spelling would make it ‘electrocuting,’ wouldn’t it? How long will it
be before the installation is completed?”
“They are starting the turbines in Lopez Canyon to-day, for a try-out.
The wires are all strung, and Stribling is installing some sort of a
safety contrivance in the tunnel as a finishing touch; a switch of some
kind that will shunt the current in case any accident should happen
to a train in transit. It’s all Greek to me--and to Benson, for that
matter. Neither of us knows enough about electric installations to keep
us from spoiling.”
“But the date,” said Sprague, with the amiable persistence which was
one of his chief characteristics. “When will the current be turned on?”
“Stribling sends word that he will be ready to cut the power in on the
tunnel wires to-morrow evening at six o’clock, and asks if I’m going to
be on hand to see it done.”
Sprague was deftly clipping the tip from one of the cigars which the
waiter had brought, preparatory to lighting it.
“Do you happen to have a time-table in your pocket?” he asked.
Maxwell had one, and he passed it across the table. The Government man
postponed the lighting of his cigar and began to turn the leaves of the
official schedule hand-book. At the pages listing the trains on the
Hophra Division he paused and ran his finger slowly down the columns
giving the movement of traffic to and through Tunnel Number Three.
“You would have to leave here early in the afternoon to reach the
tunnel by six--or rather to be there at six--wouldn’t you?” he asked,
returning the time-table.
Maxwell shook his head and smiled. “You forget that I’m not tied to
regular trains on my own piece of railroad,” he suggested. “I couldn’t
afford to go up on Three and spend two or three hours loafing around.
If I go, I shall order out a car and engine and make a quick job of it.
It is only sixty-three miles, and I can make it special in an hour and
thirty minutes or thereabouts.”
“I see,” said Sprague reflectively. “Leaving Brewster about
three-thirty, say?”
“Yes; that would be plenty early enough.”
“But you don’t know yet whether you will go at all?”
“No. There is a delegation of ore-shippers coming down from Red Butte
to-morrow, and I’ll be busy with it a good part of the day.”
After that the talk drifted to other things, among them the expert’s
mission to the Timanyoni, which, he admitted in confidence, was the
preliminary to a possible Government reclamation project. And finally,
when Maxwell broke away to go back to his office across the plaza, his
going or not going to the tunnel to be present at the turning on of the
power current on the following day was left undecided.
According to the prearranged programme, Sprague left Brewster at
daylight the next morning, riding with Starbuck to the upper valley of
the Gloria where the first of the soil specimens were to be collected.
But for some reason, saddle-soreness on the part of the tenderfoot, or
another, the trip was a short one, ending a little after noon, when the
two came jogging back through the Brewster streets.
From their corner table in the Topaz café, where they ate their late
luncheon together, they saw Maxwell entertaining a party of the
ore-shippers; and later Sprague, whose half-absent gaze seemed to miss
nothing, saw a good-looking young fellow in shabby, work-stained brown
duck push through the swinging glazed doors opening from the lobby and
go around to whisper to Maxwell at the table of entertainment. Sprague
called his companion’s attention to the new-comer.
“That will be Mr. Benson, chief engineer of the railroad, for a guess,”
he ventured; and Starbuck nodded.
“Right you are. It’s Jack; and to look at him you sure wouldn’t think
he was a married man, with a nice, tidy little wife at home, would you,
now? He always looks as if he had just tumbled out of the dirtiest car
in his work-train.”
The soil expert smiled leniently. “Possibly he is here on business, and
sometimes business won’t wait,” he suggested. “See; your brother-in-law
is excusing himself to the ore people and is going out with Benson.
After we finish our luncheon I’ll ask you to do me a little favor, Mr.
Starbuck. Find Mr. Maxwell and tell him we’re back--just on the chance
that he didn’t see us over here in this dark corner of ours. I’d like
to meet Mr. Benson, if it can be managed without too much trouble.”
Starbuck’s keen gray eyes searched the round, double-chinned face of
his newly made acquaintance shrewdly.
“I reckon I’m on,” he said slowly. “I was beginning to climb on before
you said anything. That New York crowd is after Dick and his railroad
with a black-snake whip; I know that much. Is the whip getting ready to
pop again?”
“I’m a little afraid it is, Mr. Starbuck, and I am hoping that Mr.
