen to go off——"

That ended it, so far as resistance was concerned. Judson backed quickly out through the bar-room, drawing his prisoner backward after him; and a moment later Angels was properly electrified by the sight of Rufford, the Red Desert terror, marching sullenly down to the Crow's Nest, with a fiery-headed little man at his elbow, the little man swinging the weapon which had been made to simulate the cold muzzle of the revolver when he had pressed it into Rufford's back at the gaming-table.

It was nothing more formidable than a short, thick "S"-wrench, of the kind used by locomotive engineers in tightening the nuts of the piston-rod packing glands.

X

FLEMISTER AND OTHERS

The jocosely spectacular arrest of Barton Rufford, with its appeal to the grim humor of the desert, was responsible for a brief lull in the storm of antagonism evoked by Lidgerwood's attempt to bring order out of the chaos reigning in his small kingdom. For a time Angels was a-grin again, and while the plaudits were chiefly for Judson, the figure of the correctly clothed superintendent who was courageous enough to appeal to the law, loomed large in the reflected light of the red-headed engineer's cool daring.

For the space of a week there were no serious disasters, and Lidgerwood, with good help from McCloskey and Benson, continued to dig persistently into the mystery of the wholesale robberies. With Benson's discoveries for a starting-point, the man Flemister was kept under surveillance, and it soon became evident to the three investigators that the owner of the Wire-Silver mine had been profiting liberally at the expense of the railroad company in many ways. That there had been connivance on the part of some one in authority in the railroad service, was also a fact safely assumable; and each added thread of evidence seemed more and more to entangle the chief clerk.

But behind the mystery of the robberies, Lidgerwood began to get glimpses of a deeper mystery involving Flemister and Hallock. Angelic tradition, never very clearly defined and always shot through with prejudice, spoke freely of a former friendship between the two men. Whether the friendship had been broken, or whether, for reasons best known to themselves, they had allowed the impression to go out that it had been broken, Lidgerwood could not determine from the bits of gossip brought in by the trainmaster. But one thing was certain: of all the minor officials in the railway service, Hallock was the one who was best able to forward and to conceal Flemister's thieveries.

It was in the midst of these subterranean investigations that Lidgerwood had a call from the owner of the Wire-Silver. On the Saturday in the week of surcease, Flemister came in on the noon train from the west, and it was McCloskey who ushered him into the superintendent's office. Lidgerwood looked up and saw a small man wearing the khaki of the engineers, with a soft felt hat to match. The snapping black eyes, with the straight brows almost meeting over the nose, suggested Goethe's Mephistopheles, and Flemister shaved to fit the part, with curling mustaches and a dagger-pointed imperial. Instantly Lidgerwood began turning the memory pages in an effort to recall where he had seen the man before, but it was not until Flemister began to speak that he remembered his first day in authority, the wreck at Gloria Siding, and the man who had driven up in a buckboard to hold converse with the master-mechanic.

"I've been trying to find time for a month or more to come up and get acquainted with you, Mr. Lidgerwood," the visitor began, when Lidgerwood had waved him to a chair. "I hope you are not going to hold it against me that I haven't done it sooner."

Lidgerwood's smile was meant to be no more than decently hospitable.

"We are not standing much upon ceremony in these days of reorganization," he said. Then, to hold the interview down firmly to a business basis: "What can I do for you, Mr. Flemister?"

"Nothing—nothing on top of earth; it's the other way round. I came to do something for you—or, rather, for one of your subordinates. Hallock tells me that the ghost of the old Mesa Building and Loan Association still refuses to be laid, and he intimates that some of the survivors are trying to make it unpleasant for him by accusing him to you."

"Yes," said Lidgerwood, studying his man shrewdly by the road of the eye, and without prejudice to the listening ear.

"As I understand it, the complaint of the survivors is based upon the fact that they think they ought to have had a cash dividend forthcoming on the closing up of the association's affairs," Flemister went on; and Lidgerwood again said, "Yes."

"As Hallock has probably told you, I had the misfortune to be the president of the company. Perhaps it's only fair to say that it was a losing venture from the first for those of us who put the loaning capital into it. As you probably know, the money in these mutual benefit companies is made on lapses, but when the lapses come all in a bunch——"

"I am not particularly interested in the general subject, Mr. Flemister," Lidgerwood cut in. "As the matter has been presented to me, I understand there was a cash balance shown on the books, and that there was no cash in the treasury to make it good. Since Hallock was the treasurer, I can scarcely do less than I have done. I am merely asking him—and you—to make some sort of an explanation which will satisfy the losers."

"There is only one explanation to be made," said the ex-building-and-loan president, brazenly. "A few of us who were the officers of the company were the heaviest losers, and we felt that we were entitled to the scraps and leavings."

"In other words, you looted the treasury among you," said Lidgerwood coldly. "Is that it, Mr. Flemister?"

