It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard café—the boss and I—that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck. The story was red-headlined in theMorning Herald—the Hatch-owned paper—and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns, there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.
At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.
The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college friends—which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only millionaire.
Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new "public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a single week without smashing something.
Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.
Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office, Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.
"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own copy of theHerald. "Did you read that editorial?"
The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."
"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.
"Never mind the newspaper talk," the boss interjected. "How bad is the trouble this time?"
"Pretty bad. I've just had Brockman on the wire from Alicante. The freight is practically a total loss; a good half of it is in the river. Kirgan says he can pick the freight engine up and rebuild it; but the passenger machine is a wreck."
"How did it happen?"
"It's like a good many of the others. Nobody seems to know. Brockman put the freight engine crew on the rack, and they say there was a small boulder on the track—that it rolled down the canyon slope just ahead of them as they were turning a curve. They struck it, and both men say that the engine knocked it off into the river apparently without hurting anything. But two seconds later the entire train left the track and piled up all over the right-of-way."
"The engineer and fireman weren't hurt?"
"No; they both jumped on the high side. But, of course, they were pretty badly shaken up. Riggs, the fireman, got out of the raffle first and tried to flag the passenger train, but he was too late."
The boss was sitting back in his chair and making little rings on the desk blotter with the point of his letter-opener.
"Upton, these knock-outs have got to be stopped."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed the little millionaire; "you don't have to tell me that! If we can't stop 'em, Uncle Dunton will have plenty of good reasons for cleaning us all out, lock, stock, and barrel! I was talking with Carter, in the claim office, this morning. Our loss and damage account for the past month is something frightful!"
"It is," said the boss gravely. And then: "Upton, we're not altogether as bright as we might be. Has it never occurred to you that we are having too much bad luck to warrant us in charging it all up to the chapter of accidents?"
Mr. Van Britt blew his cheeks out until the stubby, cropped mustache bristled like porcupine quills.
"So you've been getting your pointer, too, have you?" he threw in.
Mr. Norcross didn't answer the question directly.
"Put Tarbell on the job, and if he needs help, let him pick his own men," he directed. "We want to know why that boulder tumbled down ahead of Number Seventeen, and I want to see Tarbell's report on it. Keep at it night and day, Upton. The infection is getting into the rank and file and it's spreading like a sickness. You've railroaded long enough to know what that means. If it becomes psychological, we shall have all the trouble we need."
"I know," nodded the superintendent. "I went through a siege of that kind on the Great Southwestern, one winter. It was horrible. Men who had been running trains year in and year out, and never knowing that they had any nerves, went to pieces if you'd snap your fingers at them."
"That's it," said the boss. "We don't want to fall into that ditch. Things are quite bad enough, as they are."
This ended it for the time. The Petrolite Canyon wreck was picked up, the track was cleared, and once more our trains were moving on time. But anybody could see that the entire Short Line had a case of "nerves." Kirgan, Kirgan the cold-blooded, showed it one afternoon when I went over to his office to return a bunch of blue-prints sent in for the boss's approval. The big master-mechanic had a round-house foreman "on the carpet" and was harrying him like the dickens for letting an engine go out with one of her truck safety chains hanging loose.
Ever since we had gone together on the rescue run to Timber Mountain, Mart and I had been sort of chummy, and after the foreman had gone away with his foot in his hand, I joshed Kirgan a little about the way he had hammered the round-house man.
"Maybe I did, Jimmie," he said, half as if he were already sorry for the cussing out. "But the shape we're getting into is enough to make an angel bawl. Why, Great Moses! a crew can't take an engine out here in the yard to do a common job o' switchin' without breakin' something 'r hurtin' somebody!"
"Bad medicine," I told him. "It's worrying the bosses, too. What's doing it, Mart?"
"Maybe you can tell," he growled. "It's a hoodoo—that's whatitis. Seven engines in the shops in the last nine days, and three more that haven't been fished out-a the ditch yet. I wish Mr. Van Britt 'd fire the whole jumpy outfit!"
It didn't seem as though firing was needed so much as a dose of nerve tonic of some sort. Tarbell was working hard on the problem, quietly, and without making any talk about it, and Kirgan was giving him all the men he asked for from the shops; quick-witted fellows who were up in all the mechanical details, and who made better spotters than outsiders would because they knew the road and the ropes. But it was no use. I saw some of Tarbell's reports, and they didn't show any crookedness. It seemed to be just bad luck—one landslide after another of it.
Meanwhile, New York had waked up again. President Dunton had been off the job somewhere, I guess, but now he was back, and the things he wired to the boss were enough to make your hair stand on end. I looked every day to see Mr. Norcross pitch the whole shooting-match into the fire and quit, cold.
He'd never taken anything like Mr. Dunton's abuse from anybody before, and he couldn't seem to get hardened to it. But he was loyal to Mr. Chadwick; and, of course, he knew that Mr. Dunton's hot wires were meant to nag him into resigning. Then there was Mrs. Sheila. I sort of suspected she was holding him up to the rack, every day and every minute of the day. No doubt she was.
It was one evening after he had been out to the major's for just a little while, and had come back to the office, that he sent for Mr. Van Britt, who was also working late. There was blood on the moon, and I saw it in the way the boss's jaw was working.
"Upton," he began, as short as pie-crust, "have you thought of any way to break this wreck hoodoo yet?"
Mr. Van Britt sat down and crossed his solid little legs.
"If I had, I shouldn't be losing sleep at the rate of five or six hours a night," he rasped.
"There's one thing that we haven't tried," the boss shot back. "We've been advertising it as bad luck, keeping our own suspicions to ourselves and letting the men believe what they pleased. We'll change all that. I want you to call your trainmen in as fast as you can get at them. Tell them—from me, if you want to—that there isn't any bad luck about it; that the enemies of this management are making an organized raid on the property itself for the purpose of putting us out of the fight. Tell them the whole story, if you want to: how we're trying our best to make a spoon out of a spoiled horn, and how there is an army of grafters and wreckers in this State which is doing its worst to knock us out of the box."
Mr. Van Britt uncrossed his legs and sat staring for a second or two. Then he whistled and said: "By Jove! Have you caught 'em with the goods, at last?"
