“Nothing new, Mac?” he asked, when the trainmaster came aboard.

“Nothing much, only the operators have notified me that there’ll be trouble, pronto, if we don’t put Hannegan and Dickson back on the wires.  The grievance committee intimated pretty broadly that they could swing the trainmen into line if they had to make a fight.”

“We put no man back who has been discharged for cause,” said the superintendent firmly.  “Did you tell them that?”

“I did.  I have been saying that so often that it mighty nearly says itself now, when I hear my office door open.”

“Well, there is nothing to do but to go on saying it.  We shall either make a spoon or spoil a horn.  How would you be fixed in the event of a telegraphers’ strike?”

“I’ve been figuring on that.  It may seem like tempting the good Lord to say it, but I believe we could hold about half of the men.”

“That is decidedly encouraging,” said the man who needed to find encouragement where he could.  “Two weeks ago, if you had said one in ten, I should have thought you were overestimating.  We shall win out yet.”

But now McCloskey was shaking his head dubiously.  “I don’t know.  Andy Bradford has been giving me an idea of how the trainmen stand, and he says there is a good deal of strike talk.  Williams adds a word about the shop force:  he says that Gridley’s men are not saying anything, but they’ll be likely to go out in a body unless Gridley wakes up at the last minute and takes a club to them.”

Lidgerwood’s conductor was coming down the platform of the Crow’s Nest with his orders in his hand, and McCloskey made ready to swing off.  “I can reach you care of Mr. Leckhard, at Copah, I suppose?” he asked.

“Yes.  I shall be back some time to-morrow; in the meantime there is nothing to do but to sit tight in the boat.  Use my private code if you want to wire me.  I don’t more than half trust that young fellow, Dix, Callahan’s day operator.  And, by the way, Mr. Frisbie is sending me a stenographer from Denver.  If the young man turns up while I am away, see if you can’t get Mrs. Williams to board him.”

McCloskey promised and dropped off, and the one-car special presently clanked out over the eastern switches.  Lidgerwood went at once to his desk and promptly became deaf and blind to everything but his work.  The long desert run had been accomplished, and the service-car train was climbing the Crosswater grades, when Tadasu Matsuwari began to lay the table for dinner.  Lidgerwood glanced at his watch, and ran his finger down the line of figures on the framed time-table hanging over his desk.

“Humph!” he muttered; “Acheson’s making better time with me than he ever has before.  I wonder if Williams has succeeded in talking him over to our side?  He is certainly running like a gentleman to-day, at all events.”

The superintendent sat down to Tadasu’s table and took his time to Tadasu’s excellent dinner, indulging himself so far as to smoke a leisurely cigar with his black coffee before plunging again into the sea of work.  Not to spoil his improving record, Engineer Acheson continued to make good time, and it was only a little after eleven o’clock when Lidgerwood, looking up from his work at the final slowing of the wheels, saw the masthead lights of the Copah yards.