adviser, assured Lidgerwood that he was losing ground by not opening the
campaign of severity at once.

"You'll have to take a club to these hoboes before you can ever hope to
make railroad men out of them," was Gridley's oft-repeated assertion;
and the fact that the master-mechanic was continually urging the warfare
made Lidgerwood delay it.

Just why Gridley's counsel should have produced such a contrary effect,
Lidgerwood could not have explained. The advice was sound, and the man
who gave it was friendly and apparently ingenuous. But prejudices, like
prepossessions, are sometimes as strong as they are inexplicable, and
while Lidgerwood freely accused himself of injustice toward the
master-mechanic, a certain feeling of distrust and repulsion, dating
back to his first impressions of the man, died hard.

Oddly enough, on the other hand, there was a prepossession, quite as
unreasoning, for Hallock. There was absolutely nothing in the chief
clerk to inspire liking, or even common business confidence; on the
contrary, while Hallock attended to his duties and carried out his
superior's instructions with the exactness of an automaton, his attitude
was distinctly antagonistic. As the chief subaltern on Lidgerwood's
small staff he was efficient and well-nigh invaluable. But as a man,
Lidgerwood felt that he might easily be regarded as an enemy whose
designs could never be fathomed or prefigured.

In spite of Hallock's singular manner, which was an abrupt challenge to
all comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chief
clerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent
fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the
loyalty there was a deeper depth--of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to
this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood could find.

McCloskey, who had served under Hallock for a number of months before
the change in management, confessed that he knew the gloomy chief clerk
only as a man in authority, and exceedingly hard to please. Questioned
more particularly by Lidgerwood, McCloskey added that Hallock was
married; that after the first few months in Angels his wife, a
strikingly beautiful young woman, had disappeared, and that since her
departure Hallock had lived alone in two rooms over the freight station,
rooms which no one, save himself, ever entered.

These, and similar bits of local history, were mere gatherings by the
way for the supe