V

THE OUTLAWS

For the first few weeks after the change in ownership and the arrival of
the new superintendent, the Red Butte Western and its nerve-centre,
Angels, seemed disposed to take Mr. Howard Lidgerwood as a rather
ill-timed joke, perpetrated upon a primitive West and its people by some
one of the Pacific Southwestern magnates who owned a broad sense of
humor.

During this period the sardonic laugh was heard in the land, and the
chuckling appreciation of the joke by the Red Butte rank and file, and
by the Angelic soldiers of fortune who, though not upon the company's
pay-rolls, still throve indirectly upon the company's bounty, lacked
nothing of completeness. The Red Desert grinned like the famed Cheshire
cat when an incoming train from the East brought sundry boxes and
trunks, said to contain the new boss's wardrobe. Its guffaws were long
and uproarious when it began to be noised about that the company
carpenters and fitters were installing a bath and other civilizing and
softening appliances in the alcove opening out of the superintendent's
sleeping-room in the head-quarters building.

Lidgerwood slept in the Crow's Nest, not so much from choice as for the
reason that there seemed to be no alternative save a room in the town
tavern, appropriately named "The Hotel Celestial." Between his
sleeping-apartment and his private office there was only a thin board
partition; but even this gave him more privacy than the Celestial could
offer, where many of the partitions were of building-paper, muslin
covered.

It is a railroad proverb that the properly inoculated railroad man eats
and sleeps with his business; Lidgerwood exemplified the saying by
having a wire cut into the despatcher's office, with the terminals on a
little table at his bed's head, and with a tiny telegraph relay
instrument mounted on the stand. Through the relay, tapping softly in
the darkness, came the news of the line, and often, after the strenuous
day was ended, Lidgerwood would lie awake listening.

Sometimes the wire gossiped, and echoes of Homeric laughter trickled
through the relay in the small hours; as when Ruby Creek asked the night
despatcher if it were true that the new boss slept in what translated
itself in the laborious Morse of the Ruby Creek operator as
"pijjimmies"; or when Navajo, tapping the same source of information,
wished to be informed if the "Chink"--doubtless referring to Tadasu
Matsuwari--ran a laundry on the