Part 4

“After you went west, we put our wire-devil through the courts, and President Ford served notice on the New York high-finance pirates; told them he had their numbers, and that they’d better let up on us. That was the end of it for the time. But a week ago Thursday I got a hot wire from Ford, telling me to secure voting proxies on every possible share of Short Line stock held locally, firing the proxies to him in New York by special messenger, who should reach him, he said, not later than the night of the fifteenth.”

“Um,” commented the smoker thoughtfully. “Is there much of the stock held out here in your Timanyoni wilderness?”

“A good bit of it, first and last. When the Pacific Southwestern, with Ford at its head, took over the Red Butte Western, the R. B. W. was strictly a local line, and the reorganization plan was based upon an exchange of stock--the new for the old. Then, when we built the extension and issued more stock, quite a block of it was taken up by local capitalists, bankers, mineowners, and ranchmen; not a majority, of course, but a good, healthy balance of power.”

Again the giant in the lounging-chair nodded. “I see,” he cut in. “There is doubtless a stockholders’ meeting looming up in the near future--say on the day after the all-important fifteenth--and the Wall Street people are going after Ford’s scalp again, this time in a strictly legal way. He will probably need your Western proxies, and need them bad.”

“I’ve got them right here,” said Maxwell, tapping a thick bunch of papers on his desk. “And believe me, I’ve had a sweet time rounding them up. Every moneyed man in this country is a friend of Ford’s, and yet I’ve had to wrestle with every individual one of them for these proxies as if I’d been asking them to shed their good red blood.”

“Of course,” was the quiet comment. “The fellows on the other side would stack the cards on you--or try to. What’s in the wind this time? Just a stock-breaking raid for speculation, or is it something bigger than that?”

The young superintendent shook his head doubtfully.

“I don’t know, certainly; I haven’t had a chance to talk with Ford since early in the summer. But I have my own guess. If the Transcontinental could control this five-hundred-mile stretch of ours from Copah to Lorchi, it would have the short line to southern California.”

“Therefore and wherefore, if Mr. Ford doesn’t happen to have the votes in the coming stockholders’ meeting, you’ll be out of a job. Is that about the size of it?”

“Probably,” admitted Maxwell. “Not that it makes any special difference to me, personally. As you know, I have a mine up on the Gloria that beats railroading out of sight. But I’d fight like a dog for Ford, and for my own rank and file here on the Short Line. Of course, Transcontinental control would mean a clean sweep of everybody: there wouldn’t be baskets enough this side of the main range to hold the heads that would be cut off.”

“I suppose not. But, as you say, you have the ‘come-back’ right there under your hand in those proxies. How will you get them to New York?”

“My chief clerk, Calmaine, will deliver them in person. He’ll meet us at Brewster and go right along on this train, which, by the way, is the next to the last one he could take and make New York on time. It’s all arranged.”

The guest smoked on in silence for a little time and when he spoke again it was to ask the name of the junction station at which the late stop had been made.

“It’s Little Butte--where our Red Butte branch comes in from the north.”

“You’d been stopping over there?” Sprague asked.

“No; I had my car brought down from Red Butte on the local, which doubles back on the branch.”

“Um; Little Butte; good name. You people out here run pretty persistently to ‘Buttes,’ don’t you? Did I, or didn’t I, see a funeral at this particular Butte as we came along?”

“You did. It’s Murtrie; a mining engineer who has been doing a sort of weigh-master’s stunt at the Molly Baldwin mine. Died pretty suddenly last night, they say.”

“Large man?” queried the Government chemist, half-absently; and Maxwell looked up quickly.

“Beefy rather than big, yes. How could you tell?”

Sprague waved his cigar as if the question were childish and the answer obvious. “It took a dozen of them, more or less, to put him into the express-car.”

Maxwell turned back to his desk. “Metallic casket, probably,” he suggested. “They had our agent wire Brewster for the best that could be had. Said they were going to ship the body to some little town in Kentucky. They’re a rather queer lot.”

“Who?--the Kentuckians?”