Benson will be able to tell us whether it is or isn’t,” was the
even-toned rejoinder. “At all events, I’d like to meet him and have a
talk with him--some time before three o’clock. Bear the hour in mind,
will you, please? and try to arrange it for me.”
“Sure,” said Starbuck; and when they rose from the table he went in
search of the superintendent and Benson, leaving his luncheon companion
to go around to the Kinzie Building laboratory alone.
It was something less than half an hour after Sprague had stripped his
coat and gone to work on the soil specimens of the morning’s gathering
when Starbuck came in, bringing Maxwell and Benson. As Starbuck made
it appear, the visit was merely a neighborly drop-in, with no better
excuse than the expressed purpose of introducing Sprague to a possible
helper.
“I thought you might be able to use Jack in some way, Mr. Sprague,” he
said, after the introduction was a fact accomplished. “He sure knows
a heap more about Timanyoni dirt than anybody else between the two
ranges; carries right smart of it around on his clothes a good deal of
the time.”
Benson took the joke in good part; and when Sprague had found and
opened a box of his irreproachable cigars, the talk, touching lightly
at first upon Sprague’s business in the West, came around, or was
brought around, to Benson’s part in the electrification job. The big
expert with the fighting jaw and the sympathetic gray eyes had a way
of leading even a reticent man to tell of his troubles; and Benson,
knowing the part Sprague had taken in defeating the two previous
attempts to wreck the Short Line, felt free to unburden himself.
“I can’t make Maxwell, here, believe that Stribling is anything but the
fine, open-handed young fellow that he seems to be; but I want to tell
you three together what I have often told Maxwell: I’ve got a hunch.
I don’t _know_ a blessed thing. Stribling has always treated me
fine, and he is a fellow you can hardly help cottoning to, right from
the jump. But some way something inside of me keeps on telling me that
he’s too smooth--too damned smooth. Last night, for instance, in that
derailment muddle--there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do, didn’t do,
to help us out. He packed his men into the tunnel so thick that nobody
could get near that derailed car; in fact, he had the car on the rails
and the train backing out before I could get any action at all.”
“What caused the derailment, Mr. Benson?” Sprague put in quietly.
“That was one of the things that made me hot. Stribling’s messing in
made it impossible for anybody to tell. There was nothing the matter
with the track or with the car, so far as I could see after the thing
was over. Bamberg, the engineer who was pulling the train, swears that
somebody flagged him down with a red light when he was about half-way
through the tunnel, and he stopped. Then the red changed to white
and gave him the ‘go-ahead.’ When he tried to start his train, this
box-car, somewhere along in the middle of things, jumped the track and
blocked the tunnel. He felt the jerk and stopped again.”
Sprague waved a hand in token of his complete satisfaction.
“Suppose we ignore this train tangle for the present and come to other
things,” he interposed. “I’ve been wondering if you could describe for
me, briefly, the details of this tunnel installation, Mr. Benson?”
“Why, yes; it’s simple enough--it’s merely a trolley line on
a big scale: two heavy copper trolley wires strung through on
catenary brackets, with double insulation. That’s all, except the
safety-switches--cut-outs--one at each end and one in the middle of the
tunnel.”
“Ah?” said the expert, mildly interested at last; “one in the middle,
you say? What is that for?”
“It is the real safety device, Stribling says; the others are merely
mechanical cut-outs for the use of the wire repairers. He was
explaining it to me this morning when he was connecting it in with the
power wires. It’s an ordinary oil-protected switch so adjusted that in
case an accident happens to a train in the tunnel the circuit will be
broken automatically and the live-wire current cut out. It’s a good
thing, you’d say. It would make your flesh creep to think what it would
mean to have those high-power wires short-circuiting into a wreck.”
“We won’t think of it,” said the big man quizzically. “We’ll think
rather of this Mr. Stribling and your--thus far--unexplained
suspicions. How did he contrive to send you down here to-day?”
Benson looked up quickly.
“How did you know he sent me? I didn’t say he did, did I? But I guess
that is what it amounts to. He made it a sort of personal matter; urged
me to come and bring Mr. Maxwell back with me; said that on a job as
big as ours he didn’t want to take any chances with his reputation as
an electrical engineer or leave any room for a misunderstanding. He’d
like to have Maxwell go foot by foot over the installation and see that
everything is all right and safe before the power is turned on and the
first electric train is sent through.”
