Part 12

“If it’s just the same to you, Mr. Sprague, I’d a heap ruther not,” he said.

Sprague reached out and turned the lapel of Tarbell’s coat, exposing the small silver star of a deputy sheriff.

“You took an oath when you got that, Archer; and Mr. Maxwell pays you for wearing it.”

Tarbell threw up his head defiantly. “Deputy or no deputy, I ain’t goin’ to name no names,” he began slowly. “But here’s what I found out: I been in twenty-three saloons and dives since you told me to go chase, and I counted thirty-one railroad men in ’em. Not all of ’em was drinkin’ or gamblin’, but some of ’em was.”

Sprague turned to Maxwell.

“You see, I knew what I was talking about.”

The superintendent was shaking his head.

“As openly as that!” he exclaimed. “I must have been the blindest fool in all this hill country!”

Tarbell chipped in quickly. “It ain’t been that bad for very long. But it’s just as Mr. Sprague says; it’s spreadin’ like murrain on a dry range. I saw men in them places this evenin’ that I’d a swore never got off the water-wagon. I ain’t namin’ no names.”

“Mr. Maxwell isn’t asking you to give anybody away,” the expert qualified. And then: “Had your supper?”

Tarbell nodded. “I had a hand-out in one o’ the saloons.”

“Good. Then I’ll give you another job. Look around town for a man about Mr. Maxwell’s build, only about twenty pounds heavier. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, wears a slouch hat soft gray in color, dresses in pepper-and-salt, is clean-shaven, red-faced, blue-eyed, and walks with a little hitch to his left leg which isn’t quite a limp. When you catch up with him, find out who he is and come and tell me. I’ll be over at Mr. Maxwell’s office.”

Tarbell vanished, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went, and Sprague thrust his arm in Maxwell’s.

“I’ll go over to your shop with you,” he said. “I know you’re anxious to climb back into the working saddle. I’m not going to bore you; I merely want to have a little talk with that irreproachable chief clerk of yours, Harvey Calmaine.”

A little later they climbed the stair to the office floor of the railroad building together, and Maxwell went on down the corridor to the despatcher’s room. When he came back to his own office a half-hour later and found Sprague and young Calmaine figuring together at the chief clerk’s desk in the outer room, he went on to his own inner sanctum without disturbing them.

It was perhaps another half-hour farther along when the expert, who had been patiently going over a mass of statistics with the alert, well-groomed young fellow who served as the superintendent’s right hand, sat back in his chair and relighted the fat black cigar which had been suffered to go out many times during the figuring process.

“It seems that a good many things besides wrecks have been happening in the past few weeks, Mr. Calmaine,” he suggested musingly. “In that short interval you have had many changes in the force, especially in the motive-power department. I don’t know whether you have remarked it, but fully half of the men in the shops and roundhouses are new men. And that is the department in which the sickness seems to be the worst. Your maintenance costs have increased three hundred per cent. over the same period last year.”

“I know it,” admitted the chief clerk. “It is the more marked because Dawson, our former master mechanic, made such phenomenally good records.”

“I remember Dawson,” said the big man, slipping easily from the statistics into the humanities. “He was here the first time I came over the road, early in the summer. Has he left the Short Line?”

“He has been promoted. He is superintendent of motive-power on the east end of the Southwestern.”

“That is recent, isn’t it?”

“Yes; it was only a few weeks ago.”

“And you have a new man as department chief?”

“We have--Judson Bascom. You may remember him as the man who ran the special train for you and Mr. Maxwell the day you made the blind trip to Tunnel Number Three. He is a sort of slave-driver and seems to have a good deal of trouble with his men--is continually hiring and firing, you’d say, from the appearance of his pay-rolls.”

The big expert’s eyes narrowed.

“Was he also promoted from some other place on the system?” he asked.

“No; he is a new man. I don’t know where he got his experience; somewhere in the East, I suppose.”

“Another question,” put in Sprague. “Does Mr. Maxwell have the appointment of his own motive-power chief?”

“No; this appointment was made in New York--by the executive committee, I imagine.”

“Somebody’s nephew or brother-in-law?” queried the chemist, with a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t know about that. I guess it happens that way, once in a while, on any railroad. But Bascom is all kinds of capable.”

