of the remaining “job” had been explained on the way up from the
railroad head-quarters. “Do it neatly, Archer, and don’t let them catch
you at it. Everything will have quieted down by this time, and you
shouldn’t have any trouble. I’ll wait for you here.”
Tarbell was gone possibly half an hour, and when he returned the
bottles they were filled, two of them with a black-brown liquid, thick
and viscous, and four with what appeared to be specimens of more
or less dirty water. Each bottle was carefully marked on the blank
label pasted upon it. Sprague stood them in a row on the laboratory
working-table.
“I shall be busy here for twenty or thirty minutes,” he said. “I don’t
want to ride a willing horse to death, but I’d be glad if you’d go by
the hotel and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait up for me. I want to see him
before he goes to bed.”
Tarbell nodded, but he hesitated about going.
“I got a hunch that we ain’t doin’ all the shadow work by our little
lonesomes, Mr. Sprague,” he ventured to say. But before he could go on,
Sprague lifted a finger for silence, made a whirling half-turn with a
swiftness marvellous in so huge a body, and flung himself through the
open door into the unlighted outer office-room to which the laboratory
was an inner extension.
There were sounds of a collision, a fall, and a brief struggle before
Tarbell could get action. At the end of it Sprague came back into the
lighted laboratory, dragging a thick-set, square-shouldered man in
pepper-and-salt clothes; a man with a clean-shaven red face down the
side of which a thin line of blood was trickling.
“You were eminently correct, Archer,” said the expert, slamming his
unresisting burden into a corner of the room after he had deftly gone
through the pepper-and-salt pockets for weapons with the result of
turning out a cheap revolver and a wicked-looking knife. “I’m sorry I
can’t keep my word and let you go to bed, but the plot has thickened a
little too rapidly. Go around to the Topaz and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait.
Then come back here and keep this fellow quiet while I do my work.”
When Tarbell went out, Sprague quickly stripped his coat and went to
work at his laboratory table. For some little time the man in the
corner lay as he had been cast, and the worker at the table paid no
attention to him. But a few minutes before Tarbell’s return, the
red-faced man gasped, gurgled, and sat up to hold his head in his hands
as one trying to remember what had happened to him. Presently he looked
up, and after a long stare at the big figure of the man at the work
table, he found his voice.
“Say, guv’ner, wot am I doin’ here?” he asked huskily.
Sprague, who was skilfully dropping a fuming yellow liquor from a
glass-stoppered bottle into a beaker, replied without turning his head.
“If anybody should ask, I should say you are waiting for an officer to
come and take you to jail.”
“Who, me? Wot have I been doin’?” queried the husky one, in the
anxious rasp of a deeply aggrieved victim of circumstances.
“You’ve been shoving threatening letters under my door in the Hotel
Topaz, for one thing,” said Sprague, still busy with his experiment.
“Who, me? My Gawd--just lissen to ’im!” wheezed the red-faced man, as
if appealing to some third person invisible.
A silence followed during which the crouching man’s feet drew
themselves by imperceptible fractions of an inch at a time into
position for a tackling spring. Sprague did not look aside, but when
the leg muscles of the man began to bulge as if testing themselves for
the leap, the worker at the table spoke again.
“I shouldn’t try it if I were you. This stuff that I am fooling with is
nitric acid, ninety-eight per cent. pure. If any of it should happen to
get spilled on you, there wouldn’t be sweet oil enough in this town to
put the fire out.”
“My Gawd!” gasped the red-faced one, suddenly sticking his feet out in
front of him again; and just then Tarbell came in.
“I’ll be through in a minute, Archer,” said the experimenter at the
work-table, still without looking around. “Did you find your man?”
“Yes; and Starbuck is with him. What do you want me to do with this
geezer?”
“Nothing. I’ll fix him when we’re ready to go.”
“I’ve got a pair of handcuffs,” Tarbell suggested.
“They won’t be needed--not for this one.”
Tarbell dragged out a chair and sat down, tilting comfortably against
the wall and staring half-absently at the man in the corner. “Before
I’d let any bare-handed man take my arsenal away from me and slam me
around like that,” he murmured, quite impersonally.
The man on the floor lifted the challenge promptly.
“Lemme git up and gimme half a chanst,” he croaked. “I won’t hurt you
none if you don’t git in the way o’ that door.”
