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THE WRECKERS
BY FRANCIS LYNDE
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1920
To a certain grave and reverend official of the Union Pacific System
who, in his younger days, might well have played the part of _Jimmie
Dodds_, this book is affectionately inscribed by
THE AUTHOR.
[Illustration: "You have spoken only of the difficulties and
responsibilities, Graham, but there is another side to it."]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. AT SAND CREEK SIDING 1
II. A TANK PARTY 11
III. MR. CHADWICK'S SPECIAL 23
IV. THE TIPPING OF THE SCALE 36
V. THE DIRECTORS' MEETING 51
VI. THE ALEXA GOES EAST 60
VII. "HEADS OFF, GENTLEMEN!" 65
VIII. WITH THE STRINGS OFF 75
IX. AND SATAN CAME ALSO 90
X. THE BIG SMASH 96
XI. WHAT EVERY MAN KNOWS 102
XII. WITH THE WHEELS TRIGGED 112
XIII. THE LOST 1016 123
XIV. A CLOSE CALL 140
XV. THE MACHINE 155
XVI. IN THE COAL YARD 169
XVII. THE MAN AT THE WINDOW 185
XVIII. THE NAME ON THE REGISTER 200
XIX. THE HOODOO 206
XX. THE HELPLESS WIRES 216
XXI. BILLY MORRIS EXPLAINS 225
XXII. WHAT THE PILOT ENGINE FOUND 232
XXIII. THE MAJOR'S PREMONITION 247
XXIV. THE DEAD-LINE 262
XXV. FLAGGED DOWN 274
XXVI. THE DIPSOMANIAC 292
XXVII. THE DESERTER 312
XXVIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END 319
XXIX. THE MURDER MADMAN 334
XXX. "UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY" 349
XXXI. P. S. L. COMES HOME 365
THE WRECKERS
I
At Sand Creek Siding
As a general proposition, I don't believe much in the things called
"hunches." They are bad for the digestion, and as often as not are like
those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it
is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to all rules, and
we certainly uncovered the biggest one of the lot--the boss and I--the
night we left Portland and the good old Pacific Coast.
It was this way. We had finished the construction work on the Oregon
Midland; had quit, cleaned up the offices, drawn our last pay-checks,
told everybody good-by, and were on our way to the train, when I had one
of those queer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew
just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to
Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason--if you'll call
it a reason--was that, just before we came to the railroad station, the
boss walked calmly under a ladder standing in front of a new building;
and besides that, it was the thirteenth day of the month, a Friday, and
raining like the very mischief.
Just to sort of toll us along, maybe, the fates didn't begin on us that
night. They waited until the next day, and then proceeded to shove us in
behind a freight-train wreck at Widner, Idaho, where we lost twelve
hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't
due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a
little visit with his folks in Illinois, and beyond that he was going to
meet a bunch of Englishmen in Montreal, and maybe let them make him
General Manager of one of the Canadian railroads.
So Mr. Norcross was in no special hurry, and neither was I. I wasn't
under pay, but I expected to be when we reached Canada. I had been
confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland
construction, and he was taking me along partly because he knows a
cracking good stenographer when he sees one, but mostly because I was
dead anxious to go anywhere he was going.
But to come back to the Widner delay: if it hadn't been for that
twelve-hour lay-out we would have caught the Saturday night train on the
Pioneer Short Line, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there
would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram
from Mr. Chadwick, because it wouldn't have found us; no hold-up at Sand
Creek Siding; in short, nothing would have happened that did happen. But
I mustn't get ahead of my story.
It was on Sunday that the jolt began to get ready to land on us. Mr.
Norcross had been a railroad man for so long that he had forgotten how
to knock off on Sundays, and right soon after breakfast, with the help
of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our
section into a business office, saying that now we had a good quiet day,
we'd clean up the million or so odds and ends of correspondence he'd
been letting go while we were tussling for the Midland right-of-way
through the Oregon mountains.
By this time, you will understand, we were rocketing along over the
Pioneer Short Line, and were supposed to be due at Portal City at
half-past seven that evening. From where he sat dictating to me the boss
was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his
eyes while he was talking off his letters, and it puzzled me because it
wasn't like him. I may as well say here as anywhere that one of his
strong points is to be always "at himself" under all sorts of
conditions.
So, as I say, I was sort of puzzled; and one of the times after he had
given me a full grist of letters and had gone off to smoke while I
typed a few thousand lines from my notes to catch up, I made a
discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a
young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the
old-fashioned kind, with low seat-backs. I put it up that in those
absent-eyed intervals Mr. Norcross had been studying the back of the
young woman's neck. I was measurably sure it wasn't the little girl's.
Along in the forenoon I made an excuse to go and get a drink of water
out of the forward cooler, and on the way back I took a good square look
at our neighbors in Number Five. At that I didn't wonder at the boss's
temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to
start a stopped clock--only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there
wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. And the little girl was
simply a peach--a nice, downy, rosy peach; chunky, round-faced,
sunny-haired, jolly; with a neat little turned-up nose and big sort of
boyish laughing eyes that fairly dared the world.
