"Mr. Bell!" called Tom briskly.

"Here, sir," reported the foreman, coming forward..

"Mr. Bell, I wish you'd pick out twenty-one good men. Make the
brightest of the lot head of the new force of night watchmen. Place the
other twenty under his orders. Your gangs will come into play here
later than the others, so I'll let your shift of men have the first
chance at night-watchman duty."

"All right, sir," nodded Foreman Bell. "Any further orders?"

"None, except that your watchmen will do their best to guard both the
line of roadbed and the camp. Further, tell the night engineer to be
sure to have steam up so that he can blow a lot of signals at anytime in
the night."

"Very good, sir," and the foreman hurried away.

"I'm disgusted with myself for having been caught in this fashion," Tom
admitted to Mr. Ellsworth. "But I hadn't an idea that Paloma held any
dynamite. I can't imagine how a frontier town on the alkali desert
needs dynamite."

"It will probably be found that someone shipped it in a hurry,"
suggested Mr. Ellsworth.

"But how? Any fellow would be detected who had it brought in on our
trains. There has been no time to I stage I it from any other point