Part 11

“Oh, just sashayin’ round on the edges,” drawled Starbuck, replying for both; “gettin’ acquainted with the luminous landscape, and chewin’ off chunks of the scenery, and layin’ awake nights to soak up some of the good old ozone.”

“Ozone!” chuckled the big man; “I’m jammed gullet-full of it, Dick, and I have a hunch that it’s going to settle somewhere below the waist line and make me bow-legged for life. King David said that a horse is a vain thing for safety, but I can go him one better and say that it’s the vainest possible thing for just plain, ordinary, every-day comfort. I’m a living parenthesis-mark--or a pair of ’em, if you like that better.” Then without warning and almost without a break: “Where is the wreck, this time?”

Maxwell’s frown was a little brow-wrinkling of curious perplexity.

“You’ve just ridden down from the hills, haven’t you? How do you know there is a wreck?”

“That’s too easy,” laughed the expert, waving a Samsonic arm toward the five side-tracked trains held up in the Angels yard. “If you didn’t have your track cluttered up somewhere, those trains wouldn’t be hanging up here, I’m sure. Is it a bad one?--but you needn’t answer that; I can see at least one dead man in your eyes.”

“There are four of them,” said the superintendent soberly, “and some others desperately hurt. We’re in a bad way, Sprague. This is the third smash within a week.”

Sprague dismounted stiffly and secured his saddle-bags containing the soil specimens gathered at the price of so much discomfort.

“Starbuck,” he said whimsically, “I’m willing to pay the price of a hundred-dollar guinea-pig, if necessary, to have this razor-back mustang shipped home in a palace stock-car to his stable in Brewster. Mr. Maxwell’s office-car is good enough for me from this on.”

Starbuck smiled grimly and took the abandoned horse in charge. “I’ll take care of the bronc’,” he agreed; and the big man limped around the station to board the service-car while Maxwell went into the office to do his telegraphing.

When the superintendent returned half an hour later he found his self-invited guest lounging luxuriously in the easiest of the big wicker chairs in the open compartment of the car, smoking the fattest of black cigars and reading a two-days-old Denver paper.

“This is something like,” he said. “I was never cut out for a pioneer, Richard; Starbuck has proved that to my entire satisfaction in these last two weeks. But that’s enough of me and my knockings. Sit down and tell me your troubles. I see the papers are making space-fillers out of your railroad to beat the band. Are you ready to come around to my point of view yet?”

Maxwell sat down like a man who was both worried and wearied.

“The Lord knows, I wish I could come around to your point of view, Calvin. If I could see any possibility of charging these things to outside influences.... But there isn’t any. The trouble is purely local and internal--and as unaccountable as the breaking out of an epidemic when the strictest kind of quarantine has been maintained.”

Sprague smiled incredulously.

“There never was a case of typhoid yet without its germ to account for it, Dick,” he asserted dogmatically.

“I know; but that theory doesn’t hold good in the psychological field. We’ve got a good set of men, Sprague. To a degree which you don’t often find in modern railroad consolidations, we’ve had that precious thing called _esprit de corps_. We’ve never had any labor troubles since Lidgerwood’s time, and there are no grievances in the air to account for the present let-down. Yet the let-down is with us. Almost every day some man who has hitherto proved trustworthy falls down on his job, and there you are.”

“You’ve tried all the usual remedies, I suppose?”

“I should say I had! I’ve stormed and cursed and pleaded and reasoned until I’m worn out! If I fire a bunch of them, I have to hire a new bunch, and inside of a week the new men have caught the disease for themselves. One bad wreck will make a hundred trainmen uncertain and jumpy, and a second one will turn half of the hundred into irresponsible lunatics. You’d have to mix and mingle with the force as I do to understand the condition things have gotten into. It’s horrible, Calvin. It is like the black blight that you have seen spread through a well-kept orchard.”

“There is a cause,” said the expert, settling himself solidly in his chair. “I tell you, Dick, there’s a germ in the air, and that second mentality of mine that you are so fond of poking fun at tells me that in the case of your railroad orchard the germ has been deliberately planted. You say it’s impossible: I’ve a good notion to let the soil-testing rest for a few minutes and show you.”