“Not this evenin’,” said Tarbell succinctly; and there the matter
rested until Sprague put his beakers and test-tubes aside, and,
resuming his coat, took a flat black box from a shelf and slipped it
into his pocket.
“Now we’re ready,” he announced; and then he turned to the captured
spy. “We’re going to leave you here in the dark for a little while, and
there will be nothing between you and a get-away but a small matter of
fear. After we turn the lights off I shall leave a few bottles of stuff
around where they will do the most good. If you should happen to upset
one of them in moving about, it’s good-by. If it doesn’t burn you to
death, you’ll stifle.”
“My Gawd!” said the captive; and he was still saying it over softly to
himself when they switched off the lights, shut the office doors, and
went away.
“There is a good example of the power of matter over mind, Archer,”
said Sprague whimsically, when they reached the street. “If that fellow
would use his reason even a little bit he’d know that I hadn’t made any
very elaborate preparations to hold him; there wasn’t time between the
turning off of the lights and our leaving. Yet I’ll bet a small chicken
worth twenty-five dollars that we find him still crouching in his
corner and afraid to move when we go back. He saw me using acid in my
little experiment; saw the fumes and probably got a whiff of them. That
was enough.”
They found Maxwell and Starbuck sitting on the hotel porch, smoking.
Sprague took the superintendent aside.
“It’s rather worse than I thought it was, Dick,” he began, when they
had drawn their chairs a little apart. “That is my excuse for keeping
you up so late. We have one of the conspirators under a sort of mental
lock and key over at my place in the Kinzie Building, but he is only a
hired striker, and I’d like to flush the big game. Are you good for a
watch-meeting--you and Starbuck? It may last all night, and nothing may
come of it, but it’s worth trying.”
Maxwell spread his hands.
“Whatever you say, Calvin,” he acquiesced. “After the jolt you’ve given
me to-night, I can only get into the harness and pull when you give the
word.”
“All right. We’ll take Tarbell for a guide. Tarbell, you know your way
around in the shops pretty well, don’t you?”
“I reckon so,” was the young man’s reply.
“We want to go to the foundry, or to some place near by where we can
keep an eye on the pickle shed. Can you get us there without arousing
anybody’s curiosity?”
“Sure,” said Tarbell.
“Good. Pitch out,” was the curt command, and the four of them left the
hotel to make a circuit through ill-lighted streets and around the
lower end of the eastern railroad yard to come at the long line of shop
buildings from the rear.
On the way Maxwell inquired curiously: “What do you know about
pickling-sheds, Calvin?”
“I know that every well-regulated foundry has one where castings which
are to be machined are treated with acid to take the hard sand-scale
off.”
“And why, just why, are you anxious to get a near-hand view of ours, at
this time of night?”
“I’m hoping we shall find the answer to that in your foundry yard,
Dick. If we don’t, the joke will be on me.”
The approach to the locomotive-repairing section of the railroad plant
was made through a river-bank yard littered with slag dumps, piled
flasks, and heaps of scrap iron. There was no moon, and when they got
among the lumber sheds in the rear of the car-shops the darkness was
almost tangible. But Tarbell knew the ground, and when he finally
called a halt the twin cupola stacks of the foundry loomed before them
in the darkness and the acrid smell of the warm, moist moulding sand
was in the air.
When the pickling-shed had been located for him, Sprague chose the
waiting-place under a flask shelter directly opposite and the silent
watch began. For a weary half-hour nothing happened. Though the month
was August, a cool wind crept down from the Timanyoni snow peaks,
and the splash and gurgle of the near-by river added its suggestion
of chill to the moonless night. Over in the western yards the night
crew was making up the midnight freights; but with the buildings of
the plant intervening, the noises of the shifter’s exhaust and the
clankings and crashings of the shunted cars came faintly to the ears of
the watchers.
On the even hour of one the watchman made his round. They could see
his lantern twinkling through the windows of the shops, and later he
made a circuit of the outbuildings. His route led him finally through
the foundry, and as he came out the light of his lantern fell upon the
piled castings and the pickling-troughs, and on the carboys of vitriol.
There were four of the boxed acid-holders standing under the shed.
Sprague drew down his left cuff and made pencil marks on it in the
darkness when the watchman passed on.
It was possibly fifteen minutes after the watchman had disappeared when
Maxwell broke the strained silence with a whisper.