Sprague shook his head. “The true test of capability is always in the final result, my son,” he said reflectively; adding, “and results nowadays are usually measured in dollars and cents. As an outsider, I should say that this Mr. Bascom is a pretty expensive man to have around, judging from his cost sheets. He drinks some, doesn’t he?”

The young chief clerk closed one eye gravely.

“I’m not supposed to know anything about that, Mr. Sprague.”

“No, of course not. As you might say, it’s nobody’s business but Mr. Bascom’s. By the way, what is that whistle blowing so persistently for?”

Calmaine leaped out of his chair as if it had been suddenly connected with the grounding wire of a forty-kilowatt generator.

“By George! it’s a fire!” he exclaimed; and the sound of hurrying feet in the corridor confirmed the surmise. Maxwell’s door opened at the same instant, and the three rushed out to join the crowd which was already streaming across the yard tracks toward the company’s shops.

The fire was in the shops, originating in the boiler-room; and, thanks to the timely alarm and the comparative earliness of the hour, it was soon extinguished. Investigation, promptly instituted on the spot by the superintendent, proved that it was the result of pure carelessness. Some of the mechanics had washed their overalls and had hung them too near the sheet-iron stack in the fire-room; that was all.

Sprague lingered at Maxwell’s elbow while the investigation was going on, and he appeared to be a more or less perfunctory listener when Bascom, oozing wrathful profanity at every pore, told the superintendent what he would do to the careless clothes-driers when they should show up in the morning. But later, after the return to the head-quarters offices, the man from Washington sat for a long time in Maxwell’s easiest chair, smoking steadily and with his gaze fixed upon the disused gas chandelier marking the exact centre of the ceiling.

It was not until after Maxwell had finished his quota of night work and was closing his desk that Tarbell came in to make a whispered report to the big man apparently dreaming in the easy-chair.

Sprague listened, nodded, and rose to join the office-closing retreat.

“That is about what I thought, Archer,” he said soberly. “Now I have one more little job for you, and when it is done we’ll call it a go for to-night. Come around to my laboratory with me and I’ll explain it to you.” And when the four of them reached the plaza-fronting street he excused himself to Maxwell and the chief clerk and went, with Tarbell at his elbow, to the little second-floor den in the Kinzie Building where his experiments in soil analysis were conducted.

Reaching the back room which served as the laboratory proper, Sprague provided his follower with half a dozen small bottles, empty and tightly corked.

“There you are,” he said, from which it may be inferred that the nature of the remaining “job” had been explained on the way up from the railroad head-quarters. “Do it neatly, Archer, and don’t let them catch you at it. Everything will have quieted down by this time, and you shouldn’t have any trouble. I’ll wait for you here.”

Tarbell was gone possibly half an hour, and when he returned the bottles they were filled, two of them with a black-brown liquid, thick and viscous, and four with what appeared to be specimens of more or less dirty water. Each bottle was carefully marked on the blank label pasted upon it. Sprague stood them in a row on the laboratory working-table.

“I shall be busy here for twenty or thirty minutes,” he said. “I don’t want to ride a willing horse to death, but I’d be glad if you’d go by the hotel and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait up for me. I want to see him before he goes to bed.”

Tarbell nodded, but he hesitated about going.

“I got a hunch that we ain’t doin’ all the shadow work by our little lonesomes, Mr. Sprague,” he ventured to say. But before he could go on, Sprague lifted a finger for silence, made a whirling half-turn with a swiftness marvellous in so huge a body, and flung himself through the open door into the unlighted outer office-room to which the laboratory was an inner extension.

There were sounds of a collision, a fall, and a brief struggle before Tarbell could get action. At the end of it Sprague came back into the lighted laboratory, dragging a thick-set, square-shouldered man in pepper-and-salt clothes; a man with a clean-shaven red face down the side of which a thin line of blood was trickling.

“You were eminently correct, Archer,” said the expert, slamming his unresisting burden into a corner of the room after he had deftly gone through the pepper-and-salt pockets for weapons with the result of turning out a cheap revolver and a wicked-looking knife. “I’m sorry I can’t keep my word and let you go to bed, but the plot has thickened a little too rapidly. Go around to the Topaz and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait. Then come back here and keep this fellow quiet while I do my work.”

