foot-ball squad. “Draw that cot a little this way--that’s right. Now
then, Archer, stand here against the wall with your two jail-birds, and
when I give the word, rush ’em for the yard by the stairway entrance.
If they don’t obey, plug ’em, and plug ’em quick. Maxwell, you and the
boy get over on this side. When you’re ready, turn off that light.
Quick! They’re going to charge us!”
The simple programme was carried out precisely and to the letter. When
the rush came the room was in darkness, and Sprague stepped lightly
aside. Thereupon a dozen charging men, finding no resistance in the
suddenly released door, piled themselves in cursing confusion over the
barricading cot.
“Now!” shouted Sprague, and the dash for liberty was made, with the
big man in the lead clearing the hall of its stragglers, brushing them
aside with his mighty weight or driving them before him like chaff in
the fury of his onset. At the stair-head there were more coming up from
below: Sprague caught the bullet-headed ring-fighter around the waist,
and using him as a missile, cleared the stairway at a single throw.
“Come on!” he yelled to those who were behind; and a moment later the
unlocked door at the stair-foot gave them egress to the open air and
to the yard where the automobiles were parked.
Quite naturally, the din of the battle had precipitated a panic in the
unlicensed road-house, and the building was disgorging, through doors
and windows, and even over the roofs of the shelter sheds. Tarbell
drove his two prisoners into the tonneau of the hired car, while
Maxwell promptly cranked the motor and Sprague lifted Calmaine bodily
to the front seat. Ten seconds beyond this, while the panic was still
at its height, the hired car, leading all others in the townward rush,
was leaving a dense dust trail to befog its followers, and the capture
and rescue were facts accomplished.
With Tarbell at the steering-wheel, the car sped silently through the
western suburb and came into the deserted, echoing streets of the city.
Without asking any questions, the ex-cowboy drove straight to the
county jail and pulled up at the curb in front of the grim building,
with its heavily grilled windows showing their steel barrings in the
street light. Sprague passed the two prisoners out to him, jerking
even the bigger of the two clear of the auto step as if he had been a
feather-weight. But when Tarbell would have marched the pair across the
sidewalk, Sprague called out.
[Illustration: Brushing them aside with his mighty weight or driving
them before him like chaff in the fury of his onset.]
“Just one question, Givens,” he said brusquely. “You know what
you’re in for; you know that you are still wanted in Cleveland on that
charge of counterfeiting. But if you’ll answer one question straight,
we’ll forget the Ohio indictment for the present. What did you do with
the swag that you lifted a few hours ago?”
For five full seconds the black-haired man kept silence. Then he spoke
as the spirit moved him.
“It’s where you won’t get it--you n’r them make-believe crooks up at
the Molly Baldwin!” he rasped.
“Oho!” Sprague laughed. “So you planned it to give your side partners
in this little game the double-cross, did you? It’s like you. Take them
away, Archer.”
“And--and hurry back!” whispered Calmaine hoarsely. “We’ve simply
_got_ to catch Number Six, I tell you!”
Thus urged, Tarbell expedited matters with the night jailer and came
running back to take his place behind the steering-wheel.
“Where now?” he asked, dropping the clutch in; and it was Calmaine who
gave the direction.
“The Reservation Road east; it’s the one we came in over.”
Tarbell easily broke all the speed records, to say nothing of speed
limits, in the race to the eastward over the dry mesa country.
Twenty-odd miles from town they met the sheriff’s party, and there was
a momentary halt for explanations. “Camp down right where you are, and
we’ll go back pretty soon and send a bunch of autos out after you,” was
Maxwell’s word of encouragement; and then the big car sped on its way
toward Cromarty Gulch.
Calmaine seemed to have preserved his sense of locality marvellously.
A few hundred yards short of the spot at the gulch head where
Follansbee’s dogs had begun their aimless circlings, he told Tarbell to
pull up.
“They are right along here, somewhere,” he said, getting out to hobble
painfully ahead of the others when Tarbell took off a side-lamp to
serve for a lantern. “They had me blindfolded, at first, and I didn’t
know what they were trying to do with me. When they chucked me into the
auto, I tried to make a get-away. While they were knocking me silly
again, I managed to get the papers out of my pocket and fire them into
the sagebrush. It was right along here, somewhere.”
