The Taming of Red Butte Western | Page 6

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