By all the laws of Angelic procedure, Judson should have been promptly shot in the back when he turned and walked swiftly down the avenue to overtake the superintendent.  But for once the onlookers were disappointed.  Rufford was calmly relighting his cigar, and when he had sufficiently cursed the bar-room audience for not being game enough to stop the interference, he kicked Schleisinger’s dog, and turned his back upon Biggs’s and its company.

It was a bit of common human perverseness that kept Lidgerwood from thanking Judson when the engineer overtook him at the corner of the plaza.  Uppermost in his thoughts at the moment was the keen sense of humiliation arising upon the conviction that the plucky little man had surprised his secret and would despise him accordingly.  Hence his first word to Judson was the word of authority.

“Go back to Schleisinger and have him swear you in as a deputy constable,” he directed tersely.  “When you are sworn in, come down here and serve this,” and he gave Judson the warrant for Hallock’s arrest.

The engineer glanced at the name in the body of the warrant and nodded.

“So you’ve made up your mind?” he said.

Lidgerwood was frowning abstractedly up at the windows of Hallock’s office in the head-quarters building.

“I don’t know,” he said, half hesitantly.  “But he is implicated in that murderous business of last night—­that we both know—­and now he is back here.  McCloskey told you that, didn’t he?”

Judson nodded again, and Lidgerwood went on, irresistibly impelled to justify his own action.

“It would be something worse than folly to leave him at liberty when we are on the ragged edge of a fight.  Arrest him wherever you can find him, and take him over to Copah on the first train that serves.  He’ll have to clear himself, if he can; that’s all.”

When Judson, with his huge cow-boy pistol sagging at his hip, had turned back to do the first part of his errand, Lidgerwood went on around the Crow’s Nest and presented himself at the door of the Nadia.  Happily, for his purpose, he found only Mrs. Brewster and Judge Holcombe in possession, the young people having gone to climb one of the bare mesa hills behind the town for an unobstructed view of the Timanyonis.

The superintendent left Judge Holcombe out of the proposal which he urged earnestly upon Mrs. Brewster.  Telling her briefly of the threatened strike and its promise of violence and rioting, he tried to show her that the presence of the private-car party was a menace, alike to its own members and to him.  The run to Copah could be made on a special schedule and the party might be well outside of the danger zone before the armistice expired.  Would she not defer to his judgment and let him send the Nadia back to safety while there was yet time?

Mrs. Brewster, the placid, let him say his say without interruption.  But when he finished, the placidity became active opposition.  The president’s wife would not listen for a moment to an expedient which did not—­could not—­include the president himself.