superintendent’s car the track-clearers at both ends of the wreck had
made astonishingly good progress. Step by step the master mechanic
had worked his big crane up the line, tossing the derelicts aside or
righting them upon the rails, as their condition warranted; and farther
along Fordyce, with his huge tackle and its pulling locomotive, had
been equally enthusiastic.
It was Sprague’s boast that his methods of investigation, in the field
of his hobby, as in all others, were purely scientific; and he insisted
that the true scientist and the most successful is the one who can best
qualify as a shrewd and wholly impartial observer.
Where another man might have asked questions, he stood aside and looked
on and listened. In the fierce toil of track-clearing no one seemed to
pay any attention to him, and the picture which presented itself was a
life-sketch of the railroad force _in petto_ and in the raw. The
big onlooker took his time and made his mental jottings thoughtfully,
strolling from one group to another and lingering longest near the
hot boiler-cab of the great crane where a wizened human automaton in
dirty overalls and jumper jerked the levers and spun the wheels of the
hoist in obedience to the signals given by the flashily dressed master
mechanic.
It wanted less than a quarter of an hour of noon when the final
obstruction was heaved aside, and the track gang, which had been
following the wreckers, trued and spiked the distorted rails of the
main line into place. Sprague closed his mental note-book and went back
to join Maxwell.
In the office-car the porter-cook had laid the table for the mid-day
meal; and the superintendent and his guest ate it in transit, the
office-car special being the first of the halted trains to pass
westward over the newly cleared line.
“Well?” said Maxwell interrogatively, when the meal had progressed to
the meat and vegetables without comment on the part of the one who had
lifted the challenge.
“You’ve got the disease, all right; it’s with you, and in the epidemic
form, too. Its expression came out emphatically every now and then in
that track-clearing hustle. One little snappy, snarly fellow lying
under a box-car to make the hoisting-hitch voiced it precisely when his
mate yelled at him to come out, that the hitch might slip. He yapped
back, ‘Who the hell and blinkety-blank blankation cares!’ That’s one
form your disease is taking, and you’d say it would account for a good
many of the smashes.”
“Well?” queried the superintendent again. “You didn’t stop at that?”
“No; I made a few other preliminary observations which may or may not
prove up. Give me a little time; and when we get back to Brewster,
detail that ex-cowboy ‘relief operator’ of yours, Tarbell, to run
errands for me. If I can’t show you good, tangible results within
the next forty-eight hours or so, you may discharge me and hire a
Pinkerton.”
“You’ll fail,” said Maxwell gloomily. “I’ve been through a sickness of
this kind before. There’s no cure for it. It has simply got to run its
course and wear itself out.”
“That’s what they used to say about cholera and the plague and
yellow-fever, and all those things,” laughed the man from Washington;
but he did not go any farther into the matter of theories.
The run of the special train to Brewster was made without incident, and
from the station Sprague went directly across to his hotel.
“I’m going over to clean up,” he announced. “By and by, when you get
around to it, send Tarbell over and tell him to wait in the lobby for
me.”
It was possibly an hour later when the young man who resembled William
Starbuck sufficiently to pass for the mine owner’s younger brother, got
out of his chair in the quietest corner of the Hotel Topaz lobby and
crossed to the elevators to meet the Government chemist.
“How are you, Archer?” was the renovated soil-gatherer’s greeting. And
then, as he led the way back to the quiet corner from which the young
man had been keeping his watch upon the elevators: “We’re up against it
good and hard, this time, young man. Your boss has stumped us to prove
a thing which he says can’t be proved. Sit down and let’s see if we
can’t start the thin edge of a wedge. I’ll do the hammering and let you
hold the wedge, and you can squeal if I strike off and hit you. How
long has this case of bad railroading, which is smashing things right
and left, been going on?”
The young fellow who was on the railroad pay-rolls as a “relief
operator” took time to consider.
“A month or better.”
“How did it begin?”
“I don’t know. One way ’r another, the boys’ve just seemed to be
gettin’ sort o’ careless and losin’ their grip. After two or three
wrecks had happened, it was all off. Half o’ the men’ve taken to
runnin’ on their nerve, and the other half act like they don’t care a
durn.”
“Is it only in the train service?”
“Lord, no; it’s mighty near everywhere. It’s sort of a dry rot; cars go
without repairin’, engines burn out, and twice within the last week the
roundhouse has caught fire. You’d think every man on the road had just
turned loose all holts and didn’t give a cuss whether he ever got ’em
again or not.”