“If I thought there was the least chance in the world that you could show me----”

“Is that a challenge? By Jove! I’ll take you. When can you get me back to Brewster?”

“As soon as the track is cleared. We ought to be able to get through by noon.”

The expert got up, shook the riding kinks out of his legs, and threw the newspaper aside.

“I’m going out to walk around for a bit, and after a while I’ll ask you to take me down to this wreck,” he said; and Maxwell, who had a deskful of work awaiting him, nodded.

“Say, in an hour?”

“An hour will do; I’ll show up within that time.”

Later, the superintendent, wading through the files of business correspondence which always accompanied him in his goings to and fro on the line, had window glimpses of Sprague strolling up and down beside the waiting trains in the yard or standing to chat with some member of the loafing crews.

The glimpses were provocative of good-natured incredulity on the part of the desk-worker. Thrice during the summer of warfare Sprague had been able to step into the breach, each time with signal success. But in each of the three former instances there had been tangible causes with which to grapple; flesh-and-blood criminals to be ferreted out and apprehended. Maxwell, glancing out of the window again, shook his head despondently. What could the keenest intelligence avail in the case of an entire railroad suffering from an acute attack of nervous disintegration and recklessness? Nothing, the superintendent decided; there was nothing for it but to settle down upon a grim determination to outlive and worry through the period of disaster; and he was still grinding away at his desk with that thought in the back part of his mind when Sprague came in and announced his willingness to be taken on to the wreck.

Maxwell gave the necessary order, and in due time the one-car special had repassed the few miles intervening between Angels and Lobo Cut, to come to a stand on the curve of hazard. Sprague was lighting a fresh cigar preparatory to a plunge into the track-clearing activities, and Maxwell looked up from his work.

“Want me to get off with you?” he asked.

“No; it’s the very thing I don’t want,” declared the expert briefly; and therewith he went out to drop from the car-step and to take the plunge alone.

In the two hours which had elapsed since the departure of the superintendent’s car the track-clearers at both ends of the wreck had made astonishingly good progress. Step by step the master mechanic had worked his big crane up the line, tossing the derelicts aside or righting them upon the rails, as their condition warranted; and farther along Fordyce, with his huge tackle and its pulling locomotive, had been equally enthusiastic.

It was Sprague’s boast that his methods of investigation, in the field of his hobby, as in all others, were purely scientific; and he insisted that the true scientist and the most successful is the one who can best qualify as a shrewd and wholly impartial observer.

Where another man might have asked questions, he stood aside and looked on and listened. In the fierce toil of track-clearing no one seemed to pay any attention to him, and the picture which presented itself was a life-sketch of the railroad force _in petto_ and in the raw. The big onlooker took his time and made his mental jottings thoughtfully, strolling from one group to another and lingering longest near the hot boiler-cab of the great crane where a wizened human automaton in dirty overalls and jumper jerked the levers and spun the wheels of the hoist in obedience to the signals given by the flashily dressed master mechanic.

It wanted less than a quarter of an hour of noon when the final obstruction was heaved aside, and the track gang, which had been following the wreckers, trued and spiked the distorted rails of the main line into place. Sprague closed his mental note-book and went back to join Maxwell.

In the office-car the porter-cook had laid the table for the mid-day meal; and the superintendent and his guest ate it in transit, the office-car special being the first of the halted trains to pass westward over the newly cleared line.

“Well?” said Maxwell interrogatively, when the meal had progressed to the meat and vegetables without comment on the part of the one who had lifted the challenge.

“You’ve got the disease, all right; it’s with you, and in the epidemic form, too. Its expression came out emphatically every now and then in that track-clearing hustle. One little snappy, snarly fellow lying under a box-car to make the hoisting-hitch voiced it precisely when his mate yelled at him to come out, that the hitch might slip. He yapped back, ‘Who the hell and blinkety-blank blankation cares!’ That’s one form your disease is taking, and you’d say it would account for a good many of the smashes.”

“Well?” queried the superintendent again. “You didn’t stop at that?”