“No; the Molly Baldwin outfit. The mine was opened by a syndicate of New York people four years ago, and after the New Yorkers had put two or three hundred thousand into it without taking anything out, they gave up in disgust. Then a couple of young fellows from Cripple Creek came along and leased the property. There was a crooked deal somewhere, for the young fellows began to take out pay--big pay--right from the start. Then the New York people wanted to ‘renig’ on the lease, and dragged the thing into the courts.”

“And the courts said no?”

“The courts straddled. I didn’t follow the fight in detail, but the final decision was that the lessees were to keep all they could take out each month up to a certain amount. If they exceeded that amount, the excess was to be shared equally with the New Yorkers.”

“Lots of room for shenanigan in that,” was the big man’s passing comment. “Unless these young Cripple Creekers are more honest than the average, they’ll stand a good bit of watching, you’d say.”

Maxwell laughed. “That was what the New Yorkers seemed to think. They secured a court order allowing them to put an expert of their own on the job. And nobody seems to enjoy the watch-dog stunt. They’ve had to send in a new man every few weeks.”

“Do the Cripple Creekers kill them off?”

“No; they buy ’em off, I guess. Anyway, they don’t stay. Murtrie was the last.”

“And apparently he hasn’t stayed,” said Sprague reflectively; and just then a long-drawn wail of the locomotive whistle announced the approach of the train to Brewster. At the signal the guest rose and tossed the remains of the bad cigar out of the window. “Here’s where I have to quit you, Dick,” he was beginning; but Maxwell would not have it that way.

“Not much, you don’t, Calvin, old man,” he protested. “You’re going to stop over one day with me, at least. No; I won’t listen to any excuses. Give me your berth check and I’ll send my boy up ahead to get your traps out of the sleeper. Sit down right where you are and take it easy. You’ll find a box of cigars--real cigars--in this lower drawer. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve seen Calmaine.”

Apparently, the man from Washington did not require much urging. He sat down in Maxwell’s chair as the train was slowing into the division station, and was rummaging in the desk drawer for the box of cigars when an alert, carefully groomed young man came in through the forward corridor and met the superintendent as he was going out. There was a hurried conference, a passing of papers, and the two, Maxwell and his chief clerk, went out together, leaving the big man to go on with his rummaging alone.

Shortly afterward came the bump of a coupling touch, and the office-car, in the grip of a switching-engine, raced backward through the yards; backward and forward again, and when it came to rest it was standing on the short station spur at the end of the railroad head-quarters building. From the open windows Sprague could see the long through train, with its two big mountain-pulling locomotives coupled on, drawn up for its farther flight. It was after it had steamed away into the night that Maxwell returned to his side-tracked car to find his guest, half-asleep, as it seemed, in the depths of the big wicker easy-chair.

“I hope you didn’t think I’d deserted you,” he said, drawing up another of the wicker chairs. “I took time to telephone home. Mrs. Maxwell’s dining out at her sister’s, and, if you don’t mind, we’ll sit here a while and go out to the house later.”

There was enough to talk about. The two, who had been college classmates, had seen little of each other for a number of years. Maxwell told how he had gone into railroading under Ford, and how in his first summer in the Timanyoni he had acquired a gold mine and a wife. Sprague’s recounting was less romantic. After leaving college he had coached the ’varsity foot-ball team for two years and had afterward gone in for original research in chemistry, which had been his “major” in college. Later he had drifted into the Washington bureau as an expert, taking the job, as he explained, because it gave him time and frequent leisurely intervals for the pursuit of his principal hobby, which was the lifting of detective work to the plane of pure theory, treating each case as a mathematical problem to be demonstrated by logical reasoning.

“You ought to drop everything else and take up the man-hunting business as a profession,” laughed Maxwell, when the hour-long talk had come around to the big man’s pet among the hobbies.

“No,” was the instant objection. “That is where you’re wrong. A man does his best work as an amateur--in any line. As long as the man-hunting comes in the way of a recreation, I enjoy it keenly. But if I had to make a business of it, it would be different.” Then he changed the subject by asking about Tarbell, Maxwell’s ex-cowboy division detective, who had served as his understudy in the “wire-devil” case a few weeks earlier.

