Hanging off by the hand-rails, he saw the engine’s headlight pick up the switch-stand of the old spur.  The train was unmistakably slowing now, and he made ready to jump if the need should arise, picking his place at the track side as the train lights showed him the ground.  As the speed was checked, Judson saw what he was expecting to see.  Precisely at the instant of the switch passing, a man dropped from the forward step of the smoker and walked swiftly away up the disused track of the old spur.  Judson’s turn came a moment later, and when his end of the day coach flicked past the switch-stand he, too, dropped to the ground, and, waiting only until he could follow without being detected, set out after the tall figure, which was by that time scarcely more than an indistinct and retreating blur in the moonlight.

The chase led directly up the old spur, but it did not continue quite to the five-mile-distant end of it.  A few hundred yards short of the stockade enclosing the old buildings the shadowy figure took to the forest and began to climb the ridge, going straight up, as nearly as Judson could determine.  The ex-engineer followed, still keeping his distance.  From the first bench above the valley level he looked back and down into the stockade enclosure.  All of the old buildings were dark, but one of the two new and unpainted ones was brilliantly lighted, and there were sounds familiar enough to Judson to mark it as the Wire-Silver power-house.  Notwithstanding his interest in the chase, Judson was curious enough to stand a moment listening to the sharply defined exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine driving the generators.

“Say!” he ejaculated, under his breath, “if that engine ain’t a dead match for the old 216 pullin’ a grade, I don’t want a cent!  Double cylinder, set on the quarter, and choo-chooin’ like it ought to have a pair o’ steel rails under it.  If I had time I’d go down yonder and break a winder in that power-shack; blamed if I wouldn’t!”

But, unhappily, there was no time to spare; as it was, he had lingered too long, and when he came out upon the crest of the narrow ridge and attained a point of view from which he could look down upon the buildings clustering at the foot of the western slope, he had lost the scent.  The tall man had disappeared as completely and suddenly as if the earth had opened and swallowed him.

This, in Judson’s prefiguring, was a small matter.  The tall man, whom the ex-engineer had unmistakably recognized at the moment of train-forsaking as Rankin Hallock, was doubtless on his way to Flemister’s head-quarters at the foot of the western slope.  Why he should take the roundabout route up the old spur and across the mountain, when he might have gone on the train to Little Butte station and so have saved the added distance and the hard climb, was a question which Judson answered briefly:  for some reason of his own, Hallock did not wish to be seen going openly to the Wire-Silver head-quarters.  Hence the drop from the train at Silver Switch and the long tramp up the gulch and over the ridge.