Part 2

“You’ve probably settled it for yourself that it isn’t a plant for a train robbery--the kind of robbery which would be made easier by a wreck.”

Maxwell shook his head.

“A pile of cross-ties would be much simpler.”

“Doubtless. We’ll cancel that and come to the next hypothesis. Could it be the work of some crazy telegraph operator?”

“We’ve threshed out the crazy guess. It doesn’t prove up. A madman would slip up now and then--trip himself. I have a file of the fake messages. They were not sent by a lunatic.”

“Call it another cancellation,” said the guest. “You are convinced that some sane person is doing it. Very good. What is the object? You say you can’t find out; which merely means that you’ve been attacking it from the wrong angle. Or, rather, you’ve let the professional detectives give you their angle. What you need is a bit of first-class amateur work.”

The superintendent laughed mirthlessly. “If I could only find the amateur I’d hire him, Calvin,--if it took a year’s salary. I don’t know what the wire-devil’s object is, but I can catalogue the results. These periodical scares are demoralizing the entire Short Line. The service is on the ragged edge of a chaotic blow-up. Half the men in the train crews are running on their bare nerves, and the operators who have to handle train-orders are not much better.”

“Yes,” said the guest quietly. “I’ve been noticing. I saw only one man in your office who wasn’t scared stiff; and the conductor of this train we’re riding on had a pretty bad attack of the tremolos when you told him what the wrecking-train was out for.”

“Who, Garrighan? No, you’re mistaken there. He’s one of the cold-blooded ones,” said the superintendent confidently.

“Excuse me, Dick; I’m never mistaken on that side of the fence. There were signs, plenty of them. Ninety-eight men in every hundred will duck and put up one or both arms if you strike at them suddenly. Garrighan did neither, you’ll say; but if you had been watching him as closely as I was, you would have seen that he started to do both.”

Maxwell was regarding his former classmate curiously.

“Is that how you do it? Is that the way you caught the post-office thieves, Calvin?”

The chemistry expert laughed.

“It’s only a little pointer on methods,” he averred. “When my attention was first called to such things--it was on a case in the Department of Justice in which I was required to give expert testimony--I was very strongly impressed with the crudities of the ordinary detective methods. I said to myself that what was needed was some one who could apply good, careful laboratory practice; a habit of observation which counts nothing too small to be weighed and measured.”

“Go on,” said Maxwell.

“The idea came to me that I’d like to try it on, and I did. My theory is correct. Human beings react under certain given conditions just as readily, and just as inevitably, as the inorganic substances react in a laboratory experiment.”

Maxwell reached for the box of safety matches and passed it to Sprague, whose cigar had gone out.

“I wish you could stay and put this railroad of ours into your test-tube, Calvin. We’re teetering along on the edge of an earthquake--oh, yes--I know you’ll say it’s only a scare; but the worst panic that has ever gone into history was only a scare in the beginning. One of these fine nights some engineer or some operator with the bare nerves will lose his grip. You know about what that will mean. We’ve escaped alive, so far; but the first real wreck that hits us will be just about the same as dropping a lighted match into a barrel of gunpowder; I thought it had come to-night; I’m glad it hasn’t, but I know it’s only postponed.”

The chemistry man nodded.

“Somebody is reaching for you with a big stick; that is very evident, Maxwell. And there are brains behind it, too, when you come to think of it. If you wanted to kill a man without getting hanged for murder, one way to do it would be to persuade him to commit suicide. Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may be trying the same experiment on your railroad?”

“Good Lord, no!”

“Stranger things have happened. But that is beside the mark. You say you are needing help. I’ve half a mind to stop off and give you a bit of a lift.”

“By Jove, Calvin!--if you would----”

“Call it a go,” interrupted the guest. “I’ll take a chance and say that my business in San Francisco can wait a few days. The fellow I’m after out there won’t run away; it’s the one thing he doesn’t dare to do.”

“Say, old man! but that’s bully of you!” exclaimed the host, reaching across to grip the hand of helping. “You shall have everything in sight; I’ll put every man on the two divisions under your orders, and you can have a special train and my private car. If you don’t see what you want, just ask----”

The chemistry sharp was holding up his hand and laughing.

