when the current was turned on?” queried Maxwell.
“For the very simple reason that Mr. Starbuck, at my direction, dumped
a large dose of neutralizing chemical into it as we passed the tank on
our way through the tunnel, and so saponified it. That was why I had
the courage to hammer on the tank with my bolt, and why Stribling, not
dreaming that his touchy explosive’s teeth had been drawn, nearly had a
fit.”
“One other thing,” Maxwell put in. “You asked Stribling why he burned
the telegraph wires out; how did you know they had been burned out?”
Sprague chuckled good-naturedly.
“I knew that at Little Butte; you might have known it if you hadn’t
been so excited as to forget that you had a nose. That office, as well
as the next one,--I’ve forgotten its name,--fairly reeked with the
smell of burnt rubber and insulation, and I said to myself that there
were only two torches in these mountains that could heat things hot
enough to burn the instruments: namely, lightning and the high-voltage
current from your plant in Lopez Canyon.”
Again a silence, broken only by the train clamor, settled down upon the
three in the Pullman smoking-room. After a time Maxwell drew a long
breath and said:
“It was a narrow squeak; a horribly narrow squeak, Calvin. We have a
good deal to say nowadays about the lawlessness of the mob and the
individual; but big money doesn’t seem to know that there are any such
things as justice and equity and a square deal.”
Sprague sat up and methodically relighted his cigar.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he demurred. “You can’t say that all
big money is lawless. Of course, there are buccaneers in every chapter
of the world’s history, and we have ours, neatly labelled with the
dollar-mark instead of the skull and cross-bones. Good big money is an
undoubted blessing; it is only bad big money that is a curse.”
Maxwell’s smile was mirthless.
“When a man puts a gun in your face and holds you up, it isn’t very
consoling to remember that there are a good many other men in the world
who wouldn’t treat you that way,” he commented. And then: “I hope we’ve
seen the last of this fight in the dark with that stock-jobbing gang in
New York.”
“You haven’t,” Sprague declared definitely. “They’ll come back at you,
and keep on coming back, until you get a fair grand-jury underhold
on the men at the top. I counted confidently upon being able to give
you that underhold to-day. I thought we had Stribling where he would
be obliged to turn state’s evidence. It was our misfortune that he
happened to be too good a man; that he was only the tool of a villain
and not a villain himself. They’ll hit you again, Maxwell, and go on
hitting you until you can strike back hard enough to put some of the
men higher up in the prisoner’s dock.”
This might have stood for the final word; but the true finality was
reached a couple of hours later when the superintendent and the
Government expert were smoking their bedtime pipes in the Topaz lobby.
“We haven’t fully grasped the real pity of this thing yet, Dick,”
said Sprague, at the end of the ends. “It is this: that greed, the
infernal lust of money that has laid hold upon our day and generation,
can take so fine a thing as that poor boy’s gratitude, transform it
into criminality, and make him pay the price with his life. Isn’t that
enough to make your blood run cold? Let’s turn in and forget it if we
can. Good-night. I’m going to bed.”
IV
The Mystery of the Black Blight
THE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal
of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in
the advertising folders as “The Fast Mail,” had collided in the
early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight
which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time,
had run past Angels without heeding the “stop for orders” signal
plainly displayed.
Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had
shot around the hill curve to hurl itself, a six-thousand-ton,
steel-pointed projectile, into the rear end of the first section, and
the disaster was complete. Somewhere under the smoking mountain of
wreckage marking the spot where the Mail and first-section locomotives
had locked themselves together, reared, and fallen over into the ditch,
two firemen and an engineer were buried. Out of one of the crushed
mail-cars two postal clerks were taken; one of them to die a few
minutes after his rescue, and the other bruised and broken, with an
arm and a leg dangling, as he was carried out to safety.
At the other point of impact there had been no loss of life, though the
material damage was almost as great. The engine of the second section
had split its way sheer through the first-section caboose--which, in
the nature of things, had no one in it to be killed--and through two
of the three merchandise-cars next in its plunging path. With a mixed
chaos of groceries, farming implements, and splintered timbers for its
monument, the big mogul had burrowed into the soft side bank of the
cutting as if in some blind attempt to bury itself out of sight of the
havoc it had wrought.
