do a Marathon over the hill to the west end. Just the same, it will be
touch and go if they make it in time to warn the Mail. How much late is
Six?”
Connolly gave the time, making the proper deduction for the few minutes
made up west of Junico. Maxwell glanced up at the time-standard clock
on the wall.
“There is an even chance,” he asserted hopefully. “There ought to be
somebody in that mob of wire-stringers who can run the two miles in
time to head off the Mail. How did you come to let things get into such
a snarl as this, Dan?”
Again Connolly explained, and he did not try to make it easy for the
offending crew of Number Seventeen. “Jasper didn’t ask for orders at
Nophi. He simply took snap judgment and went along, leaving the Nophi
man to tell me after the thing was done.”
“Jasper and his engineer will get thirty days on this, no matter how it
turns out!” snapped the boss. “There is a good deal too much of this
rule-breaking lately, and it’s got to stop short. I won’t have it....
Suffering cats! I wish those sprinters would hurry up and get word to
us! My God, Dan, if that fast train gets into the tunnel before they
catch it----”
A thunderous clangor in the station yard below the office windows cut
into the sentence, and again the superintendent looked up at the clock.
“That’s the ‘Quick-step,’ isn’t it?” he said. “She’s bringing an old
friend of ours from the East, Dan--Mr. Sprague.”
For a moment Connolly was able to take his mind off of the tragedy or
near-tragedy which was working itself out to some kind of a climax in
the far-away Hophra Mountains to the westward.
“You asked him to come and tell us why we’re having this fit of extra
cussedness all over the line?” he asked.
“Oh, no; the Department of Agriculture is sending him to make some soil
tests in the Timanyoni. He writes that he is likely to be with us for a
month or two.”
“I’m glad,” said Connolly simply. “Somehow, you feel as if you’d got a
good solid mountain at your back when Mr. Sprague’s around. I wonder
if he’ll come up here before he goes over to the hotel?”
Even as he spoke the door opened, and the man who looked like the elder
brother of all the foot-ball “backs” in the intercollegiate try-out
came in.
“Hello, hello, hello,” he said jovially; “same old shop--same old
worries, eh? How are you, Maxwell? And you, Mr. Connolly? Glad to see
you both. What’s the trouble this time? Anything a journeyman chemist
can help you out on?”
Maxwell’s mustaches took a sharper uptilt. “How did you know there was
any trouble, Calvin?” he demanded quickly.
The big man leaned across the counter rail and laughed softly.
“There is nothing very occult about that,” he rejoined. “You have it
written all over your faces, both of you; and it is also written in the
face of that young man over in the corner, who would like to hear what
we’re saying and can’t quite compass it.”
Maxwell explained briefly.
“Two of our trains are trying to get together on a single track up
at Tunnel Number Three in the Hophras. There is a break-down in the
tunnel, and half a hundred men are sprinting over the mountain to try
to head off the other train.”
“What? half a hundred? There ought to be at least one or two good
sprinters among that many--somebody who can make your touch-down for
you. How does it come that you happened to have as big a crowd as that
on the side-lines--at this time of night?”
The superintendent went into details far enough to account for the
crowd of volunteer rescuers.
“We are electrifying Tunnel Number Three, and the contractors’ camp is
at this end of the tunnel. It was the contractors’ operator who sent
in the alarm, and his chief engineer turned out the entire camp for us
when I told him what to do.”
“And you are waiting to get word?”
“Yes; waiting and hoping. By great good luck the Fast Mail is behind
time. If it hasn’t made up----”
A fierce clattering of the sounder on Connolly’s table tore into the
sentence, and in the midst of it Maxwell shot out his arms and drew a
deep breath.
“Thank God!” he ejaculated, “they’ve caught the Mail! Now I’ll go with
you, Calvin.” And then to Connolly: “Straighten things out for those
fellows at the tunnel as quickly as you can, Dan, and get the wheels in
motion again. Order up the engine from Second Seventeen if they need
power to get that raffle out of the tunnel, and have somebody send
over to Lopez Canyon for Benson to take charge. If you want to reach
me, I’ll be over at the hotel.”
At the Hotel Topaz, across the plaza from the railroad head-quarters
building, Maxwell saw his friend and sometime college classmate
properly registered for a comfortable suite, and otherwise hospitably
provided for before the pair of them went to smoke their bedtime pipes
in the deserted writing-room facing the plaza.
