VIThe High Kibosh
SINCE it is a Western boast that the West does nothing by halves, the Brewster Town and Country Club owns two houses; a handsome pink-lava home on one of the quieter business streets of the city, and a rambling, overgrown bungalow at the golf-links on the north shore of the High Line reservoir lake, rechristened, in honor of Colonel Baldwin’s pretty daughter, “Lake Corona.”
On Saturday afternoons, which are bank holidays in the progressive little inter-mountain city, the links at Lake Corona are well patronized; and on a certain Saturday in early September, in the year written down in the annals of the inter-mountain region as “the year of the great railroad war,” one of the players was the big-muscled athlete who figured for the Brewsterites as an expert soil-tester in the Government service, and whose nickname in the Timanyoni country was “Scientific Sprague.”
Sprague’s opponent on the links on this particular Saturday afternoon was Stillings, the railroadlawyer; and at the conclusion of the game, which had been a rather easy walk-over for the big athlete, Stillings offered the winner a seat in his runabout for the return to Brewster.
“Sorry, but I can’t go with you this time, Robert,” said the heavy-weight, when he had tipped his caddie and struggled into his coat. “Maxwell is coming out to dinner and I promised to wait for him. He thinks he is up for another match game with the big-leaguers.”
Stillings paused with his hand on the dash of the runabout. “That so?” he queried. “More piracy?”
“Nothing actually in sight, as yet. But Dick has been getting fresh tips from the New York head-quarters. The big-money people who want your railroad have been keeping pretty quiet since the Mesquite fizzle; possibly they were afraid you folks might have the evidence on them. But now the air seems to be full of lightning again, and nobody, not even President Ford himself, appears to know just where it is going to strike.”
The lawyer reached over and retarded the spark on the racing engines of the little car.
“It’s a queer fight,” he commented. “I never heard of anything just like it before. Of course, we all know what it means: the Transcontinentalneeds our five-hundred-odd miles of Nevada Short Line to put in with its Jack’s Canyon branch for a short cut to the southern coast. Ordinarily, those things are fought out on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and the people who are operating the railroad never know what hits them until they’re safely dead. If the big fellows want the Short Line so bad, why the dickens don’t they go in and buy it up decently?”
The large man who had played such a successful game of golf winked one eye solemnly.
“You wouldn’t expect a Government chemist to find you the answer to any such conundrum as that, would you?” he asked, in cheerful irony.
“I’ll bet you know, just the same,” asserted Stillings confidently.
“I do happen to know, Robert,” was the even-toned reply. “A financial transaction entered into in the early summer by the Ford management—a transaction having nothing whatever to do with the fight—makes a break in prices absolutely necessary before the control can be acquired. What the Ford people did was to build a solid wall of protection around themselves without knowing it or intending to. They deposited something like sixty per cent of the Short Line stock with a syndicate of New York and Bostonbanks as collateral for a loan to be used in double-tracking.”
“Still, I don’t see,” objected the lawyer.
“Don’t you? That sixty per cent of the stock—which is the control—can’t be touched by any fireworks business on the Exchange. The big-money people have played the market up and down with the forty per cent which is not pooled, and nothing has happened. The loaning banks have merely sat tight in the boat, knowing that they held the joint control of a good paying property, and that no amount of sky-rocketing on the Street could make any difference, any real difference, in the value of their collateral so long as the property itself was earning dividends.”
“That is good as far as it goes,” said Stillings, with a frown of perplexity. “But it doesn’t explain why the big-money crowd, or somebody, has been turning heaven and earth upside down all summer to wreck, not the stock, but the property itself. You know that is what has been done. No stone has been left unturned, from demoralizing Maxwell’s force to dynamiting tunnels and planning forty-mile washouts. If big business wants the road, why is it trying to wreck it physically?”
The big man who was fond of insisting that hewas first, last, and all the time a Government chemist grinned amiably.
“It doesn’t agree with your mentality to get beaten at golf, does it, Robert?” he said jokingly. “It is plain enough, when you get hold of the right end of it. Big money’s play is to throw a real scare, not into the stockholders, but into these loaning bankers, don’t you see? If the road’s earnings fall off and it has bad luck enough to make these creditor-bankers really nervous about the value of their collateral, the trick will be turned. The Ford people will immediately be asked to make good or pay up; and there you are.”
“Why, sure!” said the attorney, in a tone which sufficiently emphasized his complete understanding. Then he climbed slowly into the driving-seat of the runabout. “I don’t see why some of the rest of us haven’t caught on long ago,” he went on. “I suppose any of us might have had the simple facts if we had taken the trouble to dig for them.” Then, abruptly: “You’re looking for more trouble, Sprague?”
“Maxwell is; and so is Ford, apparently,” was the evasive reply.
“Never mind Maxwell or Ford; you’re the man,” snapped the lawyer.
“No, I’m not,” was the decisive denial. “It’strue, I have been willing to help out and take a hand in standing off a few of the attempted smashings; but that was only because Dick Maxwell is my friend, and it suited my humor to ride my little reasoning hobby in his behalf. I’m not a sleuth, Stillings; I’m a Government chemist, and I am out here for the ostensible purpose of making a technical report on the soils of this charming valley of yours. You forget that every now and then.”
“Pardon me, old man; I did forget it,” was the hearty apology. “Just the same, you mustn’t throw us down while the fight is still on. Maxwell put it about right the other day when he said that the Nevada Short Line would have been dead and buried two months ago if it hadn’t been for you.”
“Nevertheless, I can’t help out this time, Stillings. That is why I am staying here this evening—to meet Maxwell and tell him that he’ll have to fight for his own hand if the New Yorkers come after him again.”
“Good goodness, Sprague! what’s happened?”
“A thing which nobody could have foreseen, and for which nobody is to blame. At the same time, it lets me out. I’ve got to quit you.”
The attorney adjusted the spark and throttleand cut the wheels of the little car preparatory to the start.
“I can’t very well argue with you—not having any grounds,” he said. “But I hope you won’t decide finally until after you’ve had another talk with Maxwell. Think it over between now and dinner-time, and weigh the consequences to Dick, Sprague. If there’s another earthquake on the way, and you throw him down, he’s a ruined man. I know what you will say: that he is well fixed and doesn’t have to be a railroad superintendent. That’s all right, but his job means more to him than it might to a poor man; it’s his ambition. If there is anything I can do——”
The big chemistry expert shook his head. “There isn’t anything that anybody can do, Robert,” he said soberly; and at that, Stillings eased the clutch in and drove away.
