“Yes, go on,” said the superintendent.

“I found him,” chuckled Benson, “and I took the liberty of piping his little game off to the harrowed women.  Next thing he knew they dropped in on him; and he is just crazy enough to stay here, and to keep them here.  That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for Gridley, Fred’s boss and your peach of a master-mechanic.”

“Why ‘peach’?  Gridley is a pretty decent sort of a man-driver, isn’t he?” said Lidgerwood, doing premeditated and intentional violence to what he had come to call his unjust prejudice against the handsome master-mechanic.

“You won’t believe it,” said Benson hotly, “but he has actually got the nerve to make love to Dawson’s sister! and he a widow-man, old enough to be her father!”

Lidgerwood smiled.  It is the privilege of youth to be intolerant of age in its rival.  Gridley was, possibly, forty-two or three, but Benson was still on the sunny slope of twenty-five.  “You are prejudiced, Jack,” he criticized.  “Gridley is still young enough to marry again, if he wants to—­and to live long enough to spoil his grandchildren.”

“But he doesn’t begin to be good enough for Faith Dawson,” countered the young engineer, stubbornly.

“Isn’t he? or is that another bit of your personal grudge?  What do you know against him?”

Pressed thus sharply against the unyielding fact, Benson was obliged to confess that he knew nothing at all against the master-mechanic, nothing that could be pinned down to day and date.  If Gridley had the weaknesses common to Red-Desert mankind, he did not parade them in Angels.  As the head of his department he was well known to be a hard hitter; and now and then, when the blows fell rather mercilessly, the railroad colony called him a tyrant, and hinted that he, too, had a past that would not bear inspection.  But even Benson admitted that this was mere gossip.

Lidgerwood laughed at the engineer’s failure to make his case, and asked quizzically, “Where do I come in on all this, Jack?  You have an axe to grind, I take it.”

“I have.  Mrs. Dawson wants me to take my meals at the house.  I’m inclined to believe that she is a bit shy of Gridley, and maybe she thinks I could do the buffer act.  But as a get-between I’d be chiefly conspicuous by my absence.”

“Sorry I can’t give you an office job,” said the superintendent in mock sympathy.

“So am I, but you can do the next best thing.  Get Fred to take you home with him some of these fine evenings, and you’ll never go back to Maggie Donovan and the Celestial’s individual hash-holders; not if you can persuade Mrs. Dawson to feed you.  The alternative is to fire Gridley out of his job.”

“This time you are trying to make the tail wag the dog,” said Lidgerwood.  “Gridley has twice my backing in the P. S-W. board of directors.  Besides, he is a good fellow; and if I go up on the mesa and try to stand him off for you, it will be only because I hope you are a better fellow.”