Thanks to the man with the red lantern, there were half a dozen car-lengths to spare between the two trains.
Thanks to the man with the red lantern, there were half a dozen car-lengths to spare between the two trains.
Thanks to the man with the red lantern, there were half adozen car-lengths to spare between the two trains.
“Not that anybody’s heard of. Is that what’s the matter? Was you coming to pick us up?”
Maxwell’s answer was a barked-out string of orders.
“Let these wreck-wagons in on the siding. Find Blacklock and tell him to get orders to follow you to Brewster as second section. Pull out as quick as you can. You’re ten minutes off time, right now!”
In the drawing-room of the rear sleeper of the limited, Maxwell closed the door on his guest and himself, passed his cigar-case, lighted a fresh cigar in his own behalf, and said nothing until after the short shifting stunt had been worked out and the Apache Limited was once more racing on its way westward. Then he opened up.
“You’ve got it now, Calvin; the thing that has been smashing more nerves for us than we can afford to lose. Of course, you understand what has happened. That blood-curdling report of an accident was a fake wire; God only knows where it came from, or who sent it.”
“And there have been others?” queried Sprague.
“A dozen of them, first and last. It began about a month ago. Sometimes it’s merely foolish; at other times it’s like this—a thing to bring your heart into your mouth.”
“And you mean to say you haven’t been able to run it down?”
“Run it down? If there is anything we haven’t done it’s some little item that has been merely overlooked. We’ve had about all of the company detectives here, first and last, and the best of them have had to give it up. There is nothing to work on; absolutely nothing. This wire to-night purported to come from Angels; as a matter of fact, it may have come from anywhere east of Brewster and this side of Copah. When we come to examine the Angels operator, we’ll probably find that he doesn’t know a thing about it—not a thing in the wide world.”
“Yet it was a real wire?”
“Calmaine, my own chief clerk, took it from the sounder and wrote it down. It seems that Connolly, the night despatcher, had gone out for a moment and Calmaine was holding down the wires for him. I saw the message before we left. The call and signature were all right, and the exact time, nine-thirteen, was given.”
“Wire-tappers?” suggested the listener, who had grown shrewdly sympathetic.
“That is what we’ve all thought. But to tap a wire, you have to cut in on it somewhere. Of course, it could be done in any one of a thousandisolated places, but hardly without leaving some trace. Wickert, our wire-chief, has been over the lines east and west with a magnifying-glass, you might say.”
For the measuring of a few other miles of the westward flight of the train the big man in the opposite seat said nothing. Then he began again.
“Have you tried to figure out a motive, Dick?”
“That is precisely what is driving every one of us stark, staring mad, Calvin,” was the sober confession. “There isn’t any motive—there can’t be!”
“No trouble with the labor unions?”
“Not a bit in the world. More than that, the men have spent good money of their own trying to help us find out—as a measure of self-protection. You can see what they’re afraid of; what we are all afraid of. Everybody is losing nerve, and if the scare keeps up, we’ll have real trouble—plenty of it.”
“And you say the source of the thing can’t be localized?”
“No. We have a double division, with Brewster as the common head-quarters. Sometimes the yelp comes from the east, and sometimes from the west.”
Again the big-bodied chemistry expert sank backin his seat and fell into the thoughtful trance. When he came out of it, it was to say:
“You’ve probably settled it for yourself that it isn’t a plant for a train robbery—the kind of robbery which would be made easier by a wreck.”
Maxwell shook his head.
“A pile of cross-ties would be much simpler.”
“Doubtless. We’ll cancel that and come to the next hypothesis. Could it be the work of some crazy telegraph operator?”
“We’ve threshed out the crazy guess. It doesn’t prove up. A madman would slip up now and then—trip himself. I have a file of the fake messages. They were not sent by a lunatic.”
“Call it another cancellation,” said the guest. “You are convinced that some sane person is doing it. Very good. What is the object? You say you can’t find out; which merely means that you’ve been attacking it from the wrong angle. Or, rather, you’ve let the professional detectives give you their angle. What you need is a bit of first-class amateur work.”
The superintendent laughed mirthlessly. “If I could only find the amateur I’d hire him, Calvin,—if it took a year’s salary. I don’t know what the wire-devil’s object is, but I can catalogue the results. These periodical scares are demoralizingthe entire Short Line. The service is on the ragged edge of a chaotic blow-up. Half the men in the train crews are running on their bare nerves, and the operators who have to handle train-orders are not much better.”
“Yes,” said the guest quietly. “I’ve been noticing. I saw only one man in your office who wasn’t scared stiff; and the conductor of this train we’re riding on had a pretty bad attack of the tremolos when you told him what the wrecking-train was out for.”
“Who, Garrighan? No, you’re mistaken there. He’s one of the cold-blooded ones,” said the superintendent confidently.