Two hours later Maxwell was sitting out the after-dinner interval with his friend and classmate on the broad lake-fronting veranda of the bungalow club-house. It was a fine night, and the Saturday evening crowd was larger than usual. There was a dotting of canoes on the reservoir lake, and the verandas were filling slowly as the great dining-room emptied itself. For a time the two men had let the talk drift into college reminiscences;but it took a more strictly personal turn when the superintendent said:
“Do you know, Calvin, I’ve often wondered how you came to be assigned to this job of soil-testing—this particular job, I mean—for the Department. It has been a sort of special providence to me; but things don’t often happen that way, unhelped.”
“This thing didn’t happen that way—unhelped,” was the big expert’s quiet rejoinder. “I asked for the job.”
“I’ve wondered if you didn’t. It was mighty good of you to maroon yourself out here in the tall hills for the sake of helping me fight the money pirates, Calvin.”
Sprague was silent for a full minute before he said: “I wish I could claim a motive as disinterested as that, Dick; but if I should, it wouldn’t be honest. I had quite another reason for wishing to return to the Timanyoni after my flying trip through it last July on my way back from California. I can’t tell you what it was; it’s too idiotic for a grown man to own up to.”
The superintendent’s curling mustaches took a grinning uptilt, and he laughed joyously.
“When you talk that way you don’t need to tell me,” he chuckled. “It was a girl.”
“It was,” admitted the self-confessed simpleton,matching his accuser’s grin. “Since you’ve guessed that much, I’ll tell you a little more. I saw her first on your eastbound train, the train that took on the sham dead man at Little Butte and afterward picked up your office-car. You’ll remember you asked me to stay over a day or two with you in Brewster, and I did. As a matter of fact, your persuasion wasn’t needed. I would have stopped off anyway, because the girl stopped off.”
“Heavens and earth!” ejaculated Maxwell, in ecstatic appreciation; “how are the mighty fallen! Lord of love! I never expected to see the day when Cal Sprague, the idol of the foot-ball rooters, would fall for a pretty face just seen, as you might say, in passing! Oh, gosh!”
“Have your laugh, you old married hyena!” grunted the late-comer in the sentimental field. “I can’t get back at you because I didn’t happen to be around when you were making seventeen different kinds of a donkey of yourself over old Hiram Fairbain’s daughter—as I have no doubt you did. But that’s neither here nor there; the young woman I’m speaking of tagged me, and I’m It; I’ve been It ever since that first day on the eastbound train.”
“And you say she stopped off in Brewster?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t meet her?”
“No. You’ve been calling me an amateur detective, Dick; I’m a fake! That girl and the people she was with just vanished into thin air the minute they hit the platform at the Brewster station. I lost them as completely as if they had stepped off into space.”
“So you came back, later, to hunt her up?”
“I did; or to try to get some trace of her—just that.”
“Of course, it says itself that you have found her.”
Sprague’s mellow laugh rumbled deep in his chest.
“Richard, I have been here seven weeks, and I found her—just three days ago! In all my knocking around with you and Starbuck and Stillings and the rest of you, not one man in the bunch has thought it worth his while to tell me that there is a cottage settlement of Eastern summer people up in the mountains on Lake Topaz. I had to blunder around and find out for myself, as I did last Wednesday, when Starbuck took me up to your mine on Mount Geechy.”
“Great guns!” exclaimed the superintendent; “how in the name of common-sense was anybody going to suspect that you needed to know? Thatsummer colony is as old as Brewster. But go ahead and tell me more. I’m interested, if I don’t look it.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I found her; met her. She is stopping with an aunt of hers, and by chance—good luck you’d say—I have something a little better than a speaking acquaintance with the aunt—through some common friends in New York. There’s nothing to it, Richard. The girl can have her pick—she has already turned down a couple of English titles—and she isn’t going to pick any such overgrown slob of a man as your humble. Let’s talk about something else.”
“If I branch off, it will be into my own grief,” said Maxwell half-reluctantly. “I had another wire from Ford this afternoon. The big-money people are getting ready to swat us again, and Ford admits that he can’t find out where it is to come from, or what it is to be. If it wasn’t for the name of the thing, and what I owe Ford, I’d be about ready to throw up my job, Calvin. I have money enough to live on, and this business of dragging along from day to day with the feeling that any minute you may get the knife between your ribs isn’t very exhilarating.”
“You say Ford can’t give you any hint of what is coming next?”
“Not the slightest. But there is something inthe wind. You know Kinzie, the president of the Brewster National Bank? He cornered me last night at the club and asked a lot of queer questions that didn’t seem to have any particular bearing on anything.”
“What kind of questions?” inquired the expert.
“Oh, about our right-of-way through the town of Copah, and about our outstanding floating debts, and finally about a ridiculous damage suit that has been dragging its way through the courts.”
Sprague sat up and relighted his fat, black cigar.
“What about the damage suit?” he asked.
“It’s a piker’s graft,” was the half-impatient rejoinder. “We have a little branch line over to the bauxite mines in the western edge of the county. The telegraph company doesn’t maintain an office, and our agent is authorized to handle what few commercial telegrams there are. It seems that one came for a man named Hixon, a prospector whose exact whereabouts could not be ascertained at the moment. The message was three days old when it was delivered, and Hixon sued for ten thousand dollars damages; said he’d lost the sale of a mine by the delay.”
“You are fighting the suit?”
“Of course—it’s point-blank robbery! Stillingshas had the case postponed two or three times in the hope of wearing Hixon out. It comes up again next week, I believe.”
“And you say Kinzie was curious about this lawsuit?”
“Yes. It seems that Hixon is, or has been, a customer of the bank; and Kinzie suggested that we ought to compromise.”
“Um,” said the big-bodied man thoughtfully. “In whose court does the case come up?”
“In Judge Watson’s.”
“Has Hixon a good lawyer?”
“He has the Kentucky colonel, suh,” laughed Maxwell; “our one original, dyed-in-the-wool, fire-eating spellbinder from the Blue-grass. When Colonel Bletchford gets upon his feet and turns loose, you can hear the bird of freedom scream all the way across Timanyoni Park.”
The big chemistry expert with the athletic slant was moving uneasily in his chair. After a little interval of silence he said: “I can’t be with you in any more of these little two-steps with the money trust, Richard. I’m going back to Washington to-morrow.”
Maxwell’s start carried him half-way out of his chair, and he dropped his short pipe and broke the stem of it.
“Great Scott, Calvin—don’t say that!” he implored. “You can’t throw us down that way! Why, good Lord, man, if it hadn’t been for you and your brains.... But, pshaw! there’s no use in talking about it; you simplycan’tgo and leave us hanging over the ragged edge!”
“I can; and I guess I must,” insisted Sprague gently. “And the worst of it is, Dick, I can’t tell you or anybody else the why. It’s just up to me, and I’ve got it to do.”
Maxwell’s perturbation had cleared his brain like a bucketing of cold water. “Tell me, Calvin,” he broke out; “is the girl mixed up in it?”
“She is,” was the brief admission.
