"Good Gad! do you sit there and tell me that the three of them let that hobo of Williams's push them off the map?" Stanton was demanding raucously. "I thought you had at least sense enough to last you overnight. I told you to pick out a bunch with sand--fellows that could hang on and put up a fight if they had to. And you say all this happened the day before yesterday: how does it come that you are just now reporting it?" The hard-faced henchman in the tilting chair made such explanations as he could. "Boogerfield and his two partners 've been hidin' out somewhere; I allow they was plumb ashamed to come in and tell how they'd let one man run 'em off. You'd think that curly-whiskered helper o' Williams's was a holy terror, to hear Boogerfield talk. They'd left their artillery in the chuck-wagon, and they say he come at 'em barehanded--with the colonel's girl settin' in the ortamobile a-lookin' on. Boogerfield wants to know who's goin' to pay him for them two Winchesters that His Whiskers bu'sted over the wagon-wheel." Mr. Crawford Stanton was carelessly unconcerned about the claim-jumpers' loss, either in gear or skin. "Damn the Winchesters!" he said morosely. "What do you know about this fellow Smith? Who is he, and where did he come from?" Lanterby told all that was known of Smith, and had no difficulty in compressing it into a single sentence. Stanton leaned back in his chair and the lids of the flinty eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "There's a lot more to it than that," he said incisively at the end of the reflective pause. Then he added a curt order: "Make it your job to find out." Lanterby moved uneasily in his insecure seat, but before he could speak, his employer went on again, changing the topic abruptly, but still keeping within the faultfinding boundaries. "What sort of a screw has gone loose in your deal with the railroad men? I thought you told me you had it fixed with the yard crews so that Williams's material would have a chance to season a while in the Brewster yards before it was delivered. They got two cars of cement and one of steel the day before yesterday, and the delivery was made within three hours after the stuff came in from the East." Again Lanterby tried to explain. "Dougherty, the yardmaster, took the bank roll I slipped him, all right enough, and promised to help out. But he's scared of Maxwell. He told me this mornin' that Colonel Baldwin has been kickin' like blazes to Maxwell about the delays."