“Oh, did he, indeed?” murmured Ralph thoughtfully.
“Zeph told me to advise you, very secretly he put it, to look out for trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Particularly, he said, in the train dispatcher’s department.”
“Hm!” commented the young engineer simply, but his brow became furrowed with thought, and he reflected by spells quite seriously over the subject during the evening.
Fogg had forgotten all about his fears of the day previous when he reported at the roundhouse the next morning. He grinned at his young comrade with a particularly satisfied smirk on his face, and made the remark:
“You see before you, young man, a person full of the best chicken stew ever cooked in Stanley Junction. I say, Fairbanks, if you’d kind of slow up going past Bluff Point we might grab off enough more of those chickens to do for Sunday dinner.”
“We? Don’t include me in your disreputable pilferings, Mr. Fogg,” declared Ralph, “you may get a bill for the two fowls you so boastingly allude to.”
“Hey.”
“Yes, indeed. In fact,” continued Ralph with mock seriousness, “I don’t know but what I may have a certain interest in enforcing its collection.”