“Is she gone, or going—back East, I mean?”
“N-no; not immediately, I believe.”
Maxwell sat back in his chair and began to twist nervously at the charm on his watch-fob.
“I suppose I haven’t any kick coming,” he said at length. “What you have done for me this summer couldn’t be measured in money, and I have no right to ask you to go on giving your time and your brains on the score of friendship.”
“There isn’t any bigger score in this little old round world of ours, Dick,” said the other gravely. “I’m a cold-blooded fish, and I know it. I ought to stand by you; every decent thing in me butone urges me to stand by you. But that one exception queers me. I hope you’ll win out; I hope to God you’ll win out, Dick; but I can’t be the man to put the club into your hands this time.”
The snappy little superintendent took his defeat hard. For some further time he used every argument he could devise to persuade Sprague to change his mind. But at the end the big man was shaking his head regretfully.
“It’s no use, Richard,” he said finally. “If you were in my place, you’d do just as I’m doing—and for the same reason. Let’s go back to town. It’s too cheerful here to fit either one of us just now.”
Maxwell had driven out to the club-house on the shore of Lake Corona in his small car, and when he returned to town Sprague occupied the mechanician’s seat beside him. It was a run of only a few miles, over the best driving road in the county, and there was neither time nor the occasion for much talk.
When the car had trundled across the Timanyoni bridge and the viaduct over the railroad tracks, Maxwell would have set Sprague down at his hotel across the plaza from the station; but Sprague himself objected. “You are going over to your office? I’ll go with you, if you don’tmind. It’s my last evening, and I’m not in the humor to sit it out alone. I won’t interfere, if you want to work,” was the way he put it.
It was thus it happened that they climbed the stair to the second story of the railroad building together, and together walked down the corridor to the door of the despatcher’s room. Connolly, the fat night despatcher, was at his glass-topped table behind the counter railing, and when he saw the superintendent he held up a pudgy hand.
“Benson’s been trying to get you on the wire from Copah for an hour or more, Mr. Maxwell,” he said. “I didn’t know where to raise you.”
“Is he on the wire now?” asked Maxwell, letting himself and his companion through the wicket in the counter rail.
“No; but I’ll call him for you.” Followed a sharp rattling of the key and a few broken snippings from the sounder, and then the despatcher got up out of his chair. “Here he is,” he said. “He wants to talk to you, personally.”
Maxwell took the vacated chair and key, and Connolly stood aside with the big expert. “Seems right good to have you dropping in every now and then, Mr. Sprague,” said the fat one. “You’d ought to belong to us out here. We’d sure make it warm for you in the Short Line family.”
Sprague looked the dumpling-like despatcher over in mild and altogether friendly criticism.
“Speaking of families: you got married yourself a little while ago, didn’t you, Dan?” he asked.
“You bet I did!” was the enthusiastic reply. “Sadie ain’t got done talking yet about that set of knives and forks you sent her from Philadelphia.”
Again the big-muscled man was looking the despatcher over critically, this time with a quizzical twinkle in his gray eyes.
“Tell me how you did it, Dan,” he urged soberly. “You’re fatter than I ever dared to be. How did you manage to make a girl believe that there might be a man inside of a big body as well as in a medium-sized one?”
The night despatcher laughed until his moon-like face was purple; until the car-record clerk in the distant corner of the room looked up from his type-writer to see if he, too, might not share the joke.
“Gi-give me a little time,” wheezed Connolly; and he was presumably going to tell how it had been done when Maxwell got up from the glass-topped table and broke in.
“Twenty-six is asking for orders, Dan,” he said; and when Connolly had resumed his chair andhis key: “That’s all, Calvin. We’ll go across to my office, if you like.”
It was behind the closed door of the superintendent’s room, after Sprague had chosen the easiest of the three chairs and settled himself for a smoke, that Maxwell said:
“I’m going to miss you like the devil, Calvin; I’m missing you right now.”
Sprague blew a series of smoke rings toward the disused gas-fixture hanging from the centre of the ceiling.
“Something that Chief Engineer Benson has been telling you over the wire from Copah?” he suggested.
“Yes.”
Another series of the smoke rings, and then: “Well, I didn’t tell you you couldn’t talk, did I?”
Maxwell did not haggle over the inverted terms of the permission to talk. The necessity was too pressing.
“Benson has struck something that he can’t account for. For a week or more the Transcontinental people have been gathering a working camp at the Copah end of the bridge on which their Jack’s Canyon branch crosses the Pannikin. Nobody seems to know what they are going to do,or where they are going to do it. At Leckhard’s suggestion, I sent Benson over to pry around a little.”
“And he hasn’t found out what the T-C. folks have in mind?”
“No, he hasn’t. But it is plainly some sort of a track-building job. He says they have a hundred or more scraper-teams in camp, a train-load of new steel, and forty car-loads of cross-ties. And this afternoon they brought down a mechanical rail-layer—a machine much used nowadays for rushing a job of track-laying.”
The big guest smoked reflectively for a full minute or more before he said: “No jangle with the Copah city authorities about any trackage rights in the town, or street crossings, or anything of that sort?”
“Not that I have ever heard of. The T-C. has its own Copah yard, and has a switching connection with the Pacific Southwestern yard tracks; though, naturally, there is little exchange of business between the two competitive systems.”
“Do they connect with you?” asked Sprague.
“Not directly. Our yard was originally an independent lay-out, lying a mile to the west of town. When the Short Line became a grand division of the Pacific Southwestern, the two yards,ours and the P. S-W., were operated as one, though they are still separate lay-outs.”
“I see. What else does Benson say?”
“He has been asking questions and chewing the rag with anybody who would talk, he says; but we all know Jack. He is too downright and bluff to be much of a detective.”
Maxwell turned to his desk and began on the ever-present pile of waiting work; and the big expert settled himself more deeply into his chair and smoked on with his gaze fixed upon the ceiling gas-pendant. After the lapse of many minutes he said: “Have you a blue-print of the Copah yards, Dick?”
Maxwell rose and went to a filing-case in the corner of the office. After a little search he found the required blue-print and gave it to Sprague, explaining the locations and the relative positions of the three railroad yards. The expert studied the map thoughtfully, even going so far as to scrutinize the fine lettering on it with the help of a small pocket magnifying-glass.
“And right over here by the river is where you say the new camp has been pitched?” he asked, indicating the spot with the handle of the magnifier.
“Yes; Benson says it’s at the south end of the bridge, and just west of the T-C. bridge siding.”
Sprague looked up quickly. “Did Benson say they had an electric-light outfit for night work?”
“Why, no; I don’t remember that he did.”
“Go and ask him,” said Sprague shortly; and the superintendent, who had learned to take the expert’s suggestions without question, left the office to do it.