“No; I made a few other preliminary observations which may or may not prove up. Give me a little time; and when we get back to Brewster, detail that ex-cowboy ‘relief operator’ of yours, Tarbell, to run errands for me. If I can’t show you good, tangible results within the next forty-eight hours or so, you may discharge me and hire a Pinkerton.”

“You’ll fail,” said Maxwell gloomily. “I’ve been through a sickness of this kind before. There’s no cure for it. It has simply got to run its course and wear itself out.”

“That’s what they used to say about cholera and the plague and yellow-fever, and all those things,” laughed the man from Washington; but he did not go any farther into the matter of theories.

The run of the special train to Brewster was made without incident, and from the station Sprague went directly across to his hotel.

“I’m going over to clean up,” he announced. “By and by, when you get around to it, send Tarbell over and tell him to wait in the lobby for me.”

It was possibly an hour later when the young man who resembled William Starbuck sufficiently to pass for the mine owner’s younger brother, got out of his chair in the quietest corner of the Hotel Topaz lobby and crossed to the elevators to meet the Government chemist.

“How are you, Archer?” was the renovated soil-gatherer’s greeting. And then, as he led the way back to the quiet corner from which the young man had been keeping his watch upon the elevators: “We’re up against it good and hard, this time, young man. Your boss has stumped us to prove a thing which he says can’t be proved. Sit down and let’s see if we can’t start the thin edge of a wedge. I’ll do the hammering and let you hold the wedge, and you can squeal if I strike off and hit you. How long has this case of bad railroading, which is smashing things right and left, been going on?”

The young fellow who was on the railroad pay-rolls as a “relief operator” took time to consider.

“A month or better.”

“How did it begin?”

“I don’t know. One way ’r another, the boys’ve just seemed to be gettin’ sort o’ careless and losin’ their grip. After two or three wrecks had happened, it was all off. Half o’ the men’ve taken to runnin’ on their nerve, and the other half act like they don’t care a durn.”

“Is it only in the train service?”

“Lord, no; it’s mighty near everywhere. It’s sort of a dry rot; cars go without repairin’, engines burn out, and twice within the last week the roundhouse has caught fire. You’d think every man on the road had just turned loose all holts and didn’t give a cuss whether he ever got ’em again or not.”

“What do the men themselves say about it?”

“There’s a heap o’ kickin’ and knockin’. Some say it’s Mr. Maxwell. When he gets good and mad and fires a bunch of ’em, they raise a rookus about it; and when he lets the next bunch down easy, they kick the other way.”

Sprague sat back in the big leather-upholstered lobby chair and for a time seemed to be absorbed in a study of the rather over-massive beam arrangement of the ceiling. Suddenly he turned to ask: “How much of a prohibition country is this, Archer?”

Tarbell laughed.

“I reckon you don’t need to ask that, with three saloons in every block in Brewster. We haven’t got the water-wagon bug much out here. They say it don’t breed well this side o’ the main range.”

“Much drinking among the railroad men?”

“Well--m--m--not so you could notice it. There’s a rule against it.”

“While they’re on duty, you mean?”

“Any old time.”

“Is that rule enforced?”

“Mr. Maxwell allows it is. He’s sure some Ranahan when it comes to buckin’ the booze-fighters.”

“Still, there is more or less drinking among the men; you know there is, don’t you, Archer?”

The young man grinned soberly.

“I ain’t tellin’ no tales out o’ school, Mr. Sprague, not me,” he drawled.

“Get rid of that notion,” said the big man sharply. “You are working for Mr. Maxwell and his rules are your law and gospel. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen, and then you can tell me what you’ve seen. I counted sixteen men in one place on this railroad to-day who, within the half-hour that I was looking on, stopped work either to hit or to pass a pocket-flask. Now go on.”

“If you hold me up that-away, I reckon maybe there _is_ a good many empty bottles layin’ round on the right-o’-way--more’n what the passengers throw out o’ the car windows,” was the reluctant admission.

“And more than there used to be, say, two or three months ago?”

“Yes; right smart more.”

“I thought so. We don’t need to look any further, Archer, for the disease itself. Your ‘dry rot’ is very pointedly a wet rot. Booze and the running of a railroad are two things that won’t mix. Now we’ll come to the nib of it. Why is there more drinking now than there used to be?”

