Lidgerwood had not inquired the reason for the eastern disability. He
had lived in the West long enough to know that it is an ill thing to pry
too curiously into any man's past. So there should be present
efficiency, no man in the service should be called upon to recite in
ancient history, much less one for whom Ford had spoken a good word.

Like all the other offices in the Crow's Nest, that of the trainmaster
was bare and uninviting. Lidgerwood, passing beyond the door of
communication, found himself in a dingy room, with cobwebs festooning
the ceiling and a pair of unwashed windows looking out upon the open
square called, in the past and gone day of the Angelic promoters, the
"railroad plaza." Two chairs, a cheap desk, and a pine table backed by
the "string-board" working model of the current time-table, did duty as
the furnishings, serving rather to emphasize than to relieve the
dreariness of the place.

McCloskey was at his desk at the moment of door-opening, and Lidgerwood
instantly paid tribute to Vice-President Ford's powers of
characterization. The trainmaster was undeniably homely--and more; his
hard-featured face was a study in grotesques. There was fearless honesty
in the shrewd gray eyes, and a good promise of capability in the strong
Scotch jaw and long upper lip, but the grotesque note was the one which
persisted, and the trainmaster seemed wilfully to accentuate it. His
coat, in a region where shirt-sleeves predominated, was a
close-buttoned gambler's frock, and his hat, in the country of the
sombrero and the soft Stetson, was a derby.

Lidgerwood was striving to estimate the man beneath these outward
eccentricities when McCloskey rose and thrust out a hand, great-jointed
and knobbed like a laborer's.