The Taming of Red Butte Western | Page 8

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