at he was expecting to see. Precisely at the
instant of the switch passing, a man dropped from the forward step of
the smoker and walked swiftly away up the disused track of the old
spur. Judson's turn came a moment later, and when his end of the day
coach flicked past the switch-stand he, too, dropped to the ground, and,
waiting only until he could follow without being detected, set out after
the tall figure, which was by that time scarcely more than an indistinct
and retreating blur in the moonlight.

The chase led directly up the old spur, but it did not continue quite to
the five-mile-distant end of it. A few hundred yards short of the
stockade enclosing the old buildings the shadowy figure took to the
forest and began to climb the ridge, going straight up, as nearly as
Judson could determine. The ex-engineer followed, still keeping his
distance. From the first bench above the valley level he looked back and
down into the stockade enclosure. All of the old buildings were dark,
but one of the two new and unpainted ones was brilliantly lighted, and
there were sounds familiar enough to Judson to mark it as the
Wire-Silver power-house. Notwithstanding his interest in the chase,
Judson was curious enough to stand a moment listening to the sharply
defined exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine driving the
generators.

"Say!" he ejaculated, under his breath, "if that engine ain't a dead
match for the old 216 pullin' a grade, I don't want a cent! Double
cylinder, set on the quarter, and _choo-chooin_' like it ought to have a
pair o' steel rails under it. If I had time I'd go down yonder and break
a winder in that power-shack; blamed if I wouldn't!"

But, unhappily, there was no time to spare; as it was, he had lingered
too long, and when he came out upon the crest of the narrow ridge and
attained a point of view from which he could look down upon the
buildings clustering at the foot of the western slope, he had lost the
scent. The tall man had disappeared as completely and suddenly as if the
earth had opened and swallowed him.

This, in Judson's prefiguring, was a small matter. The tall man, whom
the ex-engineer had unmistakably recognized at the moment of
train-forsaking as Rankin Hallock, was doubtless on his way to
Flemister's head-quarters at the foot of the western slope. Why he
should take the roundabout route up the old spur and across the
mountain, when he might have gone on the train to Little Butte station