"I went to school as a youngster, and learned how to read the pages of open books," the gambler confessed modestly. "So you have, as yet, no plan for compelling the young engineers to fail and quit at the Man-killer?"

This was such a direct, comprehensive question that Fred Ransom remained silent for some moments before he admitted:

"No; as yet I haven't been able to form a plan."

"Then engage me to help you," spoke Jim Duff slowly, coolly. "I know the country here, and the people. I know where to lay my finger on men who can be trusted to do unusual things. I shall come high, Mr. Ransom, but I am really worth the money. Talk it over with me, and convince me that your company will be sufficiently liberal in return for large favors."

"Oh, the Colthwaite Company would be liberal enough," protested Ransom, "and quick to hand out the cash, at that."

"I took that for granted," smiled Duff, showing his white teeth. "Your people, the Colthwaites, have always been accustomed to paying for favors that require unusual talent, some courage-and perhaps a persistency of the shooting kind."

Then the two rascals, who now thoroughly understood each other, fell to plotting. An hour later the outlook was dark, indeed, for the success of Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton.

CHAPTER II. DUFF a.s.sERTS HIS "RIGHTS"

"We've a hard afternoon ahead of us, Harry," remarked Tom Reade, as the engineer chums finished the noonday meal in the public dining room of the Mansion House.

"Pshaw! We'll have more real work to do after our material arrives,"

rejoined young Hazelton. "We're promised the material in four days. If we get it in a fortnight we will be lucky."

"That might be true on some railroads," smiled Tom. "But Mr. Ellsworth, the general manager of the A., G. & N. M., is a hustler, if I ever met one. When we wired to him what we needed, he wired back that enough of the material would be here within four days to keep us busy for some time. I believe Mr. Ellsworth never talks until he knows what he's talking about."

"Well, I hope you can find some work for the men to do this afternoon,"

murmured Harry, as the two young engineers rose from table. "Hawkins, our superintendent of construction, has about five hundred mechanics and laborers who will soon need work."

"Yes," agreed Tom. "The men took the jobs with the understanding that their pay would run on."

"The day's wages for five hundred workmen is a big item of loss when we're delayed," mused Hazelton.

"There's another consideration that's even worse than the loss," Tom went on in a low voice. "The pay train will be here this afternoon and the men will have a lot of money by evening. This town of Paloma is going to be wide open to-night in the effort to get the money away from our five hundred men."

"We can't stop that," sighed Harry. "We have no control over the way in which the workmen choose to spend their money."

"Want me to tell you a secret?" whispered Tom mysteriously.

"Yes, if it's an interesting one," smiled Harry.

"Very good, then. I know I can't actually interfere with the way the men spend their money. But I'm going to give them some earnest advice about avoiding fellows who would fleece them out of their wages."

"Go slowly, Tom!" warned Hazelton, opening his eyes rather wide. "Don't put yourself in bad with the men, or they may quit you in a body."

"Let them," retorted Tom, with one of his easy smiles. "If these men throw up their work General Manager Ellsworth will know where to find others for us. Few of our men are skilled workers. We can find subst.i.tutes for most of them anywhere that laborers can be found."

"But you've no right--"

"Of one thing you may be very sure, Harry. I'll take pains not to step over the line of my own rights, and not to step on the rights of the men who are working for us. What I mean to do is to offer them some very straight talk. I shall also warn them that we are quite ready to discharge any foolish fellows who may happen to go on sprees and unfit themselves for our work. I've one surprise to show you, Harry. Wait until Johnson, the paymaster, gets in. Then you'll see who else is with him."

"Are you gentlemen ready for your horses?" asked a stable boy, coming around to the front of the hotel.

"Yes," nodded Tom.

Two tough, lean, wiry desert ponies were brought around. Tom and Harry mounted, riding away at a slow trot at first.

From an upper window Fred Ransom looked down upon them, then called Duff to his side.

"There is your game, Duff," hinted the agent.

"They'll be easy to a man of my experience," laughed the gambler. "I've a clever scheme for starting trouble with them."

He whispered a few words in his companion's ears, at which Ransom laughed with apparent enjoyment.

"You're a keen one, Duff," grinned the agent from Chicago.

"I've seen enough of life," boasted the gambler quietly, "to be able to judge most people at first sight. You shall soon see whether I don't succeed in starting some hard feeling with Reade and Hazelton."

The nearer edge of the treacherous Man-killer was something more than two miles west of the town of Paloma. In the course of a quarter of an hour Tom and Harry drew rein near a portable wooden building that served as an office in the field.

Mr. Hawkins, a solid-looking, bearded man of fifty, with snapping eyes that contrasted with his drawling speech, stepped from the building.

"Hawkins," called Tom, as a Mexican boy led the horses away to the shade of a stable tent, "I see you have some men idle."

"Nine-tenths of 'em are idle," replied the superintendent of construction. "I warned you, Mr. Reade, that our gangs would soon eat up the little work that you left us. Out there, by the last cave-in you'll see that Foreman Payson, has about fifty men going. They'll be through within an hour."

"And the material, even if delivered within the promised time, is still two days away," remarked Reade. "I'll confess that I don't like to see the railroad lose so much through paying men for idle time."

"It can't be helped, sir," replied the superintendent. "Of course, if you like, you can set the laborers at work shoveling in more dirt at the points where the last slide of the quicksand occurred. But, then, shoveling dirt in, without the timbers and the hollow steel piles will do no good," continued Hawkins, with a shake of his head. "It would be worse than wasted work."

"I know all that," Tom admitted. "To tell you the truth, Mr. Hawkins, I wouldn't mind the men's idleness quite so much if it weren't that the pay train comes in this afternoon. An idle man, not over-nice about his habits, and with a lot of money in his pockets, is a source of danger.

We're going to have five hundred such danger spots as soon as the men are paid off."

"Don't know that, sir!" demanded Superintendent Hawkins. "The town of Paloma is just dancing on sand-paper, it's so uneasy about getting its hand into the pile of more than thirty-eight thousand dollars that the pay train is going to bring in this afternoon."

"I know," nodded Tom rather gloomily. "I hate to see the men fleeced as they're likely to be fleeced to-night. Some of our men will be so badly done up that it will be a week before they get back to work--unless there is some way that we can stop the fleecing."

"There isn't any such way," declared Superintendent Hawkins, with an air of conviction.

"You've surely been around rough railroading camps enough to know that, Mr. Reade."

"I've seen a good deal of the life, Hawkins," Tom answered, "but of course I don't know it all."

"Yet you know that you can't hope to stop railroad jacks from spending their money in their own way. The saloons in Paloma will take in thousands of dollars from our lads to-night and all day to-morrow. The gamblers will swindle them out of a whole lot more. Day after to-morrow, Mr. Reade, you wouldn't be able to borrow twenty dollars from our whole force."

"It's a shame," burst from Tom indignantly, as the three turned to gaze westward across the desert. "These men work as hard as any toilers in the world. They receive good wages. Yet where do you find a railroad jack who, after years and years of toil on these burning deserts, has two or three hundred dollars of his own saved?"

Hawkins shrugged his shoulders.