When the four passengers had picked themselves up out of the heap into which the sudden stop had piled them, they went forward to see what was to be done. There was nothing to be done locomotive-wise; but there was still plenty of time, even if the six remaining miles should have to be covered by a picked-up team borrowed from the smelter folk.
But the team expedient proved unnecessary. At the Nophi station they found a section gang at work, with a hand-car available; and on the “pump special” they made their entry, some thirty minutes past five, into the Grafton Brothers’ camp at the eastern tunnel approach.
Stribling, a handsome young fellow with a frank, open face and honest eyes, was on hand to meet them.
“By Jove, Mr. Maxwell!” he said, with what was apparently a most palpable relieving of anxious strain, “I was afraid you weren’t coming, and I’d just about made up my mind to ’phone over to Lopez to tell Canby and the rest of them that we’d postpone. I’ve got my record to make yet, most of it, and I couldn’t afford to turn that power on and start an engine through until after you and Benson have gone over the completed installation with me.”
“Well,” Maxwell rejoined, “that’s what we’re here to do. You know Starbuck, my brother-in-law? I thought so. Now shake hands with my friend Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, and we’ll go through with you.”
Starbuck was watching Stribling’s face when the young electrical engineer shook hands with the big man from Washington. There was a query in the younger man’s eyes, and Starbuck saw it. Also, he marked the half-second of hesitation which came between the introduction and its acknowledgment. But a moment later they were all on their way to the black-mouthed tunnel, Stribling walking ahead with the superintendent and Sprague, and Starbuck following with Benson.
For convenience in his work Stribling had setup a small steam-driven dynamo at his camp and had strung the tunnel with incandescents, hence there was plenty of light in the long bore for the examination of the power wiring. When they plunged underground the construction man was still walking ahead with Maxwell and Sprague, explaining, for the benefit of the superintendent’s guest, the design of the catenary brackets and the double set of insulators.
“I’m betting on every detail in the mile and a quarter,” the young engineer was saying, as the two laggards closed up. “It’s my first big job, as Mr. Maxwell knows”—this also for the guest—“and I’ve simply got to make good on it. I could have had that waiting motor-engine out there pulling trains through the mountain this morning, but I made up my mind that we wouldn’t turn a wheel until Mr. Maxwell had seen everything for himself.”
“That’s business,” said Sprague, encouragingly. “Old Davy Crockett’s maxim, eh? ‘Be sure you’re right, and then go ahead.’ But let me tell you, Mr. Stribling: Mr. Maxwell will look wise and say, ‘Yes, yes,’ but he’ll have to take your word for it, after all. What we average people don’t know about modern electrical installations would fill a—” he looked around as if in search ofa measure of capacity—“would fill a tank as big as that one across the track—the one you’ve dipped your wires into over there in that side cave.”
“The oil-switch, you mean? Yes, that is a little safety wrinkle we’re putting in wherever there’s a chance of an accident breaking down the power wires. I’ll explain it as we come back.”
When the young engineer led the way onward again a glance to the rear would have shown him that only three of the four were at his heels. Starbuck had seen his chance, and in a quick withdrawal he dodged into the side cavern housing the oil-switch. Two of the empty dynamite boxes enabled him to breast the top of the tall iron tank. What he saw was a little puzzling. Oil-switch tanks are usually left open to the air, but this one was fitted with a galvanized-iron cover made in the form of a shallow pan with double sides spaced about six inches apart. The inner compartment of the pan was half-filled with a transparent oily liquid, and the outer annular space around it was closely packed with chopped ice. Hastily breaking the seals of the package he had been carrying under his coat, he dumped the contents into the central receptacle and fled without waiting to prove Sprague’s assertion thatnothing alarming would happen. When he rejoined the inspection party Sprague was still holding Stribling in talk, and the young mine owner made sure it was done to cover his own momentary absence.
