Chapter 11

Brushing them aside with his mighty weight or driving them before him like chaff in the fury of his onset.

Brushing them aside with his mighty weight or driving them before him like chaff in the fury of his onset.

Brushing them aside with his mighty weight or driving thembefore him like chaff in the fury of his onset.

“Just one question, Givens,” he said brusquely.“You know what you’re in for; you know that you are still wanted in Cleveland on that charge of counterfeiting. But if you’ll answer one question straight, we’ll forget the Ohio indictment for the present. What did you do with the swag that you lifted a few hours ago?”

For five full seconds the black-haired man kept silence. Then he spoke as the spirit moved him.

“It’s where you won’t get it—you n’r them make-believe crooks up at the Molly Baldwin!” he rasped.

“Oho!” Sprague laughed. “So you planned it to give your side partners in this little game the double-cross, did you? It’s like you. Take them away, Archer.”

“And—and hurry back!” whispered Calmaine hoarsely. “We’ve simplygotto catch Number Six, I tell you!”

Thus urged, Tarbell expedited matters with the night jailer and came running back to take his place behind the steering-wheel.

“Where now?” he asked, dropping the clutch in; and it was Calmaine who gave the direction.

“The Reservation Road east; it’s the one we came in over.”

Tarbell easily broke all the speed records, to say nothing of speed limits, in the race to the eastwardover the dry mesa country. Twenty-odd miles from town they met the sheriff’s party, and there was a momentary halt for explanations. “Camp down right where you are, and we’ll go back pretty soon and send a bunch of autos out after you,” was Maxwell’s word of encouragement; and then the big car sped on its way toward Cromarty Gulch.

Calmaine seemed to have preserved his sense of locality marvellously. A few hundred yards short of the spot at the gulch head where Follansbee’s dogs had begun their aimless circlings, he told Tarbell to pull up.

“They are right along here, somewhere,” he said, getting out to hobble painfully ahead of the others when Tarbell took off a side-lamp to serve for a lantern. “They had me blindfolded, at first, and I didn’t know what they were trying to do with me. When they chucked me into the auto, I tried to make a get-away. While they were knocking me silly again, I managed to get the papers out of my pocket and fire them into the sagebrush. It was right along here, somewhere.”

It was Sprague who discovered the thick packet upon which so much depended. It was lying cleverly chance-hidden under a clump of the greasewood bushes. “Found!” he announced. And thenhe gave the young chief clerk his due meed of commendation. “You’re a young man to bet on, Mr. Calmaine. What we’ve been able to do, thus far, wouldn’t amount to much if you hadn’t kept your head.” Then he turned quickly to the superintendent. “How do we stand for time, now, Maxwell?”

Maxwell held his watch to the light and shook his head dejectedly.

“Number Six, the Fast Mail, is due at Corona in five minutes. We can never make it in this world!”

“You bet we can!” shouted Tarbell. “Help Mr. Calmaine, and pile into the car—quick!”

The short race to the near-by mining-camp was a sheer breakneck dash, but Tarbell made good. When the four of them leaped from the car and stormed into Allen’s office, the Fast Mail had already whistled for the “clear” signal, and the operator was reaching for the cord of his semaphore to give the “go-by” wigwag. They yelled at him as one man; and a few seconds later the fast train slid to a shrieking stop at the station.

Maxwell would have sent Tarbell on to New York with the precious proxies, but Calmaine pleaded pathetically for his chance to finish that which he had begun.

“I’ll be all right as soon as I can get into the sleeper and get these infernal shoes off,” he protested. “It’s my job, Mr. Maxwell; for pity’s sake don’t make me a quitter!”

“Let him go,” said Sprague; “he’s earned his chance to stay in the game—and this time he’ll make a touch-down.” And so it was decided.

When the Fast Mail, with its lately added passenger, had slid away among the hills to the eastward, the three who remained at Corona climbed into the hired auto and Tarbell drove another record race to town, pausing only once, when they reached the sheriff’s roadside camp, to take on Harding and as many of his deputies as the car would hold.