The mine-owner laughed easily. "I'm not going to quarrel with you over the word," he returned. "Possibly the proceeding was a little informal, if you measure it by some of the more highly civilized standards."

"I don't care to go into that," was Lidgerwood's comment, "but I cannot evade my responsibility for the one member of your official staff who is still on my pay-roll. How far was Hallock implicated?"

"He was not implicated at all, save in a clerical way."

"You mean that he did not share in the distribution of the money?"

"He did not."

"Then it is only fair that you should set him straight with the others, Mr. Flemister."

The ex-president did not reply at once. He took time to roll a cigarette leisurely, to light it, and to take one or two deep inhalations, before he said: "It's a rather disagreeable thing to do, this digging into old graveyards, don't you think? I can understand why you should wish to be assured of Hallock's non-complicity, and I have assured you of that; but as for these kickers, really I don't know what you can do with them unless you send them to me. And if you do that, I am afraid some of them may come back on hospital stretchers. I haven't any time to fool with them at this late day."

Lidgerwood felt his gorge rising, and a great contempt for Flemister was mingled with a manful desire to pitch him out into the corridor. It was a concession to his unexplainable pity for Hallock that made him temporize.

"As I said before, you needn't go into the ethics of the matter with me, Mr. Flemister," he said. "But in justice to Hallock, I think you ought to make a statement of some kind that I can show to these men who, very naturally, look to me for redress. Will you do that?"

"I'll think about it," returned the mine-owner shortly; but Lidgerwood was not to be put off so easily.

"You must think of it to some good purpose," he insisted. "If you don't, I shall be obliged to put my own construction upon your failure to do so, and to act accordingly."

Flemister's smile showed his teeth.

"You're not threatening me, are you, Mr. Lidgerwood?"

"Oh, no; there is no occasion for threats. But if you don't make me that statement, fully exonerating Hallock, I shall feel at liberty to make one of my own, embodying what you have just told me. And if I am compelled to do this, you must not blame me if I am not able to place the matter in the most favorable light for you."

This time the visitor's smile was a mere baring of the teeth.

"Is it worth your while to make it a personal quarrel with me, Mr. Lidgerwood?" he asked, with a thinly veiled menace in his tone.

"I am not looking for quarrelsome occasions with you or with any one," was the placable rejoinder. "And I hope you are not going to force me to show you up. Is there anything else? If not, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to excuse me. This is one of my many busy days."

After Flemister had gone, Lidgerwood was almost sorry that he had not struck at once into the matter of the thieveries. But as yet he had no proof upon which to base an open accusation. One thing he did do, however, and that was to summon McCloskey and give instructions pointing to a bit of experimental observation with the mine-owner as the subject.

"He can't get away from here before the evening train, and I should like to know where he goes and what be does with himself," was the form the instructions took. "When we find out who his accomplices are, I shall have something more to say to him."

"I'll have him tagged," promised the trainmaster; and a few minutes later, when the Wire-Silver visitor sauntered up Mesa Avenue in quest of diversion wherewith to fill the hours of waiting for his train, a small man, red-haired, and with a mechanic's cap pulled down over his eyes, kept even step with him from dive to dive.

Judson's report, made to the trainmaster that evening after the westbound train had left, was short and concise.

"He went up and sat in Sammy's game and didn't come out until it was time to make a break for his train. I didn't see him talking to anybody after he left here." This was the wording of the report.

"You are sure of that, are you, John?" questioned McCloskey.

Judson hung his head. "Maybe I ain't as sure as I ought to be. I saw him go into Sammy's, and saw him come out again, and I know he didn't stay in the bar-room. I didn't go in where they keep the tiger. Sammy don't love me any more since I held Bart Rufford up with an S-wrench, and I was afraid I might disturb the game if I went buttin' in to make sure that Flemister was there. But I guess there ain't no doubt about it."

Thus Judson, who was still sober, and who meant to be faithful according to his gifts. He was scarcely blameworthy for not knowing of the existence of a small back room in the rear of the gambling-den; or for the further unknowledge of the fact that the man in search of diversion had passed on into this back room after placing a few bets at the silent game, appearing no more until he had come out through the gambling-room on his way to the train. If Judson had dared to press his espial, he might have been the poorer by the loss of blood, or possibly of his life; but, living to get away with it, he would have been the richer for an important bit of information. For one thing, he would have known that Flemister had not spent the afternoon losing his money across the faro-table; and for another, he might have made sure, by listening to the subdued voices beyond the closed door, that the man he was shadowing was not alone in the back room to which he had retreated.

