For the space of a week there were no serious disasters, and Lidgerwood, with good help from McCloskey and Benson, continued to dig persistently into the mystery of the wholesale robberies.  With Benson’s discoveries for a starting-point, the man Flemister was kept under surveillance, and it soon became evident to the three investigators that the owner of the Wire-Silver mine had been profiting liberally at the expense of the railroad company in many ways.  That there had been connivance on the part of some one in authority in the railroad service, was also a fact safely assumable; and each added thread of evidence seemed more and more to entangle the chief clerk.

But behind the mystery of the robberies, Lidgerwood began to get glimpses of a deeper mystery involving Flemister and Hallock.  Angelic tradition, never very clearly defined and always shot through with prejudice, spoke freely of a former friendship between the two men.  Whether the friendship had been broken, or whether, for reasons best known to themselves, they had allowed the impression to go out that it had been broken, Lidgerwood could not determine from the bits of gossip brought in by the trainmaster.  But one thing was certain:  of all the minor officials in the railway service, Hallock was the one who was best able to forward and to conceal Flemister’s thieveries.

It was in the midst of these subterranean investigations that Lidgerwood had a call from the owner of the Wire-Silver.  On the Saturday in the week of surcease, Flemister came in on the noon train from the west, and it was McCloskey who ushered him into the superintendent’s office.  Lidgerwood looked up and saw a small man wearing the khaki of the engineers, with a soft felt hat to match.  The snapping black eyes, with the straight brows almost meeting over the nose, suggested Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and Flemister shaved to fit the part, with curling mustaches and a dagger-pointed imperial.  Instantly Lidgerwood began turning the memory pages in an effort to recall where he had seen the man before, but it was not until Flemister began to speak that he remembered his first day in authority, the wreck at Gloria Siding, and the man who had driven up in a buckboard to hold converse with the master-mechanic.

“I’ve been trying to find time for a month or more to come up and get acquainted with you, Mr. Lidgerwood,” the visitor began, when Lidgerwood had waved him to a chair.  “I hope you are not going to hold it against me that I haven’t done it sooner.”

Lidgerwood’s smile was meant to be no more than decently hospitable.

“We are not standing much upon ceremony in these days of reorganization,” he said.  Then, to hold the interview down firmly to a business basis:  “What can I do for you, Mr. Flemister?”

“Nothing—­nothing on top of earth; it’s the other way round.  I came to do something for you—­or, rather, for one of your subordinates.  Hallock tells me that the ghost of the old Mesa Building and Loan Association still refuses to be laid, and he intimates that some of the survivors are trying to make it unpleasant for him by accusing him to you.”