“No, no; hold on, Dick. You’ll have to let me tackle the thing in my own way, and there won’t be any grand-stand plays in it--in fact, I don’t mean to appear personally in it at all. Let’s see where we stand. You have a division detective of some sort, haven’t you?--a fellow who does the gun-play act when it becomes necessary?”

“We have; a young fellow named Archer Tarbell, who got his experience chasing cattle thieves in Montana. He’s a fine fellow, and it’s breaking his heart because he can’t get the nippers on our wire-devil.”

“All right. I may want to use him. Now another matter. You have a live newspaper in Brewster; I bought a copy of it on the train this morning. If I remember right, it’s called _The Tribune_. Is it friendly to your railroad?”

“Ordinarily, yes; though Treadwell, the owner, is independent enough to print anything that he thinks is news.”

“Know him pretty well?”

“Very well, indeed.”

“Good. When we get in, make it your first care to see the newspaper people and to persuade them not to make any mention of this little miss-go of to-night. That’s the first move and it’s an important one. Can you work it?”

“Sure. But I don’t see the point.”

“Never mind about that; I probably sha’n’t do anything that you think I ought to do. Now about this man Tarbell; is he known as a company detective?”

“No, not generally known; he’s on the pay-roll as a spare operator--relief man, you know.”

“That’s better. When I meet him I’ll see if I can’t get him interested in chemistry. That’s how you’re going to account for me, you know. I’m an old friend of yours, a Government man out of the Department of Agriculture off on a vacation. Incidentally, I might be wanting to buy a mine, or something of that sort--anything to start the town gossip on a harmless chase and to keep it as far as possible from the real reason for my stop-over.”

“Everything goes,” said Maxwell. “I’ll start the gossip. What else?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I shall ask you to give me the run of your railroad office, and I’d like to meet anybody and everybody, when it falls in naturally--but always as the chemistry sharp; get that well ground into your cosmos. But here--what’s this? Are we already back in Brewster?”

“We are,” said the superintendent, with a glance out of the window. Then he became the regretful host again. “I hate to have you go back to the hotel, Calvin. It’s just my crooked luck to have you come along when the house is shut up and Mrs. Maxwell and the babies are out of town. They’re due to come home in a day or two, and I’m selfish enough to hope that we can keep you over. Let’s drop off here at the crossing. It’s nearer to the hotel, and it’ll give me a chance to reach _The Tribune_ office before Treadwell’s young men come in with their scare stuff.”

It was a half-hour after the arrival of the unwrecked Limited, and the story of the curious false alarm was just getting itself passed from lip to ear among the loungers in the Hotel Topaz lobby, when the Government man came down from his room to file a rather lengthy New York message with the hotel telegraph operator.

“Cipher?--holy smoke!” exclaimed the young man at the lobby wire desk; but a liberal tip made it look easier, and he added: “All right, I’m good for it, I guess, and I’ll get it through as quick as I can. Answer to your room?”

“If you please,” said the guest; and, as it was by this time well on toward midnight, he went to bed.

By noon of the day following the false alarm run of the wrecking-train to Timanyoni Canyon, all Brewster, or at least the railroad part of it, knew that Superintendent Maxwell was entertaining an old college classmate at the Hotel Topaz. For the town portion of the gossip there was some little disagreement as to Mr. Calvin Sprague’s state and standing. Some had it that the big, handsome athlete was a foot-ball coach taking his vacation between seasons. Others said that he was a capitalist in disguise, looking for a ground-floor investment in Timanyoni mines.

These were Mr. Sprague’s placings for the man in the street. But to the rank and file in the railroad head-quarters building Sprague figured in his proper character as a Government drug-mixer on a holiday; a royal good fellow who fraternized instantly with everybody, whose naïve ignorance about railroading was a joke, and whose vast unknowledge was nicely balanced by a keen and comradely curiosity to learn all that anybody could tell him about the complex workings of a railroad head-quarters in action.

