The Taming of Red Butte Western
by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #14844 · 488,786 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Taming of Red Butte Western
Author: Francis Lynde
Release date: January 31, 2005 [eBook #14844]
Most recently updated: December 19, 2020
Language: English
Original publication: Charles Scribner's Sons New York,, 1916
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14844
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jason Isbell and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net).
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jason Isbell and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net).
[Illustration: "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
[ILLUSTRATION: Publishers Stamp]
To
Mr. CHARLES AUGUSTINE STICKLE
My brother--in deed, though not by blood--this tale of his birthland is
affectionately inscribed.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Collars-and-Cuffs 3
II. The Red Desert 24
III. A Little Brother of the Cows 38
IV. At the Rio Gloria 59
V. The Outlaws 80
VI. Everyman's Share 102
VII. The Killer 122
VIII. Benson's Bridge-Timbers 141
IX. Judson's Joke 157
X. Flemister and Others 177
XI. Nemesis 187
XII. The Pleasurers 202
XIII. Bitter-Sweet 224
XIV. Blind Signals 248
XV. Eleanor Intervenes 260
XVI. The Shadowgraph 270
XVII. The Dipsomaniac 289
XVIII. At Silver Switch 305
XIX. The Challenge 324
XX. Storm Signals 346
XXI. The Boss Machinist 369
XXII. The Terror 380
XXIII. The Crucible 398
ILLUSTRATIONS
"I'll spend the last dollar of the fortune my
father left me, if needful, in finding that
man and hanging him!"
_Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE
His hand was on the latch of the door-yard
gate when a man rose out of the gloom. 138
"Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying." 176
"Well, gentlemen, I'm waiting. Why don't you shoot?" 400
* * * * *
The Taming of Red Butte Western
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 half-way. 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: "Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying."]
"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.
"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
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