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.

After having been gone a half-hour or more, the conductor came back to
the service-car to say that the single telegraph-wire connecting
Lewi