While he was wrestling with his thoughts, delivery men were wrestling with furniture, bringing it in through the door from the corridor, blocking the passage. Mern snapped his attention from Latisan, then he pushed the latter out of the range of vision from the corridor door. Craig was out in the corridor, cursing the furniture and the men who were obstructing the doorway. Craig was in a hurry and in a state of mind; his language revealed his feelings. "It won't do--it won't do!" insisted Mern when Latisan protested at being shoved behind the partition. "He mustn't see you. Hear him rave! I'm not staging another fight to-day. Stay in there! Crouch down! Keep out of sight." When Craig won his way past the blocking furniture he stormed to Mern, stamping across the glass-strewn floor, shaking his fists and jabbering. He was in a horrible state of rage. His face was so apoplectically purple that the bruises on his patched-up countenance were subdued somewhat by lack of contrast. "Look at me! Called down to the home office just now, looking like this. Lying like blazes about an automobile accident! That's what your invitation to view the tame tiger has done for me. But that isn't what I'm here for, you damnation, four-flushing double-crosser." He continued to berate the chief. "Say, you hold on there!" barked Mern, managing a few oaths of his own after struggling out of the amazement stirred by this ferocious attack. "If you're here to do business or to complain about the business that has been done, you'll have to be decent, or I'll run you out." Mern jutted his jaw and took two steps in Craig's direction--and Craig had suffered violence too recently to persist in inviting more. But he was still as acrimonious as he dared to be. Behind his rage there was the bitterness of a man who had been tricked out of money--betrayed shamefully--but Craig was so precipitate, breathless, violent, so provokingly vague with his tumbling words and his broken sentences, that Mern ceased to be angry in return and was merely bewildered. The Comas field director shook under Mern's nose a sheet of paper. He kept referring to the writing on the paper and vouchsafed information that the writing was made up of notes of a long-distance conversation between the woods and the New York offices of the Comas company. After a time Mern suggested with acerbity that Craig was incoherent. "I don't doubt it. I feel that way," yelped Craig. "But this message has come over three or four hundred miles of wire--relayed, at that, and I think the man who started the word from a fire-outpost station wasn't entirely right in his head. There's no other way of accounting for the statement that Ward Latisan's cap and Eck Flagg's cant dog are bossing the Flagg drive." "Don't get wrought up by crazy guff!"