Part 17

“It was merely a bit of what you might call constructive reasoning,” he said modestly. “I knew by personal investigation in the line of my proper work--soil-testing--that there was no arable land within reach of the Mesquite project. The other steps followed, as a matter of course. Starbuck, here, is wondering why I risked his life and mine to get a few photographs for _The Tribune_, but if any of you will examine the snap-shots carefully under a magnifier, you will see that they prove the existence of the central pit in the dam, and that one of them shows the pipe-line through which the fuse was to run. For the possible legal purpose I was anxious to have this evidence in indisputable form. That’s all, I believe.”

“Not quite all,” Maxwell broke in. “How did you know that Jennings would be hanging over the wire at Angels while you people were making your flying trip across the mountain in the auto?”

Sprague laughed good-naturedly.

“Call it a guess,” he said. “It was evident that Jennings wasn’t anxious to kill a lot of innocent people. His inquiries about the strength of the High Line dam proved that. It ran in my mind that he wouldn’t touch off his earthquake until he could be reasonably sure that the flood wouldn’t catch a train in transit in the canyon. That would have been a little too horrible, even for him. Now you’ve got it all, I guess.”

“But you haven’t got yours yet,” laughed Stillings. “When this thing gets out in Brewster the whole town will mob you and want to make you the next mayor, or send you to Congress, or something of that sort.”

“Not this year,” said the big man, with another mellow laugh. “And I’ll tell you why. Just before this train reaches town it’s going to stop and let us law-breakers get off, scatter and drop into town as best we can without calling attention to ourselves. And to-morrow morning you’ll read in _The Tribune_ how the Mesquite dam, weakened by the recent storms and cloud-bursts, went out by littles during the night, watched over and kept from going as a disastrous whole by a brave little bunch of”--he looked around the table and winked solemnly--“by a brave little bunch of cowboys from the ‘Lazy X.’” Then, with sudden soberness: “Promise me that you won’t give it away, gentlemen all. It’s the only fee I shall exact for my small part in the affair.”

And the promise was given while the locomotive whistle was sounding for the Brewster yard-limits, and Maxwell was pulling the air-cord for the out-of-town stop.

VI

The High Kibosh

SINCE it is a Western boast that the West does nothing by halves, the Brewster Town and Country Club owns two houses; a handsome pink-lava home on one of the quieter business streets of the city, and a rambling, overgrown bungalow at the golf-links on the north shore of the High Line reservoir lake, rechristened, in honor of Colonel Baldwin’s pretty daughter, “Lake Corona.”

On Saturday afternoons, which are bank holidays in the progressive little inter-mountain city, the links at Lake Corona are well patronized; and on a certain Saturday in early September, in the year written down in the annals of the inter-mountain region as “the year of the great railroad war,” one of the players was the big-muscled athlete who figured for the Brewsterites as an expert soil-tester in the Government service, and whose nickname in the Timanyoni country was “Scientific Sprague.”

Sprague’s opponent on the links on this particular Saturday afternoon was Stillings, the railroad lawyer; and at the conclusion of the game, which had been a rather easy walk-over for the big athlete, Stillings offered the winner a seat in his runabout for the return to Brewster.

“Sorry, but I can’t go with you this time, Robert,” said the heavy-weight, when he had tipped his caddie and struggled into his coat. “Maxwell is coming out to dinner and I promised to wait for him. He thinks he is up for another match game with the big-leaguers.”

Stillings paused with his hand on the dash of the runabout. “That so?” he queried. “More piracy?”

“Nothing actually in sight, as yet. But Dick has been getting fresh tips from the New York head-quarters. The big-money people who want your railroad have been keeping pretty quiet since the Mesquite fizzle; possibly they were afraid you folks might have the evidence on them. But now the air seems to be full of lightning again, and nobody, not even President Ford himself, appears to know just where it is going to strike.”

The lawyer reached over and retarded the spark on the racing engines of the little car.

“It’s a queer fight,” he commented. “I never heard of anything just like it before. Of course, we all know what it means: the Transcontinental needs our five-hundred-odd miles of Nevada Short Line to put in with its Jack’s Canyon branch for a short cut to the southern coast. Ordinarily, those things are fought out on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and the people who are operating the railroad never know what hits them until they’re safely dead. If the big fellows want the Short Line so bad, why the dickens don’t they go in and buy it up decently?”

