questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwood
_had_ come in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week
earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now,
but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on
the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk
didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for
me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the
badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr.
Bullock was a lawyer.
I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all
conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising,
early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same,
after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box,
I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my
eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder
should show up.
That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep
habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or
whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage
porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express
westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with
two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.
When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night
clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his
grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto
so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone
for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next
got a sight of him--from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of
the bar-room colonnade--he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if
it were water and he on fire inside.
That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to
the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train
auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had
found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of
nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was
getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and
made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open
register.
A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying
lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never
showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash.
When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our
maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to
obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master
of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what
the name was.
XIX
The Hoodoo
It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard
café--the boss and I--that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck.
The story was red-headlined in the _Morning Herald_--the Hatch-owned
paper--and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns,
there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.
At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the
track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a
delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no
lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal
clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.
The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the
Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such
thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the
rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with
this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried
department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college
friends--which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only
millionaire.
Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As
I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With
the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new
"public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a
single week without smashing something.
Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross
management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and
nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors
into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising
storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.
Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and
afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office,
Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.
"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own
copy of the _Herald_. "Did you read that editorial?"
The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see
in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."
"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.
"Never mind the newspaper talk," the boss interjected. "How bad is the
trouble this time?"
"Pretty bad. I've just had Brockman on the wire from Alicante. The
freight is practically a total loss; a good half of it is in the river.
Kirgan says he can pick the freight engine up and rebuild it; but the
passenger machine is a wreck."
"How did it happen?"
"It's like a good many of the others. Nobody seems to know. Brockman put
the freight engine crew on the rack, and they say there was a small
boulder on the track--that it rolled down the canyon slope just ahead of
them as they were turning a curve. They struck it, and both men say that
the engine knocked it off into the river apparently without hurting
anything. But two seconds later the entire train left the track and
piled up all over the right-of-way."
"The engineer and fireman weren't hurt?"
"No; they both jumped on the high side. But, of course, they were pretty
badly shaken up. Riggs, the fireman, got out of the raffle first and
tried to flag the passenger train, but he was too late."
The boss was sitting back in his chair and making little rings on the
desk blotter with the point of his letter-opener.
"Upton, these knock-outs have got to be stopped."
"Good Lord!" exclaimed the little millionaire; "you don't have to tell
me that! If we can't stop 'em, Uncle Dunton will have plenty of good
reasons for cleaning us all out, lock, stock, and barrel! I was talking
with Carter, in the claim office, this morning. Our loss and damage
account for the past month is something frightful!"
"It is," said the boss gravely. And then: "Upton, we're not altogether
as bright as we might be. Has it never occurred to you that we are
having too much bad luck to warrant us in charging it all up to the
chapter of accidents?"
Mr. Van Britt blew his cheeks out until the stubby, cropped mustache
bristled like porcupine quills.
"So you've been getting your pointer, too, have you?" he threw in.
Mr. Norcross didn't answer the question directly.
"Put Tarbell on the job, and if he needs help, let him pick his own
men," he directed. "We want to know why that boulder tumbled down ahead
of Number Seventeen, and I want to see Tarbell's report on it. Keep at
it night and day, Upton. The infection is getting into the rank and file
and it's spreading like a sickness. You've railroaded long enough to
know what that means. If it becomes psychological, we shall have all the
trouble we need."
"I know," nodded the superintendent. "I went through a siege of that
kind on the Great Southwestern, one winter. It was horrible. Men who had
been running trains year in and year out, and never knowing that they
had any nerves, went to pieces if you'd snap your fingers at them."
"That's it," said the boss. "We don't want to fall into that ditch.
Things are quite bad enough, as they are."
This ended it for the time. The Petrolite Canyon wreck was picked up,
the track was cleared, and once more our trains were moving on time. But
anybody could see that the entire Short Line had a case of "nerves."
Kirgan, Kirgan the cold-blooded, showed it one afternoon when I went
over to his office to return a bunch of blue-prints sent in for the
boss's approval. The big master-mechanic had a round-house foreman "on
the carpet" and was harrying him like the dickens for letting an engine
go out with one of her truck safety chains hanging loose.
Ever since we had gone together on the rescue run to Timber Mountain,
Mart and I had been sort of chummy, and after the foreman had gone away
with his foot in his hand, I joshed Kirgan a little about the way he had
hammered the round-house man.
"Maybe I did, Jimmie," he said, half as if he were already sorry for the
cussing out. "But the shape we're getting into is enough to make an
angel bawl. Why, Great Moses! a crew can't take an engine out here in
the yard to do a common job o' switchin' without breakin' something 'r
hurtin' somebody!"
