"Yes, a man with a past. Don't tell me you haven't caught onto the
hall-mark of the Red Desert. It's notorious. The blacklegs and tin-horns
and sure-shots go without saying, of course, but they haven't a
monopoly on the broken records. Over in the ranch country beyond the
Timanyonis they lump us all together and call us the outlaws."
"Not without reason," said Lidgerwood.
"Not any," asserted Benson with cheerful pessimism. "The entire Red
Butte Western outfit is tarred with the same stick. You haven't a dozen
operators, all told, who haven't been discharged for incompetence, or
worse, somewhere else; or a dozen conductors or engineers who weren't
good and comfortably blacklisted before they climbed Crosswater. Take
McCloskey: you swear by him, don't you? He was a chief despatcher back
East, and he put two passenger-trains together in a head-on collision
the day he resigned and came West to grow up with the Red Desert."
"I know," said Lidgerwood, "and I did not have to learn it at
second-hand. Mac was man enough to tell me himself, before I had known
him five minutes.
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