“Well?” said Flemister again, this time more impatiently, Judson thought.

“He queered your lay-out by carefully omitting to come on the passenger, and now you propose to fall back upon Rufford’s method.  I don’t approve.”

Again the mine-owner said “Why don’t you?” and the other voice took up the question argumentatively.

“First, because it is unnecessary, as I have explained.  Lidgerwood is officially dead, right now.  When the grievance committees tell him what has been decided upon, he will put on his hat and go back to wherever it was that he came from.”

“And secondly?” suggested Flemister, still with the nagging sneer in his tone.

There was a little pause, and Judson listened until the effort grew positively painful.

“The secondly is a weakness of mine, you’ll say, Flemister.  I want his job; partly because it belongs to me, but chiefly because if I don’t get it a bunch of us will wind up breaking stone for the State.  But I haven’t anything against the man himself.  He trusts me; he has defended me when others have tried to put him wise; he has been damned white to me, Flemister.”

“Is that all?” queried the mine-owner, in the tone of the prosecuting attorney who gives the criminal his full length of the rope with which to hang himself.

“All of that part of it—­and you are saying to yourself that it is a good deal more than enough.  Perhaps it is; but there is still another reason for thinking twice before burning all the bridges behind us.  Lidgerwood is Ford’s man; if he throws up his job of his own accord, I may be able to swing Ford into line to name me as his successor.  On the other hand, if Lidgerwood is snuffed out and there is the faintest suspicion of foul play....  Flemister, I’m telling you right here and now that that man Ford will neither eat nor sleep until he has set the dogs on us!”

There was another pause, and Judson shifted his weight cautiously from one elbow to the other.  Then Flemister began, without heat and equally without compunction.  The ex-engineer shivered, as if the measured words had been so many drops of ice-water dribbling through the cracks in the floor to fall upon his spine.

“You say it is unnecessary; that Lidgerwood will be pushed out by the labor fight.  My answer to that is that you don’t know him quite as well as you think you do.  If he’s allowed to live, he’ll stay—­unless somebody takes him unawares and scares him off, as I meant to do to-night when I wired you.  If he continues to live, and stay, you know what will happen, sooner or later.  He’ll find you out for the double-faced cur that you are—­and after that, the fireworks.”

At this the other voice took its turn at the savage sneering.

“You can’t put it all over me that way, Flemister; you can’t, and, by God, you sha’n’t!  You’re in the hole just as deep as I am, foot for foot!”