Part 8

“Listen,” he began, “and see how frightfully near you have shaved the truth in your ‘guesses.’ In his early manhood Billy was a cowpunch--in the college-graduate class, as you intimate. He discovered a mine, sold it for a fat wad, and went to New York, where he blew in the wad to the final dollar.”

Sprague nodded. “That was the wild side-step that I couldn’t quite place,” he said, and the superintendent went on.

“When his money was gone he went to work as a stenographer for a firm of brokers, and was holding the job down when the safe was tapped and a sum of money stolen. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a term in Sing Sing, where he served his time. It was late in the first year of his freedom before a few of us who were his friends here in the West found out that he had voluntarily gone to prison to save a fellow-clerk--a half-dead, broken-down scoundrel with a wife and children, a sick mother, and a crippled sister.”

“Fine!” Sprague was beginning to say; but Maxwell interposed.

“No, hold on; you mustn’t set him down as an impossible hero. He’d be the first to object to that. I said ‘voluntarily,’ and it really amounted to that, though when Billy promised not to betray the scoundrel he had no idea that he was going to be made to suffer in his place. Nevertheless, since the promise had been given, Billy made good.”

Sprague smiled. “Entirely without prejudice to a hearty and man-sized hatred for the man who let him go in the hole, you’d say?”

“Exactly; entirely without prejudice to that very human passion.”

“Well,” said the expert; “my summing up was true, anyhow. I was sure he had that kind of stuff in him, and that he had been tried out along some such line as that.”

Maxwell nodded, and then he became insistent.

“Now tell me--you’ve got to tell me, Calvin, how you did it.”

Sprague’s mellow, booming laugh earned him more than one curious glance from the surrounding tables.

“I can no more tell you, Dick, than I can explain why, to a majority of people, white is white and black is black. For my own satisfaction I define the ‘how’ as a natural growth, favored by habit and training, of the scientific attitude; the mental slant which, if given free play, almost unconsciously notes, marks, deduces, reasons; deeming nothing too small or too trifling to go toward making up the whole of any conclusion. More than that, in my own case the faculty is able to hold itself workably aloof from the ordinary distractions of conversation and the like. It goes on, using the outward senses when it needs them, to be sure, but only as aids to the developing of its own little film in its own little darkroom. Do you get the idea?”

“Only partly. Even science has to have its raw materials to work on.”

“Oh, yes; and the materials lie all around us constantly, if we only know how to weigh and measure them. In Starbuck’s case, now, there were little lapses from the cowboy talk to tell me that he was an educated man; also, he has the true modesty of those who can really do things. Then there were gaps in his talk, little loopholes, you might call them, through which I could look back through the years and get glimpses of that period of dissipation. Each glimpse revealed a tiny ear-mark of the man who knows--who can only know--because he has been there.”

“Go on,” urged Maxwell, still only half-convinced that the deductions were not, in the last analysis, only shrewd guesses. “None of these things told you that he had been in prison.”

“No; as to that, I’ll admit I set a harmless trap for him. I fancied once, and then again, that I saw the prison look in his eye; the quick side-glance that a long-term prisoner learns to give without turning his head--notice it the next time you happen to be in a penitentiary, if you are ever so unfortunate as to visit one.”

“I have noticed it,” said Maxwell, and the expert went on.

“When I saw that, the scientific mentality said instantly, ‘That look wasn’t acquired in a jail term--it took longer.’ The next suggestion followed as a matter of course. Every long-term man answers to a number instead of to his name. At the moment I was numbering the bottles of chemicals which Tarbell had been buying for me, and I turned the talk upon my peculiar system of labelling--by numbers. Starbuck himself did the rest. He said, ‘I reckon I wouldn’t rent even a post-office box if it had to have a number on it.’ That was all, but it was enough.”

Maxwell was toying with his dessert.

“As I have said several times before, Calvin, you are almost uncanny now and then. You know too much. Some fine day it will strike in on you--sour on you and make you sick.”

Sprague’s mellow laugh sounded again.

“I haven’t begun to tell you all I know. For example, I might say that all through this spell of gossip about your brother-in-law you’ve been giving the subject no more than a scant half of your mind. The other half has been tussling with your railroad involvement, and you’ve been wondering where the Big Nine is going to land on you next. What do you hear from Tunnel Number Three?”

“Nothing much; or at least nothing out of the ordinary. They got the tangle straightened out last night after a time. Benson wires that Stribling put the entire electrifying force under his orders, and was all kinds of nice about it.”