“What do the men themselves say about it?”
“There’s a heap o’ kickin’ and knockin’. Some say it’s Mr. Maxwell.
When he gets good and mad and fires a bunch of ’em, they raise a rookus
about it; and when he lets the next bunch down easy, they kick the
other way.”
Sprague sat back in the big leather-upholstered lobby chair and for a
time seemed to be absorbed in a study of the rather over-massive beam
arrangement of the ceiling. Suddenly he turned to ask: “How much of a
prohibition country is this, Archer?”
Tarbell laughed.
“I reckon you don’t need to ask that, with three saloons in every block
in Brewster. We haven’t got the water-wagon bug much out here. They say
it don’t breed well this side o’ the main range.”
“Much drinking among the railroad men?”
“Well--m--m--not so you could notice it. There’s a rule against it.”
“While they’re on duty, you mean?”
“Any old time.”
“Is that rule enforced?”
“Mr. Maxwell allows it is. He’s sure some Ranahan when it comes to
buckin’ the booze-fighters.”
“Still, there is more or less drinking among the men; you know there
is, don’t you, Archer?”
The young man grinned soberly.
“I ain’t tellin’ no tales out o’ school, Mr. Sprague, not me,” he
drawled.
“Get rid of that notion,” said the big man sharply. “You are working
for Mr. Maxwell and his rules are your law and gospel. I’ll tell you
what I’ve seen, and then you can tell me what you’ve seen. I counted
sixteen men in one place on this railroad to-day who, within the
half-hour that I was looking on, stopped work either to hit or to pass
a pocket-flask. Now go on.”
“If you hold me up that-away, I reckon maybe there _is_ a good
many empty bottles layin’ round on the right-o’-way--more’n what the
passengers throw out o’ the car windows,” was the reluctant admission.
“And more than there used to be, say, two or three months ago?”
“Yes; right smart more.”
“I thought so. We don’t need to look any further, Archer, for the
disease itself. Your ‘dry rot’ is very pointedly a wet rot. Booze and
the running of a railroad are two things that won’t mix. Now we’ll come
to the nib of it. Why is there more drinking now than there used to be?”
The younger man took time to think about it before he said: “You got me
goin’; I don’t know the answer to that.”
“I didn’t suppose you did,” was the curt rejoinder. “But you are
going to learn the answer, Archer, my son. It is now four o’clock; by
half-past seven this evening I want you to be back here prepared to
tell me who has been letting down the fences for the railroad men in
this matter of drinking.”
“Holy Smoke!” exclaimed the ex-cowboy, jarred for once out of his
plainsman calm, “how am I goin’ to do that, Mr. Sprague?”
“That is for you to find out, my boy. If you don’t use your brain
you’ll never know whether or no you’ve got any. That’s all--until
half-past seven. You’ll find me here at the hotel.”
It was an even hour before the time appointed for Tarbell’s return when
Maxwell joined the chemistry expert at the table in the Topaz café
where they usually sat when they could dine together.
At the unfolding of the napkins Sprague said: “I’ve found your germ,
Dick, and things are beginning to develop. What do you think of
that?”--passing a bit of dingy coarse-fibred paper across the table.
Maxwell opened the paper and read the ill-spelled type-written note it
bore.
“MR. SPRAIG:
“Weer onto you with both feet. keep youre fingers out ov the geers or
maybe youll git em mashed.
“A WELL-WISHUR.”
“Where did that come from?” asked the superintendent, plainly amused.
“It was pushed under the door of my room upstairs about half an hour
ago. The man who left it was short, thick-set, smooth-shaven, and he
wore a pepper-and-salt suit and a slouch hat. Also, his breath smelled
of whiskey.”
“You expect me to recognize the description?”
“I didn’t know but you might.”
“I don’t,” Maxwell denied. Then his smile of amusement changed to one
of amazement. “How could you know all these things about this man if
you were on the other side of a closed door, Calvin?”
Sprague laughed. “See how easy it is to jump to conclusions,” he
derided. “I wasn’t on the other side of a closed door; I was in the
corridor when the fellow passed me, looking for the number on the door.
I saw him leave the note. I’ll ask one question, and then we’ll dismiss
that phase of the case. Is the wrecking-train back from Lobo yet?”
“Yes; it came in about four o’clock with the string of crippled cars.
