With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had happened.
We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally, because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt there was plenty of it: the more since the boss—a bit grimmer than usual—hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but these were all in the family, too, as you might say.
After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr. Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.
We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying on made it look as if there might be more to follow.
I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that Branderby, theMountaineerreporter, had given us and tear loose on the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business, and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.
Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage & Warehouse people after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes, and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. & W. with all sorts of legal obstacles.
Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. & W. folks, out of jail for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.
Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days, as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an "extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his being sent out to relieve anybody.
I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort, and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and a half farther than he had bargained to.
"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket," he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens' Storage & Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."
"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about our C. S. & W. friends? Are they still game?"
"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere, now, and C. S. & W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."
The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his cigar, which had gone out.
"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is not mine?" he said, after a little pause.
"Not yours?"
"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white elephants."
"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."
"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt in his voice that fairly made me sick—knowing what I did; and knowing that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"
"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."
The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the catch against interruptions.
"Let's have it," he directed.
Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger would vanish.
Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept our messages and keep in touch.
The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail, which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for it—as he did, when the time came—and go in person to stop the raid, he was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the night.
"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been listening soberly while the lawyer talked.
"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer. The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands overnight in the same place—on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence, it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr. Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped wires."
Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"
"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place, and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and would stay off until the other man could take hold."
"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley. Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."
"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.
"Oh, yes; you have it all—or practically all. I fell for the anonymous letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily, ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment. The obvious thing to do—if any attention whatever was to be paid to the anonymous warning—was to telephone the police and the round-house. I did neither because I thought it might be too slow. The letter was urgent, of course; it said that Black Ike Bradley and his gang were already in the railroad yard, preparing to steal the engine."
"So you made a straight shoot for the scene of action?"
"I did; down the back streets and across the lower end of the plaza. As it appeared—or rather as it was made to appear—I was barely in time. There were men at the engine, and when I sprinted across the yard they were ready to move it out to the main line. I yelled at them and ran in."
"You must have been beautifully rattled; to go up against a gang of thugs that way, alone and unarmed," was the lawyer's comment.
"I was," the boss confessed soberly. "Of course, I didn't have a ghost of a show. Three of them tackled me the moment I came within reach. I got one of the three on the point of the jaw, and they had to leave him behind; but there were enough more of them. Before I fairly realized what was happening, they had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey, gagged with my own handkerchief, and loaded into the cab of the engine. From that on, it was all plain sailing."
"Then they took you to the old lumber camp?"
"As fast as the engine could be made to turn her wheels. They were running against the Mail, and they knew it. Arroyo has no night operator, and when we sneaked through the Banta yard and past the station, the operator there was asleep. I saw him, with his head in the crook of his arm, at the telegraph table in the bay window as we passed."
Ripley grinned. "We've been giving that young fellow the third degree—Van Britt and I. He claims that he was doped; that somebody dropped something into his supper coffee at the station lunch counter. His story didn't hang together and Van Britt fired him. But go on."
"We ran out to the Timber Mountain 'Y'," the boss resumed, "and from that on up the old saw-mill line. The rail connections were all in place, and I knew from this that preparations had been made beforehand. At the mill stop they untied my legs and made me walk up the hill to the commissary. When they took the gag out, I said a few things and asked them what they were going to do with me. They wouldn't tell me anything except that I was to be locked up for a few days."
"You knew what that meant?"
"Perfectly. My drop-out would be made to look as if I had jumped the job, and Dunton would appoint a new man. After that, I could come back, if I wanted to. Whatever I might do or try to do would cut no figure, and no explanation I could make would be believed. I had most obligingly dug my own official grave, and there could be no resurrection."
"What then?" pressed Ripley, keenly interested, as anybody could see.
"When they took the clothes-line from my arms there was another scrap. It didn't do any good. They got the door shut on me and got it locked. After that, for four solid days, Ripley, I was made to realize how little it takes to hold a man. I had my pocket-knife, but I couldn't whittle my way out. The floor puncheons were spiked down, and I couldn't dig out. They had taken all my matches, and I couldn't burn the place. I tried the stick-rubbing, and all those things you read about: they're fakes; I couldn't get even the smell of smoke."
"The chimney?"
"There wasn't any. They had heated the place, when it was a commissary, with a stove, and the pipe hole through the ceiling had a piece of sheet iron nailed over it. And I couldn't get to the roof at all. They had me."
Ripley nodded and said, snappy-like: "Well, we've got them now—any time you give the word. Tarbell has a pinch on one of the Clanahan men and he will turn State's evidence. We can railroad every one of those fellows who carried you off."
"And the men higher up?" queried the boss.
"No; not yet."
"Then we'll drop it right where it is. I don't want the hired tools; no one of them, unless you can get the devil that crippled Jimmie Dodds, here."