“Duck!” he said to Starbuck, who was standing up. “Dunkell’s coming
back--without his lantern!”
Sprague spread his arms and crushed the other three back into the
shadows. “It isn’t the watchman this time--be ready!” he whispered; and
as he said it the figure of a man appeared coming down the littered
roadway from the blacksmith shop.
Though he walked in darkness there was no incertitude about the man’s
movements. Turning abruptly out of the material-road he went straight
to the foundry shed. A moment later a beam of white light played
steadily upon the acid carboys, a sheltered beam which seemed to come
from a tiny electric search-light. Plainly they saw a pair of hands
place a large bottle on the ground, remove the stopper, and fix a tin
funnel in the neck. Then one of the carboys was tilted, presumably by
the same pair of hands, though the hands were invisible now, and a thin
stream of the yellow acid gurgled through the funnel.
When the bottle was filled the carboy slowly righted itself; the hands
came in view again to remove the funnel and to replace the stopper;
and then the search-light went out with the faint snap of an electric
switch. Almost at the same instant the watchers saw the figure of the
man fading away into the inner and darker blackness of the foundry.
“We’ve got to follow him, Tarbell,” said Sprague, hurriedly; “and we
lose out if he discovers us. Can you pilot us?”
“I can,” asserted Maxwell, and under the superintendent’s lead the
shadow race was begun.
Happily, there was a noisy diversion to make the secret pursuit
feasible. The train-making clamor had come down from the western yards,
and for the moment the yard crew was working on the freight-house
tracks opposite the shops. Under cover of the out-door clamor the four
pursuers were able to close up on the bottle-carrier until they were
treading almost in his footsteps. The route led through the foundry
floor to the machine shop. On the erecting pits were two locomotives,
apparently ready to be hauled out and put into service after their
period of back-shop repairs.
Into the cab of one of the engines the bottle-bearer climbed, first
placing his burden carefully in the gangway. A little later they heard
him climbing over the coal in the tender, heard him remove the cover
of the water manhole, and heard the _glug-glug_ of liquid issuing
from a bottle-neck.
Sprague silently drew a small square object from his pocket, the little
flat black box he had caught up as he was leaving his office in the
Kinzie Building. Then he whispered to Tarbell: “Cover him, Archer,
and don’t hesitate to shoot if you need to: ready!” At the word there
was a blinding burst of illumination and the report of a flash-light
cartridge, followed instantly by the crash of the breaking bottle,
silence, and black darkness. Then Sprague’s mellow voice boomed into
the stillness.
“Come down, Mr. Bascom. We’ve got your picture, and a man who doesn’t
often miss what he shoots at is covering you with his gun.”
It was a grim little group of five which gathered in the master
mechanic’s room in the office wing of the machine shop a few minutes
after the flash-light photograph had been taken in the erecting shop.
Bascom’s ruddy flush was gone when he sat down heavily in his desk
chair; but his natty brown crush hat was pushed back, and the gleam in
his small, lynx-like eyes was not of fear.
“Just name the kind of a hand-spring you’d like to have me turn,
gentlemen,” he said, half-sardonically, when Tarbell had switched on
the second circuit of incandescents. “I’m not much of an acrobat, but
I’ll do the best I can to amuse you.”
It was Sprague who did the talking for the prosecution.
“We want to know first who is with you in this job of inside
worm-eating, Mr. Bascom,” he said coolly.
“Nobody,” came the prompt lie.
Sprague’s smile was affable. “I’m sure you’ll make one exception,” he
urged; “a man named Murtagh, who was for a little time one of your shop
machinists and who is now a press-repairer on _The Times-Record_.”
Bascom sat up and swore a savage oath.
“So that damned scab has welshed, has he?” he grated.
Sprague branched off and began again, this time in the straitly
criminal field.
“How many locomotives have you treated with the acid cure, first and
last, Mr. Bascom?”
“Enough so you’ll still be resetting flues in ’em a year from now.”
This time it was Maxwell’s turn to swear, and for a minute or two the
air of the office was sulphurous. When the atmosphere had cleared
again, Sprague went on.
“I presume that your defence in court will be that you were trying
an experiment to neutralize the effect of the alkaline water of this
region?”
Bascom grinned appreciatively. “You’re an expert chemist yourself, Mr.
