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Updated: May 28, 2025
Hallock dragged the one vacant chair into the circle illuminated by the shaded desk-electric, and sat on the edge of it, with his hands on his knees. "Well?" he said, in the grating voice that was so curiously like the master-mechanic's. "We can cut out the details," this from the man who, under other conditions, would have gone diplomatically into the smallest details.
"Very bad; six killed outright, and as many more to bury later on, I am told by the Red Butte doctors." "Heavens and earth! The men are calling it a broken rail; was it?" "A loosened rail," corrected Lidgerwood. The master-mechanic's eyes narrowed. "Natural?" he asked. "No, artificial." Gridley swore savagely. "This thing's got to stop, Lidgerwood! Sift it, sift it to the bottom!
"Civilization means something or it should mean something even in the Red Desert, Mr. Gridley. I suppose there is some semblance of legal protection in Angels, as elsewhere, isn't there?" The master-mechanic's smile was tolerant. "Surely. We have a town marshal, and a justice of the peace; one is a blacksmith and the other the keeper of the general store."
And when the master-mechanic's tread was no longer audible in the upper corridor, the young engineer turned to the man at the desk to say: "What tickled the boss machinist, Lidgerwood?" "I don't know. Why?" Benson looked at McCloskey.
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.
But, try as he would, the importunate demon of distrust, distrust of himself, awakened by the master-mechanic's warning, refused to be quieted; and when, after the three hours of the slow return journey were out-worn, McCloskey came to tell him that the train was pulling into the Angels yard, the explosion of a track torpedo under the wheels made him start like a nervous woman.
Without knowing just why, she had resented Gridley's attitude; this notwithstanding the master-mechanic's genial affability whenever Lidgerwood and his difficulties were the object of discussion. "They are still refusing to take you seriously?" she said. "I hope you don't mind it too much." "Personally, I don't mind it at all," he assured her which was sufficiently true at the moment.
"But he doesn't often feel like it? You can't blame him for that. Picking up wrecks isn't fairly a part of a master-mechanic's duty." "That is what he says, and he doesn't trouble himself to go when it isn't convenient. I have a notion he wouldn't be here to-day if you weren't."
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