in the coming stockholders’ meeting, you’ll be out of a job. Is that
about the size of it?”
“Probably,” admitted Maxwell. “Not that it makes any special difference
to me, personally. As you know, I have a mine up on the Gloria that
beats railroading out of sight. But I’d fight like a dog for Ford,
and for my own rank and file here on the Short Line. Of course,
Transcontinental control would mean a clean sweep of everybody: there
wouldn’t be baskets enough this side of the main range to hold the
heads that would be cut off.”
“I suppose not. But, as you say, you have the ‘come-back’ right there
under your hand in those proxies. How will you get them to New York?”
“My chief clerk, Calmaine, will deliver them in person. He’ll meet us
at Brewster and go right along on this train, which, by the way, is the
next to the last one he could take and make New York on time. It’s all
arranged.”
The guest smoked on in silence for a little time and when he spoke
again it was to ask the name of the junction station at which the late
stop had been made.
“It’s Little Butte--where our Red Butte branch comes in from the north.”
“You’d been stopping over there?” Sprague asked.
“No; I had my car brought down from Red Butte on the local, which
doubles back on the branch.”
“Um; Little Butte; good name. You people out here run pretty
persistently to ‘Buttes,’ don’t you? Did I, or didn’t I, see a funeral
at this particular Butte as we came along?”
“You did. It’s Murtrie; a mining engineer who has been doing a sort of
weigh-master’s stunt at the Molly Baldwin mine. Died pretty suddenly
last night, they say.”
“Large man?” queried the Government chemist, half-absently; and Maxwell
looked up quickly.
“Beefy rather than big, yes. How could you tell?”
Sprague waved his cigar as if the question were childish and the answer
obvious. “It took a dozen of them, more or less, to put him into the
express-car.”
Maxwell turned back to his desk. “Metallic casket, probably,” he
suggested. “They had our agent wire Brewster for the best that could
be had. Said they were going to ship the body to some little town in
Kentucky. They’re a rather queer lot.”
“Who?--the Kentuckians?”
“No; the Molly Baldwin outfit. The mine was opened by a syndicate of
New York people four years ago, and after the New Yorkers had put
two or three hundred thousand into it without taking anything out,
they gave up in disgust. Then a couple of young fellows from Cripple
Creek came along and leased the property. There was a crooked deal
somewhere, for the young fellows began to take out pay--big pay--right
from the start. Then the New York people wanted to ‘renig’ on the
lease, and dragged the thing into the courts.”
“And the courts said no?”
“The courts straddled. I didn’t follow the fight in detail, but the
final decision was that the lessees were to keep all they could take
out each month up to a certain amount. If they exceeded that amount,
the excess was to be shared equally with the New Yorkers.”
“Lots of room for shenanigan in that,” was the big man’s passing
comment. “Unless these young Cripple Creekers are more honest than the
average, they’ll stand a good bit of watching, you’d say.”
Maxwell laughed. “That was what the New Yorkers seemed to think. They
secured a court order allowing them to put an expert of their own on
the job. And nobody seems to enjoy the watch-dog stunt. They’ve had to
send in a new man every few weeks.”
“Do the Cripple Creekers kill them off?”
“No; they buy ’em off, I guess. Anyway, they don’t stay. Murtrie was
the last.”
“And apparently he hasn’t stayed,” said Sprague reflectively; and
just then a long-drawn wail of the locomotive whistle announced the
approach of the train to Brewster. At the signal the guest rose and
tossed the remains of the bad cigar out of the window. “Here’s where I
have to quit you, Dick,” he was beginning; but Maxwell would not have
it that way.
“Not much, you don’t, Calvin, old man,” he protested. “You’re going to
stop over one day with me, at least. No; I won’t listen to any excuses.
Give me your berth check and I’ll send my boy up ahead to get your
traps out of the sleeper. Sit down right where you are and take it
easy. You’ll find a box of cigars--real cigars--in this lower drawer.
I’ll be back as soon as I’ve seen Calmaine.”
Apparently, the man from Washington did not require much urging. He
sat down in Maxwell’s chair as the train was slowing into the division
station, and was rummaging in the desk drawer for the box of cigars
when an alert, carefully groomed young man came in through the forward
corridor and met the superintendent as he was going out. There was a
hurried conference, a passing of papers, and the two, Maxwell and his
chief clerk, went out together, leaving the big man to go on with his
rummaging alone.
