“Next to nothing, personally,” replied Lidgerwood, taking Benson’s abrupt change of topic as a matter of course.  “He seems a fine fellow; much too fine a fellow to be wasting himself out here in the desert.  Why?”

“Oh, I just wanted to know.  Ever met his mother and sister?”

“No.”

“Well, you ought to.  The mother is one of the only two angels in Angels, and the sister is the other.  Dawson, himself, is a ghastly monomaniac.”

Lidgerwood’s brows lifted, though his query was unspoken.

“Haven’t you heard his story?” asked Benson; “but of course you haven’t.  He is a lame duck, you know—­like every other man this side of Crosswater Summit, present company excepted.”

“A lame duck?” repeated Lidgerwood.

“Yes, a man with a past.  Don’t tell me you haven’t caught onto the hall-mark of the Red Desert.  It’s notorious.  The blacklegs and tin-horns and sure-shots go without saying, of course, but they haven’t a monopoly on the broken records.  Over in the ranch country beyond the Timanyonis they lump us all together and call us the outlaws.”

“Not without reason,” said Lidgerwood.

“Not any,” asserted Benson with cheerful pessimism.  “The entire Red Butte Western outfit is tarred with the same stick.  You haven’t a dozen operators, all told, who haven’t been discharged for incompetence, or worse, somewhere else; or a dozen conductors or engineers who weren’t good and comfortably blacklisted before they climbed Crosswater.  Take McCloskey:  you swear by him, don’t you?  He was a chief despatcher back East, and he put two passenger-trains together in a head-on collision the day he resigned and came West to grow up with the Red Desert.”

“I know,” said Lidgerwood, “and I did not have to learn it at second-hand.  Mac was man enough to tell me himself, before I had known him five minutes.”  Then he suggested mildly, “But you were speaking of Dawson, weren’t you?”

“Yes, and that’s what makes me say what I’m saying; he is one of them, though he needn’t be if he weren’t such a hopelessly sensitive ass.  He’s a B.S. in M.E., or he would have been if he had stayed out his senior year in Carnegie, but also he happened to be a foot-ball fiend, and in the last intercollegiate game of his last season he had the horrible luck to kill a man—­and the man was the brother of the girl Dawson was going to marry.”

“Heavens and earth!” exclaimed Lidgerwood.  “Is he that Dawson?”

“The same,” said the young engineer laconically.  “It was the sheerest accident, and everybody knew it was, and nobody blamed Dawson.  I happen to know, because I was a junior in Carnegie at the time.  But Fred took it hard; let it spoil his life.  He threw up everything, left college between two days, and came to bury himself out here.  For two years he never let his mother and sister know where he was; made remittances to them through a bank in Omaha, so they shouldn’t be able to trace him.  Care to hear any more?”