“It’s just my luck, Calvin, to be homeless about every other time
you happen along,” Maxwell apologized, when the pipes were lighted.
“Alice’s father and mother came through from California a few days ago,
and carried her and the children off with them to New York and the Long
Island shore. I’m a widower.”
“That’s all right,” laughed the big man. “I’m going to be here in your
midst for a month or more, and I wouldn’t think of camping down on you
for that length of time, anyway. To-morrow you’ll chase out and help me
find a couple of office rooms where I can set up a small laboratory;
and after that I’ll go out in the woods and dig dirt--which it is my
official nature so to do. That’s enough about me. How are you getting
along with the railroad wreckers?”
Maxwell lighted his pipe and answered categorically.
“We have heard nothing more, directly, from the Wall Street people
since that break they made a few weeks ago trying to hold up the
proxies I was sending to President Ford in New York,” was Maxwell’s
summing up of the current situation. “But Ford assures me from time to
time that they haven’t quit. The latest competition rate ruling by the
Interstate Commerce Commission makes it absolutely necessary for them
to own or control a shorter line than their present one to Southern
California points--this in order to protect their holdings in the big
stock pool. They’d have what they need if they could corral the Nevada
Short Line and tie it in with the Transcontinental’s branch at Copah.
Ford says they seem to consider it only a question of time until they
absorb us. The T-C. people are spending a lot of money on their Jack’s
Canyon branch, putting it in shape for heavy traffic; and they can’t
hope to get the traffic unless they get us.”
“This tunnel trouble to-night had nothing to do with the fight, I
suppose?” queried Sprague reflectively.
“Oh, no. That was merely the outgrowth of a curious sort of letting
down that comes once in a while on every railroad, no matter how well
it may be manned or handled. Our let-down has been coming on gradually
ever since we got over the ‘Wire-Devil’ scare. Men, good men who have
been with us for years, take chances that would make your hair stand on
end. Like this to-night,” and he went on to describe the causes which
had led up to the near-tragedy at Tunnel Number Three.
“I see,” said Sprague. And then: “You say you are electrifying? I
thought that was a luxury in which only the rich Eastern roads could
indulge; and then only for their city terminals.”
“It isn’t exactly a luxury in our case; it’s a working necessity.
Tunnel Number Three is part of a shortening project carried out two
years ago. It dodges under Burnt Mountain and cuts out five and
two-tenths miles of the costliest, crookedest track in Tumble-Tree
Canyon; track that we were never able to keep open for ten days in
succession during the summer season of cloud-bursts and heavy storms.
It is a timbered tunnel a mile and a quarter long, and the greater
part of it is through loose, dry shale that practically kiln-dries the
timber arching. From the time we began using it we’ve been fighting
fire in it almost daily.”
“Just so,” said the chemistry expert. “So now you are putting in
electricity to get rid of the fire-throwing locomotives. Where do you
get your juice?”
“In Lopez Canyon, about three miles from the eastern portal, there is
an excellent water-power. Eventually we shall use electricity for the
entire hill-pull over the Hophras and so make a very handsome reduction
in our fuel account.”
“Good!” was the approving comment; and then the commentator came
back to the details. “Electricity is another of my pet hobbies,” he
confessed. “What company is installing you--General Electric?”
“No; a New York firm--Grafton Brothers. I never heard of them until
they came here.”
Only the keenest of observers would have noted Sprague’s accession of
interest at the mention of the brotherly firm name.
“The Graftons, eh?” he said slowly. “How did you come to give them the
job?”
“We had nothing to do with it out here. The deal was made in New York,
with the Pacific Southwestern officials.”
Sprague was nodding absently as if in answer to some unspoken query of
his own when he said, “Have you ever met either of the Graftons, Dick?”
“No; they are only a name to me. Their representative on our job is an
engineer named Stribling; a fine young fellow and a cracker-jack in his
business. He was the man who turned out the crowd of sprinters for us
to-night.”
“Oho! general favorite all around, is he?”
Maxwell laughed dryly. “He has captured everybody except the one man
who has had the most to do with him; that’s Benson, our chief engineer.
Jack is a sort of two-fisted bluffer himself--though it is only fair to
say that he usually makes his bluff good--and I think he’d always bet
on the field against a favorite. He says Stribling is too smooth; too
damned smooth, is the way he generally phrases it.”