Shortly afterward came the bump of a coupling touch, and the
office-car, in the grip of a switching-engine, raced backward through
the yards; backward and forward again, and when it came to rest it
was standing on the short station spur at the end of the railroad
head-quarters building. From the open windows Sprague could see the
long through train, with its two big mountain-pulling locomotives
coupled on, drawn up for its farther flight. It was after it had
steamed away into the night that Maxwell returned to his side-tracked
car to find his guest, half-asleep, as it seemed, in the depths of the
big wicker easy-chair.
“I hope you didn’t think I’d deserted you,” he said, drawing up another
of the wicker chairs. “I took time to telephone home. Mrs. Maxwell’s
dining out at her sister’s, and, if you don’t mind, we’ll sit here a
while and go out to the house later.”
There was enough to talk about. The two, who had been college
classmates, had seen little of each other for a number of years.
Maxwell told how he had gone into railroading under Ford, and how in
his first summer in the Timanyoni he had acquired a gold mine and a
wife. Sprague’s recounting was less romantic. After leaving college he
had coached the ’varsity foot-ball team for two years and had afterward
gone in for original research in chemistry, which had been his “major”
in college. Later he had drifted into the Washington bureau as an
expert, taking the job, as he explained, because it gave him time and
frequent leisurely intervals for the pursuit of his principal hobby,
which was the lifting of detective work to the plane of pure theory,
treating each case as a mathematical problem to be demonstrated by
logical reasoning.
“You ought to drop everything else and take up the man-hunting business
as a profession,” laughed Maxwell, when the hour-long talk had come
around to the big man’s pet among the hobbies.
“No,” was the instant objection. “That is where you’re wrong. A
man does his best work as an amateur--in any line. As long as the
man-hunting comes in the way of a recreation, I enjoy it keenly. But if
I had to make a business of it, it would be different.” Then he changed
the subject by asking about Tarbell, Maxwell’s ex-cowboy division
detective, who had served as his understudy in the “wire-devil” case a
few weeks earlier.
“Archer is all right,” was the reply; “only he’d like to break
away from me and go with you. He thinks you are about the one only
top-notcher; says he’d like to take lessons of you for a year or so.”
Sprague was gazing absently out of the near-by window. “Speaking of
angels,” he broke in, “there is Tarbell, right now; coming down your
office stair three steps at a jump,” and a moment later the young man
in question had dashed across to the service-car and was thrusting his
face in at the open window.
“Trouble, Mr. Maxwell!” he blurted out. “The ‘Plainsman’s’ just been
held up and robbed at Cromarty Gulch! Connolly’s getting the wire from
Corona, and he started me out to see if I could find you.”
The superintendent leaped up as if his easy-chair had been suddenly
electrified.
“What’s that you say?” he demanded; “a hold-up?” Then he went into
action promptly, as a trained emergency captain should. “Call Sheriff
Harding on the ’phone, and tell him to rustle up a posse and report
here, quick! Then get the yard office and turn me out an engine and a
coach for Harding’s men. Hustle it!”
While he was closing his desk he made hurried explanation to Sprague.
“It’s probably the Scott Weber gang. They held up a train on the main
line over in Utah ten days ago. Come on upstairs with me and we’ll get
the facts.”
When the superintendent, accompanied by his broad-shouldered guest,
climbed the stair and entered the despatched office, fat, round-faced
Daniel Connolly was rattling the key at the train-sheet table. He
glanced up at the door opening.
“I’m mighty glad Tarbell found you,” he broke out, with a gasp of
relief. “I was afraid you’d gone home.” And then he recognized the
square-shouldered one: “How are you, Mr. Sprague? Glad to see you
again.”
Maxwell went quickly around to the wire-table.
“Whom have you got?” he asked.
“Allen, night operator at Corona. The train is there, and I’ve been
holding it to give you a chance to talk with McCarty, the conductor.”
“Tell me the story as you’ve got it; then I’ll tell you what to say to
Mac,” was the brisk command.
