The request for the retracing orders was sent from Coquina; and when it came clicking into the despatcher's office at Denver, a sleep-sodden young man with an extinct cigar between his teeth rose up out of his chair, stretched, yawned, and pointed for the door. "Going to leave us, Mr. Eckstein?" said the trick despatcher who was sitting at the train table. "Yes. If Mr. Ford has changed his mind, I may as well go home and go to bed." "Reckon he forgot something, and has to come back after it?" laughed the operator. "Maybe," said the private secretary, and he went out, shutting the door behind him with the bat-like softness and precision that was his distinguishing characteristic. The sounders were clicking monotonously when the trick man turned to the relief operator who was checking Darby's transfer sheet. "What do you suppose Eckstein was up to, sitting here all night, Jim?" "Give it up," said the relief man. "Ask me something easy." "I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars I can guess. He didn't want Mr. Ford to make time." The relief man looked up from his checking. "Why? He didn't do anything. He was asleep more'n half the time." "Don't you fool yourself," said the other. "He heard every word that came in about that hot box. And if the hot box hadn't got in the way, I'll bet a cockerel worth seventy-five dollars, to go with that fifty-dollar hen, that he would have tangled me up somehow till I had shuffled a freight train or something in Mr. Ford's way. He's Mr. North's man, body and soul; and Mr. North doesn't love Mr. Ford." "Oh, rats, Billy!" scoffed the relief man, getting up to fill his corn-cob pipe from the common tobacco bag. "You're always finding a nigger in the wood-pile, when there isn't any. Say; that's 201 asking for orders from Calotte. Why don't you come to life and answer 'em?" Frisbie, breakfasting early at the Brown Palace on the morning following the night of hinderings, was more than astonished when Ford came in and took the unoccupied seat at the table-for-two. "Let me eat first," said the beaten one, when Frisbie would have whelmed him with curious questions; and with the passing of the cutlets and the coffee he told the tale of the hindrances. "I guess it was foreordained not to be," he admitted, in conclusion. "We tried mighty hard to bully it through, but the fates were too many and too busy for us." "Tricks?" suggested Frisbie, suspecting North of covering his flight with special instructions to delay a possible pursuit. "Oh, no; nothing of that sort: just the cursed depravity of inanimate things. Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith. It was luck. No one of us happened to have a rabbit's foot in his pocket." "You don't believe in luck," laughed the assistant. "Don't I? I know I used to say that I didn't. But after last night I can't be so sure of it."