It was an excellent opportunity for eloquence of the explosive sort, and when the dust had settled the track and trainmen were evidently expecting the well-deserved tongue-lashing.  But in crises like this the new superintendent was at his self-contained best.  Instead of swearing at the men, he gave his orders quietly and with the brisk certainty of one who knows his trade.  The passenger-train was to keep ten minutes behind its own time until the next siding was passed, making up beyond that point if its running orders permitted.  The special was to proceed on 201’s time to the siding in question, at which point it would side-track and let the passenger precede it.

Bradford was in the cab of 266 when Williams eased his engine and the service-car over the unsafe culvert, and inched the throttle open for the speeding race down the hill curves toward the wide valley plain of the Red Desert.

“Turn it loose, Andy,” said the big engineman, when the requisite number of miles of silence had been ticked off by the space-devouring wheels.  “What-all do you think of Mister Collars-and-Cuffs by this time?”

Bradford took a leisurely minute to whittle a chewing cube from his pocket plug of hard-times tobacco.

“Well, first dash out o’ the box, I allowed he was some locoed; he jumped me like a jack-rabbit for takin’ a clearance right under Jim Carter’s nose that-a-way.  Then we got down to business, and I was just beginning to get onto his gait a little when the green flag butted in.”

“Gait fits the laundry part of him?” suggested Williams.

“It does and it don’t.  I ain’t much on systems and sure things, Bat, but I can make out to guess a guess, once in a while, when I have to.  If that little tailor-made man don’t get his finger mashed, or something, and have to go home and get somebody to poultice it, things are goin’ to have a spell of happenings on this little old cow-trail of a railroad.  That’s my ante.”

“What sort of things?” demanded Williams.

“When it comes to that, your guess is as good as mine, but they’ll spell trouble for the amatoors and the trouble-makers, I reckon.  I ain’t placin’ any bets yet, but that’s about the way it stacks up to me.”

Williams let the 266 out another notch, hung out of his window to look back at the smoking hot box, and, in the complete fulness of time, said, “Think he’s got the sand, Andy?”

“This time you’ve got me goin’,” was the slow reply.  “Sizing him up one side and down the other when he called me back to pull my ear, I said, ’No, my young bronco-buster; you’re a bluffer—­the kind that’ll put up both hands right quick when the bluff is called.’  Afterward, I wasn’t so blamed sure.  One kind o’ sand he’s got, to a dead moral certainty.  When he saw what was due to happen back yonder at the culvert, he told me ‘23,’ all right, but he took time to hike up ahead and yank that Jap cook out o’ the car-kitchen before he turned his own little handspring into the ditch.”