“Excuse me, Dick; I’m never mistaken on that side of the fence. There were signs, plenty of them. Ninety-eight men in every hundred will duck and put up one or both arms if you strike at them suddenly. Garrighan did neither, you’ll say; but if you had been watching him as closely as I was, you would have seen that he started to do both.”
Maxwell was regarding his former classmate curiously.
“Is that how you do it? Is that the way you caught the post-office thieves, Calvin?”
The chemistry expert laughed.
“It’s only a little pointer on methods,” he averred. “When my attention was first called to such things—it was on a case in the Department of Justice in which I was required to give expert testimony—I was very strongly impressed with the crudities of the ordinary detective methods. I said to myself that what was needed was some one who could apply good, careful laboratory practice; a habit of observation which counts nothing too small to be weighed and measured.”
“Go on,” said Maxwell.
“The idea came to me that I’d like to try it on, and I did. My theory is correct. Human beings react under certain given conditions just as readily, and just as inevitably, as the inorganic substances react in a laboratory experiment.”
Maxwell reached for the box of safety matches and passed it to Sprague, whose cigar had gone out.
“I wish you could stay and put this railroad of ours into your test-tube, Calvin. We’re teetering along on the edge of an earthquake—oh, yes—I know you’ll say it’s only a scare; but the worst panic that has ever gone into history was only a scare in the beginning. One of these fine nights some engineer or some operator with the bare nerves will lose his grip. You know about what that will mean. We’ve escaped alive, so far;but the first real wreck that hits us will be just about the same as dropping a lighted match into a barrel of gunpowder; I thought it had come to-night; I’m glad it hasn’t, but I know it’s only postponed.”
The chemistry man nodded.
“Somebody is reaching for you with a big stick; that is very evident, Maxwell. And there are brains behind it, too, when you come to think of it. If you wanted to kill a man without getting hanged for murder, one way to do it would be to persuade him to commit suicide. Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may be trying the same experiment on your railroad?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Stranger things have happened. But that is beside the mark. You say you are needing help. I’ve half a mind to stop off and give you a bit of a lift.”
“By Jove, Calvin!—if you would——”
“Call it a go,” interrupted the guest. “I’ll take a chance and say that my business in San Francisco can wait a few days. The fellow I’m after out there won’t run away; it’s the one thing he doesn’t dare to do.”
“Say, old man! but that’s bully of you!” exclaimed the host, reaching across to grip the handof helping. “You shall have everything in sight; I’ll put every man on the two divisions under your orders, and you can have a special train and my private car. If you don’t see what you want, just ask——”
The chemistry sharp was holding up his hand and laughing.
“No, no; hold on, Dick. You’ll have to let me tackle the thing in my own way, and there won’t be any grand-stand plays in it—in fact, I don’t mean to appear personally in it at all. Let’s see where we stand. You have a division detective of some sort, haven’t you?—a fellow who does the gun-play act when it becomes necessary?”
“We have; a young fellow named Archer Tarbell, who got his experience chasing cattle thieves in Montana. He’s a fine fellow, and it’s breaking his heart because he can’t get the nippers on our wire-devil.”
“All right. I may want to use him. Now another matter. You have a live newspaper in Brewster; I bought a copy of it on the train this morning. If I remember right, it’s calledThe Tribune. Is it friendly to your railroad?”
“Ordinarily, yes; though Treadwell, the owner, is independent enough to print anything that he thinks is news.”
“Know him pretty well?”
“Very well, indeed.”
“Good. When we get in, make it your first care to see the newspaper people and to persuade them not to make any mention of this little miss-go of to-night. That’s the first move and it’s an important one. Can you work it?”
“Sure. But I don’t see the point.”
“Never mind about that; I probably sha’n’t do anything that you think I ought to do. Now about this man Tarbell; is he known as a company detective?”
“No, not generally known; he’s on the pay-roll as a spare operator—relief man, you know.”
“That’s better. When I meet him I’ll see if I can’t get him interested in chemistry. That’s how you’re going to account for me, you know. I’m an old friend of yours, a Government man out of the Department of Agriculture off on a vacation. Incidentally, I might be wanting to buy a mine, or something of that sort—anything to start the town gossip on a harmless chase and to keep it as far as possible from the real reason for my stop-over.”
“Everything goes,” said Maxwell. “I’ll start the gossip. What else?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. I shall ask youto give me the run of your railroad office, and I’d like to meet anybody and everybody, when it falls in naturally—but always as the chemistry sharp; get that well ground into your cosmos. But here—what’s this? Are we already back in Brewster?”
“We are,” said the superintendent, with a glance out of the window. Then he became the regretful host again. “I hate to have you go back to the hotel, Calvin. It’s just my crooked luck to have you come along when the house is shut up and Mrs. Maxwell and the babies are out of town. They’re due to come home in a day or two, and I’m selfish enough to hope that we can keep you over. Let’s drop off here at the crossing. It’s nearer to the hotel, and it’ll give me a chance to reachThe Tribuneoffice before Treadwell’s young men come in with their scare stuff.”
