hirty minutes?" inquired the draftsman, without taking mind or eye off
his problem.

"Oh, yes; forty or fifty, maybe."

"All right, I'll be out of the way," was the quiet rejoinder.

"Yes, you will!" was McCloskey's ironical comment, when the draftsman
had gone around to the other side of the great crane.

"Let him alone," said Lidgerwood. "It lies in my mind that we are
developing a genius, Mac."

"He'll fall down," grumbled the trainmaster. "That crane won't pick up
the '95 clear the way she's lying."

"Won't it?" said Lidgerwood. "That's where you are mistaken. It will
pick up anything we have on the two divisions. It's the biggest and best
there is made. How did you come to get a tool like that on the Red Butte
Western?"

McCloskey grinned.

"You don't know Gridley yet. He's a crank on good machinery. That crane
was a clean steal."

"What?"

"I mean it. It was ordered for one of the South American railroads, and
was on its way to the Coast over the P. S-W. About the time it got as
far as Copah, we happened to have a mix-up in our Copah yards, with a
ditched engine that Gridley couldn't pick up with the 60-ton crane we
had on the ground. So he borrowed this one out of the P. S-W. yards,
used it, liked it, and kept it, sending our 60-ton machine on to the
South Americans in its place."

"What rank piracy!" Lidgerwood exclaimed. "I don't wonder they call us
buccaneers over here. How could he do it without being found out?"

"That puzzled more than two or three of us; but one of the men told me
some time afterward how it was done. Gridley had a painter go down in
the night and change the lettering--on our old crane and on this new
one. It happened that they were both made by the same manufacturing
company, and were of substantially the same general pattern. I suppose
the P. S-W. yard crew didn't notice particularly that the crane they had
lent us out of the through westbound freight had shrunk somewhat in the
using. But I'll bet those South Americans are saying pleasant things to
the manufacturers yet."

"Doubtless," Lidgerwood agreed, and now he was not smiling. The little
side-light on the former Red-Butte-Western methods--and upon
Gridley--was sobering.

By this time Dawson had got his big lifter in position, with its huge
steel arm overreaching the fallen engine, and was giving his orders
quietly, but with clean-cut precision.

"Man that hand-fall and take slack! Pay off, Darby," to the hoister