Lidgerwood’s decision was taken on the instant.

“Yes; I think I shall go west in my car in an hour or so.  Why?”

“There ain’t any ‘why,’ I guess, if you feel like goin’.  But what I don’t savvy is why them fellows back yonder in the waitin’-room are so dead anxious to find out if you are goin’.”

As he spoke, a man who had been skulking behind a truck-load of express freight, so near that he could have touched either of them with an out-stretched arm, withdrew silently in the direction of the lunch-room.  He was a tall man with stooping shoulders, and his noiseless retreat was cautiously made, yet not quite cautiously enough, since Judson’s sharp eyes marked the shuffling figure vanishing in the shadow cast by the over-hanging shelter roof of the station.

“By cripes!—­look at that, will you?” he exclaimed, pointing to the retreating figure.  “That’s Hallock, and he was listening!”

Lidgerwood shook his head.

“No, that isn’t Hallock,” he denied.  And then, with a bit of the man-driving rasp in his voice:  “See here, Judson, don’t you let McCloskey’s prejudices run away with you; make a memorandum of that and paste it in your hat.  I know what you have been instructed to do, and I have given my consent, but it is with the understanding that you will be at least as fair as you would be if McCloskey’s bias happened to run the other way.  I don’t want you to make a case against Hallock unless you can get proof positive that he is disloyal to the company and to me; and I’ll tell you here and now that I shall be much better pleased if you can bring me the assurance that he is a true man.”

“But that was Hallock,” insisted Judson, “or else it was his livin’ double.”

“No; follow him and you’ll see for yourself.  It was more like that Ruby Gulch operator who quit in a quarrel with McCloskey a week or two ago.  What is his name?—­Sheffield.”

Judson hastened down the platform to satisfy himself, and Lidgerwood mounted the stair to his office.  Grady was still pounding the keys of the type-writer on the batch of letters given him in the busy hour following his return from supper, and the superintendent turned his back upon the clicking activities and went to stand at the window, from which he could look down upon the platform with the waiting passenger-train drawn up beside it.

Seeing the cheerful lights in the side-tracked Nadia, he fell to thinking of Eleanor, opening the door of conscious thought to her and saying to himself that she was never more than a single step beyond the threshold of that door.  Looking across to the Nadia, he knew now why he had hesitated so long before deciding to go on the night trip to Timanyoni Park.  Chilled hearts follow the analogy of cold hands.  When the fire is near, a man will go and spread his fingers to the blaze, though he may be never so well assured that they will ache for it afterward.