“Come off, John!” growled the big foreman.  “You needn’t be afraid to talk straight over here.  He hit you when you was down, and we all know you’re only waitin’ for a chance to hit back.”

Judson was a red-headed man, effusively good-natured when he was in liquor, and a quick-tempered fighter of battles when he was not.

“Don’t you make any such mistake!” he snapped.  “That’s what McCloskey said when he handed me the ‘good-by.’  ’You’ll be one more to go round feelin’ for Mr. Lidgerwood’s throat, I suppose,’ says he.  By cripes! what I said to Mac I’m sayin’ to you, Bob Lester.  I know good and well a-plenty when I’ve earned my blue envelope.  If I’d been in the super’s place, the 271 would have had a new runner a long time ago!”

“Oh, hell! I say he’ll chase his feet,” puffed Broadbent, the fat machinist who was truing off the valve-seats of the 195.  “If Rufford doesn’t make him, there’s some others that will.”

Judson flared up again.

“Who you quotin’ now, Fatty?  One o’ the shop ’prentices?  Or maybe it’s Rank Hallock?  Say, what’s he doin’ monkeyin’ round the back shop so much lately?  I’m goin’ to stay round here till I get a chance to lick that scrub.”

Broadbent snorted his derision of all mere enginemen.

“You rail-pounders’d better get next to Rankin Hallock,” he warned.  “He’s the next sup’rintendent of the R.B.W.  You’ll see the ’pointment circular the next day after that jim-dandy over in the Crow’s Nest gets moved off’n the map.”

“Well, I’m some afeared Bart Rufford’s likely to move him,” drawled Clay, the six-foot Kentuckian who was filing the 195’s brasses at the bench.  “Which the same I ain’t rejoicin’ about, neither.  That little cuss is shore a mighty good railroad man.  And when you ain’t rubbin’ his fur the wrong way, he treats you white.”

“For instance?” snapped Hodges, a freight engineer who had been thrice “on the carpet” in Lidgerwood’s office for over-running his orders.

“Oh, they ain’t so blame’ hard to find,” Clay retorted.  “Last week, when we was out on the Navajo wreck, me and the boy didn’t have no dinner-buckets.  Bradford was runnin’ the super’s car, and when Andy just sort o’ happened to mention the famine up along, the little man made that Jap cook o’ his’n get us up a dinner that’d made your hair frizzle.  He shore did.”

“Why don’t you go and take up for him with Bart Rufford?” sneered Broadbent, stopping his facing machine to set in a new cut on the valve-seat.

“Not me.  I’ve got cold feet,” laughed the Kentuckian.  “I’m like the little kid’s daddy in the Sunday-school song:  I ain’t got time to die yet—­got too much to do.”

It was Williams’s innings, and what he said was cautionary.

“Dry up, you fellows; here comes Gridley.”

The master-mechanic was walking down the planked track from the back shop, carrying his years, which showed only in the graying mustache and chin beard, and his hundred and eighty pounds of well-set-up bone and muscle, jauntily.  Now, as always, he was the beau ideal of the industrial field-officer; handsome in a clean-cut masculine way, a type of vigor—­but also, if the signs of the full face and the eager eyes were to be regarded, of the elemental passions.