"Bad medicine," I told him. "It's worrying the bosses, too. What's doing
it, Mart?"
"Maybe you can tell," he growled. "It's a hoodoo--that's what _it_ is.
Seven engines in the shops in the last nine days, and three more that
haven't been fished out-a the ditch yet. I wish Mr. Van Britt 'd fire
the whole jumpy outfit!"
It didn't seem as though firing was needed so much as a dose of nerve
tonic of some sort. Tarbell was working hard on the problem, quietly,
and without making any talk about it, and Kirgan was giving him all the
men he asked for from the shops; quick-witted fellows who were up in all
the mechanical details, and who made better spotters than outsiders
would because they knew the road and the ropes. But it was no use. I saw
some of Tarbell's reports, and they didn't show any crookedness. It
seemed to be just bad luck--one landslide after another of it.
Meanwhile, New York had waked up again. President Dunton had been off
the job somewhere, I guess, but now he was back, and the things he wired
to the boss were enough to make your hair stand on end. I looked every
day to see Mr. Norcross pitch the whole shooting-match into the fire
and quit, cold.
He'd never taken anything like Mr. Dunton's abuse from anybody before,
and he couldn't seem to get hardened to it. But he was loyal to Mr.
Chadwick; and, of course, he knew that Mr. Dunton's hot wires were meant
to nag him into resigning. Then there was Mrs. Sheila. I sort of
suspected she was holding him up to the rack, every day and every minute
of the day. No doubt she was.
It was one evening after he had been out to the major's for just a
little while, and had come back to the office, that he sent for Mr. Van
Britt, who was also working late. There was blood on the moon, and I saw
it in the way the boss's jaw was working.
"Upton," he began, as short as pie-crust, "have you thought of any way
to break this wreck hoodoo yet?"
Mr. Van Britt sat down and crossed his solid little legs.
"If I had, I shouldn't be losing sleep at the rate of five or six hours
a night," he rasped.
"There's one thing that we haven't tried," the boss shot back. "We've
been advertising it as bad luck, keeping our own suspicions to ourselves
and letting the men believe what they pleased. We'll change all that. I
want you to call your trainmen in as fast as you can get at them. Tell
them--from me, if you want to--that there isn't any bad luck about it;
that the enemies of this management are making an organized raid on the
property itself for the purpose of putting us out of the fight. Tell
them the whole story, if you want to: how we're trying our best to make
a spoon out of a spoiled horn, and how there is an army of grafters and
wreckers in this State which is doing its worst to knock us out of the
box."
Mr. Van Britt uncrossed his legs and sat staring for a second or two.
Then he whistled and said: "By Jove! Have you caught 'em with the goods,
at last?"
"No," was the curt reply. "Call it a ruse, if you like: it's
justifiable, and it will work. If you give the force something tangible
to lay hold of, it will work the needed miracle. It is only the
mysterious that terrifies. Railroad employees, as a whole, are perfectly
intelligent human beings, open to conviction. The management which
doesn't profit by that fact is lame. If you do this and appeal to the
loyalty of the men, you will make a private detective out of every man
in the train service, and every one of them keen to be the first to
catch the wreckers. You can add a bit of a reward for that, if you like,
and I'll pay it out of my own bank account."
For a full minute our captive millionaire didn't say a word. Then he
grinned like a good-natured little Chinese god.
"Who gave you this idea of taking the pay-roll into your confidence,
Graham?" he asked softly.
For the first time in all the weeks and months I'd been knowing him, the
boss dodged; dodged just like any of us might.
"I've been talking to Major Kendrick," he said. "He is a wise old man,
Upton, and he hears a good many things that don't get printed in the
newspapers."
I could see that this excuse didn't fool Mr. Van Britt for a single
instant, and there was a look in his eye that I couldn't quite
understand. Neither could I make much out of what he said.
"We'll go into that a little deeper some day, Graham--after this
epileptic attack has been fought off. This idea--which you confess isn't
your own--is a pretty shrewd one, and I shouldn't wonder if it would
work, if we can get it in motion before the hoodoo breaks us wide open.
And, as you say, the accusation is justifiable, even if we can't prove
up against the Hatch outfit. That turned-over rail in Petrolite Canyon,
for example, might have been helped along by----"
It was Kelso, Mr. Van Britt's stenographer, who smashed in with the
interruption. He was in his shirt-sleeves, as if he'd just got up from
his typewriter, and he rushed in with his mouth open and his eyes like
saucers.
