rintendent, picked up while the Red Desert was having
its laugh at the new bath-room, the pajamas, and the clean linen. They
weighed lightly, because the principal problem was, as yet, untouched.
For while the laugh endured, Lidgerwood had not found it possible to
breach many of the strongholds of lawlessness.

Orders, regarded by disciplined railroad men as having the immutability
of the laws of the Medes and Persians, were still interpreted as loosely
as if they were but the casual suggestions of a bystander. Rules were
formulated and given black-letter emphasis in their postings on the
bulletin boards, only to be coolly ignored when they chanced to conflict
with some train crew's desire to make up time or to kill it. Directed to
account for fuel and oil consumed, the enginemen good-naturedly forged
reports and the storekeepers blandly O.K.'d them. Instructed to keep an
accurate record of all material used, the trackmen jocosely scattered
more spikes than they drove, made fire-wood of the stock cross-ties, and
were not above underpinning the section-houses with new dimension
timbers.

In countless other ways the waste was prodigious and often mysteriously
unexplainable. The company supplies had a curious fashion of
disappearing in transit. Two car-loads of building lumber sent to repair
the station at Red Butte vanished somewhere between the Angels
shipping-yards and their billing destination. Lime, cement, and paint
were exceedingly volatile. House hardware, purchased in quantities for
company repairs, figured in the monthly requisition sheet as regularly
as coal and oil; and the lost-tool account roughly balanced the pay-roll
of the company carpenters and bridge-builders.

In such a chaotic state of affairs, track and train troubles were the
rule rather than the exception, and it was a Red Butte Western boast
that the fire was never drawn under the wrecking-train engine. For the
first few weeks Lidgerwood let McCloskey answer the "hurry calls" to the
various scenes of disaster, but when three sections of an eastbound
cattle special, ignoring the ten-minute-interval rule, were piled up in
the Pinon Hills, he went out and took personal command of the
track-clearers.

This happened when the joke was at flood-tide, and the men of the
wrecking-crew took a ten-gallon keg of whiskey along wherewith to
celebrate the first appearance of the new superintendent in character as
a practical wrecking-boss. The outcome was rat