on that calendar over my desk."
"Well, we won't go back of the returns," declared Lidgerwood, meaning to
be as just as he could to his predecessors in office. "But from now
on----"
The door leading into the room beyond the trainmaster's office opened
squeakily on dry hinges, and a chattering of telegraph instruments
heralded the incoming of a disreputable-looking office-man, with a green
patch over one eye and a blackened cob-pipe between his teeth. Seeing
Lidgerwood, he ducked and turned to McCloskey. Bradley, reporting in,
had given his own paraphrase of the new superintendent's strictures on
Red Butte Western despatching and the criticism had lost nothing in the
recasting.
"Seventy-one's in the ditch at Gloria Siding," he said, speaking
pointedly to the trainmaster. "Goodloe reports it from Little Butte;
says both enginemen are in the mix-up, but he doesn't know whether they
are killed or not."
"There you are!" snarled McCloskey, wheeling upon Lidgerwood. "They
couldn't let you get your chair warmed the first day!"
With the long run from Copah to Angels to his credit, and with all the
head-quarters loose ends still to be gathered up, Lidgerwood might
blamelessly have turned over the trouble call to his trainmaster. But a
wreck was as good a starting-point as any, and he took command at once.
"Go and clear for the wrecking-train, and have some one in your office
notify the shops and the yard," he said briskly, compelling the
attention of the one-eyed despatcher; and when Callahan was gone: "Now,
Mac, get out your map and post me. I'm a little lame on geography yet.
Where is Gloria Siding?"
McCloskey found a blue-print map of the line and traced the course of
the western division among the foot-hills to the base of the Great
Timanyonis, and through the Timanyoni Canyon to a park-like valley, shut
in by the great range on the east and north, and by the Little
Timanyonis and the Hophras on the west and south. At a point midway of
the valley his stubby forefinger rested.
"That's Gloria," he said, "and here's Little Butte, twelve miles
beyond."
"Good ground?" queried Lidgerwood.
"As pretty a stretch as there is anywhere west of the desert; reminds
you of a Missouri bottom, with the river on one side and the hills a
mile away on the other. I don't know what excuse those hoboes could find
for piling a train in the ditch there."
"We'll hear the excuse later," said Lidgerwood. "Now, tell me what sort
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