They went on, talking about my burn-up. Listening in, I learned for the first time just how it had been done. Tarbell, through his hold upon the welshing Clanahan striker, had got the details at second-hand. Hatch's assassin—or Clanahan's—must have had it all doped out and made ready before Hatch had made the break at trying to bribe me.
Anyway, a lead had been taken from a power wire at the corner of the street and hooked over the outer door-knob. And inside I had been given a sheet of copper to stand on for a good "ground," the copper itself being wired to a water pipe running up through the hall. Tarbell had afterward proved up on all this, it seemed, finding the insulated wire and the copper sheet with its connections hidden in a small rubbish closet under the hall stair, just where a fellow in a hurry might chuck them.
"Tarbell is a striking success," Mr. Norcross put in, along at the end of things. "We'll keep him on with us, Ripley."
"You'd better," said the level-eyed young attorney, significantly. "From the way things are stacking up, you'll presently need a personal body-guard. I suppose it's no use asking you to carry a gun?"
"Hardly," laughed the boss. "I've never done it yet, and it's pretty late in the day to begin."
Past this there was a little more talk about the C. S. & W. deal, and about what the Hatch crowd would be likely to try next; and when it was finished, and Ripley was reaching for his hat, the boss said: "There is no change in the orders: we've got 'em going now, and we'll keep 'em going. Drive it, Ripley; drive it for every ounce there is in you. Never mind the election talk or the stock quotations. This railroad is going to be honest, if it never earns another net dollar. We'll win!"
"It's beginning to look a little that way, now," the lawyer admitted, with his hand on the door knob. "Just the same, Norcross, there is safety in numbers, and our numbers are precisely one; one man"—holding up a single finger. "As before, the pyramid is standing on its head—and you are the head. The other people have shown us once what happens when you are removed. For God's sake, be careful!"
I don't know whether the boss took that last bit of advice to heart or not. If he didn't, he was a bigger man than even I had been taking him for—with the crooks of a whole State reaching out for him, and with the knowledge which he must have had, that the next time they came gunning for him they'd shoot to kill.
It was late in the afternoon when Ripley made his visit, and pretty soon after he went away the boss and I closed up our end of the shop and left May pecking away at his typewriter on a lot of routine stuff. I don't know what made me do it, but as I was passing Fred's desk on the way out, stringing along behind the boss, I stopped and jerked open one of the drawers. I knew beforehand what was in the drawer, and pointed to it—a new .38 automatic. Fred nodded, and I slipped the gun into my left-hand pocket, wondering as I did it, if I could make out to hit the broad side of a barn, shooting with that hand, if I had to.
A half-minute later I had caught up with Mr. Norcross, and together we left the building and went up to the Bullard for dinner.
I knew, just as well as could be—without being able to prove it—that we were shadowed on the trip up from the railroad building to the hotel, and it made me nervous. There could be only one reason now for any such dogging of the boss. The grafters were not trying to find out what he was doing; they didn't need to, because he was advertising his doings—or Juneman was—in the newspapers. What they were trying to do was to catch him off his guard and do him up—this time to stay done up.
It was safe to assume that they wouldn't fumble the ball a second time. Mr. Ripley had stood the thing fairly on its feet when he said that our campaign was purely a one-man proposition, so far as it had yet gone. People who had met the boss and had done business with him liked him; but the old-time prejudice against the railroad was so widespread and so bitter that it couldn't be overcome all at once. Juneman, our publicity man, was doing his best, but as yet we had no party following in the State at large which would stand by us and see that we got justice.
I was chewing these things over while we sat at dinner in the Bullard café, and I guess Mr. Norcross was, too, for he didn't say much. It isn't altogether comfortable to be a marked man in a more or less unfriendly country, and I shouldn't wonder if the boss, big and masterful as he was, felt the pressure of it. I don't know whether he knew anything about the shadowing business I speak of or not, but he might have. We hadn't more than given our dinner order when one of Hatch's clerks, a cock-eyed chap named Kestler, came in and took a table just far enough from ours to be out of the way, and near enough to listen in if we said anything.
When we finished, Kestler was just getting his service of ice-cream; but I noticed that he left it untouched and got up and followed us to the lobby. It made me hot enough to want to turn on him and knock his crooked eye out, but of course, that wouldn't have done any good.
After Mr. Norcross had bought some cigars at the stand he said he guessed he'd run out to Major Kendrick's for a little while; and with that he went up to his rooms. Though the major was the one he named, I knew he meant that he was going to see Mrs. Sheila. I remembered what he had said to Ripley about a woman's giving him germ ideas and such things, and I guess it was really so. Every time he spent an evening at the major's he'd come back with a lot of new notions for popularizing the Short Line.