Naturally, and possibly because Davis, the chief despatcher, was willing to be hospitable, he spent an hour of the forenoon in the wire office, ingenuously absorbing detail and evincing an interest in the day’s work that made Davis, ordinarily a rather reticent man, transform himself into a lecturer on the theory and practice of railway telegraphy.

It was in Davis’s office that he met Tarbell; and the keen-eyed, sober-faced young fellow who was carried on the division pay-rolls as a relief operator became his guide on a walking tour of the shops and the yards. Tarbell saw in Mr. Maxwell’s guest nothing more than an exceedingly affable gentleman with an immense capacity for interesting himself in the workaday details of a railroad outfit; but at one o’clock, when Maxwell joined Sprague at a quiet corner table for two in the hotel café, there were several surprises awaiting the superintendent.

“Getting it shaken down a little so that you’ll know where to begin?” was Maxwell’s opening question; and the ex-fullback laughed.

“You must take me for a sleuth of the common or garden variety,” he retorted. “Did you suppose I had thrown away an entire forenoon scoring for a start? Not so, Richard; not even remotely so. I’ve been finding out a lot of things. I am even able to suggest an improvement or two in your telegraph installation.”

“For example?” said Maxwell.

“Both of your yard offices are cut in on the working wire. If this were my railroad I’d put them on a pony circuit and cut them out of the main line.”

“Why would you?”

“We’ll have to go back a little for the specific answer in the present case; back to last night, and to the young man who chased out with a red lantern to keep us from running into the passenger train which wasn’t wrecked. Why do you suppose he did that?”

“That’s easy; he heard the passenger coming down the canyon.”

“That was the inference, of course. But when you have taken the thirty-third degree in the exact science of observation, Dick, you’ll learn to distrust inferences and to accept only conclusions. He didn’t hear the passenger; he didn’t know it was coming. If you had been observing him as closely as I was, you would have seen him write this down in his actions as plain as print. He had a much better reason for stopping us--and the passenger. It was a wire order from somebody. If you don’t believe it, have Davis call him up and ask him, when you go back to your office.”

Notwithstanding the criticism just passed upon him by his table-mate, Maxwell again caught at an inference.

“You’ve found the wire-devil, Calvin? You’ve got to the bottom of the thing in a single forenoon?”

“No; not quite to the bottom. But some few things I have learned, beyond any question of doubt. In the first place, this trouble of yours is pretty serious; far more serious than you suspect. In fact, it is designed to remove your railroad from the map, not by murder outright, but by what you might call incited suicide. The condition which you described last night is painfully apparent, even to an outsider like myself. Half of your men are potential powder-mines, ready to blow up if the spark is applied.”

“Go on,” said Maxwell eagerly. “What else did you find out?”

“I learned that a stop-all-trains order was sent to your young man at the canyon station last night, and that, in all probability, it was sent from Brewster. The ultimate question fines itself down to this: did your night despatcher, Connolly, send that order through his own instrument in his own office? or did he, or some other, send it from the upper yard office?--which, as I have remarked, is rather injudiciously cut in on the regular working wire. I’ll venture to make the answer positive; the order was sent from the yard office.”

“Connolly!” said the superintendent under his breath. “I can’t believe it, Calvin. Who ever heard of a fat villain?”

“Go a little easy on the inferences,” laughed the chemistry expert. “I didn’t say it was Connolly, though it looks rather bad for him at the present stage of the game. He is in debt, and he wants to get married.”

“But, good Lord! what has that got to do with----”

“Hold on,” interposed the expert calmly. “We haven’t come to that part of it yet. As I say, this stop-order was sent from the yard office. How do I know? Because the sender left his trail behind him in the shape of a wire recently cut and recoupled--the cutout being made to keep the message from repeating itself in the head-quarters office where it might be heard by anybody who happened to be standing around.”

“But Connolly couldn’t leave his wire to go to the yard office.”

“Unfortunately for him, he did leave it. About half an hour after the wrecking-train left he called Davis, who was sleeping in one of the bunk-rooms in your wickiup attic. His excuse was that he was so rattled that he couldn’t hold himself down at the train-desk. Davis relieved him for an hour or so, and then he came back.”

