On the following morning, Blount found a telegram on his desk.  It bore the vice-president’s name, and the date-line was Twin Canyons City.  It directed him to go to a remote portion of the State beyond the Lost River Mountains to examine the papers in a right-of-way case which was coming up for trial at the next term of court.  This was in Kittredge’s department, and Blount called the superintendent on the phone.  Kittredge was in his office, and he evidently knew about the vice-president’s telegram.  Also, he seemed anxious to have the division counsel go to Lewiston at once; so anxious that he offered his own service-car to be run as a special train.

Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from the vice-president, but he was more than suspicious that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both of them, had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr. McVickar, in an attempt to get him away from the city and so to postpone a reiteration of the demand for a new freight tariff.  What he did not suspect was that Mr. McVickar’s telegram might possibly have originated in Kittredge’s office.

Asking the superintendent to have the service-car made ready immediately, he packed his handbag, left a note for Patricia, who was not yet visible, and another for Gantry, who was not in his office, and began the roundabout journey.

In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything to equal the slowness of the special train.  The noon meal, served by Kittredge’s cook in the open compartment, found the special less than fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train in the opposite direction.  Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely siding.  There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph.  So far as he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week.  It was all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor.  The train crew had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was nothing to do but to keep on waiting.

Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along, and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office.  The car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed.  But in the morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the branch line.

At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for, as he had now come firmly to believe.  The plaintiffs in the right-of-way case were out of town, and their lawyers had gone to the capital.  Blount saw that he might wait a week without accomplishing anything, hence he immediately instructed his conductor to get orders for the return.