When he said that, about going out to the major's, Kestler was near enough to overhear it, and so he waited, lounging in the lobby and pretending to read a paper. About half-past seven the boss came down and asked me to call a taxi for him. I did it; and Kestler loafed around just long enough to see him start off. Then he lit out, himself, and something in the way he did it made me take out after him.
I expected to see him turn up-town to the second cross street where the Red Tower had its general offices on the fourth floor of the Empire Building. But instead, he turned the other way, and the first thing I knew I was trailing him through the railroad yard and on down past the freight house toward the big, fenced-in, Red Tower coal yards.
At the coal yard he let himself in through a wicket in the wagon gates, and I noticed that he used a key and locked the wicket after he got inside. I put my eye to a crack in the high stockade fence and saw that the little shack office that was used for a scale-house was lighted up. My burnt hand was healing tolerably well by this time and I could use it a little. There was a slack pile just outside of the big gate, and by climbing to the top of it I got over the fence and crept up to the scale-house.
A small window in one end of the shack, opened about two inches at the bottom, answered well enough for a peep-hole. Three men were in the little box of a place—three besides Kestler; Hatch, his barrel-bodied partner, Henckel, and one other. The third man looked like a glorified barkeep'. He was of the type I have heard called "black Irish," fat, sleek, and well-fed, with little pin-point black eyes half buried in the flesh of his round face, and the padded jaw and double chin shaved to the blue. The night was warm and he had his hat off. Through the crack in the window I could smell the pomatum with which his hair was plastered into barkeep' waves to match the tightly curled black mustaches.
I knew this third man well enough, by sight; everybody in Portal City knew him—decent people only too well when it came to an election tussle. He was the redoubtable Pete Clanahan, dive-keeper, and political boss.
Kestler was talking when I glued eye and ear to the window crack; was telling the three how he had shadowed Mr. Norcross from the railroad headquarters to the Bullard, and how he stayed around until he had seen the boss take a taxi for Major Kendrick's. This seemed to be all that was wanted of him, for when he was through, Hatch told him he might go home. After the cock-eyed clerk was gone, Hatch lighted a fresh cigar and put it squarely up to the Irishman.
"It's no use being mealy-mouthed over this thing, Pete," he grated in that saw-mill voice of his. "We've got to get rid of this man. You've asked us to shadow him and keep you posted, and we have—and you've done nothing. Every day's delay gives him that much better hold. We can choke him off by littles in the business game, of course; we have Dunton and the New Yorkers on our side, and this coöperative scheme he has launched can be broken down with money. Such things never hold together very long. But that doesn't help you political people out; and your stake in the game is even bigger than ours."
Clanahan looked around the little dog-kennel of a place suspiciously.
"'Tis not here that we can talk much about thim things, Misther Hatch," he said cautiously.
"Why not?" was the rasping question. "There's nobody in the yard, and the gates are locked. It's a damned sight safer than a back room in one of your dives—as we know now to our cost."
Clanahan threw up his head with a gesture that said much. "Murphy's the man that leaked on that engine job—and he'll leak no more."
"Well," said Hatch, with growing irritation, "what are you holding back for now? We stood to win on the first play, and we would have won if your people hadn't balled it by talking too much. One more day and Dismuke would have been in the saddle. That would have settled it."
"Yah; and Mister Dismuke still here in Portal City remains," put in Henckel.
The dive-keeper locked his pudgy fingers across a cocked knee.
"'Tis foine, brave gintlemen ye are, you two, whin ye've got somebody else to pull th' nuts out av th' fire for ye!" he said. "Ye'd have us croak this felly f'r ye, and thin ye'd stand back and wash yer hands while some poor divil wint to th' rope f'r it. Where do we come in, is what I'd like to know?"
"You are already in," snapped Hatch. "You know what the Big Fellow at the capital thinks about it, and where you'll stand in the coming election if you don't put out this fire that Norcross is kindling. You're yellow, Clanahan. That's all that is the matter with you. Put your wits to work. There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with butter."
"Tell me wan thing!" insisted the dive-keeper, boring the chief grafter with his pin-point eyes. "Do you stand f'r it if we do this thing up right?"
Hatch's eyes fell, and Henckel's big body twisted uneasily in the chair that was groaning under his beer-barrel weight. There was silence for a little space, and I could feel the cold sweat starting out all over me. I hadn't dreamed of stumbling upon anything like this when I started out to shadow Kestler. They were actually plotting to murder the boss!
It was Hatch who broke the stillness.
"It's up to you, Clanahan, and you know it," he declared. "You've had your tip from the Big Fellow. The railroad people must be made to get into the fight in the coming election, and get in on the right side. If they don't; and if Norcross stays and keeps his fire burning; you fellows lose out. So shall we; but what we lose will be a mere drop in the bucket; and, as I have said, we stand to get it back, after this coöperative scheme has had time to burn itself out."
