to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the
clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze
in. If they were looking for a full-sized man--Tarbell, for instance,
who was as husky as a farm-hand--they'd never think of that crack in the
bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped
opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the
clam-shell.
That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they
combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch
had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man
might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.
As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the
three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack
between the bucket halves and touched them.
"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel.
And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"
Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner
or later.
"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."
Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And
I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out
when he whirled upon the Irishman.
"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a
thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this
country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And
what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a
belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and
wanting to know what all the shooting was about.
It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in
silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all
bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and
make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done.
With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance
offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of
murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal
tangle and had put him in peril of his life.
XVII
The Man at the Window
Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in
the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy
enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say
much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask
the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland
right-of-way squabble.
But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning
up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it
that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding
Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know
anything about that part of it--he was such a square fighter himself
that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.
Meanwhile, things grew warmer and warmer in the tussle we were making to
pull the old Short Line out of the mud; warmer in a number of ways,
because, in addition to the fight for the public confidence, we began
just then to have a perfect epidemic of wrecks.
The boss turned the material trouble over to Mr. Van Britt and devoted
himself pretty strictly to the public side of things. Everywhere, and on
every occasion--at dinners at the different chambers of commerce, and
public banquets given to this, that, or the other visiting big-wig--he
was always ready to get on his feet and tell the people that the true
prosperity of the country carried with it the prosperity of the
railroads; that the two things were one and inseparable; and that, when
it came right down to basic facts, the railroads were really a part of
the progress machinery of the country at large and should be regarded,
not as alien tax-collectors, but as contributors to the general
prosperity and welfare.
I went with him on a good many of the trips he made to be "among those
present" at these gatherings--and so, by the way, did Tarbell--and it
was plain to be seen that the new idea was gradually gathering a little
headway. By this time, also, Red Tower Consolidated was beginning to
find out what it meant to have active competition. The C. S. & W. people
were hammering their new plants into working shape, and they were
getting the patronage, both of the producers and consumers, hand over
fist.
Engineered by Billoughby, the railroad was simply playing the part of
the good big brother to these new middlemen. Track facilities and yard
service were granted freely; and while no discrimination was permitted
as against the Red Tower people, the friendly attitude of the road
counted for something, as it was bound to; hence, the C. S. & W. got the
business right from the jump, enlarging its field as it went along, and
gathering in all the little side monopolies like the ice-plants, and
city lighting installations, and so on. This, by the way, was in line
with the new slogan put out by the boss and his boosters: "Own your own
Utilities."
As to the political struggle which was now ripping the State wide open
from end to end, the boss was steel and iron on the side of
non-interference. He never allowed himself to say a public word on
either side; never spoke of the campaign at all except to assert
everywhere and at all times that the railroad was not in politics, and
never would be again.
This was the key-word given to the different members of the staff to be
passed on down the line to every official in authority. We were to be
like Cæsar's wife--above suspicion. We were neither to make nor meddle
in the campaign, and any department head or other officer or employee
caught trying to swing the railroad vote would be fired on the spot.
On one of our trips over the road we had a call from Mr. Anson Burrell,
the gubernatorial candidate who was making the race against the
machine. He was a cattle magnate of the modern sort; a big,
viking-looking man, with a Yale degree, and with a record as clean as a
hound's tooth. When he came into the private car he seemed to fill it,
not only with his presence, but with the fresh keen air of the grazing
uplands.
"I'm glad to have a chance to meet you on your own ground, Mr.
Norcross," he said, giving the boss a hand-grip that looked mighty
hearty and sincere. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell you
how much we appreciate the stand you have taken. For the first time in
its history, the railroad is keeping out of the political fight; I know
it, and the people are beginning to find it out, too. You may not mean
it that way, but it is the strongest card you could play. You need just
legislation, and there is no better way to get it than by not trying to
influence it."
The boss met him half-way on that, of course, and said what he ought to;
and they talked along that line for the full half-hour that our special
stopped in the town where Mr. Burrell had caught us. In a way, it was a
sort of temptation to take sides. Mr. Burrell made it pretty plain that
if the railroad continued to behave itself, and if the reform party got
in, there would be easier legislation, and perhaps some of the old
hard-and-fast intrastate rate laws repealed. But the boss wasn't the
man to drop his candy in the dirt, and he kept right on laying down the
law to everybody in the service; we were to let the campaign absolutely
alone, and every man was to vote as he thought best.