It was a half-hour after the arrival of the unwrecked Limited, and the story of the curious false alarm was just getting itself passed from lip to ear among the loungers in the Hotel Topaz lobby, when the Government man came down from his room to file a rather lengthy New York message with the hotel telegraph operator.
“Cipher?—holy smoke!” exclaimed the young man at the lobby wire desk; but a liberal tip made it look easier, and he added: “All right, I’m goodfor it, I guess, and I’ll get it through as quick as I can. Answer to your room?”
“If you please,” said the guest; and, as it was by this time well on toward midnight, he went to bed.
By noon of the day following the false alarm run of the wrecking-train to Timanyoni Canyon, all Brewster, or at least the railroad part of it, knew that Superintendent Maxwell was entertaining an old college classmate at the Hotel Topaz. For the town portion of the gossip there was some little disagreement as to Mr. Calvin Sprague’s state and standing. Some had it that the big, handsome athlete was a foot-ball coach taking his vacation between seasons. Others said that he was a capitalist in disguise, looking for a ground-floor investment in Timanyoni mines.
These were Mr. Sprague’s placings for the man in the street. But to the rank and file in the railroad head-quarters building Sprague figured in his proper character as a Government drug-mixer on a holiday; a royal good fellow who fraternized instantly with everybody, whose naïve ignorance about railroading was a joke, and whose vast unknowledge was nicely balanced by a keen and comradely curiosity to learn all that anybody could tell him about the complex workings of a railroad head-quarters in action.
Naturally, and possibly because Davis, the chief despatcher, was willing to be hospitable, he spent an hour of the forenoon in the wire office, ingenuously absorbing detail and evincing an interest in the day’s work that made Davis, ordinarily a rather reticent man, transform himself into a lecturer on the theory and practice of railway telegraphy.
It was in Davis’s office that he met Tarbell; and the keen-eyed, sober-faced young fellow who was carried on the division pay-rolls as a relief operator became his guide on a walking tour of the shops and the yards. Tarbell saw in Mr. Maxwell’s guest nothing more than an exceedingly affable gentleman with an immense capacity for interesting himself in the workaday details of a railroad outfit; but at one o’clock, when Maxwell joined Sprague at a quiet corner table for two in the hotel café, there were several surprises awaiting the superintendent.
“Getting it shaken down a little so that you’ll know where to begin?” was Maxwell’s opening question; and the ex-fullback laughed.
“You must take me for a sleuth of the common or garden variety,” he retorted. “Did you suppose I had thrown away an entire forenoon scoring for a start? Not so, Richard; not even remotelyso. I’ve been finding out a lot of things. I am even able to suggest an improvement or two in your telegraph installation.”
“For example?” said Maxwell.
“Both of your yard offices are cut in on the working wire. If this were my railroad I’d put them on a pony circuit and cut them out of the main line.”
“Why would you?”
“We’ll have to go back a little for the specific answer in the present case; back to last night, and to the young man who chased out with a red lantern to keep us from running into the passenger train which wasn’t wrecked. Why do you suppose he did that?”
“That’s easy; he heard the passenger coming down the canyon.”
“That was the inference, of course. But when you have taken the thirty-third degree in the exact science of observation, Dick, you’ll learn to distrust inferences and to accept only conclusions. He didn’t hear the passenger; he didn’t know it was coming. If you had been observing him as closely as I was, you would have seen him write this down in his actions as plain as print. He had a much better reason for stopping us—and the passenger. It was a wire order from somebody.If you don’t believe it, have Davis call him up and ask him, when you go back to your office.”
Notwithstanding the criticism just passed upon him by his table-mate, Maxwell again caught at an inference.
“You’ve found the wire-devil, Calvin? You’ve got to the bottom of the thing in a single forenoon?”
“No; not quite to the bottom. But some few things I have learned, beyond any question of doubt. In the first place, this trouble of yours is pretty serious; far more serious than you suspect. In fact, it is designed to remove your railroad from the map, not by murder outright, but by what you might call incited suicide. The condition which you described last night is painfully apparent, even to an outsider like myself. Half of your men are potential powder-mines, ready to blow up if the spark is applied.”
“Go on,” said Maxwell eagerly. “What else did you find out?”
“I learned that a stop-all-trains order was sent to your young man at the canyon station last night, and that, in all probability, it was sent from Brewster. The ultimate question fines itself down to this: did your night despatcher, Connolly, send that order through his own instrument in his ownoffice? or did he, or some other, send it from the upper yard office?—which, as I have remarked, is rather injudiciously cut in on the regular working wire. I’ll venture to make the answer positive; the order was sent from the yard office.”
“Connolly!” said the superintendent under his breath. “I can’t believe it, Calvin. Who ever heard of a fat villain?”