"No," was the curt reply. "Call it a ruse, if you like: it's justifiable, and it will work. If you give the force something tangible to lay hold of, it will work the needed miracle. It is only the mysterious that terrifies. Railroad employees, as a whole, are perfectly intelligent human beings, open to conviction. The management which doesn't profit by that fact is lame. If you do this and appeal to the loyalty of the men, you will make a private detective out of every man in the train service, and every one of them keen to be the first to catch the wreckers. You can add a bit of a reward for that, if you like, and I'll pay it out of my own bank account."
For a full minute our captive millionaire didn't say a word. Then he grinned like a good-natured little Chinese god.
"Who gave you this idea of taking the pay-roll into your confidence, Graham?" he asked softly.
For the first time in all the weeks and months I'd been knowing him, the boss dodged; dodged just like any of us might.
"I've been talking to Major Kendrick," he said. "He is a wise old man, Upton, and he hears a good many things that don't get printed in the newspapers."
I could see that this excuse didn't fool Mr. Van Britt for a single instant, and there was a look in his eye that I couldn't quite understand. Neither could I make much out of what he said.
"We'll go into that a little deeper some day, Graham—after this epileptic attack has been fought off. This idea—which you confess isn't your own—is a pretty shrewd one, and I shouldn't wonder if it would work, if we can get it in motion before the hoodoo breaks us wide open. And, as you say, the accusation is justifiable, even if we can't prove up against the Hatch outfit. That turned-over rail in Petrolite Canyon, for example, might have been helped along by——"
It was Kelso, Mr. Van Britt's stenographer, who smashed in with the interruption. He was in his shirt-sleeves, as if he'd just got up from his typewriter, and he rushed in with his mouth open and his eyes like saucers.
"They—they want you in the despatcher's office!" he panted, jerking the words out at Mr. Van Britt. "Durgin has let Number Five get by for a head-ender with the 'Flyer,' and he's gone crazy!"
When Bobby Kelso shot his news at us we all made a quick break for the despatcher's office, the boss in the lead. It was a big bare room flanking Mr. Van Britt's quarters at the western end of the second floor corridor and the windows looked out upon the yard twinkling with its red and yellow and green switch lights.
Durgin, the night despatcher, had been alone on the train desk, and the only other operators on duty were the car-record man and the young fellow who acted as a relief on the commercial wire. When we got there, we found that Tarbell had happened to be in the office when Durgin blew up. He was sitting in at the train key, trying to get the one intermediate wire station between the two trains that had failed to get their "meet" orders, and this was the first I knew that he really was the expert telegraph operator that his pay-roll description said he was.
Durgin looked like a tortured ghost. He was a thin, dark man with a sort of scattering beard and limp black hair; one of the clearest-headed despatchers in the bunch, and the very last man, you'd say, to get rattled in a tangle-up. Yet here he was, hunched in a chair at the car-record table in the corner, a staring-eyed, pallid-faced wreck, with the sweat standing in big drops on his forehead and his hands shaking as if he had the palsy.
Morris, the relief man, gave us the particulars, such as they were, speaking in a hushed voice as if he was afraid of breaking in on Tarbell's steady rattling of the key in the Crow Gulch station call.
"Number Four"—Four was the eastbound "Flyer"—"is five hours off her time," he explained. "As near as I can get it, Durgin was going to make her 'meet' with Number Five at the blind siding at Sand Creek tank. She ought to have had her orders somewhere west of Bauxite Junction, and Five ought to have got hers at Banta. Durgin says he simply forgot that the 'Flyer' was running late: that she was still out and had a 'meet' to make somewhere with Five."
Brief as Morris's explanation was, it was clear enough for anybody who knew the road and the schedules. The regular meeting-point for the two passenger trains was at a point well east of Portal City, instead of west, and so, of course, would not concern the Desert Division crew of either train, since all crews were changed at Portal City. From Banta to Bauxite Junction, some thirty-odd miles, there was only one telegraph station, namely, that at the Crow Gulch lumber camp, seven miles beyond the Timber Mountain "Y" and the gravel pit where the stolen 1016 had been abandoned.
Unluckily, Crow Gulch was only a day station, the day wires being handled by a young man who was half in the pay of the railroad and half in that of the saw-mill company. This young man slept at the mill camp, which was a mile back in the gulch. There was only one chance in a thousand that he would be down at the railroad station at ten o'clock at night, and it was on that thousandth chance that Tarbell was rattling the Crow Gulch call. If Five were making her card time, she was now about half-way between Timber Mountain "Y" and Crow Gulch. And Four, the "Flyer," had just left Bauxite—with no orders whatever. Which meant that the two trains would come together somewhere near Sand Greek, one of them, at least, running like the mischief to make up what time she could.
Mr. Van Britt was as good a wire man as anybody on the line, but it was the boss who took things in hand.
"There is a long-distance telephone to the Crow Gulch saw-mill; have you tried that?" he barked at Tarbell.
The big young fellow who looked like a cow-boy—and had really been one, they said—glanced up and nodded: "The call's in," he responded. "'Central' says she can't raise anybody."
"What was Four's report from Bauxite?"
"Four hours and fifty-two minutes off time."
"That will bring them together somewhere in the hill curves this side of Sand Creek," the boss said to Mr. Van Britt; "just where there is the least chance of their seeing each other before they hit." Then to Tarbell: "Try Bauxite and find out if there is a pusher engine there that can be sent out to chase the 'Flyer'."
Tarbell nodded without breaking his monotonous repetition of the Crow Gulch call.
"I did that first," he put in. "There's an engine there, and they're getting her out. But it's a slim chance; the 'Flyer' has too good a start."
For the next three or four minutes the tension was something fierce. The boss and Mr. Van Britt hung over the train desk, and Tarbell kept up his insistent clatter at the key. I had an eye on Durgin. He was still hunched up in the record-man's chair, and to all appearances had gone stone-blind crazy. Yet I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was listening—listening as if all of his sealed-up senses had turned in to intensify the one of hearing.
Just about the time when the suspense had grown so keen that it seemed as if it couldn't be borne a second longer, Morris, who was sitting in at the office phone, called out sharply: "Long-distance says she has Crow Gulch lumber camp!"