“Archer is all right,” was the reply; “only he’d like to break away from me and go with you. He thinks you are about the one only top-notcher; says he’d like to take lessons of you for a year or so.”

Sprague was gazing absently out of the near-by window. “Speaking of angels,” he broke in, “there is Tarbell, right now; coming down your office stair three steps at a jump,” and a moment later the young man in question had dashed across to the service-car and was thrusting his face in at the open window.

“Trouble, Mr. Maxwell!” he blurted out. “The ‘Plainsman’s’ just been held up and robbed at Cromarty Gulch! Connolly’s getting the wire from Corona, and he started me out to see if I could find you.”

The superintendent leaped up as if his easy-chair had been suddenly electrified.

“What’s that you say?” he demanded; “a hold-up?” Then he went into action promptly, as a trained emergency captain should. “Call Sheriff Harding on the ’phone, and tell him to rustle up a posse and report here, quick! Then get the yard office and turn me out an engine and a coach for Harding’s men. Hustle it!”

While he was closing his desk he made hurried explanation to Sprague. “It’s probably the Scott Weber gang. They held up a train on the main line over in Utah ten days ago. Come on upstairs with me and we’ll get the facts.”

When the superintendent, accompanied by his broad-shouldered guest, climbed the stair and entered the despatched office, fat, round-faced Daniel Connolly was rattling the key at the train-sheet table. He glanced up at the door opening.

“I’m mighty glad Tarbell found you,” he broke out, with a gasp of relief. “I was afraid you’d gone home.” And then he recognized the square-shouldered one: “How are you, Mr. Sprague? Glad to see you again.”

Maxwell went quickly around to the wire-table.

“Whom have you got?” he asked.

“Allen, night operator at Corona. The train is there, and I’ve been holding it to give you a chance to talk with McCarty, the conductor.”

“Tell me the story as you’ve got it; then I’ll tell you what to say to Mac,” was the brisk command.

“It was in Cromarty Gulch, just at the elbow where the track makes the ‘U’ curve. Cruger’s on the pilot-engine, and Jenkins is running the train puller. Cruger saw somebody throwing a red light at him. They stopped, and four of the hold-ups climbed on the engines and made them cut off the postal- and express-cars and pull on around the curve. Then a bunch of ’em broke in the end door of the express-car and scragged little Johnny Galt, the messenger. While they were doing that, another bunch went through the train and held up the passengers. After they’d gone through Galt’s car and taken what they wanted, they made Cruger and Jenkins couple up again and go on.”

“What did they take?” Maxwell asked.

“Some little money and jewelry from the passengers, McCarty says; not very much.”

“But from the express-car?”

The fat despatcher made a queer face and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“That’s the part of it that’s hard to believe. Galt was carrying considerable money, but they didn’t try to blow his safe. They--they smashed up a coffin and took the dead man out of it.”

“What!” ejaculated the superintendent; “Murtrie’s body?”

“I don’t know who it was--Mac didn’t say. But that’s what they did. When the boys got together and pulled Galt out from under the express stuff where they’d buried him, they found the coffin open and the body gone.”

Sprague had been listening intently.

“This seems to be something worth while, Maxwell,” he cut in. “How much time do we have to waste here?”

“Just a minute. Go on, Connolly.”

“That’s all,” said the fat despatcher. “The train’s at Corona now, and they’ve put Johnny Galt off; and--and the coffin. Mac’s asking for orders.”

“Give them their orders and let them go, and then clear for my special. I’ve sent for Harding and a posse, and we’ll chase out after this thing while the trail is warm. You’ll go along, won’t you, Calvin?” turning to the stop-over guest.

The man from Washington laughed genially.

“You couldn’t scare me off with a fire-hose--not until I have seen this little mystery of yours cleared up. Let’s be doing.”

Five minutes farther along the two-car special train had been made up and was clanking out over the switches in the eastern yard. As the last of the switch-lights were flicking past the windows, a big bearded man came in from the car ahead and Maxwell introduced him.

“Sprague, this is Sheriff Harding. Harding, shake hands with my friend, Mr. Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, Washington, and then sit down and we’ll thrash this thing out. You’ve heard the story?”