“Go a little easy on the inferences,” laughed the chemistry expert. “I didn’t say it was Connolly, though it looks rather bad for him at the present stage of the game. He is in debt, and he wants to get married.”
“But, good Lord! what has that got to do with——”
“Hold on,” interposed the expert calmly. “We haven’t come to that part of it yet. As I say, this stop-order was sent from the yard office. How do I know? Because the sender left his trail behind him in the shape of a wire recently cut and recoupled—the cutout being made to keep the message from repeating itself in the head-quarters office where it might be heard by anybody who happened to be standing around.”
“But Connolly couldn’t leave his wire to go to the yard office.”
“Unfortunately for him, he did leave it. About half an hour after the wrecking-train left he called Davis, who was sleeping in one of the bunk-rooms in your wickiup attic. His excuse was that he was so rattled that he couldn’t hold himself down at the train-desk. Davis relieved him for an hour or so, and then he came back.”
“Still I can’t believe it of Connolly,” Maxwell persisted. “If he sent that message to Timanyoni last night, that makes him responsible for all the others—the devil-messages, as the men are calling them. Some of these have come in the night, while he was on duty. How could he have worked it in that case?”
Again the chemistry expert laughed. “A suspicious person might draw a bunch of inferences,” he said, “throwing out a dark hint or so about a concealed cut-in on the wires after they enter the attic of the railroad building and a hidden set of instruments. Also, the same person would probably point to the fact that Connolly wasn’t at his desk when the fake wreck notice came last night. It was your chief clerk, Calmaine, who took it from the wire, and he tells me he was subbing for Connolly for a few minutes while Connolly went upstairs for his smoking-tobacco.”
“My Lord!” said Maxwell; “you’ve put itupon Connolly, fair and square, Calvin; it’s all over but the hanging!”
“There you go again,” joked the Government man, with his good-natured grin. “I haven’t said it is Connolly. But I will say this: with another half-day at it, I’ll probably be able to turn the case over to Tarbell—and the newspapers.”
“The newspapers?”
“Yes. That will be a part of the cure for the crazy sickness among your men. Sit tight and say nothing, and by this evening I’ll be ready to put you next.”
It was late in the afternoon, and the man from Washington had spent much of the intervening time loafing in the different offices sheltered by the head-quarters roof, when young Tarbell got a telephone summons from the hotel. In the writing-room, which was otherwise deserted, he found the superintendent’s guest waiting for him. Sprague waved him to a chair and began at once.
“What did you find out, Mr. Tarbell?”
“Nothing to hurt. The fellow you was askin’ about went out on the wreck-train and came back on it.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Sure of the first part, and not so sure of the last. I’ve found half a dozen o’ the men who sawhim get on the train here, and saw him after he was on. They’re a little hazy about the back trip, but he must’ve come back that way, because he didn’t come on the Limited.”
“And his wife?”
Tarbell’s lip curled in honest cleanliness.
“He ain’t got any wife. It was his girl he was expectin’, and she didn’t come.”
“And afterward?” suggested the questioner.
“After he got back he showed up in the office and took his job again, lettin’ Catherton go home.”
The Government man’s eyes narrowed and after a moment he began again.
“How near can you come to keeping your own counsel, Mr. Tarbell?” he demanded abruptly.
“I reckon I can talk a few without sayin’ much,” said the ex-cowboy. And then, after a pause: “You mean that you don’t want to be mixed up in this thing by name, Mr. Sprague?”
“You’ve hit it exactly. You’ve got your start and I want you to work it out yourself. You have the line. Somebody—somebody who is not a thousand miles from your head-quarters building over yonder—is working this scare, working it for a purpose which he wishes to accomplish without making himself actually and legally responsible.Had you got that far in your own reasoning, Mr. Tarbell?”
“No, indeedy,” was the prompt reply. “I reckon I’m only a plug when it comes down to the sure-enough, fine-haired part of it.”
“You’ll learn, after a bit,” said the chemistry expert shortly. “But let that go. You have the facts now, and they are driven pretty well into a corner. Can you go and get your man?”
Tarbell got up and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I reckon I can,” he admitted slowly, and started to move away. But at the door the big man at the writing-desk recalled him.
“Don’t go on supposition, Tarbell. Ask yourself, when you get outside, if you’ve got the evidence that the court will demand. Ask yourself, also, if you know of your own knowledge, or if you’ve only allowed yourself to be hypnotized into your belief. If you can get satisfactory answers to these questions, go to it and bring back the money, as they say up in Seattle.”
For what remained of the afternoon after Tarbell went away, Sprague sat in the writing-room and wrote letters, sealing and addressing the last one just as Maxwell came over to go to dinner with him. At table there were plenty of uncut back-numbersin the way of college reminiscences to be threshed over, and Sprague carefully kept the talk in this innocuous field until after they had left the dining-room to go for a smoke on the loggia porch. When the cigars were alight, Maxwell would no longer be choked off.
