“I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars I can guess.  He didn’t want Mr. Ford to make time.”

The relief man looked up from his checking.

“Why?  He didn’t do anything.  He was asleep more’n half the time.”

“Don’t you fool yourself,” said the other.  “He heard every word that came in about that hot box.  And if the hot box hadn’t got in the way, I’ll bet a cockerel worth seventy-five dollars, to go with that fifty-dollar hen, that he would have tangled me up somehow till I had shuffled a freight train or something in Mr. Ford’s way.  He’s Mr. North’s man, body and soul; and Mr. North doesn’t love Mr. Ford.”

“Oh, rats, Billy!” scoffed the relief man, getting up to fill his corn-cob pipe from the common tobacco bag.  “You’re always finding a nigger in the wood-pile, when there isn’t any.  Say; that’s 201 asking for orders from Calotte.  Why don’t you come to life and answer ’em?”

Frisbie, breakfasting early at the Brown Palace on the morning following the night of hinderings, was more than astonished when Ford came in and took the unoccupied seat at the table-for-two.

“Let me eat first,” said the beaten one, when Frisbie would have whelmed him with curious questions; and with the passing of the cutlets and the coffee he told the tale of the hindrances.

“I guess it was foreordained not to be,” he admitted, in conclusion.  “We tried mighty hard to bully it through, but the fates were too many and too busy for us.”

“Tricks?” suggested Frisbie, suspecting North of covering his flight with special instructions to delay a possible pursuit.

“Oh, no; nothing of that sort:  just the cursed depravity of inanimate things.  Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith.  It was luck.  No one of us happened to have a rabbit’s foot in his pocket.”

“You don’t believe in luck,” laughed the assistant.

“Don’t I?  I know I used to say that I didn’t.  But after last night I can’t be so sure of it.”

“Well, what’s the cost to us?” inquired Frisbie, coming down out of the high atmosphere of the superstitious to stand upon the solid earth of railway-building fact.

“I don’t know:  possibly failure.  There is no guessing what sort of a scheme North will cook up when he and MacMorrogh get Mr. Colbrith cornered.”

“Oh, it can’t be as bad as that.  Take it at the worst—­admitting that we may have to struggle along with the MacMorroghs for our general contractors; they can’t addle the egg entirely, can they?”

Ford tabulated it by length and breadth.

“With the MacMorroghs in the forefront of things to steal and cheat and make trouble with the labor, and Mr. North in the rear to back them up and to retard matters generally, we are in for a siege to which purgatory, if we ever go there, will seem restful, Richard my son.  Our one weapon is my present ranking authority over the general manager.  If he ever succeeds in breaking that, you fellows in the field would better hunt you another railroad to build.”