"By heavens! I'm making it my business, Hallock! These men who were robbed say that you are an embezzler, a thief. If you are not, you've got to clear yourself. If you are, you can't stay in the Red b.u.t.te service another day: that's all."

Again there was a silence surcharged with electric possibilities.

Lidgerwood bit the end from a cigar and lost three matches before he succeeded in lighting it. Hallock sat perfectly still, but the sallow tinge in his gaunt face had given place to a stony pallor. When he spoke, it was still without anger.

"I don't care a d.a.m.n for your chief clerkship," he said calmly, "but for reasons of my own I am not ready to quit on such short notice. When I am ready, you won't have to discharge me. Upon what terms can I stay?"

"I've stated them," said the one who was angry. "Discharge your trust; make good in dollars and cents, or show cause why you were caught with an empty cash-box."

For the first time in the interview the chief clerk switched the stare of the gloomy eyes from the memorandum desk calendar, and fixed it upon his accuser.

"You seem to take it for granted that I was the only grafter in the building and loan business," he objected. "I wasn't; on the contrary, I was only a necessary cog in the wheel. Somebody had to make the deductions from the pay-rolls, and----"

"I'm not asking you to make excuses," stormed Lidgerwood. "I'm telling you that you've got to make good! If the money was used legitimately, you, or some of your fellow-officers in the company, should be able to show it. If the others left you to hold the bag, it is due to yourself, to the men who were held up, and to me, that you set yourself straight.

Go to Flemister--he was your president, wasn't he?--and get him to make a statement that I can show to the grievance committee. That will let you out, and me, too."

Hallock stood up and leaned over the desk end. His saturnine face was a mask of cold rage, but his eyes were burning.

"If I thought you knew what you're saying," he began in the grating voice, "but you don't--you _can't_ know!" Then, with a sudden break in the fierce tone: "Don't send me to Flemister for my clearance--don't do it, Mr. Lidgerwood. It's playing with fire. I didn't steal the money; I'll swear it on a stack of Bibles a mile high. Flemister will tell you so if he is paid his price. But you don't want me to pay the price. If I do----"

"Go on," said Lidgerwood, frowning, "if you do, what then?"

Hallock leaned still farther over the desk end.

"If I do, you'll get what you are after--and a good deal more. Again I am going to ask you if it is worth while to throw me overboard."

Lidgerwood was still angry enough to resent this advance into the field of the personalities.

"You've had my last word, Hallock, and all this talk about consequences that you don't explain is beside the mark. Get me that statement from Flemister, and do it soon. I am not going to have it said that we are fighting graft in one place and covering it up in another."

Hallock straightened up and b.u.t.toned his coat.

"I'll get you the statement," he said, quietly; "and the consequences won't need any explaining." His hand was on the door-k.n.o.b when he finished saying it, and Lidgerwood had risen from his chair. There was a pause, while one might count five.

"Well?" said the superintendent.

"I was thinking again," said the man at the door. "By all the rules of the game--the game as it is played here in the desert--I ought to be giving you twenty-four hours to get out of gunshot, Mr. Lidgerwood.

Instead of that I am going to do you a service. You remember that operator, Rufford, that you discharged a few days ago?"

"Yes."

"Bart Rufford, his brother, the 'lookout' at Red Light's place, has invited a few of his friends to take notice that he intends to kill you.

You can take it straight. He means it. And that was what brought me up here to-night--not that memorandum on your desk calendar."

For a long time after the door had jarred to its shutting behind Hallock, Lidgerwood sat at his desk, idle and abstractedly thoughtful.

Twice within the interval he pulled out a small drawer under the roll-top and made as if he would take up the weapon it contained, and each time he closed the drawer to break with the temptation to put the pistol into his pocket.

Later, after he had forced himself to go to work, a door slammed somewhere in the despatcher's end of the building, and automatically his hand shot out to the closed drawer. Then he made his decision and carried it out. Taking the nickel-plated thing from its hiding-place, and breaking it to eject the cartridges, he went to the end door of the corridor, which opened into the unused s.p.a.ce under the rafters, and flung the weapon to the farthest corner of the dark loft.

