He left the door of the tail-house open behind him; and when, in a few minutes, James Starbuck returned, he found the place already cold. He shut the door to and sat down; the cigar in his mouth had gone out and he opened the door of the stove with an old iron rod to stir the fire and get a bit of live coal for a light. But he had no tongs; and indeed the live coal seemed unnecessary, as he pulled out quite a bundle of matches from his pocket. He let the glowing coals lie unheeded on the floor, and looked at his watch by the light of the open stove-door. It was three o’clock. And he cowered back in the chair, shivering. It seemed so small a thing to do, after all! His lip curled with scorn as he thought of his simple-minded associates and how great a thing they made of it. It would fill perhaps a column in the morrow’s paper--about as much space, perhaps, as might be allotted to the Duval ball. Yet such things scared the stupid public; and they encouraged his party, much as a boy is made proud by the loud report of his first toy-cannon. His own ideas went so far beyond, that he regarded it as little more than the bow-chaser some red rover fires across the bow of a fat merchantman, by way of preliminary parley. He was tired, too; and the earlier events of the night had been exciting. However, he made an effort, and shook himself together. Time was going. He got up and went to the runs. There were the two glass-covered channels, side by side; and both were running oil. Outside the little shed they entered two long wooden boxes or troughs, supported on trestle-work, and running several hundred feet in a downward inclination to the receiving-tanks, whence they were in turn conducted to the spraying-house, a quarter of a mile away. James Starbuck lifted up the iron rod he had used to poke the fire, and brought it down with a crushing blow over the glass-topped runnels. Then he struck a match across the stove, and standing in the doorway, leaned over and touched the blue flame to the edge of the running oil. For some reason it did not catch; and he tried another match. This he fairly dropped into the oil; but with no better success, as the feeble flame was put out instantly. “Damn the thing,” said he to himself; and lighting another match, he waited until the flame was fairly burning, and looked at the oil. The little runnel he had touched, partly choked with broken bits of glass, was full of a thick dark liquid, yellowish in color, but blue with numerous big globules of water. It was almost the last run, too crude or too impure to take fire at a spark. He looked at the other; and in it he recognized the shining stream, and the strange metallic lustre of the naphtha’s flow.