"They did. It was just before the thunder storm. They had everything fixed; a pile of kindlings laid in the corner back of the machine-shop annex and the whole thing saturated with kerosene."
"Well, why didn't they do it?" queried Griswold, half-heartedly. After the heavens have fallen, no mere terrestrial cataclysm can evoke a thrill.
"That's a mystery. Something happened; just what, the watchman who had the machine-shop beat couldn't tell. He says there was a flash of light bright enough to blind him, and then a scrap of some kind. When he got out of the shop and around to the place, there was no one there; nothing but the pile of kindlings."
Griswold took up the letter from the railway people and read it again. When he faced it down on Raymer's desk, he had closed with the conclusion which had been thrusting itself upon him since the early morning hour when he had picked his way among the sidewalk pools from Mereside to upper Shawnee Street.
"You can still save yourself, Edward," he said, still with the colorless note in his voice. And he added: "You know the way."
Raymer jerked his head out of his desk and swung around in the pivot-chair.
"See here, Griswold; the less said about that at this stage of the game, the better it will be for both of us!" he exploded. "I'm going to do as I said I should, but not until this fight is settled, one way or the other!"
Griswold did not retort in kind.
"The condition has already expired by limitation; the fight is as good as settled now," he said, placably. "We are only making a hopeless bluff. We can hold our forty or fifty tramp workmen just as long as we pay their board over in town, and don't ask them to report for work. But the day the shop whistle is blown, four out of every five will vanish. We both know that."
"Then there is nothing for it but a receivership," was Raymer's gloomy decision.