hat whatever the robbers had
guessed out as to the mystery of the safe, they did not consider there
was any chance of recovering it.

The two men armed with rifles remained at the trestle, while the
others took the stolen pay car back to Dover. Once there, Griscom kept
the wires busy for a time. About daylight a wrecking crew was made up.
Ralph accompanied them to the scene of the attempted robbery.

He could fairly estimate the locality of the sunken safe, and some
abrasions of the ties finally indicated the exact spot where the safe
had gone through into the water below. It was grappled for, found,
and before noon that day the pay car train arrived at Stanley Junction
with the safe aboard.

Affairs at the terminal town were still in an unsettled condition. The
presence of armed guards prevented wholesale attacks on the railroad
property, but there were many assaults on workmen at lonely spots,
switches tampered with and shanty windows broken in.

Ralph reported to Tim Forgan and then went home. He went to sleep at
once, awoke refreshed about the middle of the afternoon, and then told
his mother all the occurrences of that day and the preceding one.

While Mrs. Fairbanks was pleased at the confidence reposed in her son
by the railroad authorities, she was considerably worried at the
constant turmoil and dangers of the present railroad situation. Ralph,
however, assured her that he would take care of himself, and left the
house trying to form some plan to follow out the instructions of the
president of the Great Northern.

He could not go among the strikers, and without doing so, or sending a
spy among them, it would be difficult to ascertain their motives and
projects. Coming around a street corner, the young fireman halted
abruptly.

A procession of strikers was coming down the street. They were a
noisy, turbulent mob, cheered on by like rowdyish sympathizers lining
the pavements.

"Why, impossible!" exclaimed Ralph, as he noticed by the side of Jim
Evans, the leader of the crowd, his young friend, Zeph Dallas.

The latter seemed to share the excitement of the paraders. He acted as
if he gloried in being a striker, and the familiar way Evans treated
him indicated that the latter regarded him as a genuine, first-class
recruit.

Zeph caught Ralph's eye and then looked quickly away. The young
fireman was dreadfully disappointed in the farmer boy. He went at once
to the roundhouse, where the foreman told him