“Good,” said Frisbie, gathering up his maps and sketches of the detour country; and so, in the wording of a brief sentence or two it came to pass that Ford delivered himself bound and unarmed into the hands of his enemies.

A little light was thrown upon this dark passage that night in the office of the general manager, after Ford’s train had gone eastward, and Frisbie was on his way back to the MacMorrogh headquarters on the lower Pannikin.  North was waiting when Eckstein came in, flushed as from a rapid walk.

“It’s all settled?” asked the general manager, with a slow lift of the eyebrow to betray his anxiety.

“To the queen’s taste, I should say,” was the secretary’s not too deferential reply.  “Ford’s out of the way, to be gone ten days or a fortnight, and Frisbie has gone back to dicker with MacMorrogh, and to survey the new route up Horse Creek.  Ford doesn’t know; I doubt if he will ever know until we spring the trap on him.  The one thing I was most afraid of was that he would insist upon going over the new line himself.  Then, of course, he would have found out—­he couldn’t help finding out.”

The general manager squared his huge shoulders against the back of the chair.

“You think he would call it off if he knew?” he queried.  “You give him credit for too much virtue, Eckstein.  But I think we have him now.  By the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge.  MacMorrogh will see to that.”

Eckstein nodded.  “I made a point of that with Brian,” he said.  “The minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon the new roundabout.  But Ford won’t find out.  He’ll be too busy on this end of the line with the track-layers.  I’m a little nervous about Merriam, though.”

“He’s the man who talked Frisbie into championing the new route?”

“Yes.  He did it pretty skilfully:  made Frisbie think he was finding it out himself, and never let the little man out of his sight while they were in Copah.  But I am afraid Merriam himself knows too much.”

“Get him out of the country—­before Ford gets back,” was the crisp order.  “If he isn’t here when the gun goes off, he can’t tell anybody how it was loaded.”

“An appointment—­” Eckstein began.

“That is what I mean,” said the general manager, turning back to his desk.  “We need a traffic agency up in the Oregon country.  See Merriam—­to-night.  Find out if he’d like to have the general agency at, say, twenty-five hundred a year; and if he agrees, get out the circular appointing him.”

“He’ll agree, fast enough,” laughed the secretary.  “But I’ll nail him—­to-night.”

Ford spent rather more than two weeks in his round-up of the eastern steel mills, and there was a terrific accumulation of correspondence awaiting him when he reached Denver.  At the top of the pile was an official circular appointing one George Z. Merriam, a man whom Ford remembered, or seemed vaguely to remember, as one of the MacMorrogh bookkeepers, general agent of the P. S-W., with headquarters at Portland, Oregon.  And at the bottom of the accumulation was a second official printing, bearing the approval of the president, this; and Ford’s eyes gloomed angrily when he read it.