e gloom. 138

"Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying." 176

"Well, gentlemen, I'm waiting. Why don't you shoot?" 400

* * * * *

The Taming of Red Butte Western

I

COLLARS-AND-CUFFS

The windows of the division head-quarters of the Pacific Southwestern at
Copah look northward over bald, brown mesas, and across the Pannikin to
the eroded cliffs of the Uintah Hills. The prospect, lacking vegetation,
artistic atmosphere, and color, is crude and rather harshly aggressive;
and to Lidgerwood, glooming thoughtfully out upon it through the
weather-worn panes scratched and bedimmed by many desert sandstorms, it
was peculiarly depressing.

"No, Ford; I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not the man you are looking
for," he said, turning back to things present and in suspense, and
speaking as one who would add a reason to unqualified refusal. "I've
been looking over the ground while you were coming on from New York. It
isn't in me to flog the Red Butte Western into a well-behaved division
of the P. S-W."

The grave-eyed man who had borrowed Superintendent Leckhard's
pivot-chair nodded intelligence.

"That is what you have been saying, with variations, for the last
half-hour. Why?"

"Because the job asks for gifts that I don't possess. At the present
moment the Red Butte Western is the most hopelessly demoralized three
hundred miles of railroad west of the Rockies. There is no system, no
discipline, no respect for authority. The men run the road as if it were
a huge joke. Add to these conditions the fact that the Red Desert is a
country where the large-calibred revolver is----"

"Yes, I know all that," interrupted the man in the chair. "The road and
the region need civilizing--need it badly. That is one of the reasons
why I am trying to persuade you to take hold. You are long on
civilization, Howard."

"Not on the kind which has to be inculcated by main strength and a
cheerful disregard for consequences. I'm no scrapper."

To the eye of appraisal, Lidgerwood's personal appearance bore out the
peaceable assertion to the final well-groomed detail. Compactly built
and neatly, brawn and bulk were conspicuously lacking; and the thin,
intellectual face was made to appear still thinner by the pointed cut of
the closely trimmed brown beard. The eyes were alert and not wanting in
steadfastness; but they had a trick of seeming to look beyond, rather
than dir