“It was in Cromarty Gulch, just at the elbow where the track makes the
‘U’ curve. Cruger’s on the pilot-engine, and Jenkins is running the
train puller. Cruger saw somebody throwing a red light at him. They
stopped, and four of the hold-ups climbed on the engines and made them
cut off the postal- and express-cars and pull on around the curve. Then
a bunch of ’em broke in the end door of the express-car and scragged
little Johnny Galt, the messenger. While they were doing that, another
bunch went through the train and held up the passengers. After they’d
gone through Galt’s car and taken what they wanted, they made Cruger
and Jenkins couple up again and go on.”
“What did they take?” Maxwell asked.
“Some little money and jewelry from the passengers, McCarty says; not
very much.”
“But from the express-car?”
The fat despatcher made a queer face and wiped the sweat from his
forehead.
“That’s the part of it that’s hard to believe. Galt was carrying
considerable money, but they didn’t try to blow his safe. They--they
smashed up a coffin and took the dead man out of it.”
“What!” ejaculated the superintendent; “Murtrie’s body?”
“I don’t know who it was--Mac didn’t say. But that’s what they did.
When the boys got together and pulled Galt out from under the express
stuff where they’d buried him, they found the coffin open and the body
gone.”
Sprague had been listening intently.
“This seems to be something worth while, Maxwell,” he cut in. “How much
time do we have to waste here?”
“Just a minute. Go on, Connolly.”
“That’s all,” said the fat despatcher. “The train’s at Corona now, and
they’ve put Johnny Galt off; and--and the coffin. Mac’s asking for
orders.”
“Give them their orders and let them go, and then clear for my special.
I’ve sent for Harding and a posse, and we’ll chase out after this thing
while the trail is warm. You’ll go along, won’t you, Calvin?” turning
to the stop-over guest.
The man from Washington laughed genially.
“You couldn’t scare me off with a fire-hose--not until I have seen this
little mystery of yours cleared up. Let’s be doing.”
Five minutes farther along the two-car special train had been made up
and was clanking out over the switches in the eastern yard. As the last
of the switch-lights were flicking past the windows, a big bearded man
came in from the car ahead and Maxwell introduced him.
“Sprague, this is Sheriff Harding. Harding, shake hands with my friend,
Mr. Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, Washington, and then sit
down and we’ll thrash this thing out. You’ve heard the story?”
The sheriff nodded. “I’ve heard what Tarbell could tell me. He says the
biggest part of the haul was a dead man. Is that right?”
“It seems to be. The dead man is Murtrie, who was supposed to be
representing the New York owners of the Molly Baldwin mine. The report
goes that he died last night, and his body was put on the train at
Little Butte to be taken east to some little town in Kentucky. What’s
your guess?”
“I’d guess that the whole blamed outfit was locoed--plumb locoed,” said
Harding. “You couldn’t carve it out any other way, could you?”
It was Sprague who broke in with a quiet suggestion. “Try once more,
Mr. Harding,” he said.
The big sheriff put his head in his hands and made the effort. When he
looked up again there was the light of a new discovery in his eye.
“Say!” he exploded. “Murtrie’s the last of a string of five or six
‘watchers’ they’ve had up at that cussed hole-in-the-ground gold
mine--and he’s dead. By gravy! I believe they killed him!”
Maxwell’s smile was grim.
“It seems to me we’re just about as far off as ever,” he commented;
“unless you can carry it along to the body-snatching in some way. Why
should they----”
“Hold on,” Harding cut in; “I wasn’t through. It’s one thing to kill
a man, and another to get rid of the body so it won’t show up and get
somebody hanged. Murtrie was sick; that much I know, because Doc
Strader went out to the mine to see him day before yesterday. I was
talking with Strader about it, and he said it looked like a case of
ptomaine poisoning.”
“Well?” said Maxwell.
“Supposin’ it wasn’t natural; supposin’ it was the other kind o’
poison: they’d have to get rid o’ the body, some way or other, wouldn’t
they,--or run the risk of havin’ it dug up and looked into, after
Murtrie’s friends took hold?”
“Go on.”
“That bein’ the case, they’d have to call in some sort of outside
help; they couldn’t handle it alone. Two or three of Scott Weber’s
gang’ve been seen hanging around in Brewster within the last few days.
Supposin’ these fellows at the Molly Baldwin put up a job with Scott to
make this play with Murtrie’s body?”
“By Jove, Harding--I half believe you’ve got it!” Maxwell exclaimed;
but the chemistry expert said nothing.