The younger man took time to think about it before he said: “You got me goin’; I don’t know the answer to that.”

“I didn’t suppose you did,” was the curt rejoinder. “But you are going to learn the answer, Archer, my son. It is now four o’clock; by half-past seven this evening I want you to be back here prepared to tell me who has been letting down the fences for the railroad men in this matter of drinking.”

“Holy Smoke!” exclaimed the ex-cowboy, jarred for once out of his plainsman calm, “how am I goin’ to do that, Mr. Sprague?”

“That is for you to find out, my boy. If you don’t use your brain you’ll never know whether or no you’ve got any. That’s all--until half-past seven. You’ll find me here at the hotel.”

It was an even hour before the time appointed for Tarbell’s return when Maxwell joined the chemistry expert at the table in the Topaz café where they usually sat when they could dine together.

At the unfolding of the napkins Sprague said: “I’ve found your germ, Dick, and things are beginning to develop. What do you think of that?”--passing a bit of dingy coarse-fibred paper across the table.

Maxwell opened the paper and read the ill-spelled type-written note it bore.

“MR. SPRAIG:

“Weer onto you with both feet. keep youre fingers out ov the geers or maybe youll git em mashed.

“A WELL-WISHUR.”

“Where did that come from?” asked the superintendent, plainly amused.

“It was pushed under the door of my room upstairs about half an hour ago. The man who left it was short, thick-set, smooth-shaven, and he wore a pepper-and-salt suit and a slouch hat. Also, his breath smelled of whiskey.”

“You expect me to recognize the description?”

“I didn’t know but you might.”

“I don’t,” Maxwell denied. Then his smile of amusement changed to one of amazement. “How could you know all these things about this man if you were on the other side of a closed door, Calvin?”

Sprague laughed. “See how easy it is to jump to conclusions,” he derided. “I wasn’t on the other side of a closed door; I was in the corridor when the fellow passed me, looking for the number on the door. I saw him leave the note. I’ll ask one question, and then we’ll dismiss that phase of the case. Is the wrecking-train back from Lobo yet?”

“Yes; it came in about four o’clock with the string of crippled cars. But you say you have found the germ; does that mean that you are going to prove up on your assertion about the epidemic?”

“I can’t tell what it means yet; but I can tell you the name of the germ. It’s whiskey.”

“Drinking among the men?”

“Worse than that; drunkenness among the men. Enough of it, I should say, to account for all of your troubles and then some.”

“Oh, you’re off--’way off!” objected the harassed one irritably. “I know there is some drinking; in a wide-open country like this it is almost impossible to stamp it out entirely. But to account for the epidemic in that way, you’d have to imagine every other man in the service carrying a pocket-pistol on the job!”

“And you think that couldn’t happen without your knowing it, eh? A little farther along I may have some statistics to show you; but just now I’m looking not so much for the germ as for the germ-carrier.”

Maxwell smiled wearily.

“Still sticking to the theory that the blight is imported, are you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to be ‘yellow,’ Calvin. I can imagine some wild-eyed newspaper reporter hatching such an idea, but not you. Think of the absurdity of a bunch of Wall Street stock-jobbers trying to get at us in any such indirect way as that--shipping whiskey in here to demoralize our working force! Pshaw! When these fellows get busy and go to work, they want action--quick action.”

The expert put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.

“You are so close to the thing that you are continually losing the perspective, Dick,” he said earnestly. “You are going on the supposition that those New York looters are trying first one thing and then another. That doesn’t follow at all. For all you know, they may be gunning for you in half a dozen different ways this blessed minute--as they probably are. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that this whiskey scheme could be worked; I know you say it can’t, but suppose it could: can you conceive of any expedient that would be more certain to kill your traffic, wipe out your earnings, smash your securities, and put you on the toboggan slide generally?”

“Oh, no; if it could be worked.” Maxwell’s answer this time was less confidently derisive.

“All right; now that you’ve come that far, I’ll say this: it can be worked, and I’m here to tell you that it has been worked. Your railroad is practically an inebriate asylum in the making, right now, Richard. Half of your force has already fallen off the water chariot, and the other half is scared to death at the thought of what the drunken half may do.”

