I'll
tell him how you built a street of houses in Red Butte out of company
material and with company labor. I'll prove to him that you've scrapped
first one thing and then another--condemned them so you might sell them
for your own pocket. I'll----"

"Shut up!" shouted the other man hoarsely. And then, after a moment
that Judson felt was crammed to the bursting point with murderous
possibilities: "Get your tools and come on. We'll see who's got the
yellows before we're through with this!"

XVII

THE DIPSOMANIAC

There are moments when the primal instincts assert themselves with a
sort of blind ferocity, and to Judson, jammed under the floor timbers of
Flemister's head-quarters office, came one of these moments when he
heard the two men in the room above moving to depart, and found himself
caught between the timbers so that he could not retreat.

What had happened he was unable, in the first fierce struggle for
freedom, fully to determine. It was as if a living hand had reached down
to pin him fast in the tunnel-like space. Then he discovered that a huge
splinter on one of the joists was thrust like a great barb into his
coat. Ordinarily cool and collected in the face of emergencies, the
ex-engineer lost his head for a second or so and fought like a trapped
animal. Then the frenzy fit passed and the quick wit reasserted itself.
Extending his arms over his head and digging his toes into the dry earth
for a purchase, he backed, crab-wise, out of the entangled coat, freed
the coat, and made for the narrow exit in a sweating panic of
excitement.

Notwithstanding the excitement, however, the recovered wit was taking
note of the movements of the men who were leaving the room overhead.
They were not going out by the direct way--out of the door facing the
moonlight and the mining hamlet. They were passing out through the
store-room in the rear. Also, there were other foot-falls--cautious
treadings, these--as of some third person hastening to be first at the
more distant door of egress.

Judson was out of his dodge-hole and flitting from pine to pine on the
upper hill-side in time to see a man leap from the loading platform at
the warehouse end of the building and run for the sheltering shadows of
the timbering at the mine entrance. Following closely upon the heels of
their mysterious file leader came the two whose footsteps Judson had
been timing, and these, too, crossed quickly to the tunnel mouth of the
mine