He was back in a few minutes, with the light of a newly kindled excitement in his eyes.
“By Jove, Calvin, you’re a wizard!” he exclaimed. “Your guess is better than another man’s eyesight. They’ve not only got the light outfit—they’ve strung it up and gone to work! Benson says they are laying a track out across the valley of the Pannikin like this,” and he traced a curving line on the blue-print, which Sprague was still holding spread out on his knees.
Sprague nodded slowly. “That is move Number One,” he said. “Dick, you’re in for a fight to a finish, this time. They’ve got you foul in some way, and they are so sure of it that they are already beginning to take possession. Don’t you see what this new track means?”
“No, I don’t,” Maxwell confessed, with a frown of perplexity.
“You will see before to-morrow night. Pull yourself together, old man, and do a little clear-headed reasoning. Why are these people startingout to build a railroad at ten o’clock Saturday night? Surely you’ve had experience enough in crossing fights to know what that means!”
Maxwell straightened up and swore out of a full heart.
“You mean that they are going to cut a crossing through the Southwestern main line, and do it on Sunday, when our people can’t stop them with a court injunction?”
“You’ve surrounded at least half of it,” said the expert. “The other half will come later. If I wasn’t going away to-morrow——”
Maxwell walked to the window and stared across at the flaming arc light hanging in front of the Hotel Topaz on the opposite side of the plaza. When he turned again, Sprague had rolled the blue-print into a tube and was laying it on the desk.
“Calvin, you’ve had time to think it over,” said the man at the window. “You haven’t made it very plain for me, but I can understand that it’s friendship against—against the girl. I’m human enough to know what that means, but——”
Sprague was holding up one of his big square-fingered hands in protest.
“I have been thinking it over, Dick,” he admitted gently. “I’ll stay—for the line-up, anyway. But it’s only fair to warn you that I maydrop out at any minute; perhaps when the game is going dead against you. Now we’ll get action. You go back to the wire and keep in touch with Benson. We want to know at the earliest possible moment exactly what it is that the T-C. people are trying to do. While you’re wiring, I’ll go out and try to find Stillings.”
This was the situation at ten o’clock on Saturday night. At the nine-o’clock Sunday morning breakfast in the Topaz café, when Maxwell, hollow-eyed and haggard from his night’s vigil at the wires, next had speech with Sprague, the news from the seat of war at Copah was sufficiently exciting.
As Maxwell had predicted, the Transcontinental track-layers had built up to the Southwestern main line, and had finally succeeded in cutting a crossing through it, though not without a fight. The Southwestern force, with Leckhard, the division superintendent, at its head, had resisted as it could. Since it was past midnight, with no hope of obtaining legal help until Monday morning, Leckhard had “spotted” a locomotive on the crossing, and when the men in charge of it were overborne by numbers, the engine had been derailed and “killed” before it was abandoned.
The stubborn resistance had purchased nothing more than a short delay. The marauders had a wrecking-crane as part of their equipment; and half an hour after its abandonment the derailed Southwestern engine had been toppled over into the ditch, and the track-layers were at work installing the crossing frogs.
“And after that?” queried Sprague, when Maxwell had told of the losing fight at the main line crossing.
“After that they went on building across the valley and heading for the western end of our yard. At the last report, which came about eight o’clock, they had less than a mile of steel to lay before they would be on our right-of-way. Benson is crazy. He is yelling at me now to petition the governor for the militia.”
“You haven’t done anything?”
“There isn’t anything to do. They are on neutral ground, now, and will be until they reach our right-of-way—if that is what they are heading for. We have no manner of right to interfere with them until they become actual trespassers; and as for that, no physical force we could muster would stop them. Benson says there are between four and five hundred men in that track gang, and many of them are armed.”
Sprague nodded. “It is a fight to a finish, as I told you last night. And they have the advantage because we don’t know yet where or how they are going to hit us. Have you communicated with Ford?”
“I have tried to; but I don’t get any reply.”
“Tally!” said the big man on the opposite side of the table. “I’ve been having the same kind of bad luck. I can’t locate Stillings.”
“Did you try his house?”
“I did that first. His family is out of town, and he has been stopping at the club. But nobody there seems to know anything about him. A little after midnight I found your division detective, young Tarbell, and put him on the job. We’re needing Stillings, and needing him badly.”
“Tarbell hasn’t reported back yet?”
“Not yet; it is beginning to look as if he had dropped out, too. But the day is still young. You’d better go upstairs and get a little sleep. I’ll stay on deck and call you if you are needed.”
Maxwell had finished his simple breakfast and he took the good advice. It was nine hours later, and the electrics were twinkling yellow in the sunset pinks and grays flooding the quiet Sunday evening streets and the railroad plaza, when hecame down and found Sprague just ready to go in to dinner.
“News!” demanded the superintendent eagerly. “I had no idea of wasting the day this way.”
Sprague made him wait until they were seated at a table for two in the corner of the café.
“The Copah fight is over, and the T-C. people have broken into your yards with their new track,” the expert announced briefly. “Benson had to give up and go to bed about noon, but Leckhard has kept us posted. The track is in, and frogged to a connection with your main line; and the entire attacking force has camped down at the two points of trespass; presumably to keep you and Leckhard from interfering and tearing up their job. Move Number One, whatever it may mean, is a move accomplished.”
“I can’t understand; I can’t begin to understand!” said Maxwell, in despair. And then: “No word yet from Ford?”
“No; and what is more to the point, there is none from Stillings—nor from Tarbell. I’m beginning to think that this is a bigger game than any we’ve played yet, Dick. I dug up Editor Kendall, ofThe Tribune, this afternoon, and had a little heart-to-heart talk with him. There is big trouble of some sort in the air; he has smelled it,but he can’t tell what it is. He has his young men out everywhere, ‘on suspicion,’ and he has promised to keep in touch with us up to the time his paper goes to press.”
“That ought to help us to get at the facts,” said the superintendent. “Kendall is our friend, and he has some mighty keen young fellows on his staff. By the way, there’s one of them now—just coming in at the door. He’s looking for somebody, too.”
The young incomer was not long in finding his man. With a nod to the head-waiter, he came across to Sprague’s table. “A note for you, Mr. Sprague—from Mr. Kendall,” he said. “There’s no answer, I believe,” and he went on to another table and began to chat with two other young men, strangers to Maxwell, who had come in on the evening train.
Sprague glanced at his note and passed it across the table. Maxwell read it and found that it merely added to the mysteries without offering anything in the way of enlightenment.
“Dear Sprague:“Have followed your suggestion, and our young men have spotted at least a score of the strangers at the different hotels. Nobody seems to knowany of them, and they won’t talk. You will find a list of names, copied from the hotel registers, on enclosed slip. It has occurred to me that Maxwell might know some of them, if your suspicions are well founded.“Kendall.”
