canopy of smoke.

In the Crow's Nest the sudden coup of the strikers had the effect which
its originator had doubtless counted upon. It was some minutes after the
lights were cut off, and the irruption had swept past the captured and
disabled trains to the shops, before Lidgerwood could get his small
garrison together and send it, with McCloskey for its leader, to
reinforce the shop guard, which was presumably fighting desperately for
the control of the power plant and the fire pumps.

Only McCloskey's protest and his own anxiety for the safety of the
_Nadia's_ company, kept Lidgerwood from leading the little relief column
of loyal trainmen and head-quarters clerks in person. The lust of battle
was in his blood, and for the time the shrinking palsy of physical fear
held aloof.

When the sally of the trainmaster and his forlorn-hope squad had left
the office-story of the head-quarters building almost deserted, it was
the force of mere mechanical habit that sent Lidgerwood back to his room
to close his desk before going down to order the _Nadia_ out of the zone
of immediate danger. There was a chair in his way, and in the darkness
and in his haste he stumbled over it. When he recovered himself, two
men, with handkerchief masks over their faces, were entering from the
corridor, and as he turned at the sound of their footsteps, they sprang
upon him.

For the first rememberable time in his life, Howard Lidgerwood met the
challenge of violence joyfully, with every muscle and nerve singing the
battle-song, and a huge willingness to slay or be slain arming him for
the hand-to-hand struggle. Twice he drove the lighter of the two to the
wall with well-planted blows, and once he got a deadly wrestler's hold
on the tall man and would have killed him if the free accomplice had not
torn his locked fingers apart by main strength. But it was two against
one; and when it was over, the conflagration light reddening the
southern windows sufficed for the knotting of the piece of hemp lashing
with which the two masked garroters were binding their victim in his
chair.

Meanwhile, the pandemonium raging at the shops was beginning to surge
backward into the railway yard. Some one had fired a box-car, and the
upblaze centred a fresh fury of destruction. Up at the head of the
three-sectioned freight train a mad mob was cutting the leading
locomotive free.

Dawson, crouching in the roundhouse door directly opposite, knew all
that Judson