t time had failed.

"It's no use; we'll have to make two bites of it," he said to Grady, and
then he left his desk to go downstairs for a breathing moment and the
cup of coffee which he meant to substitute for the dinner which the lack
of time had made him forego.

Train 205, the train Flemister had suggested that he might take, was
just pulling in from the long run across the desert when he reached the
foot of the stairs. That it was too late to take this means of reaching
Little Butte and the Wire-Silver mine was a small matter; it merely
meant that he would be obliged to order out the service-car and go
special, if he should finally decide to act upon Flemister's suggestion.

Angels being a meal station, there was a twenty-minute stop for all
trains, and the passengers from 205 were crowding the platform and
hurrying to the dining-room and lunch-counter when Lidgerwood made his
way to the station end of the building. In the men's room, whither he
went to order his cup of coffee, there was a mixed throng of travellers,
with a sprinkling of trainmen and town idlers, among the latter a number
of the lately discharged railroad employees. Lidgerwood marked a group
of the trouble-makers withdrawing to a corner of the room as he entered,
and while the waiter was serving his coffee, he saw Hallock join the
group. It was only a straw, but straws are significant when the wind is
blowing from a threatening quarter. Once again Lidgerwood remembered
McCloskey's proposal, and his own reluctant assent to it, and now he was
not too greatly conscience-stricken when he saw Judson quietly working
his way through the crowded room to a point of espial upon the group in
the corner.

"Your coffee's getting cold, Mr. Lidgerwood," the man behind the counter
warned him, and Lidgerwood whirled around on the pivot stool and turned
his back upon the malcontents and their watcher. The keen inner sense,
which neither the physiologists nor the psychologists have yet been
able to define or to name, apprised him of a threat developing in the
distant corner, but he resolutely ignored it, drank his coffee, and
presently went his way around the peopled end of the building and back
to the office entrance, meaning to go above stairs and put in another
hour with Grady before he should decide definitely about making the
night run to Little Butte.

His foot was on the threshold of the stairway door when Judson overtook
him.

"Mac told me to report to