“Well, it’s easy.  Bart’ll walk up to the boss in broad daylight, drop him, and then fill him full o’lead after he’s down.  I’ve seen him—­saw him do it to Bixby, Mr. Brewster’s foreman at the Copperette.”

“Say the rest of it,” commanded McCloskey.

“I’ve been thinking.  While I’m laying round with nothing much to do, I believe I’ll keep tab on Bart for a little spell.  I don’t love him much, nohow.”

McCloskey’s face contortion was intended to figure as a derisive smile.  “Pshaw, John!” he commented, “he’d skin you alive.  Why, even Jack Hepburn is afraid of him!”

“Jack is?  How do you know that?”

McCloskey shrugged again.

“Are you with us, John?” he asked cautiously.

“I ain’t with Bart Rufford and the tin-horns,” said Judson negatively.

“Then I’ll tell you a fairy tale,” said the trainmaster, lowering his voice.  “I gave you notice that Mr. Lidgerwood would do something different:  he did it, bright and early this morning; went to Jake Schleisinger, who had to try twice before he could remember that he was a justice of the peace, and swore out a warrant for Rufford’s arrest, on a charge of assault with intent to kill.”

“Sure,” said Judson, “that’s what any man would do in a civilized country, ain’t it?”

“Yes, but not here, John—­not in the red-colored desert, with Bart Rufford’s name in the body of the warrant.”

“I don’t know why not,” insisted the engineer stubbornly.  “But go on with the story; it ain’t any fairy tale, so far.”

“When he’d got the warrant, Schleisinger protesting all the while that Bart’d kill him for issuing it, Mr. Lidgerwood took it to Hepburn and told him to serve it.  Jack backed down so fast that he fell over his feet.  Said to ask him anything else under God’s heavens and he’d do it—­anything but that.”

“Huh!” said Judson.  “If I’d took an oath to serve warrants I’d serve ’em, if it did make me sick at my stomach.”  Then he got up and shuffled away to the window again, and when next he spoke his voice was the voice of a broken man.

“I lied to you a minute ago, Mac.  I did want my job back.  I came over here hopin’ that you and Mr. Lidgerwood might be seein’ things a little different by this time.  I’ve quit the whiskey.”

McCloskey wagged his shaggy head.

“So you’ve said before, John, and not once or twice either.”

“I know, but every man gets to the bottom, some time.  I’ve hit bed-rock, and I’ve just barely got sense enough to know it.  Let me tell you, Mac, I’ve pulled trains on mighty near every railroad in this country—­and then some.  The Red Butte is my last ditch.  With my record I couldn’t get an engine anywhere else in the United States.  Can’t you see what I’m up against?”

The trainmaster nodded.  He was human.

“Well, it’s Maggie and the babies now,” Judson went on.  “They don’t starve, Mac, not while I’m on top of earth.  Don’t you reckon you could make some sort of a play for me with the boss, Jim?  He’s got bowels.”