On the Thursday morning of this, the worst of a series of accidents
thickly bestudding that fateful month of August, Maxwell, the general
superintendent, chanced to be two hundred miles away to the eastward.
His service-car was in the Copah yards, and he was asleep in it when
the night watchman came down from the despatcher’s office to rouse him
with the bad news.
What could be done at such long range was done instantly and with
good generalship. The wires were working with Brewster, the division
head-quarters in Timanyoni Park. With his own hand Maxwell sent the
orders to Connolly, the despatcher, to Fordyce, the trainmaster,
and to Bascom, the master mechanic. A relief train was to be made
up with all haste to take the doctors to the wreck, and to convey
the passengers of Number Six back to Brewster. Following the relief
train, but giving it precedence, should go the wrecking-train. The
superintendent even went so far as to specify the equipment which
should be taken: the heavier of the two wrecking-cranes, a car-load
of rails for temporary tracking, and two or three water-cars for the
extinguishing of the fire.
These things done, and the arrangements made to start his own special
immediately for the scene of disaster, the superintendent had the
fine courage, in the face of this last and most unnerving of many
disheartenments, to return to his car and to go back to bed. He had
been up very late in conference with his president, Ford, and he knew
that the demands awaiting him at the end of the five-hour run to Lobo
Cut would call for all the reserves of strength and energy he could
hope to store up during the distance-covering interval.
Much good work had already been accomplished when Maxwell’s special,
feeling its way past the four long freights and the midnight passenger,
all held up at Angels, came upon the scene of destruction among the
foot-hills at an early hour in the forenoon. The relief train had
come and gone, bearing away the unhurt, the injured, and the dead. A
temporary working-track had been laid through the cut, and the mighty
one-hundred-and-fifty-ton steam crane, its movements directed by a big,
rather flashily dressed man with an accurately creased brown hat pulled
down over his brows, was reaching its steel finger here and there in
the débris and plucking the derelict freight-cars out of the way.
Up at the other end Fordyce, the trainmaster, was working with another
crew, using a mammoth block-and-tackle, with a detached locomotive for
its pulling power. When Maxwell came on the ground, Fordyce, a gnarled
little man with a twist in his jaw and a temper like the sparks from
an emery wheel, was alternately cajoling and cursing his men in a
praiseworthy attempt to make his block-and-tackle outheave the master
mechanic’s powerful crane.
“Yank ’em--yank ’em, men! Get that rail under there and heave! Wig
it--_wig it_! Now get that grab-hook in here--lively! Don’t let
them fellows at the other end snake two to our ONE!”
Maxwell stopped to exchange a word or two with the sweating
trainmaster and then passed on down the wreck-strewn line. At the
master mechanic’s end of things he came upon Benson, chief of
construction, who had accompanied the wrecking-train from Brewster only
because he had happened to be on the way to Angels and saw no other
probable means of reaching his destination.
“Pretty bad medicine--the worst of the lot,” commented the young chief
of construction, when, tramping soberly, they came to the place where
the two great locomotives, locked in their death grapple, were nuzzling
the clay bank of the cutting.
Maxwell’s teeth came together with a savage little click.
“A few weeks ago, Jack, we were scared stiff for fear the ‘Big Nine’
crowd of stock-jobbers would succeed in doing something to put us on
the panic-slide. Now we are doing it ourselves, just about as fast as
we can. Is it true that there were four killed?”
“Yes; both firemen, and Bamberg, the engineer of the freight. The other
man was a postal clerk; and his mate had an arm and a leg broken.”
“Many injuries?”
“Astonishingly few, when there was such a good chance for a general
massacre. Both men on the second section engine jumped, and both were
hurt, though not badly. There was nobody in the split caboose when
it was hit. On the Mail, Cargill, who was running, got off with a
pretty bad scalp wound. An express messenger had his foot jammed; and
the train baggageman had a lot of trunks shaken down on him. In the
coaches there were a few people thrown out of their seats and hurt by
the sudden stop; but in the sleepers there were a good many who slept
straight through it, incredible as that may sound.”
“I know,” said Maxwell; “I’ve seen that happen more than once, when the
Pullmans stayed on the rails.” Then, with a slight backward nod of his
head he changed the subject abruptly. “Bascom--has he been handling it
all right?”