It was Sprague who discovered the thick packet upon which so much
depended. It was lying cleverly chance-hidden under a clump of the
greasewood bushes. “Found!” he announced. And then he gave the young
chief clerk his due meed of commendation. “You’re a young man to bet
on, Mr. Calmaine. What we’ve been able to do, thus far, wouldn’t amount
to much if you hadn’t kept your head.” Then he turned quickly to the
superintendent. “How do we stand for time, now, Maxwell?”
Maxwell held his watch to the light and shook his head dejectedly.
“Number Six, the Fast Mail, is due at Corona in five minutes. We can
never make it in this world!”
“You bet we can!” shouted Tarbell. “Help Mr. Calmaine, and pile into
the car--quick!”
The short race to the near-by mining-camp was a sheer breakneck dash,
but Tarbell made good. When the four of them leaped from the car and
stormed into Allen’s office, the Fast Mail had already whistled for
the “clear” signal, and the operator was reaching for the cord of his
semaphore to give the “go-by” wigwag. They yelled at him as one man;
and a few seconds later the fast train slid to a shrieking stop at the
station.
Maxwell would have sent Tarbell on to New York with the precious
proxies, but Calmaine pleaded pathetically for his chance to finish
that which he had begun.
“I’ll be all right as soon as I can get into the sleeper and get these
infernal shoes off,” he protested. “It’s my job, Mr. Maxwell; for
pity’s sake don’t make me a quitter!”
“Let him go,” said Sprague; “he’s earned his chance to stay in the
game--and this time he’ll make a touch-down.” And so it was decided.
When the Fast Mail, with its lately added passenger, had slid away
among the hills to the eastward, the three who remained at Corona
climbed into the hired auto and Tarbell drove another record race to
town, pausing only once, when they reached the sheriff’s roadside camp,
to take on Harding and as many of his deputies as the car would hold.
By Maxwell’s direction, Tarbell drove first to the railroad
head-quarters, where the superintendent and his guest got out. At
the office entrance another dusty car was drawn up; and in the upper
corridor they found the two young men from the Molly Baldwin mine,
still seeking for information. Sprague disposed of them, and he did it
with business-like brevity.
“Your dead man has been found,” he told them crisply. “He is at present
in the county jail, with one of his accomplices; and when he is given
the third degree, he will probably tell all he knows. It’s a weakness
he has--not to be able to hold out against a bit of rough handling. If
you two fellows will make a clean breast of your part in the swindle to
the prosecuting attorney, and promise to play fair with your lessors
in future, it is likely that you’ll be let off with a fine, and you’ll
probably be able to bag the remainder of the gang and to recover your
lost gold.”
The two young men heard, gasped, and backed away. When they were gone,
Maxwell unlocked the door of his business office, snapped on the
lights, opened his desk, and pressed the electric button which summoned
Connolly, the night despatcher.
“I thought you’d like to know that we’ve caught up with the dead man,
Dan,” he said, when the fat despatcher came in; and then he briefed
the story of the chase, winding up with a peremptory order to be sent
to the division despatcher at the Copah end of the line not to let
the eastbound connection get away from the Fast Mail at the main line
junction.
When Connolly had gone back to his key, Maxwell wheeled upon his guest.
“It’s late, Calvin, and by all the laws of hospitality I ought to take
you home and put you to bed. But I’ll be hanged if you shall close an
eye until you’ve told me how you did all this!”
The expert chemist ex-foot-ball coach planted himself in the easiest of
the office chairs and chuckled joyously.
“Gets you, does it?” he said; and then: “I’m not sure that I can
explain it so that you will understand, but I’ll try. In the first
place, it is necessary to go at these little problems with a perfectly
open mind--the laboratory mind, which is neither prejudiced nor
prepossessed nor in any way concerned with anything but the bare facts.
Reason, and the proper emphasis to be placed upon each fact as it comes
to bat, are the two needful qualities in any problem-solving--and about
the only two.”
“You are soaring around about a mile over my head; but go on,” said
Maxwell.
“All right; I’ll set out the facts in the order in which they came to
me. First, I see a dozen men loading a coffin into an express-car. I
note the extreme weight, and wonder how a dead man, any dead man who
doesn’t have to have his coffin built to order, can be so infernally
heavy. Next, you tell me about your proxy fact--which doesn’t have any
bearing at the moment--and then you tell me about the dead man, and how
his friends were shipping him to Kentucky. Then comes the news of the
bizarre hold-up in Cromarty Gulch. Instantly the reasoning mind, the
laboratory mind, if you prefer, goes to work, with the two foreknown
facts--the heavy-dead-man fact, and the fact that your chief clerk is
on that train with his valuable papers--clamoring each for its hearing.
