“They'll be easy to a man of my experience,” laughed the gambler. “I've a clever scheme for starting trouble with them.”
He whispered a few words in his companion's ears, at which Ransom laughed with apparent enjoyment.
“You're a keen one, Duff,” grinned the agent from Chicago.
“I've seen enough of life,” boasted the gambler quietly, “to be able to judge most people at first sight. You shall soon see whether I don't succeed in starting some hard feeling with Reade and Hazelton.”
The nearer edge of the treacherous Man-killer was something more than two miles west of the town of Paloma. In the course of a quarter of an hour Tom and Harry drew rein near a portable wooden building that served as an office in the field.
Mr. Hawkins, a solid-looking, bearded man of fifty, with snapping eyes that contrasted with his drawling speech, stepped from the building.
“Hawkins,” called Tom, as a Mexican boy led the horses away to the shade of a stable tent, “I see you have some men idle.”
“Nine-tenths of 'em are idle,” replied the superintendent of construction. “I warned you, Mr. Reade, that our gangs would soon eat up the little work that you left us. Out there, by the last cave-in you'll see that Foreman Payson, has about fifty men going. They'll be through within an hour.”
“And the material, even if delivered within the promised time, is still two days away,” remarked Reade. “I'll confess that I don't like to see the railroad lose so much through paying men for idle time.”
“It can't be helped, sir,” replied the superintendent. “Of course, if you like, you can set the laborers at work shoveling in more dirt at the points where the last slide of the quicksand occurred. But, then, shoveling dirt in, without the timbers and the hollow steel piles will do no good,” continued Hawkins, with a shake of his head. “It would be worse than wasted work.”