Thus the master-mechanic; and McCloskey, with more at stake and a less insulated point of view, took it out in good, hard blows, backing his superior like a man.  Indeed, in the small head-quarters staff, Hallock was the only non-combatant.  From the beginning of hostilities he seemed to have made a pact with himself not to let it be known by any act or word of his that he was aware of the suddenly precipitated conflict.  The routine duties of a chief clerk’s desk are never light; Hallock’s became so exacting that he rarely left his office, or the pen-like contrivance in which he entrenched himself and did his work.

When the fight began, Lidgerwood observed Hallock closely, trying to discover if there were any secret signs of the satisfaction which the revolt of the rank and file might be supposed to awaken in an unsuccessful candidate for the official headship of the Red Butte Western.  There were none.  Hallock’s gaunt face, with the loose lips and the straggling, unkempt beard, was a blank; and the worst wreck of the three which promptly followed the introduction of the new rules, was noted in his reports with the calm indifference with which he might have jotted down the breakage of a section foreman’s spike-maul.

McCloskey, being of Scottish blood and desert-seasoned, was a cool in-fighter who could take punishment without wincing overmuch.  But at the end of the first fortnight of the new time-card, he cornered his chief in the private office and freed his mind.

“It’s no use, Mr. Lidgerwood; we can’t make these reforms stick with the outfit we’ve got,” he asserted, in sharp discouragement.  “The next thing on the docket will be a strike, and you know what that will mean, in a country where the whiskey is bad and nine men out of every ten go fixed for trouble.”

“I know; nevertheless the reforms have got to stick,” returned Lidgerwood definitively.  “We are going to run this railroad as it should be run, or hang it up in the air.  Did you discharge that operator at Crow Canyon? the fellow who let Train 76 get by him without orders night before last?”

“Dick Rufford?  Oh yes, I fired him, and he came in on 202 to-day lugging a piece of artillery and shooting off his mouth about what he was going to do to me ... and to you.  I suppose you know that his brother Bart, they call him ‘the killer’, is the lookout at Red-Light Sammy Faro’s game, and the meanest devil this side of the Timanyonis?”

“I didn’t know it, but that cuts no figure.”  Lidgerwood forced himself to say it, though his lips were curiously dry.  “We are going to have discipline on this railroad while we stay here, Mac; there are no two ways about that.”

McCloskey tilted his hat to the bridge of his nose, his characteristic gesture of displeasure.

“I promised myself that I wouldn’t join the gun-toters when I came out here,” he said, half musingly, “but I’ve weakened on that.  Yesterday, when I was calling Jeff Cummings down for dropping that new shifting-engine out of an open switch in broad daylight, he pulled on me out of his cab window.  What I had to take while he had me ‘hands up’ is more than I’ll take from any living man again.”