“But you have discovered something?”

“Partly yes, and partly no.  I think I told you at the time that they vanished between two days like a puff of smoke, leaving no trace behind them.  How it was done I couldn’t imagine.  There is a wagon-road paralleling the river over there at the Siding, as you know, and the first thing I did the next morning was to look for wagon-tracks.  No set of wheels carrying anything as heavy as those twelve-by-twelve twenty-fours had gone over the road.”

“How were they taken, then?  They couldn’t have been floated off down the river, could they?”

“It was possible, but not at all probable,” said the engineer.  “My theory was that they were taken away on somebody’s railroad car.  There were only two sources of information, at first—­the night operator at Little Butte twelve miles west, and the track-walker at Point-of-Rocks, whose boat goes down to within two or three miles of the Gloria bridge.  Goodloe, at Little Butte, reports that there was nothing moving on the main line after the passing of the midnight freight east; and Shaughnessy, the track-walker, is just a plain, unvarnished liar:  he knows a lot more than he will tell.”

“Still, you are looking a good bit more cheerful than you were last week,” was Lidgerwood’s suggestion.

“Yes; after I got the work started again with a new set of timbers, I spent three or four days on the ground digging for information like a dog after a woodchuck.  There are some prospectors panning on the bar three miles up the Gloria, but they knew nothing—­or if they knew they wouldn’t tell.  That was the case with every man I talked to on our side of the river.  But over across the Timanyoni, nearly opposite the mouth of the Gloria, there is a little creek coming in from the north, and on this creek I found a lone prospector—­a queer old chap who hails from my neck of woods up in Michigan.”

“Go on,” said Lidgerwood, when the engineer stopped to light his pipe.

“The old man told me a fairy tale, all right,” Benson went on.  “He was as full of fancies as a fig is of seeds.  I have been trying to believe that what he told me isn’t altogether a pipe-dream, but it sounds mightily like one.  He says that about two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, two weeks ago, an engine and a single car backed down from the west to the Gloria bridge, and a crowd of men swarmed off the train, loaded those bridge-timbers, and ran away with them, going back up the line to the west.  He tells it all very circumstantially, though he neglected to explain how he happened to be awake and on guard at any such unearthly hour.”

“Where was he when he saw all this?”

“On his own side of the river, of course.  It was a dark night, and the engine had no headlight.  But the loading gang had plenty of lanterns, and he says they made plenty of noise.”

“You didn’t let it rest at that?” said the superintendent.