The vice-president was still a young man and he was confronting a problem that annoyed him.  He had been calling himself, and not without reason, a fair judge of men.  Yet here was a man whom he had known intimately from boyhood, who was but just now revealing a totally unsuspected quality.

“You say you have been dodging the collisions.  How do you know you wouldn’t buck up when the real pinch comes?” he demanded.

“Because the pinch came once—­and I didn’t buck up.  It was over a year ago, and to this good day I can’t think calmly about it.  You will understand when I say that it cost me the love of the one woman in the world.”

The vice-president did understand.  Being a married lover himself, he could measure the depth of the abyss into which Lidgerwood was looking.  His voice was as sympathetic as a woman’s when he said:  “Go ahead and ease your mind; tell me about it, if you can, Howard.  It’s barely possible that you are not the best judge of your own act.”

There was something approaching the abandonment of the shameless in Lidgerwood’s manner when he went on.

“It was in the Montana mountains.  I was going in to do a bit of expert engineering for her father.  Incidentally, I was escorting her and her mother from the railroad terminus to the summer camp in the hills, where they were to join a coaching party of their friends for the Yellowstone tour.  We had to drive forty miles in a stage, and there were six of us—­the two women and four men.  On the way the talk turned upon stage-robbings and hold-ups.  With the chance of the real thing as remote as a visit from Mars, I could be an ass and a braggart.  One of the men, a salesman for a powder company, gave me the rope wherewith to hang myself.  He argued for non-resistance, and I remember that I grew sarcastic over the spectacle afforded by a grown man, armed and in possession of his five senses, permitting himself to be robbed without attempting to resist.  You can guess what followed?”

“I’d rather hear you tell it,” said the listener at Superintendent Leckhard’s desk.  “Go on.”

Lidgerwood waited until the switching-engine, with its pop-valve open and screaming like a liberated devil of the noise pit, had passed.

“Three miles beyond the supper station we had our hold-up; the cut-and-dried, melodramatic sort of thing you read about, or used to read about, in the early days, with a couple of Winchesters poking through the scrub pines to represent the gang in hiding, and one lone, crippled desperado to come down to the footlights in the speaking part.  You get the picture?”

“Yes; I’ve seen the original.”

“Of course, it struck every soul of us with the shock of the incredible—­the totally unexpected.  It was a rank anachronism, twenty-five years out of date in that particular locality.  Before anybody realized what was happening, the cripple had us lined up in a row beside the stage, and I was reaching for the stars quite as anxiously as the little Jew hat salesman, who was swearing by all the patriarchs that the twenty-dollar bill in his right-hand pocket was his entire fortune.”