crossed the plaza to the working head-quarters of the double division.
Finding the superintendent’s office open and lighted but unoccupied,
they went on to the despatcher’s room. In the public space outside of
the counter railing three or four trainmen were grouped in front of the
bulletin-board looking for their assignments on the night trains and
thumbing the file of posted “General Orders.”
Behind the railing Connolly was sitting at his glass-topped wire-table
with the train-sheet under his hand and the superintendent at his
elbow. Over in the corner under his green-shaded electric bulb,
Bolton, the sallow-faced car-record man, was fingering the keys of his
type-writer.
Tarbell opened the gate in the railing to admit Sprague and himself.
Maxwell looked up and nodded a welcome to his guest.
“Got tired of sitting it out alone, did you?” he said; and then, “I’ll
be with you in a minute and we’ll go over to my office. I’m waiting to
get Timanyoni’s report of the Limited.”
“Mrs. Maxwell is on the train?”
Maxwell nodded, and a moment later Connolly’s sounder clicked out
Timanyoni’s report of the passing train. The fat despatcher was
nervous. It showed in his rattling of the key as he O K’d the canyon
station’s report, and again in a small disaster when, in reaching for
his pen to make the train-sheet entry, he overset his ink-well.
“Well, I’m damned!” he grunted, snatching at the train-sheet and
pushing the ink flood back with his free hand. Maxwell came to the
rescue, and so did Tarbell; and a liberal application of blotters
stopped the flood. But at the close of the incident Connolly’s hands
were well blackened.
It was at this conjuncture that Davis, the chief despatcher, came in on
the way up to his room in the attic half-story above. Connolly appealed
to him at once.
“If you’ll sit in here, just for a minute, Davis, while I go wash
my hands?” he said, adding: “I’d ought to be kicked all the way
downstairs!”
When Davis had taken the chair and Connolly had gone out, Tarbell
whispered to the superintendent. Maxwell nodded, and made a sign to
Sprague. When he had closed the door of the despatcher’s room behind
himself and his guest, he explained:
“Tarbell says he is ready, and we may as well have it over with. Do you
want to be present?”
“As a spectator, yes,” said the expert.
“All right; we’ll go to my office and wait for Archer.”
The waiting interval proved to be short. Maxwell had just thrown his
roll-top desk open, and the Government man had planted his big bulk
solidly in the half-shadowed window-seat, when the door opened and
Connolly came in, his full-moon face a frightened blank and his hands
still ink-blackened. Tarbell was only a step behind the despatcher, and
the reporter from _The Tribune_ office was at Tarbell’s heels.
When the three were inside, Tarbell shut the door and put his back
against it.
“Here’s your man, Mr. Maxwell,” he said briefly; and Sprague, who had
started to his feet at the door opening, sat down again in the shadow
and said nothing.
Maxwell pointed brusquely to a chair at the desk end. “Sit down, Dan,”
he snapped. And then: “I suppose you know what you’re here for?”
Connolly fell into the chair as if the sharp command had been a blow.
“Know what I’m here for?” he stammered.
“Yes. Nothing will be gained by dodging. You may as well make a clean
breast of it. You’ve been faking these scare wreck reports--don’t lie
about it; we’ve got the evidence. I want to know who is behind you. Who
bribed you to do this thing?”
“Before God, Mr. Maxwell!” the culprit began, with the sweat rolling
down his face; but Maxwell stopped him with a quick gesture.
“I’ve told you it was no use to try to lie out of it. I have here on
my desk a letter which was taken from your coat pocket to-night, since
you came on duty; a letter from which you were careful enough to tear
the signature, but on which you were not careful enough to destroy the
date line. In that letter the writer threatens to give you away to the
New York police if you don’t get busy and give the newspapers a string
of Nevada Short Line wrecks to write about. That is enough to send you
over the road, but there’s more. The working wires east and west have
been cut under the roof of this building, and leads taken off. The
leads disappear in the wall back of your bunk-room. I don’t ask you
what you have to say for yourself; I want you to tell us, right here
and now, who planned the thing, and what it was intended to accomplish.”
Connolly had been slowly collapsing in his chair under the merciless
fire of accusation, and a pasty pallor was driving the pink out of his
round face.
“My God!” he gasped thickly; and then he repeated, “My God!” A silence
crammed with threatenings settled down upon the small office-room.
Suddenly it was broken by the sound of hurried footfalls in the
corridor, and Tarbell was hurled half-way across the room when the door
was flung open from without.