XI

NEMESIS

On the second day following Flemister's visit to Angels, Lidgerwood was called again to Red Butte to another conference with the mine-owners. On his return, early in the afternoon, his special was slowed and stopped at a point a few miles east of the "Y" spur at Silver Switch, and upon looking out he saw that Benson's bridge-builders were once more at work on the wooden trestle spanning the Gloria. Benson himself was in command, but he turned the placing of the string-timbers over to his foreman and climbed to the platform of the superintendent's service-car.

"I won't hold you more than a few minutes," he began, but the superintendent pointed to one of the camp-chairs and sat down, saying: "There's no hurry. We have time orders against 73 at Timanyoni, and we would have to wait there, anyhow. What do you know now?—more than you knew the last time we talked?"

Benson shook his head. "Nothing that would do us any good in a jury trial," he admitted reluctantly. "We are not going to find out anything more until you send somebody up to Flemister's mine with a search-warrant."

Lidgerwood was gazing absently out over the low hills intervening between his point of view and the wooded summit of Little Butte.

"Whom am I to send, Jack?" he asked. "I have just come from Red Butte, and I took occasion to make a few inquiries. Flemister is evidently prepared at all points. From what I learned to-day, I am inclined to believe that the sheriff of Timanyoni County would probably refuse to serve a warrant against him, if we could find a magistrate who would issue one. Nice state of affairs, isn't it?"

"Beautiful," Benson agreed, adding: "But you don't want Flemister half as bad as you want the man who is working with him. Are you still trying to believe that it isn't Hallock?"

"I am still trying to be fair and just. McCloskey says that the two used to be friends—Hallock and Flemister. I don't believe they are now. Hallock didn't want to go to Flemister about that building-and-loan business, and I couldn't make out whether he was afraid, or whether it was just a plain case of dislike."

"It would doubtless be Hallock's policy—and Flemister's, too, for that matter—to make you believe they are not friends. You'll have to admit they are together a great deal."

"I'll admit it if you say so, but I didn't know it before. How do you know it?"

"Hallock is over here every day or two; I have seen him three or four times since that day when he and Flemister were walking down the new spur together and turned back at sight of me," said Benson. "Of course, I don't know what other business Hallock may have over here, but one thing I do know, he has been across the river, digging into the inner consciousness of my old prospector. And that isn't all. After he had got the story of the timber stealing out of the old man, he tried to bribe him not to tell it to any one else; tried the bribe first and a scare afterward—told him that something would happen to him if he didn't keep a still tongue in his head."

Lidgerwood shook his head slowly. "That looks pretty bad. Why should he want to silence the old man?"

"That's just what I've been asking myself. But right on the heels of that, another little mystery developed. Hallock asked the old man if he would be willing to swear in court to the truth of his story. The old man said he would."

"Well?" said Lidgerwood.

"A night or two later the old prospector's shack burned down, and the next morning he found a notice pinned to a tree near one of his sluice-boxes. It was a polite invitation for him to put distance between him and the Timanyoni district. I suppose you can put two and two together, as I did."

Again Lidgerwood said: "It looks pretty bad for Hallock. No one but the thieves themselves could have any possible reason for driving the old man out of the country. Did he go?"

"Not much; he isn't built that way. That same day he went to work building him a new shack; and he swears that the next man who gets near enough to set it afire won't live to get away and brag about it. Two days afterward Hallock showed up again, and the old fellow ran him off with a gun."

Just then the bridge-foreman came up to say that the timbers were in place, and Benson swung off to give Lidgerwood's engineer instructions to run carefully. As the service-car platform came along, Lidgerwood leaned over the railing for a final word with Benson. "Keep in touch with your old man, and tell him to count on us for protection," he said; and Benson nodded acquiescence as the one-car train crept out upon the dismantled bridge.

Having an appointment with Leckhard, of the main line, timed for an early hour the following morning, Lidgerwood gave his conductor instructions to stop at Angels only long enough to get orders for the eastern division.

When the division station was reached, McCloskey met the service-car in accordance with wire instructions sent from Timanyoni, bringing an armful of mail, which Lidgerwood purposed to work through on the run to Copah.

"Nothing new, Mac?" he asked, when the trainmaster came aboard.

"Nothing much, only the operators have notified me that there'll be trouble, pronto, if we don't put Hannegan and Dickson back on the wires. The grievance committee intimated pretty broadly that they could swing the trainmen into line if they had to make a fight."

"We put no man back who has been discharged for cause," said the superintendent firmly. "Did you tell them that?"

"I did. I have been saying that so often that it mighty nearly says itself now, when I hear my office door open."

"Well, there is nothing to do but to go on saying it. We shall either make a spoon or spoil a horn. How would you be fixed in the event of a telegraphers' strike?"

"I've been figuring on that. It may seem like tempting the good Lord to say it, but I believe we could hold about half of the men."

"That is decidedly encouraging," said the man who needed to find encouragement where he could. "Two weeks ago, if you had said one in ten, I should have thought you were overestimating. We shall win out yet."