# Scientific Sprague/Chapter 3
### III The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three

AT ten o'clock on the second Tuesday after the return of the lately promoted chief night despatcher, Dan Connolly, from his wedding trip, the business of the Brewster wire office had settled down, momentarily at least, into the comfortable rut of routine. Everything was moving smoothly on the double division, and between the leisurely inscribing of the figured entries on the train-sheet, the fat, jolly-looking night chief had a chance to fill his corn-cob pipe and to swap a word of gossip now and then with Johnson, the car-record operator who, as "Wire-Devil" Bolton's successor, was clattering at his type-writer in the far corner of the bare room.
It was after he had finished typing the long "record" report from Red Butte that Johnson twisted himself in his chair to say: "Who is that fellow Scientific Sprague' that I've been hearing so much about since I came on the job, Dan?"
The fat despatcher chuckled reminiscently and sat back in his tilting chair.
"Mr. Sprague? He's a whole team, and an extra horse hitched on behind, Shorty; that's about what he is. Don't you ever go around advertising your freshness in the Timanyoni by giving it out that you don't know Mr. Calvin Sprague."
"I reckon I've already done done it, haven't I?" laughed the car-record man. "What if you fix me so I won't have to do it again?"
Connolly held a lighted match to the blackened bowl of the corn-cob, and then put both match and pipe aside to take the "train-passing" report of the incoming westbound "Quick-step" as it was clicked through the sounder from the first telegraph station east of Brewster.
"Mr. Sprague is about the biggest man that ever walked into this office, Shorty," he averred, after he had made the proper train-sheet entry for the approaching train. "Big up and down, big through the middle, big sideways, and biggest of all in his think-tank. He can look you over twice and tell you the exact size of the yellow spot on your liver; and if that won't do, he'll look you over again and tell you how all-fired near you came to breaking your bond record one night up at that little shack station you've been running in the mining country."
The newly appointed car-record man bounded out of his chair as if he had been shot.
"I—I didn't, Dan!" he protested, dry-lipped; "so help me God, I didn't!" And then, curiosity getting the better of the sudden shock: "How in Sam Hill did you know?"
Connolly grinned good-naturedly and made a motion with the flat of his hand as if he would reach across the room and push Johnson back into his chair.
"Take it plumb easy, kid," he laughed. "I was only talking through my hat—just hitting out in the dark to show you how Mr. Sprague could size you up if he wanted to. But you asked who he is: he's a friend of Mr. Maxwety's, and he lives in Washington when he's at home—does chemical stunts in one of the Government offices. He's happened to soak in here a couple of times when we were needing a bushel or two more brains than we could make out to rustle up among ourselves, and——"
The break came in an importunate chattering of the west-line sounder on Connolly's table, and the despatcher righted his tilted chair with a thump and fell upon his key. The car-record man sat back with his hands locked at the nape of his neck and looked on absently. Out of the din and clatter of the several sounders he could easily have picked the story that was coming from the west over Connolly's wire, but the trained operator's habit of ignoring the irrelevant wire chatter was upon him, and his first intimation of the nature of the story came in the fading of the ruddy flush in Connolly's full-moon cheeks and the uncontrollable trembling of the despatcher's left and unbusied hand.
Instantly the short-legged car-record operator left his chair and crossed the room to hang over Connolly's shoulder.
"What's the trouble, Dan?" he asked.
"It's just a little more of the same," breathed the fat one vindictively. "I don't know what in the devil has got into the trainmen lately; this dog-blasted railroad's getting so it runs itself! Here's Seventeen overrunning her orders and trying to make the west end of Tunnel Number Three against the Fast Mail. Nophi says he argued with 'em, but they said they had plenty of time and went on. By grabs 1 if I was Mr. Maxwell I'd make a sizzlin' red-hot example of some of these crazy chance-takers!"
Johnson was running his eye down the columns of figures in the time-table.
"I wouldn't worry till I had to," he put in. "The Mail's twenty minutes off her schedule, and that gives Seventeen thirty minutes to make the six miles from Nophi to the tunnel and the mile and a quarter more to take her through to the west-end siding. She'll make it all right."
"I know. But by Jasher! that ain't railroading," insisted Connolly. "Two months ago you wouldn't find a single train crew on the Short Line that'd take chances stealing sidings this way, and now they're all doing it. Besides, the tunnel's all tore up, with that electric-wiring gang working in it, and every crew on the west end knows it."
As he fumed, the despatcher rattled his key in the call for Junico, the only night station west of the tunnel at which there would be any chance of communicating with the off-time eastbound Fast Mail. He knew it was only a chance. If the Mail had made up no more than five of the twenty minutes, it would already have passed Junico.
At the close of the impatient call the circuit broke and Junico "signed in." Connolly asked his question in clipped abbreviations, and got his answer shot-like. "Number Six passing now." "Hold Six," snapped the despatcher hurriedly. For a full minute the sounder was silent. Then it began again. "Chased out quick as I could, but couldn't catch 'em," was Junico's incident-closing reply.
Connolly pounded with a fat fist upon the plate-glass top of his table in impotent wrath.
"There it is!" he gritted. "Now if anything happens to get in the way of them cussed chance-takers on Seventeen, there you are!"
Apparently there was nothing to be done but to await the event and to hope for an auspicious outcome. As Connolly had said, it wasn't railroading; and yet he knew well enough that on many railroads the stealing of sidings, the crawling up upon meeting-points by train crews hard pressed to make their schedules, is a violation of rules which is constantly winked at, and punished only when trouble ensues.
In the present case there should have been no trouble. With a clear thirty minutes in which to make less than eight miles, the time freight should be safely in on the siding at the west end of Tunnel Number Three some minutes before the Fast Mail could possibly cover its own intervening distance.
But on this particular Tuesday night the fates were inauspicious. Fifteen minutes farther along, after Johnson had gone back to his table in the corner, Connolly's west-wire sounder began to chatter furiously. The fat despatcher broke in promptly, and again the trembling fit seized upon the unbusied half of him.
"Oh, good Lord!" he groaned; and again: "Oh, good Lord!" Then the corridor door opened and Maxwell, the superintendent, came in, looking as he always did, the square-shouldered, square-jawed fighter of transportation battles, with a few streaks of youthful gray beginning to show in his tightly curled mustaches—a militant figure of a man giving a truthful impression of the fit and purposeful railroad field officer.
"What's the matter, Dan?" he demanded, making a quick push through the gate in the counter railing.
Connolly explained hastily.
"Seventeen tried to steal a siding on Six. Gallagher, the work-line operator at the electric gang's camp, has just called up to say that the freight's stuck in the tunnel—something off the track. A flagman has come back to the camp with the news, and he says the tunnel is blocked so they can't get through with a flag for Six."
"Good God, Dan—they've got to get through!" Maxwell exploded; and pushing the despatcher aside he cut in on the wire himself. There was a brief and brittle colloquy in which the emphatic word was made to do duty for entire sentences, a wait, and when the clicking began again the superintendent translated audibly, quite as if Connolly, listening with all of his five senses concentrated in the single one of hearing, were not taking the hopeful information as it came from the sounder.
"Stribling's there, and every sprinter in the camp is turning out to do a Marathon over the hill to the west end. Just the same, it will be touch and go if they make it in time to warn the Mail. How much late is Six?"
Connolly gave the time, making the proper deduction for the few minutes made up west of Junico. Maxwell glanced up at the time-standard clock on the wall.
"There is an even chance," he asserted hopefully. "There ought to be somebody in that mob of wire-stringers who can run the two miles in time to head off the Mail. How did you come to let things get into such a snarl as this, Dan?"
Again Connolly explained, and he did not try to make it easy for the offending crew of Number Seventeen. "Jasper didn't ask for orders at Nophi. He simply took snap judgment and went along, leaving the Nophi man to tell me after the thing was done."
"Jasper and his engineer will get thirty days on this, no matter how it turns out!" snapped the boss. "There is a good deal too much of this rule-breaking lately, and it's got to stop short. I won't have it. . . . Suffering cats! I wish those sprinters would hurry up and get word to us! My God, Dan, if that fast train gets into the tunnel before they catch it——"
A thunderous clangor in the station yard below the office windows cut into the sentence, and again the superintendent looked up at the clock.
"That's the 'Quickstep,' isn't it?" he said. "She's bringing an old friend of ours from the East, Dan—Mr. Sprague."
For a moment Connolly was able to take his mind off of the tragedy or near-tragedy which was working itself out to some kind of a climax in the far-away Hophra Mountains to the westward.
"You asked him to come and tell us why we're having this fit of extra cussedness all over the line?" he asked.
"Oh, no; the Department of Agriculture is sending him to make some soil tests in the Timanyoni. He writes that he is likely to be with us for a month or two."