The sheriff nodded. “I’ve heard what Tarbell could tell me. He says the biggest part of the haul was a dead man. Is that right?”

“It seems to be. The dead man is Murtrie, who was supposed to be representing the New York owners of the Molly Baldwin mine. The report goes that he died last night, and his body was put on the train at Little Butte to be taken east to some little town in Kentucky. What’s your guess?”

“I’d guess that the whole blamed outfit was locoed--plumb locoed,” said Harding. “You couldn’t carve it out any other way, could you?”

It was Sprague who broke in with a quiet suggestion. “Try once more, Mr. Harding,” he said.

The big sheriff put his head in his hands and made the effort. When he looked up again there was the light of a new discovery in his eye.

“Say!” he exploded. “Murtrie’s the last of a string of five or six ‘watchers’ they’ve had up at that cussed hole-in-the-ground gold mine--and he’s dead. By gravy! I believe they killed him!”

Maxwell’s smile was grim.

“It seems to me we’re just about as far off as ever,” he commented; “unless you can carry it along to the body-snatching in some way. Why should they----”

“Hold on,” Harding cut in; “I wasn’t through. It’s one thing to kill a man, and another to get rid of the body so it won’t show up and get somebody hanged. Murtrie was sick; that much I know, because Doc Strader went out to the mine to see him day before yesterday. I was talking with Strader about it, and he said it looked like a case of ptomaine poisoning.”

“Well?” said Maxwell.

“Supposin’ it wasn’t natural; supposin’ it was the other kind o’ poison: they’d have to get rid o’ the body, some way or other, wouldn’t they,--or run the risk of havin’ it dug up and looked into, after Murtrie’s friends took hold?”

“Go on.”

“That bein’ the case, they’d have to call in some sort of outside help; they couldn’t handle it alone. Two or three of Scott Weber’s gang’ve been seen hanging around in Brewster within the last few days. Supposin’ these fellows at the Molly Baldwin put up a job with Scott to make this play with Murtrie’s body?”

“By Jove, Harding--I half believe you’ve got it!” Maxwell exclaimed; but the chemistry expert said nothing.

“We can tell better after we get on the ground, maybe,” the sheriff went on. “I had Follansbee bring his dogs along. There’s a trail up through the head of Cromarty Gulch leadin’ out to the old Reservation road on the mesa. If they had anything as heavy as Murtrie’s body to tote, that’s about the way they went with it.”

Maxwell had been absently marking little squares on his desk blotter as Harding talked. The sheriff’s theory was ingenious, but it failed to account for all the facts.

“There’s more to it than that,” he said, at length. And then he appealed to the silent guest. “Don’t you think so, Sprague?”

“I’m waiting to hear how Mr. Harding accounts for the raid on the passengers,” said the big man modestly. “One would think that a gang of body-snatchers would have been willing to do one thing at a time.”

“By George! that’s so,” the sheriff acknowledged. “I hadn’t thought of that. But then,” he added, after a second thought, “a gang that was tryin’ to cover up a killin’ wouldn’t be any too good to throw in a little hold-up business on the side.”

“No,” said Sprague; but he made no further comment. So far from it, he sat back in his chair and smoked patiently while Maxwell and the sheriff went on with the theory-building, a process which continued in some desultory fashion until Maxwell, glancing out of a window, said:

“We’re coming to it; this is the gulch.”

A few minutes later the two-car train slowed down and came to a stand on a sharp curve at the head of a densely wooded ravine in the foot-hills. Harding ran forward to get his posse out, and by the time Maxwell and Sprague had debarked the ground at the track-side was black with men. Sprague laughed softly.

“It’s lucky we’re not depending upon the old Indian method of ‘reading the sign,’” he said. “Whatever the ground might have told us is a story spoiled by this time.” Then he laughed again when a man broke out of the crowd, with a couple of dogs towing him furiously at the end of their leashes. “We gabble a good bit about our civilization and the advances we’ve made,” he went on. “Yet, in the relatively simple matter of running down a criminal, we haven’t got very far beyond the methods of the Stone Age. The idea of an intelligent being, with a human brain to rely upon, falling back upon the instincts of a couple of brute beasts!”