I made a good half-dozen mistakes when I got in behind the old writing
machine again and went on with the letters; but never mind about that.
As I began to say, things rocked along until we had about worn the day
out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up
the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though
I was only his stenographer, and a kid at that, he was big enough and
Western enough not to let the buck-private-to-officer gap make any
difference, and always when we were knocking about together he made me
sit at his table.
Sometimes, when it happened that way, he'd ditch the rank-and-file
dignities and talk to me as if the thousand miles or so between his job
and mine were wiped out. But this Sunday evening he was pretty quiet,
breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a
forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for
a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of the Pioneer Short Line.
Farther along, pretty well into the ice-cream and black coffee, he came
to life again to ask me if I had noticed the young lady and the girl in
the Pullman section next to ours.
I told him I had, and then, because I had never known him to bother his
head for two minutes in succession about any woman, he gave me a shock;
said they were ticketed to Portal City--and to find that out he must
have asked the train conductor--adding that when we reached Portal it
would be the neighborly thing for me to do to help them off with their
hand-bags and see that they got a cab if they wanted one.
"Sure I will," says I. "That is, if the lady's husband isn't there to
meet them."
"What?" he snaps out. "You know her? She is married?"
"No, I don't exactly _know_ her," I shuffled. "But she is married, all
right."
"How can you tell if you don't know her?" he barked; just like that.
I had to make good, right quick, as everybody does who goes up against
Mr. Graham Norcross. But it so happened that I was able to.
"Her suit case is standing in the aisle, and I saw the tag. It has her
name, 'Mrs. Sheila Macrae,' on it."
The boss has a way of making two up-and-down wrinkles and a little
curved horse-shoe line come between his eyes when he is going to reach
for you.
"There are times, Jimmie, when you see altogether too much," he said,
sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to the far side of his
ice-cream pyramid before he began again.
"'Macrae,' you say: that is Scotch. And so is 'Sheila.' Most likely the
names, both of them, are only hand-downs. She looks straight American to
me."
"She is pretty enough to look anything," I threw in, just to see how he
would take it.
"Right you are, Jimmie," he agreed. "I've been looking at the back of
her neck all day. I don't know whether you've ever noticed it--you are
only a boy and probably you haven't--but there are so many women who
don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em from behind.
You catch a glimpse of a pretty neck, and when you get around to the
face you find out that the neck was only a bit of bluff."
If I had been eating anything in the world but ice-cream I believe it
would have choked me. What he said led up to the admission that he had
been making these face-and-neck comparisons for goodness knows how long,
and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a
picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a
hard-hitter, right from the jump. And for a man of that sort women are
usually no more than fluffy little side-issues, as Eve said when they
told her she was made out of Adam's rib.
That ended the dining-car part of it. The sure-enough, knock-out round
was fought at the rear end of our Pullman, which happened to be the last
car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a
cigar and said we'd go out to the observation platform to smoke, because
the smoking-room was full up with apple-raisers, and sheep-feeders and
cattlemen, all talking at once.
As we went down the aisle I noticed that Section Five was empty, and
when we reached the door we found the young lady and the girl standing
at the rear railing to watch the track unroll itself under the trucks
and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what
they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm
collar, but the girl had a fur thing around her neck, and her stocky,
chunky little arms were elbow deep in a big pillow muff to match, though
the April night wasn't even half-way chilly.
The boss growled out something about waiting until the ladies should go
in; and then, for pure safety's sake, he stepped out on the platform to
close the side trap door which, with the railing gate on that side, had
been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific
type" that was pulling us let out a whistle screech that would have
waked the dead, and the air-brakes went on with a jerk that showed how
beautifully reckless the railroading was on the Pioneer Short Line.
Mr. Norcross was reaching for the catch on the floor trap and the jerk
didn't throw him. But it snapped the young woman and the girl away from
the railing so suddenly that the little one had to grab for hand-holds;
and when she did that, of course the big muff went overboard.
At this, a bunch of things happened, all in an eye-wink. The train
ground and jiggled to a stop; the girl squealed, "Oh, my muff!" and
skipped down the steps to disappear in the general direction of the
Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie _Ann_!--come
back here--you'll be _left_!" and then took her turn at disappearing by
the same route; and, on top of it all, the boss jumped off and sprinted
after both of them, leaving a string of large, man-sized comments on the
foolishness of women as a sex trailing along behind him as he flew.
Right then it was my golden moment to play safe and sane. With three of
them off and lost in the gathering night, somebody with at least a grain
of sense ought to have stood by to pull the emergency cord if the train
should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy
all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a
mountain desert, and when I squinted up ahead and saw that the engine
was taking water, it looked as if there were going to be plenty of time
for a bit of a promenade under the stars. So I swung off and went to
join the muff hunt.
Amongst them, they had found the pillow thing before I had a chance to
horn in. They were coming up the track, and the boss had each of the two
by an arm and was telling them that they'd be left to a dead moral
certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts
were too fashionably narrow, and there were still three or four
car-lengths to go when the tank spout went up with a clang and a
clatter of chains and the old "Pacific type" gave a couple of hisses and
a snort.
