He coolly joined the little group. MacDonald looked up, and when he saw
the new chief bending over him his eyes stared in unbounded wonder.

"Howland!" he gasped.

It was all he said, but in that one word and in the strange excitement
in the superintendent's face Howland read that which made him turn
quickly to the men, giving them his first command as general-in-chief of
the road that was going to the bay.

"Get out of the coyote, boys," he said. "We won't do anything more until
morning."

To MacDonald, as the men went out ahead of them, he added in a low
voice:

"Guard the entrance to this tunnel with half a dozen of your best men
to-night, MacDonald. I know things which will lead me to investigate
this to-morrow. I'm going to leave you as soon as I get outside. Spread
the report that it was simply a bad fuse. Understand?"

He crawled out ahead of the superintendent, and before MacDonald had
emerged from the coyote he had already lost himself in the starlit gloom
of the night and was hastening to his tryst with the beautiful girl,
who, he believed, would reveal to him at least a part of one of the
strangest and most diabolical plots that had ever originated in the
brain of man.