Clanahan sat back in his chair and shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Ye'd sthring me as if I was a boy!" he scoffed. "'Tis your own game fr'm first to last. D'ye think I'm not knowing that? 'Tis bread and butther and th' big rake-off for you, and little ye care how th' election goes. Suppose we'd croak this man in th' hot par-rt av th' p'litical fight; what happens? Half th' noospaypers in th' State'd play him up f'r a martyr to th' cause av good governmint, and we'd all go to hell in a hand-basket!"
I was cramped and sore and one of my legs had gone to sleep, but I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. My heart was skipping beats right along while I waited for Hatch's answer. When it came, the drumming in my ears pretty nearly made me lose it.
"Clanahan," he began, as cold as an icicle. "I didn't get you down here to argue with you. We've got your number—all your different numbers—and they are written down in a book. You've bungled this thing once, and for that reason you've got it to do over again. We haven't asked you to 'croak' anybody, as you put it, and we are not asking it now."
"'Tis domned little you lack av asking it," retorted the dive-keeper.
"Listen," said Hatch, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. "Besides keeping cases on Norcross here, we've been digging back into his record a few lines. Every man has his sore spot, if you can only find it, Clanahan—just as you have yours. What if I should tell you that Norcross is wanted in another State—for a crime?"
"Nobody would believe ut," was the prompt rejoinder. "If he's wanted he c'u'd be had."
"Wait," Hatch went on. "Before he came here he was chief of construction on the Oregon Midland. There was a right-of-way fight back in the mountains—fifty miles from the nearest sheriff—with the P. & S. F. Norcross armed his track-layers, and in the bluffing there was a man killed."
Though it was a warm night, as I have said, the cold chills began to chase themselves up and down my back. What Hatch said was perfectly true. In the right-of-way scrap he was talking about, there had been a few wild shots fired, and one of them had found a P. & S. F. grade laborer. I don't believe anybody had ever really blamed the boss for it. He had given strict orders that we were only to make a show of force; and, besides, the other fellows were armed, too, and had armed first. But therehadbeen a man killed.
While I was shivering, Clanahan said: "Well, what av it?"
"Norcross was responsible for that man's death. If he was having trouble over his right-of-way, his recourse was to the law, and he took the law into his own hands. Nothing was ever done about it, because nobody took the trouble to prosecute. A week ago we sent a man to Oregon to look up the facts. He succeeded in finding a brother of the dead man, and a warrant has now been sworn out for Norcross's arrest."
"Well?" said Clanahan again. "Ye have the sthring in yer own hand; why don't ye pull it?"
"That's where you come in," was the answer. "The Oregon justice issued the warrant because it was demanded, but he refused to incur, for his county, the expense of sending a deputy sheriff to another State, or to take the necessary steps to have Norcross extradited. If Norcross could be produced in court, he would try him and either discharge him or bind him over, as the facts might warrant. He took his stand upon the ground that Norcross was only technically responsible, and told the brother that in all probability nothing would come of an attempt to prosecute."
"Thin ye've got nothing on him, after all," the Irishman grunted.
"Yes," Hatch came back; "we have the warrant, and, in addition to that, we have you, Pete. A word from you to the Portal City police headquarters, and our man finds himself arrested and locked up—to wait for a requisition from the Governor of Oregon."
"But you said th' requisition wouldn't come," Clanahan put in.
Hatch was sitting back now and stroking his ugly jaw.
"It might come, Pete, if it had to: there's no knowing. In the meantime we get delay. There'll behabeas corpusproceedings, of course, to get him out of jail, but there's where you'll come in again; you've got your own man in for City Attorney. And, after all, the delay is all we need. With Norcross in trouble, and in jail on a charge of murder, the railroad ship'll go on the rocks in short order. The Norcross management is having plenty of trouble—wrecks and the like. With Norcross locked up, New York will be heard from, and Dismuke will step in and clean house. That will wind up the reform spasm."
"'Tis a small chance," growled the chief of the ward heelers. "Th' high-brow vote is stirrin', and there'll be some to say it's persecution—and say it where it'll be heard. I'll talk it over with the Big Fellow."
Again Hatch leaned forward and put his hands on his knees.
"You'll do nothing of the sort, Pete. You'll act, and act on your own responsibility. If you don't, somebody may wire the sheriff of Silver Bow County, Montana, that the man he knew in Butte as Michael Clancy is...."
The dive-keeper put up both hands as if to ward off a blow.
"'Tis enough," he mumbled, speaking as if he had a bunch of dry cotton in his mouth. "Slip me th' warrant."
Hatch went to a small safe and worked the combination. When the door was opened he passed a folded paper to Clanahan. Through all this talk, Henckel had said nothing, and I suspected that Hatch had him there solely for safety's sake, and to provide a witness. With the paper in his pocket, Clanahan got up to go. It was time for me to make a move.