“He’s a dandy!” said Benson. “Personally, I’d about as soon associate
with any one of a dozen Copah tin-horns that I could name as to
foregather with Mr. Judson Bascom. But he’s onto his job, all right. He
laid this temporary track himself; I haven’t butted in at all, either
here or at Fordyce’s end.”
“How did you happen to get here? I thought you were up Red Butte way,”
said the superintendent.
“I was; but I came down to Brewster on Six last night, meaning to go
through to Angels. While we were changing engines I ran upstairs to
get some maps and papers out of my office, and took too long about it;
the train got away from me and I chased out with the wreck-wagons.
That’s how near I came to being mixed up in this thing myself.”
“And you want to go on to Angels now?”
“Yes; when I get a chance. Those irrigation people in Mesquite Valley
are howling to have an unloading spur built up from the old copper-mine
track, and I thought I’d go and look the ground over.”
The superintendent’s frown was expressive of impatient dissatisfaction.
“That Mesquite project is another of the grafts that are continually
giving this country a black eye, Jack. It’s ‘bunk,’ pure and simple.
Everybody who has ever been in the Mesquite knows that you couldn’t
raise little white beans in that disintegrated sandstone!”
“It’ll do for an excuse to rake in a few hundred thousand Eastern
shekels,” Benson remarked. “There will be plenty of ‘come-ons’ to buy
the land when the dam is built.”
Bascom’s great crane was poising a crushed and mangled box-car in air,
and when the crooking steel finger swung its burden aside and dropped
it with a crash out of the way, Maxwell turned upon his heel.
“I have my car here, and I’m going back to Angels to do some wiring,”
he said. “Come along, if you want to see those irrigation people. But
I’ll tell you right now, I won’t approve any recommendation for more
track-laying for them.”
They had walked possibly half the length of the long blockade when a
noisy automobile, dust-covered and filled with men, drew up on the mesa
flat above the wreck. Benson looked up with a scowl.
“There’s another gang of those newspaper ghouls!” he commented, as two
of the three men in the tonneau got out and began to unlimber their
cameras and tripods. “It’s no picnic to drive a car from Brewster over
the range, to say nothing of the danger; and this is the second squad
since daylight. There have been enough pictures taken of this wreck to
fill all the newspapers between New York and San Francisco for a week!”
Maxwell’s smile was a mere teeth-baring.
“Yes; we’re getting the advertising all right,” he said. “We’ve been
getting it for a month or more.” Then, as they tramped on out of the
wreck raffle and headed for the waiting office-car: “I had a talk with
Ford last night; that is what took me to Copah. We’re in bad, Benson.
Ford says they’ve taken to calling us ‘the sick railroad’ on the Stock
Exchange, and our securities are simply going to the puppies. Another
month like this one we’ve just stumbled through will either wipe us
from the map or clean us up definitely and put us into the hands of a
receiver.”
“Does Ford say that?” gasped the young chief engineer.
“He said a good bit more than that. He still insists that these
troubles of ours are helped along from the outside; that they are in
reality just so many moves in the game that a certain Wall Street
pool is playing to get control of our road. I tried to show him how
impossible it was; how the entire slump in discipline which causes all
the trouble is merely one of those crazy epidemics that now and then
sweep over the length of the best-managed railroads on earth.”
“And he wouldn’t believe it?” queried Benson.
“No; the last thing he said to me as his train was pulling out proved
that he didn’t. He intimated that there wasn’t any ‘act-of-God’ verdict
to be brought in, in our case, and told me to go back to Brewster and
dig until I found the real cause.”
By this time they had reached the service-car special, and Maxwell
passed the word to his engineer to back up the line to Angels. When
the wreck and the wreckers had vanished beyond the hill curves, Benson
filled his short pipe and at the lighting of it asked another question.
“I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t get a little expert help on
this thing, Maxwell. Have you tried to interest Mr. Sprague in this
discipline business?”
The superintendent shook his head.
“Sprague isn’t going around doing odd jobs in psychology for anybody
and everybody,” he deprecated. “He is a Government chemist, and he is
out here on the Government’s business. Besides, it isn’t a case for
a detective; even for the best amateur detective in the bunch--which
is easily what Sprague might claim to be, you’d say. You see, there
isn’t anything special to detect. What we need is a doctor; not a
plain-clothes man.”