“Still I can’t believe it of Connolly,” Maxwell persisted. “If he sent that message to Timanyoni last night, that makes him responsible for all the others--the devil-messages, as the men are calling them. Some of these have come in the night, while he was on duty. How could he have worked it in that case?”

Again the chemistry expert laughed. “A suspicious person might draw a bunch of inferences,” he said, “throwing out a dark hint or so about a concealed cut-in on the wires after they enter the attic of the railroad building and a hidden set of instruments. Also, the same person would probably point to the fact that Connolly wasn’t at his desk when the fake wreck notice came last night. It was your chief clerk, Calmaine, who took it from the wire, and he tells me he was subbing for Connolly for a few minutes while Connolly went upstairs for his smoking-tobacco.”

“My Lord!” said Maxwell; “you’ve put it upon Connolly, fair and square, Calvin; it’s all over but the hanging!”

“There you go again,” joked the Government man, with his good-natured grin. “I haven’t said it is Connolly. But I will say this: with another half-day at it, I’ll probably be able to turn the case over to Tarbell--and the newspapers.”

“The newspapers?”

“Yes. That will be a part of the cure for the crazy sickness among your men. Sit tight and say nothing, and by this evening I’ll be ready to put you next.”

It was late in the afternoon, and the man from Washington had spent much of the intervening time loafing in the different offices sheltered by the head-quarters roof, when young Tarbell got a telephone summons from the hotel. In the writing-room, which was otherwise deserted, he found the superintendent’s guest waiting for him. Sprague waved him to a chair and began at once.

“What did you find out, Mr. Tarbell?”

“Nothing to hurt. The fellow you was askin’ about went out on the wreck-train and came back on it.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Sure of the first part, and not so sure of the last. I’ve found half a dozen o’ the men who saw him get on the train here, and saw him after he was on. They’re a little hazy about the back trip, but he must’ve come back that way, because he didn’t come on the Limited.”

“And his wife?”

Tarbell’s lip curled in honest cleanliness.

“He ain’t got any wife. It was his girl he was expectin’, and she didn’t come.”

“And afterward?” suggested the questioner.

“After he got back he showed up in the office and took his job again, lettin’ Catherton go home.”

The Government man’s eyes narrowed and after a moment he began again.

“How near can you come to keeping your own counsel, Mr. Tarbell?” he demanded abruptly.

“I reckon I can talk a few without sayin’ much,” said the ex-cowboy. And then, after a pause: “You mean that you don’t want to be mixed up in this thing by name, Mr. Sprague?”

“You’ve hit it exactly. You’ve got your start and I want you to work it out yourself. You have the line. Somebody--somebody who is not a thousand miles from your head-quarters building over yonder--is working this scare, working it for a purpose which he wishes to accomplish without making himself actually and legally responsible. Had you got that far in your own reasoning, Mr. Tarbell?”

“No, indeedy,” was the prompt reply. “I reckon I’m only a plug when it comes down to the sure-enough, fine-haired part of it.”

“You’ll learn, after a bit,” said the chemistry expert shortly. “But let that go. You have the facts now, and they are driven pretty well into a corner. Can you go and get your man?”

Tarbell got up and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“I reckon I can,” he admitted slowly, and started to move away. But at the door the big man at the writing-desk recalled him.

“Don’t go on supposition, Tarbell. Ask yourself, when you get outside, if you’ve got the evidence that the court will demand. Ask yourself, also, if you know of your own knowledge, or if you’ve only allowed yourself to be hypnotized into your belief. If you can get satisfactory answers to these questions, go to it and bring back the money, as they say up in Seattle.”

For what remained of the afternoon after Tarbell went away, Sprague sat in the writing-room and wrote letters, sealing and addressing the last one just as Maxwell came over to go to dinner with him. At table there were plenty of uncut back-numbers in the way of college reminiscences to be threshed over, and Sprague carefully kept the talk in this innocuous field until after they had left the dining-room to go for a smoke on the loggia porch. When the cigars were alight, Maxwell would no longer be choked off.

“Anything new in the wire-devil business, Calvin?” he asked.

“I’ve turned the case over to Tarbell, as I promised. I’m through with my part of it.”

“What’s that!” ejaculated the superintendent. “You’ve got your man?”

