I wasn't gone very long on this second excursion into the woozy-woozies, though it was night-time, and the shaded electric light was turned on when I opened my eyes and found Mrs. Sheila sitting by the bedside. The pie-faced nurse was gone; or at least I didn't see her anywhere; and the change in Mrs. Sheila sort of made me gasp. She wasn't any less pretty as she sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, but she was different; sober, and with the laugh all gone out of the big gray eyes, and a look in them as if she had suddenly become so wise that nobody could ever fool her.
"You are feeling better now?" she asked, when she found me staring at her.
I told her I guessed I was, but that my hand hurt me some.
"You have had a great shock of some kind—besides the burn, Jimmie," she rejoined, folding up the bed covers so that the bandaged hand would rest easier. "The doctors are all puzzled. Does your head feel quite clear now—so that you can think?"
"It feels as if I had a crazy clock in it," I said. "But the thinking part is all right. Have you heard anything from Mr. Norcross yet?"
"Not a word. It is all very mysterious and perplexing. We have been hoping that you could tell us something when you should recover sufficiently to talk. Can't you, Jimmie?"
Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't do. So I just said:
"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office some little time before I did—with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they were going."
"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his rooms."
Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who always knew everything that was going on.
"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening, wasn't there?" she asked.
"Hatch had some trouble—yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I replied.
"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the evening, while I was away.
"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.
"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.
She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he should do as he has done—or at least as everybody believes he has done."
I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let her down easy.
"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that the telegrams hadn't been delivered—that they were probably in the pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to make any man throw up his hands and quit,Ishould say."
"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing anything like that before?"
I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang on to my sham belief that it was the thing hehaddone: either that, or tell her the truth.
"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr. Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out, and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"
"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"
There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard. I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out, but that was out of the question.
"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said; not knowing what else to say.
"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so that you can help me trace it out."
"Me?" I queried.
"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr. Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him, and that is why they don't hear anything from him."
"What doyouthink?" I asked.
She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."
"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."
"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as you were able to talk. May I send him up?"
Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and polish a man till he shines.
"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again. Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"
I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put me on the question rack. I gave him all I had—except that thing about the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:
"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie. I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."
"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.
"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse organization were scared plumb out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had expected—that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.
"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.
He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."
"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"
"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the telegraph."
"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I ventured.
"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any trace of him."
"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."
"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would say.
"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us, Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a little more light on this damnable blow-up?"
I hadn't—outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about—and I told him so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his own mind.
"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"
"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."
"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"
"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats—in a business way."
"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"
I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.
"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well resign one time as another?"
"Something like that, yes."
"Can you add anything more?"
I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband living. So I just said:
"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.
It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together. Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.
After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of what I knew—or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to give the possibility standing-room.
In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed. That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs. Sheila?
Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out early in the morning and get busy.
I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr. Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand, she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.
"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."
It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible; she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled me over to her side again.
So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's auto.
Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for the roof to fall in—as I guess it was.
Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand work. They wouldn't let me do anything much—I couldn't do much with my right arm in a sling—so I had a chance to hang around and size up the situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr. Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.
Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds of all four of them about the boss's drop-out—as to whether it was voluntary or not.
Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no "company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of Mr. Norcross's disappearance.
Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his rooms.
Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr. Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that, the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big and too well known by this time to the rank and file.
Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition that had been made to him the day before—the offer of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments and plants.
Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to Citizens' Storage & Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.
This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition; was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first been to fight everything in sight.
By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say, just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory, and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which was proof positive, you'd say, that the bosshadresigned and had so notified the New York office.
When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we went to the Bullard café. It was pretty rich for our blood at two dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little threshing on our own account—and got a lot more chaff and no grain.
Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in mind all the time—the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.
By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that. The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb—as I knew. It had burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.
The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr. Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.
Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of theMountaineer, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.
I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then switched over to the big puzzle.
"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.
I told him there wasn't.
"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie?—or do you?"
