it spoil his life. He threw up everything, left college
between two days, and came to bury himself out here. For two years he
never let his mother and sister know where he was; made remittances to
them through a bank in Omaha, so they shouldn't be able to trace him.
Care to hear any more?"

"Yes, go on," said the superintendent.

"_I_ found him," chuckled Benson, "and I took the liberty of piping his
little game off to the harrowed women. Next thing he knew they dropped
in on him; and he is just crazy enough to stay here, and to keep them
here. That wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for Gridley, Fred's boss and
your peach of a master-mechanic."

"Why 'peach'? Gridley is a pretty decent sort of a man-driver, isn't
he?" said Lidgerwood, doing premeditated and intentional violence to
what he had come to call his unjust prejudice against the handsome
master-mechanic.

"You won't believe it," said Benson hotly, "but he has actually got the
nerve to make love to Dawson's sister! and he a widow-man, old enough to
be her father!"

Lidgerwood smiled. It is the privilege of youth to be intolerant of age
in its rival. Gridley was, possibly, forty-two or three, but Benson was
still on the sunny slope of twenty-five. "You are prejudiced, Jack," he
criticized. "Gridley is still young enough to marry again, if he wants
to--and to live long enough to spoil his grandchildren."

"But he doesn't begin to be good enough for Faith Dawson," countered the
young engineer, stubbornly.

"Isn't he? or is that another bit of your personal grudge? What do you
know against him?"

Pressed thus sharply against the unyielding fact, Benson was obliged to
confess that he knew nothing at all against the master-mechanic, nothing
that could be pinned down to day and date. If Gridley had the weaknesses
common to Red-Desert mankind, he did not parade them in Angels. As the
head of his department he was well known to be a hard hitter; and now
and then, when the blows fell rather mercilessly, the railroad colony
called him a tyrant, and hinted that he, too, had a past that would not
bear inspection. But even Benson admitted that this was mere gossip.

Lidgerwood laughed at the engineer's failure to make his case, and asked
quizzically, "Where do I come in on all this, Jack? You have an axe to
grind, I take it."

"I have. Mrs. Dawson wants me to take my meals at the house. I'm
inclined to believe that she is a bit shy of Gridley, and maybe she
thinks