a freight, and the crew escaped. It was a rather narrow
escape, though, for the engineer, and fireman."

"You were putting it back on the track?" she asked.

"There isn't much of it left to put back, as you may have observed,"
said Lidgerwood. Then he told her of the explosion and the fire.

She was silent for a few moments, but afterward she went on,
half-gropingly he thought.

"Is that part of your work--to get the trains on the track when they run
off?"

He laughed. "I suppose it is--or at least, in a certain sense, I'm
responsible for it. But I am lucky enough to have a wrecking-boss--two
of them, in fact, and both good ones."

She looked up quickly, and he was sure that he surprised something more
than a passing interest in the serious eyes--a trouble depth, he would
have called it, had their talk been anything more than the ordinary
conventional table exchange.

"We saw you go down to speak to two of your men: one who wore his hat
pulled down over his eyes and made dreadful faces at you as he
talked----"

"That was McCloskey, our trainmaster," he cut in.

"And the other----?"

"Was wrecking-boss Number Two," he told her, "my latest apprentice, and
a very promising young subject. This was his first time out under my
administration, and he put McCloskey and me out of the running at once."

"What did he do?" she asked, and again he saw the groping wistfulness in
her eyes, and wondered at it.

"I couldn't explain it without being unpardonably technical. But perhaps
it can best be summed up in saying that he is a fine mechanical
engineer with the added gift of knowing how to handle men."

"You are generous, Mr. Lidgerwood, to--to a subordinate. He ought to be
very loyal to you."

"He is. And I don't think of him as a subordinate--I shouldn't even if
he were on my pay-roll instead of on that of the motive-power
department. I am glad to be able to call him my friend, Miss Holcombe."

Again a few moments of silence, during which Lidgerwood was staring
gloomily across at Miss Brewster and Van Lew. Then another curiously
abrupt question from the young woman at his side.

"His college, Mr. Lidgerwood; do you chance to know where he was
graduated?"

At another moment Lidgerwood might have wondered at the young woman's
persistence. But now Benson's story of Dawson's terrible misfortune was
crowding all purely speculative thoughts out of his mind.

"He took his engineering course in Carnegie, but I believ