So meekly did he submit to his enforced departure that although Grant saw him draw a cigar from his pocket, bite it off and then throw it away as though it were distasteful to him, he paid little attention to the action. The cigar rolled along the gravelled pathway and stopped near the door of the power house. In the doorway lounged the electrician. As Grant and Marquis and their captive disappeared around the corner the electrician picked up the discarded cigar.
Dixie Mason had been working in the factory since early afternoon as shell loader. The table at which she worked was near a window overlooking the factory yard. The events of the last afternoon had not escaped her. She had watched the departure of Slakberg with Harrison Grant and a feeling of relief that unconsciously she was being helped had stolen over her. But though Grant attached no importance to the cigar Slakberg had tossed aside, Dixie from her point of vantage soon was given the opportunity to.
Scarcely had the men disappeared around the corner of the building when she saw the electrician emerge from the doorway, and pick up the cigar. The act was natural and Dixie ordinarily would have thought nothing of it. Now her gaze hung on him curiously and then brightened into interest as she saw him break the cigar open. Something white appeared as the carefully wrapped weed was broken apart. She saw the electrician unroll a tiny slip of paper, read it hurriedly and then crumple it up.
Dixie, to all appearances overcome by sudden illness, left the loading room, slipped out of the door and across the yard to the power house. The electrician was gone but where he had stood was a tiny slip of crumpled paper which Dixie snatched at eagerly and read as she hurried out of the building. It contained three words.
"Warn Von Papen."
Dixie Mason did not return to the loading room. Instead she took up the trail of the disappearing electrician. She saw him enter a saloon. In a nearby drug store she induced the operator to put her on the same line just in time to hear the electrician receive orders to go to the hill on the edge of the town when darkness fell. Dixie waited feverishly for events to resume their progress. She did not know that in the Criminology Club they had Slakberg surrounded with the evidences of his guilt and his cross examination begun. All Dixie knew was that the electrician had been told to warn Von Papen and had been ordered to await further instructions on the hill at the edge of the town.
The day faded into dusk and the dusk into darkness. The lights from the munition factory blazed out into the night as the new shift took up its duties. At last Dixie saw the electrician emerge from the saloon. She took up the trail, a trail that seemed never-ending as he walked on and on away from the town. They came to a freight yard. Out of the darkness above the freight yard a hill loomed against the sky. The electrician stopped, and Dixie sought shelter very near him by a lumber pile. The night was very dark but suddenly the sky was lighted by a series of flashes. In their brightness, Dixie could see the electrician standing with pencil and paper in hand. The flashes stopped and the electrician moved over to a switch light which gleamed with red eye into the surrounding blackness. He was examining the paper closely by the dim light. The rumble of an approaching freight train broke the silence. The electrician tossed the paper aside and glanced up the track toward the slowly nearing engine and its string of box cars. Dixie saw him hurry up the track and she guessed his purpose. He was about to catch this train back to town.
The train passed and in the dim light she discerned his figure clinging to the side of a car. Then she hurried to the switch light and picked up the scrap of paper he had thrown aside. By the light she saw a series of Morse code dots and dashes which she translated:
"Blow up the factory at once!"
This was the message he had been told to receive! And he had gone to carry out its orders! Dixie racked her mind desperately for ideas. She must get back at once, or get a message. But how? There was no telephone near. No means of getting back. The train lumbering off into the darkness was now gaining speed every moment.