The remainder of the trip through the tunnel was made without incident, and on the way back Stribling halted the party at the safety switch side cavern which, oddly enough, was charged with a curiously acrid odor that made breathing in it chokingly difficult. Coughing and gasping, Stribling explained the mechanism briefly. An electro-magnet, energized by the power current itself, held the switch in contact. If the current should be interrupted, as in the case of a breakage due to a wreck, the switch would be thrown and all the tunnel wires rendered instantly harmless.
“And these boxes are what your machinery came in?” said Sprague, pointing to a litter of small dust-covered packing-cases scattered about the tank.
“Oh, no; those are dynamite boxes,” was the hoarse reply. “They are empty—at least, Mr. Benson says they are, and he ought to know, since they are some of his leavings.” And then: “Suppose we move on. The air is frightfully bad in here. The engineer must have stopped the ventilating fans.”
Sprague had picked up a rusty bolt left by the timber-framers.
“You’ve got a good solid oil-tank here,” he said, hammering lustily on the iron with the bolt.
Starbuck was watching Stribling, and he would have sworn that the young engineer’s jump took him two feet clear into the air.
“Great Scott! Don’t do that, Mr. Sprague!” he cried. “You might break some of the—some of the adjustments, you know!”
Sprague’s mellow laugh echoed hollowly in the timbered cavern.
“If they’re that delicate, perhaps we’d better take your suggestion and move on,” he said. “I guess we’ve seen enough, anyway, eh, Maxwell?”
The superintendent acquiesced and the tunnel-threading was resumed to the portal, and beyond to the little shack where Stribling had his office. Here the young man became the hospitable host.
“Sit down, gentlemen, and I’ll call Canby at the power plant and ask him if he is all ready to ‘cut in.’ If he says yes, you can take the ’phone and give the order, Mr. Maxwell. It’s your railroad.”
The four disposed themselves as they pleased in the cramped little office fronting the tunnel. Sprague took his stand at the single window tostare absently at the black hole in the mountain side—an unrelieved spot of gloom now that the incandescents had been turned off. Starbuck chose a corner, and did not take his eyes from Stribling, who was sitting at his desk with Maxwell opposite.
With the receiver at his ear the young engineer exchanged a few words with the company’s electrician at the power-house three miles away. Then he pushed the ’phone across the desk to Maxwell.
“Canby says he’s ready,” he announced, in a voice that was strangely sharp and tremulous. “Give him the word, and then watch this volt-meter on the wall behind me. It will tell you when the current comes on.”
Maxwell hesitated for a single instant and looked across at Sprague. But the expert’s back was turned and he was still staring fixedly at the distant tunnel mouth. The superintendent took the receiver and spoke crisply.
“This is Maxwell: if you’re ready, turn on the power.”
At the word, Sprague faced about quickly and fixed his gaze upon Stribling. The young man had turned aside in his chair and his face was ghastly. Benson and Maxwell were watching the indicator on the wall; but Starbuck was risingnoiselessly from his seat on the cot, with one hand buried in the side-pocket of his coat. For ten dragging seconds the index finger of the volt-meter remained motionless. Stribling was twitching in his chair, and finally he burst out.
“Those dynamite boxes! We ought to have taken them out! What if they shouldn’t happen to be empty—all of them?”
As he spoke, the index of the volt-meter began to jump like a thing suddenly endowed with life, and Benson cried out, “There she comes!” Stribling crouched in his chair as if shrinking from a blow and covered his face with his hands. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, ticked themselves off on the little desk clock at Maxwell’s elbow, and then Sprague’s voice broke into the tense silence.
“It’s all over, Stribling. You can sit up now and take your medicine. The end of the world is still safely in the future.”
The young man whirled in his chair and his right hand shot toward a half-opened drawer of the desk. It was Starbuck who interposed.
“Nixie,” he said sharply; “it isn’t time for you to pass out yet. Keep your hands out of that drawer, or I’ll put these on,” jingling a pair of handcuffs before the culprit’s staring eyes.
