s a
sleeping-apartment. When he was preparing to go to bed, he noticed that
the tiny relay on the stand at his bed's head was silent. Afterward,
when he tried to adjust the instrument, he found it ruined beyond
repair. Some one had connected its wiring with the electric lighting
circuit, and the tiny coils were fused and burned into solid little
cylinders of copper.

IX

JUDSON'S JOKE

Barton Rufford, ex-distiller of illicit whiskey in the Tennessee
mountains, ex-welsher turned informer and betraying his neighbor
law-breakers to the United States revenue officers, ex-everything which
made his continued stay in the Cumberlands impossible, was a man of
distinction in the Red Desert.

In the wider field of the West he had been successively a claim-jumper,
a rustler of unbranded cattle, a telegraph operator in collusion with a
gang of train-robbers, and finally a faro "lookout": the armed guard
who sits at the head of the gaming-table in the untamed regions to kill
and kill quickly if a dispute arises.

Angels acknowledged his citizenship without joy. A cold-blooded
murderer, with an appalling record; and a man with a temper like smoking
tow, an itching trigger-finger, the eye of a duck-hawk, and cat-like
swiftness of movement, he tyrannized the town when the humor was on
him; and as yet no counter-bully had come to chase him into oblivion.

For Lidgerwood to have earned the enmity of this man was considered
equivalent to one of three things: the superintendent would throw up his
job and leave the Red Desert, preferably by the first train; or Rufford
would kill him; or he must kill Rufford. Red Butte Western opinion was
somewhat divided as to which horn of the trilemma the victim of
Rufford's displeasure would choose, all admitting that, for the moment,
the choice lay with the superintendent. Would Lidgerwood fight, or run,
or sit still and be slain? In the Angels roundhouse, on the second
morning following the attempt upon Lidgerwood's life at the gate of the
Dawson cottage, the discussion was spirited, not to say acrimonious.

"I'm telling you hyenas that Collars-and-Cuffs ain't going to run away,"
insisted Williams, who was just in from the all-night trip to Red Butte
and return. "He ain't built that way."

Lester, the roundhouse foreman, himself a man-queller of no mean repute,
thought differently. Lidgerwood would, most likely, take to the high
grass and the tall timber. The alternative was to "pack a