Sprague put his face in his hands and for a few seconds the silence in
the makeshift laboratory was unbroken. Then suddenly he came to life
again.
“You were telling us about this internal safety device,” he broke out
abruptly. “It’s an oil-switch, you say?”
“Yes; there is an iron tank to hold the oil, and----”
“Hold on; where do you find room in the tunnel for a tank?”
“In one of the side excavations. When we were driving the tunnel we
left side niches every two hundred feet or so; safety-holes for the men
in blasting, and places where we could store dynamite and tools out of
danger and out of the way.”
“Stop. Was this particular dodge-hole where the safety switch is placed
ever used for dynamite storing?”
“Yes; there are a lot of empty boxes in it now. In the arching, the
timber-setters had covered them in, I suppose, and they were overlooked
in the cleaning out.”
“You are sure they are empty?”
“Oh, yes; they’re empty all right. Stribling called my attention to
them this morning, and I kicked over two or three of them, at his
suggestion, just to make sure that they were empty.”
“I see; he called your attention to them, did he? That is interesting,
but not nearly as interesting as this oil-switch you’ve been trying to
describe for me. Go over it again, will you?”
The young chief engineer was evidently disappointed. The scientist
of whose gifts he had heard so much seemed to have a brain in which
pertinacity, the pertinacity which clings helplessly to trivial and
perfectly obvious things, was the over-shadowing faculty.
“I don’t know that I can make it any plainer,” he said, with a touch of
impatience. “It’s just an ordinary electric circuit-breaker, the same
as they use on street-cars, and it is buried in oil to keep it from
arcing--as all switches are when they’re under voltages as high as ours
will be. The mechanism is suspended in a tank by its own wires, and the
tank is filled with oil. I was there when they were filling the tank
this morning, and Stribling poured a queer sirupy mess in on top of
it--some patent stuff to keep the oil from thickening under exposure,
he said.”
“A patent mixture, eh? I’m interested in patents,” said the listener,
going off at another of the blind tangents. “How did it come--in a can?”
“Yes; in four square cans, holding about a gallon or so each, I should
say. They were packed in a box--like varnish cans, you know--only they
were taller and not so big in section.”
“I suppose you weren’t near enough to notice any name or advertisement
on these cans, were you?”
Benson had by this time lost all hope of finding anything like
continuity in the big man’s mind, but he answered the query.
“Yes, I was near enough; Stribling was up on the tank and I passed the
cans up to him, one at a time--and spilled the stuff all over me doing
it. There wasn’t any name on them. They were just plain square tin
cans; that’s all.”
Sprague got up and crossed over to Benson’s chair.
“Spilled it on you, eh? Is this the stain of it on your coat?” he
asked; and when Benson nodded: “It’s too bad to spoil a perfectly good
working-coat that way. Suppose you let me have it and I’ll see if I
can’t take those spots out of it.”
Benson obeyed, half-contemptuously, and, together with the two who
had taken no part in the colloquy, looked on curiously while the
expert, who had apparently lost all interest in everything save the
coat-cleaning, swiftly treated the stained patches with various
chemicals, put the resultant washings into a beaker and began to add
ingredients from sundry bottles on the laboratory shelves, holding the
beaker to the light after each fresh addition to note if there were
changing colors in the solution.
At the close of the rapidly conducted experiment he poured a little of
the solution into a tiny test-tube, which he proceeded to heat over
the flame of a small alcohol lamp. This part of whatever experiment
he was attempting appeared to be unsuccessful. Almost immediately the
test-tube cracked with a miniature explosion, scattering bits of broken
glass and extinguishing the flame of the little lamp.
Sprague tossed the neck of the shattered glass tube aside and returned
the brown-duck shooting-coat to its owner. Benson put it on, and
was curious enough to say: “Did you think you could find out what
Stribling’s protective mixture was from those grease-spots?”
“Mere force of habit,” laughed the chemist, putting on his own coat.
“I’m obliged to analyze everything I get hold of, you know; it’s a sort
of disease with me, I guess.”
“But could you tell what it was, just from those discolored washings?”
queried Maxwell.
“Perfectly. Mr. Stribling’s ‘patent’ is a compound in which the chief
ingredient is a grease derived from the spent lye of the soap-makers,
and one of the principal uses of which in the arts is, as Mr. Stribling
says, to keep oils, and other things, from drying out.” Then, more
pointedly to the superintendent: “I suppose you’ll go up to the tunnel
and look the job over, making our careful young friend Stribling
entirely happy, won’t you?”