"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.
"Branderby"—he was one of theMountaineerreporters—"tells me that you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"
"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."
The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall. When he got good and ready, he began again.
"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if there ever were such a miracle."
"You think it is a case for a detective?"
"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."
Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was, I jumped into the hole pretty quick.
"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.
"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you suspicious—very suspicious, Jimmie."
"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross—reason in fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in a day."
The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr. Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job—and I shouldn't let much grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at theMountaineeroffice if I can help." And with that he went away.
It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I loafed in on Kirgan.
I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.
Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother. As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.
"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."
When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't wedge them apart.
"An engine—even a little old Atlantic-type—is a pretty big thing to lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.
Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.
"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!" he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's gone!"
"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported. And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild engine over the main line without orders."
"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."
I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to let go.
"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"
After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.
"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway? Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was to order out his car and tell the despatcher, andgo."
"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll findhim!"
Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go alone he turned on me.
"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he demanded.
I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking the wheels of reform.
"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked; you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and turn in and help him."
"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land, Mart?"
"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces—as it's doin', right now. They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a that."
"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"
"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I did, Jimmie, and not think it—and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o' Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we belonged to 'em!—orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs, helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need, usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."
"You stopped all this?"
"You bet I did—between two days! They've been makin' seventeen different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."
What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.
"Say, Jimmie, boy—you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose end."
"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."
He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home. When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.
At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.
Tracing the other way—westward—we had a clear track for ten miles to Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down. Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station shouldn't have been.
"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been running—without orders, we must remember—against the Fast Mail coming east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere—not officially, at least; if it had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's office."
At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the "meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before ten-forty-five.
The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed, would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.
When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise. West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.
Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the following morning.
Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.
"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"
The big master-mechanic shook his head.
"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut off."
This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.
"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"
"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."
You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a root.
"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the stolen engine!"
"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or, leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding, just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."
Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.
"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there. But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."
"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work on," I retorted.
I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest of the way to save my life.
"If there was the least little scrap—a reason even to imagine that Mr. Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square meal inside o' your clothes."
We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard, by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.
This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a reformed cow-punch'—with a record for getting out of more tight places with a heavy train than any other man on the division.
"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet, among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."
"What's that—where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like the pop of a whip-lash.
"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the far end o' that gravel track, coldanddead."
"When did you see her?"
"Just now—comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin' more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big as a house."
"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.
"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."
Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"
"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."
"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"
"I ain't kickin' none."
"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go down along and get that runaway."
This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had been opened some time after the map had been made.
When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr. Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to quit; and, so far as we knew—or didn't know, rather—he had done it and had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.
Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.
I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie—which wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the major's—when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point: "What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr. Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody—the New York people, perhaps—had wired him that a new general manager had been appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had become of him,Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago!
Gee! but that brought on more talk—a whaling lot of it. I meant to find out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice sounded that she was mightily excited.
"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient, "Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from Mr. Cantrell, the editor of theMountaineer. He called the house to try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to theMountaineeroffice," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper aside.
"Yes; just a minute ago."
"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One of our young men—Branderby—has a clue; a very slight one. He has discovered—in some way that he didn't care to explain over the phone—that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared. From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"
"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir about it."
"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending a note to somebody at the Bullard—a note that 'would do the business,' was the way it was put."
"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a running jump at the guess.
"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good gosh!—I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that engine-rescuing trip.
"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were filling her with water.
It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the tender.
"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.
Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.
Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes, shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
From Banta on, we took it a bit easier—had to. The track was pretty crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
At the "Y" siding we stopped—without going on to the gravel track where Gorcher had seen the lost 1016—and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern. This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet, physically.
"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it hadn't been used in years.
"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel track."
I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole; fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new splinter of the wood sticking up beside it—a splinter that had been broken out when the spike was pulled.
I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.
Kirgan didn't say a word—not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with his pocket tape.
"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.
Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going, but we were on our way.
I suppose we poked along into the black heart of the Timber range for as much as five or six miles before the engine headlight showed us the remains of the old saw-mill camp lying in a little pocket-like valley from the sides of which all the mill timber had been cut. The camp had been long deserted. There were perhaps a dozen shacks of all sizes and shapes, and with a single exception they were all dilapidated and dismantled, some with the roofs falling in.
The one exception was the stout log building which had probably served as the mill-gang commissary and store. It stood a little back on the slope, and was on the opposite side of the creek from the mill site and sleeping-shacks. The ties at this end of the line were so rotten with age that our engine was grinding a good half of them to powder as she edged up, and a little below the switch that had formerly led in to the mill, Kirgan gave Gorcher the stop signal.
After we had piled off, there wasn't any question raised as to what we should do. Kirgan had taken a hammer from Gorcher's tool-box, and he was the one who led the way straight across the little creek and up the hill to the commissary. I had the lantern, but it wasn't needed. From where the engine was standing, the headlight flooded the whole gulch basin with its electric beam, picking out every detail of the deserted saw-mill camp.
When we reached the log commissary we found the windows all boarded up and the door fastened with a strong hasp and a bright new brass padlock—the only new thing in sight. Kirgan swung his hammer just once and the lock went spinning off down the slope and fell with a splash into the creek. Then he pushed the door open with his foot, and shoved in; and for just one half-second I was afraid to follow—afraid of what we might find in that gloomy looking log warehouse, with its blinded windows and locked door.
I thank the good Lord I had my scare for nothing. While I was nerving myself and stumbling over the threshold behind Kirgan with the lantern, I heard the boss's voice, and it wasn't the voice of any dead man, not by a long shot! From what he said, and the way he was trimming it up with hot ones, it was evident that he took us for some other crowd that he'd been cussing out before.
The light of the lantern showed us a long room, bare of furnishings, and dark and musty from having been shut up so tight. In the far end there were a couple of bunks built against the log wall. On what had once been the counter of the commissary there was a lot of canned stuff and a box of crackers that had been broken open, and on a bench by the door there was a bucket of water and a tin cup.
The boss was sitting up in one of the bunks, and he was still tearing off language in strips at us when we closed in on him. He recognized Kirgan first, and then Gorcher. I guess he couldn't see me very well because I was holding the lantern. When he found out who we were, he stopped swearing and got up out of the bunk to put his hand on Mart Kirgan's shoulder. That was the only break he made to show that he was a man, like the rest of us. The next minute he was the Big Boss again, rapping out his orders as if he had just pushed his desk button to call us in.
"You've got an engine here, I suppose?" he snapped, at Kirgan. "Then we'll get out of this quick. What day of the week is it?"
I told him it was Friday, and by his asking that, I knew he must have been so roughly handled that he had lost count of time. The next order was shot at the two firemen.
"You boys kick that packing-box to pieces and then pull the straw out of that bunk and touch a match to it. We'll make sure that they'll never lock anybody else up in this damned dog-hole."
The two young huskies obeyed the order promptly. In half a minute the dry slab stuff that the bunks were built of was ablaze and the boss herded us to the door. In the open he stopped and looked around as if he had half a mind to burn the rest of the deserted lumber camp, but if he had any such notion he thought better of it, and a minute or so later we were all climbing into the cab of the waiting engine.
I had one last glimpse of the commissary as Gorcher released the air and the backing engine slid away around the first curve. It was sweating smoke through the split-shingle roof, and the open door framed a square of lurid crimson. I guess the boss was right. "They," whoever they were, wouldn't ever lock anybody else up in that particular shack.
