ho had been thrice
"on the carpet" in Lidgerwood's office for over-running his orders.

"Oh, they ain't so blame' hard to find," Clay retorted. "Last week, when
we was out on the Navajo wreck, me and the boy didn't have no
dinner-buckets. Bradford was runnin' the super's car, and when Andy just
sort o' happened to mention the famine up along, the little man made
that Jap cook o' his'n get us up a dinner that'd made your hair frizzle.
He shore did."

"Why don't you go and take up for him with Bart Rufford?" sneered
Broadbent, stopping his facing machine to set in a new cut on the
valve-seat.

"Not me. I've got cold feet," laughed the Kentuckian. "I'm like the
little kid's daddy in the Sunday-school song: I ain't got time to die
yet--got too much to do."

It was Williams's innings, and what he said was cautionary.

"Dry up, you fellows; here comes Gridley."

The master-mechanic was walking down the planked track from the back
shop, carrying his years, which showed only in the graying mustache and
chin beard, and his hundred and eighty pounds of well-set-up bone and
muscle, jauntily. Now, as always, he was the beau ideal of the
industrial field-officer; handsome in a clean-cut masculine way, a type
of vigor--but also, if the signs of the full face and the eager eyes
were to be regarded, of the elemental passions.

Angelic rumor hinted that he was a periodic drunkard: he was both more
and less than that. Like many another man, Henry Gridley lived a double
life; or, perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that there were
two Henry Gridleys. Lidgerwood, the Dawsons, the little world of Angels
at large, knew the virile, accomplished mechanical engineer and master
of men, which was his normal personality. What time the other
personality, the elemental barbarian, yawned, stretched itself, and came
awake, the unspeakable dens of the Copah lower quarter engulfed him
until the nether-man had gorged himself on degradation.

To his men, Gridley was a tyrant, exacting, but just; ruling them, as
the men of the desert could only be ruled, with the mailed fist. Yet
there was a human hand inside of the steel gauntlet, as all men knew.
Having once beaten a bullying gang-boss into the hospital at Denver, he
had promptly charged himself with the support of the man's family. Other
generous roughnesses were recorded of him, and if the attitude of the
men was somewhat tempered by wholesome fear, it was none the less
loyal.

Henc