Benson’s left eye closed itself slowly in qualified dissent.
“What does Mr. Sprague himself have to say about it?” he queried.
“He hasn’t said anything. In fact, I haven’t seen him for over two
weeks. He’s been out with Billy Starbuck, gathering soil specimens;
they are still out somewhere, I don’t know just where.”
Neither of the two men riding the rear platform of the backing
service-car spoke again until the car stopped with a jerk at the
edge-of-the-desert station with the celestial name, which had once been
the head-quarters of the original Red Butte Western Railroad. Then
Benson summed up the situation in a couple of terse sentences.
“If we don’t do something, and do it quick, there is a bunch of us
so-called railroad bosses on this high line who may as well pack our
duffle-bags and fade away into the landscape. Three wrecks within a
week; and this last one will cost a hundred thousand cold iron dollars
before we’re through with the lawyers; I’ll be hanged if I wouldn’t
call in the doctor--some doctor--any doctor, Maxwell. That’s my ante.
So long; see you a little later about this Mesquite business, if you’re
still here.” And he put a leg over the platform railing and went away.
Three minutes later, when the superintendent had crossed the station
platform and was on his way around to the door opening into the
operator’s office, two men mounted upon wiry range horses rode down
the single remaining street of the dead-alive former railroad town,
pointing for the station.
One of them, a good-looking youngish man with a preternaturally grave
face and the shrewd thoughtful eyes that tell of days and nights spent
afield and alone with the desert immensities, was the superintendent’s
brother-in-law by courtesy. The other, a gigantic athlete of a man,
whose weight fairly bowed the back of the stout horse he rode, was Mr.
Calvin Sprague.
Maxwell paused when he saw and recognized the two horsemen. But when
they came up, the weight of the recent disaster made his greeting a
rather dismal attempt at friendly jocularity.
“Well, well!” he said, gripping hands with the athlete; “Billy
certainly had it in for you this time! Rode you over the range, did he?
I’ll bet you’ll never have the nerve to look a horse in the face again,
after this. Where on top of earth have you two been keeping yourselves
for the last fortnight?”
“Oh, just sashayin’ round on the edges,” drawled Starbuck, replying for
both; “gettin’ acquainted with the luminous landscape, and chewin’ off
chunks of the scenery, and layin’ awake nights to soak up some of the
good old ozone.”
“Ozone!” chuckled the big man; “I’m jammed gullet-full of it, Dick, and
I have a hunch that it’s going to settle somewhere below the waist line
and make me bow-legged for life. King David said that a horse is a vain
thing for safety, but I can go him one better and say that it’s the
vainest possible thing for just plain, ordinary, every-day comfort. I’m
a living parenthesis-mark--or a pair of ’em, if you like that better.”
Then without warning and almost without a break: “Where is the wreck,
this time?”
Maxwell’s frown was a little brow-wrinkling of curious perplexity.
“You’ve just ridden down from the hills, haven’t you? How do you know
there is a wreck?”
“That’s too easy,” laughed the expert, waving a Samsonic arm toward
the five side-tracked trains held up in the Angels yard. “If you
didn’t have your track cluttered up somewhere, those trains wouldn’t
be hanging up here, I’m sure. Is it a bad one?--but you needn’t answer
that; I can see at least one dead man in your eyes.”
“There are four of them,” said the superintendent soberly, “and some
others desperately hurt. We’re in a bad way, Sprague. This is the third
smash within a week.”
Sprague dismounted stiffly and secured his saddle-bags containing the
soil specimens gathered at the price of so much discomfort.
“Starbuck,” he said whimsically, “I’m willing to pay the price of
a hundred-dollar guinea-pig, if necessary, to have this razor-back
mustang shipped home in a palace stock-car to his stable in Brewster.
Mr. Maxwell’s office-car is good enough for me from this on.”
Starbuck smiled grimly and took the abandoned horse in charge. “I’ll
take care of the bronc’,” he agreed; and the big man limped around the
station to board the service-car while Maxwell went into the office to
do his telegraphing.
