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 t