Mr. Van Britt jumped to take the phone, and we got one side of the talk—our side—in shot-like sentences:
"That you, Bertram? All right; this is Van Britt, at Portal City. Take one of the mules and ride for your life down the gulch to the station! Get that? Stop Number Five and make her take siding quick. Report over your own wire what you do.Hurry!"
By the time Mr. Van Britt got back to the train desk, the boss had his pencil out and was figuring on Bertram's time margin. It was now ten-twelve, and Five's time at Crow Gulch was ten-eighteen. The Crow Gulch operator had just six minutes in which to get his mule and cover the rough mile down the gulch.
"He'll never make it," said Tarbell, who knew the gulch road. "Our only chance on that lay is that Five may happen to be a few minutes late—and she was right on the dot at Banta."
There was nothing to do but wait, and the waiting was savage. Tarbell had a nerve of iron, but I could see his hand shake as it lay on the glass-topped table. The boss was cool enough outwardly, but I knew that in his brain there was a heart-breaking picture of those two fast passenger trains rushing together in the night among the hills with no hint of warning to help them save themselves. Mr. Van Britt couldn't keep still. He had his hands jammed in the side pockets of his coat and was pacing back and forth in the little space between the train desk and the counter railing.
At the different tables in the room the sounders were clicking away as if nothing were happening or due to happen, and above the spattering din and clatter you could hear the escapement of the big standard-time clock on the wall, hammering out the seconds that might mean life or death to two or three hundred innocent people.
In that horrible suspense the six minutes pulled themselves out to an eternity for that little bunch of us in the despatcher's office who could do nothing but wait. On the stroke of ten-eighteen, the time when Five was due at Crow Gulch on her schedule, Tarbell tuned his relay to catch the first faint tappings from the distant day-station. Another sounder was silent. There was hope in the delay, and Morris voiced it.
"He's there, and he's too busy to talk to us," he suggested, in a hushed voice; and Disbrow, the car-record man, added: "That's it; it'd take a minute or two to get them in on the siding."
The second minute passed, and then a third, and yet there was no word from Bertram. "Call him," snapped the boss to Tarbell, but before the ex-cowboy's hand could reach the key, the sounder began to rattle out a string of dots and dashes; ragged Morse it was, but we could all read it only too plainly.
"Too late—mule threw me and I had to crawl and drag a game leg—Five passed full speed at ten-nineteen—I couldn't make it."
I saw the boss's hands shut up as though the finger nails would cut into the palms.
"That ends it," he said, with a sort of swearing groan in his voice; and then to Tarbell: "You may as well call Kirgan and tell him to order out the wrecking train. Then have Perkins make up a relief train while you're calling the doctors. Van Britt, you go and notify the hospital over your own office wire. Have my private car put into the relief, and see to it that it has all the necessary supplies. And you'd better notify the undertakers, too."
Great Joash! but it was horrible—for us to be hustling around and making arrangements for the funeral while the people who were to be gathered up and buried were still swinging along live and well, half of them in the crookings among the Timber Mountain foot-hills and the other half somewhere in the desert stretches below Sand Creek!
Tarbell had sent Disbrow to the phone to call Kirgan, and Mr. Van Britt was turning away to go to his own office, when the chair in the corner by the car-record table fell over backwards with a crash and Durgin came staggering across the room. He was staring straight ahead of him as if he had gone blind, and the sweat was running down his face to lose itself in the straggling beard.
When he spoke his voice seemed to come from away off somewhere, and he was still staring at the blank wall beyond the counter-railing.
"Did I—did I hear somebody say you're sending for the undertakers?" he choked, with a dry rattle in his throat; and then, without waiting for an answer: "While you're at it, you'd better get one for me ... there's the money to pay him," and he tossed a thick roll of bank bills, wrapped around with a rubber band, over to Tarbell at the train desk.
Naturally, the little grand-stand play with the bank roll made a diversion, and that is why the muffled crash of a pistol shot came with a startling shock to everybody. When we turned to look, the mischief was done. Durgin had crumpled down into a misshapen heap on the floor and the sight we saw was enough to make your blood run cold.
You see, he had put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth, and—but it's no use: I can't tell about it, and the very thought of that thing that had just a minute before been a man, lying there on the floor makes me see black and want to keel over. What he had said about sending for an extra undertaker was right as right. With the top of his head blown off, the poor devil didn't need anything more in this world except the burying.
Somebody has said, mighty truthfully, that even a death in the family doesn't stop the common routine; that the things that have to be done will go grinding on, just the same, whether all of us live, or some of us die. Disbrow had jumped from the telephone at the crash of Durgin's shot, and for just a second or so we all stood around the dead despatcher, nobody making a move.
Then Mr. Norcross came alive with a jerk, telling Disbrow to get back on his job of calling out the wreck wagons and the relief train, and directing Bobby Kelso to go to another 'phone and call an undertaker to come and get Durgin's body. Tarbell turned back to the train desk to keep things from getting into a worse tangle than they already were in, and to wait for the dreadful news, and the boss stood by him.
This second wait promised to be the worst of all. The collision was due to happen miles from the nearest wire station; the news, when we should get it, would probably be carried back to Bauxite Junction by the pusher engine which had gone out to try to overtake the "Flyer." But even in that case it might be an agonizing hour or more before we could hear anything.
In a little while Disbrow had clicked in his call to Kirgan, and when the undertaker's wagon came to gather up what was left of the dead despatcher, the car-record man was hurriedly writing off his list of doctors, and Mr. Van Britt had gone down to superintend the making up of the relief train. True to his theory, which, among other things, laid down the broad principle that the public had a right to be given all the facts in a railroad disaster, Mr. Norcross was just telling me to call up theMountaineeroffice, when Tarbell, calmly inking time reports upon the train sheet, flung down his pen and snatched at his key to "break" the chattering sounder.
Mr. Van Britt had come up-stairs again, and he and the boss were both standing over Tarbell when the "G-S" break cleared the wire. Instantly there came a quick call, "G-S" "G-S," followed by the signature, "B-J" for Bauxite Junction. Tarbell answered, and then we all heard what Bauxite had to say:
"Pusher overtook Number Four three miles west of Sand Creek and has brought her back here. What orders for her?"