Sprague. The water in this country, outside of the Park, is pretty
badly alkali, as you probably know.”
“But that defence will scarcely explain why you put acid in the
oil which is used for lubricating the internal parts of the
engines--cylinders and valves,” Sprague cut in quietly.
The master mechanic’s chair righted itself with a crash, and the crash
punctuated another blast of bad language directed at the man who had
been left crouching in the corner in Sprague’s uptown laboratory.
“So Murtagh gave you that, too, did he?” Bascom finished. “It’s your
lead, Mr. Sprague; what do you want me to play?”
“Names,” said the expert curtly.
“But if I say I was playing a lone hand?”
“We should know you were lying. This acid business may be all your own;
but there are other things. You’ve had plenty of help in the drink-fest
and the demoralization game, Bascom.”
The big master mechanic’s lips shut like the jaws of a steel trap. But
after a time he said: “What do I get if I spout on the others?”
“A chance to get out of the country--eh, Maxwell?”
The superintendent nodded. “Yes; if he can get away before I can find a
gun to kill him with.”
Bascom reached into his desk, found a scratch-pad and tossed it over
to Starbuck. “Take ’em down,” he said briefly; and then followed a
black-list that was simply heart-breaking to Richard Maxwell, a man
who had built his reputation as a railroad executive, and would have
staked it instantly, upon the loyalty of his rank and file. Shop
foremen, roundhouse bosses, bridge men, yard foremen, section bosses, a
travelling engineer, a clerk here and a telegraph operator there--the
list seemed endless.
When Bascom paused, Sprague began again.
“What was the plan, Bascom, as it was outlined to these others?”
The master mechanic’s smile showed his fine even teeth.
“To make this jerk-water railroad a little easier to work for,” he
sneered. “When we found the right kind of a man we made him believe
that the discipline was keyed up too damned tight and showed him how he
could loosen up a little, if he felt like it. Murtagh was barkeep’ and
handed out the bug-juice. That’s all there was to it.”
“Not quite all,” said Sprague evenly. “You got Murtagh his job on
_The Times-Record_ in order to have him handy without being
too much in the way or too much in evidence. How much do the
_Times-Record_ people know about the scheme for smashing the
Nevada Short Line securities from the inside?”
Bascom laughed hardily.
“You’ll never catch a newspaper man,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this:
Parker Higginson is a pretty smooth politician, and he’s got a mighty
long arm when it comes to reaching for the thing he wants. He was the
man who got me my job here, and I’ll bet those New York people who
appointed me don’t know yet why they did it. Another thing: when I’m
gone, Higginson will still be here--don’t you forget that!”
“We’ll try to remember it,” Sprague promised. Then he looked at his
watch. “The overland passenger, westbound, will be here in a few
minutes, and when it goes, you may go with it, Mr. Bascom. But first we
want a few more names, the names of the New York people who are behind
both you and Mr. Higginson.”
Bascom got up, went to a wardrobe in one corner of the office, and
dragged out two heavy suit-cases.
“I’ve been fixed for this for some little time,” he volunteered. “Send
Murtagh to the stone-pile for splitting on us, and I won’t make any
claim for the half-month’s salary that’s due me. As to the names of
the big fellows, I only wish I knew them, Mr. Sprague. If I did, I’d
go east instead of west and make somebody come across with big money.
As it is, I guess it’s South America for mine. Good-night, all. I wish
you luck with the booze-fighters, Mr. Maxwell. You’ll have a bully good
time loading some of them back onto the water-automobile.” And he went
out into the night with a suit-case in either hand.
“Talk about cold gall!” said Starbuck, when the door closed behind the
retreating figure of the big master mechanic; “Great Cat! that fellow’s
got enough to swim in.” Then he turned to Sprague. “Is the show over?”
The man from Washington laughed genially.
“That is for Maxwell to say. We might go uptown and give those
newspaper people a bad quarter of an hour, though I doubt if we’d make
any money at it.”
Maxwell looked up quickly.
“You think they’re in it, Calvin? Bascom wasn’t lying about that part
of it?”
“Yes; they are in it up to their necks. I suppose it’s politics for
Higginson. Haven’t I heard somewhere that he is one of the State
bosses?”
“You might have,” drawled Starbuck. “He’s It, all right.”
Sprague stood up and yawned sleepily.