"I'm glad, " said Connolly simply. "Somehow, you feel as if you'd got a good solid mountain at your back when Mr. Sprague's around. I wonder if he'll come up here before he goes over to the hotel?"
Even as he spoke the door opened, and the man who looked like the elder brother of all the football "backs" in the intercollegiate try-out came in.
"Hello, hello, hello," he said jovially; "same old shop—same old worries, eh? How are you, Maxwell? And you, Mr. Connolly? Glad to see you both. What's the trouble this time? Anything a journeyman chemist can help you out on?"
Maxwell's mustaches took a sharper uptilt. "How did you know there was any trouble, Calvin?" he demanded quickly.
The big man leaned across the counter rail and laughed softly.
"There is nothing very occult about that," he rejoined. "You have it written all over your faces, both of you; and it is also written in the face of that young man over in the corner, who would like to hear what we're saying and can't quite compass it."
Maxwell explained briefly.
"Two of our trains are trying to get together on a single track up at Tunnel Number Three in the Hophras. There is a break-down in the tunnel, and half a hundred men are sprinting over the mountain to try to head off the other train."
"What? half a hundred? There ought to be at least one or two good sprinters among that many—somebody who can make your touch-down for you. How does it come that you happened to have as big a crowd as that on the side-lines—at this time of night?"
The superintendent went into details far enough to account for the crowd of volunteer rescuers.
"We are electrifying Tunnel Number Three, and the contractors' camp is at this end of the tunnel. It was the contractors' operator who sent in the alarm, and his chief engineer turned out the entire camp for us when I told him what to do."
"And you are waiting to get word?"
"Yes; waiting and hoping. By great good luck the Fast Mail is behind time. If it hasn't made up——"
A fierce clattering of the sounder on Connolly's table tore into the sentence, and in the midst of it Maxwell shot out his arms and drew a deep breath.
"Thank God!" he ejaculated, "they've caught the Mail! Now I'll go with you, Calvin." And then to Connolly: "Straighten things out for those fellows at the tunnel as quickly as you can, Dan, and get the wheels in motion again. Order up the engine from Second Seventeen if they need power to get that raffle out of the tunnel, and have somebody send over to Lopez Canyon for Benson to take charge. If you want to reach me, I'll be over at the hotel."
At the Hotel Topaz, across the plaza from the railroad head-quarters building, Maxwell saw his friend and sometime college classmate properly registered for a comfortable suite, and otherwise hospitably provided for before the pair of them went to smoke their bedtime pipes in the deserted writing-room facing the plaza.
"It's just my luck, Calvin, to be homeless about every other time you happen along," Maxwell apologized, when the pipes were lighted. "Alice's father and mother came through from California a few days ago, and carried her and the children off with them to New York and the Long Island shore. I'm a widower."
"That's all right," laughed the big man. "I'm going to be here in your midst for a month or more, and I wouldn't think of camping down on you for that length of time, anyway. To-morrow you'll chase out and help me find a couple of office rooms where I can set up a small laboratory; and after that I'll go out in the woods and dig dirt—which it is my official nature so to do. That's enough about me. How are you getting along with the railroad wreckers?"
Maxwell lighted his pipe and answered categorically.
"We have heard nothing more, directly, from the Wall Street people since that break they made a few weeks ago trying to hold up the proxies I was sending to President Ford in New York," was Maxwell's summing up of the current situation. "But Ford assures me from time to time that they haven't quit. The latest competition rate ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission makes it absolutely necessary for them to own or control a shorter line than their present one to Southern California points—this in order to protect their holdings in the big stock pool. They'd have what they need if they could corral the Nevada Short Line and tie it in with the Transcontinental's branch at Copah. Ford says they seem to consider it only a question of time until they absorb us. The T-C. people are spending a lot of money on their Jack's Canyon branch, putting it in shape for heavy traffic; and they can't hope to get the traffic unless they get us."
"This tunnel trouble to-night had nothing to do with the fight, I suppose?" queried Sprague reflectively.
"Oh, no. That was merely the outgrowth of a curious sort of letting down that comes once in a while on every railroad, no matter how well it may be manned or handled. Our let-down has been coming on gradually ever since we got over the 'Wire Devil' scare. Men, good men who have been with us for years, take chances that would make your hair stand on end. Like this to-night," and he went on to describe the causes which had led up to the near-tragedy at Tunnel Number Three.
"I see," said Sprague. And then: "You say you are electrifying? I thought that was a luxury in which only the rich Eastern roads could indulge; and then only for their city terminals."
"It isn't exactly a luxury in our case; it's a working necessity. Tunnel Number Three is part of a shortening project carried out two years ago. It dodges under Burnt Mountain and cuts out five and two-tenths miles of the costliest, crookedest track in Tumble-Tree Canyon; track that we were never able to keep open for ten days in succession during the summer season of cloud-bursts and heavy storms. It is a timbered tunnel a mile and a quarter long, and the greater part of it is through loose, dry shale that practically kiln-dries the timber arching. From the time we began using it we've been fighting fire in it almost daily."
"Just so," said the chemistry expert. "So now you are putting in electricity to get rid of the fire-throwing locomotives. Where do you get your juice?"
"In Lopez Canyon, about three miles from the eastern portal, there is an excellent water-power. Eventually we shall use electricity for the entire hill-pull over the Hophras and so make a very handsome reduction in our fuel account."
"Good!" was the approving comment; and then the commentator came back to the details. "Electricity is another of my pet hobbies," he confessed. "What company is installing you—General Electric?"
"No; a New York firm—Grafton Brothers. I never heard of them until they came here."
Only the keenest of observers would have noted Sprague's accession of interest at the mention of the brotherly firm name.
"The Graftons, eh?" he said slowly. "How did you come to give them the job?"
"We had nothing to do with it out here. The deal was made in New York, with the Pacific Southwestern officials."
Sprague was nodding absently as if in answer to some unspoken query of his own when he said, "Have you ever met either of the Graftons, Dick?"
"No; they are only a name to me. Their representative on our job is an engineer named Stribling; a fine young fellow and a cracker-jack in his business. He was the man who turned out the crowd of sprinters for us to-night."
"Oho! general favorite all around, is he?"
Maxwell laughed dryly. "He has captured everybody except the one man who has had the most to do with him; that's Benson, our chief engineer. Jack is a sort of two-fisted bluffer himself—though it is only fair to say that he usually makes his bluff good—and I think he'd always bet on the field against a favorite. He says Stribling is too smooth; too damned smooth, is the way he generally phrases it."
"I shall have great pleasure in making the acquaintance of this Mr. Benson of yours some day," said the man from Washington. And after that he smoked on in silence until Maxwell was about to bid him good-night and suggest a bell-hop and the elevator—did suggest them, in fact.
"No, I'm not sleepy," was the rejoinder. "I was just thinking about railroads and tunnels and the like. If I were a railroad man, Dick, I believe I should have a crazy horror of a tunnel."
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know; superstition, perhaps. You know the old saying:
Every superstition
Is a foolish superstition
Save the little superstition
Of me.
Maxwell laughed at the quaint conceit, though he was prompt to make the timely application.
"That would be true enough for us if Tunnel Number Three should ever be wiped out," he admitted. "As I have said, it is in dry shale, a good part of it, and it had to be carefully supported by follow-up timbering as we went along in the digging. I wanted Ford to let us keep the roundabout track in commission, against emergencies, but he decided it would be too expensive—as it probably would have been."
"And you have let the roundabout track lapse?"
"Oh, yes; the cloud-bursts of the first summer wiped it out for us completely."
"So this tunnel is really the neck of your five-hundred-mile-long man, is it?"
"It is. If Burnt Mountain should happen to fall in on us one of these fine nights—which it won't—we'd be definitely out of the game as a through line. It would bottle us up for weeks, if not for months."
A slow smile spread itself over Sprague's smooth-shaven, good-natured face.
"If I had as tender a neck as that, Dick, I'd have night sweats thinking about it; I should, for a fact," he averred. And then, after a pause: "Ah; I've been waiting for that. The lights have just gone out in your office over there in the railroad building. Who is so industrious as to stay on the job until nearly midnight?"
"It is Harvey Calmaine, my paragon of a chief clerk. He's a mighty hard-working young fellow—a treasure, as you may remember. He has been getting up some statistics for me, and he won't take the time out of the working day."
"H'm, yes; he is a fine young fellow, Dick, and no mistake." Then, after he had refilled his pipe: "He still limps a little from that foot-scorching episode in Bart Holladay's back room—when they were torturing him to make him tell what he had done with the proxies—doesn't he?"
Maxwell turned upon his companion with a frown of mystification wrinkling between his eyes.
"How did you know that, Calvin?" he demanded.
"Some fine day, Dick, you'll learn to use your eyes and ears. I saw young Calmaine walking across from the railroad building just now—as you did, only you didn't remark it consciously; and at the present moment I hear him coming through the lobby, with the limp very distinctly noticeable in the click of his heels upon the tiled floor. And now I'll venture a guess: he is looking for you, and when he finds you he will give you a telegram."
