o be
comforted because they are not."

"But you have discovered something?"

"Partly yes, and partly no. I think I told you at the time that they
vanished between two days like a puff of smoke, leaving no trace behind
them. How it was done I couldn't imagine. There is a wagon-road
paralleling the river over there at the Siding, as you know, and the
first thing I did the next morning was to look for wagon-tracks. No set
of wheels carrying anything as heavy as those twelve-by-twelve
twenty-fours had gone over the road."

"How were they taken, then? They couldn't have been floated off down the
river, could they?"

"It was possible, but not at all probable," said the engineer. "My
theory was that they were taken away on somebody's railroad car. There
were only two sources of information, at first--the night operator at
Little Butte twelve miles west, and the track-walker at Point-of-Rocks,
whose boat goes down to within two or three miles of the Gloria bridge.
Goodloe, at Little Butte, reports that there was nothing moving on the
main line after the passing of the midnight freight east; and
Shaughnessy, the track-walker, is just a plain, unvarnished liar: he
knows a lot more than he will tell."

"Still, you are looking a good bit more cheerful than you were last
week," was Lidgerwood's suggestion.

"Yes; after I got the work started again with a new set of timbers, I
spent three or four days on the ground digging for information like a
dog after a woodchuck. There are some prospectors panning on the bar
three miles up the Gloria, but they knew nothing--or if they knew they
wouldn't tell. That was the case with every man I talked to on our side
of the river. But over across the Timanyoni, nearly opposite the mouth
of the Gloria, there is a little creek coming in from the north, and on
this creek I found a lone prospector--a queer old chap who hails from
my neck of woods up in Michigan."

"Go on," said Lidgerwood, when the engineer stopped to light his pipe.

"The old man told me a fairy tale, all right," Benson went on. "He was
as full of fancies as a fig is of seeds. I have been trying to believe
that what he told me isn't altogether a pipe-dream, but it sounds
mightily like one. He says that about two o'clock in the morning of
Saturday, two weeks ago, an engine and a single car backed down from the
west to the Gloria bridge, and a crowd of men swarmed off the train,
loaded those bridge-timbers, and ran away with