“So he thoughtfully stopped us to give us the chance!” snapped Lidgerwood in wrathful scorn.  “What did you do?”

“Oh, as long as he had done it, I had him call up the Angels despatcher to find out where we were at.  We’re on 204’s time, you know—­ought to have met her here.”

“Why didn’t we?” asked the superintendent, taking the time-card from its pigeon-hole and glancing at Train 204’s schedule.

“She was late out of Red Butte; broke something and had to stop and tie it up; lost a half-hour makin’ her get-away.”

“Then we reach Little Butte before 204 gets there—­is that it?”

“That’s about the way the night despatcher has it ciphered out.  He gave the Timanyoni plug operator hot stuff for holdin’ us up.”

Lidgerwood shook his head.  The artless simplicity of Red-Butte-Western methods, or unmethods, was dying hard, inexcusably hard.

“Does the night despatcher happen to know just where 204 is, at this present moment?” he inquired with gentle irony.

Bradford laughed.

“I’d be willing to bet a piebald pinto against a no-account yaller dog that he don’t.  But I reckon he won’t be likely to let her get past Little Butte, comin’ this way, when he has let us get by Timanyoni goin’ t’other way.”

“That’s all right, Andy; that is the way you would have a right to figure it out if you were running a special on a normally healthy railroad—­you’d be justified in running to your next telegraph station, regardless.  But the Red Butte Western is an abnormally unhealthy railroad, and you’d better feel your way—­pretty carefully, too.  From Point-of-Rocks you can see well down toward Little Butte.  Tell Williams to watch for 204’s headlight, and if he sees it, to take the siding at Silver Switch, the old Wire-Silver spur.”

Bradford nodded, and when Lidgerwood reimmersed himself in the cattleman’s claim papers, went forward to share Williams’s watch in the cab of the 266.

Twenty minutes farther on, the train slowed again, made a momentary stop, and began to screech and grind heavily around a sharp curve.  Lidgerwood looked out of the window at his right.  The moon had gone behind a huge hill, a lantern was pricking a point in the shadows some little distance from the track, and the tumultuous river was no longer sweeping parallel with the embankment.  He shut his desk and went to the rear platform, projecting himself into the group of sight-seers just as the train stopped for the second time.

“Where are we now?” asked Miss Brewster, looking up at the dark mass of the hill whose forested ramparts loomed black in the near foreground.

“At Silver Switch,” replied Lidgerwood; and when the bobbing lantern came nearer he called to the bearer of it.  “What is it, Bradford?”

“The passenger, I reckon,” was the answer.  “Williams thought he saw it as we came around Point-o’-Rocks, and he was afraid the despatcher had got balled up some and let ’em get past Little Butte without a meet-order.”