“We can tell better after we get on the ground, maybe,” the sheriff
went on. “I had Follansbee bring his dogs along. There’s a trail up
through the head of Cromarty Gulch leadin’ out to the old Reservation
road on the mesa. If they had anything as heavy as Murtrie’s body to
tote, that’s about the way they went with it.”
Maxwell had been absently marking little squares on his desk blotter as
Harding talked. The sheriff’s theory was ingenious, but it failed to
account for all the facts.
“There’s more to it than that,” he said, at length. And then he
appealed to the silent guest. “Don’t you think so, Sprague?”
“I’m waiting to hear how Mr. Harding accounts for the raid on the
passengers,” said the big man modestly. “One would think that a gang of
body-snatchers would have been willing to do one thing at a time.”
“By George! that’s so,” the sheriff acknowledged. “I hadn’t thought of
that. But then,” he added, after a second thought, “a gang that was
tryin’ to cover up a killin’ wouldn’t be any too good to throw in a
little hold-up business on the side.”
“No,” said Sprague; but he made no further comment. So far from it,
he sat back in his chair and smoked patiently while Maxwell and the
sheriff went on with the theory-building, a process which continued in
some desultory fashion until Maxwell, glancing out of a window, said:
“We’re coming to it; this is the gulch.”
A few minutes later the two-car train slowed down and came to a
stand on a sharp curve at the head of a densely wooded ravine in the
foot-hills. Harding ran forward to get his posse out, and by the time
Maxwell and Sprague had debarked the ground at the track-side was black
with men. Sprague laughed softly.
“It’s lucky we’re not depending upon the old Indian method of ‘reading
the sign,’” he said. “Whatever the ground might have told us is a story
spoiled by this time.” Then he laughed again when a man broke out of
the crowd, with a couple of dogs towing him furiously at the end of
their leashes. “We gabble a good bit about our civilization and the
advances we’ve made,” he went on. “Yet, in the relatively simple matter
of running down a criminal, we haven’t got very far beyond the methods
of the Stone Age. The idea of an intelligent being, with a human brain
to rely upon, falling back upon the instincts of a couple of brute
beasts!”
“Oh, hold on,” Maxwell protested. “Those dogs have run down a good many
crooks, first and last. Follansbee will take any bet you want to make,
right now.”
“And he would lose,” was the confident answer. “But come on; let’s see
what’s going to happen.”
The chase, with the dogs running upon a comparatively fresh scent, led
up through the pine wood at the head of the gulch. Beyond the wood was
a bare, high-lying mesa table-land, with its summer-baked soil dried
out to almost rocky hardness. A hundred yards from the gulch head an
indistinct road skirted the mesa edge, and here the dogs began to run
in circles.
Sprague was chuckling again, but Maxwell counselled patience.
“Wait a minute,” he suggested. “The body-snatchers probably had a team
here. The dogs will get the scent of the horses presently.”
“Think so?” queried the expert. Then he drew his companion aside. “Do
you know anything about this road, Dick?”
“Yes, it’s the old wagon road from the Reservation into the park.”
“Which way would you go toward Brewster?”
“That way,” said the superintendent, pointing.
“All right; let’s go a little way toward Brewster, and perhaps I can
show you why Mr. Follansbee would lose his bet on his dogs.”
When they were well out of the dog-circling area, the chemistry expert
stooped and struck a match. “See here,” he said; and Maxwell, squatting
beside him, saw the broad track of an automobile tire. Sprague gurgled
softly. “Do you think the dogs will get the scent of that?” he
inquired.
Maxwell stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Calvin, the way you hop across and light upon the one only sure thing,
comes mighty near being uncanny, at times. How the devil did you find
out that those fellows came in an auto?”
“If I should tell you that it was pure reasoning, you’d doubt it. But
never mind the whys and wherefores just now; they can come later. Tell
me how long we’re going to stay here losing time on Follansbee and his
dogs.”
“Not a minute longer than you care to stay. What do you want to do?”
“I want to see that crippled express messenger who was put off the
train at Corona. Also, I’d like to have a look at the dead man’s
coffin.”
“You shall do both. If you’re taking the case, you are very pointedly
the only doctor there is in it,” Maxwell asserted. Then he called to
the sheriff: “O Harding!” and when the county officer came up: “I’m
going to take the train and run on to Corona after Galt. We’ll stop
here for your orders when we come back.”
