dness, Ford ... as one born out of time; apprehending, as well as
you or any one, what is required of a man and a gentleman, and yet
unable to answer when my name is called. I said I had been paying the
price; I am paying it here and now. This is the fourth time I have had
to refuse a good offer that carried with it the fighting chance."

The vice-president's heavy eyebrows slanted in questioning surprise.

"You knew in advance that you were going to turn me down? Yet you came a
thousand miles to meet me here; and you admit that you have gone the
length of looking the ground over."

Lidgerwood's smile was mirthless.

"A regular recurring phase of the disease. It manifests itself in a
determination to break away and do or die in the effort to win a little
self-respect. I can't take the plunge. I know beforehand that I can't
... which brings us down to Copah, the present exigency, and the fact
that you'll have to look farther along for your Red Butte Western
man-queller. The blood isn't in my veins, Stuart. It was left out in the
assembling."

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 mi