Somebody groaned, "Oh, thank God!" and Mr. Van Britt dropped into a chair as if he had been hit by a cannon ball. Only the boss kept his head, calling out sharply to Disbrow to break off on the doctors' list and to hurry and stop Kirgan from getting away with the wrecking train. Then, as curtly as if it were all merely a matter of routine, he told Tarbell what to do; how he was to give the "Flyer" orders to wait at Bauxite for Number Five, and then to proceed under time-card regulations to Portal City.
When it was all over, and Tarbell had been given charge of the despatching while a hurry call was sent out for the night relief man, Donohue, to come down and take the train desk, there was a little committee meeting in the general manager's office, with the boss in the chair, and Mr. Van Britt sitting in for the other member.
"Of course, you've drawn your own conclusions, Upton," the boss began, when he had asked me to shut the door.
"I guess so," was the grave rejoinder. "I'm afraid it is only too plain that Durgin was hired to do it. What became of the money?"
"I have it here," said the boss, and he took the blood-money bank-roll from his pocket and removed the rubber band. "Count it, Jimmie," he ordered, passing it to me.
I ran through the bunch. It was in twenties and fifties, and there was an even thousand dollars.
"That is the price of a man's life," said Mr. Van Britt, soberly, and then Mr. Norcross said, "Who knows anything about Durgin? Was he a married man?"
Mr. Van Britt shook his head.
"He had been married, but he and his wife didn't live together. He had no relatives here. I knew him in the southwest two years ago. He'd had domestic trouble of some kind, and didn't mix or mingle much with the other men. But he was a good despatcher, and two months ago, when we had an opening here, I sent for him."
"You think there is no doubt but that he was bribed to put those trains together to-night?"
"None in the least—only I wish we had a little better proof of it."
"Where did he live?"
"He boarded at Mrs. Chandler's, out on Cross Street. Morris boards there, too, I believe."
The boss turned to me.
"Jimmie, go and get Morris."
I carried the call and brought Morris back with me. He was a cheerful, red-headed fellow, and everybody liked him.
"It isn't a 'sweat-box' session, Morris," said the boss, quietly, when we came in and the relief operator sat down, sort of half scared, on the edge of a chair. "We want to know something more about Durgin. He roomed at your place, didn't he?"
Morris admitted it, but said he'd never been very chummy with the despatcher; that Durgin wasn't chummy with anybody. Then the boss went straight to the point, as he usually did.
"You were present and saw all that happened in the other room. Can you tell us anything about that money?" pointing to the pile of bills on my desk.
Billy Morris wriggled himself into a little better chair-hold. "Nothing that would be worth telling, if things hadn't turned out just as they have," he returned. "But now I guess I know. I left Mrs. Chandler's this evening about seven o'clock to come on duty, and Durgin was just ahead of me. Some fellow—a man in a snuff-colored overcoat and with a soft hat pulled down so that I couldn't see his face—stopped Durgin on the sidewalk, and they talked together."
"Go on," said Mr. Van Britt.
"I didn't hear what was said; I was up on the stoop, trying to make Mrs. Chandler's broken door latch work to hold the door shut. But I saw the overcoated man pass something to Durgin, and saw Durgin put whatever it was into his pocket. Then the other man dodged and went away, and did it so quick that I didn't see which way he went or what became of him. I walked on down the steps after I had got the door to stay shut and tried to overtake Durgin—just to walk on down here with him. But I guess he must have run after he left the corner, for I didn't see anything more of him until I got to the office."
"He was there when you came in?" It was Mr. Norcross who wanted to know.
"Yes. He had his coat off and was at work on the train sheet."
"That was a little after seven," said Mr. Van Britt. "What happened between that and ten o'clock?"
"Nothing. Disbrow was busy at his table, and I had some work to do, though not very much. I don't think Durgin left his chair, or said anything to anybody until he jumped up and began to walk the floor, taking on and saying that he'd put Four and Five together on the single track. Just then, Tarbell came in and jumped for the train key, and I ran out to give the alarm."
There was silence for a little time, and then the boss said, "That's all, Morris; all but one thing. Do you think you would recognize the man in the snuff-colored overcoat, if you should see him again?"
"Yes, I might; if he had on the same coat and hat."
"That will do, then. Keep this thing to yourself, and if the newspaper people come after you, send them to Mr. Van Britt or to me."
After Morris had gone, Mr. Van Britt shook his head sort of savagely.
"It's hell, Graham!" he ripped out, bouncing to his feet and beginning to tramp up and down the room. "To think that these devils would take the chance of murdering a lot of totally innocent people to gain their end! What are you going to do about it?"
"I don't know yet, Upton; but I am going to do something. This state of affairs can't go on. The simplest thing is for me to throw up the job and let the Short Line drop back into the old rut. I'm not sure that it wouldn't save a good many lives in the end if I should do it. And yet it seems such a cowardly thing to do—to resign under fire."
Mr. Van Britt had his hand on the door-knob, and what he said made me warm to my finger-tips.
"We're all standing by you, Graham; all, you understand—to the last man and the last ditch. And you're not going to pitch it up; you're going to stay until you have thrown the harpoon into these high-binders, clear up to the hitchings. That's my prophecy. The trouble's over for to-night, and you'd better go up to the hotel and turn in. There is another day coming, or if there isn't, it won't make any difference to any of us. Good-night."
For a time after the suicide of the off-trick-despatcher the wreck epidemic paused. Acting upon Mr. Norcross's suggestion, Mr. Van Britt called his trainmen in, a crew at a time, and gave them the straight tip; and after that the hoodoo died a natural death, and a good many pairs of eyes all along the Short Line were keeping a sharp lookout for the trouble-makers.
In the meantime, Tarbell, still digging faithfully, managed to turn up a few facts that were worth something. In the Petrolite case he found a lone prospector living in a shack high up on the farther side of the canyon who told him that late in the evening of the day preceding the wreck he had seen two men climbing the slope from which the boulder had been dislodged, and that one of them was carrying a pick. Also, further investigation seemed to prove that the rail which the blow of the rock was supposed to have knocked loose had been previously weakened, either by drawing some of the spikes, or by unscrewing the nuts on the bolts at the joints.
In another field, and this time under Ripley's instructions, our ex-cow-punch' had been able to set and bait a trap. By diligent search he had found the man Murphy, the Clanahan henchman, who, under pressure, had given away the Timber Mountain plot which had climaxed in the kidnapping of the boss. This man had been deliberately shot in a bar-room brawl and left for dead. But he had crawled away and had got out of town to live and recover at a distant cattle ranch in the Limberton Hills.