By Maxwell’s direction, Tarbell drove first to the railroad head-quarters, where the superintendent and his guest got out. At the office entrance another dusty car was drawn up; and in the upper corridor they found the two young men from the Molly Baldwin mine, still seeking for information. Sprague disposed of them, and he did it with business-like brevity.

“Your dead man has been found,” he told them crisply. “He is at present in the county jail, with one of his accomplices; and when he is given the third degree, he will probably tell all he knows.It’s a weakness he has—not to be able to hold out against a bit of rough handling. If you two fellows will make a clean breast of your part in the swindle to the prosecuting attorney, and promise to play fair with your lessors in future, it is likely that you’ll be let off with a fine, and you’ll probably be able to bag the remainder of the gang and to recover your lost gold.”

The two young men heard, gasped, and backed away. When they were gone, Maxwell unlocked the door of his business office, snapped on the lights, opened his desk, and pressed the electric button which summoned Connolly, the night despatcher.

“I thought you’d like to know that we’ve caught up with the dead man, Dan,” he said, when the fat despatcher came in; and then he briefed the story of the chase, winding up with a peremptory order to be sent to the division despatcher at the Copah end of the line not to let the eastbound connection get away from the Fast Mail at the main line junction.

When Connolly had gone back to his key, Maxwell wheeled upon his guest.

“It’s late, Calvin, and by all the laws of hospitality I ought to take you home and put you to bed. But I’ll be hanged if you shall close an eye until you’ve told me how you did all this!”

The expert chemist ex-foot-ball coach planted himself in the easiest of the office chairs and chuckled joyously.

“Gets you, does it?” he said; and then: “I’m not sure that I can explain it so that you will understand, but I’ll try. In the first place, it is necessary to go at these little problems with a perfectly open mind—the laboratory mind, which is neither prejudiced nor prepossessed nor in any way concerned with anything but the bare facts. Reason, and the proper emphasis to be placed upon each fact as it comes to bat, are the two needful qualities in any problem-solving—and about the only two.”

“You are soaring around about a mile over my head; but go on,” said Maxwell.

“All right; I’ll set out the facts in the order in which they came to me. First, I see a dozen men loading a coffin into an express-car. I note the extreme weight, and wonder how a dead man, any dead man who doesn’t have to have his coffin built to order, can be so infernally heavy. Next, you tell me about your proxy fact—which doesn’t have any bearing at the moment—and then you tell me about the dead man, and how his friends were shipping him to Kentucky. Then comes the news of the bizarre hold-up in Cromarty Gulch. Instantly the reasoning mind, the laboratory mind,if you prefer, goes to work, with the two foreknown facts—the heavy-dead-man fact, and the fact that your chief clerk is on that train with his valuable papers—clamoring each for its hearing. Don’t let me bore you.”

“Heavens—you’re not boring me! What next?”

“Reason, the laboratory brand of it, tells me immediately that your proxy fact has the emphasis. You had told me that your Wall Street opponents had been throwing stumbling-blocks in your way in the obtaining of the proxies. Here, said I, is the last desperate resort. Nevertheless, there were complications. I was pretty sure that the hold-ups had taken Calmaine and his papers; that this was what the hold-up was for. But in order to get track of them—and of Calmaine—other facts must be added. We added them on the trip with the special train; all we needed, and a few more thrown in for good measure.”

“I don’t see it,” Maxwell objected.

“Don’t you? When we reached the scene of the hold-up, I was already doubting the heavy-dead-man theory; doubting it extremely. Also, my reason told me that the robbers, carrying some weight which was heavier than any dead person, would not trust to a team which could be overtaken, if need be, by pursuers on foot. Hence theautomobile track that we found. Then we came to the coffin, and half of the mystery vanished at once. If you hadn’t been excited and—well, let us say, prepossessed, you would have noticed that there was no smell of disinfectants, that the coffin pillow wasn’t dented with the print of a head, that the broken glass was lying on the pillow, as it wouldn’t have been if the man’s head had been there when the plate was smashed, that——”

“Great Scott,” Maxwell broke in, in honest self-depreciation, “what blind bats we are—most of us!”

