Close beside the building and back perhaps twenty feet from the front corner, a telephone and electric light pole stood with outstretched arms, holding aloft its faintly humming wires.  Starr stood looking that way for some time before it occurred to him that there was no street light near enough to send that warm, yellow glow across the second bar from the bottom.  The rest of the pole was vague and shadowy, like everything else in the immediate neighborhood.  The bottom of the pole he could not see at all from where he stood, it was so dark alongside the building.  But that second cross-arm was lighted as from a near-by window.  Yet there was no lighted window anywhere in the place.

Starr was puzzled.  Being puzzled, he went slowly toward the pole, his face turned upward.  The nearest street lamp was a full block away, and it would have lighted up the whole top of the pole evenly, if at all.  At the foot of the pole Starr stood for a minute, still staring upward.  Then he reached up, gripped the metal steps and began carefully to climb.

Before he had reached the lighted cross-arm he knew that the glow must come from a skylight; and that the skylight must be the one that had saved that hidden little office room from being dark.  He was no lineman, but he knew enough to be careful about the wires, so it took him several minutes to work his way to where he could straddle a crosstree that had few wires.

Just below him and no more than twelve or fifteen feet distant was the skylight he had suspected, but before he gave that much attention, he looked across to where the fire was sending up a column of crimson smoke and bright, eddying sparks, four blocks or so away.  The man left on guard would find it difficult to tear himself away from all that excitement, Starr thought satisfiedly; though if he came back he could scarcely help seeing Starr on that lighted perch, and he would undoubtedly take a shot at him if he were any man at all and had a spark of loyalty to his fellows.  For Starr’s business up there could not be mistaken by the stupidest greaser in the town.

With the fire to help his cause, Starr craned toward the building and looked down through the skylight.  It had been partly raised for ventilation, which was needed in that little, inside room, especially since twelve men were foregathered there, and since every man in the lot was burning tobacco in some form.

Sommers was there, seated at the end of a table that had been moved into the center of the room, which brought it directly under the skylight.  He sat facing Starr, and he was reading something to himself while the others waited in silence until he had finished.  His strong, dark face was grave, his high forehead creased with the wrinkles of deep thinking.  He had a cigar in one corner of his mouth, and he was absentmindedly chewing it rather than smoking.  He looked the leader, though his clothes were inclined to shabbiness and he sat slouched forward in his chair.  He looked the leader, and their leader those others proclaimed him by their very silence, and by the way their faces turned toward him while they waited.