“Anything new in the wire-devil business, Calvin?” he asked.
“I’ve turned the case over to Tarbell, as I promised. I’m through with my part of it.”
“What’s that!” ejaculated the superintendent. “You’ve got your man?”
“Tarbell will get him—most probably before we go to bed to-night. He’s a fine young fellow, that reformed cowboy of yours, Dick. I like him.”
Maxwell was still gasping. “You’re a wonder, Calvin—a latter-day wizard! Good Heavens! Do you realize that we’ve been working on this thing for a month? And you’ve cleaned it up in a day!”
The chemistry expert was smiling good-naturedly.
“Perhaps I came at a fortuitous moment, and had exceptional advantages,” he demurred.
“But are you sure?” demanded Maxwell soberly.
“So sure that if your ‘devil’ had caused any lossof life in his monkeyings, I could go into court and hang him.”
“Thank God!” said the superintendent; and then again, as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, “Thank God!”
Sprague looked up quickly.
“You’ve been taking it pretty hard, haven’t you, Dick? Any special reason?”
“Yes. You know Ford, our president: he has made the Pacific Southwestern System—made it out of whole cloth; and, incidentally, he has made a good few of us fellows who have fought with him shoulder to shoulder from the first. When I was last in New York, a couple of months ago, he rode from the club to the station in the taxi with me. He was in trouble of some sort—he didn’t tell me what it was; but the last thing he said as I was boarding the train gave me some notion of it. ‘Run that jerk-water Short Line of yours, Dick, as if you were carrying all your eggs to market and had them all in one basket,’ he said, and then he added: ‘No wrecks, Dick, if you have to sit up nights to head them off.’”
Sprague was smoking peacefully. It was perhaps too much to expect that a man whose problems were chiefly in the field of laboratory science should be very deeply interested in one in whichthe elements were merely human. When he spoke again it was to recur to his favorable impression of Tarbell. “I like that young fellow,” he said in conclusion. “He’ll pull you out of the hole—with a little timely help from the newspapers. When he gets the ball into his hands and starts down the field with it, you’d best be prepared for some pretty sensational developments. They’re due.”
For a little while Maxwell said nothing, and the fine lines between his eyes deepened slowly into a frown of anxiety. Finally he said: “I’ve got ’em, too, Calvin—the ‘jimmies,’ I mean. My wife and the two kiddies are coming home on the ‘Apache’ to-night, and don’t you know, I had half a mind to wire her to stop over in Copah until I could go after her? That’s a pretty pass for things to come to, isn’t it?—when a man’s afraid to have the members of his family ride over his own particular piece of railroad?”
Sprague flipped the ash from his cigar.
“That’s one of the bridges you don’t have to cross until you come to it.”
Maxwell got out of his chair and refused Sprague’s offer of a fresh cigar.
“No,” he said; “this has been one of the days when I’ve smoked too much. I’m going over tothe office to keep my finger on the pulse of things. When it gets too dull for you over here, come across and break in. If I’m not in my own office, you’ll find me in room eleven—the despatcher’s—keeping tab on the movements of the Apache Limited.”
Fully two hours beyond the time when the superintendent had crossed the railroad plaza to climb the stair of the head-quarters building, Tarbell, strolling along the plaza-fronting street, swung himself over the railing of the loggia porch and took the chair next to the man from Washington, who was still sitting as Maxwell had left him and still smoking.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the patient smoker, without taking his eyes from the row of lighted windows in the railroad building opposite.
“I allowed you would be,” rejoined Tarbell in his gentle Tennessee-mountain drawl. And then, quite as calmly: “I reckon I’ve found the answers to all them questions you ’lotted to me. I reckon I’ve got him.”
“I’ve been betting on you, Tarbell,” was the word of approval. Then: “It comes pretty near home, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does. It’s goin’ to hurt Mr. Maxwellgood and plenty. He counts all the men in the home office as his fam’ly, and there’s never been one o’ them to go back on him till now.”
“What is your evidence?” queried Sprague.
“I reckon you’d call it circumstantial—and so will the judge. But it hobbles him all right. There’s a cut-in on the despatcher’s wires over yonder, ’way up under the roof where nobody’d find it, with four little fine lead wires goin’ down in the wall. I couldn’t find where they come out at, but I reckon that don’t make any difference: they’rethere.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. I’ve got a letter that I hooked out of his coat pocket not ten minutes ago; a letter from some gang boss o’ his’n in New York, givin’ him goss for not showin’ up results, and allowin’ to pull some sort of a gun on him if the papers don’t begin to print scare heads about a certain railroad management,pronto.”
The chemistry expert smiled shrewdly.
“You are not the young man I took you for, Tarbell, if you are not wringing your brain like a wet towel to make it tell you why anybody in New York should wish to see Nevada Short Line wreck bulletins in the newspapers.”