“Tarbell will get him--most probably before we go to bed to-night. He’s a fine young fellow, that reformed cowboy of yours, Dick. I like him.”

Maxwell was still gasping. “You’re a wonder, Calvin--a latter-day wizard! Good Heavens! Do you realize that we’ve been working on this thing for a month? And you’ve cleaned it up in a day!”

The chemistry expert was smiling good-naturedly.

“Perhaps I came at a fortuitous moment, and had exceptional advantages,” he demurred.

“But are you sure?” demanded Maxwell soberly.

“So sure that if your ‘devil’ had caused any loss of life in his monkeyings, I could go into court and hang him.”

“Thank God!” said the superintendent; and then again, as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, “Thank God!”

Sprague looked up quickly.

“You’ve been taking it pretty hard, haven’t you, Dick? Any special reason?”

“Yes. You know Ford, our president: he has made the Pacific Southwestern System--made it out of whole cloth; and, incidentally, he has made a good few of us fellows who have fought with him shoulder to shoulder from the first. When I was last in New York, a couple of months ago, he rode from the club to the station in the taxi with me. He was in trouble of some sort--he didn’t tell me what it was; but the last thing he said as I was boarding the train gave me some notion of it. ‘Run that jerk-water Short Line of yours, Dick, as if you were carrying all your eggs to market and had them all in one basket,’ he said, and then he added: ‘No wrecks, Dick, if you have to sit up nights to head them off.’”

Sprague was smoking peacefully. It was perhaps too much to expect that a man whose problems were chiefly in the field of laboratory science should be very deeply interested in one in which the elements were merely human. When he spoke again it was to recur to his favorable impression of Tarbell. “I like that young fellow,” he said in conclusion. “He’ll pull you out of the hole--with a little timely help from the newspapers. When he gets the ball into his hands and starts down the field with it, you’d best be prepared for some pretty sensational developments. They’re due.”

For a little while Maxwell said nothing, and the fine lines between his eyes deepened slowly into a frown of anxiety. Finally he said: “I’ve got ’em, too, Calvin--the ‘jimmies,’ I mean. My wife and the two kiddies are coming home on the ‘Apache’ to-night, and don’t you know, I had half a mind to wire her to stop over in Copah until I could go after her? That’s a pretty pass for things to come to, isn’t it?--when a man’s afraid to have the members of his family ride over his own particular piece of railroad?”

Sprague flipped the ash from his cigar.

“That’s one of the bridges you don’t have to cross until you come to it.”

Maxwell got out of his chair and refused Sprague’s offer of a fresh cigar.

“No,” he said; “this has been one of the days when I’ve smoked too much. I’m going over to the office to keep my finger on the pulse of things. When it gets too dull for you over here, come across and break in. If I’m not in my own office, you’ll find me in room eleven--the despatcher’s--keeping tab on the movements of the Apache Limited.”

Fully two hours beyond the time when the superintendent had crossed the railroad plaza to climb the stair of the head-quarters building, Tarbell, strolling along the plaza-fronting street, swung himself over the railing of the loggia porch and took the chair next to the man from Washington, who was still sitting as Maxwell had left him and still smoking.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the patient smoker, without taking his eyes from the row of lighted windows in the railroad building opposite.

“I allowed you would be,” rejoined Tarbell in his gentle Tennessee-mountain drawl. And then, quite as calmly: “I reckon I’ve found the answers to all them questions you ’lotted to me. I reckon I’ve got him.”

“I’ve been betting on you, Tarbell,” was the word of approval. Then: “It comes pretty near home, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does. It’s goin’ to hurt Mr. Maxwell good and plenty. He counts all the men in the home office as his fam’ly, and there’s never been one o’ them to go back on him till now.”

“What is your evidence?” queried Sprague.

“I reckon you’d call it circumstantial--and so will the judge. But it hobbles him all right. There’s a cut-in on the despatcher’s wires over yonder, ’way up under the roof where nobody’d find it, with four little fine lead wires goin’ down in the wall. I couldn’t find where they come out at, but I reckon that don’t make any difference: they’re _there_.”

“Anything else?”