“Oh, no; I was bringing the specially trained mind to bear, you must remember; the scientifically trained mind. You couldn’t afford to cultivate it; it wouldn’t leave room for your business of railroad managing. But I’ll cut it short. I saw that there had been no corpse in the coffin, and that there had been something else in it—something heavy enough to leave its marks on the silk lining, which was torn and soiled. Also, I saw, away down in the foot end of the thing, an ingot-shaped chunk of something that looked like a bar of gold bullion; one piece of the heavy coffin load that had been overlooked in the hurried emptying. That’s why I advised you to bring the coffin back on your train. There’s a ten-thousand-dollar gold brick in it, right now!”

“Heavens and earth!” gasped the listener; but Sprague went on rapidly.

“Just here is where your machine-made detective would have missed the emphasis. But the scientist, having once for good and sufficient reasons placed his emphasis, never has occasion to change it. The main thing yet was the stopping of your messenger to Ford. I was convinced that the gold robbery, in which, of course, not only the two young lessees, but the man Murtrie as well, must be implicated, was only a side-issue, intended either to divert attention from the main thing, or as a double-cross theft on the part of Murtrie. When you and Tarbell described Murtrie for me on the way back to town, I had it all, simply because I happened to know the man. He is a counterfeiter, whom I have twice run down for the Department of Justice; but who, both times, contrived to break jail and get away.”

“But how were you able to strike so sure and hard at Holladay’s?”

“Just a bit more reasoning; as you’ll see presently. After we had established the fact that Calmaine wasn’t on the train—but argue it out for yourself. They’d take him somewhere where he could be kept safe and out of the way until the criminals concerned were all securely out of thecountry. And where would they take him if not to the unlawful den out yonder on the pike where Murtrie was best known, and from which, no doubt, he secured his helpers for the hold-up job?”

“But hold on,” Maxwell interrupted. “I haven’t got it entirely clear yet. If Murtrie put up this job with Calthrop and Higgins——”

Sprague shook his head.

“You have no imagination, Dick. Murtrie came here to do you up in the proxy business—as the Wall Street crowd’s last resort. He got in with Calthrop and Higgins and showed them how to beat their game, meaning to put the double-cross on them—as he did—when the time came. He was merely killing two birds with one stone; but your bird was the big one. I don’t know what sort of a dodge he put up with Calthrop and Higgins, but I can suppose that there is a trusty confederate at the Kentucky end of the string who is doubtless waiting now for a corpse that will never come.”

“Of course!” said the unimaginative one disgustedly. “Just the same, it’s all mighty miraculous to me, Calvin—how you can reason out these things hot off the bat, as you do. Why, Great Jonah! I had all the opportunities you had, andthen some; and I didn’t see an inch ahead of my nose at any stage of the game!”

The big man rose and yawned good-naturedly.

“It’s my hobby—not yours,” he laughed; and then, as the telephone buzzer went off with a purring noise under Maxwell’s desk: “That will be Mrs. Maxwell, calling up to ask why in the world you don’t come home. Tell her all right, and let’s go. It will be the biggest miracle of all if you succeed in getting me up in time for breakfast to-morrow—or rather, I should say, to-day, since it’s three o’clock, and worse, right now.”

Maxwell put the receiver to his ear and exchanged a few words with some one at the other end of the wire. When he closed his desk and made ready to go, a little frown of reflective puzzlement was gathering between his eyes.

“You know too much—too thundering much, Calvin. As I said a while back, it’s uncanny. It was Alice; and she said the very words you said she would: ‘Why in the world don’t you come home, Dick?’ If you weren’t so blooming big and beefy and good-natured—but, pshaw! who ever heard of a fat wizard? Come on; let’s go and hunt a taxi. It’s too far to walk.”

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