The large man who had played such a successful game of golf winked one eye solemnly.

“You wouldn’t expect a Government chemist to find you the answer to any such conundrum as that, would you?” he asked, in cheerful irony.

“I’ll bet you know, just the same,” asserted Stillings confidently.

“I do happen to know, Robert,” was the even-toned reply. “A financial transaction entered into in the early summer by the Ford management--a transaction having nothing whatever to do with the fight--makes a break in prices absolutely necessary before the control can be acquired. What the Ford people did was to build a solid wall of protection around themselves without knowing it or intending to. They deposited something like sixty per cent of the Short Line stock with a syndicate of New York and Boston banks as collateral for a loan to be used in double-tracking.”

“Still, I don’t see,” objected the lawyer.

“Don’t you? That sixty per cent of the stock--which is the control--can’t be touched by any fireworks business on the Exchange. The big-money people have played the market up and down with the forty per cent which is not pooled, and nothing has happened. The loaning banks have merely sat tight in the boat, knowing that they held the joint control of a good paying property, and that no amount of sky-rocketing on the Street could make any difference, any real difference, in the value of their collateral so long as the property itself was earning dividends.”

“That is good as far as it goes,” said Stillings, with a frown of perplexity. “But it doesn’t explain why the big-money crowd, or somebody, has been turning heaven and earth upside down all summer to wreck, not the stock, but the property itself. You know that is what has been done. No stone has been left unturned, from demoralizing Maxwell’s force to dynamiting tunnels and planning forty-mile washouts. If big business wants the road, why is it trying to wreck it physically?”

The big man who was fond of insisting that he was first, last, and all the time a Government chemist grinned amiably.

“It doesn’t agree with your mentality to get beaten at golf, does it, Robert?” he said jokingly. “It is plain enough, when you get hold of the right end of it. Big money’s play is to throw a real scare, not into the stockholders, but into these loaning bankers, don’t you see? If the road’s earnings fall off and it has bad luck enough to make these creditor-bankers really nervous about the value of their collateral, the trick will be turned. The Ford people will immediately be asked to make good or pay up; and there you are.”

“Why, sure!” said the attorney, in a tone which sufficiently emphasized his complete understanding. Then he climbed slowly into the driving-seat of the runabout. “I don’t see why some of the rest of us haven’t caught on long ago,” he went on. “I suppose any of us might have had the simple facts if we had taken the trouble to dig for them.” Then, abruptly: “You’re looking for more trouble, Sprague?”

“Maxwell is; and so is Ford, apparently,” was the evasive reply.

“Never mind Maxwell or Ford; you’re the man,” snapped the lawyer.

“No, I’m not,” was the decisive denial. “It’s true, I have been willing to help out and take a hand in standing off a few of the attempted smashings; but that was only because Dick Maxwell is my friend, and it suited my humor to ride my little reasoning hobby in his behalf. I’m not a sleuth, Stillings; I’m a Government chemist, and I am out here for the ostensible purpose of making a technical report on the soils of this charming valley of yours. You forget that every now and then.”

“Pardon me, old man; I did forget it,” was the hearty apology. “Just the same, you mustn’t throw us down while the fight is still on. Maxwell put it about right the other day when he said that the Nevada Short Line would have been dead and buried two months ago if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Nevertheless, I can’t help out this time, Stillings. That is why I am staying here this evening--to meet Maxwell and tell him that he’ll have to fight for his own hand if the New Yorkers come after him again.”

“Good goodness, Sprague! what’s happened?”

“A thing which nobody could have foreseen, and for which nobody is to blame. At the same time, it lets me out. I’ve got to quit you.”

The attorney adjusted the spark and throttle and cut the wheels of the little car preparatory to the start.

