Lidgerwood sat on a tie-end a little apart, morosely observant.  It is the curse of the self-conscious soul to find itself often at the meeting-point of comparisons.  The superintendent knew Flemister a little, as he had admitted to the president; and he also knew that some of his evil qualities were of the sort which appeal, by the law of opposites, to the normal woman, the woman who would condemn evil in the abstract, perhaps, only to be irresistibly drawn by some of its purely masculine manifestations.  The cynical assertion that the worst of men can win the love of the best of women is something both more and less than a mere contradiction of terms; and since Eleanor Brewster’s manly ideal was apparently builded upon physical courage as its pedestal, Flemister, in his dare-devil character, was quite likely to be the man to embody it.

But just now the “gentleman buccaneer” was not living up to the full measure of his reputation in the dare-devil field, as Lidgerwood was not slow to observe.  His replies to Miss Brewster and the others were not always coherent, and his face, seen in the flickering firelight, was almost ghastly.  True, the talk was low-toned and fragmentary; desultory enough to require little of any member of the group sitting around the smouldering fire on the spur embankment.  Death, in any form, insists upon its rights, of silence and of respect, and the six motionless figures lying under the spread Pullman-car sheets on the other side of the spur track were not to be ignored.

Yet Lidgerwood fancied that of the group circling the fire, Flemister was the one whose eyes turned oftenest toward the sheeted figures across the track; sometimes in morbid starings, but now and again with the haggard side-glance of fear.  Why was the mine-owner afraid?  Lidgerwood analyzed the query shrewdly.  Was he implicated in the matter of the loosened rail?  Remembering that the trap had been set, not for the passenger train, but for the special, the superintendent dismissed the charge against Flemister.  Thus far he had done little to incur the mine-owner’s enmity—­at least, nothing to call for cold-blooded murder in reprisal.  Yet the man was acting very curiously.  Much of the time he scarcely appeared to hear what Miss Brewster was saying to him.  Moreover, he had lied.  Lidgerwood recalled his glib explanation at the meeting beside the displaced rail.  Flemister claimed to have had the news of the disaster by ’phone:  where had he been when the ’phone message found him?  Not at his mine, Lidgerwood decided, since he could not have walked from the Wire-Silver to the wreck in an hour.  It was all very puzzling, and what little suppositional evidence there was, was conflicting.  Lidgerwood put the query aside finally, but with a mental reservation.  Later he would go into this newest mystery and probe it to the bottom.  Judson would doubtless have a report to make, and this might help in the probing.

Fortunately, the waiting interval was not greatly prolonged; fortunately, since for the three young women the reaction was come and the full horror of the disaster was beginning to make itself felt.  Lidgerwood contrived the necessary diversion when the relief-train from Red Butte shot around the curve of the hillside cutting.