It's curious how an idea will sometimes lay hold of you and knock out reason and common sense and everything else. Clanahan had in his pocket a piece of paper that simply meant ruin to Mr. Norcross, and the blowing up of all the plans that had been made and all the work that had been done. If he should be allowed to get up-town with that warrant, the end of everything would be in sight. But how was I to prevent it?
I saw where the Irishman had put the warrant; in the right-hand, outside pocket of his coat. The pocket wasn't deep enough, and about an inch of the folded paper showed white against the black of his coat. The three men were on their feet, and Hatch was reaching for the wall switch which controlled the single incandescent lamp hanging from the ceiling of the scale-house. If I could only think of some way to blow the place up and snatch the paper in the confusion.
Up to that minute I had never thought once of the pistol I had taken from Fred May's drawer, though it was still sagging in my left hip pocket. When I did think of it I dragged it out with some silly notion of trying to hold the three men up at the door of the shack as they came out. Hatch's stop to light a cigar and to hand out a couple to the other two gave me time to chuck that notion and grab another. With the muzzle of the automatic resting in the crack of the opened window I took dead aim at the incandescent lamp in the ceiling and turned her loose for the whole magazineful.
Since the first bullet got the lamp and left the place black dark, I couldn't see what was happening in the close little room. But whatever it was, there was plenty of it. I could hear them gasping and yelling and knocking one another down as they fought to get the door open. Sticking the empty pistol back into my pocket I jumped to get action, hurting my sore hand like the mischief in doing it.
Hatch was the first man out, but the big German was so close a second that he knocked his smaller partner down and fell over him. Clanahan kept his feet. He had a gun in his hand that looked to me, in the darkness, as big as a cannon. I was flattened against the side of the scale shack, and when the dive-keeper tried to side-step around the two fallen men who were blocking the way, I snatched the folded paper from his pocket; snatched it and ran as if the dickens was after me.
That was a bad move—the runaway. If I had kept still there might have been a chance for me to make a sneak. But when I ran, and fell over a pile of loose coal, and got up and ran again, they were all three after me, Clanahan taking blind shots in the dark with his cannon as he came.
Naturally, I made straight for the wagon gate, and forgot, until I was right there, that it, and the wicket through one of the leaves, were both locked. As I shook the wicket, a bullet from Clanahan's gun spatted into the woodwork and stuck a splinter into my hand, and I turned and sprinted again, this time for the gates where the coal cars were pushed in from the railroad yard. These, too, were shut and locked, and when I ducked under the nearest gondola I realized that I was trapped. Before I could climb the high fence anywhere, they'd get me.
They came up, all three of them, puffing and blowing, while I was hiding under the gondola.
"It's probably that cow-boy spotter of Norcross's, but he can't get away," Hatch was gritting—meaning Tarbell, probably. "The gates are locked and we can plug him if he tries to climb the fence. There's a gun in the scale-house. You two look under these cars while I go and get it!"
It was up to me to move again. Henckel was striking matches and holding them so that Clanahan could look under the cars, and I could feel, in anticipation, the shock of a bullet from the big gun in the dive-keeper's fat fist as I crawled cautiously out on the far side. Creeping along behind the string of coal cars I came presently to the great gantry crane used for unloading the fuel. It was a huge traveling machine, straddling the tracks and a good part of the yard, and the clam-shell grab-bucket was down, resting on its two lips on the ground.
At first I thought of climbing to the frame-work of the crane and trying to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze in. If they were looking for a full-sized man—Tarbell, for instance, who was as husky as a farm-hand—they'd never think of that crack in the bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the clam-shell.
That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.
As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack between the bucket halves and touched them.
"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel. And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"
Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner or later.
"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."
Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out when he whirled upon the Irishman.
"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and wanting to know what all the shooting was about.
It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done. With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal tangle and had put him in peril of his life.
Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland right-of-way squabble.
But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know anything about that part of it—he was such a square fighter himself that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.
Meanwhile, things grew warmer and warmer in the tussle we were making to pull the old Short Line out of the mud; warmer in a number of ways, because, in addition to the fight for the public confidence, we began just then to have a perfect epidemic of wrecks.
The boss turned the material trouble over to Mr. Van Britt and devoted himself pretty strictly to the public side of things. Everywhere, and on every occasion—at dinners at the different chambers of commerce, and public banquets given to this, that, or the other visiting big-wig—he was always ready to get on his feet and tell the people that the true prosperity of the country carried with it the prosperity of the railroads; that the two things were one and inseparable; and that, when it came right down to basic facts, the railroads were really a part of the progress machinery of the country at large and should be regarded, not as alien tax-collectors, but as contributors to the general prosperity and welfare.