“I shall have great pleasure in making the acquaintance of this Mr.
Benson of yours some day,” said the man from Washington. And after that
he smoked on in silence until Maxwell was about to bid him good-night
and suggest a bell-hop and the elevator--did suggest them, in fact.
“No, I’m not sleepy,” was the rejoinder. “I was just thinking about
railroads and tunnels and the like. If I were a railroad man, Dick, I
believe I should have a crazy horror of a tunnel.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know; superstition, perhaps. You know the old saying:
Every superstition
Is a foolish superstition
Save the little superstition
Of me.
A tunnel always seems to me like a man’s neck. One little grip and a
squeeze, and your man, though he may have a couple of hundred pounds of
other organs in perfect working order, is dead.”
Maxwell laughed at the quaint conceit, though he was prompt to make the
timely application.
“That would be true enough for us if Tunnel Number Three should ever be
wiped out,” he admitted. “As I have said, it is in dry shale, a good
part of it, and it had to be carefully supported by follow-up timbering
as we went along in the digging. I wanted Ford to let us keep the
roundabout track in commission, against emergencies, but he decided it
would be too expensive--as it probably would have been.”
“And you have let the roundabout track lapse?”
“Oh, yes; the cloud-bursts of the first summer wiped it out for us
completely.”
“So this tunnel is really the neck of your five-hundred-mile-long man,
is it?”
“It is. If Burnt Mountain should happen to fall in on us one of these
fine nights--which it won’t--we’d be definitely out of the game as a
through line. It would bottle us up for weeks, if not for months.”
A slow smile spread itself over Sprague’s smooth-shaven, good-natured
face.
“If I had as tender a neck as that, Dick, I’d have night sweats
thinking about it; I should, for a fact,” he averred. And then, after
a pause: “Ah; I’ve been waiting for that. The lights have just gone
out in your office over there in the railroad building. Who is so
industrious as to stay on the job until nearly midnight?”
“It is Harvey Calmaine, my paragon of a chief clerk. He’s a mighty
hard-working young fellow--a treasure, as you may remember. He has been
getting up some statistics for me, and he won’t take the time out of
the working day.”
“H’m, yes; he is a fine young fellow, Dick, and no mistake.” Then,
after he had refilled his pipe: “He still limps a little from that
foot-scorching episode in Bart Holladay’s back room--when they
were torturing him to make him tell what he had done with the
proxies--doesn’t he?”
Maxwell turned upon his companion with a frown of mystification
wrinkling between his eyes.
“How did you know that, Calvin?” he demanded.
Sprague chuckled gently.
“Some fine day, Dick, you’ll learn to use your eyes and ears. I saw
young Calmaine walking across from the railroad building just now--as
you did, only you didn’t remark it consciously; and at the present
moment I hear him coming through the lobby, with the limp very
distinctly noticeable in the click of his heels upon the tiled floor.
And now I’ll venture a guess: he is looking for you, and when he finds
you he will give you a telegram.”
Almost as he spoke, Calmaine came up behind them. As Sprague had
predicted, he had a telegram in his hand, which he gave to his superior
with a word in explanation. “That is only a translation. The original
is a cipher, and I locked it up in the office safe. It came just as I
was getting ready to knock off.”
Maxwell read the telegram and passed it on to Sprague.
“It’s a little odd that Ford should use the same figure of speech
that you did a few minutes ago,” he remarked. And then, with a short
laugh, “If I were inclined to be superstitious I might wonder if your
marvellous second mentality wasn’t looking over Calmaine’s shoulder as
he translated that.”
Sprague had glanced at the message. It read:
“Big Nine still feeling for a strangle-hold on us. Look sharp that it
does not get its fingers on your windpipe.
“FORD.”
The big man passed the square of paper back to his friend and stood up
to stretch his arms over his head, yawning like a sleepy farm-hand.
“I’ve got to set up my shop and go to work sometime to-morrow,” he
said. “Let’s go upstairs and turn in for a few lines of sleep.”
“Not me, just yet,” said Maxwell, with a curt disregard for his
English. “I’m going over to the shack for a little while.”
“What for?” questioned the sleepy one, with half-absent interest.
“To try and get Benson on the wire and have him post guards in that
tunnel. There is no reason on earth for it, but between you and Ford
you’ve got me nervous on this choking proposition. Good-night, old man.
