conference with the Red Butte
mine-owners postponed all office business for an additional twenty-four
hours. It was late in the evening of the third day when the
superintendent's special steamed home from the west, and Lidgerwood, who
had dined in his car, went directly to his office in the Crow's Nest.

He had scarcely settled himself at his desk for an attack upon the
accumulation of mail when Benson came in. It was a trouble call, and the
young engineer's face advertised it.

"It's no use talking, Lidgerwood," he began, "I can't do business on
this railroad until you have killed off some of the thugs and
highbinders."

Lidgerwood flung the paper-knife aside and whirled his chair to face the
new complaint.

"What is the matter now, Jack?" he snapped.

"Oh, nothing much--when you're used to it; only about a thousand
dollars' worth of dimension timber gone glimmering. That's all."

"Tell it out," rasped the superintendent. The mine-owners' conference,
from which he had just returned, had been called to protest against the
poor service given by the railroad, and knowing his present inability to
give better service, he had temporized until it needed but this one more
touch of the lash to make him lose his temper hopelessly.

"It's the Gloria bridge," said Benson. "We had the timbers all ready to
pull out the old and put in the new, and the shift was to be made to-day
between trains. Last night every stick of the new stock disappeared."

Lidgerwood was not a profane man, but what he said to Benson in the
coruscating minute or two which followed resolved itself into a very
fair imitation of profanity, inclusive and world-embracing.

"And you didn't have wit enough to leave a watchman on the job!" he
chafed--this by way of putting an apex to the pyramid of objurgation.
"By heavens! this thing has got to stop, Benson. And it's going to stop,
if we have to call out the State militia and picket every cursed mile of
this rotten railroad!"

"Do it," said Benson gruffly, "and when it's done you notify me and I'll
come back to work." And with that he tramped out, and was too angry to
remember to close the door.

Lidgerwood turned back to his desk, savagely out of humor with Benson
and with himself, and raging inwardly at the mysterious thieves who were
looting the company as boldly as an invading army might. At this, the
most inauspicious moment possible, his eye fell upon the calendar
memorandum, "See Hallock about B