Part 13

“To make this jerk-water railroad a little easier to work for,” he sneered. “When we found the right kind of a man we made him believe that the discipline was keyed up too damned tight and showed him how he could loosen up a little, if he felt like it. Murtagh was barkeep’ and handed out the bug-juice. That’s all there was to it.”

“Not quite all,” said Sprague evenly. “You got Murtagh his job on _The Times-Record_ in order to have him handy without being too much in the way or too much in evidence. How much do the _Times-Record_ people know about the scheme for smashing the Nevada Short Line securities from the inside?”

Bascom laughed hardily.

“You’ll never catch a newspaper man,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this: Parker Higginson is a pretty smooth politician, and he’s got a mighty long arm when it comes to reaching for the thing he wants. He was the man who got me my job here, and I’ll bet those New York people who appointed me don’t know yet why they did it. Another thing: when I’m gone, Higginson will still be here--don’t you forget that!”

“We’ll try to remember it,” Sprague promised. Then he looked at his watch. “The overland passenger, westbound, will be here in a few minutes, and when it goes, you may go with it, Mr. Bascom. But first we want a few more names, the names of the New York people who are behind both you and Mr. Higginson.”

Bascom got up, went to a wardrobe in one corner of the office, and dragged out two heavy suit-cases.

“I’ve been fixed for this for some little time,” he volunteered. “Send Murtagh to the stone-pile for splitting on us, and I won’t make any claim for the half-month’s salary that’s due me. As to the names of the big fellows, I only wish I knew them, Mr. Sprague. If I did, I’d go east instead of west and make somebody come across with big money. As it is, I guess it’s South America for mine. Good-night, all. I wish you luck with the booze-fighters, Mr. Maxwell. You’ll have a bully good time loading some of them back onto the water-automobile.” And he went out into the night with a suit-case in either hand.

“Talk about cold gall!” said Starbuck, when the door closed behind the retreating figure of the big master mechanic; “Great Cat! that fellow’s got enough to swim in.” Then he turned to Sprague. “Is the show over?”

The man from Washington laughed genially.

“That is for Maxwell to say. We might go uptown and give those newspaper people a bad quarter of an hour, though I doubt if we’d make any money at it.”

Maxwell looked up quickly.

“You think they’re in it, Calvin? Bascom wasn’t lying about that part of it?”

“Yes; they are in it up to their necks. I suppose it’s politics for Higginson. Haven’t I heard somewhere that he is one of the State bosses?”

“You might have,” drawled Starbuck. “He’s It, all right.”

Sprague stood up and yawned sleepily.

“Perhaps, a little later on, we can throw a scare into this Mr. Parker Higginson,” he suggested. “Just now, I’m for the hotel and a few winks of much-needed sleep. Tarbell, you go up to my office and get Murtagh. Have him locked up on a charge of--oh, any old charge will do; breaking into my office to-night, if you can’t think of anything better. If we can manage to hold onto him for a while, we may be able to keep this Mr. Higginson quiet while Maxwell is straightening out his booze-fighters. Let’s go.”

“Hold on, just a minute,” pleaded Maxwell. “There are three of us here who have seen the wheels go round, and I don’t forget that I was the one who said there weren’t any wheels. How in the name of all that is wonderful have you been able to work this puzzle out in less than twelve hours, Sprague?”

The big chemistry expert sat down again and locked his hands behind his head.

“My gosh!” he said; “have I got to open up a kindergarten for you fellows when I’m so sleepy that I don’t know what I’m going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning? It was easy, dead easy. Half an hour with those delayed train crews at Angels this morning showed me that the discipline strings were all off; one of the freight conductors even offered me a nip out of his pocket-flask when I intimated that I was thirsty. With that for a pointer, I had my eyes open at the wreck, and what I saw there you all know. Moreover, I noticed that the pocket-flasks were all alike, as if they’d all been handed out over the same bar. All straight, so far?”

“Go on,” said Maxwell.

