Lidgerwood’s acceptance as a table boarder in the cottage on the mesa being hospitably prompt, he was coming and going as regularly as his oversight of the three hundred miles of demoralization permitted before the buffoonery of the Red Butte Western suddenly laughed itself out, and war was declared.  In the interval he had come to concur very heartily in Benson’s estimate of the family, and to share—­without Benson’s excuse, and without any reason that could be set in words—­the young engineer’s opposition to Gridley as Miss Faith’s possible choice.

There was little to be done in this field, however.  Gridley came and went, not too often, figuring always as a friend of the family, and usurping no more of Miss Dawson’s time and attention than she seemed willing to bestow upon him.  Lidgerwood saw no chance to obstruct and no good reason for obstructing.  At all events, Gridley did not furnish the reason.  And the first time Lidgerwood found himself sitting out the sunset hour after dinner on the tiny porch of the mesa cottage, with Faith Dawson as his companion—­this while the joke was still running its course—­his talk was not of Gridley, nor yet of Benson; it was of himself.

“How long is it going to be before you are able to forget that I am constructively your brother’s boss, Miss Faith?” he asked, when she had brought him a cushion for the back of the hard veranda chair in which he was trying to be luxuriously lazy.

“Oh, do I remember it?—­disagreeably?” she laughed.  And then, with charming naivete:  “I am sure I try not to.”

“I am beginning to wish you would try a little harder,” he ventured, endeavoring to put her securely upon the plane of companionship.  “It is pretty lonesome sometimes, up here on the top round of the Red-Butte-Western ladder of authority.”

“You mean that you would like to leave your official dignity behind you when you come to us here on the mesa?” she asked.

“That’s the idea precisely.  You have no conception how strenuous it is, wearing the halo all the time, or perhaps I should say, the cap and bells.”

She smiled.  Frederic Dawson, the reticent, had never spoken of the attitude of the Red Butte Western toward its new boss, but Gridley had referred to it quite frequently and had made a joke of it.  Without knowing just why, she had resented Gridley’s attitude; this notwithstanding the master-mechanic’s genial affability whenever Lidgerwood and his difficulties were the object of discussion.

“They are still refusing to take you seriously?” she said.  “I hope you don’t mind it too much.”

“Personally, I don’t mind it at all,” he assured her—­which was sufficiently true at the moment.  “The men are acting like a lot of foolish schoolboys bent on discouraging the new teacher.  I am hoping they will settle down to a sensible basis after a bit, and take me and the new order of things for granted.”

Miss Dawson had something on her mind; a thing not gathered from Gridley or from any one else in particular, but which seemed to take shape of itself.  The effect of setting it in speech asked for a complete effacement of Lidgerwood the superintendent, and that was rather difficult.  But she compassed it.