It was young Cargill, the engineer, who burst into the private office,
and his lips were white.
“The Limited!” he broke out. “She’s overrun her orders at Corona and
she’s due to meet Second Eighteen on the single track!”
It was the Government man who led the rush to the despatcher’s room, a
rush in which even the fat culprit joined. In the wire office Davis had
the key; his jaw was set and the perspiration was standing thickly on
his forehead, but he had not lost his nerve. Calmaine, the chief clerk,
was hanging over his shoulder, and outside of the railing the group of
trainmen had grown to a breathless crowd, pressing to hear the latest
word.
When Maxwell’s party pushed through the gate, Sprague was still in the
lead, and his quick glance took in every detail of the scene. Like a
flash he turned upon Tarbell, who was fumbling a pair of handcuffs in
his pocket, and pinioned him in a grip that was like the nip of a vice.
“Not yet!” he whispered in Tarbell’s ear; and then Davis snapped his
switch and spoke.
“It’s no use,” he said, and his harsh tone was only a thin mask for the
break in his voice. “It’s the real thing this time. First Eighteen was
ready to pull out of Corona when the Limited went by. Corringer left
his wire and chased the freight, hoping to get its engine to cut loose
and run after the passenger. He couldn’t catch it.”
A low murmur ran through the crowd packed against the counter railing
and somebody whispered, “It’s got the boss; his wife and babies are on
that train. Look at him!”
Maxwell had gripped the back of a chair and he was staring hot-eyed at
the despatcher.
“Do something, Davis,” he pleaded. “Don’t sit there and let those
trains come together! For Christ’s sake, think of something!”
The chief despatcher ducked his head as if he were dodging a blow and
swallowed hard.
“There isn’t anything to do, Mr. Maxwell--you know there isn’t
anything,” he began in low tones. “If there was----”
It was Connolly who made the break. Twisting away from Tarbell’s grip
on his arm he flung himself upon Davis.
“Get out o’ that chair and let me have the key,” he wheezed; and when
Davis did not move quickly enough he pounced upon the key standing.
Davis got up and quietly slid the chair under the night man who sank
heavily into it without missing a letter in the call he was insistently
clicking out, over and over again in endless repetition.
“What is it?” whispered the newspaper man, who was standing aside with
Tarbell and Sprague; and Tarbell answered:
“It’s the Corcoran coal mine--about half-way between Corona and the
first station this side, and a half-mile up the gulch. They’ve got a
private wire, but they ain’t got any night operator.”
Davis overheard the whisper and shook his head.
“Dan’s got his wits with him,” he said, in open admiration. “There’s a
young time-keeper that sleeps in the coal company’s office shack, and
he’s learning to plug in on the wire a little. If Dan can only wake
him----” And then, in sudden sharp self-accusation: “God forgive me!
why didn’t I think of it and save all the time that’s been wasted?”
Then, as Connolly closed the circuit and a halting reply clicked
through the receiving instrument: “He’s got him! Thank the Lord, he’s
got him! If he can only make him understand what’s wanted, there’s a
chance--just one chance in a thousand!”
With the very seconds now freighted with disaster, and with
only the crudest of amateur telegraphers at the other end of
the wire, nine men out of ten would have blown up and lost the
thousandth part of a chance remaining. But Connolly was the tenth
man. With his left hand shaking until it was beating a tattoo
on the glass table top he hitched his chair closer and began to
spell out, letter by letter, the brief call for help upon which
so much depended. Tarbell translated for Sprague, word by word.
“Hurry--down--to--main-line--and--throw--your--switch--to--red.
Then--run--west--and--flag--passenger.”
The key-switch clicked on the final word, and for five long, dragging
seconds the silence was a keen agony. Then the sounder began
hesitantly: dot--pause--dot; dash--dot--dash, it spelled; and Tarbell
translated under his breath, “He says ‘O K’. Now, if he can only chase
his feet fast enough----”
How Maxwell managed to live and not die through the interminable
twenty minutes that followed; how Davis and Tarbell and Connolly
hung breathless over the wire-table, while the throng outside of the
railing, augmented now to a jammed crowd of sympathetic watchers,
rustled and moved and whispered in awed undertones--are themes upon
which the rank and file of the Nevada Short Line still enlarge in the
roundhouse tool-rooms and in the switch shanties when the crews are
waiting for a delayed train.
