“Sit down and I’ll tell you.  I’ve been jarred.  Everything I’ve told you so far, I can remember, or it seems as if I can, but right where I broke off a cog slipped.  I must ‘a’ been drunker than I thought I was.  Gridley says he was going by and he says I called him in and told him, fool-wise, all the things I was going to do to Mr. Lidgerwood.  He says he hushed me up, called me out to the sidewalk, and started me home.  Mac, I don’t remember a single wheel-turn of all that, and it makes me scary about the other part.”

McCloskey relapsed into his swing-chair.

“You said you thought you recognized the other man by his voice.  It sounds like a drunken pipe-dream, the whole of it; but who did you think it was?”

Judson rose up, jerked his thumb toward the door of the superintendent’s business office, and said, “Mac, if the whiskey didn’t fake the whole business for me—­the man who was mumblin’ with Bart Rufford was—­Hallock!”

“Hallock?” said McCloskey; “and you said there was a woman in it?  That fits down to the ground, John.  Mr. Lidgerwood has found out something about Hallock’s family tear-up, or he’s likely to find out.  That’s what that means!”

What more McCloskey said was said to an otherwise empty room.  Judson had opened the door and closed it, and was gone.

Summing up the astounding thing afterward, those who could recall the details and piece them together traced Judson thus: 

It was ten-forty when he came down from McCloskey’s office, and for perhaps twenty minutes he had been seen lounging at the lunch-counter in the station end of the Crow’s Nest.  At about eleven one witness had seen him striking at the anvil in Hepburn’s shop, the town marshal being the town blacksmith in the intervals of official duty.

Still later, he had apparently forgotten the good resolution declared to McCloskey, and all Angels saw him staggering up and down Mesa Avenue, stumbling into and out of the many saloons, and growing, to all appearances, more hopelessly irresponsible with every fresh stumble.  This was his condition when he tripped over the doorstep into the “Arcade,” and fell full length on the floor of the bar-room.  Grimsby, the barkeeper, picked him up and tried to send him home, but with good-natured and maudlin pertinacity he insisted on going on to the gambling-room in the rear.

The room was darkened, as befitted its use, and a lighted lamp hung over the centre of the oval faro table as if the time were midnight instead of midday.  Eight men, five of them miners from the Brewster copper mine, and three of them discharged employees of the Red Butte Western, were the bettors; Red-Light himself, in sombrero and shirt-sleeves, was dealing, and Rufford, sitting on a stool at the table’s end, was the “lookout.”

When Judson reeled in there was a pause, and a movement to put him out.  One of the miners covered his table stakes and rose to obey Rufford’s nod.  But at this conjuncture the railroad men interfered.  Judson was a fellow craftsman, and everybody knew that he was harmless in his cups.  Let him stay—­and play, if he wanted to.