“Technically, you mean?”

“No, I didn’t mean that, because, if your friends tell the truth about you, you can come as near to making bricks without straw as the next man.  But the Red Butte Western reorganization asks for something more than a good railroad officer.”

“I’m listening,” said Lidgerwood.

Gridley laughed again.

“What will you do when a conductor or an engineer whom you have called on the carpet curses you out and invites you to go to hell?”

“I shall fire him,” was the prompt rejoinder.

“Naturally and properly, but afterward?  Four out of five men in this human scrap-heap you’ve inherited will lay for you with a gun to play even for the discharge.  What then?”

It was just here that Lidgerwood, staring absently at the passing panorama of shifting hill shoulders framing itself in the open side-door of the tool-car, missed a point.  If he had been less absorbed in the personal problem he could scarcely have failed to mark the searching scrutiny in the shrewd eyes shaded by Gridley’s soft hat.

“I don’t know,” he said, half hesitantly.  “Civilization means something—­or it should mean something—­even in the Red Desert, Mr. Gridley.  I suppose there is some semblance of legal protection in Angels, as elsewhere, isn’t there?”

The master-mechanic’s smile was tolerant.

“Surely.  We have a town marshal, and a justice of the peace; one is a blacksmith and the other the keeper of the general store.”

The good-natured irony in Gridley’s reply was not thrown away upon his listener, but Lidgerwood held tenaciously to his own contention.

“The inadequacy of the law, or of its machinery, hardly excuses a lapse into barbarism,” he protested.  “The discharged employee, in the case you are supposing, might hold himself justified in shooting at me; but if I should shoot back and happen to kill him, it would be murder.  We’ve got to stand for something, Mr. Gridley, you and I who know the difference between civilization and savagery.”

Gridley’s strong teeth came together with a little snap.

“Certainly,” he agreed, without a shade of hesitation; adding, “I’ve never carried a gun and have never had to.”  Then he changed the subject abruptly, and when the train had swung around the last of the hills and was threading its tortuous way through the great canyon, he proposed a change of base to the rear platform from which Chandler’s marvel of engineering skill could be better seen and appreciated.

The wreck at Gloria Siding proved to be a very mild one, as railway wrecks go.  A broken flange under a box-car had derailed the engine and a dozen cars, and there were no casualties—­the report about the involvement of the two enginemen being due to the imagination of the excited flagman who had propelled himself on a hand-car back to Little Butte to send in the call for help.