Almost as he spoke, Calmaine came up behind them. As Sprague had predicted, he had a telegram in his hand, which he gave to his superior with a word in explanation. "That is only a translation. The original is a cipher, and I locked it up in the office safe. It came just as I was getting ready to knock off."
Maxwell read the telegram and passed it on to Sprague.
"It's a little odd that Ford should use the same figure of speech that you did a few minutes ago," he remarked. And then, with a short laugh, "If I were inclined to be superstitious I might wonder if your marvellous second mentality wasn't looking over Calmaine's shoulder as he translated that."
Sprague had glanced at the message. It read:
"Big Nine still feeling for a strangle-hold on us. Look sharp that it does not get its fingers on your windpipe. "Ford."
The big man passed the square of paper back to his friend and stood up to stretch his arms over his head, yawning like a sleepy farm-hand.
"I've got to set up my shop and go to work sometime to-morrow," he said. "Let's go upstairs and turn in for a few lines of sleep."
"Not me, just yet," said Maxwell, with a curt disregard for his English. "I'm going over to the shack for a little while."
"What for?" questioned the sleepy one, with half-absent interest.
"To try and get Benson on the wire and have him post guards in that tunnel. There is no reason on earth for it, but between you and Ford you've got me nervous on this choking proposition. Good-night, old man. Breakfast with me in the morning, and afterward I'll take you out and steer you up against some of the real-estate robbers and get them to find you an office."
On the following day the superintendent was as good as his word in the office-finding matter, and by noon the Government soil-tester was comfortably established in a couple of rooms on the second floor of the Kinzie Building, in the same corridor with Mr. Robert Stillings, the local attorney for the railroad company.
The two-room suite gave him an office—which he said was about as necessary as an auxiliary tail to a cat—and a second room in the rear which he speedily transformed into a working laboratory, using the young man named Tarbell, who still figured on the railroad pay-rolls as a "relief operator," for his errand-boy and man-of-all-work in securing the needed furnishings and equipment.
Later in the day Maxwell brought his brother-in-law, "Billy" Starbuck, around to the new office, introducing him as a mine owner and a gentleman of easy leisure, and one who knew every square acre of soil, arable or otherwise, in the entire Timanyoni.
"Billy has nothing on earth to do, and, like me, he is a temporary widower," Maxwell explained. "We married sisters, and his wife has gone with mine and the Fairbairns to dabble in the salt sea waves at Norman Towers. Make use of him as you can, only don't take his word for the gentleness of the horse you're going to ride. He is an absolutely truthful man on any other subject, but he never misses a chance to play a bucking bronc' against a tenderfoot."
Sprague foregathered at once with the clean-cut, rather shabbily clothed young mine owner whose principal affectations were his worn khaki suit, a cowboy Stetson tilted carelessly to the back of his head, and a vocabulary of cow-camp slang which happened to be no measure of his knowledge of grammatical English. Before he left the newly established laboratory in the Kinzie Building, Starbuck had engaged to go with the expert on a soil-collecting trip through the Park, the trip to begin early in the morning of the following day, and to continue indefinitely; or until the chief soil-hunter should be sufficiently saddle-sore to wish to cut it short.
"I like that brother-in-law of yours a whole heap, Dick," was Sprague's verdict when he met the superintendent at dinner in the Topaz café that evening. "He is a man with a history, isn't he?"
The queer look which Sprague seemed to be able to evoke at will in his table-mate crept into Maxwell's eyes.
"Did you ever meet Billy before I took him into your office this afternoon?" he asked.
"No."
"Ever hear of him before?"
"No."
"All right; now I'm going to try you out good and hard. You intimate that he is a man with a history. What is his history?"
The expert sat back, thrust his hands into his pockets, and for a moment seemed to go into a trance, with his gaze fixed upon the ornate decorations of the café ceiling.
"I'll make what you will probably call a series of wild guesses," he said at length, "prefacing them with the assurance, which you must take at its face value, that Mr. Starbuck has told me nothing whatever of himself—at least, not consciously."
"Go on," said Maxwell.
"In the first place, he is an educated man—a college man—and he talks cowboy English only because it suits his fancy to talk it. Also, though he wears khaki and a cowboy hat, he is quite as much at home in evening clothes as you or I. Am I right, so far?"
"Yes."
"Beyond that, he is a man of many accomplishments, most of which he is at some pains to conceal. In his younger youth, if not later, he was a bit wild—too much money to spend, I take it—and the wildness, or some of its consequences, landed him in jail; no, it wasn't a jail—it was a penitentiary."
Maxwell's look of amused half-triumph had changed to one of sober consternation
"Calvin!" he exclaimed, in low tones. "You must know; you must have heard——"
"I pledge you my word, Dick; I am cutting this out of whole cloth, so far as any outside information is concerned. But let me go on. Whatever Mr. Starbuck was, or whatever he did, he was never a criminal in the true sense of the word. So far from it, I can assure you of what you doubtless know for yourself; that he is a man to tie to—a true man and a loyal friend and kinsman. I'm going to take the field with him to-morrow morning, and we shall come back brothers of the blood. That's a measure of my regard for him."
Maxwell put down his knife and fork and said what clansman relationship demanded.
"Listen," he began, "and see how frightfully near you have shaved the truth in your 'guesses.' In his early manhood Billy was a cowpunch—in the college-graduate class, as you intimate. He discovered a mine, sold it for a fat wad, and went to New York, where he blew in the wad to the final dollar."
Sprague nodded. "That was the wild side-step that I couldn't quite place," he said, and the superintendent went on.
"When his money was gone he went to work as a stenographer for a firm of brokers, and was holding the job down when the safe was tapped and a sum of money stolen. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a term in Sing Sing, where he served his time. It was late in the first year of his freedom before a few of us who were his friends here in the West found out that he had voluntarily gone to prison to save a fellow-clerk—a half-dead, broken-down scoundrel with a wife and children, a sick mother, and a crippled sister."
"Fine!" Sprague was beginning to say; but Maxwell interposed.
"No, hold on; you mustn't set him down as an impossible hero. He'd be the first to object to that. I said 'voluntarily,' and it really amounted to that, though when Billy promised not to betray the scoundrel he had no idea that he was going to be made to suffer in his place. Nevertheless, since the promise had been given, Billy made good."
Sprague smiled. "Entirely without prejudice to a hearty and man-sized hatred for the man who let him go in the hole, you'd say?"
"Exactly; entirely without prejudice to that very human passion."
"Well," said the expert; "my summing up was true, anyhow. I was sure he had that kind of stuff in him, and that he had been tried out along some such line as that."
Maxwell nodded, and then he became insistent.
"Now tell me—you've got to tell me, Calvin, how you did it."
Sprague's mellow, booming laugh earned him more than one curious glance from the surrounding tables.
"I can no more tell you, Dick, than I can explain why, to a majority of people, white is white and black is black. For my own satisfaction I define the 'how' as a natural growth, favored by habit and training, of the scientific attitude; the mental slant which, if given free play, almost unconsciously notes, marks, deduces, reasons; deeming nothing too small or too trifling to go toward making up the whole of any conclusion. More than that, in my own case the faculty is able to hold itself workably aloof from the ordinary distractions of conversation and the like. It goes on, using the outward senses when it needs them, to be sure, but only as aids to the developing of its own little film in its own little dark- room. Do you get the idea?"
"Only partly. Even science has to have its raw materials to work on."
"Oh, yes; and the materials lie all around us constantly, if we only know how to weigh and measure them. In Starbuck's case, now, there were little lapses from the cowboy talk to tell me that he was an educated man; also, he has the true modesty of those who can really do things. Then there were gaps in his talk, little loopholes, you might call them, through which I could look back through the years and get glimpses of that period of dissipation. Each glimpse revealed a tiny ear-mark of the man who knows—who can only know—because he has been there."
"Go on," urged Maxwell, still only half-convinced that the deductions were not, in the last analysis, only shrewd guesses. "None of these things told you that he had been in prison."
"No; as to that, I'll admit I set a harmless trap for him. I fancied once, and then again, that I saw the prison look in his eye; the quick side-glance that a long-term prisoner learns to give without turning his head—notice it the next time you happen to be in a penitentiary, if you are ever so unfortunate as to visit one."
"I have noticed it," said Maxwell, and the expert went on.
"When I saw that, the scientific mentality said instantly, 'That look wasn't acquired in a jail term—it took longer.' The next suggestion followed as a matter of course. Every long-term man answers to a number instead of to his name. At the moment I was numbering the bottles of chemicals which Tarbell had been buying for me, and I turned the talk upon my peculiar system of labelling—by numbers. Starbuck himself did the rest. He said, 'I reckon I wouldn't rent even a post-office box if it had to have a number on it.' That was all, but it was enough. "
Maxwell was toying with his dessert.
