WHERE WAS HE?
Jim was breathing heavily, profoundly asleep, and the fellow's first
action was to rifle Jim's valise with the skill of an old hand, taking
every scrap of paper he could find, a few letters and a memorandum book;
these he glanced through; they were not what he wanted, at least the
paper that he had been told to bring was not there.
As he shoved the valise under the berth he heard the conductor coming
back on his return trip, and he remained as quiet as a frozen mummy,
leaning far into the berth and behind the curtain, as the conductor
brushed past him. Then he proceeded to the dangerous part of his task.
Jim's coat lay under his head, a precaution he never neglected.
With his knife in his teeth, better than a revolver for close work and
entirely noiseless, the fellow began slowly and with great cunning to
work his hand into the pockets of the coat. He found a long flat letter;
this was what he was told to get. Now his cupidity was aroused. He had
found nothing of pecuniary value, and he knew that this young fellow
carried some treasures of value in the way of jewels.
Jim was too old a campaigner to put these even in the coat on which he
was asleep. The spy knew that they must be in a belt around the boy's
body. Carefully he located it, and now the lust of theft as strong as
that of the Italian for blood gripped him. He despised all risk though
he did not lose his craft or caution; he cut the leather belt at Jim's
back, and began to draw it by minute particles towards him.
Then Jim was aroused and was wide awake in an instant. He knew that he
had been robbed and grabbed for the fellow who slipped away as though he
had been quicksilver and when Jim who became entangled in the bed
clothes got to the door of the sleeper it was locked. Perhaps he has
gone the other way, thought Jim, and he rushed to the other end of the
car; the door there was likewise locked.
Jim hated to raise a hue and cry, but he was determined to get the
thief. The loss of the belt which contained many of the jewels which he
had brought from Mexico was a severe jolt. It would cripple him cruelly
in his plans for his coming campaign when he reached San Francisco. At
all hazards he must recover that belt.
He went to his berth and slipped into his trousers and sweater and then
he found the porter apparently asleep in the smoking-room.
"Here you wake up," cried Jim, shaking him by the shoulder; "I've been
robbed not three minutes ago."
"I didn't rob you. I dunno nothing about it," declared the porter
surlily. "I've been sleeping all the time."
"You go and get the conductor," ordered Jim.
"I can't leave this hyah car," replied the negro.
Jim's face grew hard with anger, and he grabbed the porter by the back
of the neck in a grip that fairly made that worthy's bones crack, and
lifted him towards the door.
"All right, Boss, all right, I'll fatch him sure," cried the terrified
porter. "I dunno you was in such a hurry."
Jim said nothing but kept watch until the porter returned with the
conductor to whom he briefly explained the situation. He looked hard at
the porter, who began to protest his utter innocence with great
vehemence. "Why, Boss, I wouldn't steal a chicken if he crowed right in
my face," he concluded.
"I smelled a rat when I came through this car a time back. You say you
caught sight of this fellow when he escaped from your section?"
"Yes," replied Jim. "It was dark of course. But when he slipped through
the curtains I got a glimpse of him. He was very short, with a hat
pulled down, hiding most of his face, but I think that he had a beard. I
reckon he must be in here somewhere for I found both doors locked and I
was out in a hurry."
"Here you get in there, Porter," cried the conductor, his face red with
wrath, and he gave the negro a shove into the smoking-room, and slammed
and locked the door. "That will hold him for a while. I saw that fellow
all right enough. He was a Mexican and he got on at Reno."
"A Mexican!" cried Jim, starting back. "No, it can't be, this fellow had
a beard."
"Sure! he had a beard!" agreed the conductor. "Well if he is on this
train we will get him."
"He couldn't be anywhere else," declared Jim.
"Not at the rate we are going," agreed the conductor. "This is no
country to jump off in, especially this time of the year."
A thorough search was made of the sleeper which aroused all the
passengers, but the Mexican was not found. However, a trace was
discovered when the conductor unlocked the tall, narrow door, to the
linen closet.
"Somebody has been here all right," declared the conductor. "I bet he
hid here when I came through the train. Something is liable to happen to
that Coon when we get to Oakland."
Meanwhile the search was going on through the other cars of the train.
Nearly everyone had been asleep at the time and the fellow might have
passed through a number of the coaches and not been seen. One woman in
the chair car declared that she had seen someone just like the Mexican
going through the car, about one o'clock.
Everyone joined in the search, looking under the seats in every nook and
corner of the cars. If he was inside the train, it seemed that he must
have the trick of invisibility to escape. At that moment, an idea came
into Jim's mind suggested by a former experience.
"Maybe the beggar has crawled up on top of the cars," he said.
"He must be an acrobat," remarked the conductor, "to do that."
"I'm going to have a look, anyway," Jim declared. The trainmen regarded
him with amazement.
"No, you don't," said the conductor; "that's foolhardy."
"It's slippery as the deuce on top of the cars," put in the brakeman. "I
wouldn't risk it myself."
Then Jim's face broke into a grin, as a sudden thought struck him, in
regard to the subject.
"It won't take long to find out whether the Mexican gent is enjoying the
fresh air on top of the cars," announced Jim; "there's plenty of snow on
top and none has fallen for the past six hours."
The conductor hit Jim a clip on the shoulder.
"Long head, boy!" he exclaimed, "I never thought of that."
They went outside and Jim, the tallest of the crowd, was boosted up by a
couple of trainmen, between the swaying cars (this was long before the
days of vestibules), but they found no trace of the bandit.
"He's certainly not roosting up there," declared Jim.
"Well, if he jumped off, he's a dead greaser," asserted the conductor.
"We will watch and see that he don't slide off at the next station,"
remarked one of the brakemen.
"He couldn't have slipped under one of the cars, could he?" questioned
Jim.
The conductor shook his head with emphasis.
"There's no telling what that fellow mightn't do," said one of the
trainmen.
"With the devil to help him," put in Jim.
"To make sure we will search under the train," decided the conductor,
"at the next stop."
In a few minutes the train rolled into a small station, near the top of
the range. There was a flare of yellow torches under the cars as the
trainmen searched every possible foothold, while Jim stood a short
distance back so that he could see on either side of the train if a
short, dark figure should dart forth to seek escape in the wilds of the
mountains; but their quarry was not flushed into the open, even by the
flare and glare of the torches.
"Well, boy, we will have to give it up," said the conductor to Jim, when
the train started once more.
"It seems so," admitted Jim quietly.
It was hard for him to accept defeat, in this very first skirmish with
his old enemy, Bill Broome, and harder still to lose his treasure that
was to be the sinews of war in the campaign that had already opened. But
Jim soon pulled himself together with rugged determination.
"If I remember right, old Broome gave us a jolly good licking to start
with, when he captured us in the canyon in the coast range," mused Jim
to himself, "and we beat him in the end."
But the reader is probably asking about the "Mysterious Mexican or Where
Did He Go To." Well, friend, I will tell you in confidence that Mr.
Mexican was in the train all the time. Perhaps the ingenious reader has
already solved the problem of the Mexican's escape, but for those who do
not care to be bothered, I will relate what happened, and where he was
located.
When he slipped through the door of the sleeping car, which his
confederate, the negro, locked after him, he glided through several
coaches, where the occupants were all soundly and some loudly asleep,
until he came to the forward car which carried a number of emigrants, on
their way to the coast.
It must be remembered that the Mexican was a dwarf, no larger than a
child. It was easy for him to reach one of the long brass brackets above
one of the rear seats, intended for bundles often heavier than he was;
here he curled up in his heavy coat, for all the world like one of the
bundles belonging to an emigrant and thus escaped detection.