“Dear Sprague:
“Have followed your suggestion, and our young men have spotted at least a score of the strangers at the different hotels. Nobody seems to knowany of them, and they won’t talk. You will find a list of names, copied from the hotel registers, on enclosed slip. It has occurred to me that Maxwell might know some of them, if your suspicions are well founded.
“Kendall.”
Maxwell frowned over the list for a moment before handing it back.
“A few of them are familiar,” he said. “Tom Carmody is a division superintendent on the west end of the T-C., and this man Hunniwell used to be in their legal department. Vance Jackson is, or used to be, Carmody’s chief despatcher; and—why, say! this is a T-C. crowd; here’s Andy Cochran, their Canyon Division trainmaster.”
“Any more?” asked Sprague quietly.
“No; the other names are all strange to me.”
Sprague took the list and pointed with a square-ended forefinger to one of the names.
“This man Dimmock; you don’t know him?” he queried.
“No.”
“Well, I don’t know him, either; but I happen to know something about him. Two years ago I was doing a little soil work down in Oklahoma. It was during the time they were having the scrapwith the oil companies. Mr. Dimmock was there, ostensibly as an independent capitalist from the East looking for bargains in oil-wells, but really as a representative of the trust.”
“Is this the same man?”
The expert held his fork pointing diagonally across his plate. “Follow the line of this fork,” he directed in low tones, “and you’ll see him—at the farther table by the door.”
Maxwell looked and saw a generously built, smooth-shaven, cold-featured man who looked like big money, dining at a table alone. The big-money look was not obtrusive; but it was sufficiently apparent in the city cut of the Sunday broadcloth, in the spotless linen, and not less in the attitude of the obsequious waiter who hovered around the great man’s chair.
“I took the trouble to look up Mr. Dimmock in the Oklahoma period,” Sprague went on. “I found that he was pretty well known in New York as the right hand of a certain great money lord whose name we needn’t mention here. That being the case, it is hardly necessary to add that his presence in Brewster at this particular crisis is a bit ominous.”
“Have you told Kendall this about Dimmock?” asked the superintendent.
“No; but he’ll be pretty sure to trace the gentleman for himself. Where a question of pure news is involved, Kendall is apt to be found running well ahead of the field.”
“But that doesn’t help us out any,” Maxwell objected.
“No. We seem to be forced to await developments; and that, Richard, is always a mark of the losing side. I wish to goodness Stillings would turn up.”
“It’s odd about Bob. He doesn’t often drop out without leaving a trail behind him. Have you finished? Then let’s go over to the office and see if there is any further word from Benson or Leckhard.”
It was when they were leaving the dining-room together that they came upon Tarbell, the ex-terror of Montana cattle thieves. The young man was way-worn and dusty, and his eyes were red for want of sleep. Sprague’s question was shot-like.
“You’ve found him, Archer?”
“Yep; as good as,” was the short rejoinder.
“Turn it loose,” commanded Sprague.
“He’s at the bottom of an old prospect hole up on Mount Baldwin; him and Mr. Maxwell’s brother-in-law, Billy Starbuck. I had to come back to town to get a rope to pull ’em out.”
“What?” said Maxwell. “How did they get there?”
The young special deputy shook his head.
“I don’t know the whys an’ wherefores any more ’n a goat,” he said simply. “I got onto it through the barkeep’ at the road-house out on the Topaz pike. He said a bunch o’ fellas came along in an auto late last night and stopped for drinks. They come in two at a time, and two of ’em didn’t come in at all. Just as they was startin’ off, there was a scrap o’ some sort in the auto, and the barkeep’, who was lookin’ out o’ the window, swore to me he got a glimpse o’ Mr. Stillings. I found the auto tracks and followed ’em. They left the road this side o’ the lake, crossed the Gloria on the bridge, and shoved that machine up an old wood trail on Baldwin.”
“Well, go on,” said Maxwell, impatiently.
“I found where they’d stopped and took Mr. Stillings and Billy out o’ the car; and it sure looked as if there’d been another scrap, the way the bushes was tore up. About a quarter back from the trail I found the hole. Starbuck hollered up at me when I peeked in. I couldn’t see ’em none, but Billy he said they was both there, and wasn’t hurt none to speak of—only in their feelin’s. He told me to chase back and get a rope.”
Maxwell looked at his watch. “How deep is this hole, Archer?”
“’Bout a hundred foot, or maybe more.”
“We’ll get a car and go after them,” was the superintendent’s instant decision. “You say this was last night; have they had anything to eat?”
“Yep; Billy said a basket o’ grub had been lowered down to ’em a little spell after they was chucked in.”
“All right. Go over to the shops and get a coil of rope out of the wrecking-car, and I’ll get an auto. Want to go along, Calvin?”
“Sure,” was the prompt reply.
Maxwell, being a reasonably wealthy mine owner, as well as the superintendent of the railroad, kept two cars; a runabout and a big touring-machine which, in the absence of his family, were both housed in a down-town garage. In the big car the twenty-mile drive over the Topaz Lake pike was quickly made.
Just before they came to the bridge over the Gloria, they passed an auto with two men in it going toward town. Oddly enough, as it seemed, the in-bound car gave them a wide berth, steering almost into the ditch at the passing, and speeding up to a racing clip as soon as the ditched machine had been yanked back into the roadway. Tarbell,who was driving the Maxwell car, stopped, jumped out, and examined the tracks of the other car by the help of a lighted match.
“That’s them,” he said laconically, when he resumed the steering-wheel. “That was the same car. It’s got a set o’ them new-fangled tires with creepers on ’em.”
“Hurry!” snapped Maxwell. “We don’t know what they’ve been doing to Stillings and Billy, this time.”
Happily they soon found that the evening visit of the two unknown men to the abandoned prospect shaft had been charitable rather than malevolent. Stillings, who was the first of the two captives to be hauled out of the dark pit on the mountain side, told them that another basket of food had just been lowered by a string into the shaft. And when Starbuck came up he brought the basket with him.
Singularly enough, the two rescued ones had no explanation to offer; or, at least, none that served to explain anything. It transpired that they had dined together in the town house of the club the evening before, and had afterward gone to the theatre together. After the play they had taken a taxi to go to Stillings’s house in the suburbs to sleep. An auto had followed them, andwhen they had dismissed the taxi they had been set upon by a number of masked men who tumbled out of the pursuing car. Since they had no weapons, they were quickly overpowered, thrown into the car, carried off to the mountains, and dumped into the prospect hole, the rope by which they had been lowered being thrown in after them. That was all.
“And you don’t know what it was for?” asked Sprague, when they were rolling evenly back to the city with Starbuck at the steering-wheel.