When Tarbell went out, Sprague quickly stripped his coat and went to work at his laboratory table. For some little time the man in the corner lay as he had been cast, and the worker at the table paid no attention to him. But a few minutes before Tarbell’s return, the red-faced man gasped, gurgled, and sat up to hold his head in his hands as one trying to remember what had happened to him. Presently he looked up, and after a long stare at the big figure of the man at the work table, he found his voice.

“Say, guv’ner, wot am I doin’ here?” he asked huskily.

Sprague, who was skilfully dropping a fuming yellow liquor from a glass-stoppered bottle into a beaker, replied without turning his head.

“If anybody should ask, I should say you are waiting for an officer to come and take you to jail.”

“Who, me? Wot have I been doin’?” queried the husky one, in the anxious rasp of a deeply aggrieved victim of circumstances.

“You’ve been shoving threatening letters under my door in the Hotel Topaz, for one thing,” said Sprague, still busy with his experiment.

“Who, me? My Gawd--just lissen to ’im!” wheezed the red-faced man, as if appealing to some third person invisible.

A silence followed during which the crouching man’s feet drew themselves by imperceptible fractions of an inch at a time into position for a tackling spring. Sprague did not look aside, but when the leg muscles of the man began to bulge as if testing themselves for the leap, the worker at the table spoke again.

“I shouldn’t try it if I were you. This stuff that I am fooling with is nitric acid, ninety-eight per cent. pure. If any of it should happen to get spilled on you, there wouldn’t be sweet oil enough in this town to put the fire out.”

“My Gawd!” gasped the red-faced one, suddenly sticking his feet out in front of him again; and just then Tarbell came in.

“I’ll be through in a minute, Archer,” said the experimenter at the work-table, still without looking around. “Did you find your man?”

“Yes; and Starbuck is with him. What do you want me to do with this geezer?”

“Nothing. I’ll fix him when we’re ready to go.”

“I’ve got a pair of handcuffs,” Tarbell suggested.

“They won’t be needed--not for this one.”

Tarbell dragged out a chair and sat down, tilting comfortably against the wall and staring half-absently at the man in the corner. “Before I’d let any bare-handed man take my arsenal away from me and slam me around like that,” he murmured, quite impersonally.

The man on the floor lifted the challenge promptly.

“Lemme git up and gimme half a chanst,” he croaked. “I won’t hurt you none if you don’t git in the way o’ that door.”

“Not this evenin’,” said Tarbell succinctly; and there the matter rested until Sprague put his beakers and test-tubes aside, and, resuming his coat, took a flat black box from a shelf and slipped it into his pocket.

“Now we’re ready,” he announced; and then he turned to the captured spy. “We’re going to leave you here in the dark for a little while, and there will be nothing between you and a get-away but a small matter of fear. After we turn the lights off I shall leave a few bottles of stuff around where they will do the most good. If you should happen to upset one of them in moving about, it’s good-by. If it doesn’t burn you to death, you’ll stifle.”

“My Gawd!” said the captive; and he was still saying it over softly to himself when they switched off the lights, shut the office doors, and went away.

“There is a good example of the power of matter over mind, Archer,” said Sprague whimsically, when they reached the street. “If that fellow would use his reason even a little bit he’d know that I hadn’t made any very elaborate preparations to hold him; there wasn’t time between the turning off of the lights and our leaving. Yet I’ll bet a small chicken worth twenty-five dollars that we find him still crouching in his corner and afraid to move when we go back. He saw me using acid in my little experiment; saw the fumes and probably got a whiff of them. That was enough.”

They found Maxwell and Starbuck sitting on the hotel porch, smoking. Sprague took the superintendent aside.

“It’s rather worse than I thought it was, Dick,” he began, when they had drawn their chairs a little apart. “That is my excuse for keeping you up so late. We have one of the conspirators under a sort of mental lock and key over at my place in the Kinzie Building, but he is only a hired striker, and I’d like to flush the big game. Are you good for a watch-meeting--you and Starbuck? It may last all night, and nothing may come of it, but it’s worth trying.”

