do, if you had the chance, Rankin?"

"I'd kill out some of the waste and recklessness, if it took the last
man off the pay-rolls; and I'd break even with at least one man over in
the Timanyoni, if I had to use the whole Red Butte Western to pry him
loose!"

"Flemister again?" queried the master-mechanic. And then, in mild
deprecation, "You are a bad loser, Hallock, a damned bad loser. But I
suppose that is one of your limitations."

A silence settled down upon the upper room, but Gridley made no move to
go. Out in the yards the night men were making up a westbound freight,
and the crashing of box-cars carelessly "kicked" into place added its
note to the discord of inefficiency and destructive breakage.

Over in the town a dance-hall piano was jangling, and the raucous voice
of the dance-master calling the figures came across to the Crow's Nest
curiously like the barking of a distant dog. Suddenly the barking voice
stopped, and the piano clamor ended futilely in an aimless tinkling. For
climax a pistol-shot rang out, followed by a scattering volley. It was a
precise commentary on the time and the place that neither of the two men
in the head-quarters upper room gave heed to the pistol-shots, or to the
yelling uproar that accompanied them.

It was after the shouting had died away in a confused clatter of hoofs,
and the pistol cracklings were coming only at intervals and from an
increasing distance, that the corridor door opened and the night
despatcher's off-trick man came in with a message for Hallock.

It was a mere routine notification from the line-end operator at Copah,
and the chief clerk read it sullenly to the master-mechanic.

"Engine 266, Williams, engineer, and Blackmar, fireman, with service-car
Naught-One, Bradford, conductor, will leave Copah at 12:01 A.M., and run
special to Angels. By order of Howard Lidgerwood, General
Superintendent."

Gridley's pivot-chair righted itself with a snap. But he waited until
the off-trick man was gone before he said, "Lidgerwood! Well, by all the
gods!" then, with a laugh that was more than half a snarl, "There is a
chance for you yet, Rankin."

"Why, do you know him?"

"No, but I know something about him. I've got a line on New York, the
same as you have, and I get a hint now and then. I knew that Lidgerwood
had been considered for the place, but I was given to understand that he
would refuse the job if it were offered to him."

"Why should he refuse?" demanded