Stribling leaped from his chair and took onelong haggard look through the open door at the tunnel mouth where nothing was happening. Then he dropped back and became the trapped animal fighting for life.
“What have you got on me?—or what is it you think you’ve got?” he rasped.
It was the man from Washington who replied.
“Don’t make it harder for yourself than you have to,” he said gently. “We’ve got it all. We know that you had that train stopped last night so that you could unload those empty dynamite boxes—they are empty, you know—without discovery. We also know that this morning you placed a quantity of nitro-glycerine in that safety switch, and that you have the wiring rigged to fire the stuff and destroy the tunnel.”
The young man looked up and his smile showed his teeth.
“But the current is on and the tunnel isn’t destroyed,” he interrupted.
“No; you overdid it a little in asking Benson to help you handle the nitro-glycerine and in letting him spill it on his clothes; also you skipped a stitch when you thought that by smuggling those dynamite boxes in and calling everybody’s attention to them, you’d put the blame of the explosion upon Benson and the railroad people. You forgotthat all makers of dynamite nowadays stamp the date on the boxes. The tunnel was completed two years ago; and the date on one of the boxes, at least, is January of the present year. You are down and out, Mr. Stribling, and there is only one way in which you can dodge the stripes. That is by telling us who hired you to do this.”
A silence, tense like the silence of the court-room when the judge pronounces the sentence, fell upon the group gathered in the little shack-office, and it lasted for a full minute. At the end of it Stribling jerked his head up and spoke.
“I’m a man again now, Mr. Sprague, if I haven’t been for the past two months,” he said steadily. “I’ll tell you this: you can give me the third degree, if you want to—there are enough of you here to do it—and after that you can send me to the pen if you feel like it. But, so help me God, you’ll never make me welsh on the man for whom I did this: never, so long as I have the breath to say no!”
Again the tense silence supervened, and Starbuck held up the handcuffs tentatively. Sprague shook his head, and spoke again.
“You’ve considered this resolution well, have you, Stribling?”
“I have. I owe that man everything I’ve gotin this world: education, the chance to hold my head up with others and, more than that, he once saved my father from going where you mean to send me—over the road. I’ll admit all you have charged. I did set the trap, and I don’t know yet why it hasn’t gone off. All I ask is that you’ll remember that I picked a time when there wouldn’t be any lives lost.”
“I discovered that last night,” said Sprague quietly; adding, with a glance for the superintendent’s brother-in-law, “I guess we’ll have to turn him over to you, Mr. Starbuck.” Then, turning once more upon the culprit: “Why did you find it necessary to cross the power wires with the telegraph lines early this afternoon, and so to destroy the instruments on a hundred miles of railroad, Stribling?”
The young engineer looked up hardily. “It was necessary. I took care to have Canby and the railroad electricians all over at the power plant, and I couldn’t take the chance of leaving them in communication with head-quarters at Brewster.”
Maxwell, who had sat as a silent listener, shook his head sadly and got up and went out, followed by Benson. A little later Sprague, standing at the window, saw them trying out the electric locomotive in short runs up and down the tunnel approach.Starbuck came out of his corner and snapped the manacles on Stribling’s wrists, and the young man made no resistance. Sprague turned at the click of the handcuffs, standing to frown down thoughtfully upon the self-confessed wrecker.
“I was in hopes we were going to get the men higher up this time; get them so they would stay got,” he said, half to himself. “But it seems that a bit of common human gratitude is going to blunder around and get in the way. Stribling, I’m honestly sorry for you. I’m afraid we made a mistake in not letting you get hold of that gun a few minutes ago.”
The young man with the honest eyes looked up quickly. “You did, indeed, Mr. Sprague. It’s the simplest way out of it for me.”
“You are still determined not to do the larger justice by giving us the information we need?”
The young man raised his manacled hands.
