Part 7

“It’s just a little more of the same,” breathed the fat one vindictively. “I don’t know what in the devil has got into the trainmen lately; this dog-blasted railroad’s getting so it runs itself! Here’s Seventeen overrunning her orders and trying to make the west end of Tunnel Number Three against the Fast Mail. Nophi says he argued with ’em, but they said they had plenty of time and went on. By grabs! if I was Mr. Maxwell I’d make a sizzlin’ red-hot example of some of these crazy chance-takers!”

Johnson was running his eye down the columns of figures in the time-table.

“I wouldn’t worry till I had to,” he put in. “The Mail’s twenty minutes off her schedule, and that gives Seventeen thirty minutes to make the six miles from Nophi to the tunnel and the mile and a quarter more to take her through to the west end siding. She’ll make it all right.”

“I know. But by Jasher! that ain’t railroading,” insisted Connolly. “Two months ago you wouldn’t find a single train crew on the Short Line that’d take chances stealing sidings this way, and now they’re all doing it. Besides, the tunnel’s all tore up, with that electric-wiring gang working in it, and every crew on the west end knows it.”

As he fumed, the despatcher rattled his key in the call for Junico, the only night station west of the tunnel at which there would be any chance of communicating with the off time eastbound Fast Mail. He knew it was only a chance. If the Mail had made up no more than five of the twenty minutes, it would already have passed Junico.

At the close of the impatient call the circuit broke and Junico “signed in.” Connolly asked his question in clipped abbreviations, and got his answer shot-like. “Number Six passing now.” “_Hold Six_,” snapped the despatcher hurriedly. For a full minute the sounder was silent. Then it began again. “Chased out quick as I could, but couldn’t catch ’em,” was Junico’s incident-closing reply.

Connolly pounded with a fat fist upon the plate-glass top of his table in impotent wrath.

“There it is!” he gritted. “Now if anything happens to get in the way of them cussed chance-takers on Seventeen, there you are!”

Apparently there was nothing to be done but to await the event and to hope for an auspicious outcome. As Connolly had said, it wasn’t railroading; and yet he knew well enough that on many railroads the stealing of sidings, the crawling up upon meeting-points by train crews hard pressed to make their schedules, is a violation of rules which is constantly winked at, and punished only when trouble ensues.

In the present case there should have been no trouble. With a clear thirty minutes in which to make less than eight miles, the time freight should be safely in on the siding at the west end of Tunnel Number Three some minutes before the Fast Mail could possibly cover its own intervening distance.

But on this particular Tuesday night the fates were inauspicious. Fifteen minutes farther along, after Johnson had gone back to his table in the corner, Connolly’s west-wire sounder began to chatter furiously. The fat despatcher broke in promptly, and again the trembling fit seized upon the unbusied half of him.

“Oh, good Lord!” he groaned; and again: “Oh, good _Lord_!” Then the corridor door opened and Maxwell, the superintendent, came in, looking as he always did, the square-shouldered, square-jawed fighter of transportation battles, with a few streaks of youthful gray beginning to show in his tightly curled mustaches--a militant figure of a man giving a truthful impression of the fit and purposeful railroad field officer.

“What’s the matter, Dan?” he demanded, making a quick push through the gate in the counter railing.

Connolly explained hastily.

“Seventeen tried to steal a siding on Six. Gallagher, the work-line operator at the electric gang’s camp, has just called up to say that the freight’s stuck in the tunnel--something off the track. A flagman has come back to the camp with the news, and he says the tunnel is blocked so they can’t get through with a flag for Six.”

“Good God, Dan--they’ve _got_ to get through!” Maxwell exploded; and pushing the despatcher aside he cut in on the wire himself. There was a brief and brittle colloquy in which the emphatic word was made to do duty for entire sentences, a wait, and when the clicking began again the superintendent translated audibly, quite as if Connolly, listening with all of his five senses concentrated in the single one of hearing, were not taking the hopeful information as it came from the sounder.

“Stribling’s there, and every sprinter in the camp is turning out to do a Marathon over the hill to the west end. Just the same, it will be touch and go if they make it in time to warn the Mail. How much late is Six?”