Maxwell spread his hands.

“Whatever you say, Calvin,” he acquiesced. “After the jolt you’ve given me to-night, I can only get into the harness and pull when you give the word.”

“All right. We’ll take Tarbell for a guide. Tarbell, you know your way around in the shops pretty well, don’t you?”

“I reckon so,” was the young man’s reply.

“We want to go to the foundry, or to some place near by where we can keep an eye on the pickle shed. Can you get us there without arousing anybody’s curiosity?”

“Sure,” said Tarbell.

“Good. Pitch out,” was the curt command, and the four of them left the hotel to make a circuit through ill-lighted streets and around the lower end of the eastern railroad yard to come at the long line of shop buildings from the rear.

On the way Maxwell inquired curiously: “What do you know about pickling-sheds, Calvin?”

“I know that every well-regulated foundry has one where castings which are to be machined are treated with acid to take the hard sand-scale off.”

“And why, just why, are you anxious to get a near-hand view of ours, at this time of night?”

“I’m hoping we shall find the answer to that in your foundry yard, Dick. If we don’t, the joke will be on me.”

The approach to the locomotive-repairing section of the railroad plant was made through a river-bank yard littered with slag dumps, piled flasks, and heaps of scrap iron. There was no moon, and when they got among the lumber sheds in the rear of the car-shops the darkness was almost tangible. But Tarbell knew the ground, and when he finally called a halt the twin cupola stacks of the foundry loomed before them in the darkness and the acrid smell of the warm, moist moulding sand was in the air.

When the pickling-shed had been located for him, Sprague chose the waiting-place under a flask shelter directly opposite and the silent watch began. For a weary half-hour nothing happened. Though the month was August, a cool wind crept down from the Timanyoni snow peaks, and the splash and gurgle of the near-by river added its suggestion of chill to the moonless night. Over in the western yards the night crew was making up the midnight freights; but with the buildings of the plant intervening, the noises of the shifter’s exhaust and the clankings and crashings of the shunted cars came faintly to the ears of the watchers.

On the even hour of one the watchman made his round. They could see his lantern twinkling through the windows of the shops, and later he made a circuit of the outbuildings. His route led him finally through the foundry, and as he came out the light of his lantern fell upon the piled castings and the pickling-troughs, and on the carboys of vitriol. There were four of the boxed acid-holders standing under the shed. Sprague drew down his left cuff and made pencil marks on it in the darkness when the watchman passed on.

It was possibly fifteen minutes after the watchman had disappeared when Maxwell broke the strained silence with a whisper.

“Duck!” he said to Starbuck, who was standing up. “Dunkell’s coming back--without his lantern!”

Sprague spread his arms and crushed the other three back into the shadows. “It isn’t the watchman this time--be ready!” he whispered; and as he said it the figure of a man appeared coming down the littered roadway from the blacksmith shop.

Though he walked in darkness there was no incertitude about the man’s movements. Turning abruptly out of the material-road he went straight to the foundry shed. A moment later a beam of white light played steadily upon the acid carboys, a sheltered beam which seemed to come from a tiny electric search-light. Plainly they saw a pair of hands place a large bottle on the ground, remove the stopper, and fix a tin funnel in the neck. Then one of the carboys was tilted, presumably by the same pair of hands, though the hands were invisible now, and a thin stream of the yellow acid gurgled through the funnel.

When the bottle was filled the carboy slowly righted itself; the hands came in view again to remove the funnel and to replace the stopper; and then the search-light went out with the faint snap of an electric switch. Almost at the same instant the watchers saw the figure of the man fading away into the inner and darker blackness of the foundry.

“We’ve got to follow him, Tarbell,” said Sprague, hurriedly; “and we lose out if he discovers us. Can you pilot us?”

“I can,” asserted Maxwell, and under the superintendent’s lead the shadow race was begun.

Happily, there was a noisy diversion to make the secret pursuit feasible. The train-making clamor had come down from the western yards, and for the moment the yard crew was working on the freight-house tracks opposite the shops. Under cover of the out-door clamor the four pursuers were able to close up on the bottle-carrier until they were treading almost in his footsteps. The route led through the foundry floor to the machine shop. On the erecting pits were two locomotives, apparently ready to be hauled out and put into service after their period of back-shop repairs.