“Think of it a minute,” he pleaded. “You wouldn’t do it yourself; you know you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know—I don’t know; perhaps I shouldn’t,” admitted the big man thoughtfully. Then he went on with visible reluctance: “I’m afraid we shall have to pinch you, and pinch you hard, my boy. And it’s a shame, when you wereonly a tool in the hands of the men who ought to do time for this thing. I suppose we shall be taking the seven o’clock passenger back to Brewster. Is there anything you’d like to do before it comes along?”
“Yes; I’d like to write a letter or two.”
“You shall do it, and you shall have privacy.” And then to Starbuck: “Fix him so that he can.”
Starbuck unlocked the manacle from Stribling’s right wrist and locked it again around the arm of the office chair. “Will that give you room enough?” he asked.
“More than enough,” was the quiet reply. And when Starbuck had taken the pistol from the half-opened desk drawer the two who were free went out and closed the door against any possible intrusion upon the captive’s privacy.
“I’ll stay round,” Starbuck volunteered, when they were outside. “You go over and ride the engine with Mr. Maxwell, if you want to.”
It was half an hour later when the three who had been trying out the electric locomotive side-tracked the big machine at the sound of the down passenger’s whistle signal at the western tunnel approach, and crossed the tracks to where Starbuck was standing guard at the reopened door of the office-shack.
“Still writing?” asked Sprague of the silent guard.
“No; for the last ten minutes he’s been sitting there with his head on the table, just as you see him. He asked me to open the door a while ago, so he could see better.”
Moved by a common impulse they entered the office-room, stepping softly. But the young man at the desk was far beyond all earthly disturbances. One letter, addressed to a girl in New York, lay on the desk, stamped and sealed. Hanging beside the chair, and ingeniously strung and weighted so that they could touch nothing, were the two heavily insulated power wires which he had somehow managed to disconnect from the volt-meter switch-board at his back; these and a freshly burned shrivel on the hand of the arm that was crooked for a pillow told how it had been done.
“Good God!” Maxwell exclaimed; “we might have thought of that! Poor fellow! He couldn’t face it out, after all!”
Starbuck gently released the handcuffs and slipped them into his pocket. Then he helped Benson put the body of the man who could not face it out upon the cot in the corner. The train was coming, and Benson pushed the others toward the door.
“Don’t stay here and miss your train,” he said. “I’ll do what there is to be done. I was going to stay, anyway.”
The evening train was feeling its way down over the wireless line and was half-way to Brewster before the three men sitting in the otherwise unoccupied smoking-compartment of the sleeper broke the silence which the sudden tragedy had laid upon them. But at the lighting of his third cigar Maxwell could contain himself no longer.
“It’s another of your miracles, Calvin,” he said. “By this time I’m so well used to them that nothing you do fazes me any more. But I’m sure Billy will sleep better to-night if you tell him how you did it.”
The big man grunted softly.
“I think both of you have put the broken bits of the puzzle together before this,” he returned. “The motive was the chief thing; what I call the ‘nucleus thought,’ and we had that all ready-made. We knew that this ‘Big Nine,’ as Ford names it, was out after your scalp; and as soon as you told me about the tunnel and the Grafton Brothers’ contract the probable point of attack was no longer in doubt. You see, I happen to know that the Graftons have always been hand-in-glovewith your principal competitor—had installed all the block signals for it, cutting a fine melon for themselves in the process, too.”
“Still,” said Maxwell, “it’s a long way from that to this.”
“It was only taking one step after another, and Benson gave me three or four of them. The details of Stribling’s exceedingly simple plot became very plain after Benson had told us about the train-stopping, the empty dynamite boxes, the safety switch—which could have been just as easily and effectively placed at either end of the tunnel as in that hole in the middle of it—and finally about the pouring of the sirupy stuff into the oil-tank. There was a bit of fine work on Stribling’s part. Benson doubtless knows nitro-glycerine when he sees it; but under the circumstances he would be completely disarmed—as he was.”