“I can’t very well argue with you--not having any grounds,” he said. “But I hope you won’t decide finally until after you’ve had another talk with Maxwell. Think it over between now and dinner-time, and weigh the consequences to Dick, Sprague. If there’s another earthquake on the way, and you throw him down, he’s a ruined man. I know what you will say: that he is well fixed and doesn’t have to be a railroad superintendent. That’s all right, but his job means more to him than it might to a poor man; it’s his ambition. If there is anything I can do----”

The big chemistry expert shook his head. “There isn’t anything that anybody can do, Robert,” he said soberly; and at that, Stillings eased the clutch in and drove away.

Two hours later Maxwell was sitting out the after-dinner interval with his friend and classmate on the broad lake-fronting veranda of the bungalow club-house. It was a fine night, and the Saturday evening crowd was larger than usual. There was a dotting of canoes on the reservoir lake, and the verandas were filling slowly as the great dining-room emptied itself. For a time the two men had let the talk drift into college reminiscences; but it took a more strictly personal turn when the superintendent said:

“Do you know, Calvin, I’ve often wondered how you came to be assigned to this job of soil-testing--this particular job, I mean--for the Department. It has been a sort of special providence to me; but things don’t often happen that way, unhelped.”

“This thing didn’t happen that way--unhelped,” was the big expert’s quiet rejoinder. “I asked for the job.”

“I’ve wondered if you didn’t. It was mighty good of you to maroon yourself out here in the tall hills for the sake of helping me fight the money pirates, Calvin.”

Sprague was silent for a full minute before he said: “I wish I could claim a motive as disinterested as that, Dick; but if I should, it wouldn’t be honest. I had quite another reason for wishing to return to the Timanyoni after my flying trip through it last July on my way back from California. I can’t tell you what it was; it’s too idiotic for a grown man to own up to.”

The superintendent’s curling mustaches took a grinning uptilt, and he laughed joyously.

“When you talk that way you don’t need to tell me,” he chuckled. “It was a girl.”

“It was,” admitted the self-confessed simpleton, matching his accuser’s grin. “Since you’ve guessed that much, I’ll tell you a little more. I saw her first on your eastbound train, the train that took on the sham dead man at Little Butte and afterward picked up your office-car. You’ll remember you asked me to stay over a day or two with you in Brewster, and I did. As a matter of fact, your persuasion wasn’t needed. I would have stopped off anyway, because the girl stopped off.”

“Heavens and earth!” ejaculated Maxwell, in ecstatic appreciation; “how are the mighty fallen! Lord of love! I never expected to see the day when Cal Sprague, the idol of the foot-ball rooters, would fall for a pretty face just seen, as you might say, in passing! Oh, gosh!”

“Have your laugh, you old married hyena!” grunted the late-comer in the sentimental field. “I can’t get back at you because I didn’t happen to be around when you were making seventeen different kinds of a donkey of yourself over old Hiram Fairbain’s daughter--as I have no doubt you did. But that’s neither here nor there; the young woman I’m speaking of tagged me, and I’m It; I’ve been It ever since that first day on the eastbound train.”

“And you say she stopped off in Brewster?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t meet her?”

“No. You’ve been calling me an amateur detective, Dick; I’m a fake! That girl and the people she was with just vanished into thin air the minute they hit the platform at the Brewster station. I lost them as completely as if they had stepped off into space.”

“So you came back, later, to hunt her up?”

“I did; or to try to get some trace of her--just that.”

“Of course, it says itself that you have found her.”

Sprague’s mellow laugh rumbled deep in his chest.

“Richard, I have been here seven weeks, and I found her--just three days ago! In all my knocking around with you and Starbuck and Stillings and the rest of you, not one man in the bunch has thought it worth his while to tell me that there is a cottage settlement of Eastern summer people up in the mountains on Lake Topaz. I had to blunder around and find out for myself, as I did last Wednesday, when Starbuck took me up to your mine on Mount Geechy.”

“Great guns!” exclaimed the superintendent; “how in the name of common-sense was anybody going to suspect that you needed to know? That summer colony is as old as Brewster. But go ahead and tell me more. I’m interested, if I don’t look it.”

“There isn’t much to tell. I found her; met her. She is stopping with an aunt of hers, and by chance--good luck you’d say--I have something a little better than a speaking acquaintance with the aunt--through some common friends in New York. There’s nothing to it, Richard. The girl can have her pick--she has already turned down a couple of English titles--and she isn’t going to pick any such overgrown slob of a man as your humble. Let’s talk about something else.”

