“Yet you say Flemister is a born gentleman, as well as a born buccaneer?”

“Well, yes; he behaves himself well enough in decent company.  He isn’t exactly the kind of man you can turn down short—­he has education, good manners, and all that, you know; but if he were hard up I shouldn’t let him get within roping distance of my pocket-book, or, if I had given him occasion to dislike me, within easy pistol range.”

“Wherein he is neither better nor worse than a good many others who take the sunburn of the Red Desert,” was Lidgerwood’s comment, and just then the waiter opened the door a second time to say that luncheon was served.

“Don’t forget to remind me that I’m to tell you Gridley’s story, Howard,” said the president, rising out of the depths of his lounging-chair and stripping off the dust-coat, “Reads like a romance—­only I fancy it was anything but a romance for poor Lizzie Gridley.  Let’s go and see what the cook has done for us.”

At luncheon Lidgerwood was made known to the other members of the private-car party.  The white-haired old man who had been dozing in his chair was Judge Holcombe, Van Lew’s uncle and the father of the prettier of the two young women who had been entertaining Jefferis, the curly-headed collegian.  Jefferis laughingly disclaimed relationship with anybody; but Miss Carolyn Doty, the less pretty but more talkative of the two young women, confessed that she was a cousin, twice removed, of Mrs. Brewster.

Quite naturally, Lidgerwood sought to pair the younger people when the table gathering was complete, and was not entirely certain of his prefiguring.  Eleanor Brewster and Van Lew sat together and were apparently absorbed in each other to the exclusion of all things extraneous.  Jefferis had Miss Doty for a companion, and the affliction of her well-balanced tongue seemed to affect neither his appetite nor his enjoyment of what the young woman had to say.

Miriam Holcombe had fallen to Lidgerwood’s lot, and at first he thought that her silence was due to the fact that young Jefferis had gotten upon the wrong side of the table.  But after she began to talk, he changed his mind.

“Tell me about the wrecked train we passed a little while ago, Mr. Lidgerwood,” she began, almost abruptly.  “Was any one killed?”

“No; it was a freight, and the crew escaped.  It was a rather narrow escape, though, for the engineer, and fireman.”

“You were putting it back on the track?” she asked.

“There isn’t much of it left to put back, as you may have observed,” said Lidgerwood.  Then he told her of the explosion and the fire.

She was silent for a few moments, but afterward she went on, half-gropingly he thought.

“Is that part of your work—­to get the trains on the track when they run off?”

He laughed.  “I suppose it is—­or at least, in a certain sense, I’m responsible for it.  But I am lucky enough to have a wrecking-boss—­two of them, in fact, and both good ones.”