“We’re ready when you are, Mr. Lidgerwood,” he interrupted; and with a few hurried directions to Hallock, Lidgerwood joined the trainmaster on the Crow’s Nest platform.  The train was backing up to get its clear-track orders, and on the tool-car platform stood the big man whom Lidgerwood had already identified presumptively as Gridley.

McCloskey would have introduced the new superintendent when the train paused for the signal from the despatcher’s window, but Gridley did not wait for the formalities.

“Come aboard, Mr. Lidgerwood,” he called, genially.  “It’s too bad we have to give you a sweat-box welcome.  If there are any of Seventy-one’s crew left alive, 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.”