Don’t let me bore you.”
“Heavens--you’re not boring me! What next?”
“Reason, the laboratory brand of it, tells me immediately that
your proxy fact has the emphasis. You had told me that your Wall
Street opponents had been throwing stumbling-blocks in your way in
the obtaining of the proxies. Here, said I, is the last desperate
resort. Nevertheless, there were complications. I was pretty sure
that the hold-ups had taken Calmaine and his papers; that this was
what the hold-up was for. But in order to get track of them--and of
Calmaine--other facts must be added. We added them on the trip with
the special train; all we needed, and a few more thrown in for good
measure.”
“I don’t see it,” Maxwell objected.
“Don’t you? When we reached the scene of the hold-up, I was already
doubting the heavy-dead-man theory; doubting it extremely. Also,
my reason told me that the robbers, carrying some weight which was
heavier than any dead person, would not trust to a team which could
be overtaken, if need be, by pursuers on foot. Hence the automobile
track that we found. Then we came to the coffin, and half of the
mystery vanished at once. If you hadn’t been excited and--well, let us
say, prepossessed, you would have noticed that there was no smell of
disinfectants, that the coffin pillow wasn’t dented with the print of
a head, that the broken glass was lying on the pillow, as it wouldn’t
have been if the man’s head had been there when the plate was smashed,
that----”
“Great Scott,” Maxwell broke in, in honest self-depreciation, “what
blind bats we are--most of us!”
“Oh, no; I was bringing the specially trained mind to bear, you must
remember; the scientifically trained mind. You couldn’t afford to
cultivate it; it wouldn’t leave room for your business of railroad
managing. But I’ll cut it short. I saw that there had been no corpse
in the coffin, and that there had been something else in it--something
heavy enough to leave its marks on the silk lining, which was torn
and soiled. Also, I saw, away down in the foot end of the thing, an
ingot-shaped chunk of something that looked like a bar of gold bullion;
one piece of the heavy coffin load that had been overlooked in the
hurried emptying. That’s why I advised you to bring the coffin back on
your train. There’s a ten-thousand-dollar gold brick in it, right now!”
“Heavens and earth!” gasped the listener; but Sprague went on rapidly.
“Just here is where your machine-made detective would have missed
the emphasis. But the scientist, having once for good and sufficient
reasons placed his emphasis, never has occasion to change it. The main
thing yet was the stopping of your messenger to Ford. I was convinced
that the gold robbery, in which, of course, not only the two young
lessees, but the man Murtrie as well, must be implicated, was only a
side-issue, intended either to divert attention from the main thing, or
as a double-cross theft on the part of Murtrie. When you and Tarbell
described Murtrie for me on the way back to town, I had it all, simply
because I happened to know the man. He is a counterfeiter, whom I have
twice run down for the Department of Justice; but who, both times,
contrived to break jail and get away.”
“But how were you able to strike so sure and hard at Holladay’s?”
“Just a bit more reasoning; as you’ll see presently. After we had
established the fact that Calmaine wasn’t on the train--but argue it
out for yourself. They’d take him somewhere where he could be kept safe
and out of the way until the criminals concerned were all securely out
of the country. And where would they take him if not to the unlawful
den out yonder on the pike where Murtrie was best known, and from
which, no doubt, he secured his helpers for the hold-up job?”
“But hold on,” Maxwell interrupted. “I haven’t got it entirely clear
yet. If Murtrie put up this job with Calthrop and Higgins----”
Sprague shook his head.
“You have no imagination, Dick. Murtrie came here to do you up in the
proxy business--as the Wall Street crowd’s last resort. He got in with
Calthrop and Higgins and showed them how to beat their game, meaning
to put the double-cross on them--as he did--when the time came. He was
merely killing two birds with one stone; but your bird was the big one.
I don’t know what sort of a dodge he put up with Calthrop and Higgins,
but I can suppose that there is a trusty confederate at the Kentucky
end of the string who is doubtless waiting now for a corpse that will
never come.”
“Of course!” said the unimaginative one disgustedly. “Just the same,
it’s all mighty miraculous to me, Calvin--how you can reason out these
things hot off the bat, as you do. Why, Great Jonah! I had all the
opportunities you had, and then some; and I didn’t see an inch ahead
of my nose at any stage of the game!”