“That ain’t no joke, neither,” Tarbell admittedgravely, adding, “I been hopin’ maybe it would come out in the round-up.”
“Yes,” said Sprague, half-absently. “It will come out in the round-up.” And then, after a thoughtful pause, “Perhaps we’d better go over and relieve Mr. Maxwell’s mind. But first it wouldn’t be a bad idea to telephone the editor ofThe Tribuneand ask him to send his railroad reporter down to Mr. Maxwell’s office. If you say that Mr. Maxwell will probably have a bit of first-page stuff for him, it won’t be necessary to go into details.”
Tarbell went into the hotel lobby to telephone, and afterward they crossed the plaza to the working head-quarters of the double division. Finding the superintendent’s office open and lighted but unoccupied, they went on to the despatcher’s room. In the public space outside of the counter railing three or four trainmen were grouped in front of the bulletin-board looking for their assignments on the night trains and thumbing the file of posted “General Orders.”
Behind the railing Connolly was sitting at his glass-topped wire-table with the train-sheet under his hand and the superintendent at his elbow. Over in the corner under his green-shaded electric bulb, Bolton, the sallow-faced car-record man, was fingering the keys of his type-writer.
Tarbell opened the gate in the railing to admit Sprague and himself. Maxwell looked up and nodded a welcome to his guest.
“Got tired of sitting it out alone, did you?” he said; and then, “I’ll be with you in a minute and we’ll go over to my office. I’m waiting to get Timanyoni’s report of the Limited.”
“Mrs. Maxwell is on the train?”
Maxwell nodded, and a moment later Connolly’s sounder clicked out Timanyoni’s report of the passing train. The fat despatcher was nervous. It showed in his rattling of the key as he O K’d the canyon station’s report, and again in a small disaster when, in reaching for his pen to make the train-sheet entry, he overset his ink-well.
“Well, I’m damned!” he grunted, snatching at the train-sheet and pushing the ink flood back with his free hand. Maxwell came to the rescue, and so did Tarbell; and a liberal application of blotters stopped the flood. But at the close of the incident Connolly’s hands were well blackened.
It was at this conjuncture that Davis, the chief despatcher, came in on the way up to his room in the attic half-story above. Connolly appealed to him at once.
“If you’ll sit in here, just for a minute, Davis, while I go wash my hands?” he said, adding: “I’d ought to be kicked all the way downstairs!”
When Davis had taken the chair and Connolly had gone out, Tarbell whispered to the superintendent. Maxwell nodded, and made a sign to Sprague. When he had closed the door of the despatcher’s room behind himself and his guest, he explained:
“Tarbell says he is ready, and we may as well have it over with. Do you want to be present?”
“As a spectator, yes,” said the expert.
“All right; we’ll go to my office and wait for Archer.”
The waiting interval proved to be short. Maxwell had just thrown his roll-top desk open, and the Government man had planted his big bulk solidly in the half-shadowed window-seat, when the door opened and Connolly came in, his full-moon face a frightened blank and his hands still ink-blackened. Tarbell was only a step behind the despatcher, and the reporter fromThe Tribuneoffice was at Tarbell’s heels. When the three were inside, Tarbell shut the door and put his back against it.
“Here’s your man, Mr. Maxwell,” he said briefly; and Sprague, who had started to his feet at the door opening, sat down again in the shadow and said nothing.
Maxwell pointed brusquely to a chair at the deskend. “Sit down, Dan,” he snapped. And then: “I suppose you know what you’re here for?”
Connolly fell into the chair as if the sharp command had been a blow.
“Know what I’m here for?” he stammered.
“Yes. Nothing will be gained by dodging. You may as well make a clean breast of it. You’ve been faking these scare wreck reports—don’t lie about it; we’ve got the evidence. I want to know who is behind you. Who bribed you to do this thing?”
“Before God, Mr. Maxwell!” the culprit began, with the sweat rolling down his face; but Maxwell stopped him with a quick gesture.
“I’ve told you it was no use to try to lie out of it. I have here on my desk a letter which was taken from your coat pocket to-night, since you came on duty; a letter from which you were careful enough to tear the signature, but on which you were not careful enough to destroy the date line. In that letter the writer threatens to give you away to the New York police if you don’t get busy and give the newspapers a string of Nevada Short Line wrecks to write about. That is enough to send you over the road, but there’s more. The working wires east and west have been cut under the roof of this building, and leads taken off. The leadsdisappear in the wall back of your bunk-room. I don’t ask you what you have to say for yourself; I want you to tell us, right here and now, who planned the thing, and what it was intended to accomplish.”
Connolly had been slowly collapsing in his chair under the merciless fire of accusation, and a pasty pallor was driving the pink out of his round face.
“My God!” he gasped thickly; and then he repeated, “My God!” A silence crammed with threatenings settled down upon the small office-room. Suddenly it was broken by the sound of hurried footfalls in the corridor, and Tarbell was hurled half-way across the room when the door was flung open from without.
