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?"