Connolly gave the time, making the proper deduction for the few minutes made up west of Junico. Maxwell glanced up at the time-standard clock on the wall.

“There is an even chance,” he asserted hopefully. “There ought to be somebody in that mob of wire-stringers who can run the two miles in time to head off the Mail. How did you come to let things get into such a snarl as this, Dan?”

Again Connolly explained, and he did not try to make it easy for the offending crew of Number Seventeen. “Jasper didn’t ask for orders at Nophi. He simply took snap judgment and went along, leaving the Nophi man to tell me after the thing was done.”

“Jasper and his engineer will get thirty days on this, no matter how it turns out!” snapped the boss. “There is a good deal too much of this rule-breaking lately, and it’s got to stop short. I won’t have it.... Suffering cats! I wish those sprinters would hurry up and get word to us! My God, Dan, if that fast train gets into the tunnel before they catch it----”

A thunderous clangor in the station yard below the office windows cut into the sentence, and again the superintendent looked up at the clock.

“That’s the ‘Quick-step,’ isn’t it?” he said. “She’s bringing an old friend of ours from the East, Dan--Mr. Sprague.”

For a moment Connolly was able to take his mind off of the tragedy or near-tragedy which was working itself out to some kind of a climax in the far-away Hophra Mountains to the westward.

“You asked him to come and tell us why we’re having this fit of extra cussedness all over the line?” he asked.

“Oh, no; the Department of Agriculture is sending him to make some soil tests in the Timanyoni. He writes that he is likely to be with us for a month or two.”

“I’m glad,” said Connolly simply. “Somehow, you feel as if you’d got a good solid mountain at your back when Mr. Sprague’s around. I wonder if he’ll come up here before he goes over to the hotel?”

Even as he spoke the door opened, and the man who looked like the elder brother of all the foot-ball “backs” in the intercollegiate try-out came in.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said jovially; “same old shop--same old worries, eh? How are you, Maxwell? And you, Mr. Connolly? Glad to see you both. What’s the trouble this time? Anything a journeyman chemist can help you out on?”

Maxwell’s mustaches took a sharper uptilt. “How did you know there was any trouble, Calvin?” he demanded quickly.

The big man leaned across the counter rail and laughed softly.

“There is nothing very occult about that,” he rejoined. “You have it written all over your faces, both of you; and it is also written in the face of that young man over in the corner, who would like to hear what we’re saying and can’t quite compass it.”

Maxwell explained briefly.

“Two of our trains are trying to get together on a single track up at Tunnel Number Three in the Hophras. There is a break-down in the tunnel, and half a hundred men are sprinting over the mountain to try to head off the other train.”

“What? half a hundred? There ought to be at least one or two good sprinters among that many--somebody who can make your touch-down for you. How does it come that you happened to have as big a crowd as that on the side-lines--at this time of night?”

The superintendent went into details far enough to account for the crowd of volunteer rescuers.

“We are electrifying Tunnel Number Three, and the contractors’ camp is at this end of the tunnel. It was the contractors’ operator who sent in the alarm, and his chief engineer turned out the entire camp for us when I told him what to do.”

“And you are waiting to get word?”

“Yes; waiting and hoping. By great good luck the Fast Mail is behind time. If it hasn’t made up----”

A fierce clattering of the sounder on Connolly’s table tore into the sentence, and in the midst of it Maxwell shot out his arms and drew a deep breath.

“Thank God!” he ejaculated, “they’ve caught the Mail! Now I’ll go with you, Calvin.” And then to Connolly: “Straighten things out for those fellows at the tunnel as quickly as you can, Dan, and get the wheels in motion again. Order up the engine from Second Seventeen if they need power to get that raffle out of the tunnel, and have somebody send over to Lopez Canyon for Benson to take charge. If you want to reach me, I’ll be over at the hotel.”

At the Hotel Topaz, across the plaza from the railroad head-quarters building, Maxwell saw his friend and sometime college classmate properly registered for a comfortable suite, and otherwise hospitably provided for before the pair of them went to smoke their bedtime pipes in the deserted writing-room facing the plaza.

