At the tar-paper-covered, iron-roofed Celestial, where he took his meals, Lidgerwood had a table to himself, which he shared at times with McCloskey, and at other times with breezy Jack Benson, the young engineer whom Vice-President Ford had sent, upon Lidgerwood’s request and recommendation, to put new life into the track force, and to make the preliminary surveys for a possible western extension of the road.

When the superintendent had guests, the long table on the opposite side of the dining-room restrained itself.  When he ate alone, Maggie Donovan, the fiery-eyed, heavy-handed table-girl who ringed his plate with the semicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke.  And since Maggie’s displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal.

On the line, and in the roundhouse and repair-shops, the joke was far too good to be muzzled.  The nickname, “Collars-and-Cuffs,” became classical; and once, when Brannagan and the 117 were ordered out on the service-car, the Irishman wore the highest celluloid collar he could find in Angels, rounding out the clownery with a pair of huge wickerware cuffs, which had once seen service as the coverings of a pair of Maraschino bottles.

No official notice having been taken of Brannagan’s fooling, Buck Tryon, ordered out on the same duty, went the little Irishman one better, decorating his engine headlight and handrails with festoonings of colored calico, the decoration figuring as a caricature of Lidgerwood’s college colors, and calico being the nearest approach to bunting obtainable at Jake Schleisinger’s emporium, two doors north of Red-Light Sammy’s house of call.

All of which was harmless enough, one would say, however subversive of dignified discipline it might be.  Lidgerwood knew.  The jests were too broad to be missed.  But he ignored them good-naturedly, rather thankful for the playful interlude which gave him a breathing-space and time to study the field before the real battle should begin.

That a battle would have to be fought was evident enough.  As yet, the demoralization had been scarcely checked, and sooner or later the necessary radical reforms would have to begin.  Gridley, whose attitude toward the new superintendent continued to be that of a disinterested 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.