Whereupon the trainmaster’s homely face would take on added furrowings of distress.

“That’s all right, Mr. Lidgerwood; that is stout, two-fisted talk all right; and I’m not doubting that you mean every word of it.  But, they’ll murder you.”

“That is neither here nor there, what they will do to me.  I handled them with gloves at first, but they wanted the bare fist.  They’ve got it now, and as I have said before, we are going to fight this thing through to a complete and artistic finish.  Who goes east on 202 to-day?”

“It is Judson’s run, but he is laying off.”

“What is the matter with him, sick?”

“No; just plain drunk.”

“Fire him.  I won’t have a single solitary man in the train service who gets drunk.  Tell him so.”

“All right; one more stick of dynamite, with a cap and fuse in it, turned loose under foot,” prophesied McCloskey gloomily.  “Judson goes.”

“Never mind the dynamite.  Now, what has been done with Johnston, that conductor who turned in three dollars as the total cash collections for a hundred-and-fifty-mile run?”

“I’ve had him up.  He grinned and said that that was all the money there was, everybody had tickets.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“No; Grantby, the superintendent of the Ruby Mine, came in on Johnston’s train that morning and he registered a kick because the Ruby Gulch station agent wasn’t out of bed in time to sell him a ticket.  He paid Johnston on the train, and that one fare alone was five dollars and sixty cents.”

Lidgerwood was adding another minute square to the pencilled checker-board on his desk blotter.

“Discharge Johnston and hold back his time-check.  Then have him arrested for stealing, and wire the legal department at Denver that I want him prosecuted.”

Again McCloskey’s rough-cast face became the outward presentment of a soul in anxious trouble.

“Call it done—­and another stick of dynamite turned loose,” he acquiesced.  “Is there anything else?”

“Yes.  What have you found out about that missing switch-engine?” This had come to be the stereotyped query, vocalizing itself every time the trainmaster showed his face in the superintendent’s room.

“Nothing, yet.  I’m hunting for proof.”

“Against the men you suspect?  Who are they, and what did they do with the engine?”

McCloskey became dumb.

“I don’t dare to say part of it till I can say it all, Mr. Lidgerwood.  You hit too quick and too hard.  But tell me one thing:  have you had to report the loss of that engine to anybody higher up?”

“I shall have to report it to General Manager Frisbie, of course, if we don’t find it.”

“But haven’t you already reported it?”

“No; that is, I guess not.  Wait a minute.”

A touch of the bell-push brought Hallock to the door of the inner office.  The green shade was pulled low over his eyes, and he held the pen he had been using as if it were a dagger.