he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the
headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been
advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That
engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for
four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every
hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's
gone!"
"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't
pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported.
And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild
engine over the main line without orders."
"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst
us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."
I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of
the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in
some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to
let go.
"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason
why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had
quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change
his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"
After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it
back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.
"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But
where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody
findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway?
Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was
to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and _go_."
"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the
same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and
the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and
twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross
went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find
_him_!"
Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little
space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best
boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a
clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go
alone he turned on me.
"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its
scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he
demanded.
I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of
things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had
taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking
the wheels of reform.
"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it
ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods
is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the
bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked;
you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to
look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and
turn in and help him."
"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land,
Mart?"
"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the
whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces--as it's doin', right now.
They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if
it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all
up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could
bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you
could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a
that."
"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"
"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I
did, Jimmie, and not think it--and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o'
Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we
belonged to 'em!--orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs,
helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need,
usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."
"You stopped all this?"
"You bet I did--between two days! They've been makin' seventeen
different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the
Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."
What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on
their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if
they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and
Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.
"Say, Jimmie, boy--you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when
you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about
as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose
end."
"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I
asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."
He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy
stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown
and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home.
When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study
it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.
At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map
was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations
and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western
end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get
out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the
shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at
that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.
Tracing the other way--westward--we had a clear track for ten miles to
Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen
engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down.
Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west
of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been
seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and
the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station
shouldn't have been.
"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or
other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be
considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been
running--without orders, we must remember--against the Fast Mail coming
east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere--not officially, at least; if it
had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's
office."
At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the
"meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at
twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making
due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the
missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before
ten-forty-five.
The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta
was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the
opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or
thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time
to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In
other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed,
would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.
When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay
in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the
diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise.
West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around
among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand
Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.
Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing
point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have
been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a
blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand
Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was
nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served
for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would
surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And
they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the
following morning.
Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any
number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail
topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything
about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.
"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by
without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"
The big master-mechanic shook his head.
"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is
part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the
mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in
for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for
their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch
somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut
off."
This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.
"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is
one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that
gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"
"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there
yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of
that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."
You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a
root.
"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just
around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we
can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And
the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the
stolen engine!"
"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or,
leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding,
just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."
Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our
guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles
west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van
Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.
"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the
map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there.
But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."
"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you
and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work
on," I retorted.
I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest
of the way to save my life.
"If there was the least little scrap--a reason even to imagine that Mr.
Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be
different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know
doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to
eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square
meal inside o' your clothes."
We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard,
by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew
shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait
for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop
track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.
This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the
turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing
down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the
step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the
table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a
reformed cow-punch'--with a record for getting out of more tight places
with a heavy train than any other man on the division.
"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy
Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet,
among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost
in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."
"What's that--where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like
the pop of a whip-lash.
"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the
old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the
far end o' that gravel track, cold _and_ dead."
"When did you see her?"
"Just now--comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber
Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin'
more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big
as a house."
"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.
"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into
the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."
Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"
"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."
"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not
to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"
"I ain't kickin' none."
"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and
report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go
down along and get that runaway."
This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the
gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on
the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had
been opened some time after the map had been made.
When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his
fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for
town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he
patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more
said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen
engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr.
Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to
quit; and, so far as we knew--or didn't know, rather--he had done it and
had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.
Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive
assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more
infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a
train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have
made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story
at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.
I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie--which
wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the
major's--when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the
grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When
he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a
telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it
was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There
were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point:
"What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr.
Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody--the New York
people, perhaps--had wired him that a new general manager had been
appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our
office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had
become of him, _Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago_!
Gee! but that brought on more talk--a whaling lot of it. I meant to find
out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek
wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption
butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head
waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came
over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice
sounded that she was mightily excited.
"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she
began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back
yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient,
"Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from
Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the _Mountaineer_. He called the house to
try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain
about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the _Mountaineer_
office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail,
I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third
floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper
aside.
"Yes; just a minute ago."
"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One
of our young men--Branderby--has a clue; a very slight one. He has
discovered--in some way that he didn't care to explain over the
phone--that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of
a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared.
From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in
part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it
entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's
men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a
locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"
"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our
master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in
hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir
about it."
"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly
muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an
attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending
a note to somebody at the Bullard--a note that 'would do the business,'
was the way it was put."
"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a
running jump at the guess.
"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you
more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good
gosh!--I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able
to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that
engine-rescuing trip.
"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two
flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the
round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher
and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were
filling her with water.
It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high
foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the
tender.
"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could
say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay
for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over
into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.
Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the
fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was
on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light
engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight
piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.
XIV
A Close Call
Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight
track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its
good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at
Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes,
shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight
was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
From Banta on, we took it a bit easier--had to. The track was pretty
crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew
his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
At the "Y" siding we stopped--without going on to the gravel track where
Gorcher had seen the lost 1016--and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern.
This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big
master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in
making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just
the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was
trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out
toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as
nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman
when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet,
physically.
"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped
along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find
anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail
connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there
was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was
still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch
rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it
hadn't been used in years.
"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan
said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail
connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them
thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came
down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps
there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel
track."
I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and
its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we
were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the
two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter
saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole;
fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new
splinter of the wood sticking up beside it--a splinter that had been
broken out when the spike was pulled.
I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there
waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the
saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were
fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But
that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the
rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new
holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track
that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over
them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.
Kirgan didn't say a word--not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed
rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What
followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a
driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen
were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with
his pocket tape.
"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in
the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up
and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.
Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with
Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing
was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way
cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained
anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going,
but we were on our way.