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Updated: May 9, 2025
Lidgerwood flung the paper-knife aside and whirled his chair to face the new complaint. "What is the matter now, Jack?" he snapped. "Oh, nothing much when you're used to it; only about a thousand dollars' worth of dimension timber gone glimmering. That's all." "Tell it out," rasped the superintendent.
Through the relay, tapping softly in the darkness, came the news of the line, and often, after the strenuous day was ended, Lidgerwood would lie awake listening.
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.
Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood could find.
It was only a few weeks ago that it dawned upon our executive committee that this particular kite without a tail offered us a ready-made jump of three hundred miles toward Tonopah and Goldfield. We began buying quietly for the control with the stock at nineteen. Naturally the Transcontinental people caught on, and in twenty-four hours we were at it, hammer and tongs." Lidgerwood nodded.
And with that he tramped out, and was too angry to remember to close the door. Lidgerwood turned back to his desk, savagely out of humor with Benson and with himself, and raging inwardly at the mysterious thieves who were looting the company as boldly as an invading army might.
But one thing was certain: of all the minor officials in the railway service, Hallock was the one who was best able to forward and to conceal Flemister's thieveries. It was in the midst of these subterranean investigations that Lidgerwood had a call from the owner of the Wire-Silver.
He was a chief despatcher back East, and he put two passenger-trains together in a head-on collision the day he resigned and came West to grow up with the Red Desert." "I know," said Lidgerwood, "and I did not have to learn it at second-hand. Mac was man enough to tell me himself, before I had known him five minutes." Then he suggested mildly, "But you were speaking of Dawson, weren't you?"
Taking advantage of the twenty-four-hour notice the strikers gave us, I've scattered these men of ours east and west on the day trains to the points where the trouble will hit us at twelve o'clock to-night." "Good!" said Lidgerwood briefly. "How will you handle it?" "It will handle itself, barring too many broken heads.
Dawson is a very charming middle-aged widow, with a grown son and a daughter," said Lidgerwood, a little stiffly. It seemed entirely unnecessary that she should ridicule him before the athlete. "And the daughter is she charming, too? But that says itself, since she must also date 'from Massachusetts." Then to Van Lew: "Every one out here in the Red Desert is 'from' somewhere, you know."
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