“It’s just my luck, Calvin, to be homeless about every other time you happen along,” Maxwell apologized, when the pipes were lighted. “Alice’s father and mother came through from California a few days ago, and carried her and the children off with them to New York and the Long Island shore. I’m a widower.”

“That’s all right,” laughed the big man. “I’m going to be here in your midst for a month or more, and I wouldn’t think of camping down on you for that length of time, anyway. To-morrow you’ll chase out and help me find a couple of office rooms where I can set up a small laboratory; and after that I’ll go out in the woods and dig dirt--which it is my official nature so to do. That’s enough about me. How are you getting along with the railroad wreckers?”

Maxwell lighted his pipe and answered categorically.

“We have heard nothing more, directly, from the Wall Street people since that break they made a few weeks ago trying to hold up the proxies I was sending to President Ford in New York,” was Maxwell’s summing up of the current situation. “But Ford assures me from time to time that they haven’t quit. The latest competition rate ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission makes it absolutely necessary for them to own or control a shorter line than their present one to Southern California points--this in order to protect their holdings in the big stock pool. They’d have what they need if they could corral the Nevada Short Line and tie it in with the Transcontinental’s branch at Copah. Ford says they seem to consider it only a question of time until they absorb us. The T-C. people are spending a lot of money on their Jack’s Canyon branch, putting it in shape for heavy traffic; and they can’t hope to get the traffic unless they get us.”

“This tunnel trouble to-night had nothing to do with the fight, I suppose?” queried Sprague reflectively.

“Oh, no. That was merely the outgrowth of a curious sort of letting down that comes once in a while on every railroad, no matter how well it may be manned or handled. Our let-down has been coming on gradually ever since we got over the ‘Wire-Devil’ scare. Men, good men who have been with us for years, take chances that would make your hair stand on end. Like this to-night,” and he went on to describe the causes which had led up to the near-tragedy at Tunnel Number Three.

“I see,” said Sprague. And then: “You say you are electrifying? I thought that was a luxury in which only the rich Eastern roads could indulge; and then only for their city terminals.”

“It isn’t exactly a luxury in our case; it’s a working necessity. Tunnel Number Three is part of a shortening project carried out two years ago. It dodges under Burnt Mountain and cuts out five and two-tenths miles of the costliest, crookedest track in Tumble-Tree Canyon; track that we were never able to keep open for ten days in succession during the summer season of cloud-bursts and heavy storms. It is a timbered tunnel a mile and a quarter long, and the greater part of it is through loose, dry shale that practically kiln-dries the timber arching. From the time we began using it we’ve been fighting fire in it almost daily.”

“Just so,” said the chemistry expert. “So now you are putting in electricity to get rid of the fire-throwing locomotives. Where do you get your juice?”

“In Lopez Canyon, about three miles from the eastern portal, there is an excellent water-power. Eventually we shall use electricity for the entire hill-pull over the Hophras and so make a very handsome reduction in our fuel account.”

“Good!” was the approving comment; and then the commentator came back to the details. “Electricity is another of my pet hobbies,” he confessed. “What company is installing you--General Electric?”

“No; a New York firm--Grafton Brothers. I never heard of them until they came here.”

Only the keenest of observers would have noted Sprague’s accession of interest at the mention of the brotherly firm name.

“The Graftons, eh?” he said slowly. “How did you come to give them the job?”

“We had nothing to do with it out here. The deal was made in New York, with the Pacific Southwestern officials.”

Sprague was nodding absently as if in answer to some unspoken query of his own when he said, “Have you ever met either of the Graftons, Dick?”

“No; they are only a name to me. Their representative on our job is an engineer named Stribling; a fine young fellow and a cracker-jack in his business. He was the man who turned out the crowd of sprinters for us to-night.”

“Oho! general favorite all around, is he?”

Maxwell laughed dryly. “He has captured everybody except the one man who has had the most to do with him; that’s Benson, our chief engineer. Jack is a sort of two-fisted bluffer himself--though it is only fair to say that he usually makes his bluff good--and I think he’d always bet on the field against a favorite. He says Stribling is too smooth; too damned smooth, is the way he generally phrases it.”