"They're going!" gritted the boss, sort of between his teeth, and
without another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under
his arms, just as if they'd been a couple of sacks of meal, and broke
into a run.
It wasn't a morsel of use, you know. Mr. Norcross stands six feet two in
his socks, and I've heard that he was the best all-around athlete in his
college bunch. But old Hercules himself couldn't have run very far or
very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half
a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail
lights of the train were vanishing to pin points in the night. We were
like the little tad that went out to the garden to eat worms. Nobody
loved us, and we were beautifully and artistically left.
II
A Tank Party
When he saw that it was no manner of use, the boss quit on the handicap
race and put his two armfuls down while he still had breath enough left
to talk with.
"Well," he said, in his best rusty-hinge rasp, "you've done it! Why, in
the name of common sense, couldn't you have let me go back after that
muff thing?"
The young woman was panting as if she had been doing the running, and
the girl was choking and making a noise that made me think that she was
crying. If I had been as well acquainted with her as I got to be a
little later on, I would have known that she was only trying to bottle
up a laugh that was too beautifully big to be wasted upon just three
people and a treeless desert.
It was the young woman who answered the boss.
"I--I didn't stop to think!" she fluttered, taking the blame as if she
had been the one to head the procession. "Isn't there _any_ way we can
stop that train?"
The boss said there wasn't, and I know the only reason why he didn't say
a lot of other things was because he was too much of a gentleman to say
them in the presence of a couple of women.
"But what shall we do?" the young woman went on, gasping a little.
"Isn't there any telegraph station, or--or anything?"
There wasn't. So far as we could see, the surroundings consisted of a
short side-track, a spur running off into the hills, and the water tank.
The siding switches had no lights, which argued that there wasn't even a
pump-man at the tank--as there was not, the tank being filled
automatically by a gravity pipe line running back to a natural reservoir
in the mountains.
Before the boss had a chance to answer her question about the telegraph
office he got his eye on me, and then I knew that he hadn't noticed me
before.
"You here, too?" he ripped out, and I know it did him a lot of good to
be able to unload on somebody in trousers. "Why in blue blazes didn't
you stay on that train and keep it from running away from us?"
That's it: why didn't I? What made the dog stop before he caught the
rabbit? I was trying to frame up some sort of an excuse that would sound
just a few degrees less than plumb foolish, when the young woman took up
for me. She'd had the clatter of my typewriter dinned into her pretty
ears all day, and she knew who I was, even if it was dark.
"Don't take it out on the poor boy!" she said, kind of crisp, and yet
sort of motherly. "If you feel obliged to bully some one, I'm the one
who is to blame."
"Indeed, you're not!" chipped in the stocky little girl. "_I_ was the
one who jumped off first. And I don't care: I wasn't going to lose my
perfectly good muff."
By this time the boss was beginning to get a little better grip on
himself and he laughed.
"We've all earned the leather medal, I guess," he chuckled. "It's done
now, and it can't be helped. We're stuck until another train comes
along, and perhaps we ought to be thankful that we've got Jimmie Dodds
along to chaperon us."
"But isn't there anything else we can do?" said the young woman. "Can't
we walk somewhere to where there is a station or a town with people in
it?"
I saw Mr. Norcross look down at her skirts and then at the girl's.
"You two couldn't walk very far or very fast in those things you are
wearing," he grunted. "Besides, we are in one of the desert strips, and
it is probably miles to a night wire station in either direction."
"And how long shall we have to wait for another train?" This time it was
the little girl who wanted to know.
"I wish I could tell you, but I can't," said the boss. "I'm not familiar
with the Short Line schedules." Then to the young woman: "Shall we go
and sit under the water tank? That seems to be about the nearest
approach to a waiting-room that the place affords."
We trailed off together up the track, two and two, the boss walking with
the young woman. After we'd counted a few of the cross-ties, the girl
said: "Is your name Jimmie Dodds?" And when I admitted it: "Mine is
Maisie Ann. I'm Sheila's cousin on her mother's side. I think this is a
great lark; don't you?"
"I can tell better after it's over," I said. "Maybe we'll have to stay
here all night."
"I shouldn't mind," she came back airily. "I haven't been up all night
since I was a little kiddie and our house burned down. You're just a
boy, aren't you? You must excuse me; it's so dark that I can't see you
very well."
I told her I had been shaving for three years and more, and she let out
a little gurgling laugh, as though I had said something funny. By that
time we had reached the big water tank, and the boss picked out one of
the square footing timbers for a seat. It seemed as if he were finding
it a good bit harder to get acquainted with his half of the combination
than I was with mine, but after a little the young women thawed out a
bit and made him talk--to help pass away the time, I took it--and the
little girl and I sat and listened. When the young woman finally got him
started, the boss told her all about himself, how he'd been railroading
ever since he left college, and a lot of things that I'd never even
dreamed of. It's curious how a pretty woman can make a man turn himself
inside out that way, just for her amusement.
