When McCloskey had come at a push of the call-button, Lidgerwood snapped the night-latch on the corridor door.

“Let us have it, Judson,” he said, when the trainmaster had dragged his chair into the circle of light described by the green cone shade of the desk lamp.  “We have been wondering what had become of you.”

Summarized, Judson’s story was the report of an intelligent scout.  Since he was classed with the discharged men, he had been able to find out some of the enemy’s moves in the game of coercion.  The strikers had transferred their head-quarters from the Celestial to Cat Biggs’s place, where the committees, jealously safeguarded, were now sitting “in permanence” in the back room.  Judson had not been admitted to the committee-room; but the thronged bar-room was public, and the liquor which was flowing freely had loosened many tongues.

From the bar-room talk Judson had gathered that the strikers knew nothing as yet of McCloskey’s plan to keep the trains moving and the wires alive.  Hence—­unless the free-flowing whiskey should precipitate matters—­there would probably be no open outbreak before midnight.  As an offset to this, however, the engineer had overheard enough to convince him that the Copah wire had been tapped; that Dix, the day operator, had been either bribed or intimidated, and was now under guard at the strikers’ head-quarters, and that some important message had been intercepted which was, in Judson’s phrase, “raising sand” in the camp of the disaffected.  This recurrence of the mysterious message, of which no trace could be found in the head-quarters record, opened a fresh field of discussion, and it was McCloskey who put his finger upon the only plausible conclusion.

“It is Hallock again,” he rasped.  “He is the only man who could have used the private code.  Dix probably picked out the cipher; he’s got a weakness for such things.  Hallock’s carrying double.  He has fixed up some trouble-making message, or faked one, and signed your name to it, and then schemed to let it leak out through Dix.”

“It’s making the trouble, all right,” was Judson’s comment.  “When I left Biggs’s a few minutes ago, Tryon was calling for volunteers to come down here and steal an engine.  From what he said, I took it they were aimin’ to go over into the desert to tear up the track and stop somebody or something coming this way from Copah—­all on account of that make-believe message that you didn’t send.”

Thus far Judson’s report had dealt with facts.  But there were other things deducible.  He insisted that the strength of the insurrection did not lie in the dissatisfied employees of the Red Butte Western, or even in the ex-employees; it was rather in the lawless element of the town which lived and fattened upon the earnings of the railroad men—­the saloon-keepers, the gamblers, the “tin-horns” of every stripe.  Moreover, it was certain that some one high in authority in the railroad service was furnishing the brains.  There was a chief to whom all the malcontents deferred, and who figured in the bar-room talk as the “boss,” or “the big boss.”