I went with him on a good many of the trips he made to be "among those present" at these gatherings—and so, by the way, did Tarbell—and it was plain to be seen that the new idea was gradually gathering a little headway. By this time, also, Red Tower Consolidated was beginning to find out what it meant to have active competition. The C. S. & W. people were hammering their new plants into working shape, and they were getting the patronage, both of the producers and consumers, hand over fist.
Engineered by Billoughby, the railroad was simply playing the part of the good big brother to these new middlemen. Track facilities and yard service were granted freely; and while no discrimination was permitted as against the Red Tower people, the friendly attitude of the road counted for something, as it was bound to; hence, the C. S. & W. got the business right from the jump, enlarging its field as it went along, and gathering in all the little side monopolies like the ice-plants, and city lighting installations, and so on. This, by the way, was in line with the new slogan put out by the boss and his boosters: "Own your own Utilities."
As to the political struggle which was now ripping the State wide open from end to end, the boss was steel and iron on the side of non-interference. He never allowed himself to say a public word on either side; never spoke of the campaign at all except to assert everywhere and at all times that the railroad was not in politics, and never would be again.
This was the key-word given to the different members of the staff to be passed on down the line to every official in authority. We were to be like Cæsar's wife—above suspicion. We were neither to make nor meddle in the campaign, and any department head or other officer or employee caught trying to swing the railroad vote would be fired on the spot.
On one of our trips over the road we had a call from Mr. Anson Burrell, the gubernatorial candidate who was making the race against the machine. He was a cattle magnate of the modern sort; a big, viking-looking man, with a Yale degree, and with a record as clean as a hound's tooth. When he came into the private car he seemed to fill it, not only with his presence, but with the fresh keen air of the grazing uplands.
"I'm glad to have a chance to meet you on your own ground, Mr. Norcross," he said, giving the boss a hand-grip that looked mighty hearty and sincere. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell you how much we appreciate the stand you have taken. For the first time in its history, the railroad is keeping out of the political fight; I know it, and the people are beginning to find it out, too. You may not mean it that way, but it is the strongest card you could play. You need just legislation, and there is no better way to get it than by not trying to influence it."
The boss met him half-way on that, of course, and said what he ought to; and they talked along that line for the full half-hour that our special stopped in the town where Mr. Burrell had caught us. In a way, it was a sort of temptation to take sides. Mr. Burrell made it pretty plain that if the railroad continued to behave itself, and if the reform party got in, there would be easier legislation, and perhaps some of the old hard-and-fast intrastate rate laws repealed. But the boss wasn't the man to drop his candy in the dirt, and he kept right on laying down the law to everybody in the service; we were to let the campaign absolutely alone, and every man was to vote as he thought best.
As time went on, I was a little surprised to see that Hatch and his gunmen side partners under Pete Clanahan made no further move; at least, not toward keeping cases on Mr. Norcross. Though Tarbell and I still went everywhere with him, we saw no more shadowers. I put it up that perhaps they were lying quiet because they knew that somebody had overheard their talk in the coal yard scale-house and they were waiting for the thing to blow over a little. All of us who were on the inside felt that the move was only postponed, and that when it did come it would be a center shot. But there was nothing we could do. We could only hang on and keep a sharp eye to windward.
During those few pre-election weeks the New York end of us seemed to have petered out completely. We heard nothing more from President Dunton, worse than an occasional wire complaint about the number of wrecks we were having, though the stock was still going down, point by point, and, so far as a man up a tree could see, we were making no attempt to show net earnings—were turning all our money into betterments as fast as it came in. I knew that couldn't go on. Without a flurry of some sort, the New Yorkers would never be able to break even, to say nothing of a profit, and I looked every day for a howl that would tear things straight up the back.
While all these threads were weaving along, I'm sorry to say that I hadn't yet drummed up the courage to tell the boss the truth about Mrs. Sheila. He kept on going to the major's every chance he had, and Maisie Ann was making life miserable for me because I hadn't told him—calling me a coward and everything under the sun. I told her to tell him herself, and she retorted that I knew she couldn't: that it was my job and nobody else's. We fussed over it a lot; and because I most always contrived some excuse to chase out to the Kendrick house at the boss's heels—merely to help Tarbell keep cases on him—there were plenty of chances for the fussing.
It was on one of these chasing trips to "Kenwood" that the roof fell in. The major had gone out somewhere—to the theater, I guess—taking his wife and Maisie Ann, and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together in the major's den, with a little coal blaze in the basket grate because the nights were beginning to get a bit chilly.
As usual when they were together, they made no attempt at privacy: the den doorway had no door, nothing but one of those Japanese curtains made out of bits of bamboo strung like beads on a lot of strings. I had butted in with a telegram—which might just as well have stood over until the next morning, if you want to know. After I had delivered it, Mrs. Sheila gave me that funny little laugh of hers and told me to go hunt in the pantry and see if I could find a piece of pie, and the boss added that if I'd wait, he'd go back to town with me pretty soon.
