ld probably be no open outbreak before midnight. As an
offset to this, however, the engineer had overheard enough to convince
him that the Copah wire had been tapped; that Dix, the day operator, had
been either bribed or intimidated, and was now under guard at the
strikers' head-quarters, and that some important message had been
intercepted which was, in Judson's phrase, "raising sand" in the camp of
the disaffected. This recurrence of the mysterious message, of which no
trace could be found in the head-quarters record, opened a fresh field
of discussion, and it was McCloskey who put his finger upon the only
plausible conclusion.

"It is Hallock again," he rasped. "He is the only man who could have
used the private code. Dix probably picked out the cipher; he's got a
weakness for such things. Hallock's carrying double. He has fixed up
some trouble-making message, or faked one, and signed your name to it,
and then schemed to let it leak out through Dix."

"It's making the trouble, all right," was Judson's comment. "When I left
Biggs's a few minutes ago, Tryon was calling for volunteers to come down
here and steal an engine. From what he said, I took it they were aimin'
to go over into the desert to tear up the track and stop somebody or
something coming this way from Copah--all on account of that
make-believe message that you didn't send."

Thus far Judson's report had dealt with facts. But there were other
things deducible. He insisted that the strength of the insurrection did
not lie in the dissatisfied employees of the Red Butte Western, or even
in the ex-employees; it was rather in the lawless element of the town
which lived and fattened upon the earnings of the railroad men--the
saloon-keepers, the gamblers, the "tin-horns" of every stripe. Moreover,
it was certain that some one high in authority in the railroad service
was furnishing the brains. There was a chief to whom all the malcontents
deferred, and who figured in the bar-room talk as the "boss," or "the
big boss."

"And that same 'big boss' is sitting up yonder in Cat Biggs's back room,
right now, givin' his orders and tellin' 'em what to do," was Judson's
crowning guess, and since Hallock had not been visible since the early
afternoon, for the three men sitting under the superintendent's desk
lamp, Judson's inference stood as a fact assured. It was Hallock who had
fomented the trouble; it was Hallock who was now directing it.

"I suppose you didn't see