“Perhaps, a little later on, we can throw a scare into this Mr. Parker
Higginson,” he suggested. “Just now, I’m for the hotel and a few
winks of much-needed sleep. Tarbell, you go up to my office and get
Murtagh. Have him locked up on a charge of--oh, any old charge will
do; breaking into my office to-night, if you can’t think of anything
better. If we can manage to hold onto him for a while, we may be able
to keep this Mr. Higginson quiet while Maxwell is straightening out his
booze-fighters. Let’s go.”
“Hold on, just a minute,” pleaded Maxwell. “There are three of us here
who have seen the wheels go round, and I don’t forget that I was the
one who said there weren’t any wheels. How in the name of all that
is wonderful have you been able to work this puzzle out in less than
twelve hours, Sprague?”
The big chemistry expert sat down again and locked his hands behind his
head.
“My gosh!” he said; “have I got to open up a kindergarten for you
fellows when I’m so sleepy that I don’t know what I’m going to have
for breakfast to-morrow morning? It was easy, dead easy. Half an hour
with those delayed train crews at Angels this morning showed me that
the discipline strings were all off; one of the freight conductors
even offered me a nip out of his pocket-flask when I intimated that
I was thirsty. With that for a pointer, I had my eyes open at the
wreck, and what I saw there you all know. Moreover, I noticed that the
pocket-flasks were all alike, as if they’d all been handed out over the
same bar. All straight, so far?”
“Go on,” said Maxwell.
“I got my first pointer on Bascom at the wreck, too. I saw that the
men in the trainmaster’s gang didn’t drink when the boss was looking,
a condition which didn’t apply in the other crew. Again, I noticed
that Bascom took his track-clearing privilege with a large and
handsome disregard for the salvage. He didn’t care how much property
was destroyed in the process, and once I saw him give the signal to
the crane engineer to drop a car loaded with automobiles--which was
promptly done and the autos properly smashed.”
“The cold-blooded devil!” growled the superintendent.
“When we reached town, Tarbell here promptly confirmed my guess about
the whiskey; and in the evening Calmaine helped some more by going
with me over the pay-rolls for new names, and over the cost-sheets for
increases. Naturally, we dwelt longest upon the motive-power and repair
department, with its huge increases, and it so happened that my eye
fell upon the various charges for vitriol in carboys. I asked Calmaine
what use a railroad shop had for so much sulphuric acid, and he told me
it was used to pickle castings. Afterward I sent Tarbell out to bring
me samples of water from the tanks of the crippled locomotives on the
shop track and of the oil in their cylinder-cups. Analyses of both,
which I made on the spot, showed the presence of sulphuric acid in the
water, and also in the oil.”
“Still, you didn’t have any cinch on Bascom,” Starbuck put in.
“No, but things were leaning pretty heavily his way. Tarbell had traced
Murtagh for me and had found out the one thing that I needed to know;
namely, that Murtagh had been ‘placed’ on _The Times-Record_
by Bascom’s recommendation. Murtagh was the man who put the
threatening note under my door; the note was printed on a scrap of
scratch-paper--copy paper--of the sort that you rarely find outside of
a newspaper office. Here I simply put two and two together. Bascom had
been conferring with Higginson, or his editor, or both of them, and
telling them of my rubbernecking at the wreck. They had agreed among
themselves that I’d better be warned off the grass, and they took about
the stupidest possible way they could think of to do it.”
“Still, you didn’t have Bascom,” reiterated Starbuck.
“No; but he was the man who had been signing the requisitions for the
big purchases of acid, and I was far enough along to chance a jump at
him. I knew that if he were the man who was poisoning the locomotives,
he wasn’t trusting anybody else; he was doing it himself, often and
by littles. I wasn’t at all sure of catching him to-night, of course;
but we saw him down here at the fire, and I thought there was an even
chance that he might stay and do a little more devilment.”
Maxwell stood up and shook himself into his coat.
“I’m onto you now, Sprague,” he chuckled, in a brave attempt to jolly
himself out of the depressive nightmare which had been weighing him
down for weeks. “You’re a guesser--a bold, bad four-flusher, with a
perfectly miraculous knack of drawing the other card you need when you
reach for it. Now, if you could only guess me out some way in which I
can straighten up these poor fellows of mine who have been pulled neck
and heels off of the water-wagon----”