Kurt was soft-footed and keen-eyed.  He just kept the dim shadows in range.  They were heading for some freight-cars that stood upon a side-track.  The dark figures disappeared behind them.  Then one figure reappeared, coming back.  Kurt crouched low.  This man passed within a few yards of Kurt and he was whispering to himself.  After he was safely out of earshot Kurt stole on stealthily until he reached the end of the freight-cars.  Here he paused, listening.  He thought he heard low voices, but he could not see the men he was following.  No doubt they were waiting in the secluded gloom for the other men apparently necessary for that secret conference.  Kurt had sensed this event and he had determined to be present.  He tried not to conjecture.  It was best for him to apply all his faculties to the task of slipping unseen and unheard close to these men who had involved his father in some dark plot.

Not long after Kurt hid himself on the other side of the freight-car he heard soft-padded footsteps and subdued voices.  Dark shapes appeared to come out of the gloom.  They passed him.  He distinguished low, guttural voices, speaking German.  These men, three in number, were scarcely out of sight when Kurt laid his rifle on the projecting shelf of the freight-car and followed them.

Presently he came to deep shadow, where he paused.  Low voices drew him on again, then a light made him thrill.  Now and then the light appeared to be darkened by moving figures.  A dark object loomed up to cut off Kurt’s view.  It was a pile of railroad ties, and beyond it loomed another.  Stealing along these, he soon saw the light again, quite close.  By its glow he recognized his father’s huge frame, back to him, and the burly Neuman on the other side, and Glidden, whose dark face was working as he talked.  These three were sitting, evidently on a flat pile of ties, and the other two men stood behind.  Kurt could not make out the meaning of the low voices.  Pressing closer to the freight-car, he cautiously and noiselessly advanced.

Glidden was importuning with expressive hands and swift, low utterance.  His face gleamed dark, hard, strong, intensely strung with corded, quivering muscles, with eyes apparently green orbs of fire.  He spoke in German.

Kurt dared not go closer unless he wanted to be discovered, and not yet was he ready for that.  He might hear some word to help explain his father’s strange, significant intimations about Anderson.

“...must—­have—­money,” Glidden was saying.  To Kurt’s eyes treachery gleamed in that working face.  Neuman bent over to whisper gruffly in Dorn’s ear.  One of the silent men standing rubbed his hands together.  Old Dorn’s head was bowed.  Then Glidden spoke so low and so swiftly that Kurt could not connect sentences, but with mounting blood he stood transfixed and horrified, to gather meaning from word on word, until he realized Anderson’s doom, with other rich men of the Northwest, was sealed—­that there were to be burnings of wheat-fields and of storehouses and of freight-trains—­destruction everywhere.