The Taming of Red Butte Western

I

COLLARS-AND-CUFFS


The windows of the division head-quarters of the Pacific Southwestern at
Copah look northward over bald, brown mesas, and across the Pannikin to
the eroded cliffs of the Uintah Hills. The prospect, lacking vegetation,
artistic atmosphere, and color, is crude and rather harshly aggressive;
and to Lidgerwood, glooming thoughtfully out upon it through the
weather-worn panes scratched and bedimmed by many desert sandstorms, it
was peculiarly depressing.

"No, Ford; I hate to disappoint you, but I'm not the man you are looking
for," he said, turning back to things present and in suspense, and
speaking as one who would add a reason to unqualified refusal. "I've
been looking over the ground while you were coming on from New York. It
isn't in me to flog the Red Butte Western into a well-behaved division
of the P. S-W."

The grave-eyed man who had borrowed Superintendent Leckhard's
pivot-chair nodded intelligence.

"That is what you have been saying, with variations, for the last
half-hour. Why?"

"Because the job asks for gifts that I don't possess. At the present
moment the Red Butte Western is the most hopelessly demoralized three