midnight
He 'd started out as a railroad man , Hammond had , back in the days when Pyramid Gordon was first beginnin ' to discover that swappin ' hot air for votin ' shares was perfectly good business so long as you could get away with the goods . Only Hammond was the real thing . He was a construction expert . Mr. Gordon had found him on the payroll of a line he 'd annexed by a midnight deal ; concluded he knew too much about the job to be a safe man to have around ; so he transfers him to the Far West and sets him to work on a scheme to lay out a road parallelin ' the Southern Pacific . Hammond could n't tell it was a stall . He blazes merrily ahead surveyin ' a right of way across three States , and had got as far as Death Valley when the rumor comes to camp that this new line is all a fake . Hammond had a gang of twenty-five or thirty men with him , and his weekly pay check had n't shown up for about a month .