office more insistent.

When Lidgerwood faced about again after the interval of abstraction
there were fine lines of harassment between his eyes, and his words came
as if speech were costing him a conscious effort.

"If it were merely a matter of technical fitness, I suppose I might go
over to Angels and do what you want done with the three hundred miles of
demoralization. But the Red Butte proposition asks for more; for
something that I can't give it. Stuart, there is a yellow streak in me
that you seem never to have discovered. I am a coward."

The ghost of an incredulous smile wrinkled about the tired eyes of the
big man in the pivot-chair.

"You put it with your usual exactitude," he assented slowly; "I hadn't
discovered it." Then: "You forget that I have known you pretty much all
your life, Howard."

"You haven't known me at all," was the sober reply.

"Oh, yes, I have! Let me recall one of the boyhood pictures that has
never faded. It was just after school, one hot day, in the Illinois
September. Our crowd had gone down to the pond back of the school-house,
and two of us were paddling around on a raft made of sawmill slabs. One
of the two--who always had more dare-deviltry than sense under his skull
thatch--was silly enough to 'rock the boat,' and it went to pieces. You
couldn't swim, Howard, but if you hadn't forgotten that trifling
handicap and wallowed in to pull poor Billy Mimms ashore, I should have
been a murderer."