Maisie Ann and I sat on the end of the timber; not too near to be
butt-ins, nor so far away that we couldn't hear all that was said. I
still had the cigar the boss had given me, and I sure wanted to smoke
mighty bad, only I thought it wouldn't look just right--me being the
chaperon. Along in the middle of things, Mr. Norcross broke off short
and begged the young woman's pardon for boring her with so much shop
talk.
"Oh, you're not boring me at all; I like to hear it," she protested. And
then: "You have been telling me the story of a man who has done things,
Mr. Norcross. It has been my misfortune to have to associate chiefly
with men who only play at doing things."
He switched off at that and asked her if she were warm enough, saying
that if she were not, he and I would scrap up some sage-brush or
something and make a fire. She replied that she didn't care for a fire,
that the night wasn't at all cold--which it wasn't. Then she showed that
she was human, clear down to the tips of her pretty fingers.
"You may smoke if you want to," she told the boss. "I sha'n't mind it in
the least."
At that, my little girl turned on me and said, in exactly the same tone:
"You may smoke if you want to, Mr. Dodds. I sha'n't mind it in the
least." I heard a sort of smothered chuckle from the other end of the
timber seat, and the boss lighted his cigar. Then there was more talk,
in which it turned out that the young woman and her cousin were to have
been met at Portal City by somebody she called "Cousin Basil," but there
wouldn't be any scare, because she had written ahead to say that
possibly they might stop over with some friends in one of the apple
towns.
Then Mr. Norcross said _he_ wouldn't miss anything by the drop-out but
an appointment he had with an old friend, and he guessed that could
wait. I listened, thinking maybe he would mention the name of the
friend, and after a while he did. The forwarded Portal City telegram the
boss had gotten just before we went to dinner in the dining-car was from
"Uncle John" Chadwick, the Chicago wheat king, and that left me
wondering what the mischief Mr. Chadwick was doing away out in the wild
and woolly western country where they raise more apples than they do
wheat, and more mining stock schemes than they do either.
There was another thing that I listened for, too, but it didn't come.
That was some little side mention of the young woman's husband. So far
as that under-the-tank talk went, there needn't have been any "Mr.
Macrae" at all, and I was puzzled. If she'd been wearing mourning--but
she wasn't, so I told myself that she simply couldn't be a widow.
Anyway, she was a lot too light-hearted for that.
We had been marooned for nearly an hour when I struck a match and looked
at my watch. Mr. Norcross was still doing his best to kill time for the
young woman, and he was just in the exciting part of another railroad
story, telling about a right-of-way fight on the Midland, where we had
to smuggle in a few cases of Winchesters and arm the track-layers to
keep from being shut out of the only canyon there was by the P. & S. F.,
when the little girl grabbed my arm and said: "Listen!"
I did, and broke in promptly. "Excuse me," I called to the other two,
"but I think there's a train coming."
The boss cut his story short and we all listened. It seemed that I was
wrong. The noise we heard was more like an auto running with the
cut-out open than a train rumbling.
"What do you make it, Jimmie?" came from the boss's end of the timber.
"Motor car. It's out that way," I said, pointing in the darkness toward
the east.
My guess was right. In less than a minute we saw the lights of the car,
which was turning in a wide circle to come up beside the main line track
so it would head back to the east. It stopped a little way below the
water tank and about a hundred yards north of the track, or maybe less;
anyway, we could see it quite well even when the lamps were switched off
and four men came tumbling out of it. If I had been alone on the job I
should probably have called to the men as they came tramping over to the
side-track. But Mr. Norcross had a different think coming.
"Out of sight--quick, Jimmie!" he whispered, and in another second he
had whipped the young woman over the big footing timber to a standing
place under the tank among the braces, and I had done the same for the
girl.
What followed was as mysterious as a chapter out of an Anna Katherine
Green detective story. After doing something to the switch of the unused
spur track, the four men separated. One of them went back to the auto,
and the other three walked down the main track to the lower switch of
the short siding which was on the same side of the main line as the
spur. Here the fourth man rejoined them, and the girl at my elbow told
us what he had gone back to the car for.
"He has lighted a red lantern," she whispered. "I saw it when he took it
out of the auto."
I guess it was pretty plain to all of us by this time that there was
something decidedly crooked on the cards, but if we had known what it
was, we couldn't very well have done anything to prevent it. There were
only two of us men to their four; and, besides, there wasn't any time.
The lantern-carrying man had barely reached the lower switch when we
heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was a train coming from the
west, and a few seconds later an electric headlight showed up on the
long tangent beyond the siding.
It was a bandit hold-up, all right. We saw the four men at the switch
stop the train, which seemed to be a special, since it had only the
engine and one passenger car. One of the men stood on the track waving
the red lantern; we could see him plainly in the glare of the headlight.
There wasn't much of a scrap. There were two or three pistol shots, and
then, as near as we could make out, the hold-up men, or some of them,
climbed into the engine.
What they did next was as blind as a Chinese puzzle. Before you could
count ten they had made a flying switch with the single car, kicking it
in on the siding. Before the car had come fully to a stop, the engine
was switched in behind it, coupled on, and the reversed train, with the
engine pushing the car, rattled away on the old spur that led off into
the hills; clattered away and was lost to sight and hearing in less than
a minute.