As time went on, I was a little surprised to see that Hatch and his
gunmen side partners under Pete Clanahan made no further move; at least,
not toward keeping cases on Mr. Norcross. Though Tarbell and I still
went everywhere with him, we saw no more shadowers. I put it up that
perhaps they were lying quiet because they knew that somebody had
overheard their talk in the coal yard scale-house and they were waiting
for the thing to blow over a little. All of us who were on the inside
felt that the move was only postponed, and that when it did come it
would be a center shot. But there was nothing we could do. We could only
hang on and keep a sharp eye to windward.
During those few pre-election weeks the New York end of us seemed to
have petered out completely. We heard nothing more from President
Dunton, worse than an occasional wire complaint about the number of
wrecks we were having, though the stock was still going down, point by
point, and, so far as a man up a tree could see, we were making no
attempt to show net earnings--were turning all our money into
betterments as fast as it came in. I knew that couldn't go on. Without a
flurry of some sort, the New Yorkers would never be able to break even,
to say nothing of a profit, and I looked every day for a howl that would
tear things straight up the back.
While all these threads were weaving along, I'm sorry to say that I
hadn't yet drummed up the courage to tell the boss the truth about Mrs.
Sheila. He kept on going to the major's every chance he had, and Maisie
Ann was making life miserable for me because I hadn't told him--calling
me a coward and everything under the sun. I told her to tell him
herself, and she retorted that I knew she couldn't: that it was my job
and nobody else's. We fussed over it a lot; and because I most always
contrived some excuse to chase out to the Kendrick house at the boss's
heels--merely to help Tarbell keep cases on him--there were plenty of
chances for the fussing.
It was on one of these chasing trips to "Kenwood" that the roof fell in.
The major had gone out somewhere--to the theater, I guess--taking his
wife and Maisie Ann, and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together
in the major's den, with a little coal blaze in the basket grate because
the nights were beginning to get a bit chilly.
As usual when they were together, they made no attempt at privacy: the
den doorway had no door, nothing but one of those Japanese curtains
made out of bits of bamboo strung like beads on a lot of strings. I had
butted in with a telegram--which might just as well have stood over
until the next morning, if you want to know. After I had delivered it,
Mrs. Sheila gave me that funny little laugh of hers and told me to go
hunt in the pantry and see if I could find a piece of pie, and the boss
added that if I'd wait, he'd go back to town with me pretty soon.
I found the pie, and ate it in the dining-room, making noise enough
about it so that they could know I was there if they wanted to. But they
went right on talking, and paid no attention to me.
"Do you know, Sheila"--they had long since got past the "Mr." and
"Mrs."--"you've been the greatest possible help to me in this
rough-house, all the way along," the boss was saying. "And I don't
understand how you, or any woman, can plan so clearly and logically to a
purely business end. I was just thinking to-night as I came out here:
you have given me nearly every suggestion I have had that was worth
anything; more than that, you have held me up to the rack, time and
again, when I have been ready to throw it all up and let go. Why have
you done it?"
I heard the little laugh again, and she said: "It is worth something to
have a friend. Odd as it may seem, Graham, I have been singularly
poverty-stricken in that respect. And I have wanted to see you succeed.
Though you are still calling it merely a 'business deal,' it is really a
mission, you know, crammed full of good things to a struggling world. If
you do succeed--and I am sure you are going to--you will leave this
community, and hundreds of others, vastly the better for what you are
doing and demonstrating."
"But that is a man's point of view," the boss persisted. "How do you get
it? You are all woman, you know; and your mixing and mingling--at least,
since I have known you--has all been purely social. How do you get the
big overlook?"
"I don't know. I was foolish and frivolous once, like most young girls,
I suppose. But we all grow older; and we ought to grow wiser. Besides,
the woman has the advantage of the man in one respect; she has time to
think and plan and reason things out as a busy man can't have. Your
problem has seemed very simple to me, from the very beginning. It asked
only for a strong man and an honest one. You were to take charge of a
piece of property that had been abused and knocked about and used as a
means of extortion and oppression, and you were to make it good."