"As I have said several times before, Calvin, you are almost uncanny now and then. You know too much. Some fine day it will strike in on you—sour on you and make you sick."
Sprague's mellow laugh sounded again.
"I haven't begun to tell you all I know. For example, I might say that all through this spell of gossip about your brother-in-law you've been giving the subject no more than a scant half of your mind. The other half has been tussling with your railroad involvement, and you've been wondering where the Big Nine is going to land on you next. What do you hear from Tunnel Number Three?"
"Nothing much; or at least nothing out of the ordinary. They got the tangle straightened out last night after a time. Benson wires that Stribling put the entire electrifying force under his orders, and was all kinds of nice about it."
"‘Electrifying,’" repeated Sprague musingly. "A slight change in the spelling would make it 'electrocuting,' wouldn't it? How long will it be before the installation is completed?"
"They are starting the turbines in Lopez Canyon to-day, for a try-out. The wires are all strung, and Stribling is installing some sort of a safety contrivance in the tunnel as a finishing touch; a switch of some kind that will shunt the current in case any accident should happen to a train in transit. It's all Greek to me—and to Benson, for that matter. Neither of us knows enough about electric installations to keep us from spoiling."
"But the date," said Sprague, with the amiable persistence which was one of his chief characteristics. "When will the current be turned on?"
"Stribling sends word that he will be ready to cut the power in on the tunnel wires to-morrow evening at six o'clock, and asks if I'm going to be on hand to see it done."
Sprague was deftly clipping the tip from one of the cigars which the waiter had brought, preparatory to lighting it.
"Do you happen to have a timetable in your pocket?" he asked.
Maxwell had one, and he passed it across the table. The Government man postponed the lighting of his cigar and began to turn the leaves of the official schedule hand-book. At the pages listing the trains on the Hophra Division he paused and ran his finger slowly down the columns giving the movement of traffic to and through Tunnel Number Three.
"You would have to leave here early in the afternoon to reach the tunnel by six—or rather to be there at six—wouldn't you?" he asked, returning the time-table.
Maxwell shook his head and smiled. "You forget that I'm not tied to regular trains on my own piece of railroad," he suggested. "I couldn't afford to go up on Three and spend two or three hours loafing around. If I go, I shall order out a car and engine and make a quick job of it. It is only sixty-three miles, and I can make it special in an hour and thirty minutes or thereabouts."
"I see," said Sprague reflectively. "Leaving Brewster about three-thirty, say?"
"Yes; that would be plenty early enough."
"But you don't know yet whether you will go at all?"
"No. There is a delegation of ore-shippers coming down from Red Butte to-morrow, and I'll be busy with it a good part of the day."
After that the talk drifted to other things, among them the expert's mission to the Timanyoni which, he admitted in confidence, was the preliminary to a possible Government reclamation project. And finally, when Maxwell broke away to go back to his office across the plaza, his going or not going to the tunnel to be present at the turning on of the power current on the following day was left undecided.
According to the prearranged programme, Sprague left Brewster at daylight the next morning, riding with Starbuck to the upper valley of the Gloria where the first of the soil specimens were to be collected. But for some reason, saddle-soreness on the part of the tenderfoot, or another, the trip was a short one, ending a little after noon, when the two came jogging back through the Brewster streets.
From their corner table in the Topaz café, where they ate their late luncheon together, they saw Maxwell entertaining a party of the ore-shippers; and later Sprague, whose half-absent gaze seemed to miss nothing, saw a good-looking young fellow in shabby, work-stained brown duck push through the swinging glazed doors opening from the lobby and go around to whisper to Maxwell at the table of entertainment. Sprague called his companion's attention to the new-comer.
"That will be Mr. Benson, chief engineer of the railroad, for a guess," he ventured; and Starbuck nodded.
"Right you are. It's Jack; and to look at him you sure wouldn't think he was a married man, with a nice, tidy little wife at home, would you, now? He always looks as if he had just tumbled out of the dirtiest car in his work-train."
The soil expert smiled leniently. "Possibly he is here on business, and sometimes business won't wait," he suggested. "See; your brother-in-law is excusing himself to the ore people and is going out with Benson. After we finish our luncheon I'll ask you to do me a little favor, Mr. Starbuck. Find Mr. Maxwell and tell him we're back—just on the chance that he didn't see us over here in this dark corner of ours. I'd like to meet Mr. Benson, if it can be managed without too much trouble."
Starbuck's keen gray eyes searched the round, double-chinned face of his newly made acquaintance shrewdly.
"I reckon I'm on," he said slowly. "I was beginning to climb on before you said anything. That New York crowd is after Dick and his railroad with a black-snake whip; I know that much. Is the whip getting ready to pop again?"
"I'm a little afraid it is, Mr. Starbuck, and I am hoping that Mr. Benson will be able to tell us whether it is or isn't," was the even-toned rejoinder. "At all events, I'd like to meet him and have a talk with him—some time before three o'clock. Bear the hour in mind, will you, please? and try to arrange it for me."
"Sure," said Starbuck; and when they rose from the table he went in search of the superintendent and Benson, leaving his luncheon companion to go around to the Kinzie Building laboratory alone.
It was something less than half an hour after Sprague had stripped his coat and gone to work on the soil specimens of the morning's gathering when Starbuck came in, bringing Maxwell and Benson. As Starbuck made it appear, the visit was merely a neighborly drop-in, with no better excuse than the expressed purpose of introducing Sprague to a possible helper.
"I thought you might be able to use Jack in some way, Mr. Sprague," he said, after the introduction was a fact accomplished. "He sure knows a heap more about Timanyoni dirt than anybody else between the two ranges; carries right smart of it around on his clothes a good deal of the time."
Benson took the joke in good part; and when Sprague had found and opened a box of his irreproachable cigars, the talk, touching lightly at first upon Sprague's business in the West, came around, or was brought around, to Benson's part in the electrification job. The big expert with the fighting jaw and the sympathetic gray eyes had a way of leading even a reticent man to tell of his troubles; and Benson, knowing the part Sprague had taken in defeating the two previous attempts to wreck the Short Line, felt free to unburden himself.
"I can't make Maxwell, here, believe that Stribling is anything but the fine, open-handed young fellow that he seems to be; but I want to tell you three together what I have often told Maxwell: I've got a hunch. I don't know a blessed thing. Stribling has always treated me fine, and he is a fellow you can hardly help cottoning to, right from the jump. But some way something inside of me keeps on telling me that he's too smooth—too damned smooth. Last night, for instance, in that derailment muddle—there wasn't anything he wouldn't do, didn't do, to help us out. He packed his men into the tunnel so thick that nobody could get near that derailed car; in fact, he had the car on the rails and the train backing out before I could get any action at all."
"What caused the derailment, Mr. Benson?" Sprague put in quietly.
"That was one of the things that made me hot. Stribling's messing in made it impossible for anybody to tell. There was nothing the matter with the track or with the car, so far as I could see after the thing was over. Bamberg, the engineer who was pulling the train, swears that somebody flagged him down with a red light when he was about half-way through the tunnel, and he stopped. Then the red changed to white and gave him the 'go-ahead.' When he tried to start his train, this box-car, somewhere along in the middle of things, jumped the track and blocked the tunnel. He felt the jerk and stopped again."
Sprague waved a hand in token of his complete satisfaction.
"Suppose we ignore this train tangle for the present and come to other things," he interposed. "I've been wondering if you could describe for me, briefly, the details of this tunnel installation, Mr. Benson?"
"Why, yes; it's simple enough—it's merely a trolley line on a big scale: two heavy copper trolley wires strung through on catenary brackets, with double insulation. That's all, except the safety-switches—cut-outs—one at each end and one in the middle of the tunnel."
"Ah?" said the expert, mildly interested at last; "one in the middle, you say? What is that for?"
"It is the real safety device, Stribling says; the others are merely mechanical cut-outs for the use of the wire repairers. He was explaining it to me this morning when he was connecting it in with the power wires. It's an ordinary oil-protected switch so adjusted that in case an accident happens to a train in the tunnel the circuit will be broken automatically and the live-wire current cut out. It's a good thing, you'd say. It would make your flesh creep to think what it would mean to have those high-power wires short-circuiting into a wreck."
"We won't think of it," said the big man quizzically. "We'll think rather of this Mr. Stribling and your—thus far—unexplained suspicions. How did he contrive to send you down here to-day?"
Benson looked up quickly.
"How did you know he sent me? I didn't say he did, did I? But I guess that is what it amounts to. He made it a sort of personal matter; urged me to come and bring Mr. Maxwell back with me; said that on a job as big as ours he didn't want to take any chances with his reputation as an electrical engineer or leave any room for a misunderstanding. He'd like to have Maxwell go foot by foot over the installation and see that everything is all right and safe before the power is turned on and the first electric train is sent through."