“I shall have great pleasure in making the acquaintance of this Mr. Benson of yours some day,” said the man from Washington. And after that he smoked on in silence until Maxwell was about to bid him good-night and suggest a bell-hop and the elevator--did suggest them, in fact.

“No, I’m not sleepy,” was the rejoinder. “I was just thinking about railroads and tunnels and the like. If I were a railroad man, Dick, I believe I should have a crazy horror of a tunnel.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know; superstition, perhaps. You know the old saying:

Every superstition Is a foolish superstition Save the little superstition Of me.

A tunnel always seems to me like a man’s neck. One little grip and a squeeze, and your man, though he may have a couple of hundred pounds of other organs in perfect working order, is dead.”

Maxwell laughed at the quaint conceit, though he was prompt to make the timely application.

“That would be true enough for us if Tunnel Number Three should ever be wiped out,” he admitted. “As I have said, it is in dry shale, a good part of it, and it had to be carefully supported by follow-up timbering as we went along in the digging. I wanted Ford to let us keep the roundabout track in commission, against emergencies, but he decided it would be too expensive--as it probably would have been.”

“And you have let the roundabout track lapse?”

“Oh, yes; the cloud-bursts of the first summer wiped it out for us completely.”

“So this tunnel is really the neck of your five-hundred-mile-long man, is it?”

“It is. If Burnt Mountain should happen to fall in on us one of these fine nights--which it won’t--we’d be definitely out of the game as a through line. It would bottle us up for weeks, if not for months.”

A slow smile spread itself over Sprague’s smooth-shaven, good-natured face.

“If I had as tender a neck as that, Dick, I’d have night sweats thinking about it; I should, for a fact,” he averred. And then, after a pause: “Ah; I’ve been waiting for that. The lights have just gone out in your office over there in the railroad building. Who is so industrious as to stay on the job until nearly midnight?”

“It is Harvey Calmaine, my paragon of a chief clerk. He’s a mighty hard-working young fellow--a treasure, as you may remember. He has been getting up some statistics for me, and he won’t take the time out of the working day.”

“H’m, yes; he is a fine young fellow, Dick, and no mistake.” Then, after he had refilled his pipe: “He still limps a little from that foot-scorching episode in Bart Holladay’s back room--when they were torturing him to make him tell what he had done with the proxies--doesn’t he?”

Maxwell turned upon his companion with a frown of mystification wrinkling between his eyes.

“How did you know that, Calvin?” he demanded.

Sprague chuckled gently.

“Some fine day, Dick, you’ll learn to use your eyes and ears. I saw young Calmaine walking across from the railroad building just now--as you did, only you didn’t remark it consciously; and at the present moment I hear him coming through the lobby, with the limp very distinctly noticeable in the click of his heels upon the tiled floor. And now I’ll venture a guess: he is looking for you, and when he finds you he will give you a telegram.”

Almost as he spoke, Calmaine came up behind them. As Sprague had predicted, he had a telegram in his hand, which he gave to his superior with a word in explanation. “That is only a translation. The original is a cipher, and I locked it up in the office safe. It came just as I was getting ready to knock off.”

Maxwell read the telegram and passed it on to Sprague.

“It’s a little odd that Ford should use the same figure of speech that you did a few minutes ago,” he remarked. And then, with a short laugh, “If I were inclined to be superstitious I might wonder if your marvellous second mentality wasn’t looking over Calmaine’s shoulder as he translated that.”

Sprague had glanced at the message. It read:

“Big Nine still feeling for a strangle-hold on us. Look sharp that it does not get its fingers on your windpipe.

“FORD.”

The big man passed the square of paper back to his friend and stood up to stretch his arms over his head, yawning like a sleepy farm-hand.

“I’ve got to set up my shop and go to work sometime to-morrow,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs and turn in for a few lines of sleep.”

“Not me, just yet,” said Maxwell, with a curt disregard for his English. “I’m going over to the shack for a little while.”

“What for?” questioned the sleepy one, with half-absent interest.

