you ought to give them thirty days for calling you out
before you could shake hands with yourself."

Being by nature deliberate in forming friendships, and proportionally
tenacious of them when they were formed, Lidgerwood's impulse was to
hold all men at arm's length until he was reasonably assured of
sincerity and a common ground. But the genial master-mechanic refused to
be put on probation. Lidgerwood made the effort while the rescue train
was whipping around the hill shoulders and plunging deeper into the
afternoon shadows of the great mountain range. The tool-car was
comfortably filled with men and working tackle, and for seats there were
only the blocking timbers, the tool-boxes, and the coils of rope and
chain cables. Sharing a tool-box with Gridley and smoking a cigar out of
Gridley's pocket-case, Lidgerwood found it difficult to be less than
friendly.

It was to little purpose that he recalled Ford's qualified
recommendation of the man who had New York backing and who, in Ford's
phrase, was a "brute after his own peculiar fashion." Brute or human,
the big master-mechanic had the manners of a gentleman, and his easy
good-nature broke down all the barriers of reserve that his somewhat
reticent companion could interpose.

"You smoke good cigars, Mr. Gridley," said Lidgerwood, trying, as he
had tried before, to wrench the talk aside from the personal channel
into which it seemed naturally to drift.

"Good tobacco is one of the few luxuries the desert leaves a man capable
of enjoying. You haven't come to that yet, but you will. It is a savage
life, Mr. Lidgerwood, and if a man hasn't a good bit of the blood of his
stone-age ancestors in him, the desert will either kill him or make a
beast of him. There doesn't seem to be any medium."

The talk was back again in the personal channel, and this time
Lidgerwood met the issue fairly.

"You have been saying that, in one form or another, ever since we left
Angels: are you trying to scare me off, Mr. Gridley, or are you only
giving me a friendly warning?" he asked.

The master-mechanic laughed easily.

"I hope I wouldn't be impudent enough to do either, on such short
acquaintance," he protested. "But now that you have opened the door,
perhaps a little man-to-man frankness won't be amiss. You have tackled a
pretty hard proposition, Mr. Lidgerwood."

"Technically, you mean?"

"No, I didn't mean that, because, if your friends tell the truth about
you, you can co