, whipping a weapon from its convenient shelf
under the table's edge. But Judson, trained to the swift handling of
many mechanisms in the moment of respite before a wreck or a
derailment, was ready for him.

"Bart's afraid he can't duck without dying," he said grimly, screening
himself behind his captive. Then to the others, in the same unhasting
tone: "Some of you fellows just quiet Sammy down till I get out of here
with this peach of mine. I've got the papers, and I know what I'm doin';
if this thing I'm holdin' against Bart's back should happen to go
off----"

That ended it, so far as resistance was concerned. Judson backed quickly
out through the bar-room, drawing his prisoner backward after him; and a
moment later Angels was properly electrified by the sight of Rufford,
the Red Desert terror, marching sullenly down to the Crow's Nest, with a
fiery-headed little man at his elbow, the little man swinging the weapon
which had been made to simulate the cold muzzle of the revolver when he
had pressed it into Rufford's back at the gaming-table.

It was nothing more formidable than a short, thick "S"-wrench, of the
kind used by locomotive engineers in tightening the nuts of the
piston-rod packing glands.

X

FLEMISTER AND OTHERS

The jocosely spectacular arrest of Barton Rufford, with its appeal to
the grim humor of the desert, was responsible for a brief lull in the
storm of antagonism evoked by Lidgerwood's attempt to bring order out of
the chaos reigning in his small kingdom. For a time Angels was a-grin
again, and while the plaudits were chiefly for Judson, the figure of the
correctly clothed superintendent who was courageous enough to appeal to
the law, loomed large in the reflected light of the red-headed
engineer's cool daring.

For the space of a week there were no serious disasters, and Lidgerwood,
with good help from McCloskey and Benson, continued to dig persistently
into the mystery of the wholesale robberies. With Benson's discoveries
for a starting-point, the man Flemister was kept under surveillance, and
it soon became evident to the three investigators that the owner of the
Wire-Silver mine had been profiting liberally at the expense of the
railroad company in many ways. That there had been connivance on the
part of some one in authority in the railroad service, was also a fact
safely assumable; and each added thread of evidence seemed more and more
to entangle the chief clerk.

But behind