“No more than you do,” was the lawyer’s answer. “Billy and I have speculated over it all day—having no other way of amusing ourselves—and it’s a perfectly blind trail. Billy says he knows I must have been the one they were after, and I say he must have been the one. You can take your choice.”
At the club town house the two rescued ones were set down, and Tarbell was released to go and get his well-earned rest after the twenty-four-hour task of shadow work.
“Get yourself in shape to go on an advisory committee with us as soon as you can, Robert,” was Sprague’s injunction to the attorney; and then Maxwell drove down to the railroad building, and the expert was with him when he went up to the despatcher’s office.
There was no more news from the Copah seat of war, two hundred miles to the eastward, or, at most, nothing different. The huge alien track-laying force was still guarding the crossing through the Southwestern main line and the new junction with the Nevada Short Line in the western yards. Leckhard reported that Benson was sleeping off his fatigues of the previous night, and said that all was quiet on the late battle-ground.
“And still no word from Ford!” said Maxwell, as he and Sprague, having put the car up at the garage, walked back to the hotel. “By and large, Calvin, that is the most mysterious thing in the bunch. I can’t understand it.”
“Unless I am much mistaken, we shall all understand many things to-morrow that we can’t appreciate to-night,” was Sprague’s prediction; and long after Maxwell had gone back to his office to put in a make-up period at his desk, the big-bodied man from Washington sat out on the loggia porch of the hotel smoking in thoughtful solitude and staring absently at the unwinking eyes of the mast-head electrics in the railroad yard diagonally opposite.
The Monday morning dawned bright and fair, as a vast majority of the mornings do in the favored inter-mountain paradise known as Timanyoni Park. Notwithstanding his long Sundaysleep, Maxwell came down late to his breakfast, and the café waiter told him that Sprague had eaten at his usually early hour and was gone.
While he was waiting to be served, the superintendent glanced through the morningTribune. There was a rather exciting first-page news story of the track-laying fight at Copah. The story was evidently an Associated Press despatch, and was carefully non-committal in its reference to the Transcontinental’s purpose in rushing the new trackage through to a connection with the Nevada Short Line yards. None the less, the impression was given that the Southwestern’s opposition to the move had been only perfunctory and for public effect. Also, the impression was conveyed that the Copah public, at least, believed that there was a secret understanding between the two railroad corporations.
Turning to the inside pages, Maxwell found no editorial comment on the news story, and he was still wondering why Editor Kendall had missed his chance when Stillings came in and took the chair at the end of the table.
“They told me I’d find you here,” said the lawyer, “and I wanted to have a word with you before the wheels begin to go round. This is ourday in court on the Hixon damage suit, and we’ll have to fish or cut bait this time. In all probability, we sha’n’t be able to get another postponement, and if we let the case come to trial, it’s all off. The jury will give Hixon his verdict, if only for the reason that he is one man fighting a corporation. The only question is, shall I try to compromise before it is too late?”
“Is there any chance for a compromise?” asked Maxwell.
“I don’t know positively. Bletchford was willing a few weeks ago, but his figure was so high that I refused to talk to him.”
“It’s a hold-up!” snapped the superintendent shortly. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“All right,” said the attorney, rising to go. “I thought I’d give you one last chance at it. The case is called for ten o’clock in Judge Watson’s court. If you’re foot-loose, you might come up and see us lose ten thousand dollars. I guess that is what it will come to.” And then, as he was turning to go: “By the way, that was a mighty cold-blooded thing the T-C. people did yesterday, wasn’t it? What does it mean?”
“If Sprague hasn’t told you, I’m sure I can’t.”
“I haven’t seen Sprague. He left a note at the office this morning, saying he’d be around later;but he hasn’t shown up yet. Will you come over to the court-house and see the jury sand-bag us?”
Quite naturally, the hard-working superintendent had no notion of wasting his forenoon in a court-room, and he said so tersely. And beyond Stillings’s departure and the finishing of the late breakfast, he went across to his office and plunged into the day’s tasks.
There was an unusual quantity of the work that morning, it seemed, and no sooner was he through with one file of referred papers than Calmaine, the chief clerk, was ready with another. Only once during the forenoon was the steady office grind lightened by an interruption from the outside world. At ten o’clock Benson wired from Copah, saying that the T-C. track-layers were at work again, carefully surfacing and ballasting the new track as if it were to be a permanency. Also, the chief engineer asked if any legal steps had been taken looking to the prevention of further trespass.
Maxwell broke the routine pace long enough to dictate to Calmaine the reply to Benson’s asking. It stated the facts briefly. No legal steps had as yet been taken. A full report of the intrusion had gone to the Pacific Southwesternhead-quarters in New York, and no action would be taken until New York had spoken.
It was a little before noon when Calmaine carried away the final files of claim correspondence with the superintendent’s notations on them, and Maxwell sat back in his chair and relighted his cigar, which had gone out many times during the stressful morning. In the act the door of the private office suddenly opened and the heavy-set, neatly groomed gentleman whom Sprague had pointed out at the hotel dinner-table the previous evening walked in and took the chair at the desk end, removing his hat and wiping his brow with a handkerchief filmy enough to have figured as themouchoirof a fine lady.
“Mr. Maxwell, I believe?” he said, dropping a card bearing the single line, “C. P. Dimmock,” on the desk.
“That is my name,” returned Maxwell, bristling with a wholly unaccountable prickling of antagonism.
“I have come, as an officer of Judge Watson’s court, to take over your railroad,” announced the cold-featured man calmly, and as he said it, the telephone buzzer under Maxwell’s desk went off as though a general fire-alarm had been sounded from the central office.
Maxwell reached for the telephone and put the receiver to his ear. It was Stillings who was at the other end of the wire, and he was frantically incoherent. But out of the attorney’s coruscating babblement the superintendent picked enough to enable him to surround the principal fact. In the face of all precedent, in defiance of all its legal rights, the Nevada Short Line had been practically declared bankrupt and a receiver had been appointed.
Notwithstanding his nerve, which was ordinarily very good, the snappy little superintendent’s hand trembled when he replaced the ear-piece on its hook and turned to his visitor.
“So you’ve got us at last, have you, Mr. Dimmock?” he said, constraining himself to speak calmly. “It was on the Hixon case, our attorney tells me.”
The visitor nodded blandly.
“You should have compromised that case, Mr. Maxwell—if you will allow me the privilege of criticising, after the fact. But we needn’t come to blows over the purely academic question. Judge Watson has appointed me receiver—temporary, of course—for the railroad property. I am here to take charge in the interest of all concerned, and I am assuming that you won’t put yourself in contemptof court by any ill-considered resistance. Here is the court order.” And he tossed a folded paper across to the desk.
For the moment Maxwell was speechless. Then he slowly straightened up and took a few packets of papers out of the desk pigeon-holes marked “R. Maxwell, Private,” putting them into his pocket. That done, he removed the desk and door keys from his pocket ring and laid them upon the desk.