Sprague put his face in his hands and for a few seconds the silence in the makeshift laboratory was unbroken. Then suddenly he came to life again.
"You were telling us about this internal safety device," he broke out abruptly. "It's an oil-switch, you say?"
"Yes; there is an iron tank to hold the oil, and——"
"Hold on; where do you find room in the tunnel for a tank?"
"In one of the side excavations. When we were driving the tunnel we left side niches every two hundred feet or so; safety-holes for the men in blasting, and places where we could store dynamite and tools out of danger and out of the way."
"Stop. Was this particular dodge-hole where the safety switch is placed ever used for dynamite storing?"
"Yes; there are a lot of empty boxes in it now. In the arching, the timber-setters had covered them in, I suppose, and they were overlooked in the cleaning out."
"You are sure they are empty?"
"Oh, yes; they're empty all right. Stribling called my attention to them this morning, and I kicked over two or three of them, at his suggestion, just to make sure that they were empty."
"I see; he called your attention to them, did he? That is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as this oil-switch you've been trying to describe for me. Go over it again, will you?"
The young chief engineer was evidently disappointed. The scientist of whose gifts he had heard so much seemed to have a brain in which pertinacity, the pertinacity which clings helplessly to trivial and perfectly obvious things, was the overshadowing faculty.
"I don't know that I can make it any plainer," he said, with a touch of impatience. "It's just an ordinary electric circuit-breaker, the same as they use on street-cars, and it is buried in oil to keep it from arc-ing—as all switches are when they're under voltages as high as ours will be. The mechanism is suspended in a tank by its own wires, and the tank is filled with oil. I was there when they were filling the tank this morning, and Stribling poured a queer sirupy mess in on top of it—some patent stuff to keep the oil from thickening under exposure, he said."
"A patent mixture, eh? I'm interested in patents," said the listener, going off at another of the blind tangents. "How did it come—in a can?"
"Yes; in four square cans, holding about a gallon or so each, I should say. They were packed in a box—like varnish cans, you know—only they were taller and not so big in section."
"I suppose you weren't near enough to notice any name or advertisement on these cans, were you?"
Benson had by this time lost all hope of finding anything like continuity in the big man's mind, but he answered the query.
"Yes, I was near enough; Stribling was up on the tank and I passed the cans up to him, one at a time—and spilled the stuff all over me doing it. There wasn't any name on them. They were just plain square tin cans; that's all."
Sprague got up and crossed over to Benson's chair.
"Spilled it on you, eh? Is this the stain of it on your coat?" he asked; and when Benson nodded: "It's too bad to spoil a perfectly good working-coat that way. Suppose you let me have it and I'll see if I can't take those spots out of it."
Benson obeyed, half-contemptuously, and, together with the two who had taken no part in the colloquy, looked on curiously while the expert, who had apparently lost all interest in everything save the coat-cleaning, swiftly treated the stained patches with various chemicals, put the resultant washings into a beaker and began to add ingredients from sundry bottles on the laboratory shelves, holding the beaker to the light after each fresh addition to note if there were changing colors in the solution.
At the close of the rapidly conducted experiment he poured a little of the solution into a tiny test-tube, which he proceeded to heat over the flame of a small alcohol lamp. This part of whatever experiment he was attempting appeared to be unsuccessful. Almost immediately the test-tube cracked with a miniature explosion, scattering bits of broken glass and extinguishing the flame of the little lamp.
Sprague tossed the neck of the shattered glass tube aside and returned the brown-duck shooting-coat to its owner. Benson put it on, and was curious enough to say: "Did you think you could find out what Stribling's protective mixture was from those grease-spots?"
"Mere force of habit," laughed the chemist, putting on his own coat. "I'm obliged to analyze everything I get hold of, you know; it's a sort of disease with me, I guess."
"But could you tell what it was, just from those discolored washings?" queried Maxwell.
"Perfectly. Mr. Stribling's 'patent' is a compound in which the chief ingredient is a grease derived from the spent lye of the soap-makers, and one of the principal uses of which in the arts is, as Mr. Stribling says, to keep oils, and other things, from drying out." Then, more pointedly to the superintendent: "I suppose you'll go up to the tunnel and look the job over, making our careful young friend Stribling entirely happy, won't you?"
Maxwell looked at his watch.
"Perhaps I'd better. Benson wants to get back, anyway. Will you two go along?"—to Sprague and Starbuck.
"I don't mind," said the expert, with a barely perceptible nod to Starbuck; and after he had rearranged the chemicals on his newly made shelves the four left the office and had themselves dropped to the ground floor of the building.
It was while they were walking two and two down the street that Sprague dropped a few steps behind with Starbuck and passed him a carefully wrapped package which he took from under his coat.
"I have another little experiment in mind, Mr. Starbuck," he said in low tones. "When we are on our way through the tunnel, watch your opportunity to drop out of the procession long enough to empty the contents of that package into the patent grease, which you will find, not floating on the oil, but in some sort of a receptacle let into the top of the oil-tank of that safety contrivance which Mr. Benson has so accurately described for us. I'm curious enough to want to prove up on my analysis of a few minutes ago—to see if it was correct."
"What will happen if it was correct?"
"Nothing; nothing alarming, I assure you. But be careful not to get any of the stuff in that package on your hands when you break the paraffin seals. And perhaps it might be as well if you don't let our young electrical friend see you do it. He might think we were messing in where we had no business to."
Starbuck made a sign of complete understanding, and a few minutes later, when they reached the main street, made a time-saving suggestion.
"Suppose you folks take a taxi to the round-house," he said. "I'll mosey up to the despatcher's office and get your clear-track orders for you."
Maxwell approved the suggestion and they separated, Starbuck catching a passing electric car for the plaza-fronting railroad head-quarters, and Maxwell impressing the first auto hack he could find to take the remaining three of them directly to the western yards. The hackman drove across the city and let them out at the nearest street crossing, and from thence they walked the final hundred yards over the ties of the shop track.
At the roundhouse door they met a big, bearded man whose carefully creased brown hat and rather vociferous business suit would have marked him elsewhere as a gentleman of elegant, if somewhat precarious, leisure. Judson Bascom was this gentleman's name, and he was comparatively a new-comer in the Short Line service; having been appointed to succeed Fred Dawson, master mechanic, promoted.
Bascom was stooping to pat a stray dog, but he rose to his feet when the three came down upon him.
"You're the man we're looking for, Bascom," said Maxwell shortly. "I want a light engine to go up to Tunnel Number Three. What have you got in?"
The big master mechanic twiddled the bunch of charms on his watch-fob, and the stray dog began to sniff warily at Benson's heels.
"The Nine-fifteen's got fire in her; will she do?"
"Yes. Get me a crew as quickly as you can. I want a man who isn't afraid to run."
The man in the brown hat and the loud plaids dragged out a fat gold watch and shook his head.
"I guess that'll be me. There's nobody 'round, and I suppose you wouldn't want to wait until I can send the caller out after somebody?"
"No; I'm in a hurry," snapped the boss. "Let's get a move. My car is in the shop, so you can couple onto that caboose over there on the split track. There are four of us to go, and we'd crowd you in the cab."
Big and leisurely-looking as he was, the master mechanic made good time. In a minute or two he had the smart, light eight-wheeler on the turn-table, with the blower roaring, a red-headed pit-boy to fire, and half a dozen roundhouse men to put their shoulders to the table-levers. The shifting took five minutes more; and by that time a switching-engine, with Starbuck hanging from the step, came racing down the yard from the mile-away head-quarters.
Starbuck swung off before the switcher came to a stop, and joined the three who were waiting at the step of the caboose.
"Hell's a-poppin'," he said laconically. "Davis hasn't got a single west wire that he can use. They all went out, blink, about twenty minutes ago."
"What's that?" demanded Maxwell "Not all of them, surely!"
"Every blamed one—commercial wires and all. Can't get a whisper out of anything west of Little Butte. He says it acts like a general 'ground,' and then again it don't."
The nattily dressed master mechanic had dropped from his engine-step to come and join the group at the caboose. Maxwell put him in possession of the blockading fact in a brief sentence.
"The wires are dead and we'll have to bluff our way from siding to siding. Are you game for it, Bascom?"
The big man inclined his head. "I guess so," he said.
"All right. Go to Little Butte for the first lap. There is nothing in the way between here and the junction. All aboard, gentlemen."
The start was made briskly enough, but two miles beyond the yard-limits the caboose-car chucked noisily as Bascom slowed for the single-span bridge over the Gloria.
"Good Gad!" raged Maxwell, jumping up and jerking the air-whistle cord for full speed ahead. "If he's going to slow up for every trestle we come to, we'll never get anywhere!"
"We can prod him," said Benson.