But you say you have found the germ; does that mean that you are going
to prove up on your assertion about the epidemic?”
“I can’t tell what it means yet; but I can tell you the name of the
germ. It’s whiskey.”
“Drinking among the men?”
“Worse than that; drunkenness among the men. Enough of it, I should
say, to account for all of your troubles and then some.”
“Oh, you’re off--’way off!” objected the harassed one irritably. “I
know there is some drinking; in a wide-open country like this it is
almost impossible to stamp it out entirely. But to account for the
epidemic in that way, you’d have to imagine every other man in the
service carrying a pocket-pistol on the job!”
“And you think that couldn’t happen without your knowing it, eh? A
little farther along I may have some statistics to show you; but just
now I’m looking not so much for the germ as for the germ-carrier.”
Maxwell smiled wearily.
“Still sticking to the theory that the blight is imported, are you?
It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to be ‘yellow,’ Calvin. I can
imagine some wild-eyed newspaper reporter hatching such an idea, but
not you. Think of the absurdity of a bunch of Wall Street stock-jobbers
trying to get at us in any such indirect way as that--shipping whiskey
in here to demoralize our working force! Pshaw! When these fellows get
busy and go to work, they want action--quick action.”
The expert put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.
“You are so close to the thing that you are continually losing
the perspective, Dick,” he said earnestly. “You are going on the
supposition that those New York looters are trying first one thing and
then another. That doesn’t follow at all. For all you know, they may be
gunning for you in half a dozen different ways this blessed minute--as
they probably are. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that this
whiskey scheme could be worked; I know you say it can’t, but suppose it
could: can you conceive of any expedient that would be more certain to
kill your traffic, wipe out your earnings, smash your securities, and
put you on the toboggan slide generally?”
“Oh, no; if it could be worked.” Maxwell’s answer this time was less
confidently derisive.
“All right; now that you’ve come that far, I’ll say this: it can be
worked, and I’m here to tell you that it has been worked. Your railroad
is practically an inebriate asylum in the making, right now, Richard.
Half of your force has already fallen off the water chariot, and the
other half is scared to death at the thought of what the drunken half
may do.”
Maxwell pushed away his dessert untasted.
“You have the proof of this, Calvin?” he broke out.
“I have some proof, and Tarbell is getting more. You’ve been blind. You
didn’t want to admit that your house of discipline was tumbling about
your ears, and you’ve been shutting your eyes to the plain facts. For
example: you may or may not be the only man in the service who doesn’t
know that those two freight engineers--the one who was killed and the
other--who overran their orders and smashed into the passenger at Lobo
Cut this morning were just plain drunk!”
“What’s that? It--it can’t be, Calvin!”
“But it _is_,” insisted the big man across the table. “It is
common talk among your own men; so common that it reached out and hit
me--an outsider.”
The superintendent drank his small coffee at a single gulp and flung
his napkin aside.
“I’ll get ’em!” he gritted savagely. “I’ll get the last damned
booze-fighter in the bunch!” And then: “Good God, Sprague; how could
anything like this go on without my knowing it?”
“You would have found it out, sooner or later, of course. But you’re a
railroad man yourself, and you ought to know railroad men well enough
to take into consideration that sort of loyalty among them which keeps
them from ‘peaching’ on one another. Even Tarbell had to be jarred
before he would admit that he knew about it. I can imagine that there
has been a sort of generous conspiracy among the men to keep you from
finding out.”
“That’s all right; I know now, and I’ll sift them out; I’ll go through
the whole blamed outfit with a club! I’ll----”
The man who had called out this upbubbling of righteous wrath was
chuckling softly.
“You won’t do anything that you say you will,” he interrupted
good-naturedly. “You stumped me to take the case, and I’ve taken it;
which means that you’re under the doctor’s orders. When you have cooled
down a bit, you’ll see very clearly that the worst thing you could do
at this particular crisis would be to start a division-wide scrap with
the rank and file.”
“But, good Lord, Sprague; I’ve got to do something, haven’t I?”
“You surely have; and that something is to help me find the
germ-carrier. Somebody has been taking down the bars for your men; who
is it?”
“I don’t know any more than a goat. I can’t yet believe that it is the
work of any one man.”
“Possibly it isn’t; there may be a good many. But I’ll chance a guess
that some one in authority is setting the pace. Leave that for a moment
and we’ll take up something else. You have two daily papers here
in Brewster: I’ve noticed that one of them, _The Tribune_, is
friendly to your road. How about the other, _The Times-Record_?”