“I got my first pointer on Bascom at the wreck, too. I saw that the men in the trainmaster’s gang didn’t drink when the boss was looking, a condition which didn’t apply in the other crew. Again, I noticed that Bascom took his track-clearing privilege with a large and handsome disregard for the salvage. He didn’t care how much property was destroyed in the process, and once I saw him give the signal to the crane engineer to drop a car loaded with automobiles--which was promptly done and the autos properly smashed.”

“The cold-blooded devil!” growled the superintendent.

“When we reached town, Tarbell here promptly confirmed my guess about the whiskey; and in the evening Calmaine helped some more by going with me over the pay-rolls for new names, and over the cost-sheets for increases. Naturally, we dwelt longest upon the motive-power and repair department, with its huge increases, and it so happened that my eye fell upon the various charges for vitriol in carboys. I asked Calmaine what use a railroad shop had for so much sulphuric acid, and he told me it was used to pickle castings. Afterward I sent Tarbell out to bring me samples of water from the tanks of the crippled locomotives on the shop track and of the oil in their cylinder-cups. Analyses of both, which I made on the spot, showed the presence of sulphuric acid in the water, and also in the oil.”

“Still, you didn’t have any cinch on Bascom,” Starbuck put in.

“No, but things were leaning pretty heavily his way. Tarbell had traced Murtagh for me and had found out the one thing that I needed to know; namely, that Murtagh had been ‘placed’ on _The Times-Record_ by Bascom’s recommendation. Murtagh was the man who put the threatening note under my door; the note was printed on a scrap of scratch-paper--copy paper--of the sort that you rarely find outside of a newspaper office. Here I simply put two and two together. Bascom had been conferring with Higginson, or his editor, or both of them, and telling them of my rubbernecking at the wreck. They had agreed among themselves that I’d better be warned off the grass, and they took about the stupidest possible way they could think of to do it.”

“Still, you didn’t have Bascom,” reiterated Starbuck.

“No; but he was the man who had been signing the requisitions for the big purchases of acid, and I was far enough along to chance a jump at him. I knew that if he were the man who was poisoning the locomotives, he wasn’t trusting anybody else; he was doing it himself, often and by littles. I wasn’t at all sure of catching him to-night, of course; but we saw him down here at the fire, and I thought there was an even chance that he might stay and do a little more devilment.”

Maxwell stood up and shook himself into his coat.

“I’m onto you now, Sprague,” he chuckled, in a brave attempt to jolly himself out of the depressive nightmare which had been weighing him down for weeks. “You’re a guesser--a bold, bad four-flusher, with a perfectly miraculous knack of drawing the other card you need when you reach for it. Now, if you could only guess me out some way in which I can straighten up these poor fellows of mine who have been pulled neck and heels off of the water-wagon----”

“Pshaw! that’s a cinch,” said the big man, yawning sleepily again. “We’ll just put our heads together and get out a little circular letter, talking to the boys just as you’d talk to a bunch of them in your office. Tell ’em it’s all off, and the bar is closed and padlocked, and you’ll have ’em all eating out of your hand again, same as they used to. You don’t believe it can be done? You let me write the letter and I’ll show you. All you have to do is to apply the scientific principle; surround the whole subject and look at it calmly and dispassionately, and--ye-ow! Say, I’m going to chance another guess--the last in the box. If you don’t head me over to the hotel and my room, you’ll have to carry me over and put me to bed. And that’s no joke, with a man of my size. Let’s go.”

V

The Cloud-Bursters

IT was an article in the news columns of _The Brewster Morning Tribune_ which first called attention--the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general--to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.

Connabel, a hard-working reporter on _The Tribune_, had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s place, the one remaining Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the construction camp of the Mesquite Company.

Being short of “copy” on the fight story, the reporter had written up the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on the job whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which, to Connabel’s unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.

Kendall, managing editor of _The Tribune_, had run the story, partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country with the brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.

That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in the evening of the day on which Connabel’s write-up appeared.

It was Kendall’s regular habit to close his desk at seven o’clock and to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling down to his night’s work. On the evening in question he had chanced to sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad, and with Maxwell’s friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had appeared that morning in _The Tribune_.

“Yes,” said the editor; “Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. We’ve all known, in a general way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had no idea that they’d got their dam pretty nearly done and were about ready to open up for business.”