"They--they want you in the despatcher's office!" he panted, jerking the
words out at Mr. Van Britt. "Durgin has let Number Five get by for a
head-ender with the 'Flyer,' and he's gone crazy!"
XX
The Helpless Wires
When Bobby Kelso shot his news at us we all made a quick break for the
despatcher's office, the boss in the lead. It was a big bare room
flanking Mr. Van Britt's quarters at the western end of the second floor
corridor and the windows looked out upon the yard twinkling with its red
and yellow and green switch lights.
Durgin, the night despatcher, had been alone on the train desk, and the
only other operators on duty were the car-record man and the young
fellow who acted as a relief on the commercial wire. When we got there,
we found that Tarbell had happened to be in the office when Durgin blew
up. He was sitting in at the train key, trying to get the one
intermediate wire station between the two trains that had failed to get
their "meet" orders, and this was the first I knew that he really was
the expert telegraph operator that his pay-roll description said he was.
Durgin looked like a tortured ghost. He was a thin, dark man with a
sort of scattering beard and limp black hair; one of the clearest-headed
despatchers in the bunch, and the very last man, you'd say, to get
rattled in a tangle-up. Yet here he was, hunched in a chair at the
car-record table in the corner, a staring-eyed, pallid-faced wreck, with
the sweat standing in big drops on his forehead and his hands shaking as
if he had the palsy.
Morris, the relief man, gave us the particulars, such as they were,
speaking in a hushed voice as if he was afraid of breaking in on
Tarbell's steady rattling of the key in the Crow Gulch station call.
"Number Four"--Four was the eastbound "Flyer"--"is five hours off her
time," he explained. "As near as I can get it, Durgin was going to make
her 'meet' with Number Five at the blind siding at Sand Creek tank. She
ought to have had her orders somewhere west of Bauxite Junction, and
Five ought to have got hers at Banta. Durgin says he simply forgot that
the 'Flyer' was running late: that she was still out and had a 'meet' to
make somewhere with Five."
Brief as Morris's explanation was, it was clear enough for anybody who
knew the road and the schedules. The regular meeting-point for the two
passenger trains was at a point well east of Portal City, instead of
west, and so, of course, would not concern the Desert Division crew of
either train, since all crews were changed at Portal City. From Banta
to Bauxite Junction, some thirty-odd miles, there was only one telegraph
station, namely, that at the Crow Gulch lumber camp, seven miles beyond
the Timber Mountain "Y" and the gravel pit where the stolen 1016 had
been abandoned.
Unluckily, Crow Gulch was only a day station, the day wires being
handled by a young man who was half in the pay of the railroad and half
in that of the saw-mill company. This young man slept at the mill camp,
which was a mile back in the gulch. There was only one chance in a
thousand that he would be down at the railroad station at ten o'clock at
night, and it was on that thousandth chance that Tarbell was rattling
the Crow Gulch call. If Five were making her card time, she was now
about half-way between Timber Mountain "Y" and Crow Gulch. And Four, the
"Flyer," had just left Bauxite--with no orders whatever. Which meant
that the two trains would come together somewhere near Sand Greek, one
of them, at least, running like the mischief to make up what time she
could.
Mr. Van Britt was as good a wire man as anybody on the line, but it was
the boss who took things in hand.
"There is a long-distance telephone to the Crow Gulch saw-mill; have you
tried that?" he barked at Tarbell.
The big young fellow who looked like a cow-boy--and had really been one,
they said--glanced up and nodded: "The call's in," he responded.
"'Central' says she can't raise anybody."
"What was Four's report from Bauxite?"
"Four hours and fifty-two minutes off time."
"That will bring them together somewhere in the hill curves this side of
Sand Creek," the boss said to Mr. Van Britt; "just where there is the
least chance of their seeing each other before they hit." Then to
Tarbell: "Try Bauxite and find out if there is a pusher engine there
that can be sent out to chase the 'Flyer'."
Tarbell nodded without breaking his monotonous repetition of the Crow
Gulch call.
"I did that first," he put in. "There's an engine there, and they're
getting her out. But it's a slim chance; the 'Flyer' has too good a
start."
For the next three or four minutes the tension was something fierce. The
boss and Mr. Van Britt hung over the train desk, and Tarbell kept up his
insistent clatter at the key. I had an eye on Durgin. He was still
hunched up in the record-man's chair, and to all appearances had gone
stone-blind crazy. Yet I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was
listening--listening as if all of his sealed-up senses had turned in to
intensify the one of hearing.
