nd hunting a
chance to kick a fice-dog just because the fice don't happen to be a
blooded bull-terrier.'"

Williams, brawny and broad-chested, leaned against his box, his bare
arms folded and his short pipe at the disputatious angle.

"He'd better have nerve, or get some," he commented. "T'otherways it's
him for an early wooden overcoat and a trip back home in the
express-car. After which, let me tell you, Andy, that man Ford'll sift
this cussed country through a flour-shaker but what he'll cinch the
outfit that does it. You write that out in your car-report."

Back in the service-car Lidgerwood was sitting quietly in the doorway,
smoking his delayed after-breakfast cigar, and timing the up-coming
passenger-train, watch in hand. Carter was ten minutes, to the exact
second, behind his schedule time when the train thundered past on the
main track, and Lidgerwood pocketed his watch with a smile of
satisfaction. It was the first small victory in the campaign for reform.

Later, however, when the special was once more in motion westward, the
desert laid hold upon him with the grip which first benumbs, then breeds
dull rage, and finally makes men mad. Mile after mile the glistening
rails sped backward into a shimmering haze of red dust. The glow of the
breathless forenoon was like the blinding brightness of a forge-fire. To
right and left the great treeless plain rose to bare buttes, backed by
still barer mountains. Let the train speed as it would, there was always
the same wearying prospect, devoid of interest, empty of human
landmarks. Only the blazing sun swung from side to side with the slow
veerings of the track: what answered for a horizon seemed never to
change, never to move.

At long intervals a siding, sometimes with its waiting train, but
oftener empty and deserted, slid into view and out again. Still less
frequently a telegraph station, with its red, iron-roofed office, its
water-tank cars and pumping machinery, and its high-fenced corral and
loading chute, moved up out of the distorting heat haze ahead, and was
lost in the dusty mirages to the rear. But apart from the crews of the
waiting trains, and now and then the desert-sobered face of some
telegraph operator staring from his window at the passing special, there
were no signs of life: no cattle upon the distant hills, no loungers on
the station platforms.

Lidgerwood had crossed this arid, lifeless plain twice within the week
on his preliminary tour of