“You’re Mr. Lidgerwood, I take it?” said he, tilting the derby to the back of his head.  “Come to tell me to pack my kit and get out?”

“Not yet, Mr. McCloskey,” laughed Lidgerwood, getting his first real measure of the man in the hearty hand-grip.  “On the contrary, I’ve come to thank you for not dropping things and running away before the new management could get on the ground.”

The trainmaster’s rejoinder was outspokenly blunt.  “I’ve nowhere to run to, Mr. Lidgerwood, and that’s no joke.  Some of the backcappers will be telling you presently that I was a train despatcher over in God’s country, and that I put two trains together.  It’s your right to know that it’s true.”

“Thank you, Mr. McCloskey,” said Lidgerwood simply; “that sounds good to me.  And take this for yourself:  the man who has done that once won’t do it again.  That is one thing, and another is this:  we start with a clean slate on the Red Butte Western.  No man in the service who will turn in and help us make a real railroad out of the R.B.W. need worry about his past record:  it won’t be dug up against him.”

“That’s fair—­more than fair,” said the trainmaster, mouthing the words as if the mere effort of speech were painful, “and I wish I could promise you that the rank and file will meet you half-way.  But I can’t.  You’ll find a plucked pigeon, Mr. Lidgerwood—­with plenty of hawks left to pick the bones.  The road has been running itself for the past two years and more.”

“I understand,” said Lidgerwood; and then he spoke of the careless despatching.

“That will be Callahan, the day man,” McCloskey broke in wrathfully.  “But that’s the way of it.  When we get through the twenty-four hours without killing somebody or smashing something, I thank God, and put a red mark 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.