Benson sank a little lower in his chair.  “The first thing I found was a couple of armed guards—­a pair of tough-looking citizens with guns sagging at their hips, lounging around the Wire-Silver back door.  There is quite a little nest of buildings at the old entrance to the Wire-Silver, and a stockade has been built to enclose them.  The old spur runs through a gate in the stockade, and the gate was open; but the two toughs wouldn’t let me go inside.  I wrangled with them first, and tried to bribe them afterward, but it was no go.  Then I started to walk around the outside of the stockade, which is only a high board fence, and they objected to that.  Thereupon I told them to go straight to blazes, and walked away down the spur, but when I got out of sight around the first curve I took to the timber on the butte slope and climbed to a point from which I could look over into Flemister’s carefully built enclosure.”

“Well, what did you see?”

“Much or little, just as you happen to look at it.  There are half a dozen buildings in the yard, and two of them are new and unpainted.  Sizing them up from a distance, I said to myself that the lumber in them hadn’t been very long out of the mill.  One of them is evidently the power-house; it has an iron chimney set in the roof, and the power-plant was running.”

For a little time after Benson had finished his report there was silence, and Lidgerwood had added many squares to the pencillings on his desk blotter before he spoke again.

“You say two of the buildings are new; did you make any inquiries about recent lumber shipments to the Wire-Silver?”

“I did,” said the young engineer soberly.  “So far as our station records show, Flemister has had no material, save coal, shipped in over either the eastern or the western spur for several months.”

“Then you believe that he took your bridge-timbers and sawed them up into lumber?”

“I do—­as firmly as I believe that the sun will rise to-morrow.  And that isn’t all of it, Lidgerwood.  He is the man who has your switch-engine.  As I have said, the power-plant was running while I was up there to-day.  The power is a steam engine, and if you’d stand off and listen to it you’d swear it was a locomotive pulling a light train up an easy grade.  Of course, I’m only guessing at that, but I think you will agree with me that the burden of proof lies upon Flemister.”

Lidgerwood was nodding slowly.  “Yes, on Flemister and some others.  Who are the others, Benson?”

“I have no more guesses coming, and I am too tired to invent any.  Suppose we drop it until to-morrow.  I’m afraid it means a fight or a funeral, and I am not quite equal to either to-night.”

For a long time after Benson had gone, Lidgerwood sat staring out of his office window at the masthead electrics in the railroad yard.  Benson’s news had merely confirmed his own and McCloskey’s conclusion that some one in authority was in collusion with the thieves who were raiding the company.  Sooner or later it must come to a grapple, and he dreaded it.