"You know what he said is so, don't you?" laughed Hawk savagely. "What? You don't?" he demanded, as Perry tried to face him down. "You'll be lucky, when that time comes, if you don't get your heels tangled up with a telegraph pole before you reach the river," concluded Hawk tauntingly. "Let him keep away from me if he doesn't want trouble," snarled the discomfited gambler, eying Bucks threateningly. But he was plainly out-faced, and retreated, grumbling, toward the dance-hall steps. Dan Baggs, at the first sign of hostilities, had fled. Bucks, afraid of losing him, now followed, leaving Hawk still abusing the gambler, but when he overtook the engineman he found he was going, as he had promised, straight to the roundhouse. It was almost time for the night trick. Bucks hastened upstairs to the despatchers' office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of him and was elated at Bucks's success. Before the young substitute took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him. "He has a reason for it," responded Baxter briefly. "What reason?" "There is as good a railroad man as ever lived," said Baxter, referring to the black-bearded conductor. "He is the master of us all in the handling of trains. He could be anything anybody is on this line to-day that he might want to be but for one thing. If he hadn't ruined his own life, Dave Hawk could be superintendent here. He knows whereof he speaks, Bucks." "What do you mean?" "I mean he is a gambler. Did you hear the shooting after I left you?" "No, what was it?" "It must have been while you were in Perry's. Not five minutes after we parted, a saloon-keeper shot a woman down right in front of me; I was standing less than ten feet from her when she fell," said the despatcher, recounting the incident. "But I was too late to protect her; and I should probably have been shot myself if I had tried to." "Was the brute arrested?" "Arrested! Who arrests anybody in this town?" "How long is this sort of thing going on?" asked Bucks, sitting down and signing a transfer. "How long!" echoed the despatcher, taking up his hat to go to his room. "I don't know how long. But when their time comes--God help that crowd up Front Street!" CHAPTER XVI Following Collins's return to duty, Bucks was assigned to a new western station, Point of Rocks. It was in the mountains and where Casement, now laying five and even six miles of track a day, had just turned over a hundred and eighty miles to the operating department. Bucks, the first operator ever sent to the lonely place afterward famous in railroad story, put his trunk aboard a freight train the next morning and started for his destination.