“I think that is about as far as I have to go, personally,” he said, rising and reaching for his hat. “And, of course, I have nothing to ask for myself. But for the staff and the rank and file, Mr. Dimmock—I hope you’re not going to make a clean sweep. We have a mighty good working organization, and it will cause a great deal of hardship if you take the usual course of discharging and replacing all heads of departments.”
The new head of all departments smiled, and in the smile much of the cold hardness of his face disappeared.
“That is a matter with which I shall have very little to do, Mr. Maxwell,” he returned. “Mr. Carmody, lately in charge of the Transcontinental’s Pacific Division, will be my operatingchief, and I am sure that you yourself, as a practical railroad man, would counsel me to give him a free hand.”
Maxwell took the additional bitter dose of the medicine of defeat like a man, but he made one more attempt—an attempt to save Calmaine’s head.
“My chief clerk,—the young man who admitted you here,—I hope you can provide for him, Mr. Dimmock. Apart from any personal relations, I have found him the most faithful, the most painstaking——”
The new receiver lifted a faultlessly manicured hand in genial protest.
“You know I couldn’t do that, Mr. Maxwell,” he objected. “Your young man has probably been much too close to you to make it possible or prudent. You are a rich man yourself, and you can very easily provide for your secretary, as I make no doubt you will. Must you go? Don’t be in a hurry. We needn’t make this a personal fight, I’m sure.”
The ex-superintendent looked at his watch and told a lie for the sake of keeping the peace.
“It is my luncheon hour,” he said. “If there are any routine matters upon which you may wish to consult me, you will find me over at the hotel.”And he went out with his hat pulled over his eyes and his blood boiling. To have stayed another minute would have been to risk an explosion.
It was a small but exceedingly fervent indignation meeting which gathered in Attorney Stillings’s office in the Kinzie Building a little after twelve o’clock on this day of cataclysms. When Maxwell entered, Stillings was trying to explain to Starbuck and Sprague and Editor Kendall—who had been hauled out of bed to lend his presence to the conference—just how it had come about.
As it appeared in the wrathful summing up, it had happened very easily; so easily as to present every indication of careful prearrangement. When the Hixon case had been called in court, Stillings had risen and asked for a further postponement, having, as it chanced, a very good excuse in the fact that the witness by whom he expected to prove that Hixon’s claim of a lost mining sale was a pure invention was absent. Instantly the Kentucky colonel counsel for the plaintiff had jumped up, not to protest against the further delay, but to introduce his colleague in the cause—the stranger whose name on the Hophra House register was Mr. Peter Hunniwell.
Before Stillings could get his breath, Hunniwell was on his feet, making an impassioned pleafor justice. Rapidly rehearsing the course of the defendant railroad company, which he charged with maliciously striving to defeat the ends of justice, he summed up with a still more serious charge, namely, that the railroad was not only unwilling to pay the just claims upon it, but was unable to do so; was, in effect, practically bankrupt, as the thick packet of affidavits, which he here passed up to the judge, would sufficiently prove.
“After that,” Stillings went on, “it wasbiff! bang!and the fight was over. Judge Watson merely glanced through the affidavits—which may or may not be purely faked—while Hunniwell, in a voice like a steam calliope, was demanding that the court appoint a receiver. It was so ridiculous, so absolutely beyond all precedent, that it didn’t seem worth while to try to call him down. When Hunniwell finally quit, the judge was looking over his spectacles at us in that mild, half-vacant way of his, and saying, ‘I think your point is very well taken. It is time that something was done to bring these defendant corporations to a sense of their responsibilities to the plain people. I shall appoint, as temporary receiver, Mr. C. F. Dimmock, the appointment to take effect this day at noon.’ At noon, mind you!” choked Stillings. “And it was at that moment half-past eleven!”
“Of course, you tried to break in,” said Maxwell.
“Sure! But I might as well have gone out on the court-house steps and shouted at the scenery! Watson told me, in the same half-absent way, that the receivership was only temporary, and that we should have ample opportunity to show cause, if we could, why the receiver should be discharged at the regular hearing, which he there and then set for the twelfth of the month, naming his chambers as the place. Before I could wedge in another word, court was adjourned and Watson was leaving the bench.”
Sprague was nodding slowly.
“Now we know the meaning of the Sunday track-laying, and the sudden influx of strangers—most of whom will doubtless turn out to be T-C. officials and employees—and the mysterious kidnapping of the Short Line’s attorney night before last,” he said. And then to Maxwell: “I suppose the thing is definitely done, and you have been properly kicked out of your office, Dick?”
Maxwell briefed the short interview with Dimmock for the benefit of the others.
“Dimmock and Carmody are in charge,” he concluded, “and before night they will have tried and executed everybody in the service whose head sticks up far enough to give them an excuse forcutting it off. They are going to make a clean sweep. Dimmock practically admitted it. By this time to-morrow the Nevada Short Line will be part and parcel of the Transcontinental System, with only T-C. men in charge.”
“Holy Smoke!” said Kendall, and the ejaculation from him meant more than the most frenzied outburst of the average man: and then again he said, “Holy Smoke!”
It was Starbuck, himself a small stockholder in the confiscated railroad, who first got his feet upon the solid earth again.
“I reckon we-all are just going to sit around and bite our thumbs and let these hold-ups put it all over us,” he said, in his slow drawl; adding, after the proper pause: “I don’t think!”
Maxwell sprang out of his chair.
“I must go to the commercial office and wire Ford!” he broke out. “He’ll know what to do, if there is anything that can be done. Stillings, you get in touch with our general counsel in Chicago. We’re an interstate road, and this thing can’t be settled in a Timanyoni county court!”
“Hold on,” said Stillings. “That is where we’re lame. We allowed ourselves to be sued in this cause, as we have in a good many others, under the old corporate name—The Red ButteWestern. That, as you know, was a purely intrastate corporation. Our newer lines are only ‘extensions.’”
“Then we can’t carry it up to the Federal courts?” gasped Maxwell.
“We can try it, and, of course, we shall try it. But the presumptive facts are against us. What I am hoping is that our Pacific Southwestern backers will be able to help us make a killing and dump these pirates at the regular hearing.”
“Then you needn’t hope any more,” said Sprague quietly. “Apart from the fact that they’ve put the high kibosh on you to-day, the element of time comes in to cut the largest figure. For the stock-smashing purpose in this particular instance, a short receivership will prove as efficacious as a long one. You’ve had one experience with the steam-roller to-day, and you’ll have as many more of them as may seem necessary. It wouldn’t make any difference if you should import a train-load of eastern lawyers; the thing’s done, and it is going to stay done until it has accomplished the end in view—which is to transfer the stock control of the Short Line to the T-C. Your only chance is to strike back, and strike quickly—before the mischief is done in New York.”