Maxwell pushed away his dessert untasted.

“You have the proof of this, Calvin?” he broke out.

“I have some proof, and Tarbell is getting more. You’ve been blind. You didn’t want to admit that your house of discipline was tumbling about your ears, and you’ve been shutting your eyes to the plain facts. For example: you may or may not be the only man in the service who doesn’t know that those two freight engineers--the one who was killed and the other--who overran their orders and smashed into the passenger at Lobo Cut this morning were just plain drunk!”

“What’s that? It--it can’t be, Calvin!”

“But it _is_,” insisted the big man across the table. “It is common talk among your own men; so common that it reached out and hit me--an outsider.”

The superintendent drank his small coffee at a single gulp and flung his napkin aside.

“I’ll get ’em!” he gritted savagely. “I’ll get the last damned booze-fighter in the bunch!” And then: “Good God, Sprague; how could anything like this go on without my knowing it?”

“You would have found it out, sooner or later, of course. But you’re a railroad man yourself, and you ought to know railroad men well enough to take into consideration that sort of loyalty among them which keeps them from ‘peaching’ on one another. Even Tarbell had to be jarred before he would admit that he knew about it. I can imagine that there has been a sort of generous conspiracy among the men to keep you from finding out.”

“That’s all right; I know now, and I’ll sift them out; I’ll go through the whole blamed outfit with a club! I’ll----”

The man who had called out this upbubbling of righteous wrath was chuckling softly.

“You won’t do anything that you say you will,” he interrupted good-naturedly. “You stumped me to take the case, and I’ve taken it; which means that you’re under the doctor’s orders. When you have cooled down a bit, you’ll see very clearly that the worst thing you could do at this particular crisis would be to start a division-wide scrap with the rank and file.”

“But, good Lord, Sprague; I’ve got to do something, haven’t I?”

“You surely have; and that something is to help me find the germ-carrier. Somebody has been taking down the bars for your men; who is it?”

“I don’t know any more than a goat. I can’t yet believe that it is the work of any one man.”

“Possibly it isn’t; there may be a good many. But I’ll chance a guess that some one in authority is setting the pace. Leave that for a moment and we’ll take up something else. You have two daily papers here in Brewster: I’ve noticed that one of them, _The Tribune_, is friendly to your road. How about the other, _The Times-Record_?”

“It is supposed to be independent, with a slant against corporations and ‘the system,’ whatever that may be.”

“Um,” said the scientist. “Before I went out on this last trip with Billy, I remarked that this other paper was giving a good bit of space to your road troubles in its news columns, and a good bit of its editorial space to criticisms of the Ford management. It occurred to me then that there might be a reason. How is the paper organized?”

“It is owned by one of our near-millionaires; a retired ranchman named Parker Higginson, who has dabbled in real-estate, in mines, and latterly in politics. His grouch against the railroad is purely personal. He has asked favors that I couldn’t legally grant; and on one occasion he took offence because I told him that a newspaper man should be the last person in the world to invite us to become law-breakers.”

“And his editor?” queried the expert.

“Is a bird of the same feather; a rather ‘yellow’ little fice named Healy.”

Sprague looked rather dubiously at the two cigars which the waiter was tendering on a server. “No, I think not, George,” he said, waving the cigars aside and feeling for his own pocket-case of stronger ones. And then to Maxwell: “This is all very nourishing. It may help out more than you suspect. Later in the evening I may ask you to call with me at the office of _The Times-Record_--though we may not have to go that far up the ladder to find what we are looking for. In the meantime, Tarbell is waiting for us out yonder in the lobby. Suppose we go and see what he wants.”

They found the young man, who looked like a younger brother to Starbuck, and who had made his record chasing cattle thieves in Montana, methodically rolling a cigarette in the loggia alcove, and Sprague began on him briskly.

“Spit it out, Archer; what have you found?”

“I didn’t make out to find what you sent me after,” was the half-evasive reply.

“All right; tell us what you did find.”

The young man dropped his cigarette and looked up with a glint of stubbornness in his stone-gray eyes.