“Oh, hold on,” Maxwell protested. “Those dogs have run down a good many crooks, first and last. Follansbee will take any bet you want to make, right now.”

“And he would lose,” was the confident answer. “But come on; let’s see what’s going to happen.”

The chase, with the dogs running upon a comparatively fresh scent, led up through the pine wood at the head of the gulch. Beyond the wood was a bare, high-lying mesa table-land, with its summer-baked soil dried out to almost rocky hardness. A hundred yards from the gulch head an indistinct road skirted the mesa edge, and here the dogs began to run in circles.

Sprague was chuckling again, but Maxwell counselled patience.

“Wait a minute,” he suggested. “The body-snatchers probably had a team here. The dogs will get the scent of the horses presently.”

“Think so?” queried the expert. Then he drew his companion aside. “Do you know anything about this road, Dick?”

“Yes, it’s the old wagon road from the Reservation into the park.”

“Which way would you go toward Brewster?”

“That way,” said the superintendent, pointing.

“All right; let’s go a little way toward Brewster, and perhaps I can show you why Mr. Follansbee would lose his bet on his dogs.”

When they were well out of the dog-circling area, the chemistry expert stooped and struck a match. “See here,” he said; and Maxwell, squatting beside him, saw the broad track of an automobile tire. Sprague gurgled softly. “Do you think the dogs will get the scent of that?” he inquired.

Maxwell stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Calvin, the way you hop across and light upon the one only sure thing, comes mighty near being uncanny, at times. How the devil did you find out that those fellows came in an auto?”

“If I should tell you that it was pure reasoning, you’d doubt it. But never mind the whys and wherefores just now; they can come later. Tell me how long we’re going to stay here losing time on Follansbee and his dogs.”

“Not a minute longer than you care to stay. What do you want to do?”

“I want to see that crippled express messenger who was put off the train at Corona. Also, I’d like to have a look at the dead man’s coffin.”

“You shall do both. If you’re taking the case, you are very pointedly the only doctor there is in it,” Maxwell asserted. Then he called to the sheriff: “O Harding!” and when the county officer came up: “I’m going to take the train and run on to Corona after Galt. We’ll stop here for your orders when we come back.”

During the short run around the hills to the small mining-town station, Sprague sat quietly in his chair, puffing steadily at his cigar, and saying nothing. When Maxwell announced their arrival he got up and followed the superintendent into the Corona office.

Galt, the express messenger, was lying on the night operator’s cot in the telegraph office. Some physician passenger on the held-up train had dressed his wounds, and he had fully recovered consciousness. His story was a mere amplification of the wire report which had gone to Brewster. He had marked, and wondered at, the unscheduled stop on the gulch curve, but before he could open his door to look out, the postal- and express-cars had been pulled on ahead, his end door had been battered in, and he had found himself trying to fight back a couple of masked men who were forcing an entrance. Then somebody hit him on the head and that was the end of it, so far as he was concerned.

Following this, the Corona night operator was put upon the question rack. He knew only what the trainmen had told him. No; there was nothing missing out of the express-car save the dead man’s body. While the train was waiting, he, the operator, and the conductor had made a careful check of the contents of the car from Galt’s waybills, and, with the single exception noted, everything was undisturbed. No, there was no panic; the scare was pretty well quieted down by the time the train reached Corona. Of course, a good many of the passengers had got out at the station stop, and everybody was curious to see the coffin.

“You took the coffin off?” Maxwell questioned.

“Yes, it’s in the freight-room.”

Sprague had taken no part in the examination of the man, and had listened only cursorily to Galt’s story. But now he became as curious as any of the morbid passengers had been. Allen, the operator, lighted a lantern and led the way to the freight-room. The coffin was lying upon a baggage-truck. It was encased in an ordinary shipping-box, half of the cover of which had been torn off. The lid of the coffin had been broken, split into three pieces; and one of the pieces was missing. It was a rather expensive affair, wooden and not metallic, of the kind known as a “casket,” silk-lined, and with a sliding glass face-plate. The glass had been broken, and the fragments were lying inside on the small silken pillow.