“If I branch off, it will be into my own grief,” said Maxwell half-reluctantly. “I had another wire from Ford this afternoon. The big-money people are getting ready to swat us again, and Ford admits that he can’t find out where it is to come from, or what it is to be. If it wasn’t for the name of the thing, and what I owe Ford, I’d be about ready to throw up my job, Calvin. I have money enough to live on, and this business of dragging along from day to day with the feeling that any minute you may get the knife between your ribs isn’t very exhilarating.”

“You say Ford can’t give you any hint of what is coming next?”

“Not the slightest. But there is something in the wind. You know Kinzie, the president of the Brewster National Bank? He cornered me last night at the club and asked a lot of queer questions that didn’t seem to have any particular bearing on anything.”

“What kind of questions?” inquired the expert.

“Oh, about our right-of-way through the town of Copah, and about our outstanding floating debts, and finally about a ridiculous damage suit that has been dragging its way through the courts.”

Sprague sat up and relighted his fat, black cigar.

“What about the damage suit?” he asked.

“It’s a piker’s graft,” was the half-impatient rejoinder. “We have a little branch line over to the bauxite mines in the western edge of the county. The telegraph company doesn’t maintain an office, and our agent is authorized to handle what few commercial telegrams there are. It seems that one came for a man named Hixon, a prospector whose exact whereabouts could not be ascertained at the moment. The message was three days old when it was delivered, and Hixon sued for ten thousand dollars damages; said he’d lost the sale of a mine by the delay.”

“You are fighting the suit?”

“Of course--it’s point-blank robbery! Stillings has had the case postponed two or three times in the hope of wearing Hixon out. It comes up again next week, I believe.”

“And you say Kinzie was curious about this lawsuit?”

“Yes. It seems that Hixon is, or has been, a customer of the bank; and Kinzie suggested that we ought to compromise.”

“Um,” said the big-bodied man thoughtfully. “In whose court does the case come up?”

“In Judge Watson’s.”

“Has Hixon a good lawyer?”

“He has the Kentucky colonel, suh,” laughed Maxwell; “our one original, dyed-in-the-wool, fire-eating spellbinder from the Blue-grass. When Colonel Bletchford gets upon his feet and turns loose, you can hear the bird of freedom scream all the way across Timanyoni Park.”

The big chemistry expert with the athletic slant was moving uneasily in his chair. After a little interval of silence he said: “I can’t be with you in any more of these little two-steps with the money trust, Richard. I’m going back to Washington to-morrow.”

Maxwell’s start carried him half-way out of his chair, and he dropped his short pipe and broke the stem of it.

“Great Scott, Calvin--don’t say that!” he implored. “You can’t throw us down that way! Why, good Lord, man, if it hadn’t been for you and your brains.... But, pshaw! there’s no use in talking about it; you simply _can’t_ go and leave us hanging over the ragged edge!”

“I can; and I guess I must,” insisted Sprague gently. “And the worst of it is, Dick, I can’t tell you or anybody else the why. It’s just up to me, and I’ve got it to do.”

Maxwell’s perturbation had cleared his brain like a bucketing of cold water. “Tell me, Calvin,” he broke out; “is the girl mixed up in it?”

“She is,” was the brief admission.

“Is she gone, or going--back East, I mean?”

“N-no; not immediately, I believe.”

Maxwell sat back in his chair and began to twist nervously at the charm on his watch-fob.

“I suppose I haven’t any kick coming,” he said at length. “What you have done for me this summer couldn’t be measured in money, and I have no right to ask you to go on giving your time and your brains on the score of friendship.”

“There isn’t any bigger score in this little old round world of ours, Dick,” said the other gravely. “I’m a cold-blooded fish, and I know it. I ought to stand by you; every decent thing in me but one urges me to stand by you. But that one exception queers me. I hope you’ll win out; I hope to God you’ll win out, Dick; but I can’t be the man to put the club into your hands this time.”

