inspection, but both times he had been in the
Pullman, with fellow-passengers to fill the nearer field of vision and
to temper the awful loneliness of the waste. Now, however, the desert
with its heat, its stillness, its vacancy, its pitiless barrenness,
claimed him as its own. He wondered that he had been impatient with the
men it bred. The wonder now was that human virtue of any temper could
long withstand the blasting touch of so great and awful a desolation.

It was past noon when the bowl-like basin, in which the train seemed to
circle helplessly without gaining upon the terrifying horizons, began to
lose its harshest features. Little by little, the tumbled hills drew
nearer, and the red-sand dust of the road-bed gave place to broken lava.
Patches of gray, sun-dried mountain grass appeared on the passing hill
slopes, and in the arroyos trickling threads of water glistened, or, if
the water were hidden, there were at least paths of damp sand to hint at
the blessed moisture underneath.

Lidgerwood began to breathe again; and when the shrill whistle of the
locomotive signalled the approach to the division head-quarters, he was
thankful that the builders of Angels had pitched their tents and driven
their stakes in the desert's edge, rather than in its heart.

Truly, Angels was not much to be thankful for, as the exile from the
East regretfully admitted when he looked out upon it from the windows of
his office in the second story of the Crow's Nest. A many-tracked
railroad yard, flanked on one side by the repair shops, roundhouse, and
coal-chutes; and on the other by a straggling town of bare and
commonplace exteriors, unpainted, unfenced, treeless, and wind-swept:
Angels stood baldly for what it was--a mere stopping-place in transit
for the Red Butte Western.

The new superintendent turned his back upon the depressing outlook and
laid his hand upon the latch of the door opening into the adjoining
room. There was a thing to be said about the reckless bunching of trains
out of reach of the wires, and it might as well be said now as later, he
determined. But at the moment of door-opening he was made to realize
that a tall, box-like contrivance in one corner of the office was a
desk, and that it was inhabited.

The man who rose up to greet him was bearded, heavy-shouldered, and
hollow-eyed, and he was past middle age. Green cardboard cones
protecting his shirt-sleeves, and a shade of the same material visoring
the su