Miss Faith?"

"Certainly." She was far enough from making any personal application of
the test case suggested by the superintendent. But in a world which took
its keynote from the harsh discords of the Red Desert, these little
thoughtful talks with a man who was most emphatically not of the Red
Desert were refreshing. And she could scarcely have been Martha Dawson's
daughter or Frederic Dawson's sister without having a thoughtful cast of
mind.

Lidgerwood rose and felt in his pockets for his after-dinner cigar.

"You are much more charitable than most women, Miss Dawson," he said
gravely; after which he left abruptly, and went back to his desk in the
Crow's Nest.

As we have seen, this bit of confidential talk between the
superintendent and Faith Dawson fell in the period of the jesting
horse-laugh; fell, as it chanced, on a day when the horse-laugh was at
its height. Later, after the storm broke, there were no more quiet
evenings on the cottage porch for a harassed superintendent. Lidgerwood
came and went as before, when the rapidly recurring wrecks did not keep
him out on the line, but he scrupulously left his troubles behind him
when he climbed to the cottage on the mesa.

Quite naturally, his silence on the one topic which was stirring the Red
Desert from the Crosswater Hills to Timanyoni Canyon was a poor mask.
The increasing gravity of the situation wrote itself plainly enough in
his face, and Faith Dawson was sorry for him, giving him silent
sympathy, unasked, if not wholly unexpected. The town talk of Angels,
what little of it reached the cottage, was harshly condemnatory of the
new superintendent; and public opinion, standing for what it was worth,
feared no denial when it asserted that Lidgerwood was doing what he
could to earn his newer reputation.

After the mysterious disappearance of the switching-engine, mystery
still unsolved and apparently unsolvable, he struck fast and hard,
searching painstakingly for the leaders in the rebellion, reprimanding,
suspending, and discharging until McCloskey warned him that, in addition
to the evil of short-handing the road, he was filling Angels with a
growing army of ex-employees, desperate and ripe for anything.

"I can't help it, Mac," was his invariable reply. "Unless they put me
out of the fight I shall go on as I have begun, staying with it until we
have a railroad in fact, or a forfeited charter. Do the best you can,
but let it be plainly and distinctly u