The big man rose and yawned good-naturedly.
“It’s my hobby--not yours,” he laughed; and then, as the telephone
buzzer went off with a purring noise under Maxwell’s desk: “That
will be Mrs. Maxwell, calling up to ask why in the world you don’t
come home. Tell her all right, and let’s go. It will be the biggest
miracle of all if you succeed in getting me up in time for breakfast
to-morrow--or rather, I should say, to-day, since it’s three o’clock,
and worse, right now.”
Maxwell put the receiver to his ear and exchanged a few words with some
one at the other end of the wire. When he closed his desk and made
ready to go, a little frown of reflective puzzlement was gathering
between his eyes.
“You know too much--too thundering much, Calvin. As I said a while
back, it’s uncanny. It was Alice; and she said the very words you said
she would: ‘Why in the world don’t you come home, Dick?’ If you weren’t
so blooming big and beefy and good-natured--but, pshaw! who ever heard
of a fat wizard? Come on; let’s go and hunt a taxi. It’s too far to
walk.”
III
The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three
AT ten o’clock on the second Tuesday after the return of the lately
promoted chief night despatcher, Dan Connolly, from his wedding trip,
the business of the Brewster wire office had settled down, momentarily
at least, into the comfortable rut of routine. Everything was moving
smoothly on the double division, and between the leisurely inscribing
of the figured entries on the train-sheet, the fat, jolly-looking
night chief had a chance to fill his corn-cob pipe and to swap a word
of gossip now and then with Johnson, the car-record operator who, as
“Wire-Devil” Bolton’s successor, was clattering at his type-writer in
the far corner of the bare room.
It was after he had finished typing the long “record” report from Red
Butte that Johnson twisted himself in his chair to say: “Who is that
fellow ‘Scientific Sprague’ that I’ve been hearing so much about since
I came on the job, Dan?”
The fat despatcher chuckled reminiscently and sat back in his tilting
chair.
“Mr. Sprague? He’s a whole team, and an extra horse hitched on behind,
Shorty; that’s about what he is. Don’t you ever go around advertising
your freshness in the Timanyoni by giving it out that you don’t know
Mr. Calvin Sprague.”
“I reckon I’ve already done done it, haven’t I?” laughed the car-record
man. “What if you fix me so I won’t have to do it again?”
Connolly held a lighted match to the blackened bowl of the corn-cob,
and then put both match and pipe aside to take the “train-passing”
report of the incoming westbound “Quick-step” as it was clicked through
the sounder from the first telegraph station east of Brewster.
“Mr. Sprague is about the biggest man that ever walked into this
office, Shorty,” he averred, after he had made the proper train-sheet
entry for the approaching train. “Big up and down, big through the
middle, big sideways, and biggest of all in his think-tank. He can look
you over twice and tell you the exact size of the yellow spot on your
liver; and if that won’t do, he’ll look you over again and tell you how
all-fired near you came to breaking your bond record one night up at
that little shack station you’ve been running in the mining country.”
The newly appointed car-record man bounded out of his chair as if he
had been shot.
“I--I didn’t, Dan!” he protested, dry-lipped; “so help me God, I
didn’t!” And then, curiosity getting the better of the sudden shock:
“How in Sam Hill did you know?”
Connolly grinned good-naturedly and made a motion with the flat of his
hand as if he would reach across the room and push Johnson back into
his chair.
“Take it plumb easy, kid,” he laughed. “I was only talking through my
hat--just hitting out in the dark to show you how Mr. Sprague could
size you up if he wanted to. But you asked who he is: he’s a friend
of Mr. Maxwell’s, and he lives in Washington when he’s at home--does
chemical stunts in one of the Government offices. He’s happened to soak
in here a couple of times when we were needing a bushel or two more
brains than we could make out to rustle up among ourselves, and----”
The break came in an importunate chattering of the west-line sounder
on Connolly’s table, and the despatcher righted his tilted chair with
a thump and fell upon his key. The car-record man sat back with his
hands locked at the nape of his neck and looked on absently. Out of the
din and clatter of the several sounders he could easily have picked
the story that was coming from the west over Connolly’s wire, but the
trained operator’s habit of ignoring the irrelevant wire chatter was
upon him, and his first intimation of the nature of the story came in
the fading of the ruddy flush in Connolly’s full-moon cheeks and the
uncontrollable trembling of the despatcher’s left and unbusied hand.