We had to run so slowly down the old track to the "Y" that there was plenty of chance for the boss to talk, if he had wanted to. But apparently he didn't want to. He sat on the fireman's seat, with an arm back of me to hold me on, just as Kirgan had sat on the way up, and never opened his head except once to ask me what was the matter with my wrapped-up hand. When I told him, he made no comment, and didn't speak again until we had stopped on the leg of the "Y" to let Kirgan and his three helpers put the borrowed rails back into place. That left just the two of us in the cab, and I thought maybe he would tell me some of the particulars, but he didn't. Instead, he made me tell him.
"You say it's Friday," he began abruptly. "What's been going on since Monday night, Jimmie?"
I boiled it down for him into just as few words as possible; about the letter he had left for Mr. Van Britt, how everybody thought he had resigned, how Mrs. Sheila and the major were two of the few who weren't willing to believe it, how Mr. Chadwick had been out of reach, how the railroad outfit was flopping around like a chicken with its head chopped off, how President Dunton had appointed a new general manager who was expected now on any train, how Gorcher had discovered the lost 1016 on the old disused gravel-pit track a mile below us, and, to wind up with, I slipped him Mr. Chadwick's telegram which had come just as I was finishing my supper in the Bullard grill-room, and those two others that had come on the knock-out night, and which had been in my pocket ever since.
He heard me through without saying a word, and when I gave him the telegrams he read them by the light of the gauge lamp—also without saying anything. But when the men had the "Y" rails replaced he took hold of things again with a jerk.
"Kirgan, you'll want to see to getting that dead engine out of the gravel pit yourself. Take one of the firemen and go to it. It's a short mile and you can walk it. Jimmie and I want to get back to Portal City in a hurry, and Gorcher will take us." And then to Gorcher: "We'll run to Banta ahead of Number Eighteen and get orders there. Move lively, Billy; time's precious."
The orders were carried out precisely as they were given. Kirgan took one of the huskies and tramped off in the darkness down the main line, and Gorcher, turning our engine on the "Y," headed back east. This time he wasn't so awfully careful of the curves and sags as he had been coming up, and we made Banta at a record clip. While he was in the Banta wire office, getting orders for Portal City, Mr. Norcross took the time-card out of its cage in the cab and fell to studying it by the light of the gauge lamp. Gorcher came back pretty soon with his clearance, which gave him the right to run to Arroyo as first section of Number Eighteen.
The boss blew up like a Roman candle when he saw that train order. It meant that we were to take the siding at Arroyo with the freight that was just behind us, and wait there for the westbound "Flyer," the "Flyer" being due in Portal City from the east at 9:15, and due to leave there, coming west, at 9:20. I didn't realize at the moment why the boss was so sizzling anxious to cut out the delay which would be imposed on us by the wait at Arroyo, but the anxiety was there, all right.
"Billy, it's eighteen miles to Portal, and you've got twenty minutes to make it against the 'Flyer's' leaving time," he ripped out. "Can you do it?"
Gorcher said he could, if he didn't have to lose any more time getting his order changed.
"Let her go!" snapped the boss. "I'm taking all the responsibility."
That was enough for Gorcher, and the way we hustled out of the Banta yard was a caution. By the time we hit the last set of switches the old "Pacific-type" was lurching like a ship at sea, and once out on the long grass-country tangents she went like a shot out of a gun. Of course, with nothing to pull but her own weight she had plenty of steam, and all Gorcher had to do was to keep her from choking herself with too much of it.
He did it to the queen's taste; and in exactly eight minutes out of Banta we tore over the switches at Arroyo. That left us ten miles to go, and twelve minutes in which to make them. It looked pretty easy, and it would have been if the night crew hadn't been switching in the lower Portal City yard when we finished the race and Gorcher was whistling for the town stop. There was a hold-out of perhaps two minutes while the shifter was getting out of our way, and when we finally went clattering up through the yard, the "Flyer," a few minutes late, was just pulling in from the opposite direction.
A yardman let us in on the spur at the end of the headquarters building, and the boss was off in half a jiffy. "Come along with me, Jimmie," he commanded quickly, and I couldn't imagine why he was in such a tearing hurry. Pushing through the platform crowd, made up of people who were getting off the "Flyer" and those who were waiting to get on, he led the way straight up-stairs to our offices.
