Part 10

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 fazes 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.”

IV

The Mystery of the Black Blight

THE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in the advertising folders as “The Fast Mail,” had collided in the early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time, had run past Angels without heeding the “stop for orders” signal plainly displayed.

Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had shot around the hill curve to hurl itself, a six-thousand-ton, steel-pointed projectile, into the rear end of the first section, and the disaster was complete. Somewhere under the smoking mountain of wreckage marking the spot where the Mail and first-section locomotives had locked themselves together, reared, and fallen over into the ditch, two firemen and an engineer were buried. Out of one of the crushed mail-cars two postal clerks were taken; one of them to die a few minutes after his rescue, and the other bruised and broken, with an arm and a leg dangling, as he was carried out to safety.

At the other point of impact there had been no loss of life, though the material damage was almost as great. The engine of the second section had split its way sheer through the first-section caboose--which, in the nature of things, had no one in it to be killed--and through two of the three merchandise-cars next in its plunging path. With a mixed chaos of groceries, farming implements, and splintered timbers for its monument, the big mogul had burrowed into the soft side bank of the cutting as if in some blind attempt to bury itself out of sight of the havoc it had wrought.

On the Thursday morning of this, the worst of a series of accidents thickly bestudding that fateful month of August, Maxwell, the general superintendent, chanced to be two hundred miles away to the eastward. His service-car was in the Copah yards, and he was asleep in it when the night watchman came down from the despatcher’s office to rouse him with the bad news.

What could be done at such long range was done instantly and with good generalship. The wires were working with Brewster, the division head-quarters in Timanyoni Park. With his own hand Maxwell sent the orders to Connolly, the despatcher, to Fordyce, the trainmaster, and to Bascom, the master mechanic. A relief train was to be made up with all haste to take the doctors to the wreck, and to convey the passengers of Number Six back to Brewster. Following the relief train, but giving it precedence, should go the wrecking-train. The superintendent even went so far as to specify the equipment which should be taken: the heavier of the two wrecking-cranes, a car-load of rails for temporary tracking, and two or three water-cars for the extinguishing of the fire.

These things done, and the arrangements made to start his own special immediately for the scene of disaster, the superintendent had the fine courage, in the face of this last and most unnerving of many disheartenments, to return to his car and to go back to bed. He had been up very late in conference with his president, Ford, and he knew that the demands awaiting him at the end of the five-hour run to Lobo Cut would call for all the reserves of strength and energy he could hope to store up during the distance-covering interval.

Much good work had already been accomplished when Maxwell’s special, feeling its way past the four long freights and the midnight passenger, all held up at Angels, came upon the scene of destruction among the foot-hills at an early hour in the forenoon. The relief train had come and gone, bearing away the unhurt, the injured, and the dead. A temporary working-track had been laid through the cut, and the mighty one-hundred-and-fifty-ton steam crane, its movements directed by a big, rather flashily dressed man with an accurately creased brown hat pulled down over his brows, was reaching its steel finger here and there in the débris and plucking the derelict freight-cars out of the way.

Up at the other end Fordyce, the trainmaster, was working with another crew, using a mammoth block-and-tackle, with a detached locomotive for its pulling power. When Maxwell came on the ground, Fordyce, a gnarled little man with a twist in his jaw and a temper like the sparks from an emery wheel, was alternately cajoling and cursing his men in a praiseworthy attempt to make his block-and-tackle outheave the master mechanic’s powerful crane.

“Yank ’em--yank ’em, men! Get that rail under there and heave! Wig it--_wig it_! Now get that grab-hook in here--lively! Don’t let them fellows at the other end snake two to our ONE!”

Maxwell stopped to exchange a word or two with the sweating trainmaster and then passed on down the wreck-strewn line. At the master mechanic’s end of things he came upon Benson, chief of construction, who had accompanied the wrecking-train from Brewster only because he had happened to be on the way to Angels and saw no other probable means of reaching his destination.

“Pretty bad medicine--the worst of the lot,” commented the young chief of construction, when, tramping soberly, they came to the place where the two great locomotives, locked in their death grapple, were nuzzling the clay bank of the cutting.

Maxwell’s teeth came together with a savage little click.

“A few weeks ago, Jack, we were scared stiff for fear the ‘Big Nine’ crowd of stock-jobbers would succeed in doing something to put us on the panic-slide. Now we are doing it ourselves, just about as fast as we can. Is it true that there were four killed?”

“Yes; both firemen, and Bamberg, the engineer of the freight. The other man was a postal clerk; and his mate had an arm and a leg broken.”

“Many injuries?”

“Astonishingly few, when there was such a good chance for a general massacre. Both men on the second section engine jumped, and both were hurt, though not badly. There was nobody in the split caboose when it was hit. On the Mail, Cargill, who was running, got off with a pretty bad scalp wound. An express messenger had his foot jammed; and the train baggageman had a lot of trunks shaken down on him. In the coaches there were a few people thrown out of their seats and hurt by the sudden stop; but in the sleepers there were a good many who slept straight through it, incredible as that may sound.”

“I know,” said Maxwell; “I’ve seen that happen more than once, when the Pullmans stayed on the rails.” Then, with a slight backward nod of his head he changed the subject abruptly. “Bascom--has he been handling it all right?”

“He’s a dandy!” said Benson. “Personally, I’d about as soon associate with any one of a dozen Copah tin-horns that I could name as to foregather with Mr. Judson Bascom. But he’s onto his job, all right. He laid this temporary track himself; I haven’t butted in at all, either here or at Fordyce’s end.”

“How did you happen to get here? I thought you were up Red Butte way,” said the superintendent.