The dreadful interval seemed as if it would never be outworn, but the
end came at last when the hesitant clicking of the sounder was resumed.
“Call it out, Dan,” shouted somebody among the waiting trainmen, and
Connolly pronounced the words slowly as the amateur at the end of the
private wire ticked them off.
“Both--trains--safe--freight--backing--to--blind--siding--at--
Quentin--switch--passenger--following--under--flag.”
A shout went up that drowned the feeble patter of the telegraph
instruments and made the windows rattle. “Bully for the kid at the coal
mine!” “Bully for Danny Connolly!” “Come out here, Danny, till we get
a chanst at you!”
Maxwell fought his way stubbornly through the crowd, with the newspaper
man, Sprague, Tarbell, and Connolly following in his wake. When the
five were once more behind the closed door of the private office
across the hall, the superintendent turned morosely upon the night
despatcher, and he was so full of the thing he was about to do that he
did not notice that his guest had taken Tarbell aside for a whispered
conference.
“You’ve drawn the teeth of the law, this time, Connolly,” he said
sharply. “After what you’ve just done I’m not going to send you to
jail. But the least you can do is to tell me who hired you and sent you
out here to make trouble for us. If you’ll do that----”
It was Sprague’s hand on his shoulder that stopped him, and then he
noticed that Tarbell had disappeared. “Just a minute--until Tarbell
gets back,” said the guest, in low tones; and while he was saying
it, the door opened suddenly and the ex-cowboy returned, thrusting a
sallow-faced young fellow, shirt-sleeved and livid with fear, into the
office ahead of him. Then the Government man went on in the same low
tone, “You can say to this young man all the things you were going to
say to Mr. Connolly. There was a little miscue on Tarbell’s part, and
I was just going to tell you about it when the train trouble butted
in.” Then to the fat despatcher, “Mr. Connolly, sit down. You’ve jolly
well earned the right to look on and listen.”
Connolly sat down heavily, and so did the superintendent. Thereupon the
man from Washington slipped easily into the breach, turning briskly
upon the yellow-faced car-record operator.
“Step up here, Bolton, and make a clean sweep of it to Mr. Maxwell.
Tell him how a certain firm of New York brokers--you needn’t give the
names now--sent you, a convicted bucket-shop wire-tapper, out here
to disarrange things on this railroad for stock-jobbing purposes.
Then tell him how you tapped the despatcher’s wires and put a set of
concealed keys under your car-record table in the other room. Tell him
how, after you’d faked that wreck message last night, you ran a bluff
for sympathy, and how, when it had worked, your nerve flickered and you
dropped from the wrecking-train in the yard and sent a stop-order from
the yard office. Come to the front and loosen up!”
Bolton was shuffling forward and was beginning a tremulous confession
when Maxwell stopped him harshly.
“You can keep all that to tell in court!” he snapped. And then to
Tarbell: “Take him away, Archer. And you go back to your job, Dan, and
let Davis go to bed. What I’ve got to say to you will keep.” Then to
the young man from the _Tribune_, who had his note-book out and
was scribbling down his story at breakneck speed: “Write out what you
please, Scanlan, but tell Mr. Kendall that I’ll be up to the office
presently, and that I’d like to see the story before it goes to the
linotypes.”
When the room was cleared, the snappy little superintendent spun his
chair around to face his guest.
“Calvin,” he said solemnly, “you’ll never know how near you came to
making me break my heart to-night. If I’d had to send Dan Connolly to
jail after what he did in the other room a little while ago----”
The chemistry expert was grinning joyously.
“It was a curious little slip,” he commented. “I thought Tarbell
was on; never suspected for a moment that he wasn’t until he butted
Connolly in here and shot him at you.”
“But you knew Connolly wasn’t the man? How on top of earth did you run
it down, in a single day? I can’t surround it, even yet.”
“It wasn’t much of a nut to crack,” laughed the expert easily. “I hope
you’ll have a harder one for me the next time I happen along. I got my
pointer last night--before I knew anything at all about the nature of
your trouble. You see, Bolton was the only man in the outfit who wasn’t
sincerely jarred and horrified by that fake message. I saw it the
minute I’d had a look into his eyes. From that on it was easy enough.”
“I don’t see it,” objected Maxwell.