It was not until after the train was switched and gone that we
discovered that two of the bandits had been left behind. These two reset
the switches for the main track, leaving everything as they had found
it, and then crossed over to the auto. Pretty soon we saw match flares,
and two little red dots that appeared told us that they were smoking.
"What are they doing, Jimmie?" asked the boss, under his breath.
"They are waiting for the other two to come back," I ventured, taking a
chance shot at it. Then I asked him if he knew where the old spur track
led to. He said he didn't; that there used to be some bauxite mines back
in the hills, somewhere in this vicinity, but he understood they had
been worked out and abandoned.
I was just thinking that all this mystery and kidnapping and gun play
must be sort of hard on the young woman and the girl, but though my half
of the allotment was shivering a little and snuggling up just a grain
closer to me, she proved that she hadn't lost her nerve.
"Did you see the name on that car when the engine went past to get in
behind it?" she asked, turning the whispered question loose for anybody
to answer.
"No," said the boss; and I hadn't, either.
"I did," she asserted, showing that her eyes, or her wits, were quicker
than ours. "I had just one little glimpse of it. The name is
'A-l-e-x-a,'" spelling it out.
Mr. Norcross started as if he had been shot.
"The _Alexa_? That is Mr. Chadwick's private car--they've kidnapped
him!" Then he whirled short on me. "Jimmie, are you man enough to go
with me and try a tackle on those fellows over there in that auto?"
I said I was; but I didn't add what I thought--that it would probably be
a case of double suicide for us two to go up against a pair of armed
thugs with our bare hands. The boss would have done it in the hollow
half of a minute; he's built just that way. But now the young woman put
in her word.
"You mustn't think of doing such a thing!" she protested; and she was
still telling him all the different reasons why he mustn't, when we
heard the creak and grind of the stolen engine coming back down the old
spur.
After that there was nothing to do but to wait and see what was going to
happen next. What did happen was as blind as all the rest. The engine
was stopped somewhere in the gulch back of us and out of sight from our
hiding-place, and pretty soon the two men who had gone with her came
hurrying across out of the hill shadows, making straight for the auto. A
minute or two later they had climbed into the machine, the motor had
sputtered, and the car was gone.
III
Mr. Chadwick's Special
Of course, as soon as the skip-out of the four hold-up men gave us a
free hand we knew it was up to us to get busy and do something. It was a
safe bet that the _Alexa_ was carrying her owner, and in that case Mr.
John Chadwick and his train crew were somewhere back in the hills,
without an engine, and with a good prospect of staying "put" until
somebody should go and hunt them up.
Mr. Norcross had our part in the play figured out before the retreating
auto had covered its first mile.
"We've got to find out what they've done with Mr. Chadwick," he broke
out. And then: "It can't be very far to where they have left the engine,
and if they haven't crippled it--" He stopped short and slung a question
at the two women: "Will you two stay here with Jimmie while I go and see
what I can find in that gulch?"
They both paid me the compliment of saying that they'd stay with me, but
the young woman suggested that it might be just as well if we should all
go up the gulch together. So we piked out in the dark, the boss helping
Mrs. Sheila to hobo along over the cross-ties of the spur, and the
little girl stumbling on behind with me. She had got over her scare, if
she had any, and when I asked her if she didn't want an arm to grab at,
she laughed and said, No, and that it was grand; that she wouldn't miss
a single stumble for worlds.
"In all my life I've never had anything half as exciting as this happen
to me," was the way she put it, and she sure acted as if she meant to
make the most of it.
We had followed the spur track up the gulch for maybe a short quarter of
a mile when we came to the engine. There was nobody on it, and the
brigands had been good-natured enough to leave the fire-door open so
that the steam would run down gently and let the boiler cool off by
degrees. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert on engines, just as he
is on everything else belonging to a railroad, and he struck matches and
looked our find over carefully before he tried to move it. As we had
feared it might be, the big machine was crippled. There was a key gone
out of one of the connecting-rod crank-pin straps; one miserable little
piece of steel, maybe eight inches long and tapering one way, and half
an inch or so thick the other; but that was a-plenty. We couldn't make a
move without it.
I thought we were done for, but Mr. Norcross chased me up into the cab
for a lantern. With the light we began to hunt around in the short
grass, all four of us down on our hands and knees doing the
needle-in-the-haystack stunt. I had been sensible enough to show the
little girl the other connecting-rod key, so she knew exactly what to
look for, and it did me a heap of good when it turned out that she was
the one who found the lost bit of steel.
"I've got it--I've got it!" she cried; and sure enough she had. The
hold-up people had merely taken it out and thrown it aside on the
extremely probable chance that nobody would be foolish enough to look
for it so near at hand, or, looking, would be able to find it in the
dark.
It didn't take more than a minute or two, with a wrench from the
engineer's box, to put the key back in place. Then, with one to boost
and the other to pull, we got our two passengers up into the high cab,
and Mr. Norcross made them as comfortable as he could on the fireman's
box, showing them how to brace and hang on when the machine should begin
to bounce over the rough track of the old spur.