When the superintendent returned half an hour later he found his
self-invited guest lounging luxuriously in the easiest of the big
wicker chairs in the open compartment of the car, smoking the fattest
of black cigars and reading a two-days-old Denver paper.
“This is something like,” he said. “I was never cut out for a pioneer,
Richard; Starbuck has proved that to my entire satisfaction in these
last two weeks. But that’s enough of me and my knockings. Sit down and
tell me your troubles. I see the papers are making space-fillers out
of your railroad to beat the band. Are you ready to come around to my
point of view yet?”
Maxwell sat down like a man who was both worried and wearied.
“The Lord knows, I wish I could come around to your point of view,
Calvin. If I could see any possibility of charging these things to
outside influences.... But there isn’t any. The trouble is purely
local and internal--and as unaccountable as the breaking out of an
epidemic when the strictest kind of quarantine has been maintained.”
Sprague smiled incredulously.
“There never was a case of typhoid yet without its germ to account for
it, Dick,” he asserted dogmatically.
“I know; but that theory doesn’t hold good in the psychological field.
We’ve got a good set of men, Sprague. To a degree which you don’t often
find in modern railroad consolidations, we’ve had that precious thing
called _esprit de corps_. We’ve never had any labor troubles since
Lidgerwood’s time, and there are no grievances in the air to account
for the present let-down. Yet the let-down is with us. Almost every day
some man who has hitherto proved trustworthy falls down on his job, and
there you are.”
“You’ve tried all the usual remedies, I suppose?”
“I should say I had! I’ve stormed and cursed and pleaded and reasoned
until I’m worn out! If I fire a bunch of them, I have to hire a new
bunch, and inside of a week the new men have caught the disease for
themselves. One bad wreck will make a hundred trainmen uncertain
and jumpy, and a second one will turn half of the hundred into
irresponsible lunatics. You’d have to mix and mingle with the force
as I do to understand the condition things have gotten into. It’s
horrible, Calvin. It is like the black blight that you have seen spread
through a well-kept orchard.”
“There is a cause,” said the expert, settling himself solidly in his
chair. “I tell you, Dick, there’s a germ in the air, and that second
mentality of mine that you are so fond of poking fun at tells me that
in the case of your railroad orchard the germ has been deliberately
planted. You say it’s impossible: I’ve a good notion to let the
soil-testing rest for a few minutes and show you.”
“If I thought there was the least chance in the world that you could
show me----”
“Is that a challenge? By Jove! I’ll take you. When can you get me back
to Brewster?”
“As soon as the track is cleared. We ought to be able to get through by
noon.”
The expert got up, shook the riding kinks out of his legs, and threw
the newspaper aside.
“I’m going out to walk around for a bit, and after a while I’ll ask you
to take me down to this wreck,” he said; and Maxwell, who had a deskful
of work awaiting him, nodded.
“Say, in an hour?”
“An hour will do; I’ll show up within that time.”
Later, the superintendent, wading through the files of business
correspondence which always accompanied him in his goings to and fro on
the line, had window glimpses of Sprague strolling up and down beside
the waiting trains in the yard or standing to chat with some member of
the loafing crews.
The glimpses were provocative of good-natured incredulity on the part
of the desk-worker. Thrice during the summer of warfare Sprague had
been able to step into the breach, each time with signal success. But
in each of the three former instances there had been tangible causes
with which to grapple; flesh-and-blood criminals to be ferreted out
and apprehended. Maxwell, glancing out of the window again, shook his
head despondently. What could the keenest intelligence avail in the
case of an entire railroad suffering from an acute attack of nervous
disintegration and recklessness? Nothing, the superintendent decided;
there was nothing for it but to settle down upon a grim determination
to outlive and worry through the period of disaster; and he was still
grinding away at his desk with that thought in the back part of his
mind when Sprague came in and announced his willingness to be taken on
to the wreck.
Maxwell gave the necessary order, and in due time the one-car special
had repassed the few miles intervening between Angels and Lobo Cut, to
come to a stand on the curve of hazard. Sprague was lighting a fresh
cigar preparatory to a plunge into the track-clearing activities, and
Maxwell looked up from his work.
“Want me to get off with you?” he asked.
“No; it’s the very thing I don’t want,” declared the expert briefly;
and therewith he went out to drop from the car-step and to take the
plunge alone.