The Taming of Red Butte Western | Page 7

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