“Oh, yes; that is one of the things I can fix.  But there are going to be plenty of others.”

“Still we must take something for granted, Mr. M’Tosh.  What I have to do up-town won’t wait until Callahan has finished his run.  I thought the main difficulty was safely overcome.”

“Umph!” said the train-master; “the troubles are barely getting themselves born.  You must remember that we swapped horses at the last minute.  We were ready for the race to the east.  Everybody on the Prairie Division had been notified that a special was to go through to-night without stop from Lesterville to A. & T. Junction.”

“Well?”

“Now we have it all to straighten out by wire on another division; meeting points to make, slow trains to side-track, fool operators to hold down; all on the dizzy edge of a strike that is making every man on the line lose his balance.  But you go ahead with your newspaper business.  I’ll do what a man can here.  And if you come across that right-of-way agent, I wish you’d make it a case of assault and battery and get him locked up.  I’m leery about him.”

Kent went his way dubiously reflective.  In the moment of triumph, when Durgan had announced the success of the bold change in the programme, he had made light of Hawk’s escape.  But now he saw possibilities.  True, the junto was leaderless for the moment, and Bucks had no very able lieutenants.  But Hawk would give the alarm; and there was the rank and file of the machine to reckon with.  And for weapons, the ring controlled the police power of the State and of the city.  Let the word be passed that the employees of the Trans-Western were kidnapping their receiver and the governor, and many things might happen before “Red” Callahan should finish his long race to the westward.

Thinking of these things, David Kent walked up-town when he might have taken a car.  When the toxin of panic is in the air there is no antidote like vigorous action.

Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person at the denouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible instant of time.  “Everything depends upon this,” he added, when he had made the message otherwise emphatic.  “If we miss the morning papers, we are done.”

While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk’s pigeon-hole, a cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out.  Kent saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked.  He was.  For once in a way the ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his surroundings.  There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent’s elbow.

Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the receiving clerk’s window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled away.  Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and smoothed them out.  Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made illegible, it would seem, by the writer’s haste and nervousness.  But at the third attempt Hawk had got as far as the address:  “To All Trans-Western agents on Western Division.”