When Tarbell discovered him he had cut out the booze, had grown a beard, and was thirsting for vengeance. Tarbell brought him back to Portal City, and presently there began to be developments. Murphy knew all the ropes. In a little time, Ripley, with Tarbell's help, was loaded for bear. One chilly October afternoon the lawyer came down to our office to tell Mr. Norcross that the game was cornered.
"All you have to do now is to give the word," was the way Ripley wound up. "You refused to do it on a former occasion because we couldn't get the men higher up. This time we can nail Clanahan, and a good few of the political gangsters and bosses in the other towns along the line. What do you say?"
The boss looked up with the little horse-shoe frown wrinkling between his eyes.
"Can we get Hatch and Henckel?"
"No; not yet."
"Very well; then you may lock those papers up in your safe and we'll wait. When you can see your way clear to a criminal trial, with Rufus Hatch and Gustave Henckel in the prisoner's dock, we'll start the legal machinery: but not before."
By now we were right on the eve of the State election. As far as anybody could see, the railroad had stayed free and clear of the political fight. The boss had kept his promise to maintain neutrality and was still keeping it.
At the appointed time the big day dawned, and the political wind-up held the center of the stage. So far as we were concerned, it passed off very quietly. From the wire gossip that dribbled in during the day it appeared that the railroad vote was heavy, though there were neither charges nor counter-charges to indicate which way it had been thrown.
Along in the afternoon the newspaper offices began to put out bulletins, and by evening the result was no longer doubtful. For the first time in years the power of the political machine had been smashed decisively at the polls, and on the following morning theMountaineerannounced the election of Governor Burrell, with a safe working majority in both houses of the Legislature for the Independents.
Naturally, there was all sorts of a yell from the other side of the fence. Charges were freely made, now, that the railroad had deliberately ditched its friends, and all that. Also there were the bluest kind of predictions for the future, most of them winding up with the assertion that there could be no such thing as true prosperity for the country while the Short Line continued under its present management.
It was on the third day after the election, rather late in the afternoon, that the boss had a call from a mining promoter named Dawes, representing a bunch of mine owners at Strathcona who were having trouble with the smelter.
I was busy at the time and didn't pay much attention to what was said, but I got the drift of it. The smelter, one of the few Hatch monopolies which hadn't been shaken loose as yet, was located in the gulch six miles below Strathcona, and it was served exclusively by its own industrial railroad, which it was using as a lever to pry an excessive hauling charge out of the mine owners. Wouldn't Mr. Norcross try to do something about it?
The boss said he'd do anything he could, and asked what the mine owners wanted. Dawes said they wanted help; that they were going to hold a mass meeting in Strathcona the following morning at nine o'clock. Would it, or wouldn't it, be possible for Mr. Norcross to be present at that meeting?
Of course, the boss said he'd go. It meant the better part of a night's run, special, in the private car, but that didn't make any difference. Dawes went away, and before we broke off to go to dinner at the railroad club, I was given a memorandum order for the special.
At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest—Major Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a guest at anybody's table.
For a while the table talk—in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any part whatever—circled around the late landslide election, and what Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by and by it got around to the railroad situation.
"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't over yet—not by a jugful, suh"—this isn't just the way the major said it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs, and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't lose sight of that, Graham."
The boss looked up kind of curiously.
"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more than any other," he commented.
The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.
"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin' at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame—she has, for a fact, suh."
"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand how she can do it."
They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then some.
The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.
"I'm sorry I can't stay and smoke with you, major," he said, pushing his chair back. "But the business grind never lets up. I'm obliged to go to Strathcona to-night."
I don't know what the major was going to say to this abrupt break-away: the after-dinner social cigar was a sort of religious ceremony with him. But whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it, for at that moment a telegraph boy came in and handed him a message. He put on his other glasses and read the telegram, with his big goatee looking more than ever like a dagger and the fierce white mustaches twitching. At the end of things he folded the message and put it into his pocket, saying, sort of soberly:
"Graham, there are times when Sheila's intuhferences are mighty neah uncanny; they are, for a fact, suh. This wire is from her. What do you suppose it says?"
Of course, the boss said he couldn't suppose anything about it, and the major went on.
"She tells me, in just seven words, not to let you go to Strathcona to-night. Now what do you make of that? How on top of God's green earth did she know, away off yondeh at the capital, that you were meaning to go to Strathcona to-night?"
Mr. Norcross shook his head. Then he said: "There are wires—both kinds—though I don't know why anybody should telegraph or telephone the capital that I expect to attend a mine-owners' meeting to-morrow morning in the big gold camp. That's why I'm going, you know."
"But this warning," the major insisted. "There's a reason for it, Graham, as sure as you are bawn!"
Again the boss shook his head.
"Between you two, you and Sheila, I'm due to acquire a case of nerves. I don't know what she has heard, but I can't afford to dodge a business appointment. I have wired the Strathcona people that I shall be there to-morrow morning, and it is too late to make other arrangements. Sheila has merely overheard an echo of the threats that are constantly being made by the Hatch sympathizers. It's the aftermath of the election, but it's all talk. They're down and out, and they haven't the nerve to strike back, now."
That ended matters at the club, and the boss and I walked down to the headquarters. The special, with Buck Chandler on the smart little eight-wheeler that we always had for the private-car trips, was waiting, and at the last minute I thought I wasn't going to get to go.
"There's no need of your putting in a night on the road, Jimmie," said the boss, with the kindly thought for other people's comfort that never failed him. But after I had begged a little, telling him that he'd need somebody to take notes in the mine meeting, he said, "All right," and we got aboard and gave the word to Maclise, the conductor, to get his clearance and go.
A few minutes later we pulled out and the night run was begun. Like every other car the boss had ever owned, the "05" was fitted up as a working office, and since he had me along, he opened up a lot of claim papers upon which the legal department was giving him the final say-so, and we went to work.
For the next two hours I was so busy that I didn't know when we passed the various stations. There were no passenger trains to meet, and the despatcher was apparently giving us "regardless" rights over everything else, since we made no stops. At half-past nine, Mr. Norcross snapped a rubber band over the last of the claim files, lighted a pipe, and told me I might go to bed if I wanted to; said that he was going himself after he'd had a smoke. Just then, Chandler whistled for a station, and, looking out of a window, I saw that we were pulling into Bauxite, the little wind-blown junction from which the Strathcona branch led away into the northern mountains.