"Again, that is a man's point of view."
"Oh, no," she protested quickly. "There is no sex in ethics. Women are
the natural house-cleaners, perhaps, but that isn't saying that a man
can't be one, too, if he wants to be."
At this, the boss got up and began to tramp up and down the room; I
could hear him. I knew she'd been having the biggest kind of a job to
keep him shut up in this sort of abstract corral, when all the time he
was loving her fit to kill, but apparently she had been doing it,
successfully. There wasn't the faintest breath of sentiment in the air;
not the slightest whiff. When she began again, I could somehow feel that
she was just in time to prevent his breaking out into all sorts of
love-making. I shouldn't wonder if that was the way it had been from the
beginning.
"The time has come, now, when you must take another leaf out of my
book," she said, with just the proper little cooling tang in her voice.
"Up to the present you have been hammering your way to the end like a
strong man, and that was right. But you have been more or less
reckless--and that isn't right or fair or just to a lot of other
people."
The tramping stopped and I heard him say: "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean that matters have come to such a pass now that you can't afford
to take any risks--personal risks. The enmity that caused you to be
kidnapped and carried away into the mountains still exists, and exists
in even greater measure. It hasn't stopped fighting you for a single
minute, and if the plan it is now trying doesn't work, it will try
another and a more desperate one."
"You've been talking to Ripley," he laughed. "Ripley wants me to become
a gun-toter and provide myself with a body-guard. I'd look well,
wouldn't I? But what do you mean by 'the plan it is now trying'?"
She hesitated a little, and then said: "I shall make no charges, because
I have no proof. But I read the newspapers, and Mr. Van Britt tells me
something, now and then. You are having a terrible lot of wrecks."
"That is merely bad luck," he rejoined easily, adding: "And the wrecks
have nothing to do with my personal safety."
"Rashness is no part of true courage," she interpolated, calmly. "As a
private individual you might say that your life is your own, and that
you have a perfect right to risk it as you please. But as the general
manager of the railroad, with a lot of your friends holding office under
you, you can't say that. Besides, you are fighting for a cause, and that
cause will stand or fall with you."
"You ought to be a member of this new reform legislature that some of
our good friends think is coming up the pike," he chuckled; but she
ignored the good-natured gibe and made him listen.
"I was visiting a day or two at the capital last week, and there are
influences at work that you don't know about. It has grown away past and
beyond any mere fight with the Hatch people. If the opposition can't
make your administration a failure, it won't hesitate to get rid of you
in the easiest way that offers."
There was silence in the major's den for a minute or so, and then the
boss said:
"As usual, you know more than you are willing to tell me."
"Perhaps not," was the prompt answer. "Perhaps I am only the
onlooker--who can usually see things rather better than the persons
actually involved. Hitherto I have urged you to be bold, and then again
to be bold. Now I am begging you to be prudent."
"In what way?"
"Careful for yourself. For example: you walked out here this evening;
don't do that any more. Come in a taxi--and don't come alone."
I couldn't see his frown of disagreement, but I knew well enough it was
there.
"There spoke the woman in you," he said. "If I should show the white
feather that way, they'd have some excuse for potting me."
There was a silence again, and I got up quietly and crossed the
dining-room to the big recessed window where I stood looking out into
the darkness of the tree-shaded lawn. It was pretty evident that Mrs.
Sheila knew a heap more than she was telling the boss, just as he had
said, and I couldn't help wondering how she came to know it. What she
said about the increased number of wrecks looked like a pointer. Was she
in touch with the enemy in some way?
I knew that Major Kendrick heard all the gossip of the streets and the
clubs, and that he carried a good bit of it home; but that wouldn't
account for much inside knowledge of the real thing in Mrs. Sheila. Then
my mind went back in a flash to what Maisie Ann had told me. Was the
husband who ought to be dead, and wasn't, mixed up in it in any way?
Could it be possible that he was one of those who were in the fight on
the other side, and that she was still keeping in touch with him?