“But how did you know that there would be a false cover on the tank?” queried Starbuck.
“A bit of pure reasoning. The specific gravity of glycerine is greater than that of the heaviest of the earth oils; hence the explosive would sink to the bottom of the tank and mix with the oil to some extent. I reasoned that Stribling would not take the risk of the mixture.”
“He didn’t,” said the mine owner; “the pan was there and it was packed in ice.”
“But the laboratory experiment?” put in Maxwell.
“Was a simple test for nitro-glycerine, of course. You saw it blow up the test-tube, but even then only one of you,—Mr. Starbuck here,—suspected the truth. You did, didn’t you, Mr. Starbuck?”
“I had a guess comin’,” said the young mine owner quietly; adding: “That was why I took the trouble to hunt me up a pair of handcuffs when I went to get the train-orders.”
“But if there was nitro-glycerine in that tank, why didn’t it go off when the current was turned on?” queried Maxwell.
“For the very simple reason that Mr. Starbuck, at my direction, dumped a large dose of neutralizing chemical into it as we passed the tank on our way through the tunnel, and so saponified it. That was why I had the courage to hammer on the tank with my bolt, and why Stribling, not dreaming that his touchy explosive’s teeth had been drawn, nearly had a fit.”
“One other thing,” Maxwell put in. “You asked Stribling why he burned the telegraph wires out; how did you know they had been burned out?”
Sprague chuckled good-naturedly.
“I knew that at Little Butte; you might have known it if you hadn’t been so excited as to forget that you had a nose. That office, as well as the next one,—I’ve forgotten its name,—fairly reeked with the smell of burnt rubber and insulation, and I said to myself that there were only two torches in these mountains that could heat things hot enough to burn the instruments: namely, lightning and the high-voltage current from your plant in Lopez Canyon.”
Again a silence, broken only by the train clamor, settled down upon the three in the Pullman smoking-room. After a time Maxwell drew a long breath and said:
“It was a narrow squeak; a horribly narrow squeak, Calvin. We have a good deal to say nowadays about the lawlessness of the mob and the individual; but big money doesn’t seem to know that there are any such things as justice and equity and a square deal.”
Sprague sat up and methodically relighted his cigar.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he demurred. “You can’t say that all big money is lawless. Of course, there are buccaneers in every chapter of the world’s history, and we have ours, neatlylabelled with the dollar-mark instead of the skull and cross-bones. Good big money is an undoubted blessing; it is only bad big money that is a curse.”
Maxwell’s smile was mirthless.
“When a man puts a gun in your face and holds you up, it isn’t very consoling to remember that there are a good many other men in the world who wouldn’t treat you that way,” he commented. And then: “I hope we’ve seen the last of this fight in the dark with that stock-jobbing gang in New York.”
“You haven’t,” Sprague declared definitely. “They’ll come back at you, and keep on coming back, until you get a fair grand-jury underhold on the men at the top. I counted confidently upon being able to give you that underhold to-day. I thought we had Stribling where he would be obliged to turn state’s evidence. It was our misfortune that he happened to be too good a man; that he was only the tool of a villain and not a villain himself. They’ll hit you again, Maxwell, and go on hitting you until you can strike back hard enough to put some of the men higher up in the prisoner’s dock.”
This might have stood for the final word; but the true finality was reached a couple of hours later when the superintendent and the Governmentexpert were smoking their bedtime pipes in the Topaz lobby.
“We haven’t fully grasped the real pity of this thing yet, Dick,” said Sprague, at the end of the ends. “It is this: that greed, the infernal lust of money that has laid hold upon our day and generation, can take so fine a thing as that poor boy’s gratitude, transform it into criminality, and make him pay the price with his life. Isn’t that enough to make your blood run cold? Let’s turn in and forget it if we can. Good-night. I’m going to bed.”