While he was doing this, I threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the
firebox and put the blower on; and when we were all set, the boss opened
the throttle and we went carefully nosing ahead over the old track,
feeling our way up the gulch and keeping a sharp lookout for the _Alexa_
as we ground and squealed around the curves.
It must have been four or five miles back in the hills to the place
where we found the private car, and a little way short of it we picked
up Mr. Chadwick's conductor, walking the ties to try to get in touch
with the civilized world once more. He looked a trifle suspicious when
he found the engine in the hands of still another bunch of strangers,
and two of them women; but as soon as he heard Mr. Norcross's name he
quit being offish and got suddenly respectful. Young as he was for a
top-rounder, the boss had a "rep," and I guess there were not very many
railroad men west of the Rockies who didn't know him, or know of him.
The conductor told us where we'd find the car, and we found it just as
he said we would: pushed in on an old mine-loading track at the end of
the spur. The other members of the crew were off and waiting for us; and
standing out on the back platform, in the full glare of the headlight as
we nosed up for a coupling, there was a big, gray-haired man, bareheaded
and dressed in rough-looking old clothes like a mining prospector.
The big man was "Uncle John" Chadwick, and if he was properly astonished
at seeing us turn up with his lost engine, he didn't let it interfere
with our welcome when we took our passengers around to the car and
lifted them one at a time over the railing and climbed up after them.
Mr. Chadwick seemed to know Mrs. Sheila; at any rate, he shook hands
with her and called her by name. Then he grabbed for the boss and fairly
shouted at him: "Well, well, Graham!--of all the lucky things this side
of Mesopotamia! How the dev--how in thunder did you manage to turn up
here?" And all that, you know.
The explanations, such as they were, came later, after the young lady,
confessing herself a bit excited and fussed up, had taken her cousin
under her arm and they had both gone to lie down in one of the
staterooms. With the women out of the way, the boss and Mr. Chadwick sat
together in the open compartment while the train crew was trundling us
back to the main line. Mr. Norcross had put me in right by telling the
wheat king who I was, so they didn't pay any attention to me.
As a matter of course, the talk jumped first to the mysterious hold-up
and kidnapping and the reason why. All either of them could say didn't
serve to throw any light on the mystery, not a single ray. There had
been no violence--the pistol shots had been merely meant to scare the
trainmen--and there had been no attempt at robbery; for that matter,
Mr. Chadwick hadn't even seen the kidnappers, and hadn't known what was
going on until after it was all over.
Mr. Norcross told what we had seen, and how we had come to be where we
were able to see it, but that didn't help out much, either. From any
point of view it seemed perfectly foolish, and the boss made mention of
that. If we hadn't happened to be there to bring the engine back, the
worst that could have befallen Mr. Chadwick and the crew of the special
would have been a few hours' bother and delay. In the course of time the
conductor would have walked out and got to a wire station somewhere,
though it might have taken him all night, and then some, to get another
engine.
Naturally, Mr. Chadwick was red-hot about it, on general principles. I
guess he wasn't used to being kidnapped. But, after all, the thing that
bothered him most was the fact that he couldn't account for it.
"I can't help thinking that it is connected with what is due to happen
to-morrow morning, Graham," he said, at the end of things. "There are
some certain scoundrels in Portal City at the present moment who
wouldn't stop at anything to gain their ends, and I am wondering now if
Dawes wasn't mixed up in it."
The boss laughed and said:
"You'll have to begin at the beginning with me: I'm too new in this
region to know even the names. Who is Dawes?"
"Dawes is a mining man in Portal City, and before I'd been an hour in
town yesterday he hunted me up and wanted me to go over to Strathcona to
look at some gold prospects he's trying to finance. I said 'No' at
first, because I was expecting you, and thought you'd reach Portal City
this morning. When you didn't show up, I knew I had twelve hours more on
my hands, and as Dawes was still hanging on, I had our trainmaster give
me a special over to Strathcona, on a promise that I'd be brought back
early this evening, ahead of the 'Flyer' from the west--the train you
were on."
Mr. Norcross nodded. "And the promise wasn't kept."
"No promise is ever kept on the Pioneer Short Line," growled the big
magnate. And then, with a beautiful disregard for the mixed figures of
speech: "Once in a blue moon the chapter of accidents hits the
bull's-eye whack in the middle, Graham. When Hardshaw wired me from
Portland, I knew you couldn't reach Portal City before this morning, at
the very earliest. That was going to cut my time pretty short, with the
big gun due to be fired to-morrow morning, and you cut it still shorter
by losing twelve hours somewhere along the road--they told me in the
despatcher's office that your train was behind a wreck somewhere up in
Oregon. But it has turned out all right, in spite of everything. You're
here, and we've got the night before us."
Again Mr. Norcross said something about beginning at the beginning.
"Just remember that I am entirely in the dark," he went on. "I didn't
see Hardshaw at all before leaving Portland; he merely forwarded your
wire, asking me to stop over in Portal City, to me on the train--and it
was handed to me just before dinner this evening. Of course, that was
enough--from anybody who has been as good a friend to me as you have."
