afters, and
flung the weapon to the farthest corner of the dark loft.

VII

THE KILLER

Lidgerwood had found little difficulty in getting on the companionable
side of Dawson, so far as the heavy-muscled, silent young draftsman had
a companionable side; and an invitation to the family dinner-table at
the Dawson cottage on the low mesa above the town had followed, as a
matter of course.

Once within the home circle, with Benson to plead his cause with the
meek little woman whose brown eyes held the shadow of a deep trouble,
Lidgerwood had still less difficulty in arranging to share Benson's
permanent table welcome. Though Martha Dawson never admitted it, even to
her daughter, she stood in constant terror of the Red Desert and its
representative town of Angels, and the presence of the superintendent as
the member of the household promised to be an added guaranty of
protection.

Lidgerwood's acceptance as a table boarder in the cottage on the mesa
being hospitably prompt, he was coming and going as regularly as his
oversight of the three hundred miles of demoralization permitted before
the buffoonery of the Red Butte Western suddenly laughed itself out, and
war was declared. In the interval he had come to concur very heartily in
Benson's estimate of the family, and to share--without Benson's excuse,
and without any reason that could be set in words--the young engineer's
opposition to Gridley as Miss Faith's possible choice.

There was little to be done in this field, however. Gridley came and
went, not too often, figuring always as a friend of the family, and
usurping no more of Miss Dawson's time and attention than she seemed
willing to bestow upon him. Lidgerwood saw no chance to obstruct and no
good reason for obstructing. At all events, Gridley did not furnish the
reason. And the first time Lidgerwood found himself sitting out the
sunset hour after dinner on the tiny porch of the mesa cottage, with
Faith Dawson as his companion--this while the joke was still running its
course--his talk was not of Gridley, nor yet of Benson; it was of
himself.

"How long is it going to be before you are able to forget that I am
constructively your brother's boss, Miss Faith?" he asked, when she had
brought him a cushion for the back of the hard veranda chair in which
he was trying to be luxuriously lazy.

"Oh, do I remember it?--disagreeably?" she laughed. And then, with
charming naivete: "I am sure I try not to."