“It is supposed to be independent, with a slant against corporations
and ‘the system,’ whatever that may be.”
“Um,” said the scientist. “Before I went out on this last trip with
Billy, I remarked that this other paper was giving a good bit of space
to your road troubles in its news columns, and a good bit of its
editorial space to criticisms of the Ford management. It occurred to me
then that there might be a reason. How is the paper organized?”
“It is owned by one of our near-millionaires; a retired ranchman
named Parker Higginson, who has dabbled in real-estate, in mines,
and latterly in politics. His grouch against the railroad is purely
personal. He has asked favors that I couldn’t legally grant; and on one
occasion he took offence because I told him that a newspaper man should
be the last person in the world to invite us to become law-breakers.”
“And his editor?” queried the expert.
“Is a bird of the same feather; a rather ‘yellow’ little fice named
Healy.”
Sprague looked rather dubiously at the two cigars which the waiter was
tendering on a server. “No, I think not, George,” he said, waving the
cigars aside and feeling for his own pocket-case of stronger ones.
And then to Maxwell: “This is all very nourishing. It may help out
more than you suspect. Later in the evening I may ask you to call with
me at the office of _The Times-Record_--though we may not have
to go that far up the ladder to find what we are looking for. In the
meantime, Tarbell is waiting for us out yonder in the lobby. Suppose we
go and see what he wants.”
They found the young man, who looked like a younger brother to
Starbuck, and who had made his record chasing cattle thieves in
Montana, methodically rolling a cigarette in the loggia alcove, and
Sprague began on him briskly.
“Spit it out, Archer; what have you found?”
“I didn’t make out to find what you sent me after,” was the
half-evasive reply.
“All right; tell us what you did find.”
The young man dropped his cigarette and looked up with a glint of
stubbornness in his stone-gray eyes.
“If it’s just the same to you, Mr. Sprague, I’d a heap ruther not,” he
said.
Sprague reached out and turned the lapel of Tarbell’s coat, exposing
the small silver star of a deputy sheriff.
“You took an oath when you got that, Archer; and Mr. Maxwell pays you
for wearing it.”
Tarbell threw up his head defiantly. “Deputy or no deputy, I ain’t
goin’ to name no names,” he began slowly. “But here’s what I found
out: I been in twenty-three saloons and dives since you told me to go
chase, and I counted thirty-one railroad men in ’em. Not all of ’em was
drinkin’ or gamblin’, but some of ’em was.”
Sprague turned to Maxwell.
“You see, I knew what I was talking about.”
The superintendent was shaking his head.
“As openly as that!” he exclaimed. “I must have been the blindest fool
in all this hill country!”
Tarbell chipped in quickly. “It ain’t been that bad for very long. But
it’s just as Mr. Sprague says; it’s spreadin’ like murrain on a dry
range. I saw men in them places this evenin’ that I’d a swore never got
off the water-wagon. I ain’t namin’ no names.”
“Mr. Maxwell isn’t asking you to give anybody away,” the expert
qualified. And then: “Had your supper?”
Tarbell nodded. “I had a hand-out in one o’ the saloons.”
“Good. Then I’ll give you another job. Look around town for a man
about Mr. Maxwell’s build, only about twenty pounds heavier. He is
between twenty-five and thirty years old, wears a slouch hat soft gray
in color, dresses in pepper-and-salt, is clean-shaven, red-faced,
blue-eyed, and walks with a little hitch to his left leg which isn’t
quite a limp. When you catch up with him, find out who he is and come
and tell me. I’ll be over at Mr. Maxwell’s office.”
Tarbell vanished, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went, and Sprague
thrust his arm in Maxwell’s.
“I’ll go over to your shop with you,” he said. “I know you’re anxious
to climb back into the working saddle. I’m not going to bore you; I
merely want to have a little talk with that irreproachable chief clerk
of yours, Harvey Calmaine.”
A little later they climbed the stair to the office floor of the
railroad building together, and Maxwell went on down the corridor to
the despatcher’s room. When he came back to his own office a half-hour
later and found Sprague and young Calmaine figuring together at the
chief clerk’s desk in the outer room, he went on to his own inner
sanctum without disturbing them.
It was perhaps another half-hour farther along when the expert, who
had been patiently going over a mass of statistics with the alert,
well-groomed young fellow who served as the superintendent’s right
hand, sat back in his chair and relighted the fat black cigar which had
been suffered to go out many times during the figuring process.
