"Merely to say to you that I have had orders to check you up, to see that you check every car properly."
"I won't stand it. I'll——"
Steve shrugged his shoulders.
"That is a matter with which I have no concern. You will have to fight that out with the superintendent. I shall obey my orders and it will be better for you, I should imagine, to submit without trying to make matters uncomfortable for me. I shall do what I have been told to do, just the same. When a train draws up you will plug only when you see that I am looking at the board, please. I'll dump the cars after you have done that and I shall know if you have moved the plugs when I am not looking."
Marvin's face twitched nervously, but he made no reply.
There was nothing of triumph in Steve's attitude. The lad was attending to business to the best of his ability. He discovered, after a time, that Marvin was watching him narrowly. As he watched, the tally-man's face grew blacker and blacker.
"I wonder if he suspects?" thought Rush.
As a matter of fact, Marvin was beginning to see light. At noon the tally-man hurried away, after sulkily asking Steve to watch the tally-board. First, however, the man made a memorandum of the tally, so that Steve could not change it without Marvin's being aware of the fact. The lad pretended not to have observed this, but a quiet smile hovered about the corners of his mouth as he laid out his lunch on a clean, white napkin on the bench beside him.
Instead of going up in the cage, Marvin hastily climbed a ladder to the sub-level, where he waited for Spooner to come out.
"Well, what is it?" demanded the contractor in a surly tone.