"They are all up at the bonfire. I'm having the Jap launder the car a little before they move in."
There was another interval of delay, and Lidgerwood held aloof from the group at the fire, pacing a slow sentry beat up and down beside the ditched train, and pausing at either turn to listen for the signal of Dawson's coming. It sounded at length: a series of shrill whistle-shrieks, distance-softened, and presently the drumming of hasting wheels.
The draftsman was on the engine of the wrecking-train, and he dropped off to join the superintendent.
"Not so bad for my part of it, this time," was his comment, when he had looked the wreck over. Then he asked the inevitable question: "What did it?"
Lidgerwood beckoned him down the line and showed him the sprung rail. Dawson examined it carefully before he rose up to say: "Why didn't they spring it the other way, if they wanted to make a thorough job of it? That would have put the train into the river."
Lidgerwood's reply was as laconic as the query. "Because the trap was set for my car, going west; not for the passenger, going east."
"Of course," said the draftsman, as one properly disgusted with his own lack of perspicacity. Then, after another and more searching scrutiny, in which the headlight glare of his own engine was helped out by the burning of half a dozen matches: "Whoever did that, knew his business."
"How do you know?"
"Little things. A regular spike-puller claw-bar was used—the marks of its heel are still in the ties; the place was chosen to the exact rail-length—just where your engine would begin to hug the outside of the curve. Then the rail is sprung aside barely enough to let the wheel flanges through, and not enough to attract an engineer's attention unless he happened to be looking directly at it, and in a good light."
The superintendent nodded. "What is your inference?" he asked.