nly two remained as residents of Angels the decadent.
One of these was Gridley, the master-mechanic, and the other was
Hallock, chief clerk for a diminishing series of imported
superintendents, and now for the third time the disappointed applicant
for the headship of the Red Butte Western.

Associated for some brief time in the real-estate venture, and hailing
from the same far-away Eastern State and city, these two had been at
first yoke-fellows, and afterward, as if by tacit consent, inert
enemies. As widely separated as the poles in characteristics, habits,
and in their outlook upon life, they had little in common, and many
antipathies.

Gridley was a large man, virile of face and figure, and he marched in
the ranks of the full-fed and the self-indulgent. Hallock was big-boned
and cadaverous of face, but otherwise a fair physical match for the
master-mechanic; a dark man with gloomy eyes and a permanent frown.
Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling
easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the
straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal
jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. Hallock's
smile was bitter, and if he had a social side no one in Angels had ever
discovered it. In a region where fellowship in some sort, if it were
only that of the bottle and the card-table, was any man's for the
taking, he was a hermit, an ascetic; and his attitude toward others, all
others, so far as Angels knew, was that of silent and morose ferocity.

It was in an upper room of the "Crow's Nest" head-quarters building that
these two, the master-mechanic and the acting superintendent, met late
in the evening of the day when Vice-President Ford had kept his
appointment in Copah with Lidgerwood.

Gridley, clad like a gentleman, and tilting comfortably in his chair as
he smoked a cigar that neither love nor money could have bought in
Angels, was jocosely sarcastic. Hallock, shirt-sleeved, unkempt, and
with the permanent frown deepening the furrow between his eyes, neither
tilted nor smoked.

"They tell me you have missed the step up again, Hallock," said the
smoker lazily, when the purely technical matter that had brought him to
Hallock's office had been settled.

"Who tells you?" demanded the other; and a listener, knowing neither,
would have remarked the curious similarity of the grating note in both
voices as infallibly as a student