“He’s here; and so is Mr. Loring.  They’re stopping at the Clarendon,” said Brodrick.

“Then they haven’t quit,” drawled Griggs; adding:  “I wonder if they have a ghost of a show against the politicals?”

“Has annybody been to see ’em?” asked Callahan.

“There’s a notion for you, Scott,” said Brodrick.  Scott was the presiding officer in the B. of L.E. local.  “Get up a committee from the Federative to go and ask Mr. Loring if there’s any use in our tryin’ to hold on.”

The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile vista.  Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb, where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the one to the eastward and the other to the west.

“Holy smut!” said the wiper.  “See Dicky Dixon comin’ out with the Flyer!  How’s that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?”

It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces.  Halkett, the “political” general superintendent, had called Dixon on the carpet for not making time with his train.  “If you’re afraid to run, say so, and we’ll get a man that isn’t,” Halkett had said; and here was Dixon coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.

The conclave had gathered at the wiper’s window.

“The dum fool!” said Brodrick.  “If anything gets in front of him——­”

There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the “yard limits” telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the diverging tracks of the two divisions.  Beyond the yard the street became a country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city.  When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in the path of the Flyer.  The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask of grime.

“There it is again,” said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a stand two hundred yards beyond the “limits” office where he should have stopped for orders.  “We’re all hoodooed, the last one of us.  I’ll get that committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring.”

Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the junto.  It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and Loring found M’Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic, waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon at the Camelot Club.