Wanting a bite of fresh air before turning in, I got off when we made the stop and strolled up to the engine. Maclise was in the office, getting orders for the branch, and Chandler was squatting in the gangway of the 815 and waiting. Up ahead of us, and too far away for me to read the number on her tender, there was a light engine. I thought at first it was the pusher which was kept at Bauxite to help heavy freights up the branch grades, and I wondered what it was doing out on the branch "Y" and in our way.
"What's the pusher out for, Buck?" I asked.
Chandler grinned down at me.
"You ain't so much of a railroad man as you might be, Jimmie," he said. "That ain't the pusher."
"What is it, then?"
"It's our first section, runnin' light to Strathcona."
Maybe Chandler was right, that I wasn't much of a railroad man, but I savvied the Short Line operating rules well enough to know that it wasn't usual to run a light engine, deadheading over the road, as a section of a special. Also, I knew that Buck knew it.
With that last little talk over the club dinner-table fresh in mind, I began to wonder, but instead of asking Chandler any more questions about the engine out ahead, I asked him if I might ride a piece with him up the branch; and when he said "Sure," I climbed up and humped myself on the fireman's box.
Maclise got his orders in due time and we pulled out. I noticed that when he gave Chandler the word, he also made motions with his lantern to the engine up ahead and it promptly steamed away, speeding up until it had about a half-mile lead and then holding it. That seemed funny, too. Though it is a rule that is often broken on all railroads, the different sections of a train are supposed to keep at least five minutes apart, and our "first" wasn't much more than a minute away from us at any time.
Another thing that struck me as being funny was the way Chandler was running. It was only sixty mountain miles up the branch to the big gold camp, and we ought to have been able to make it by one o'clock, taking it dead easy. But the way Buck was niggling along it looked as if it might be going to take us all night.
Just the same, nothing happened. The first ten miles was across a desert stretch with only a slightly rising grade, and it was pretty much all tangent—straight line. Beyond the ten-mile station of Nippo we hit the mountain proper, climbing it through a dry canyon, with curves that blocked off everything fifty feet ahead of the engine, and grades that would have made pretty good toboggan slides. The night was fine and starlit, but there was no moon and the canyon shadows loomed like huge walls to shut us in.
On the reverse curves I could occasionally get a glimpse of the red tail lights of the engine which ought, by rights, to have been five full minutes ahead of us. It was still holding its short lead, jogging along as leisurely as we were.
With nothing to do and not much to see, I got sleepy after a while, and about the time when I was thinking that I might as well climb back over the tender and turn in, I dozed off right there on the fireman's box—which was safe enough, at the snail's pace we were running. When I awoke it was with the feeling that I hadn't been asleep more than a minute or two, but the facts were against me. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning, and we had worried through the thirty-five miles of canyon run and were climbing the steep talus of Slide Mountain.
At first I didn't know what it was that woke me. On my side of the engine the big mountain fell away, miles it seemed, on a slope on which a man could hardly have kept his footing, and where a train, jumping the track, would roll forever before it would stop in the gorges at the bottom. While I was rubbing my eyes, the eight-wheeler gave another little jerk, and I saw that Chandler was slowing for a stop; saw this and got a glimpse of somebody on the track ahead, flagging us down with a lantern.
A minute later the brakes had been set and Buck and I were off. As we swung down from the engine step, Maclise joined us, and we went to meet the man with the lantern. He was the fireman of the engine ahead, and when we got around on the track I saw that our "first section" was stopped just a little way farther on.
"What is it, Barty?" said Maclise, when we came up to the fireman.
"It's them hell-fired wreckers again," was the gritting reply. "Rail joint disconnected and sprung out so's to let us off down the mountain."
I thought it was up to me to go back and tell the boss, but there wasn't any need of it. The stop or the slow running or something had roused him, and he was up and dressed and coming along beside the engine. When he came up, Maclise told him why we were stopping. He didn't say anything about the rail break, but he did ask, sort of sharp and quick, what engine that was up ahead.
I don't know what Maclise told him. Chandler turned to go back to his engine, and the rest of us were moving along the other way, the boss setting the pace with Maclise at his elbow. Three rail-lengths ahead of the stopped light engine we came to the break. The head engineer and another man were down on their hands and knees examining it, and when they stood up at our coming, I saw that the other man was Mr. Van Britt.
"What?" said the boss; "you here?"
Our only millionaire nodded.
"I ride the line once in a while—just to see how things are going," he returned crisply.
The boss didn't say anything more, but he knelt to look at the break. It was a trap, all right, set, beyond all question of doubt, to catch the private-car special. The fish-plates had been removed from a joint in the left-hand rail and the end of the downhill rail had been sprung out to make a derailing switch, which was held in position by the insertion of one of the fish-plates between the rail-webs. If we had hit the trap, going at even ordinary mountain-climbing speed, there would have been nothing left to tell the tale but a heap of scrap at the bottom of the thousand-foot dump.
There wasn't very much talk made by anybody. Under Mr. Van Britt's directions the engineer and fireman of the pilot engine brought tools and the break was repaired. All they had to do was to spring the bent rail back into place and spike it, and bolt the fish-plates on again.
While they were doing it the boss stood aside with Mr. Van Britt, and I heard what was said. Mr. Van Britt began it by saying, "We don't need any detectives this time. You are on your way to Strathcona to put a crimp in the smelter squeeze—the last of the Red Tower monopolies—so Dawes told me. He was probably foolish enough to tell others, and the word was pasted to scrag you before you could get to it. This trap was set to catch your special."
"Evidently," barked the boss; and then: "How did you happen to be here on that engine, Upton?"
"I've been ahead of you all the way up from Portal City," was the calm reply. "I thought it might be safer if you had a pilot to show you the way. I guess I must have had a hunch."
The boss turned on him like a flash.
"You had something more than a hunch: what was it—a wire?"
Mr. Van Britt gritted his teeth a little, but he told the truth.
