It was Lidgerwood’s challenge to the outlaws, and as if the blasts of the three tearing exhausts had been the signal it was awaiting, the strike storm broke with the suddenness and fury of a tropical hurricane.  From a hundred hiding-places in the car-strewn yard, men came running, some to swarm thickly upon the moving engines and cabooses, others swinging by the drawheads to cut the air-brake hose.

Benson was swept aside and overpowered before he could strike a blow.  Bogard, speeding across to take his post beside the Nadia, was struck down before he could get clear of the pouring hornet swarm.  Shots were fired; shrill yells arose.  Into the midst of the clamor the great siren whistle at the shops boomed out the fire alarm, and almost at the the same instant a red glow, capped by a rolling nimbus of sooty oil smoke, rose to beacon the destruction already begun in the shop yards.  And while the roar of the siren was still jarring upon the windless night air, the electric-light circuits were cut out, leaving the yards and the Crow’s Nest in darkness, and the frantic battle for the trains to be lighted only by the moon and the lurid glow of destruction spreading slowly under its black canopy of smoke.

In the Crow’s Nest the sudden coup of the strikers had the effect which its originator had doubtless counted upon.  It was some minutes after the lights were cut off, and the irruption had swept past the captured and disabled trains to the shops, before Lidgerwood could get his small garrison together and send it, with McCloskey for its leader, to reinforce the shop guard, which was presumably fighting desperately for the control of the power plant and the fire pumps.

Only McCloskey’s protest and his own anxiety for the safety of the Nadia’s company, kept Lidgerwood from leading the little relief column of loyal trainmen and head-quarters clerks in person.  The lust of battle was in his blood, and for the time the shrinking palsy of physical fear held aloof.

When the sally of the trainmaster and his forlorn-hope squad had left the office-story of the head-quarters building almost deserted, it was the force of mere mechanical habit that sent Lidgerwood back to his room to close his desk before going down to order the Nadia out of the zone of immediate danger.  There was a chair in his way, and in the darkness and in his haste he stumbled over it.  When he recovered himself, two men, with handkerchief masks over their faces, were entering from the corridor, and as he turned at the sound of their footsteps, they sprang upon him.

For the first rememberable time in his life, Howard Lidgerwood met the challenge of violence joyfully, with every muscle and nerve singing the battle-song, and a huge willingness to slay or be slain arming him for the hand-to-hand struggle.  Twice he drove the lighter of the two to the wall with well-planted blows, and once he got a deadly wrestler’s hold on the tall man and would have killed him if the free accomplice had not torn his locked fingers apart by main strength.  But it was two against one; and when it was over, the conflagration light reddening the southern windows sufficed for the knotting of the piece of hemp lashing with which the two masked garroters were binding their victim in his chair.