"We'll see presently just how far that friendship rope is going to
reach," returned the wheat king, and though my back was turned to them,
I could easily imagine the quizzical twinkle of the shrewd old eyes that
went with it. Then I suppose he nodded toward me, for the boss said:
"Oh, Jimmie's all right; he knew what I had for dinner this evening, and
he'll know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning."
With the bridle off, the big man went ahead abruptly, cutting out all
the frills.
"You finished your building contract on the Oregon Midland, Graham, and
after the road was opened for business you refused an offer of the
general managership. Would you mind telling me why you did that?"
"Not in the least. I'm rather burnt out on trying to operate American
railroads; at any rate, when it comes to trying to operate one of them
for a legitimate profit. There is nothing in it. An operating head is
now nothing more than a score-keeper for a national gambling game. The
boss gamblers around the railroad post in the Stock Exchange tell him
what he has to do and where he has to get off. Stock gambling, under
whatever name it masquerades--boosting values, buying and selling
margins, reorganizations, with their huge rake-offs for the
underwriters--is the incubus which is crushing the life out of the
nation's industries, especially in the railroad field. It makes me wish
I'd never seen a railroad track."
"Yet it is your trade, isn't it?" asked the wheat king.
"It is; but luckily I can build railroads as well as operate them; and
there are other countries besides the United States of America. I'm on
my way home to Illinois for a little visit with my mother and sisters;
and after that I think I shall close with an offer I've had from one of
the Canadian companies."
"Good boy!" chuckled the Chicago magnate. "In due time we might hope to
be reading your name in the newspapers--'Sir Graham Norcross, D.S.O.,'
or something of that sort." Then, with a sharp return to the sort of
gritting seriousness: "You've been riding over the Pioneer Short Line
since early this morning, Graham: what do you think of it?"
I couldn't see the boss's smile, but I could figure it pretty well when
he said: "There may be worse managed, worse neglected pieces of railroad
track in some of the great transcontinental lines, but if there are I
haven't happened to notice them. I suppose it is capitalized to death,
like many of the others."
"Fictitious values doubtless have something to do with it at the present
stage of the game," Mr. Chadwick admitted. "The Pioneer Short Line is
'under suspicion' on the books of the commissions, both State and
Interstate, as a heavily 'watered' corporation--which it is. Do you know
the history of the road?"
When I got up to get a match, Mr. Norcross was shaking his head and
saying: "Not categorically; no."
"Then I'll brief it for you," said the big man in the stuffed wicker
chair. "It has always been a good earning property, being largely, even
yet, without much local competition. But from the day it was completed
its securities have figured in the market only for their speculative
values. The property itself has never been considered, save as a means
to an end; the end being to enable one bunch of the Wall Street
gamesters you speak of to make a 'killing' and unload on another bunch."
"The old story," said Mr. Norcross.
"We are bumping over the net result, right now," Mr. Chadwick went on.
"The property is bled white; there is no money for betterments; we are
tied hand and foot by all sorts of legal restrictions and regulations;
and, worse than all, the people we are supposed to serve hate us until
you can smell it and taste it in every town and hamlet on the
right-of-way."
"So I have heard," put in the boss, calmly.
"That brings us down to the nib of the matter. Pioneer Short Line is
practically in the last ditch. The stock has slumped to forty and worse;
Shaffer, the general manager and the only able man we have had for
years, has resigned in disgust; and if something isn't done to-morrow
morning in Portal City, I know of at least one minority stockholder who
is going to throw the whole mess into the courts and try for a
receivership."
Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting
himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat
pit.
"I am--more's the pity. I had a little lapse of sanity one fine morning
a few years ago and bought in for an investment. I've done everything I
could think of, Graham, to persuade Breck Dunton and his Wall Street
accomplices to spend just one dollar in ten of their reorganization and
recapitalization stealings on the road itself, but it's no good. All
they want is to get one more rise out of the securities, so they can
unload."
"Is there to be a stockholders' meeting in Portal City to-morrow
morning?"
"No; a directors' meeting. Dunton has been making an inspection trip
over the system with a dozen or so of his New York cronies. It's a
junketing excursion, pure and simple, but while they're here they'll get
together and go through the form of picking out a new general manager.
I'm on the board and they had to send me notice, though it's an even bet
they hoped I'd stay away. In fact, I think they scheduled the meeting
out here on the chance that the distance from Chicago would keep me from
attending it."
All this talk had taken up a good bit of time, and just as Mr. Chadwick
said that about the "even bet," our engineer was whistling for Portal
City. From where I was sitting I could see the electric lights dotting
the wide valley between the two gateway buttes from which the city gets
its name. Mr. Norcross was looking at the lights, too, when he said:
"Are you really going to spring the receivership on the Dunton people
to-morrow?"
"I'm going to give Dunton his chance. He can appoint the man I want
appointed as general manager, with full power to act, and ratify a
little plan I've got up my sleeve for providing a bit of working capital
for the road, or--he can turn me down."
"And if he does turn you down?"