I found the pie, and ate it in the dining-room, making noise enough about it so that they could know I was there if they wanted to. But they went right on talking, and paid no attention to me.
"Do you know, Sheila"—they had long since got past the "Mr." and "Mrs."—"you've been the greatest possible help to me in this rough-house, all the way along," the boss was saying. "And I don't understand how you, or any woman, can plan so clearly and logically to a purely business end. I was just thinking to-night as I came out here: you have given me nearly every suggestion I have had that was worth anything; more than that, you have held me up to the rack, time and again, when I have been ready to throw it all up and let go. Why have you done it?"
I heard the little laugh again, and she said: "It is worth something to have a friend. Odd as it may seem, Graham, I have been singularly poverty-stricken in that respect. And I have wanted to see you succeed. Though you are still calling it merely a 'business deal,' it is really a mission, you know, crammed full of good things to a struggling world. If you do succeed—and I am sure you are going to—you will leave this community, and hundreds of others, vastly the better for what you are doing and demonstrating."
"But that is a man's point of view," the boss persisted. "How do you get it? You are all woman, you know; and your mixing and mingling—at least, since I have known you—has all been purely social. How do you get the big overlook?"
"I don't know. I was foolish and frivolous once, like most young girls, I suppose. But we all grow older; and we ought to grow wiser. Besides, the woman has the advantage of the man in one respect; she has time to think and plan and reason things out as a busy man can't have. Your problem has seemed very simple to me, from the very beginning. It asked only for a strong man and an honest one. You were to take charge of a piece of property that had been abused and knocked about and used as a means of extortion and oppression, and you were to make it good."
"Again, that is a man's point of view."
"Oh, no," she protested quickly. "There is no sex in ethics. Women are the natural house-cleaners, perhaps, but that isn't saying that a man can't be one, too, if he wants to be."
At this, the boss got up and began to tramp up and down the room; I could hear him. I knew she'd been having the biggest kind of a job to keep him shut up in this sort of abstract corral, when all the time he was loving her fit to kill, but apparently she had been doing it, successfully. There wasn't the faintest breath of sentiment in the air; not the slightest whiff. When she began again, I could somehow feel that she was just in time to prevent his breaking out into all sorts of love-making. I shouldn't wonder if that was the way it had been from the beginning.
"The time has come, now, when you must take another leaf out of my book," she said, with just the proper little cooling tang in her voice. "Up to the present you have been hammering your way to the end like a strong man, and that was right. But you have been more or less reckless—and that isn't right or fair or just to a lot of other people."
The tramping stopped and I heard him say: "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean that matters have come to such a pass now that you can't afford to take any risks—personal risks. The enmity that caused you to be kidnapped and carried away into the mountains still exists, and exists in even greater measure. It hasn't stopped fighting you for a single minute, and if the plan it is now trying doesn't work, it will try another and a more desperate one."
"You've been talking to Ripley," he laughed. "Ripley wants me to become a gun-toter and provide myself with a body-guard. I'd look well, wouldn't I? But what do you mean by 'the plan it is now trying'?"
She hesitated a little, and then said: "I shall make no charges, because I have no proof. But I read the newspapers, and Mr. Van Britt tells me something, now and then. You are having a terrible lot of wrecks."
"That is merely bad luck," he rejoined easily, adding: "And the wrecks have nothing to do with my personal safety."
"Rashness is no part of true courage," she interpolated, calmly. "As a private individual you might say that your life is your own, and that you have a perfect right to risk it as you please. But as the general manager of the railroad, with a lot of your friends holding office under you, you can't say that. Besides, you are fighting for a cause, and that cause will stand or fall with you."
"You ought to be a member of this new reform legislature that some of our good friends think is coming up the pike," he chuckled; but she ignored the good-natured gibe and made him listen.
"I was visiting a day or two at the capital last week, and there are influences at work that you don't know about. It has grown away past and beyond any mere fight with the Hatch people. If the opposition can't make your administration a failure, it won't hesitate to get rid of you in the easiest way that offers."
There was silence in the major's den for a minute or so, and then the boss said:
"As usual, you know more than you are willing to tell me."
"Perhaps not," was the prompt answer. "Perhaps I am only the onlooker—who can usually see things rather better than the persons actually involved. Hitherto I have urged you to be bold, and then again to be bold. Now I am begging you to be prudent."
"In what way?"
"Careful for yourself. For example: you walked out here this evening; don't do that any more. Come in a taxi—and don't come alone."
I couldn't see his frown of disagreement, but I knew well enough it was there.
"There spoke the woman in you," he said. "If I should show the white feather that way, they'd have some excuse for potting me."