"Yes; a friend of ours tipped me off—not about the broken track, of course, but just in a general way. I knew you'd bully me if I should tell you that I was going to run a pilot ahead of you, so I didn't tell you."
The break was repaired and the men were taking the tools back to the engine. As we turned to follow them, Mr. Norcross said: "Just one more question, Upton. Did your wire come from the capital?"
But at this Mr. Van Britt seemed to forget that he was talking to his general manager.
"It's none of your damned business where it came from," he snapped back; and that ended it.
Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning; and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their relief—and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out—by promising that our traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.
They tried to give him an ovation for that—the Strathcona men—did give him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon before we got away for the return to Portal City.
We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's box.
The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk. Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window, smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.
I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be killed if he didn't let go.
On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.
There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is trying his best to walk straight.
Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations—the laws about headlights, and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and I had heard him say:
"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to act both ways—for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."
Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.
That was the way Mrs. Sheila had put it to the boss, one evening along in the summer when they were sitting out on the Kendricks' porch, and I had butted in, as usual, with a bunch of telegrams that didn't matter. She had said that the experimentcouldn'tbe a success unless the conditions could be changed in some way; that so long as the railroads were owned or controlled by men of the Mr. Dunton sort and used as counters in the money-making game, there would never be any real peace between the companies and the people at large.
I knew that the boss had taken that saying of hers for another of the inspirations, and that he believed it clear through to the bottom. But I guess he didn't see any way as yet in which the Duntons could be shaken out, or just what could be made to happen if they were shaken out.
It was at Bauxite Junction that we picked up Mr. Hornack. He had been down in the sugar-beet country on a business trip, and had come up as far as Bauxite on a freight, after the Sedgwick operator had told him that our special was on the way home from Strathcona, and that he could catch it at the Junction.
I was glad when I saw him come in. I had just been thinking that it wasn't healthy for the boss to be grilling there at the car window so long alone, and I knew Mr. Hornack would keep him talking about something or other all the rest of the way in.
For a little while they talked business, and I took my chance to stretch out on the leather lounge behind their chairs and kind of half doze off. By and by the business talk wound itself up and I heard Mr. Hornack say: "I saw Ripley going in on Number Six this morning, and he had company; Mrs. Macrae, and the major's wife, and the husky little-girl cousin. They've been visiting at the capital, so they told me, and I expect the major will be mighty glad to see them back."
I didn't hear what Mr. Norcross said, if he said anything at all, but if I had been stone deaf I think I should have heard the thing that Mr. Hornack said when he went on.
"I heard something the other day in Portal City that seems pretty hard to believe, Norcross. It was at one of Mrs. Stagford's 'evenings,' and I was sitting out a dance with a certain young woman who shall be nameless. We were speaking of the Kendricks, and she gave me a rather broad hint that Mrs. Macrae isn't a widow at all; that her husband is still living."
My heavens! I had figured out a thousand ways in which the boss might get wised up to the dreadful truth, but never anything like this; to have it dropped on him that way out of a clear sky!
For a minute or two he didn't say anything, but when he did speak, I saw that the truth wasn't going to take hold.
"That is gossip, pure and simple, Hornack. The Kendricks are my friends, and I have been as intimate in their household as any outsider could be. It's merely idle gossip, I can assure you."
"Maybe so," said Mr. Hornack, sort of drawing in his horns when he saw how positive the boss was about it. "I'm not beyond admitting that the young woman who told me is a little inclined that way. But the story was pretty circumstantial: it went so far as to assert that 'Macrae' wasn't Mrs. Sheila's married name at all, and to say that her long stay with her Western cousins was—and still is—really a flight from conditions that were too humiliating to be borne."
"I don't care what was said, or who said it," the boss cut in brusquely. "It's ridiculous to suppose that any woman, and especially a woman like Sheila Macrae, would attempt to pass herself off as a widow when she wasn't one."
"I know," said the traffic manager, temporizing a little. "But on the other hand, I've never heard the major, or any one else, say outright that she was a widow. It seems to be just taken for granted. It stirred me up a bit on Van Britt's account. You don't go anywhere to mix and mingle socially, but it's the talk of the town that Upton is in over his head in that quarter."
I shut my eyes and held my breath. Mr. Hornack hadn't the slightest idea what thin ice he was skating over, or how this easy mention of Mr. Van Britt might be just like rubbing salt into a fresh cut. By this time it was growing dark, and we were running into Portal City, and I was mighty glad that it couldn't last much longer. The boss didn't speak again until the yard switches were clanking under the car, and then he said:
"Upton is well able to take care of himself, Hornack, and I don't think we need worry about him," and then over his shoulder to me: "Jimmie, it's time to wake up. We're pulling in."
As he always did on a return from a trip, Mr. Norcross ran up to his office to see if there was anything pressing, before he did anything else. May was still at his desk, and in answer to the boss's question he shook his head.
"No; nobody that couldn't wait," he said, referring to the day's callers. "Mr. Hatch was up with a couple of men that I didn't know, but he only wanted to inquire if you would be in the office this evening after dinner. I told him I'd find out when you came, and let him know by 'phone."
I thought, after all that had happened, Hatch certainly had his nerve to want to come and make a talk with the man his hired assassins were trying to murder. But if Mr. Norcross took that view of it, he didn't show it. On the contrary, he told Fred it would be all right to telephone Hatch; that he was coming down after dinner and the office would be open, as usual.
When things got that far along I slipped out and went to Mr. Van Britt's office at the other end of the hall. Bobby Kelso was there, holding the office down, and I asked him where I could find Tarbell. Luckily, he was able to tell me that Tarbell was at that moment down in the station restaurant, eating his supper; so down I went and butted in with my story of the Hatch call, and how it was to be repeated a little later on.
"I'll be there," said Tarbell; and with that load off my mind, I mogged off up-town to the club to get my own dinner.
When I broke into the grill-room at the railroad club, I found that Mr. Norcross had beaten me to it by a few minutes; that he had already ordered his dinner at a table with Major Kendrick. I suppose, by good rights, I ought to have gone off into a corner by myself, but I saw that the boss had tipped a chair at the end of the table where I usually sat, so I just went ahead and took it.
Coming in late, that way, I didn't get the first of the talk, but I took it that the boss had been saying something about his rare good luck in having the major for a table-mate two days in succession.