“Don’t you? I merely argued backward from the results your wire-devil
was trying to obtain and sent a cipher message to a friend of mine
in New York. He put me next to a nice little plot in the Street to
hamper Ford and break down your company credit. Then I loafed around
your shack here until I found Bolton’s wire machinery. Bolton didn’t
catch on, but he was suspicious enough of a stranger like me to take a
little measure of precaution by slipping that incriminating letter into
Connolly’s coat pocket. I supposed Tarbell knew that, or I’d have told
him.”
Maxwell had been listening in appreciative admiration, but gratitude
came quickly to the fore when Sprague paused.
“Calvin, there’s no telling how many lives you’ve saved by this little
stop-over of yours here in Timanyoni Park!” he broke out. “You’ve
done it. When that story, properly trimmed down, comes out in the
_Tribune_ to-morrow morning, the bare-nerves strain will go off
like that”--snapping his fingers. “I wish I could show you.... By
George! there’s the Limited pulling in. I’ve got to go down and meet
the wife and kiddies!”
The big-bodied man who called himself a chemistry sharp and confessed
to the riding of many hobbies rose up with a laugh.
“You want to show me? All right: take me downstairs with you and show
me Mrs. Maxwell and the babies. As for the other, you know as well
as I do that it’s all in the day’s work. Pitch out or we’ll miss the
folks--and that would be worse than getting another message from the
wire-devil.”
II
High Finance in Cromarty Gulch
IT was a warm night for altitude five thousand feet, and the last few
lingerers in the dining-car on the eastbound “Flying Plainsman” had
their windows open. Midway of the car a quartette of light-hearted
young people were exchanging guesses as to the proper classification of
a big man with laughing eyes and a fighting jaw who was dining alone at
one of the end tables.
“He looks like money--nice, large, ready money--to me,” commented the
prettiest of the three young women; but her seat-mate, a handsome
young fellow with the badge of his college athletic association worn
conspicuously in his button-hole, thought differently. “You’ve fumbled
the ball this time, Kitty,” he dissented. “If he isn’t the champion of
all the amateur heavy-weights, you can put him down as a ’varsity coach
out scouting for talent. Jehu! what a ‘back’ he’d make under the new
rules!”
“Vaudeville is my guess,” chimed in the next-to-the-prettiest girl
mockingly; “the strong man who puts up the dumb-bells, and all that,
you know. If you could break into his luggage, I’d wager a box of
chocolates that you’d find a perfectly beautiful suit of pink tights
with spangled trunks and resined slippers.”
A little later the big man in the far corner took his change from the
waiter and left the car. As he passed the joyous party at the double
table there was a good-natured twinkle in his gray eyes and he dropped
a neatly engraved card at the collegian’s plate.
“Heavens and earth!--he heard us!” gasped the prettiest girl. And then,
feminine curiosity overcoming shame, “What does it say, Tommy?”
The young man held the card so that all could see, and admitted himself
a loser in the classification game.
CALVIN W. SPRAGUE,
Washington, D. C.
_Chemist, Dept. of Agriculture_
was what they read; and the fourth member of the group, a young
woman with fine eyes and an adorable chin, who was neither pretty
nor prettier, but something far more transcendent, took the card and
studied it thoughtfully.
“You’ve all missed the most astonishing thing--how he contrived to
overhear us at this distance,” she commented musingly. And then,
addressing the vanished card-owner through his bit of pasteboard: “So
you’re a chemist, are you, Mr. Sprague? You don’t look it, not the
least little bit, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I say that I doubt
it; doubt it very much indeed.”
While the young people were debating among themselves as to whether
or no there might not be an apology due, the big man who had dined
alone passed quite through the string of vestibuled Pullmans and went
to light his cigar on the rear platform of the combination buffet and
observation car.
Shortly after he had seated himself in one of the platform camp-chairs,
the train, which had been rocketing down a wide valley with an isolated
ridge on one hand and a huge mountain range on the other, came to a
stand at one of the few-and-far-between stations. The pause, one would
say, should have been only momentary; but after it had lasted for a
full minute or more the solitary smoker on the rear platform left his
chair and went to lean over the platform railing for a forward glance.
Looking down the length of the long train, he saw the lights of the
small station, with other lights beyond it which seemed to mark a
railroad crossing or junction. On the station platform there were
a number of lanterns held high to light a group of men who were
struggling to lift a long, ominous-looking box into the express-car.
A little later the wheels of the train began to trundle again, and as
his car-end passed the station the smoker on the observation platform
had a fleeting glimpse of the funeral party, and of the heavy four-mule
mountain-wagon which had apparently served as its single equipage.
