Clavering glanced at Torrance with a little sardonic smile on his lips. “I don’t quite know, but a good many of our secrets have been leaking out.”
“You’re quite sure you are right, Clavering?” somebody asked.
“Yes. The information is worth the fifty dollars I paid for it. The homestead-boys mean to run that stock train through the Bitter Creek bridge. As you know, it’s a good big trestle, and it is scarcely likely we would get a head of stock out of the wreck alive.”
There were angry ejaculations and the faces round the table grew set and stern. Some of the men had seen what happens when a heavy train goes through a railroad trestle.
“It’s devilish!” said Allonby. “Larry is in the thing?”
“Well,” said Clavering drily, “it appears the boys can’t do anything unless they have an order from their executive, and the man who told me declared he had seen one signed by him. Still, one has to be fair to Larry, and it is quite likely some of the foreign Reds drove him into it. Any way, if we could get that paper—and I think I can—it would fix the affair on him.”
Torrance nodded. “Now we have the cavalry here, it would be enough to have him shot,” he said. “Well, this is going to suit us. But there must be no fooling. We want to lay hands upon them when they are at work on the trestle.”
The other men seemed doubtful, and Allonby made a protest. “It is by no means plain how it’s going to suit me to have my steers run through the bridge,” he said. “I can’t afford it.”
Clavering laughed. “You will not lose one of them,” he said. “Now, don’t ask any questions, but listen to me.”
There were objections to the scheme he suggested, but he won over the men who raised them, and when all had been arranged and Allonby had gone back to his other guests, Clavering appeared satisfied and Torrance very grim. Unfortunately, however, they had not bound Christopher Allonby to silence, and when he contrived to find a place near Miss Schuyler and Hetty he could not refrain from mentioning what he had heard. This was, however, the less astonishing since the cattle-barons’ wives and daughters shared their anxieties and were conversant with most of what happened.