Oddly enough, on the other hand, there was a prepossession, quite as unreasoning, for Hallock.  There was absolutely nothing in the chief clerk to inspire liking, or even common business confidence; on the contrary, while Hallock attended to his duties and carried out his superior’s instructions with the exactness of an automaton, his attitude was distinctly antagonistic.  As the chief subaltern on Lidgerwood’s small staff he was efficient and well-nigh invaluable.  But as a man, Lidgerwood felt that he might easily be regarded as an enemy whose designs could never be fathomed or prefigured.

In spite of Hallock’s singular manner, which was an abrupt challenge to all comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chief clerk.  Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty.  But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth—­of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood could find.

McCloskey, who had served under Hallock for a number of months before the change in management, confessed that he knew the gloomy chief clerk only as a man in authority, and exceedingly hard to please.  Questioned more particularly by Lidgerwood, McCloskey added that Hallock was married; that after the first few months in Angels his wife, a strikingly beautiful young woman, had disappeared, and that since her departure Hallock had lived alone in two rooms over the freight station, rooms which no one, save himself, ever entered.

These, and similar bits of local history, were mere gatherings by the way for the superintendent, picked up while the Red Desert was having its laugh at the new bath-room, the pajamas, and the clean linen.  They weighed lightly, because the principal problem was, as yet, untouched.  For while the laugh endured, Lidgerwood had not found it possible to breach many of the strongholds of lawlessness.

Orders, regarded by disciplined railroad men as having the immutability of the laws of the Medes and Persians, were still interpreted as loosely as if they were but the casual suggestions of a bystander.  Rules were formulated and given black-letter emphasis in their postings on the bulletin boards, only to be coolly ignored when they chanced to conflict with some train crew’s desire to make up time or to kill it.  Directed to account for fuel and oil consumed, the enginemen good-naturedly forged reports and the storekeepers blandly O.K.’d them.  Instructed to keep an accurate record of all material used, the trackmen jocosely scattered more spikes than they drove, made fire-wood of the stock cross-ties, and were not above underpinning the section-houses with new dimension timbers.

In countless other ways the waste was prodigious and often mysteriously unexplainable.  The company supplies had a curious fashion of disappearing in transit.  Two car-loads of building lumber sent to repair the station at Red Butte vanished somewhere between the Angels shipping-yards and their billing destination.  Lime, cement, and paint were exceedingly volatile.  House hardware, purchased in quantities for company repairs, figured in the monthly requisition sheet as regularly as coal and oil; and the lost-tool account roughly balanced the pay-roll of the company carpenters and bridge-builders.