“It’s wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!” cut in the railroad man snappily. “What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as this street pavement here.”

Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face the color of old oak-tanned leather.

“That is what you would think--that they are out for the easy money,” he agreed. “But there is something a little queer about it. They haven’t advertised.”

“Not here,” supplemented Maxwell. “It would be a trifle too rank. Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of the Red Desert.”

“They haven’t advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain,” put in the editor, quietly. “What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers.”

“Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings,” was Maxwell’s comment; but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.

“What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as that, Mr. Kendall?”

“Oh, he had his reason pat enough,” rejoined the editor, with his tired smile. “He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project. He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert project alone. He claimed that it had been financed without taking a dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local investors to be protected.”

“Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it’s an admission that the Eastern investors might need protection,” scoffed the railroad superintendent. Then he added: “They certainly will if they expect to get any of the money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why, Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!”

“And the other half?” inquired Sprague.

“It’s a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill arroyos,” Maxwell explained. “Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then, for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand.”

“Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water,” commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: “As you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long as it doesn’t stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven’t much excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you’re up my way. Always glad to see you.”

The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding highlands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.

The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over Maxwell’s railroad.

“Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we concocted?”

“They are, for a fact,” was the hearty assurance. “I have never seen anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They’ve been coming in squads to ’fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that it’s the water-wagon for theirs from now on. By George, Calvin, it’s the most mellowing experience I’ve ever had! It proves what you have always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the front if you only know how to appeal to it.”

“That’s right,” averred the chemist. “It is the strong hope of the country that there is justice and fairness and sane common-sense at the American bottom of us, if you can only get at it. I think you can call the booze-fight and demoralization round-up a trouble past and begin to look around you for the signs and symptoms of the next biff you’re going to get.”

The stockily built little man who stood as the railroad company’s chief field-officer on the far-western fighting line moved uneasily in his chair.

“I have been hoping there wasn’t going to be any ‘next time,’” he said, chewing thoughtfully upon his cigar.

“I should hope with you, Dick, if we had been able, in any of the former scrimmages, to secure good, indubitable court evidence against the men who are backing these buccaneering raids on your securities. The one thing that big money really fears to-day is the law--the law as the Federal courts are likely to construe and administer it. But to obtain your day in court you’ve got to have evidence; and thus far we haven’t been able to sweat out anything that would implicate the man or men higher up. Therefore, you may continue to sleep on your arms, keeping a sharp eye out for surprises.”

“I guess that is pretty good advice,” was the ready admission; “but it is rather difficult to put into practice, Calvin. There are five hundred miles of this railroad, and my job of operating them is big enough to keep me busy without doing any detective stunts on the side.”

“I know,” Sprague nodded reflectively, “and for that reason I’ve been half-way keeping an eye out for you myself.”

“You have? Don’t tell me you’ve been finding more grief!”

Sprague threw away his outburned stub and found and lighted a fresh cigar.

“I don’t want to pose as an alarmist,” he offered at length, “but I’d like to dig a little deeper into this Mesquite irrigation scheme. How much or little do you know about it?”

“Next to nothing. About two months ago Jennings, the construction engineer, made application for the through handling, from Copah, of a train-load of machinery, tools, and camp outfit. He asked to have the stuff delivered at the end of the old copper-mine spur above Angels. We put the spur in shape for him and delivered the freight.”

“Well, what else?”

“That is about all we have had to do with them in a business way. Two weeks ago, when we had that wreck at Lobo, they were asking Benson for an extension of the copper-mine spur to a point nearer their job, chiefly, I think, so they could run a hand-car back and forth between the camp and the saloon at Angels. Benson didn’t recommend it, and the matter was dropped.”

“Without protest?”

“Oh, yes; Jennings didn’t make much of a roar. In fact, I’ve always felt that he avoided me when he could. He is in town a good bit, but I rarely see him. Somebody told me he tried once to get into the Town and Country Club, and didn’t make it. I don’t know who would blackball him, or why; but evidently some one did.”

The ash grew a full half-inch longer on Sprague’s fresh cigar before he said:

“Doesn’t it occur to you that there is something a bit mysterious about this dry-land irrigation scheme, Dick?”

