e about him would fix itself in the
memory. His round, pleasant face, his heavy brown mustache, the medium
build that concealed under its commonplace symmetry an unusual
strength, his slightly rounding shoulders bespeaking a not too serious
estimate of himself--every characteristic, even to his unobtrusive
suit and black hat, made him distinctly an ordinary man--one to be met
in the street to-day and passed, and forgotten to-morrow.

He was laughing under Bucks's scrutiny when he handed the message
back. "Why, I don't know a thing about it, not a thing; but taking a
long shot and speaking by and far, I should say it looks something
like first blood for Sinclair," he suggested, and to change the
subject lifted his cup of coffee.

"Then it looks like you for the mountains to-night instead of for
Weber and Fields's," retorted Bucks, reaching for a cigar. "Brown, why
have you never learned to smoke?"

CHAPTER IX

THE MISUNDERSTANDING

No attempt was made to minimize the truth that the blow to the
division was a staggering one. The loss of Smoky Creek Bridge put
almost a thousand miles of the mountain division out of business.
Perishable freight and time freight were diverted to other lines.
Passengers were transferred; lunches were served to them in the deep
valley, and they were supplied by an ingenuous advertising department
with pictures of the historic bridge as it had long stood, and their
addresses were taken with the promise of a picture of the ruins. Smoky
Creek Bridge had long been famous in mountain song and story. For one
generation of Western railroad men it had stood as a monument to the
earliest effort to conquer the Rockies with a railroad. Built long
before the days of steel, this high and slender link in the first
transcontinental line had for thirty years served faithfully at its
danger-post, only to fall in the end at the hands of a bridge
assassin; nor has the mystery of its fate ever completely been solved,
though it is believed to lie with Murray Sinclair in the Frenchman
hills. The engineering department and the operating department united
in a tremendous effort to bring about a resumption of traffic.
Glover's men, pulled off construction, were sent forward in
trainloads. Dancing's linemen strung arc-lights along the creek until
the canyon twinkled at night like a mountain village, and men in three
shifts worked elbow to elbow unceasingly to run the switchbacks down
to the creek-bed. Th