“Do it,” said Benson gruffly, “and when it’s done you notify me and I’ll come back to work.”  And with that he tramped out, and was too angry to remember to close the door.

Lidgerwood turned back to his desk, savagely out of humor with Benson and with himself, and raging inwardly at the mysterious thieves who were looting the company as boldly as an invading army might.  At this, the most inauspicious moment possible, his eye fell upon the calendar memorandum, “See Hallock about B/L.,” and his finger was on the chief clerk’s bell-push before he remembered that it was late, and that there had been no light in Hallock’s room when he had come down the corridor to his own door.

The touch of the push-button was only a touch, and there was no answering skirl of the bell in the adjoining room.  But, as if the intention had evoked it, a shadow crossed behind the superintendent’s chair and came to rest at the end of the roll-top desk.  Lidgerwood looked up with his eyes aflame.  It was Hallock who was standing at the desk’s end, and he was pointing to the memorandum on the calendar pad.

“You made that note three days ago,” he said abruptly.  “I saw your train come in and your light go on.  What bill of lading was it you wanted to see me about?”

For an instant Lidgerwood failed to understand.  Then he saw that in abbreviating he had unconsciously used the familiar sign, “B/L,” the common abbreviation of “bill of lading.”  At another time he would have turned Hallock’s very natural mistake into an easy introduction to a rather delicate subject.  But now he was angry.

“Sit down,” he rapped out.  “That isn’t ‘bill of lading’; it’s ’building and loan.’”

Hallock dragged the one vacant chair into the circle illuminated by the shaded desk-electric, and sat on the edge of it, with his hands on his knees.  “Well?” he said, in the grating voice that was so curiously like the master-mechanic’s.

“We can cut out the details,” this from the man who, under other conditions, would have gone diplomatically into the smallest details.  “Some years ago you were the treasurer of the Mesa Building and Loan Association.  When the association went out of business, its books showed a cash balance in the treasury.  What became of the money?”

Hallock sat as rigid as a carved figure flanking an Egyptian propylon, which his attitude suggested.  He was silent for a time, so long a time that Lidgerwood burst out impatiently, “Why don’t you answer me?”

“I was just wondering if it is worth while for you to throw me overboard,” said the chief clerk, speaking slowly and quite without heat.  “You are needing friends pretty badly just now, if you only knew it, Mr. Lidgerwood.”

The cool retort, as from an equal in rank, added fresh fuel to the fire.

“I’m not buying friends with concessions to injustice and crooked dealing,” Lidgerwood exploded.  “You were in the railroad service when the money was paid over to you, and you are in the railroad service now.  I want to know where the money went.”