“I had never thought of it as being mysterious. It is a palpable swindle, of course; but swindles are like the poor--they’re always with us.”

“It interests me,” said the big man, half-musingly. “A company, formed nobody knows where or how, drops down in the edge of the Red Desert and begins--absolutely without any of the clatter and clamor of advertising that usually go with such enterprises--to build what, from all reports, must be a pretty costly dam. If they have acquired a title to the Mesquite Mesa, no one seems to have heard of it; and if they are hoping to sell the land when the dam is completed, that, too, has been kept dark. Now comes this little newspaper puff this morning, and Mr. Jennings promptly turns up to ask Kendall to drop it.”

“It is rather queer, when you come to put the odds and ends of it together,” admitted the railroad man.

“Decidedly queer, I should say.” So far the Government man went on the line which he himself had opened. Then he switched abruptly. “By the way, where is your brother-in-law, Starbuck? I haven’t seen him for three or four days.”

“Billy has been in Red Butte, figuring on a little mining deal in which we are both interested. But I am looking for him back to-night.”

“Good. If you should happen to see him when the train comes in, ask him to come over here and smoke a pipe with me. Tell him I’m losing my carefully acquired cowboy accent and I’d like to freshen it up a bit.”

The superintendent promised; and, since he always had work to do, went across to his office in the second story of the combined head-quarters and station building.

Some hour or so later the evening train came in from the west, and at the outpouring of passengers from it one, a man whose air of prosperous independence was less in the grave, young-old face and the loosely fitting khaki service clothes than in the way in which he carried his shoulders, was met by a boy from the superintendent’s office, and the word passed sent him diagonally across the grass-covered plaza to swing himself lightly over the railing of the hotel porch.

“Dick made motions as if you wanted to smoke a peace pipe with me,” he said, dropping carelessly into the chair which had been Maxwell’s.

“Yes,” Sprague assented; and then he went on to explain why. At the end of the explanation Starbuck nodded.

“I reckon we can do it all right; go up on the early-morning train to the canyon head, and take a chance on picking up a couple of bronc’s at Wimberley’s ranch. But we could hoof it over from Angels in less than a quarter of the time it’ll take us to ride up the river from Wimberley’s.”

“For reasons of my own, Billy, I don’t want to ‘hoof it,’ as you say, from Angels. To mention one of them, I might ask you to remember that I tip the scale at a little over the half of the third hundred, just now, and I’m pretty heavy on my feet.” And therewith the matter rested.

At an early hour the following morning, an hour when the sun was just swinging clear over the far-distant blue horizon line of the Crosswater Hills which marks the eastern limit of the great desert, two men dropped from the halted eastbound train at the Timanyoni Canyon water-tank and made their way around the nearest of the hogbacks to the ranch house of one William Wimberley.

As Starbuck had predicted, two horses were obtainable, though the ranchman looked long and dubiously at the big figure of the Government chemist before he was willing to risk even the heaviest of the horses in his small _remuda_.

“I reckon you’ll have ter set sort o’ light in the saddle, Mister,” he said at the mounting; and then, apparently as an after-thought: “By gollies, I wouldn’t have you fall over ag’inst me f’r a farm in God’s country, stranger! Ef you was to live round here, we’d call you Samson, and take up a c’lection fer the pore, sufferin’ Philistines. We shore would.”

Sprague laughed good-naturedly as he followed Starbuck’s lead toward the river. He was well used to being joked about his size, and there were times when he rather encouraged the joke. Big men are popularly supposed to be more or less helpless, physically, and Sprague was enough of a humorist to enjoy the upsetting, now and then, of the popular tradition. In his college days he had held the record for the heavy lift and the broad jump; there was no man of his class who could stand up to him with the gloves or on the wrestling-mat; and in the foot-ball field he was at once the strongest “back” and the fastest man on the team--a combination rare enough to be miraculous.

“You say you want to follow the river?” said Starbuck, when they had struck in between the precipitous hills among which the green flood of the Timanyoni made its way toward the canyon portal.

“Yes, if it is at all practicable. I’d like to get some idea of the lay of the land between this and the camp on the Mesquite.”