Again Lidgerwood made the sign of assent.

“Mr. Brewster is a level-headed Westerner.  He doubtless knew, to the dotting of an ‘i,’ the particular brand of trouble you two expansionists were so eager to acquire.”

“He did.  He has a copper property somewhere in the vicinity of Angels, and he knows the road.  He contended that we were buying two streaks of rust and a right-of-way in the Red Desert.  More than that, he asserted that the executive officer didn’t live who could bring order out of the chaos into which bad management and a peculiarly tough environment had plunged the Red Butte Western.  That’s where I had him bested, Howard.  All through the hot fight I kept saying over and over to myself that I knew the man.”

“But you don’t know him, Stuart; that is the weak link in the chain.”

Lidgerwood turned away to the scratched window-panes and the crude prospect, blurred now by the gathering shadows of the early evening.  In the yards below, a long freight-train was pulling in from the west, with a switching-engine chasing it to begin the cutting out of the Copah locals.  Over in the Red Butte yard a road-locomotive, turning on the table, swept a wide arc with the beam of its electric headlight in the graying dusk.  Through the half-opened door in the despatcher’s room came the diminished chattering of the telegraph instruments; this, with the outer clamor of trains and engines, made the silence in the private office more insistent.

When Lidgerwood faced about again after the interval of abstraction there were fine lines of harassment between his eyes, and his words came as if speech were costing him a conscious effort.

“If it were merely a matter of technical fitness, I suppose I might go over to Angels and do what you want done with the three hundred miles of demoralization.  But the Red Butte proposition asks for more; for something that I can’t give it.  Stuart, there is a yellow streak in me that you seem never to have discovered.  I am a coward.”

The ghost of an incredulous smile wrinkled about the tired eyes of the big man in the pivot-chair.

“You put it with your usual exactitude,” he assented slowly; “I hadn’t discovered it.”  Then:  “You forget that I have known you pretty much all your life, Howard.”

“You haven’t known me at all,” was the sober reply.

“Oh, yes, I have!  Let me recall one of the boyhood pictures that has never faded.  It was just after school, one hot day, in the Illinois September.  Our crowd had gone down to the pond back of the school-house, and two of us were paddling around on a raft made of sawmill slabs.  One of the two—­who always had more dare-deviltry than sense under his skull thatch—­was silly enough to ‘rock the boat,’ and it went to pieces.  You couldn’t swim, Howard, but if you hadn’t forgotten that trifling handicap and wallowed in to pull poor Billy Mimms ashore, I should have been a murderer.”