Breakfast with me in the morning, and afterward I’ll take you out and
steer you up against some of the real-estate robbers and get them to
find you an office.”
On the following day the superintendent was as good as his word in
the office-finding matter, and by noon the Government soil-tester was
comfortably established in a couple of rooms on the second floor of
the Kinzie Building, in the same corridor with Mr. Robert Stillings,
the local attorney for the railroad company.
The two-room suite gave him an office--which he said was about as
necessary as an auxiliary tail to a cat--and a second room in the rear
which he speedily transformed into a working laboratory, using the
young man named Tarbell, who still figured on the railroad pay-rolls as
a “relief operator,” for his errand-boy and man-of-all-work in securing
the needed furnishings and equipment.
Later in the day Maxwell brought his brother-in-law, “Billy” Starbuck,
around to the new office, introducing him as a mine owner and a
gentleman of easy leisure, and one who knew every square acre of soil,
arable or otherwise, in the entire Timanyoni.
“Billy has nothing on earth to do, and, like me, he is a temporary
widower,” Maxwell explained. “We married sisters, and his wife has
gone with mine and the Fairbairns to dabble in the salt sea waves at
Norman Towers. Make use of him as you can, only don’t take his word for
the gentleness of the horse you’re going to ride. He is an absolutely
truthful man on any other subject, but he never misses a chance to play
a bucking bronc’ against a tenderfoot.”
Sprague foregathered at once with the clean-cut, rather shabbily
clothed young mine owner whose principal affectations were his worn
khaki suit, a cowboy Stetson tilted carelessly to the back of his head,
and a vocabulary of cow-camp slang which happened to be no measure
of his knowledge of grammatical English. Before he left the newly
established laboratory in the Kinzie Building, Starbuck had engaged to
go with the expert on a soil-collecting trip through the Park, the trip
to begin early in the morning of the following day, and to continue
indefinitely; or until the chief soil-hunter should be sufficiently
saddle-sore to wish to cut it short.
“I like that brother-in-law of yours a whole heap, Dick,” was Sprague’s
verdict when he met the superintendent at dinner in the Topaz café that
evening. “He is a man with a history, isn’t he?”
The queer look which Sprague seemed to be able to evoke at will in his
table-mate crept into Maxwell’s eyes.
“Did you ever meet Billy before I took him into your office this
afternoon?” he asked.
“No.”
“Ever hear of him before?”
“No.”
“All right; now I’m going to try you out good and hard. You intimate
that he is a man with a history. What is his history?”
The expert sat back, thrust his hands into his pockets, and for a
moment seemed to go into a trance, with his gaze fixed upon the ornate
decorations of the café ceiling.
“I’ll make what you will probably call a series of wild guesses,” he
said at length, “prefacing them with the assurance, which you must take
at its face value, that Mr. Starbuck has told me nothing whatever of
himself--at least, not consciously.”
“Go on,” said Maxwell.
“In the first place, he is an educated man--a college man--and he talks
cowboy English only because it suits his fancy to talk it. Also, though
he wears khaki and a cowboy hat, he is quite as much at home in evening
clothes as you or I. Am I right, so far?”
“Yes.”
“Beyond that, he is a man of many accomplishments, most of which he is
at some pains to conceal. In his younger youth, if not later, he was a
bit wild--too much money to spend, I take it--and the wildness, or some
of its consequences, landed him in jail; no, it wasn’t a jail--it was a
penitentiary.”
Maxwell’s look of amused half-triumph had changed to one of sober
consternation.
“_Calvin!_” he exclaimed, in low tones. “You must know; you must
have heard----”
“I pledge you my word, Dick; I am cutting this out of whole cloth, so
far as any outside information is concerned. But let me go on. Whatever
Mr. Starbuck was, or whatever he did, he was never a criminal in the
true sense of the word. So far from it, I can assure you of what you
doubtless know for yourself; that he is a man to tie to--a true man
and a loyal friend and kinsman. I’m going to take the field with him
to-morrow morning, and we shall come back brothers of the blood. That’s
a measure of my regard for him.”
Maxwell put down his knife and fork and said what clansman relationship
demanded.
“Listen,” he began, “and see how frightfully near you have shaved the
truth in your ‘guesses.’ In his early manhood Billy was a cowpunch--in
the college-graduate class, as you intimate. He discovered a mine, sold
it for a fat wad, and went to New York, where he blew in the wad to the
final dollar.”