For the few miles intervening between the bridge and Little Butte the master mechanic did not need prodding. Taking the air-whistle hint for what it meant, he hurled the wild train around the curves and over the tangents wholly without regard for the comfort of the four men who vainly tried to keep their seats on the bunk benches in the caboose. At Silver Switch the landscape was merely a blur; and in rounding the great side-cut at the Butte bluff the short car shrieked and groaned and seemed to be riding like a toe-balancer on the outer rail.
At the Little Butte stop the four made a dash for the operator's office, where Bascom presently joined them. There was no information to be got out of Wooffert, the station agent. His wires were working north on the Red Butte branch, but there was a dead "ground" somewhere to the westward. Broken snatches were still coming through from Caliger, ten miles up the main line west, and the instruments acted as if somebody had been pouring cold molasses into them.
Maxwell had his pocket time-card out, though he did not need to consult it. "Sixteen and Eighteen are somewhere between here and Nophi," he announced. "We've got to find and pass them as we can. Let her go, Bascom."
A half-minute later the up-valley race was begun. In the lower reaches the tangents were long, giving the volunteer engineer measurably safe sights ahead; and there was no occasion for Maxwell to jerk the whistle cord. Again the big man in the engine cab was hurling the train along with small regard for anything but speed.
At Caliger another stop was made. Like the man at Little Butte, the operator knew nothing save that his wires were dead. At his last report both of the down-coming freight trains had been on time. Maxwell did some quick figuring.
"We're pretty safe to run to Hatcher's," he told Bascom. "That will give us five minutes against Sixteen, provided she's not running ahead of her schedule. Can you make Hatcher's in forty minutes?"
"I'll make it or land this outfit in hell," said the master mechanic grittingly. And once again the wheels began to spin.
It proved to be a close call at Hatcher's, the little "blind" siding in the upper valley. One mile short of the passing track Bascom began to blow his whistle like a madman, and the four on the caboose, leaning far out on the platforms, saw a long freight lumbering down from the west. A short, stabbing puff of steam from the freight locomotive's whistle, soundless because of the din of hammering wheels and shrieking flanges, told them that the freight engineer had seen and heard and was trying to stop. Also, it was apparent to the two who looked on with railroad knowledge that the stop could not be made within the siding's switch limits.
Bascom took a chance and a risky one. Speeding like a fiend, he sent his one-car train onward to what promised to be a smashing head-on collision with the freight. But at the lower switch, with the slowing freight less than three hundred yards away, he made a grinding stop; his fireman leaped from the gangway and ran to turn the switch; and an instant later the wild train was snatched in on the siding and the freight was rolling past in safety over the reset switch.
"Good work!" said Sprague, speaking for the first time since the departure from Little Butte. "This man Bascom may not be the heavy villain that he looks to be, but he is certainly carrying his nerve with him this afternoon."
Maxwell was leaning out and shouting to the volunteer in the cab.
"Easy, Bascom!" he yelled; "they're carrying green!"
Bascom looked back and nodded; and the red-headed fireman strolled on ahead to take his stand at the upper switch.
"Anything significant about the St. Patrick's Day color?" queried Sprague; and Maxwell said there was.
"It means another section following," he explained; and then: "Here it comes!" And as he said it, another freight came into view, plunging around the curves toward the siding.
Unhappily for the speed-making purpose, this train, too, was carrying green, and Maxwell swore impatiently to the universe in general. "Three sections to this; and Eighteen's pretty sure to have two or more. It's three fifty-five, right now, and we've got thirty miles to go!"
Benson laughed.
"Stribling will wait until the last minute for you, never fear. With two hours we could mighty near get out and walk it."
"I reckon we're going to get a chance to walk a piece of the way," said Starbuck in his slow drawl. "That maverick choo-choo wrangler up ahead will have us in the ditch before he hits the Nophi grades, if he keeps up his lick."
"I don't want to call him down," said Maxwell, dubiously. "He's probably got a grouch because I pulled the string on him back yonder at the Gloria bridge."
"There comes the third section!" Benson called out; and a minute afterward the third and last division of the overland freight went hurtling past on the main track.
Bascom's makeshift fireman was promptly on his job. While the tail-end of the third section was clanking over the frogs he jerked the switch, and at the same instant the master mechanic jerked the throttle of the Nine-fifteen. The wild train shot out into position on the main line, halted for the fraction of a minute needed to enable the fireman to run up and scramble to the footboard, and the breakneck race was continued.
By this time none of the four thought of going back into the caboose. They were crowded together upon the front platform, ready to make the leap for life which seemed momentarily imminent as Bascom snatched the short car recklessly around the curves and over the switches at the various stations. Train Number Eighteen, also a through freight, was scheduled one hour behind Sixteen; but in the absence of all wire reports of its progress, nobody knew just where it would be found.
As a matter of fact, it was met between two sidings, ten miles on the hither side of Nophi; and, happily for the safety of all concerned, the meeting with the first section chanced upon a piece of straight track—one of the exceedingly few tangents in the rough, gulch-like valley known as Tumble-Tree Canyon. As before, Bascom held his whistle open, and, thanks to the brakes and a liberal sanding of the rails, a collision was averted.
When the two locomotives were nose to nose, and a flagman was racing frantically back to flag the following section, Maxwell sprang off and fell upon the conductor of the freight.
"How many sections of you?" he demanded explosively.
"Two," said the man, putting up an arm as if he expected to be hit.
"How close are you?" was the next shot-like question.
"That's them, comin' now," said the conductor, as a hoarse whistle bellow answered the racing flagman's stop signal.
Two miles back of the halted freights there was a disused saw-mill spur, not over a hundred feet long, to be sure, but it would serve. Maxwell's decision was made instantly.
"Back up, both of you, until we can get in on Crawford's spur," he ordered; and as the conductor started to run to the rear: "Don't waste time doing that! Whistle for 'em, you blockhead!" and he made impatient motions as of an engineer pulling the whistle-lever.
The first-section engineer, leaning from his cab window, heard, saw, and understood. Three shrieks of his whistle were answered by three of the hoarse bellows from the rear, and the two long freights began to pound heavily in the reverse motion up the grade.
"Push 'em, Bascom!" shouted Maxwell, as his own engine crept up after the retreating first section. "We'll go in at Crawford's and let 'em by."
The two miles to the passing point, worried out slowly at the pace set by the laboring freights, seemed to stretch themselves out into ten. Sprague was looking at his watch.
"Sixteen miles yet, you say, and we have an hour and twenty minutes in which to make them. That looks as if we were still margined well enough to pull through."
"I guess so," said Maxwell. The laboring freights were at last backing around the curve from which the saw-mill spur branched off, and again the red-headed fireman was on hand with his switch-key. Luckily the unused lock did not refuse to work, and presently the light rails of the abandoned spur were buckling and bending ominously under the Nine-fifteen, as Bascom trundled the wild train out upon them.
Almost immediately the whistles screamed again, and the two freights slid away down the grade. "Right!" yelled the red-headed one, shifting the rusty switch again; and once more the race was resumed.
When the Nophi smelter stacks came in sight in the vista opened up by the flying swing around the mountain of approach, four watches were out.
"We're nearly an hour to the good yet," cried Benson.
"Yes; and we ain't there yet," said Starbuck, who seemed to have acquired a pessimistic slant.
Maxwell swung far out as they were rounding the great curve and got a clear view of the small smelter-town yard. Straightening up, he pulled the whistle cord to attract Bascom's attention, and then leaned out and made the necessary hand-signal to run through the small town without stopping.
In some inexplicable way the signal, or rather the giving and receiving of it, proved fatal. Bascom looked back to nod his understanding, and when he faced about again he saw, too late, that a box-car, set out by one of the lately passing freights on the smelter-loading track, had "drifted" down the siding to a point at which it would not clear the main line. There was a ripping crash, a roar of steam escaping through a broken cylinder, and the race, so far as Engine Nine-fifteen was concerned, was over.
When the four passengers had picked themselves up out of the heap into which the sudden stop had piled them, they went forward to see what was to be done. There was nothing to be done locomotive-wise; but there was still plenty of time, even if the six remaining miles should have to be covered by a picked-up team borrowed from the smelter folk.
But the team expedient proved unnecessary. At the Nophi station they found a section gang at work, with a hand-car available; and on the "pump special" they made their entry, some thirty minutes past five, into the Grafton Brothers' camp at the eastern tunnel approach.
Stribling, a handsome young fellow with a frank, open face and honest eyes, was on hand to meet them.
"By Jove, Mr. Maxwell!" he said, with what was apparently a most palpable relieving of anxious strain, "I was afraid you weren't coming, and I'd just about made up my mind to 'phone over to Lopez to tell Canby and the rest of them that we'd postpone. I've got my record to make yet, most of it, and I couldn't afford to turn that power on and start an engine through until after you and Benson have gone over the completed installation with me."