Of course, there was nobody there at that time of night, and the place was all dark until we switched the electrics on. There was a little lavatory off the third room of the suite, and Mr. Norcross went in and washed his face and hands. In a minute or two he came out, put on his office coat, opened up his desk, lighted a cigar and sat down at the desk as though he had just come in from a late dinner at the club. And still he had me guessing.
The guess didn't have to wait long. While I was making a bluff at uncovering my typewriter and getting ready for business there was a heavy step in the hall, and a red-faced, portly gentleman with fat eyes and little close-cropped English side-whiskers came bulging in. He had a light top-coat on his arm, and his tan gloves were an exact match for his spats.
"Good evening," he said, nodding sort of brusquely at the boss. "I'm looking for the general manager's office."
"You've found it," said the boss, crisply.
The tan-gloved gentleman looked first at me and then at Mr. Norcross.
"You are the chief clerk, perhaps?" he suggested, pitching the query in the general direction of the big desk.
"Hardly," was the curt rejoinder. "My name is Norcross. What can I do for you?"
If I didn't hate slang so bad, I should say that the portly man looked as if he were going to throw a fit.
"Not—not Graham Norcross?" he stammered.
"Well, yes; I am 'Graham'—to my friends. Anything else?"
The portly gentleman subsided into a chair.
"There is some misunderstanding about this," he said, his voice thickening a little—with anger, I thought. "My name is Dismuke, and I am the general manager of this railroad."
"I wouldn't dispute the name, but your title is away off," said Mr. Norcross, as cool as a handful of dry snow. "Who appointed you, if I may ask?"
"President Dunton and the board of directors, of course."
"The same authority appointed me, something like three months ago," was the calm reply. "So far as I know, I am still at the head of the company's staff in Portal City."
The gentleman who had named himself Dismuke puffed out his cheeks and looked as if he were about to explode.
"This is a devil of a mess!" he rapped out. "I understood—we all understood in New York—that you had resigned!"
"Well, I haven't," retorted the boss shortly. And then he stuck the knife in good and deep and twisted it around. "There is a commercial telegraph wire in the Hotel Bullard, where I suppose you will put up, Mr. Dismuke, and I'm sure you will find it entirely at your service. If you have anything further to say to me I hope it will keep until after this office opens in the morning. I am very busy, just now."
I mighty nearly gasped. This Dismuke was the new general manager, appointed, doubtless in all good faith, by the president and sent out to take charge of things. And here was the boss practically ordering him out of the office—telling him that his room was better than his company!
The portly man got out of his chair, puffing like a steam-engine.
"We'll see about this!" he threatened. "You've been here three months and you haven't done anything but muddle things until the stock of the company isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on! If I can get a clear wire to New York, you'll have word from President Dunton to-morrow morning telling you where you get off!"
To this Mr. Norcross made no reply whatever, and the heavy-footed gentleman stumped out, saying things to himself that wouldn't look very well in print. When the hall door below gave a big slam to let us know that he was still going, the boss looked across at me with a sour grin wrinkling around his eyes.
"Now you know why I made Gorcher break all the rules of the service getting here, Jimmie," he said. "From what you told me down yonder on the old 'Y,' I gathered that my successor was not yet on the ground, but that he was likely to be at any minute. That's why I wanted to beat the 'Flyer' in. Possession is nine points of the law, and in this case it was rather important that Mr. Dismuke shouldn't find the outfit without a head and these offices of ours unoccupied." He rose, stretched his arms over his head like a tired boy, and reached for the golf cap he kept to wear when he went out to knock around in the shops and yard. "Let's go up to the hotel and see if we can break into the café, Jimmie," he finished up. "Later on, we'll wire Mr. Chadwick; but that can wait. I haven't had a square meal in four days."