like yours with a ten-foot pole, unless
I could shoot good enough to be sure of hitting a half-dollar nine times
out of ten at thirty paces. Somebody was telling me that you have
already had trouble with that fellow Rufford."

"Nobody was hurt, and Rufford is in jail," said Lidgerwood, hoping to
kill the friendly inquiry before it should run into details.

"Oh, well, it's all in the day's work, I suppose, which reminds me: my
day's work to-morrow won't amount to much if I don't go and turn in.
Good-night."

When Leckhard was gone, Lidgerwood climbed the stair in the station
building to the despatcher's office and gave orders for the return of
his car to Angels. Half an hour later the one-car special was retracing
its way westward up the valley of the Tumbling Water, and Lidgerwood was
trying to go to sleep in the well-appointed little state-room which it
was Tadasu Matsuwari's pride to keep spick and span and spotlessly
clean. But there were disturbing thoughts, many and varied, to keep him
awake, chief among them those which hung upon the dramatic midnight
episode with the demented woman for its central figure. Through what
dreadful Valley of Humiliation had she come to reach the abysmal depths
in which the one cry of her soul was a cry for vengeance? Who was the
unnamed man whom Hallock had promised to kill? How much or how little
was this tragedy figuring in the trouble storm which was brooding over
the Red Desert? And how much or how little would it involve one who was
anxious only to see even-handed justice prevail?

These and similar insistent questions kept Lidgerwood awake long after
his train had left the crooked pathway marked out by the Tumbling Water,
and when he finally fell asleep the laboring engine of the one-car
special was storming the approaches to Crosswater Summit.

XII

THE PLEASURERS

The freight wreck in the Crosswater Hills, coming a fortnight after
Rufford's arrest and deportation to Copah and the county jail, rudely
marked the close of the short armistice in the conflict between law and
order and the demoralization which seemed to thrive the more lustily in
proportion to Lidgerwood's efforts to stamp it out.

Thirty-two boxes, gondolas, and flats, racing down the Crosswater grades
in the heart of a flawless, crystalline summer afternoon at the heels of
Clay's big ten-wheeler, suddenly left the steel as a unit to heap
themselves in chaotic confusion upon the right-of-way, and