“To try and get Benson on the wire and have him post guards in that tunnel. There is no reason on earth for it, but between you and Ford you’ve got me nervous on this choking proposition. Good-night, old man. Breakfast with me in the morning, and afterward I’ll take you out and steer you up against some of the real-estate robbers and get them to find you an office.”

On the following day the superintendent was as good as his word in the office-finding matter, and by noon the Government soil-tester was comfortably established in a couple of rooms on the second floor of the Kinzie Building, in the same corridor with Mr. Robert Stillings, the local attorney for the railroad company.

The two-room suite gave him an office--which he said was about as necessary as an auxiliary tail to a cat--and a second room in the rear which he speedily transformed into a working laboratory, using the young man named Tarbell, who still figured on the railroad pay-rolls as a “relief operator,” for his errand-boy and man-of-all-work in securing the needed furnishings and equipment.

Later in the day Maxwell brought his brother-in-law, “Billy” Starbuck, around to the new office, introducing him as a mine owner and a gentleman of easy leisure, and one who knew every square acre of soil, arable or otherwise, in the entire Timanyoni.

“Billy has nothing on earth to do, and, like me, he is a temporary widower,” Maxwell explained. “We married sisters, and his wife has gone with mine and the Fairbairns to dabble in the salt sea waves at Norman Towers. Make use of him as you can, only don’t take his word for the gentleness of the horse you’re going to ride. He is an absolutely truthful man on any other subject, but he never misses a chance to play a bucking bronc’ against a tenderfoot.”

Sprague foregathered at once with the clean-cut, rather shabbily clothed young mine owner whose principal affectations were his worn khaki suit, a cowboy Stetson tilted carelessly to the back of his head, and a vocabulary of cow-camp slang which happened to be no measure of his knowledge of grammatical English. Before he left the newly established laboratory in the Kinzie Building, Starbuck had engaged to go with the expert on a soil-collecting trip through the Park, the trip to begin early in the morning of the following day, and to continue indefinitely; or until the chief soil-hunter should be sufficiently saddle-sore to wish to cut it short.

“I like that brother-in-law of yours a whole heap, Dick,” was Sprague’s verdict when he met the superintendent at dinner in the Topaz café that evening. “He is a man with a history, isn’t he?”

The queer look which Sprague seemed to be able to evoke at will in his table-mate crept into Maxwell’s eyes.

“Did you ever meet Billy before I took him into your office this afternoon?” he asked.

“No.”

“Ever hear of him before?”

“No.”

“All right; now I’m going to try you out good and hard. You intimate that he is a man with a history. What is his history?”

The expert sat back, thrust his hands into his pockets, and for a moment seemed to go into a trance, with his gaze fixed upon the ornate decorations of the café ceiling.

“I’ll make what you will probably call a series of wild guesses,” he said at length, “prefacing them with the assurance, which you must take at its face value, that Mr. Starbuck has told me nothing whatever of himself--at least, not consciously.”

“Go on,” said Maxwell.

“In the first place, he is an educated man--a college man--and he talks cowboy English only because it suits his fancy to talk it. Also, though he wears khaki and a cowboy hat, he is quite as much at home in evening clothes as you or I. Am I right, so far?”

“Yes.”

“Beyond that, he is a man of many accomplishments, most of which he is at some pains to conceal. In his younger youth, if not later, he was a bit wild--too much money to spend, I take it--and the wildness, or some of its consequences, landed him in jail; no, it wasn’t a jail--it was a penitentiary.”

Maxwell’s look of amused half-triumph had changed to one of sober consternation.

“_Calvin!_” he exclaimed, in low tones. “You must know; you must have heard----”

“I pledge you my word, Dick; I am cutting this out of whole cloth, so far as any outside information is concerned. But let me go on. Whatever Mr. Starbuck was, or whatever he did, he was never a criminal in the true sense of the word. So far from it, I can assure you of what you doubtless know for yourself; that he is a man to tie to--a true man and a loyal friend and kinsman. I’m going to take the field with him to-morrow morning, and we shall come back brothers of the blood. That’s a measure of my regard for him.”

Maxwell put down his knife and fork and said what clansman relationship demanded.