Maxwell looked at his watch.
“Perhaps I’d better. Benson wants to get back, anyway. Will you two go
along?”--to Sprague and Starbuck.
“I don’t mind,” said the expert, with a barely perceptible nod to
Starbuck; and after he had rearranged the chemicals on his newly made
shelves the four left the office and had themselves dropped to the
ground floor of the building.
It was while they were walking two and two down the street that Sprague
dropped a few steps behind with Starbuck and passed him a carefully
wrapped package which he took from under his coat.
“I have another little experiment in mind, Mr. Starbuck,” he said in
low tones. “When we are on our way through the tunnel, watch your
opportunity to drop out of the procession long enough to empty the
contents of that package into the patent grease, which you will find,
not floating on the oil, but in some sort of a receptacle let into the
top of the oil-tank of that safety contrivance which Mr. Benson has so
accurately described for us. I’m curious enough to want to prove up on
my analysis of a few minutes ago--to see if it was correct.”
“What will happen if it was correct?”
“Nothing; nothing alarming, I assure you. But be careful not to get any
of the stuff in that package on your hands when you break the paraffin
seals. And perhaps it might be as well if you don’t let our young
electrical friend see you do it. He might think we were messing in
where we had no business to.”
Starbuck made a sign of complete understanding, and a few minutes
later, when they reached the main street, made a time-saving
suggestion.
“Suppose you folks take a taxi to the roundhouse,” he said. “I’ll mosey
up to the despatcher’s office and get your clear-track orders for you.”
Maxwell approved the suggestion and they separated, Starbuck catching
a passing electric car for the plaza-fronting railroad head-quarters,
and Maxwell impressing the first auto hack he could find to take the
remaining three of them directly to the western yards. The hackman
drove across the city and let them out at the nearest street-crossing,
and from thence they walked the final hundred yards over the ties of
the shop track.
At the roundhouse door they met a big, bearded man whose carefully
creased brown hat and rather vociferous business suit would have
marked him elsewhere as a gentleman of elegant, if somewhat
precarious, leisure. Judson Bascom was this gentleman’s name, and he
was comparatively a new-comer in the Short Line service; having been
appointed to succeed Fred Dawson, master mechanic, promoted.
Bascom was stooping to pat a stray dog, but he rose to his feet when
the three came down upon him.
“You’re the man we’re looking for, Bascom,” said Maxwell shortly. “I
want a light engine to go up to Tunnel Number Three. What have you got
in?”
The big master mechanic twiddled the bunch of charms on his watch-fob,
and the stray dog began to sniff warily at Benson’s heels.
“The Nine-fifteen’s got fire in her; will she do?”
“Yes. Get me a crew as quickly as you can. I want a man who isn’t
afraid to run.”
The man in the brown hat and the loud plaids dragged out a fat gold
watch and shook his head.
“I guess that’ll be me. There’s nobody ’round, and I suppose you
wouldn’t want to wait until I can send the caller out after somebody?”
“No; I’m in a hurry,” snapped the boss. “Let’s get a move. My car is in
the shop, so you can couple onto that caboose over there on the split
track. There are four of us to go, and we’d crowd you in the cab.”
Big and leisurely-looking as he was, the master mechanic made good
time. In a minute or two he had the smart, light eight-wheeler on
the turntable, with the blower roaring, a red-headed pit-boy to
fire, and half a dozen roundhouse men to put their shoulders to the
table-levers. The shifting took five minutes more; and by that time a
switching-engine, with Starbuck hanging from the step, came racing
down the yard from the mile-away head-quarters.
Starbuck swung off before the switcher came to a stop, and joined the
three who were waiting at the step of the caboose.
“Hell’s a-poppin’,” he said laconically. “Davis hasn’t got a single
west wire that he can use. They all went out, blink, about twenty
minutes ago.”
“What’s that?” demanded Maxwell. “Not all of them, surely!”
“Every blamed one--commercial wires and all. Can’t get a whisper out of
anything west of Little Butte. He says it acts like a general ‘ground,’
and then again it don’t.”
The nattily dressed master mechanic had dropped from his engine-step to
come and join the group at the caboose. Maxwell put him in possession
of the blockading fact in a brief sentence.
