So the ambitious Giddings by means of a pocket-mirror inspected a threatening pimple on the end of his chubby nose palming the glass skilfully so Barnes Tracy couldn't see it even if he did interrupt his eruption, and waited for Bob Duffy, the Rat River nightman, to come back at him with Third Eighty's signature. Under Giddings' eye, as he sat, ticked Martin Duffy's chronometer--the watch that split the seconds and chimed the quarters and stopped and started so impossibly and ran to a second a month--the watch that Bucks (who never did things by halves) had given little Martin Duffy with the order that made him Chief. It lay at Giddings's fingers, and the minute hand wiped from the enamelled dial seven o'clock fifty-five, fifty-six, seven, eight--nine. Young Giddings turned to his order book and inspected his entries like a methodical bookkeeper, and Martin Duffy's chronometer chimed the fourth quarter, eight o'clock. One entry he had still to make. Book in hand he called Rat River. "Get Third Eighty's signature to Order 79 and hurry them out," he tapped impatiently at Bob Duffy. There was a wait. Giddings lighted his pipe the way Callahan always lighted _his_ pipe--putting out his lips to catch all the perfume and blowing the first cloud away wearily, as Callahan always did wearily. Then he twirled the match meditatively, and listened, and got suddenly this from Bob Duffy at Rat River: "I forgot Order 79," came Bob Duffy's message. "I let Third Eighty go without it. They left here at seven--fifty"--fifty something, Giddings never heard fifty what. The match went into the ink, the pipe into the water-pail, and Giddings, before Bob Duffy finished, like a drowning man was calling Elcho with the life and death, the Nineteen call. "Hold Special 326!" he cried over the wire the instant Elcho replied. But Elcho, steadily, answered this: "Special--Three-twenty-six--left--here--seven-fifty-five." Giddings, with both hands on the table, raised up like a drunken man. The West End was against it. Third Eighty in the open and going against the De Molay Four. Bucks, Callahan, wife--everybody--and Rock Point a blind siding that no word from anybody on earth could reach ahead of Third Eighty. Giddings sprang to the open window and shouted to anybody and everybody to call Martin Duffy. But Martin Duffy spoke behind him. "What do you want?" he asked; it came terribly quick on Giddings as he turned. "What's the matter?" exclaimed Martin, looking into the boy's face. "Speak, can't you? What's the matter, Giddings?" "Bob forgot Order 79 and let Third Eighty go without it--and Special 326 is out of Elcho," choked Giddings. "_What?_" "Bob at--Rat River--gave Third Eighty a clearance without the Order 79."