She looked up quickly, and he was sure that he surprised something more than a passing interest in the serious eyes—­a trouble depth, he would have called it, had their talk been anything more than the ordinary conventional table exchange.

“We saw you go down to speak to two of your men:  one who wore his hat pulled down over his eyes and made dreadful faces at you as he talked——­”

“That was McCloskey, our trainmaster,” he cut in.

“And the other——?”

“Was wrecking-boss Number Two,” he told her, “my latest apprentice, and a very promising young subject.  This was his first time out under my administration, and he put McCloskey and me out of the running at once.”

“What did he do?” she asked, and again he saw the groping wistfulness in her eyes, and wondered at it.

“I couldn’t explain it without being unpardonably technical.  But perhaps it can best be summed up in saying that he is a fine mechanical engineer with the added gift of knowing how to handle men.”

“You are generous, Mr. Lidgerwood, to—­to a subordinate.  He ought to be very loyal to you.”

“He is.  And I don’t think of him as a subordinate—­I shouldn’t even if he were on my pay-roll instead of on that of the motive-power department.  I am glad to be able to call him my friend, Miss Holcombe.”

Again a few moments of silence, during which Lidgerwood was staring gloomily across at Miss Brewster and Van Lew.  Then another curiously abrupt question from the young woman at his side.

“His college, Mr. Lidgerwood; do you chance to know where he was graduated?”

At another moment Lidgerwood might have wondered at the young woman’s persistence.  But now Benson’s story of Dawson’s terrible misfortune was crowding all purely speculative thoughts out of his mind.

“He took his engineering course in Carnegie, but I believe he did not stay through the four years,” he said gravely.

Miss Holcombe was looking down the table, down and across to where her father was sitting, at Mr. Brewster’s right.  When she spoke again the personal note was gone; and after that the talk, what there was of it, was of the sort that is meant to bridge discomforting gaps.

In the dispersal after the meal, Lidgerwood attached himself to Miss Doty; this in sheer self-defense.  The desert passage was still in its earlier stages, and Miss Carolyn’s volubility promised to be the less of two evils, the greater being the possibility that Eleanor Brewster might seek to re-open a certain spring of bitterness at which he had been constrained to drink deeply and miserably in the past.

The self-defensive expedient served its purpose admirably.  For the better part of the desert run, the president slept in his state-room, Mrs. Brewster and the judge dozed in their respective easy-chairs, and Jefferis and Miriam Holcombe, after roaming for an uneasy half-hour from the rear platform to the cook’s galley forward, went up ahead, at one of the stops, to ride—­by the superintendent’s permission—­in the engine cab with Williams.  Miss Brewster and Van Lew were absorbed in a book of plays, and their corner of the large, open compartment was the one farthest removed from the double divan which Lidgerwood had chosen for Miss Carolyn and himself.