"Well," Maxwell rejoined, "that's what we're here to do. You know Starbuck, my brother-in-law? I thought so. Now shake hands with my friend Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, and we'll go through with you."
Starbuck was watching Stribling's face when the young electrical engineer shook hands with the big man from Washington. There was a query in the younger man's eyes, and Starbuck saw it. Also, he marked the half-second of hesitation which came between the introduction and its acknowledgment. But a moment later they were all on their way to the black-mouthed tunnel, Stribling walking ahead with the superintendent and Sprague, and Starbuck following with Benson.
For convenience in his work Stribling had set up a small steam-driven dynamo at his camp and had strung the tunnel with incandescents, hence there was plenty of light in the long bore for the examination of the power wiring. When they plunged underground the construction man was still walking ahead with Maxwell and Sprague, explaining, for the benefit of the superintendent's guest, the design of the catenary brackets and the double set of insulators.
"I'm betting on every detail in the mile and a quarter," the young engineer was saying, as the two laggards closed up. "It's my first big job, as Mr. Maxwell knows"—this also for the guest—"and I've simply got to make good on it. I could have had that waiting motor-engine out there pulling trains through the mountain this morning, but I made up my mind that we wouldn't turn a wheel until Mr. Maxwell had seen everything for himself."
"That's business," said Sprague, encouragingly. "Old Davy Crockett's maxim, eh? 'Be sure you're right, and then go ahead.' But let me tell you, Mr. Stribling: Mr. Maxwell will look wise and say, 'Yes, yes,' but he'll have to take your word for it, after all. What we average people don't know about modern electrical installations would fill a—" he looked around as if in search of a measure of capacity—"would fill a tank as big as that one across the track—the one you've dipped your wires into over there in that side cave."
"The oil-switch, you mean? Yes, that is a little safety wrinkle we're putting in wherever there's a chance of an accident breaking down the power wires. I'll explain it as we come back."
When the young engineer led the way onward again a glance to the rear would have shown him that only three of the four were at his heels. Starbuck had seen his chance, and in a quick withdrawal he dodged into the side cavern housing the oil-switch. Two of the empty dynamite boxes enabled him to breast the top of the tall iron tank. What he saw was a little puzzling. Oil-switch tanks are usually left open to the air, but this one was fitted with a galvanized-iron cover made in the form of a shallow pan with double sides spaced about six inches apart. The inner compartment of the pan was half-filled with a transparent oily liquid, and the outer annular space around it was closely packed with chopped ice. Hastily breaking the seals of the package he had been carrying under his coat, he dumped the contents into the central receptacle and fled without waiting to prove Sprague's assertion that nothing alarming would happen. When he rejoined the inspection party Sprague was still holding Stribling in talk, and the young mine owner made sure it was done to cover his own momentary absence.
The remainder of the trip through the tunnel was made without incident, and on the way back Stribling halted the party at the safety-switch side cavern which, oddly enough, was charged with a curiously acrid odor that made breathing in it chokingly difficult. Coughing and gasping, Stribling explained the mechanism briefly. An electro-magnet, energized by the power current itself, held the switch in contact. If the current should be interrupted, as in the case of a breakage due to a wreck, the switch would be thrown and all the tunnel wires rendered instantly harmless.
"And these boxes are what your machinery came in?" said Sprague, pointing to a litter of small dust-covered packing-cases scattered about the tank.
"Oh, no; those are dynamite boxes," was the hoarse reply. "They are empty—at least, Mr. Benson says they are, and he ought to know, since they are some of his leavings." And then: "Suppose we move on. The air is frightfully bad in here. The engineer must have stopped the ventilating fans."
Sprague had picked up a rusty bolt left by the timber-framers.
"You've got a good solid oil-tank here," he said, hammering lustily on the iron with the bolt.
Starbuck was watching Stribling, and he would have sworn that the young engineer's jump took him two feet clear into the air.
"Great Scott! Don't do that, Mr. Sprague!" he cried. "You might break some of the—some of the adjustments, you know!"
Sprague's mellow laugh echoed hollowly in the timbered cavern.
"If they're that delicate, perhaps we'd better take your suggestion and move on," he said. "I guess we've seen enough, anyway, eh, Maxwell?"
The superintendent acquiesced and the tunnel-threading was resumed to the portal, and beyond to the little shack where Stribling had his office. Here the young man became the hospitable host.
"Sit down, gentlemen, and I'll call Canby at the power plant and ask him if he is all ready to 'cut in.' If he says yes, you can take the 'phone and give the order, Mr. Maxwell. It's your railroad."
The four disposed themselves as they pleased in the cramped little office fronting the tunnel. Sprague took his stand at the single window to stare absently at the black hole in the mountain side—an unrelieved spot of gloom now that the incandescents had been turned off. Starbuck chose a corner, and did not take his eyes from Stribling, who was sitting at his desk with Maxwell opposite.
With the receiver at his ear the young engineer exchanged a few words with the company's electrician at the power-house three miles away. Then he pushed the 'phone across the desk to Maxwell.
"Canby says he's ready," he announced, in a voice that was strangely sharp and tremulous. "Give him the word, and then watch this volt-meter on the wall behind me. It will tell you when the current comes on."
Maxwell hesitated for a single instant and looked across at Sprague. But the expert's back was turned and he was still staring fixedly at the distant tunnel mouth. The superintendent took the receiver and spoke crisply.
"This is Maxwell: if you're ready, turn on the power."
At the word, Sprague faced about quickly and fixed his gaze upon Stribling. The young man had turned aside in his chair and his face was ghastly. Benson and Maxwell were watching the indicator on the wall; but Starbuck was rising noiselessly from his seat on the cot, with one hand buried in the side-pocket of his coat. For ten dragging seconds the index finger of the volt-meter remained motionless. Stribling was twitching in his chair, and finally he burst out.
"Those dynamite boxes! We ought to have taken them out! What if they shouldn't happen to be empty—all of them?"
As he spoke, the index of the volt-meter began to jump like a thing suddenly endowed with life, and Benson cried out, "There she comes!" Stribling crouched in his chair as if shrinking from a blow and covered his face with his hands. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, ticked themselves off on the little desk clock at Maxwell's elbow, and then Sprague's voice broke into the tense silence.
"It's all over, Stribling. You can sit up now and take your medicine. The end of the world is still safely in the future."
The young man whirled in his chair and his right hand shot toward a half-opened drawer of the desk. It was Starbuck who interposed.
"Nixie," he said sharply; "it isn't time for you to pass out yet. Keep your hands out of that drawer, or I'll put these on," jingling a pair of handcuffs before the culprit's staring eyes.
Stribling leaped from his chair and took one long haggard look through the open door at the tunnel mouth where nothing was happening. Then he dropped back and became the trapped animal fighting for life.
"What have you got on me?—or what is it you think you've got?" he rasped.
It was the man from Washington who replied.
"Don't make it harder for yourself than you have to," he said gently. "We've got it all. We know that you had that train stopped last night so that you could unload those empty dynamite boxes—they are empty, you know—without discovery. We also know that this morning you placed a quantity of nitro-glycerine in that safety-switch, and that you have the wiring rigged to fire the stuff and destroy the tunnel."
The young man looked up and his smile showed his teeth.
"But the current is on and the tunnel isn't destroyed," he interrupted.
"No; you overdid it a little in asking Benson to help you handle the nitro-glycerine and in letting him spill it on his clothes; also you skipped a stitch when you thought that by smuggling those dynamite boxes in and calling everybody's attention to them, you'd put the blame of the explosion upon Benson and the railroad people. You forgot that all makers of dynamite nowadays stamp the date on the boxes. The tunnel was completed two years ago; and the date on one of the boxes, at least, is January of the present year. You are down and out, Mr. Stribling, and there is only one way in which you can dodge the stripes. That is by telling us who hired you to do this."
A silence, tense like the silence of the court-room when the judge pronounces the sentence, fell upon the group gathered in the little shack-office, and it lasted for a full minute. At the end of it Stribling jerked his head up and spoke.
"I'm a man again now, Mr. Sprague, if I haven't been for the past two months," he said steadily. "I'll tell you this: you can give me the third degree, if you want to—there are enough of you here to do it—and after that you can send me to the pen if you feel like it. But, so help me God, you'll never make me welsh on the man for whom I did this: never, so long as I have the breath to say no!"
Again the tense silence supervened, and Starbuck held up the handcuffs tentatively. Sprague shook his head, and spoke again.
"You've considered this resolution well, have you, Stribling?"
"I have. I owe that man everything I've got in this world: education, the chance to hold my head up with others and, more than that, he once saved my father from going where you mean to send me—over the road. I'll admit all you have charged. I did set the trap, and I don't know yet why it hasn't gone off. All I ask is that you'll remember that I picked a time when there wouldn't be any lives lost."