It was young Cargill, the engineer, who burst into the private office, and his lips were white.
“The Limited!” he broke out. “She’s overrun her orders at Corona and she’s due to meet Second Eighteen on the single track!”
It was the Government man who led the rush to the despatcher’s room, a rush in which even the fat culprit joined. In the wire office Davis had the key; his jaw was set and the perspiration was standing thickly on his forehead, but he had not lost his nerve. Calmaine, the chief clerk, washanging over his shoulder, and outside of the railing the group of trainmen had grown to a breathless crowd, pressing to hear the latest word.
When Maxwell’s party pushed through the gate, Sprague was still in the lead, and his quick glance took in every detail of the scene. Like a flash he turned upon Tarbell, who was fumbling a pair of handcuffs in his pocket, and pinioned him in a grip that was like the nip of a vice.
“Not yet!” he whispered in Tarbell’s ear; and then Davis snapped his switch and spoke.
“It’s no use,” he said, and his harsh tone was only a thin mask for the break in his voice. “It’s the real thing this time. First Eighteen was ready to pull out of Corona when the Limited went by. Corringer left his wire and chased the freight, hoping to get its engine to cut loose and run after the passenger. He couldn’t catch it.”
A low murmur ran through the crowd packed against the counter railing and somebody whispered, “It’s got the boss; his wife and babies are on that train. Look at him!”
Maxwell had gripped the back of a chair and he was staring hot-eyed at the despatcher.
“Do something, Davis,” he pleaded. “Don’t sit there and let those trains come together! For Christ’s sake, think of something!”
The chief despatcher ducked his head as if he were dodging a blow and swallowed hard.
“There isn’t anything to do, Mr. Maxwell—you know there isn’t anything,” he began in low tones. “If there was——”
It was Connolly who made the break. Twisting away from Tarbell’s grip on his arm he flung himself upon Davis.
“Get out o’ that chair and let me have the key,” he wheezed; and when Davis did not move quickly enough he pounced upon the key standing. Davis got up and quietly slid the chair under the night man who sank heavily into it without missing a letter in the call he was insistently clicking out, over and over again in endless repetition.
“What is it?” whispered the newspaper man, who was standing aside with Tarbell and Sprague; and Tarbell answered:
“It’s the Corcoran coal mine—about half-way between Corona and the first station this side, and a half-mile up the gulch. They’ve got a private wire, but they ain’t got any night operator.”
Davis overheard the whisper and shook his head.
“Dan’s got his wits with him,” he said, in open admiration. “There’s a young time-keeper that sleeps in the coal company’s office shack, and he’s learning to plug in on the wire a little. If Dancan only wake him——” And then, in sudden sharp self-accusation: “God forgive me! why didn’t I think of it and save all the time that’s been wasted?” Then, as Connolly closed the circuit and a halting reply clicked through the receiving instrument: “He’s got him! Thank the Lord, he’s got him! If he can only make him understand what’s wanted, there’s a chance—just one chance in a thousand!”
With the very seconds now freighted with disaster, and with only the crudest of amateur telegraphers at the other end of the wire, nine men out of ten would have blown up and lost the thousandth part of a chance remaining. But Connolly was the tenth man. With his left hand shaking until it was beating a tattoo on the glass table top he hitched his chair closer and began to spell out, letter by letter, the brief call for help upon which so much depended. Tarbell translated for Sprague, word by word. “Hurry—down—to—main-line—and—throw—your—switch—to—red. Then—run—west—and—flag—passenger.”
The key-switch clicked on the final word, and for five long, dragging seconds the silence was a keen agony. Then the sounder began hesitantly: dot—pause—dot; dash—dot—dash, it spelled;and Tarbell translated under his breath, “He says ‘O K’. Now, if he can only chase his feet fast enough——”
How Maxwell managed to live and not die through the interminable twenty minutes that followed; how Davis and Tarbell and Connolly hung breathless over the wire-table, while the throng outside of the railing, augmented now to a jammed crowd of sympathetic watchers, rustled and moved and whispered in awed undertones—are themes upon which the rank and file of the Nevada Short Line still enlarge in the roundhouse tool-rooms and in the switch shanties when the crews are waiting for a delayed train.
The dreadful interval seemed as if it would never be outworn, but the end came at last when the hesitant clicking of the sounder was resumed.
“Call it out, Dan,” shouted somebody among the waiting trainmen, and Connolly pronounced the words slowly as the amateur at the end of the private wire ticked them off.
“Both—trains—safe—freight—backing—to—blind—siding—at—Quentin—switch—passenger—following—under—flag.”
A shout went up that drowned the feeble patter of the telegraph instruments and made the windows rattle. “Bully for the kid at the coal mine!”“Bully for Danny Connolly!” “Come out here, Danny, till we get a chanst at you!”