“I was; but I came down to Brewster on Six last night, meaning to go through to Angels. While we were changing engines I ran upstairs to get some maps and papers out of my office, and took too long about it; the train got away from me and I chased out with the wreck-wagons. That’s how near I came to being mixed up in this thing myself.”

“And you want to go on to Angels now?”

“Yes; when I get a chance. Those irrigation people in Mesquite Valley are howling to have an unloading spur built up from the old copper-mine track, and I thought I’d go and look the ground over.”

The superintendent’s frown was expressive of impatient dissatisfaction.

“That Mesquite project is another of the grafts that are continually giving this country a black eye, Jack. It’s ‘bunk,’ pure and simple. Everybody who has ever been in the Mesquite knows that you couldn’t raise little white beans in that disintegrated sandstone!”

“It’ll do for an excuse to rake in a few hundred thousand Eastern shekels,” Benson remarked. “There will be plenty of ‘come-ons’ to buy the land when the dam is built.”

Bascom’s great crane was poising a crushed and mangled box-car in air, and when the crooking steel finger swung its burden aside and dropped it with a crash out of the way, Maxwell turned upon his heel.

“I have my car here, and I’m going back to Angels to do some wiring,” he said. “Come along, if you want to see those irrigation people. But I’ll tell you right now, I won’t approve any recommendation for more track-laying for them.”

They had walked possibly half the length of the long blockade when a noisy automobile, dust-covered and filled with men, drew up on the mesa flat above the wreck. Benson looked up with a scowl.

“There’s another gang of those newspaper ghouls!” he commented, as two of the three men in the tonneau got out and began to unlimber their cameras and tripods. “It’s no picnic to drive a car from Brewster over the range, to say nothing of the danger; and this is the second squad since daylight. There have been enough pictures taken of this wreck to fill all the newspapers between New York and San Francisco for a week!”

Maxwell’s smile was a mere teeth-baring.

“Yes; we’re getting the advertising all right,” he said. “We’ve been getting it for a month or more.” Then, as they tramped on out of the wreck raffle and headed for the waiting office-car: “I had a talk with Ford last night; that is what took me to Copah. We’re in bad, Benson. Ford says they’ve taken to calling us ‘the sick railroad’ on the Stock Exchange, and our securities are simply going to the puppies. Another month like this one we’ve just stumbled through will either wipe us from the map or clean us up definitely and put us into the hands of a receiver.”

“Does Ford say that?” gasped the young chief engineer.

“He said a good bit more than that. He still insists that these troubles of ours are helped along from the outside; that they are in reality just so many moves in the game that a certain Wall Street pool is playing to get control of our road. I tried to show him how impossible it was; how the entire slump in discipline which causes all the trouble is merely one of those crazy epidemics that now and then sweep over the length of the best-managed railroads on earth.”

“And he wouldn’t believe it?” queried Benson.

“No; the last thing he said to me as his train was pulling out proved that he didn’t. He intimated that there wasn’t any ‘act-of-God’ verdict to be brought in, in our case, and told me to go back to Brewster and dig until I found the real cause.”

By this time they had reached the service-car special, and Maxwell passed the word to his engineer to back up the line to Angels. When the wreck and the wreckers had vanished beyond the hill curves, Benson filled his short pipe and at the lighting of it asked another question.

“I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t get a little expert help on this thing, Maxwell. Have you tried to interest Mr. Sprague in this discipline business?”

The superintendent shook his head.

“Sprague isn’t going around doing odd jobs in psychology for anybody and everybody,” he deprecated. “He is a Government chemist, and he is out here on the Government’s business. Besides, it isn’t a case for a detective; even for the best amateur detective in the bunch--which is easily what Sprague might claim to be, you’d say. You see, there isn’t anything special to detect. What we need is a doctor; not a plain-clothes man.”

Benson’s left eye closed itself slowly in qualified dissent.

“What does Mr. Sprague himself have to say about it?” he queried.

“He hasn’t said anything. In fact, I haven’t seen him for over two weeks. He’s been out with Billy Starbuck, gathering soil specimens; they are still out somewhere, I don’t know just where.”

Neither of the two men riding the rear platform of the backing service-car spoke again until the car stopped with a jerk at the edge-of-the-desert station with the celestial name, which had once been the head-quarters of the original Red Butte Western Railroad. Then Benson summed up the situation in a couple of terse sentences.

“If we don’t do something, and do it quick, there is a bunch of us so-called railroad bosses on this high line who may as well pack our duffle-bags and fade away into the landscape. Three wrecks within a week; and this last one will cost a hundred thousand cold iron dollars before we’re through with the lawyers; I’ll be hanged if I wouldn’t call in the doctor--some doctor--any doctor, Maxwell. That’s my ante. So long; see you a little later about this Mesquite business, if you’re still here.” And he put a leg over the platform railing and went away.

Three minutes later, when the superintendent had crossed the station platform and was on his way around to the door opening into the operator’s office, two men mounted upon wiry range horses rode down the single remaining street of the dead-alive former railroad town, pointing for the station.

One of them, a good-looking youngish man with a preternaturally grave face and the shrewd thoughtful eyes that tell of days and nights spent afield and alone with the desert immensities, was the superintendent’s brother-in-law by courtesy. The other, a gigantic athlete of a man, whose weight fairly bowed the back of the stout horse he rode, was Mr. Calvin Sprague.

Maxwell paused when he saw and recognized the two horsemen. But when they came up, the weight of the recent disaster made his greeting a rather dismal attempt at friendly jocularity.

“Well, well!” he said, gripping hands with the athlete; “Billy certainly had it in for you this time! Rode you over the range, did he? I’ll bet you’ll never have the nerve to look a horse in the face again, after this. Where on top of earth have you two been keeping yourselves for the last fortnight?”