During the short run around the hills to the small mining-town station,
Sprague sat quietly in his chair, puffing steadily at his cigar, and
saying nothing. When Maxwell announced their arrival he got up and
followed the superintendent into the Corona office.
Galt, the express messenger, was lying on the night operator’s cot in
the telegraph office. Some physician passenger on the held-up train had
dressed his wounds, and he had fully recovered consciousness. His story
was a mere amplification of the wire report which had gone to Brewster.
He had marked, and wondered at, the unscheduled stop on the gulch
curve, but before he could open his door to look out, the postal- and
express-cars had been pulled on ahead, his end door had been battered
in, and he had found himself trying to fight back a couple of masked
men who were forcing an entrance. Then somebody hit him on the head and
that was the end of it, so far as he was concerned.
Following this, the Corona night operator was put upon the question
rack. He knew only what the trainmen had told him. No; there was
nothing missing out of the express-car save the dead man’s body. While
the train was waiting, he, the operator, and the conductor had made a
careful check of the contents of the car from Galt’s waybills, and,
with the single exception noted, everything was undisturbed. No, there
was no panic; the scare was pretty well quieted down by the time the
train reached Corona. Of course, a good many of the passengers had got
out at the station stop, and everybody was curious to see the coffin.
“You took the coffin off?” Maxwell questioned.
“Yes, it’s in the freight-room.”
Sprague had taken no part in the examination of the man, and had
listened only cursorily to Galt’s story. But now he became as curious
as any of the morbid passengers had been. Allen, the operator, lighted
a lantern and led the way to the freight-room. The coffin was lying
upon a baggage-truck. It was encased in an ordinary shipping-box, half
of the cover of which had been torn off. The lid of the coffin had been
broken, split into three pieces; and one of the pieces was missing. It
was a rather expensive affair, wooden and not metallic, of the kind
known as a “casket,” silk-lined, and with a sliding glass face-plate.
The glass had been broken, and the fragments were lying inside on the
small silken pillow.
Sprague bent to examine the silent witness of the mysterious robbery
and the operator offered his lantern. But the Government man took a
small electric flash-light from his pocket and made it serve a better
purpose. Only once, while he was flashing the tiny beam of the
electric into the coffin’s interior, did he speak, and then it was to
say to Maxwell: “I thought you said this was a metallic coffin.”
“That was the inference, when you spoke of the weight and the number of
men required to handle it. Of course, I didn’t know anything definite
about it.”
Once more Sprague peered into the silk-lined interior, stooping to send
the light ray to the foot of the casket, which was still hidden under
the undestroyed half of the outer case. Then, snapping the switch of
the flash-light and carefully replacing the broken box cover, he nodded
briskly to Maxwell.
“That’s all, for the present. If I were you, I’d have this coffin
nailed up in its box, just as it is, without disturbing anything. You
can manage that, can’t you, young man?” turning short upon the operator.
Allen said he could and proceeded to do it; after which, under
Sprague’s direction, the case was trundled out to the platform, and the
three of them, with Maxwell’s private-car porter to help, loaded the
coffin upon the front platform of Maxwell’s car.
“We’ll take it back with us,” said the Government man, with a sober
twinkle in his eyes. “It’s a passably good coffin, you know, and with a
little repairing it will do to use again--say, when we have found the
man it belongs to.”
While the night operator, the porter, and the two enginemen were
carrying the wounded express messenger to the private car and making
him comfortable in Maxwell’s own state-room, the superintendent’s
curiosity got the better of him.
“You’re not saying much, Calvin,” he offered. “Have you found any clew
to the mystery?”
“Clews?--yes; I’ve found plenty of them. They’re slightly tangled as
yet, but we’ll get hold of the proper thread in a little while. When do
we start back?”
“Any time, if you’ve seen all you want to. I’ll have Allen get orders
for us right now, if you say so.”
The big-bodied Government man stood aside while the Corona operator
called the despatcher and obtained the order for the return of the
two-car special to Brewster. But after the bit of routine was finished
he made another suggestion.
“I’d like to know, in so many words, exactly what was taken from the
passengers on the train, Dick,” he said. “Can’t you have this young man
catch the train somewhere and instruct the conductor to find out for
us?”
Maxwell nodded and gave Allen the necessary directions. “Tell McCarty
to wire his answer direct to me at Brewster,” he added; and then, as
the train was ready, the start was made for the return.