“The wires are dead and we’ll have to bluff our way from siding to
siding. Are you game for it, Bascom?”
The big man inclined his head. “I guess so,” he said.
“All right. Go to Little Butte for the first lap. There is nothing in
the way between here and the junction. All aboard, gentlemen.”
The start was made briskly enough, but two miles beyond the yard-limits
the caboose-car chucked noisily as Bascom slowed for the single-span
bridge over the Gloria.
“Good Gad!” raged Maxwell, jumping up and jerking the air-whistle cord
for full speed ahead. “If he’s going to slow up for every trestle we
come to, we’ll never get anywhere!”
“We can prod him,” said Benson.
For the few miles intervening between the bridge and Little Butte the
master mechanic did not need prodding. Taking the air-whistle hint for
what it meant, he hurled the wild train around the curves and over the
tangents wholly without regard for the comfort of the four men who
vainly tried to keep their seats on the bunk benches in the caboose.
At Silver Switch the landscape was merely a blur; and in rounding the
great side-cut at the Butte bluff the short car shrieked and groaned
and seemed to be riding like a toe-balancer on the outer rail.
At the Little Butte stop the four made a dash for the operator’s
office, where Bascom presently joined them. There was no information to
be got out of Wooffert, the station agent. His wires were working north
on the Red Butte branch, but there was a dead “ground” somewhere to
the westward. Broken snatches were still coming through from Caliger,
ten miles up the main line west, and the instruments acted as if
somebody had been pouring cold molasses into them.
Maxwell had his pocket time-card out, though he did not need to consult
it. “Sixteen and Eighteen are somewhere between here and Nophi,” he
announced. “We’ve got to find and pass them as we can. Let her go,
Bascom.”
A half-minute later the up-valley race was begun. In the lower reaches
the tangents were long, giving the volunteer engineer measurably safe
sights ahead; and there was no occasion for Maxwell to jerk the whistle
cord. Again the big man in the engine cab was hurling the train along
with small regard for anything but speed.
At Caliger another stop was made. Like the man at Little Butte, the
operator knew nothing save that his wires were dead. At his last report
both of the down-coming freight trains had been on time. Maxwell did
some quick figuring.
“We’re pretty safe to run to Hatcher’s,” he told Bascom. “That will
give us five minutes against Sixteen, provided she’s not running ahead
of her schedule. Can you make Hatcher’s in forty minutes?”
“I’ll make it or land this outfit in hell,” said the master mechanic
grittingly. And once again the wheels began to spin.
It proved to be a close call at Hatcher’s, the little “blind” siding in
the upper valley. One mile short of the passing track Bascom began to
blow his whistle like a madman, and the four on the caboose, leaning
far out on the platforms, saw a long freight lumbering down from the
west. A short, stabbing puff of steam from the freight locomotive’s
whistle, soundless because of the din of hammering wheels and shrieking
flanges, told them that the freight engineer had seen and heard and was
trying to stop. Also, it was apparent to the two who looked on with
railroad knowledge that the stop could not be made within the siding’s
switch limits.
Bascom took a chance and a risky one. Speeding like a fiend, he sent
his one-car train onward to what promised to be a smashing head-on
collision with the freight. But at the lower switch, with the slowing
freight less than three hundred yards away, he made a grinding stop;
his fireman leaped from the gangway and ran to turn the switch; and
an instant later the wild train was snatched in on the siding and the
freight was rolling past in safety over the reset switch.
“Good work!” said Sprague, speaking for the first time since the
departure from Little Butte. “This man Bascom may not be the heavy
villain that he looks to be, but he is certainly carrying his nerve
with him this afternoon.”
Maxwell was leaning out and shouting to the volunteer in the cab.
“Easy, Bascom!” he yelled; “they’re carrying green!”
Bascom looked back and nodded; and the red-headed fireman strolled on
ahead to take his stand at the upper switch.
“Anything significant about the St. Patrick’s Day color?” queried
Sprague; and Maxwell said there was.
“It means another section following,” he explained; and then: “Here it
comes!” And as he said it, another freight came into view, plunging
around the curves toward the siding.
Unhappily for the speed-making purpose, this train, too, was carrying
green, and Maxwell swore impatiently to the universe in general. “Three
sections to this; and Eighteen’s pretty sure to have two or more. It’s
three fifty-five, right now, and we’ve got thirty miles to go!”
Benson laughed.