"Then, by George, I'll see if I can't persuade the courts to put the
property into bankruptcy and install my man as receiver!"
"I don't envy your man his job, either way around; not the least little
morsel in the world," said the boss, quietly. And then: "Who is he,
Uncle John?"
The wheat king gave a great laugh.
"Don't tell me you haven't guessed it," he chuckled. "You're the man,
Graham."
But now Mr. Norcross had something to say for himself, sitting up
straight and shaking his head sort of sorrowfully at the big man in the
padded chair.
"No you don't, my good old friend; not in a thousand years! You'd lose
out in the end, and I'd lose out; and besides, I'm not quite ready to
commit suicide." And then to me: "Jimmie, suppose you go and tap on the
door and tell the ladies we're pulling into Portal City."
IV
The Tipping of the Scale
After all, it wasn't so very late in the night when our special pulled
up to the Portal City station platform and I turned myself into a
messenger-boy escort for the lady and the little girl whose muff had
been responsible for so many different flip-flaps in the short space of
a few hours.
I hadn't hung around while the boss was telling Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
Ann good-by. Our conductor had wired ahead from the first telegraph
station we came to and had asked to have our dunnage--the two women's,
the boss's, and mine--taken out of the "Flyer" Pullman and sent back to
Portal City on a local, and I was in the baggage-room, digging up the
put-off stuff, at the good-by minute. But I guess they didn't quarrel
any--the boss and Mrs. Sheila. She was laughing a little to herself as I
helped her down from the car, and when I asked her where she wanted to
go, she said I might ask one of the porters to carry the traps, and we'd
walk to the hotel, which was only a few blocks up the main street.
She took Maisie Ann on the other side of her and let two of the blocks
go by without saying anything more, and then she gave that quiet little
laugh again and said, "Your Mr. Norcross amuses me, Jimmie. He says I
have no business to travel without a guardian. What do you think about
it?"
I told her I hadn't any thinks coming, and she seemed to take that for a
joke and laughed some more. Then she asked me if I'd ever been in New
York, and I felt sort of small when I had to tell her that I had never
been east of Omaha in all my life. With that, she told me not to worry;
that if I stayed with Mr. Norcross I'd probably get to go anywhere I
wanted to.
Something in the way she said it made it sound like a little slam on the
boss, and of course I wasn't going to stand for that.
"There is one thing about it: the boss will make good wherever he goes,"
I hit back. "You can bet on that."
"I like your loyalty," she flashed out. "It is a fine thing in a day
that is much too careless of such qualities. And I agree with you that
your Mr. Norcross is likely to succeed; more than likely, if he will
only learn to combine a little gentle cleverness with the heavy hand."
There was no doubt about it this time; she _was_ slamming the boss, and
I meant to get at the bottom of it, right there and then.
"I don't think you have any cause to blacklist Mr. Norcross," I said.
"Hasn't he been right good and brotherly to both of you this evening?"
"Oh, I didn't mean that," she said real earnestly. "But in the stateroom
in Mr. Chadwick's car: the ventilator was open, you know, until Maisie
Ann got up and shut it, and we couldn't very well help hearing what was
said about the kidnapping. Neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Norcross seemed
to be able to account for it."
"Can you account for it?" I asked, bluntly enough, I guess.
At this she smiled and said, "It would be rather presumptuous for me to
try where Mr. Norcross and Mr. Chadwick failed, wouldn't it? But maybe I
can give you just a wee little hint. If you are not well enough
acquainted with Mr. Chadwick to ask him yourself, you might tell Mr.
Norcross to ask him if there isn't some strong reason why somebody, or
perhaps a number of somebodies, wanted to keep him out of Portal City
over Sunday night and possibly a part of the Monday."
We were coming to the big electric sign that was winking out the letters
to spell "Hotel Bullard," and I was bound to have it out with her before
my chance was gone.
"See here," I put in; "you saw something more than I did, and more than
Mr. Norcross did. What was it?"
This time she took the motherly tone with me again and told me I must
learn not to be rude and masterful, like the boss. Then she gave me what
I was reaching for.
"You saw the two men who went over to the auto and smoked while they
were waiting for the other two to come back?"
I told her that I hadn't seen them very well; couldn't, with nothing but
the starlight to help out.
"Neither did I," she admitted. "But if I am not mistaken, I have seen
them many times before, and they are very well known here in Portal
City. One of them, the smaller one with the derby hat and the short
overcoat, was either Mr. Rufus Hatch or his double; and the other, the
heavy-set one, might have been Mr. Gustave Henckel, Mr. Hatch's partner
in the Red Tower Company."
This didn't help out much, but you can bet that I made a note of the two
names. We were just going into the hotel, so I didn't have a chance to
ask any more questions; and after I had paid the porter for lugging the
grips, Mrs. Sheila had made whatever arrangement she wanted to with the
clerk, and she and Maisie Ann were ready to take the elevator.
"You are going back to Mr. Chadwick's car?" she asked, when she was
telling me good-by and thanking me for coming up to the hotel with them.
I told her I was, and then she came around to the kidnapping business
again of her own accord.