Also, he remarked what a less observant person might have missed: that
the lantern-bearers were roughly clothed, and that they were armed.
A hundred yards beyond the station the train stopped again; and when it
presently began to back slowly the platform watcher understood that it
was preparing to take on a lighted coach standing on a siding belonging
to the junction railroad. When the coupling was made and the “Flying
Plainsman,” with the picked-up car in tow, was once more gathering
headway in its eastward flight up the valley of a torrenting mountain
river, the big man read the number “04” over the door of the newly
added coach. After he had made out the number he coolly put a leg over
the barrier railing, brushed the guarding porter aside, and pushed his
way through the narrow side corridor of the trailer.
In the rear half of the car the corridor opened into a comfortable
working-room fitted with easy-chairs, lounges, and a desk;
otherwise, the office in transit of the Nevada Short Line’s general
superintendent, Mr. Richard Maxwell. Maxwell was at his desk when the
big-bodied intruder shouldered himself into the open compartment, but
he sprang up joyfully when he recognized his unannounced visitor.
“Why, Calvin, old man! Where in thunder did you drop from?” he
demanded, wringing the hand of greeting in a vain endeavor to match the
big man’s crushing grip. “Sit down and tell it out. I thought you’d
gone back east over the Transcontinental a full month ago.”
The man whose card named him as a Government chemist picked out the
easiest of the lounging-chairs and planted himself comfortably in it.
“Jarred you, did I? That’s nothing; I’ve jarred worse men than you are
in my time. Your thinking machinery is all right; I was due to go back
a month ago, but I got interested in a little laboratory experiment on
the coast and couldn’t tear myself away. How are Mrs. Maxwell and the
kiddies?”
“Fine! And I’m hurrying to get home to them. I’ve been out for a week
and had begun to think I was never going to get back to the Brewster
office again. I’ve been having the busiest little ghost dance you ever
heard of during the past few days.”
The big man settled himself still more comfortably in his chair and
relighted the cigar, which, being of the dining-car brand, had sulked
for a time and then gone dejectedly out.
“Will the busy story bear telling?” he asked.
“Yes--to you,” was the half-guarded reply. “You’ll be interested when I
tell you that I’m inclined to believe that it’s ‘a little more of the
same’--a continuation of our round-up with the ‘wire-devil’ that you
straightened out for us a few weeks ago.”
The listener nodded. “Begin back a bit,” he suggested; and Maxwell did
it.
“After you went west, we put our wire-devil through the courts, and
President Ford served notice on the New York high-finance pirates; told
them he had their numbers, and that they’d better let up on us. That
was the end of it for the time. But a week ago Thursday I got a hot
wire from Ford, telling me to secure voting proxies on every possible
share of Short Line stock held locally, firing the proxies to him in
New York by special messenger, who should reach him, he said, not later
than the night of the fifteenth.”
“Um,” commented the smoker thoughtfully. “Is there much of the stock
held out here in your Timanyoni wilderness?”
“A good bit of it, first and last. When the Pacific Southwestern,
with Ford at its head, took over the Red Butte Western, the R. B. W.
was strictly a local line, and the reorganization plan was based upon
an exchange of stock--the new for the old. Then, when we built the
extension and issued more stock, quite a block of it was taken up by
local capitalists, bankers, mineowners, and ranchmen; not a majority,
of course, but a good, healthy balance of power.”
Again the giant in the lounging-chair nodded. “I see,” he cut in.
“There is doubtless a stockholders’ meeting looming up in the near
future--say on the day after the all-important fifteenth--and the
Wall Street people are going after Ford’s scalp again, this time in a
strictly legal way. He will probably need your Western proxies, and
need them bad.”
“I’ve got them right here,” said Maxwell, tapping a thick bunch of
papers on his desk. “And believe me, I’ve had a sweet time rounding
them up. Every moneyed man in this country is a friend of Ford’s, and
yet I’ve had to wrestle with every individual one of them for these
proxies as if I’d been asking them to shed their good red blood.”
“Of course,” was the quiet comment. “The fellows on the other side
would stack the cards on you--or try to. What’s in the wind this time?
Just a stock-breaking raid for speculation, or is it something bigger
than that?”
The young superintendent shook his head doubtfully.
“I don’t know, certainly; I haven’t had a chance to talk with
Ford since early in the summer. But I have my own guess. If the
Transcontinental could control this five-hundred-mile stretch of
ours from Copah to Lorchi, it would have the short line to southern
California.”