In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything
to equal the slowness of the special train. The noon meal, served by
Kittredge's cook in the open compartment, found the special less than
fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a
side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train
in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely
siding. There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph. So far as
he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week. It was
all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor. The train crew
had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was
nothing to do but to keep on waiting.
Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along,
and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time
it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and
once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office. The
car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed. But in the
morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the
branch line.
At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way
trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for,
as he had now come firmly to believe.
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