The snappy little superintendent took his defeat hard. For some further time he used every argument he could devise to persuade Sprague to change his mind. But at the end the big man was shaking his head regretfully.

“It’s no use, Richard,” he said finally. “If you were in my place, you’d do just as I’m doing--and for the same reason. Let’s go back to town. It’s too cheerful here to fit either one of us just now.”

Maxwell had driven out to the club-house on the shore of Lake Corona in his small car, and when he returned to town Sprague occupied the mechanician’s seat beside him. It was a run of only a few miles, over the best driving road in the county, and there was neither time nor the occasion for much talk.

When the car had trundled across the Timanyoni bridge and the viaduct over the railroad tracks, Maxwell would have set Sprague down at his hotel across the plaza from the station; but Sprague himself objected. “You are going over to your office? I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind. It’s my last evening, and I’m not in the humor to sit it out alone. I won’t interfere, if you want to work,” was the way he put it.

It was thus it happened that they climbed the stair to the second story of the railroad building together, and together walked down the corridor to the door of the despatcher’s room. Connolly, the fat night despatcher, was at his glass-topped table behind the counter railing, and when he saw the superintendent he held up a pudgy hand.

“Benson’s been trying to get you on the wire from Copah for an hour or more, Mr. Maxwell,” he said. “I didn’t know where to raise you.”

“Is he on the wire now?” asked Maxwell, letting himself and his companion through the wicket in the counter rail.

“No; but I’ll call him for you.” Followed a sharp rattling of the key and a few broken snippings from the sounder, and then the despatcher got up out of his chair. “Here he is,” he said. “He wants to talk to you, personally.”

Maxwell took the vacated chair and key, and Connolly stood aside with the big expert. “Seems right good to have you dropping in every now and then, Mr. Sprague,” said the fat one. “You’d ought to belong to us out here. We’d sure make it warm for you in the Short Line family.”

Sprague looked the dumpling-like despatcher over in mild and altogether friendly criticism.

“Speaking of families: you got married yourself a little while ago, didn’t you, Dan?” he asked.

“You bet I did!” was the enthusiastic reply. “Sadie ain’t got done talking yet about that set of knives and forks you sent her from Philadelphia.”

Again the big-muscled man was looking the despatcher over critically, this time with a quizzical twinkle in his gray eyes.

“Tell me how you did it, Dan,” he urged soberly. “You’re fatter than I ever dared to be. How did you manage to make a girl believe that there might be a man inside of a big body as well as in a medium-sized one?”

The night despatcher laughed until his moon-like face was purple; until the car-record clerk in the distant corner of the room looked up from his type-writer to see if he, too, might not share the joke.

“Gi-give me a little time,” wheezed Connolly; and he was presumably going to tell how it had been done when Maxwell got up from the glass-topped table and broke in.

“Twenty-six is asking for orders, Dan,” he said; and when Connolly had resumed his chair and his key: “That’s all, Calvin. We’ll go across to my office, if you like.”

It was behind the closed door of the superintendent’s room, after Sprague had chosen the easiest of the three chairs and settled himself for a smoke, that Maxwell said:

“I’m going to miss you like the devil, Calvin; I’m missing you right now.”

Sprague blew a series of smoke rings toward the disused gas-fixture hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

“Something that Chief Engineer Benson has been telling you over the wire from Copah?” he suggested.

“Yes.”

Another series of the smoke rings, and then: “Well, I didn’t tell you you couldn’t talk, did I?”

Maxwell did not haggle over the inverted terms of the permission to talk. The necessity was too pressing.

“Benson has struck something that he can’t account for. For a week or more the Transcontinental people have been gathering a working camp at the Copah end of the bridge on which their Jack’s Canyon branch crosses the Pannikin. Nobody seems to know what they are going to do, or where they are going to do it. At Leckhard’s suggestion, I sent Benson over to pry around a little.”

“And he hasn’t found out what the T-C. folks have in mind?”

“No, he hasn’t. But it is plainly some sort of a track-building job. He says they have a hundred or more scraper-teams in camp, a train-load of new steel, and forty car-loads of cross-ties. And this afternoon they brought down a mechanical rail-layer--a machine much used nowadays for rushing a job of track-laying.”