There was a silence again, and I got up quietly and crossed the dining-room to the big recessed window where I stood looking out into the darkness of the tree-shaded lawn. It was pretty evident that Mrs. Sheila knew a heap more than she was telling the boss, just as he had said, and I couldn't help wondering how she came to know it. What she said about the increased number of wrecks looked like a pointer. Was she in touch with the enemy in some way?
I knew that Major Kendrick heard all the gossip of the streets and the clubs, and that he carried a good bit of it home; but that wouldn't account for much inside knowledge of the real thing in Mrs. Sheila. Then my mind went back in a flash to what Maisie Ann had told me. Was the husband who ought to be dead, and wasn't, mixed up in it in any way? Could it be possible that he was one of those who were in the fight on the other side, and that she was still keeping in touch with him?
Pretty soon I heard the murmur of their voices again, but now I was so far away from the bamboo-screened door that I couldn't hear what they were saying. I wished they would break it off so the boss could go. It was getting late, and there had been enough said to make me wish we were both safely back in the hotel. It's that way sometimes, you know, in spite of all you can do. You hear a talk, and you can't help reading between the lines. I knew, as well as I knew that I was alive, that Mrs. Sheila meant more than she had said: perhaps more than she had dared to say.
It was while I was standing there in the big window, sweating over the way the talk in the other room was dragging itself out, that I saw the man on the lawn. At first I thought it was Tarbell, who was never very far out of reach when the boss was running loose. But the next minute I saw I was mistaken. The man under the trees looked as if he might be an English tourist. He had on a long traveling coat that came nearly to his heels, and his cap was the kind that has two visors, one in front and the other behind.
Realizing that it wasn't Tarbell, I stood perfectly still. The house was lighted with gas, and the dining-room chandelier had been turned down, so there was a chance that the skulker under the trees wouldn't see me standing in the corner of the box window. To make it surer, I edged away until the curtain hid me. I was just in time. The man had crept out of his hiding-place and was coming up to the window on the outside. As he passed through the dim beam of light thrown by the turned-down chandelier, I saw that he had a pistol in his hand, or a weapon of some kind; anyway, I caught the glint of the gas-light on dull steel.
That stirred me up good and plenty. I still had the gun I had taken out of Fred May's drawer; I had carried it ever since the night when it had mighty nearly got me killed off in the Red Tower coal yard. I fished it out and made ready, thinking, of course, that the skulker must certainly be one of Clanahan's gunmen. I still had that idea when I felt, rather than saw, that the man was pulling himself up to the window so that he could take a look into the dining-room.
The look satisfied him, apparently, for the next second I heard him drop among the bushes; and when I stood up and looked out again I could just make him out going around toward the back of the house. Thanks to Maisie Ann and the pantry excursions, I knew the house like a book, and without making any noise about it I slipped through the butler's pantry and got a look out of a rear window. My man was there, and he was working his way sort of blindly around to the den side of the place.
I guess maybe I ought to have given the alarm. But I knew there was only one window in the major's den room, and that was nearly opposite the screened doorway. So I ducked back into the dining-room and took a stand where I could see the one window through the door-curtain net-work of bamboo beads. I was so excited that I caught only snatches of what Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss, but the bits that I heard were a good deal to the point.
"No, I mean it, Graham ... it is as I told you at first ... there is no standing room for either of us on that ground ... and you must not come here again when you know that I am alone.... No, Jimmieisn'tenough!"
I wrenched the half-working ear-sense aside and jammed it into my eyes, concentrating hard on the window at which I expected every second to see a man's face. If the man was a murderer, I thought I could beat him to it. He would have to look in first before he could fire; and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were at the other end of the room, sitting before the little blaze in the grate.
The suspense didn't last very long. A hand came up first to push the window vines aside. It was a white hand, long and slender, more like a woman's than a man's. Then against the glass I saw the face, and it gave me such a turn that I thought I must be going batty.
Instead of the ugly mug of one of Clanahan's gunmen, the haggard face framed in the window sash was a face that I had seen once—and only once—before; on a certain Sunday night in the Bullard when the loose-lipped mouth belonging to it had been babbling drunken curses at the night clerk. The man at the window was the dissipated young rounder who had been pointed out as the nephew of President Dunton.
So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the other side of that window—and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.
What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end of the room where the fireplace was.
Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either the boss or Mrs. Sheila—if that was what he was aiming to do. All the same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.
While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."
Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt the boss's hand on my shoulder.
"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs. Kendrick, we got out.
At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for us.
"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.
When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y." Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had come in from the West—which was a bit puzzling, since it left the inference that he wasn't direct from New York.
Waiting for a good chance at the night clerk, I ventured a few questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwoodhadcome in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now, but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr. Bullock was a lawyer.
I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising, early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same, after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box, I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder should show up.
That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.
When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next got a sight of him—from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of the bar-room colonnade—he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if it were water and he on fire inside.
That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open register.
A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash. When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what the name was.