Into the cab of one of the engines the bottle-bearer climbed, first placing his burden carefully in the gangway. A little later they heard him climbing over the coal in the tender, heard him remove the cover of the water manhole, and heard the _glug-glug_ of liquid issuing from a bottle-neck.

Sprague silently drew a small square object from his pocket, the little flat black box he had caught up as he was leaving his office in the Kinzie Building. Then he whispered to Tarbell: “Cover him, Archer, and don’t hesitate to shoot if you need to: ready!” At the word there was a blinding burst of illumination and the report of a flash-light cartridge, followed instantly by the crash of the breaking bottle, silence, and black darkness. Then Sprague’s mellow voice boomed into the stillness.

“Come down, Mr. Bascom. We’ve got your picture, and a man who doesn’t often miss what he shoots at is covering you with his gun.”

It was a grim little group of five which gathered in the master mechanic’s room in the office wing of the machine shop a few minutes after the flash-light photograph had been taken in the erecting shop. Bascom’s ruddy flush was gone when he sat down heavily in his desk chair; but his natty brown crush hat was pushed back, and the gleam in his small, lynx-like eyes was not of fear.

“Just name the kind of a hand-spring you’d like to have me turn, gentlemen,” he said, half-sardonically, when Tarbell had switched on the second circuit of incandescents. “I’m not much of an acrobat, but I’ll do the best I can to amuse you.”

It was Sprague who did the talking for the prosecution.

“We want to know first who is with you in this job of inside worm-eating, Mr. Bascom,” he said coolly.

“Nobody,” came the prompt lie.

Sprague’s smile was affable. “I’m sure you’ll make one exception,” he urged; “a man named Murtagh, who was for a little time one of your shop machinists and who is now a press-repairer on _The Times-Record_.”

Bascom sat up and swore a savage oath.

“So that damned scab has welshed, has he?” he grated.

Sprague branched off and began again, this time in the straitly criminal field.

“How many locomotives have you treated with the acid cure, first and last, Mr. Bascom?”

“Enough so you’ll still be resetting flues in ’em a year from now.”

This time it was Maxwell’s turn to swear, and for a minute or two the air of the office was sulphurous. When the atmosphere had cleared again, Sprague went on.

“I presume that your defence in court will be that you were trying an experiment to neutralize the effect of the alkaline water of this region?”

Bascom grinned appreciatively. “You’re an expert chemist yourself, Mr. Sprague. The water in this country, outside of the Park, is pretty badly alkali, as you probably know.”

“But that defence will scarcely explain why you put acid in the oil which is used for lubricating the internal parts of the engines--cylinders and valves,” Sprague cut in quietly.

The master mechanic’s chair righted itself with a crash, and the crash punctuated another blast of bad language directed at the man who had been left crouching in the corner in Sprague’s uptown laboratory.

“So Murtagh gave you that, too, did he?” Bascom finished. “It’s your lead, Mr. Sprague; what do you want me to play?”

“Names,” said the expert curtly.

“But if I say I was playing a lone hand?”

“We should know you were lying. This acid business may be all your own; but there are other things. You’ve had plenty of help in the drink-fest and the demoralization game, Bascom.”

The big master mechanic’s lips shut like the jaws of a steel trap. But after a time he said: “What do I get if I spout on the others?”

“A chance to get out of the country--eh, Maxwell?”

The superintendent nodded. “Yes; if he can get away before I can find a gun to kill him with.”

Bascom reached into his desk, found a scratch-pad and tossed it over to Starbuck. “Take ’em down,” he said briefly; and then followed a black-list that was simply heart-breaking to Richard Maxwell, a man who had built his reputation as a railroad executive, and would have staked it instantly, upon the loyalty of his rank and file. Shop foremen, roundhouse bosses, bridge men, yard foremen, section bosses, a travelling engineer, a clerk here and a telegraph operator there--the list seemed endless.

When Bascom paused, Sprague began again.

“What was the plan, Bascom, as it was outlined to these others?”

The master mechanic’s smile showed his fine even teeth.