Pretty soon I heard the murmur of their voices again, but now I was so
far away from the bamboo-screened door that I couldn't hear what they
were saying. I wished they would break it off so the boss could go. It
was getting late, and there had been enough said to make me wish we were
both safely back in the hotel. It's that way sometimes, you know, in
spite of all you can do. You hear a talk, and you can't help reading
between the lines. I knew, as well as I knew that I was alive, that
Mrs. Sheila meant more than she had said: perhaps more than she had
dared to say.
It was while I was standing there in the big window, sweating over the
way the talk in the other room was dragging itself out, that I saw the
man on the lawn. At first I thought it was Tarbell, who was never very
far out of reach when the boss was running loose. But the next minute I
saw I was mistaken. The man under the trees looked as if he might be an
English tourist. He had on a long traveling coat that came nearly to his
heels, and his cap was the kind that has two visors, one in front and
the other behind.
Realizing that it wasn't Tarbell, I stood perfectly still. The house was
lighted with gas, and the dining-room chandelier had been turned down,
so there was a chance that the skulker under the trees wouldn't see me
standing in the corner of the box window. To make it surer, I edged away
until the curtain hid me. I was just in time. The man had crept out of
his hiding-place and was coming up to the window on the outside. As he
passed through the dim beam of light thrown by the turned-down
chandelier, I saw that he had a pistol in his hand, or a weapon of some
kind; anyway, I caught the glint of the gas-light on dull steel.
That stirred me up good and plenty. I still had the gun I had taken out
of Fred May's drawer; I had carried it ever since the night when it had
mighty nearly got me killed off in the Red Tower coal yard. I fished it
out and made ready, thinking, of course, that the skulker must certainly
be one of Clanahan's gunmen. I still had that idea when I felt, rather
than saw, that the man was pulling himself up to the window so that he
could take a look into the dining-room.
The look satisfied him, apparently, for the next second I heard him drop
among the bushes; and when I stood up and looked out again I could just
make him out going around toward the back of the house. Thanks to Maisie
Ann and the pantry excursions, I knew the house like a book, and without
making any noise about it I slipped through the butler's pantry and got
a look out of a rear window. My man was there, and he was working his
way sort of blindly around to the den side of the place.
I guess maybe I ought to have given the alarm. But I knew there was only
one window in the major's den room, and that was nearly opposite the
screened doorway. So I ducked back into the dining-room and took a stand
where I could see the one window through the door-curtain net-work of
bamboo beads. I was so excited that I caught only snatches of what Mrs.
Sheila was saying to the boss, but the bits that I heard were a good
deal to the point.
"No, I mean it, Graham ... it is as I told you at first ... there is no
standing room for either of us on that ground ... and you must not come
here again when you know that I am alone.... No, Jimmie _isn't_ enough!"
I wrenched the half-working ear-sense aside and jammed it into my eyes,
concentrating hard on the window at which I expected every second to see
a man's face. If the man was a murderer, I thought I could beat him to
it. He would have to look in first before he could fire; and the boss
and Mrs. Sheila were at the other end of the room, sitting before the
little blaze in the grate.
The suspense didn't last very long. A hand came up first to push the
window vines aside. It was a white hand, long and slender, more like a
woman's than a man's. Then against the glass I saw the face, and it gave
me such a turn that I thought I must be going batty.
Instead of the ugly mug of one of Clanahan's gunmen, the haggard face
framed in the window sash was a face that I had seen once--and only
once--before; on a certain Sunday night in the Bullard when the
loose-lipped mouth belonging to it had been babbling drunken curses at
the night clerk. The man at the window was the dissipated young rounder
who had been pointed out as the nephew of President Dunton.
XVIII
The Name on the Register
So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one
of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought
I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I
really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough
question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the
sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the
other side of that window--and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw
that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.
What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major
Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and
peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the
beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the
sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end
of the room where the fireplace was.
Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he
should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either
the boss or Mrs. Sheila--if that was what he was aiming to do. All the
same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the
door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's
nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.
While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his
cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the
boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as
usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."
Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and
stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick
padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the
rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major
and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol
and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt
the boss's hand on my shoulder.
"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a
minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs.
Kendrick, we got out.
At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With
the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I
grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for
us.
"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man
stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something
to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on
the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and
started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and
put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.
When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I
had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it
over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names
written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I
found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y."
Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had
come in from the West--which was a bit puzzling, since it left the
inference that he wasn't direct from New York.