Maxwell fought his way stubbornly through the crowd, with the newspaper man, Sprague, Tarbell, and Connolly following in his wake. When the five were once more behind the closed door of the private office across the hall, the superintendent turned morosely upon the night despatcher, and he was so full of the thing he was about to do that he did not notice that his guest had taken Tarbell aside for a whispered conference.
“You’ve drawn the teeth of the law, this time, Connolly,” he said sharply. “After what you’ve just done I’m not going to send you to jail. But the least you can do is to tell me who hired you and sent you out here to make trouble for us. If you’ll do that——”
It was Sprague’s hand on his shoulder that stopped him, and then he noticed that Tarbell had disappeared. “Just a minute—until Tarbell gets back,” said the guest, in low tones; and while he was saying it, the door opened suddenly and the ex-cowboy returned, thrusting a sallow-faced young fellow, shirt-sleeved and livid with fear, into the office ahead of him. Then the Government man went on in the same low tone, “You can say to this young man all the things you were going tosay to Mr. Connolly. There was a little miscue on Tarbell’s part, and I was just going to tell you about it when the train trouble butted in.” Then to the fat despatcher, “Mr. Connolly, sit down. You’ve jolly well earned the right to look on and listen.”
Connolly sat down heavily, and so did the superintendent. Thereupon the man from Washington slipped easily into the breach, turning briskly upon the yellow-faced car-record operator.
“Step up here, Bolton, and make a clean sweep of it to Mr. Maxwell. Tell him how a certain firm of New York brokers—you needn’t give the names now—sent you, a convicted bucket-shop wire-tapper, out here to disarrange things on this railroad for stock-jobbing purposes. Then tell him how you tapped the despatcher’s wires and put a set of concealed keys under your car-record table in the other room. Tell him how, after you’d faked that wreck message last night, you ran a bluff for sympathy, and how, when it had worked, your nerve flickered and you dropped from the wrecking-train in the yard and sent a stop-order from the yard office. Come to the front and loosen up!”
Bolton was shuffling forward and was beginning a tremulous confession when Maxwell stopped him harshly.
“You can keep all that to tell in court!” he snapped. And then to Tarbell: “Take him away, Archer. And you go back to your job, Dan, and let Davis go to bed. What I’ve got to say to you will keep.” Then to the young man from theTribune, who had his note-book out and was scribbling down his story at breakneck speed: “Write out what you please, Scanlan, but tell Mr. Kendall that I’ll be up to the office presently, and that I’d like to see the story before it goes to the linotypes.”
When the room was cleared, the snappy little superintendent spun his chair around to face his guest.
“Calvin,” he said solemnly, “you’ll never know how near you came to making me break my heart to-night. If I’d had to send Dan Connolly to jail after what he did in the other room a little while ago——”
The chemistry expert was grinning joyously.
“It was a curious little slip,” he commented. “I thought Tarbell was on; never suspected for a moment that he wasn’t until he butted Connolly in here and shot him at you.”
“But you knew Connolly wasn’t the man? How on top of earth did you run it down, in a single day? I can’t surround it, even yet.”
“It wasn’t much of a nut to crack,” laughed theexpert easily. “I hope you’ll have a harder one for me the next time I happen along. I got my pointer last night—before I knew anything at all about the nature of your trouble. You see, Bolton was the only man in the outfit who wasn’t sincerely jarred and horrified by that fake message. I saw it the minute I’d had a look into his eyes. From that on it was easy enough.”
“I don’t see it,” objected Maxwell.
“Don’t you? I merely argued backward from the results your wire-devil was trying to obtain and sent a cipher message to a friend of mine in New York. He put me next to a nice little plot in the Street to hamper Ford and break down your company credit. Then I loafed around your shack here until I found Bolton’s wire machinery. Bolton didn’t catch on, but he was suspicious enough of a stranger like me to take a little measure of precaution by slipping that incriminating letter into Connolly’s coat pocket. I supposed Tarbell knew that, or I’d have told him.”
Maxwell had been listening in appreciative admiration, but gratitude came quickly to the fore when Sprague paused.
“Calvin, there’s no telling how many lives you’ve saved by this little stop-over of yours here in Timanyoni Park!” he broke out. “You’vedone it. When that story, properly trimmed down, comes out in theTribuneto-morrow morning, the bare-nerves strain will go off like that”—snapping his fingers. “I wish I could show you.... By George! there’s the Limited pulling in. I’ve got to go down and meet the wife and kiddies!”
The big-bodied man who called himself a chemistry sharp and confessed to the riding of many hobbies rose up with a laugh.
“You want to show me? All right: take me downstairs with you and show me Mrs. Maxwell and the babies. As for the other, you know as well as I do that it’s all in the day’s work. Pitch out or we’ll miss the folks—and that would be worse than getting another message from the wire-devil.”