"Too late," muttered Glidden in a sort of groan. "Thunder! she can't be reached till she gets to Fairview, forty miles ahead." Maddox had wired back to headquarters the following message: "83 just passed after coaling. Fairview reports four feet of snow in the cuts. No stop this side." Then Ralph did the only thing he could. He wired to the operator at Fairview: "Hold 83 on arrival for special orders." The sleepy look left Glidden's eyes and Ralph was all nerved up. There had come a break in the progress of the substitute pay car, and both felt anxiously serious as to its significance. "There's something mighty wrong in this business," declared Glidden. "It looks that way," assented Ralph. "Get Tipton." Ralph called over the wire and repeated. "Something has shut out Tipton," he reported. "Wires down or cut," observed Glidden. "Try Maddox." Ralph did so. "Maddox not open," he said. His mind ran over the situation. He recalled a night like this when he and Fireman Fogg had run alone a battered locomotive over the same stretch of road on a Special for President Grant of the Great Northern. It had been a hairbreadth experience, and he wondered if No. 83 would get through. One o'clock--two o'clock. The young dispatcher and his first trick man found it hard to endure the irksome monotony of those two anxious hours. It was like a tensioned cord breaking when at last the welcome call from Fairview came over the wires. "83," the message ticked out, "crippled; six feet of snow ahead, and will have to lay over. Send orders." "She's got through safe, that's a consolation," said Glidden, with a vast sigh of satisfaction. Ralph simply clicked an "O. K." It had been arranged that at Fairview the conductor would wire for instructions. These had been purposely withheld for secrecy's sake. A transfer of two pay safes was due at the next station and Ralph waited, knowing that as soon as he could leave his train the conductor would send a personal message. Suddenly the instrument began to click again. "From conductor 83: metaphor, resolve, adirondacks, typists." "What!" shouted Glidden, jumping to his feet in a frenzy. Ralph's hand shook and the color left his face. Translated, the message from the conductor of train No. 83 meant: "The substitute pay car has disappeared." CHAPTER XXVII THE STOLEN PAY CAR Long before the whistles blew for seven o'clock at Stanley Junction the news had spread like wildfire--train No. 83, carrying the substitute pay car, containing two hundred thousand dollars in cash and a king's ransom in bullion for the banks, had disappeared. Somewhere between Fairview and Maddox, the time, and means unknown, the car containing all this treasure had been boldly stolen, disconnected from the train, had vanished.