"The honoh is mine, my deah boy," the genial old Kentuckian was telling him as I sat down. "They told me in the despatchuh's office that youh special was expected in, so I telephoned Sheila and the madam not to wait for me."
"Then you stayed down town purposely to see me?" asked the boss.
"In a manneh, yes. I was by way of picking up a bit of information late this afte'noon that I thought ought to be passed on to you without any great delay."
The boss looked up quickly. "What is it, Major?" he inquired. "Are you going to tell me that something new has broken loose?"
"I wish I might be that he'pfully definite—I do so, Graham. But I can't. It's me'uhly a bit of street talk. They're telling it, oveh at the Commercial Club, that Hatch and John Marshall—you know him,—that Sedgwick stock jobbeh who has been so active in this Citizens' Storage & Warehouse business—have finally come togetheh."
"In a business way, you mean?"
The major gave a right and left twist to his big mustaches and shrugged one shoulder.
"They are most probably calling it business," he rejoined.
The boss nodded. "I know what has happened. In spite of the fact that the local people know that their economic salvation depends upon a wide and even distribution of their C. S. & W. stock, there has been a good bit of buying and selling and swapping around. I remember you prophesied that in a little while we'd have another trust in the hands of a few men. You may recollect that I didn't dispute your prediction. I merely said that our ground leases—the fact that all of the C. S. & W. plants and buildings are on railroad land—would still give us the whip-hand over any new monopoly that might be formed."
"Yes, suh; I remember you said that," the major allowed.
"Very good. Marshall and his pocket syndicate may have acquired a voting control in C. S. & W., and they may be willing now to patch up an alliance with Hatch. But in that case the new monopoly will still lack the one vital ingredient: the power to fix prices. If there is a new combine, and it tries to make the producers and merchants pay more than the agreed percentages for storage and handling——"
"I know," the major cut in. "You-all will rise up in the majesty of youh wrath and put it out of business by terminating the leases. I hope you may: I sutt'inly do hope you may. But you'll recollect that I didn't advise you on that point, suh. You took Misteh Ripley's opinion. Maybe the cou'ts will hold with you, but, candidly, Graham, I doubt it—doubt it right much."
The boss didn't seem to be much scared up over the doubt. He just smiled and said we'd be likely to find out what was in the wind, and that before very long. Then he spoke of Hatch's afternoon call at our offices, and mentioned the fact that the Red Tower president would probably try again, later in the evening.
The major let the business matter drop, and he was working his way patiently through the salad course when he looked up to say:
"Was there anything in youh trip to Strathcona to warrant Sheila's little telegraphic dangeh signal, Graham?"
"Nothing worth mentioning," said the boss, without turning a hair; doing it, as I made sure, because he didn't want Mrs. Sheila to be mixed up in the plotting business, even by implication.
The major didn't press the inquiry any farther, and when he spoke again it was of an entirely different matter.
"Away along in the beginning, somebody—I think it was John Chadwick—spoke of you as a man with a sawt of raw-head-and-bloody-bones tempeh, Graham: what have you done with that tempeh in these heah latteh days?"
This time the boss's smile was a good-natured grin.
"Temper is not always a matter of temperament, Major. Sometimes it is only a means to an end. Much of my experience has been in the construction camps, where I have had to deal with men in the raw. Just the same, there have been moments within the past six months when I have been sorely tempted to burn the wires with a few choice words of the short and ugly variety and throw up my job."
"Which, as you may say, brings us around to President Dunton," put in the old lawyer shrewdly. "He is still opposing youh policies?"
"Up to a few weeks ago he was still hounding me to do something that would boost the stock, regardless of what the something should be, or of its effect upon the permanent value of the property."
Again the major held his peace, as if he were debating some knotty point with himself—the table-clearing giving him his chance.
"Did I undehstand you to say that these—ah—suggestions from Dunton had stopped?" he inquired, after the little coffees had been served.
"Temporarily, at least. I haven't heard anything from New York—not lately."
"Then Dunton's nephew hasn't made himself known to you?"
"Collingwood? Hardly. I'm not in Mr. Howie Collingwood's set—which is one of the things I have to be thankful for. But this is news: I didn't know he was out here."
The news-giver bent his head gravely in confirmation of the fact.
"He's heah, I'm sorry to say, Graham. He has been heah quite some little time, vibratin' round with the Grigsbys and the Gannons and a lot mo' of the new-rich people up at the capital."
It was the boss's turn to go silent, and I could guess pretty well what he was thinking. The presence of President Dunton's nephew in the West might mean much or nothing. But I could imagine the boss was thinking that his own single experience with Collingwood was enough to make him wish that the nephew of Big Money would stay where he belonged—among the high-rollers and spenders of his own set in the effete East.
"I can't quite get the proper slant on men of the Collingwood type," he remarked, after the pause. "The only time I ever saw him was on the night before the directors' meeting last spring. He was here with his uncle's party in the special train, and that night at the Bullard he had been drinking too much and made a braying ass of himself. I had to knock him silly before I could get him up to his room."
"You did that, Graham?—for a strangeh?"
"I did it for the comfort of all concerned. As I say, he was making an ass of himself."
There was another break, and then the major looked up with a little frown.
"That was befo' you had met Sheila?" he asked, thoughtfully.
"Why, no; not exactly. It was the same night—the night we all dropped off the 'Flyer' and got left behind at Sand Creek. You may remember that we came in later on Mr. Chadwick's special."
The major made no reply to this, and pretty soon the boss was on his feet and excusing himself once more on the after-dinner smoking stunt, saying that he was obliged to go back to the office. The major got up and shook hands with him as if he were bidding him good-by for a long journey.
"You are going down to keep that appointment with Misteh Rufus Hatch?" he said. "You take an old man's advice, Graham, my boy, and keep youh hand—figuratively speaking, of cou'se—on youh gun. It runs in my mind, somehow, that you are going to be hit—and hit right hard. No, don't ask me why. Call it a rotten suspicion, and let it go at that. Come up to the house, afte'wards, if you have time, and tell me I'm a false prophet, suh; I hope you may."
The boss promised plenty cheerfully as to the calling part, as you'd know he would since he hadn't seen Mrs. Sheila for I don't know how long; and a few minutes later we were on our way, walking briskly, to keep the Fred-May-made engagement with the chief of the grafters.