"I discovered that last night," said Sprague quietly; adding, with a glance for the superintendent's brother-in-law, "I guess we'll have to turn him over to you, Mr. Starbuck." Then, turning once more upon the culprit: "Why did you find it necessary to cross the power wires with the telegraph lines early this afternoon, and so to destroy the instruments on a hundred miles of railroad, Stribling?"
The young engineer looked up hardily. "It was necessary. I took care to have Canby and the railroad electricians all over at the power plant, and I couldn't take the chance of leaving them in communication with head-quarters at Brewster."
Maxwell, who had sat as a silent listener, shook his head sadly and got up and went out, followed by Benson. A little later Sprague, standing at the window, saw them trying out the electric locomotive in short runs up and down the tunnel approach. Starbuck came out of his corner and snapped the manacles on Stribling's wrists, and the young man made no resistance. Sprague turned at the click of the handcuffs, standing to frown down thoughtfully upon the self-confessed wrecker.
"I was in hopes we were going to get the men higher up this time; get them so they would stay got," he said, half to himself. "But it seems that a bit of common human gratitude is going to blunder around and get in the way. Stribling, I'm honestly sorry for you. I'm afraid we made a mistake in not letting you get hold of that gun a few minutes ago."
The young man with the honest eyes looked up quickly. "You did, indeed, Mr. Sprague. It's the simplest way out of it for me."
"You are still determined not to do the larger justice by giving us the information we need?"
The young man raised his manacled hands.
"Think of it a minute," he pleaded. "You wouldn't do it yourself; you know you wouldn't."
"I don't know—I don't know; perhaps I shouldn't," admitted the big man thoughtfully. Then he went on with visible reluctance: "I'm afraid we shall have to pinch you, and pinch you hard, my boy. And it's a shame, when you were only a tool in the hands of the men who ought to do time for this thing. I suppose we shall be taking the seven o'clock passenger back to Brewster. Is there anything you'd like to do before it comes along?"
"Yes; I'd like to write a letter or two."
"You shall do it, and you shall have privacy." And then to Starbuck: "Fix him so that he can."
Starbuck unlocked the manacle from Stribling's right wrist and locked it again around the arm of the office chair. "Will that give you room enough?" he asked.
"More than enough," was the quiet reply. And when Starbuck had taken the pistol from the half-opened desk drawer the two who were free went out and closed the door against any possible intrusion upon the captive's privacy.
"I'll stay round," Starbuck volunteered, when they were outside. "You go over and ride the engine with Mr. Maxwell, if you want to."
It was half an hour later when the three who had been trying out the electric locomotive side-tracked the big machine at the sound of the down passenger's whistle signal at the western tunnel approach, and crossed the tracks to where Starbuck was standing guard at the reopened door of the office-shack.
"Still writing?" asked Sprague of the silent guard.
"No; for the last ten minutes he's been sitting there with his head on the table, just as you see him. He asked me to open the door a while ago, so he could see better."
Moved by a common impulse they entered the office-room, stepping softly. But the young man at the desk was far beyond all earthly disturbances. One letter, addressed to a girl in New York, lay on the desk, stamped and sealed. Hanging beside the chair, and ingeniously strung and weighted so that they could touch nothing, were the two heavily insulated power wires which he had somehow managed to disconnect from the volt-meter switch-board at his back; these and a freshly burned shrivel on the hand of the arm that was crooked for a pillow told how it had been done.
"Good God!" Maxwell exclaimed; "we might have thought of that! Poor fellow! He couldn't face it out, after all!"
Starbuck gently released the handcuffs and slipped them into his pocket. Then he helped Benson put the body of the man who could not face it out upon the cot in the corner. The train was coming, and Benson pushed the others toward the door.
"Don't stay here and miss your train," he said. "I'll do what there is to be done. I was going to stay, anyway."
The evening train was feeling its way down over the wireless line and was half-way to Brewster before the three men sitting in the otherwise unoccupied smoking-compartment of the sleeper broke the silence which the sudden tragedy had laid upon them. But at the lighting of his third cigar Maxwell could contain himself no longer.
"It's another of your miracles, Calvin," he said. "By this time I'm so well used to them that nothing you do feazes me any more. But I'm sure Billy will sleep better to-night if you tell him how you did it."
The big man grunted softly.
"I think both of you have put the broken bits of the puzzle together before this," he returned. "The motive was the chief thing; what I call the 'nucleus thought,' and we had that all ready-made. We knew that this 'Big Nine,' as Ford names it, was out after your scalp; and as soon as you told me about the tunnel and the Grafton Brothers' contract the probable point of attack was no longer in doubt. You see, I happen to know that the Graftons have always been hand-in-glove with your principal competitor—had installed all the block signals for it, cutting a fine melon for themselves in the process, too."
"Still," said Maxwell, "it's a long way from that to this."
"It was only taking one step after another, and Benson gave me three or four of them. The details of Stribling's exceedingly simple plot became very plain after Benson had told us about the train-stopping, the empty dynamite boxes, the safety switch—which could have been just as easily and effectively placed at either end of the tunnel as in that hole in the middle of it—and finally about the pouring of the sirupy stuff into the oil-tank. There was a bit of fine work on Stribling's part. Benson doubtless knows nitro-glycerine when he sees it; but under the circumstances he would be completely disarmed—as he was."
"But how did you know that there would be a false cover on the tank?" queried Starbuck.
"A bit of pure reasoning. The specific gravity of glycerine is greater than that of the heaviest of the earth oils; hence the explosive would sink to the bottom of the tank and mix with the oil to some extent. I reasoned that Stribling would not take the risk of the mixture."
"He didn't," said the mine owner; "the pan was there and it was packed in ice."
"But the laboratory experiment?" put in Maxwell.
"Was a simple test for nitro-glycerine, of course. You saw it blow up the test-tube, but even then only one of you,—Mr. Starbuck here,—suspected the truth. You did, didn't you, Mr. Starbuck?"
"I had a guess comin'," said the young mine owner quietly; adding: "That was why I took the trouble to hunt me up a pair of handcuffs when I went to get the train-orders."
"But if there was nitro-glycerine in that tank, why didn't it go off when the current was turned on?" queried Maxwell.
"For the very simple reason that Mr. Starbuck, at my direction, dumped a large dose of neutralizing chemical into it as we passed the tank on our way through the tunnel, and so saponified it. That was why I had the courage to hammer on the tank with my bolt, and why Stribling, not dreaming that his touchy explosive's teeth had been drawn, nearly had a fit."
"One other thing," Maxwell put in. "You asked Stribling why he burned the telegraph wires out; how did you know they had been burned out?"
Sprague chuckled good-naturedly.
"I knew that at Little Butte; you might have known it if you hadn't been so excited as to forget that you had a nose. That office, as well as the next one,—I've forgotten its name,—fairly reeked with the smell of burnt rubber and insulation, and I said to myself that there were only two torches in these mountains that could heat things hot enough to burn the instruments: namely, lightning and the high-voltage current from your plant in Lopez Canyon."
Again a silence, broken only by the train clamor, settled down upon the three in the Pullman smoking-room. After a time Maxwell drew a long breath and said:
"It was a narrow squeak; a horribly narrow squeak, Calvin. We have a good deal to say nowadays about the lawlessness of the mob and the individual; but big money doesn't seem to know that there are any such things as justice and equity and a square deal."
Sprague sat up and methodically relighted his cigar.
"Oh, I don't know about that," he demurred. "You can't say that all big money is lawless. Of course, there are buccaneers in every chapter of the world's history, and we have ours, neatly labelled with the dollar-mark instead of the skull and cross-bones. Good big money is an undoubted blessing; it is only bad big money that is a curse."
Maxwell's smile was mirthless.
"When a man puts a gun in your face and holds you up, it isn't very consoling to remember that there are a good many other men in the world who wouldn't treat you that way," he commented. And then: "I hope we've seen the last of this fight in the dark with that stock-jobbing gang in New York."
"You haven't," Sprague declared definitely. "They'll come back at you, and keep on coming back, until you get a fair grand-jury underhold on the men at the top. I counted confidently upon being able to give you that underhold to-day. I thought we had Stribling where he would be obliged to turn state's evidence. It was our misfortune that he happened to be too good a man; that he was only the tool of a villain and not a villain himself. They'll hit you again, Maxwell, and go on hitting you until you can strike back hard enough to put some of the men higher up in the prisoner's dock."
This might have stood for the final word; but the true finality was reached a couple of hours later when the superintendent and the Government expert were smoking their bedtime pipes in the Topaz lobby.
"We haven't fully grasped the real pity of this thing yet, Dick," said Sprague, at the end of the ends. "It is this: that greed, the infernal lust of money that has laid hold upon our day and generation, can take so fine a thing as that poor boy's gratitude, transform it into criminality, and make him pay the price with his life. Isn't that enough to make your blood run cold? Let's turn in and forget it if we can. Good-night. I'm going to bed."