Instantly the short-legged car-record operator left his chair and
crossed the room to hang over Connolly’s shoulder.
“What’s the trouble, Dan?” he asked.
“It’s just a little more of the same,” breathed the fat one
vindictively. “I don’t know what in the devil has got into the trainmen
lately; this dog-blasted railroad’s getting so it runs itself! Here’s
Seventeen overrunning her orders and trying to make the west end of
Tunnel Number Three against the Fast Mail. Nophi says he argued with
’em, but they said they had plenty of time and went on. By grabs! if I
was Mr. Maxwell I’d make a sizzlin’ red-hot example of some of these
crazy chance-takers!”
Johnson was running his eye down the columns of figures in the
time-table.
“I wouldn’t worry till I had to,” he put in. “The Mail’s twenty
minutes off her schedule, and that gives Seventeen thirty minutes to
make the six miles from Nophi to the tunnel and the mile and a quarter
more to take her through to the west end siding. She’ll make it all
right.”
“I know. But by Jasher! that ain’t railroading,” insisted Connolly.
“Two months ago you wouldn’t find a single train crew on the Short Line
that’d take chances stealing sidings this way, and now they’re all
doing it. Besides, the tunnel’s all tore up, with that electric-wiring
gang working in it, and every crew on the west end knows it.”
As he fumed, the despatcher rattled his key in the call for Junico,
the only night station west of the tunnel at which there would be any
chance of communicating with the off time eastbound Fast Mail. He knew
it was only a chance. If the Mail had made up no more than five of the
twenty minutes, it would already have passed Junico.
At the close of the impatient call the circuit broke and Junico “signed
in.” Connolly asked his question in clipped abbreviations, and got his
answer shot-like. “Number Six passing now.” “_Hold Six_,” snapped
the despatcher hurriedly. For a full minute the sounder was silent.
Then it began again. “Chased out quick as I could, but couldn’t catch
’em,” was Junico’s incident-closing reply.
Connolly pounded with a fat fist upon the plate-glass top of his table
in impotent wrath.
“There it is!” he gritted. “Now if anything happens to get in the way
of them cussed chance-takers on Seventeen, there you are!”
Apparently there was nothing to be done but to await the event and
to hope for an auspicious outcome. As Connolly had said, it wasn’t
railroading; and yet he knew well enough that on many railroads the
stealing of sidings, the crawling up upon meeting-points by train crews
hard pressed to make their schedules, is a violation of rules which is
constantly winked at, and punished only when trouble ensues.
In the present case there should have been no trouble. With a clear
thirty minutes in which to make less than eight miles, the time freight
should be safely in on the siding at the west end of Tunnel Number
Three some minutes before the Fast Mail could possibly cover its own
intervening distance.
But on this particular Tuesday night the fates were inauspicious.
Fifteen minutes farther along, after Johnson had gone back to his table
in the corner, Connolly’s west-wire sounder began to chatter furiously.
The fat despatcher broke in promptly, and again the trembling fit
seized upon the unbusied half of him.
“Oh, good Lord!” he groaned; and again: “Oh, good _Lord_!”
Then the corridor door opened and Maxwell, the superintendent, came
in, looking as he always did, the square-shouldered, square-jawed
fighter of transportation battles, with a few streaks of youthful gray
beginning to show in his tightly curled mustaches--a militant figure of
a man giving a truthful impression of the fit and purposeful railroad
field officer.
“What’s the matter, Dan?” he demanded, making a quick push through the
gate in the counter railing.
Connolly explained hastily.
“Seventeen tried to steal a siding on Six. Gallagher, the work-line
operator at the electric gang’s camp, has just called up to say that
the freight’s stuck in the tunnel--something off the track. A flagman
has come back to the camp with the news, and he says the tunnel is
blocked so they can’t get through with a flag for Six.”
“Good God, Dan--they’ve _got_ to get through!” Maxwell exploded;
and pushing the despatcher aside he cut in on the wire himself. There
was a brief and brittle colloquy in which the emphatic word was made
to do duty for entire sentences, a wait, and when the clicking began
again the superintendent translated audibly, quite as if Connolly,
listening with all of his five senses concentrated in the single one of
hearing, were not taking the hopeful information as it came from the
sounder.