VII

THE KILLER

Lidgerwood had found little difficulty in getting on the companionable side of Dawson, so far as the heavy-muscled, silent young draftsman had a companionable side; and an invitation to the family dinner-table at the Dawson cottage on the low mesa above the town had followed, as a matter of course.

Once within the home circle, with Benson to plead his cause with the meek little woman whose brown eyes held the shadow of a deep trouble, Lidgerwood had still less difficulty in arranging to share Benson's permanent table welcome. Though Martha Dawson never admitted it, even to her daughter, she stood in constant terror of the Red Desert and its representative town of Angels, and the presence of the superintendent as the member of the household promised to be an added guaranty of protection.

Lidgerwood's acceptance as a table boarder in the cottage on the mesa being hospitably prompt, he was coming and going as regularly as his oversight of the three hundred miles of demoralization permitted before the buffoonery of the Red b.u.t.te Western suddenly laughed itself out, and war was declared. In the interval he had come to concur very heartily in Benson's estimate of the family, and to share--without Benson's excuse, and without any reason that could be set in words--the young engineer's opposition to Gridley as Miss Faith's possible choice.

There was little to be done in this field, however. Gridley came and went, not too often, figuring always as a friend of the family, and usurping no more of Miss Dawson's time and attention than she seemed willing to bestow upon him. Lidgerwood saw no chance to obstruct and no good reason for obstructing. At all events, Gridley did not furnish the reason. And the first time Lidgerwood found himself sitting out the sunset hour after dinner on the tiny porch of the mesa cottage, with Faith Dawson as his companion--this while the joke was still running its course--his talk was not of Gridley, nor yet of Benson; it was of himself.

"How long is it going to be before you are able to forget that I am constructively your brother's boss, Miss Faith?" he asked, when she had brought him a cushion for the back of the hard veranda chair in which he was trying to be luxuriously lazy.

"Oh, do I remember it?--disagreeably?" she laughed. And then, with charming navete: "I am sure I try not to."

"I am beginning to wish you would try a little harder," he ventured, endeavoring to put her securely upon the plane of companionship. "It is pretty lonesome sometimes, up here on the top round of the Red-b.u.t.te-Western ladder of authority."

"You mean that you would like to leave your official dignity behind you when you come to us here on the mesa?" she asked.

"That's the idea precisely. You have no conception how strenuous it is, wearing the halo all the time, or perhaps I should say, the cap and bells."

She smiled. Frederic Dawson, the reticent, had never spoken of the att.i.tude of the Red b.u.t.te Western toward its new boss, but Gridley had referred to it quite frequently and had made a joke of it. Without knowing just why, she had resented Gridley's att.i.tude; 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 a.s.sured her--which was sufficiently true at the moment. "The men are acting like a lot of foolish schoolboys bent on discouraging the new teacher. I am hoping they will settle down to a sensible basis after a bit, and take me and the new order of things for granted."

Miss Dawson had something on her mind; a thing not gathered from Gridley or from any one else in particular, but which seemed to take shape of itself. The effect of setting it in speech asked for a complete effacement of Lidgerwood the superintendent, and that was rather difficult. But she compa.s.sed it.

"I don't think you ought to take them so much for granted--the men, I mean," she cautioned. "I can't help feeling afraid that some of the joking is not quite good-natured."

"I fancy very little of it is what you would call good-natured," he rejoined evenly. "Very much of it is thinly disguised contempt."

"For your authority?"

"For me, personally, first; and for my authority as a close second."

"Then you are antic.i.p.ating trouble when the laugh is over?"

He shook his head. "I'm hoping No, as I said a moment ago, but I'm expecting Yes."

"And you are not afraid?"

It would have been worth a great deal to him if he could have looked fearlessly into the clear gray eyes of questioning, giving her a brave man's denial. But instead, his gaze went beyond her and he said: "You surely wouldn't expect me to confess it if I were afraid, would you?

Don't you despise a coward, Miss Dawson?"