Sprague nodded. “That was the wild side-step that I couldn’t quite
place,” he said, and the superintendent went on.
“When his money was gone he went to work as a stenographer for a firm
of brokers, and was holding the job down when the safe was tapped and
a sum of money stolen. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a
term in Sing Sing, where he served his time. It was late in the first
year of his freedom before a few of us who were his friends here in
the West found out that he had voluntarily gone to prison to save
a fellow-clerk--a half-dead, broken-down scoundrel with a wife and
children, a sick mother, and a crippled sister.”
“Fine!” Sprague was beginning to say; but Maxwell interposed.
“No, hold on; you mustn’t set him down as an impossible hero. He’d
be the first to object to that. I said ‘voluntarily,’ and it really
amounted to that, though when Billy promised not to betray the
scoundrel he had no idea that he was going to be made to suffer in his
place. Nevertheless, since the promise had been given, Billy made good.”
Sprague smiled. “Entirely without prejudice to a hearty and man-sized
hatred for the man who let him go in the hole, you’d say?”
“Exactly; entirely without prejudice to that very human passion.”
“Well,” said the expert; “my summing up was true, anyhow. I was sure
he had that kind of stuff in him, and that he had been tried out along
some such line as that.”
Maxwell nodded, and then he became insistent.
“Now tell me--you’ve got to tell me, Calvin, how you did it.”
Sprague’s mellow, booming laugh earned him more than one curious glance
from the surrounding tables.
“I can no more tell you, Dick, than I can explain why, to a majority
of people, white is white and black is black. For my own satisfaction
I define the ‘how’ as a natural growth, favored by habit and training,
of the scientific attitude; the mental slant which, if given free play,
almost unconsciously notes, marks, deduces, reasons; deeming nothing
too small or too trifling to go toward making up the whole of any
conclusion. More than that, in my own case the faculty is able to hold
itself workably aloof from the ordinary distractions of conversation
and the like. It goes on, using the outward senses when it needs them,
to be sure, but only as aids to the developing of its own little film
in its own little darkroom. Do you get the idea?”
“Only partly. Even science has to have its raw materials to work on.”
“Oh, yes; and the materials lie all around us constantly, if we only
know how to weigh and measure them. In Starbuck’s case, now, there
were little lapses from the cowboy talk to tell me that he was an
educated man; also, he has the true modesty of those who can really do
things. Then there were gaps in his talk, little loopholes, you might
call them, through which I could look back through the years and get
glimpses of that period of dissipation. Each glimpse revealed a tiny
ear-mark of the man who knows--who can only know--because he has been
there.”
“Go on,” urged Maxwell, still only half-convinced that the deductions
were not, in the last analysis, only shrewd guesses. “None of these
things told you that he had been in prison.”
“No; as to that, I’ll admit I set a harmless trap for him. I fancied
once, and then again, that I saw the prison look in his eye; the quick
side-glance that a long-term prisoner learns to give without turning
his head--notice it the next time you happen to be in a penitentiary,
if you are ever so unfortunate as to visit one.”
“I have noticed it,” said Maxwell, and the expert went on.
“When I saw that, the scientific mentality said instantly, ‘That look
wasn’t acquired in a jail term--it took longer.’ The next suggestion
followed as a matter of course. Every long-term man answers to a number
instead of to his name. At the moment I was numbering the bottles of
chemicals which Tarbell had been buying for me, and I turned the talk
upon my peculiar system of labelling--by numbers. Starbuck himself did
the rest. He said, ‘I reckon I wouldn’t rent even a post-office box if
it had to have a number on it.’ That was all, but it was enough.”
Maxwell was toying with his dessert.
“As I have said several times before, Calvin, you are almost uncanny
now and then. You know too much. Some fine day it will strike in on
you--sour on you and make you sick.”
Sprague’s mellow laugh sounded again.
“I haven’t begun to tell you all I know. For example, I might say that
all through this spell of gossip about your brother-in-law you’ve been
giving the subject no more than a scant half of your mind. The other
half has been tussling with your railroad involvement, and you’ve been
wondering where the Big Nine is going to land on you next. What do you
hear from Tunnel Number Three?”
“Nothing much; or at least nothing out of the ordinary. They got the
tangle straightened out last night after a time. Benson wires that
Stribling put the entire electrifying force under his orders, and was
all kinds of nice about it.”