“But how?” pleaded Stillings. “Tell us how!”
“By proving clearly, what I presume we all accept as the undoubted fact, that Judge Watson has been bribed.”
True to his calling, Stillings was the first to object to so sweeping a charge.
“Oh, hold on!” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t go so far as that. That is a pretty serious charge, Sprague.”
“I know it is. But when I say bribery, it doesn’t necessarily mean the grosser form of buying with cash money. Let us say that Judge Watson has been ‘influenced.’ If you can’t make that charge and sustain it, you may as well call the incident closed.”
Maxwell was leaning against the door-jamb. His eyes were fiery and his breath was coming quickly.
“If you say there has been crooked work, Calvin, that settles it; I believe it. Now tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”
Kendall’s lean, leathery jaw was set hard, and he was furtively watching the big expert. That a fierce struggle of some kind was going on behind the mask of the ruddy, half-boyish face, he made no doubt. And Sprague’s answer quickly confirmed the editor’s conclusion.
“You don’t know what you’re asking, Dick,” said the big man slowly.
“I do!” said Maxwell hotly. “I’m asking you to help us send a bunch of criminals—just low-down, ordinary thieving criminals—to jail! Sprague, if you can do it, andwon’tdo it——”
There was a strained silence in the shabby little law office that seemed as if it would never be broken. Kendall turned his face away, and Starbuck slid noiselessly out of his chair and went to stand at the window with his back to the others. At length the reply to Maxwell’s demand came, wrung out, as it seemed, from the very heart of reluctance.
“It can be done. Every chain that was ever forged has its weak link. For reasons which are purely personal to me, I’d rather be shot than go into this thing with you. I’d refuse, if I could in common decency; and, in any event, I may fall down on you when it comes to the pinch. But I’ll go as far as I can. Will that do?”
“Say it!” snapped the ex-superintendent eagerly.
“All right. Stillings, you may come to my room in the hotel at two o’clock, and bring Mr. David Kinzie, our downstairs bank president, with you if you have to club him to do it. Kendall,I’m going to ask you to make just as little as possible of this railroad grab in your news columns for the present, taking my word for it that you shall have the biggest story of the year if we win out. Starbuck, you’ll come over to the hotel with me now, and I’ll give you your stunt. That’s all; the meeting’s adjourned.”
To say that the little inter-mountain city was stirred to the depths by the news which quickly spread from lip to lip is putting it mildly. In its beginnings, Brewster had been a railroad town in the strictest sense, owing its location and its phenomenal after-growth largely to the fostering policy of the railroad. Under Maxwell’s wise and just management the Nevada Short Line had identified itself very closely with the growth and prosperity of the entire inter-mountain region, and it had stood as a shining example of a “good” corporation. To have the popular management swept ruthlessly aside and the rule of another company, operating under the thin mask of a receivership, set up in its place, provoked a storm of indignant protest.
Moreover, many of the well-to-do citizens of the Timanyoni were stockholders in the Short Line, and upon these the blow fell as a disaster. Prominent among these local stockholders stood theowner of the Kinzie Building, Brewster’s one multi-millionaire and the president of the Brewster National Bank. At precisely two o’clock David Kinzie, gray and pale, and with his small ferret-like eyes peering shrewdly from under the rim of the soft, gray hat which he always wore, stepped into the Hotel Topaz elevator with Stillings. It had not been necessary for the attorney to bludgeon him to induce him to come to the conference with Sprague.
What went on behind the locked door of Room 403 after the two had been admitted was a secret that was not shared with any fourth party, though one of Editor Kendall’s young men promptly waylaid Stillings at the close of the conference.
“Tell Mr. Kendall he shall have the news, and have it first, when there is any,” was all the lawyer would say; but Connabel, the star reporter who had done the waylaying, died hard.
“Give me a hint, Mr. Stillings—just the barest shadow of a hint,” he begged. “Will the case be taken to the Federal courts?”
“Not for publication, Fred,” laughed the lawyer, who was evidently in better spirits. Then he added: “There’s a big story in this, my boy, and you shall have it when it’s ripe; I’ll promiseyou that—I’ll ask Kendall to detail you. And that is positively all you’ll get out of me now.”
Fifteen minutes after the lawyer and Mr. Kinzie had left Room 403 the door opened again, this time to admit Starbuck.
“Well?” said the big-bodied expert, when Maxwell’s brother-in-law had taken the chair recently vacated by the banker.
“The judge is sick, or playing sick,” was the answer. “Doc Mangum has just gone out to the house, and the servants have their orders to admit nobody.”
“What is the nature of his sickness? Does anybody know that?”
“Oh, yes; it’s heart trouble and too much altitude. He’s had it before.”
Sprague’s eyes narrowed and his big hands closed in a vice-like grip on the arms of his chair.
“Billy, does it occur to you that this is a most opportune time for him to be taken sick again? What do they do for patients with heart trouble in this country?”
“Order ’em down to a lower altitude,” said the mine owner.
“Exactly. And we shall find that this is what Doctor Mangum will advise in the present case. When he does so, Judge Watson will go.”
Starbuck was deftly rolling a cigarette of dry tobacco. “And then what?” he queried.
“Then the regular hearing, which is set for the twelfth of the month, can’t be held, and the temporary receivership will hold over until it is either confirmed or set aside by the higher courts. In the meantime the delay will have accomplished its purpose. The New York bank pool of the stock will be broken, the T-C. people will buy it in, and the nail will be driven and clinched.”
Starbuck winked gravely.
“You’re not going to let Judge Watson get out of town,” he predicted. “I can ride up the trail that far without falling off.”
“No,” said Sprague, “we are not going to let him get away until we are through with him. Did you make the other arrangement I spoke of?”
“I sure did. If anybody’s fool enough to let the cat out o’ the bag, we’ll get the cat. Tarbell’s on that part of the job.”
Sprague went to the wardrobe at the other end of the room and got out his hat and a light top-coat.
“Yes, we’ll get the cat, Billy. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we may get the kitten, too. If that should happen, your Uncle Calvin mightfly the track. Let’s go. I have an appointment to meet Judge Walsh, of the United States District Court, at half-past three, and I’m going to ask you to borrow Maxwell’s car and drive me out to the judge’s house.”
Before nightfall of the Monday it became plainly evident that the new management of the Short Line had climbed fairly into the executive saddle and was making due preparations to stay there. As Maxwell had prophesied, Receiver Dimmock made a clean sweep, and before the first through train came in over the new routing a score of minor department heads had been let out and their places filled by T-C. men. Even the train-despatchers were discharged; and after dinner Maxwell held a “consolation” meeting in the hotel club-rooms with his fired staff, and listened patiently to the bad language which the wholesale hardship evoked.