Just about the time when the suspense had grown so keen that it seemed
as if it couldn't be borne a second longer, Morris, who was sitting in
at the office phone, called out sharply: "Long-distance says she has
Crow Gulch lumber camp!"
Mr. Van Britt jumped to take the phone, and we got one side of the
talk--our side--in shot-like sentences:
"That you, Bertram? All right; this is Van Britt, at Portal City. Take
one of the mules and ride for your life down the gulch to the station!
Get that? Stop Number Five and make her take siding quick. Report over
your own wire what you do. _Hurry!_"
By the time Mr. Van Britt got back to the train desk, the boss had his
pencil out and was figuring on Bertram's time margin. It was now
ten-twelve, and Five's time at Crow Gulch was ten-eighteen. The Crow
Gulch operator had just six minutes in which to get his mule and cover
the rough mile down the gulch.
"He'll never make it," said Tarbell, who knew the gulch road. "Our only
chance on that lay is that Five may happen to be a few minutes late--and
she was right on the dot at Banta."
There was nothing to do but wait, and the waiting was savage. Tarbell
had a nerve of iron, but I could see his hand shake as it lay on the
glass-topped table. The boss was cool enough outwardly, but I knew that
in his brain there was a heart-breaking picture of those two fast
passenger trains rushing together in the night among the hills with no
hint of warning to help them save themselves. Mr. Van Britt couldn't
keep still. He had his hands jammed in the side pockets of his coat and
was pacing back and forth in the little space between the train desk and
the counter railing.
At the different tables in the room the sounders were clicking away as
if nothing were happening or due to happen, and above the spattering din
and clatter you could hear the escapement of the big standard-time clock
on the wall, hammering out the seconds that might mean life or death to
two or three hundred innocent people.
In that horrible suspense the six minutes pulled themselves out to an
eternity for that little bunch of us in the despatcher's office who
could do nothing but wait. On the stroke of ten-eighteen, the time when
Five was due at Crow Gulch on her schedule, Tarbell tuned his relay to
catch the first faint tappings from the distant day-station. Another
sounder was silent. There was hope in the delay, and Morris voiced it.
"He's there, and he's too busy to talk to us," he suggested, in a hushed
voice; and Disbrow, the car-record man, added: "That's it; it'd take a
minute or two to get them in on the siding."
The second minute passed, and then a third, and yet there was no word
from Bertram. "Call him," snapped the boss to Tarbell, but before the
ex-cowboy's hand could reach the key, the sounder began to rattle out a
string of dots and dashes; ragged Morse it was, but we could all read it
only too plainly.
"Too late--mule threw me and I had to crawl and drag a game leg--Five
passed full speed at ten-nineteen--I couldn't make it."
I saw the boss's hands shut up as though the finger nails would cut into
the palms.
"That ends it," he said, with a sort of swearing groan in his voice; and
then to Tarbell: "You may as well call Kirgan and tell him to order out
the wrecking train. Then have Perkins make up a relief train while
you're calling the doctors. Van Britt, you go and notify the hospital
over your own office wire. Have my private car put into the relief, and
see to it that it has all the necessary supplies. And you'd better
notify the undertakers, too."
Great Joash! but it was horrible--for us to be hustling around and
making arrangements for the funeral while the people who were to be
gathered up and buried were still swinging along live and well, half of
them in the crookings among the Timber Mountain foot-hills and the other
half somewhere in the desert stretches below Sand Creek!
Tarbell had sent Disbrow to the phone to call Kirgan, and Mr. Van Britt
was turning away to go to his own office, when the chair in the corner
by the car-record table fell over backwards with a crash and Durgin came
staggering across the room. He was staring straight ahead of him as if
he had gone blind, and the sweat was running down his face to lose
itself in the straggling beard.
When he spoke his voice seemed to come from away off somewhere, and he
was still staring at the blank wall beyond the counter-railing.
"Did I--did I hear somebody say you're sending for the undertakers?" he
choked, with a dry rattle in his throat; and then, without waiting for
an answer: "While you're at it, you'd better get one for me ... there's
the money to pay him," and he tossed a thick roll of bank bills, wrapped
around with a rubber band, over to Tarbell at the train desk.
Naturally, the little grand-stand play with the bank roll made a
diversion, and that is why the muffled crash of a pistol shot came with
a startling shock to everybody. When we turned to look, the mischief was
done. Durgin had crumpled down into a misshapen heap on the floor and
the sight we saw was enough to make your blood run cold.