“It seems that a good many things besides wrecks have been happening
in the past few weeks, Mr. Calmaine,” he suggested musingly. “In that
short interval you have had many changes in the force, especially in
the motive-power department. I don’t know whether you have remarked it,
but fully half of the men in the shops and roundhouses are new men. And
that is the department in which the sickness seems to be the worst.
Your maintenance costs have increased three hundred per cent. over the
same period last year.”
“I know it,” admitted the chief clerk. “It is the more marked because
Dawson, our former master mechanic, made such phenomenally good
records.”
“I remember Dawson,” said the big man, slipping easily from the
statistics into the humanities. “He was here the first time I came over
the road, early in the summer. Has he left the Short Line?”
“He has been promoted. He is superintendent of motive-power on the east
end of the Southwestern.”
“That is recent, isn’t it?”
“Yes; it was only a few weeks ago.”
“And you have a new man as department chief?”
“We have--Judson Bascom. You may remember him as the man who ran the
special train for you and Mr. Maxwell the day you made the blind trip
to Tunnel Number Three. He is a sort of slave-driver and seems to have
a good deal of trouble with his men--is continually hiring and firing,
you’d say, from the appearance of his pay-rolls.”
The big expert’s eyes narrowed.
“Was he also promoted from some other place on the system?” he asked.
“No; he is a new man. I don’t know where he got his experience;
somewhere in the East, I suppose.”
“Another question,” put in Sprague. “Does Mr. Maxwell have the
appointment of his own motive-power chief?”
“No; this appointment was made in New York--by the executive committee,
I imagine.”
“Somebody’s nephew or brother-in-law?” queried the chemist, with a
twinkle in his eye.
“I don’t know about that. I guess it happens that way, once in a while,
on any railroad. But Bascom is all kinds of capable.”
Sprague shook his head. “The true test of capability is always in the
final result, my son,” he said reflectively; adding, “and results
nowadays are usually measured in dollars and cents. As an outsider,
I should say that this Mr. Bascom is a pretty expensive man to have
around, judging from his cost sheets. He drinks some, doesn’t he?”
The young chief clerk closed one eye gravely.
“I’m not supposed to know anything about that, Mr. Sprague.”
“No, of course not. As you might say, it’s nobody’s business but Mr.
Bascom’s. By the way, what is that whistle blowing so persistently for?”
Calmaine leaped out of his chair as if it had been suddenly connected
with the grounding wire of a forty-kilowatt generator.
“By George! it’s a fire!” he exclaimed; and the sound of hurrying feet
in the corridor confirmed the surmise. Maxwell’s door opened at the
same instant, and the three rushed out to join the crowd which was
already streaming across the yard tracks toward the company’s shops.
The fire was in the shops, originating in the boiler-room; and, thanks
to the timely alarm and the comparative earliness of the hour, it was
soon extinguished. Investigation, promptly instituted on the spot by
the superintendent, proved that it was the result of pure carelessness.
Some of the mechanics had washed their overalls and had hung them too
near the sheet-iron stack in the fire-room; that was all.
Sprague lingered at Maxwell’s elbow while the investigation was
going on, and he appeared to be a more or less perfunctory listener
when Bascom, oozing wrathful profanity at every pore, told the
superintendent what he would do to the careless clothes-driers when
they should show up in the morning. But later, after the return to the
head-quarters offices, the man from Washington sat for a long time in
Maxwell’s easiest chair, smoking steadily and with his gaze fixed upon
the disused gas chandelier marking the exact centre of the ceiling.
It was not until after Maxwell had finished his quota of night work and
was closing his desk that Tarbell came in to make a whispered report to
the big man apparently dreaming in the easy-chair.
Sprague listened, nodded, and rose to join the office-closing retreat.
“That is about what I thought, Archer,” he said soberly. “Now I have
one more little job for you, and when it is done we’ll call it a go for
to-night. Come around to my laboratory with me and I’ll explain it to
you.” And when the four of them reached the plaza-fronting street he
excused himself to Maxwell and the chief clerk and went, with Tarbell
at his elbow, to the little second-floor den in the Kinzie Building
where his experiments in soil analysis were conducted.
Reaching the back room which served as the laboratory proper, Sprague
provided his follower with half a dozen small bottles, empty and
tightly corked.