At The Rio Gloria

: Red Butte Western

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,"

wa 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.