“‘Electrifying,’” repeated Sprague musingly. “A slight change in the spelling would make it ‘electrocuting,’ wouldn’t it? How long will it be before the installation is completed?”

“They are starting the turbines in Lopez Canyon to-day, for a try-out. The wires are all strung, and Stribling is installing some sort of a safety contrivance in the tunnel as a finishing touch; a switch of some kind that will shunt the current in case any accident should happen to a train in transit. It’s all Greek to me--and to Benson, for that matter. Neither of us knows enough about electric installations to keep us from spoiling.”

“But the date,” said Sprague, with the amiable persistence which was one of his chief characteristics. “When will the current be turned on?”

“Stribling sends word that he will be ready to cut the power in on the tunnel wires to-morrow evening at six o’clock, and asks if I’m going to be on hand to see it done.”

Sprague was deftly clipping the tip from one of the cigars which the waiter had brought, preparatory to lighting it.

“Do you happen to have a time-table in your pocket?” he asked.

Maxwell had one, and he passed it across the table. The Government man postponed the lighting of his cigar and began to turn the leaves of the official schedule hand-book. At the pages listing the trains on the Hophra Division he paused and ran his finger slowly down the columns giving the movement of traffic to and through Tunnel Number Three.

“You would have to leave here early in the afternoon to reach the tunnel by six--or rather to be there at six--wouldn’t you?” he asked, returning the time-table.

Maxwell shook his head and smiled. “You forget that I’m not tied to regular trains on my own piece of railroad,” he suggested. “I couldn’t afford to go up on Three and spend two or three hours loafing around. If I go, I shall order out a car and engine and make a quick job of it. It is only sixty-three miles, and I can make it special in an hour and thirty minutes or thereabouts.”

“I see,” said Sprague reflectively. “Leaving Brewster about three-thirty, say?”

“Yes; that would be plenty early enough.”

“But you don’t know yet whether you will go at all?”

“No. There is a delegation of ore-shippers coming down from Red Butte to-morrow, and I’ll be busy with it a good part of the day.”

After that the talk drifted to other things, among them the expert’s mission to the Timanyoni, which, he admitted in confidence, was the preliminary to a possible Government reclamation project. And finally, when Maxwell broke away to go back to his office across the plaza, his going or not going to the tunnel to be present at the turning on of the power current on the following day was left undecided.

According to the prearranged programme, Sprague left Brewster at daylight the next morning, riding with Starbuck to the upper valley of the Gloria where the first of the soil specimens were to be collected. But for some reason, saddle-soreness on the part of the tenderfoot, or another, the trip was a short one, ending a little after noon, when the two came jogging back through the Brewster streets.

From their corner table in the Topaz café, where they ate their late luncheon together, they saw Maxwell entertaining a party of the ore-shippers; and later Sprague, whose half-absent gaze seemed to miss nothing, saw a good-looking young fellow in shabby, work-stained brown duck push through the swinging glazed doors opening from the lobby and go around to whisper to Maxwell at the table of entertainment. Sprague called his companion’s attention to the new-comer.

“That will be Mr. Benson, chief engineer of the railroad, for a guess,” he ventured; and Starbuck nodded.

“Right you are. It’s Jack; and to look at him you sure wouldn’t think he was a married man, with a nice, tidy little wife at home, would you, now? He always looks as if he had just tumbled out of the dirtiest car in his work-train.”

The soil expert smiled leniently. “Possibly he is here on business, and sometimes business won’t wait,” he suggested. “See; your brother-in-law is excusing himself to the ore people and is going out with Benson. After we finish our luncheon I’ll ask you to do me a little favor, Mr. Starbuck. Find Mr. Maxwell and tell him we’re back--just on the chance that he didn’t see us over here in this dark corner of ours. I’d like to meet Mr. Benson, if it can be managed without too much trouble.”

Starbuck’s keen gray eyes searched the round, double-chinned face of his newly made acquaintance shrewdly.

“I reckon I’m on,” he said slowly. “I was beginning to climb on before you said anything. That New York crowd is after Dick and his railroad with a black-snake whip; I know that much. Is the whip getting ready to pop again?”

“I’m a little afraid it is, Mr. Starbuck, and I am hoping that Mr. Benson will be able to tell us whether it is or isn’t,” was the even-toned rejoinder. “At all events, I’d like to meet him and have a talk with him--some time before three o’clock. Bear the hour in mind, will you, please? and try to arrange it for me.”

“Sure,” said Starbuck; and when they rose from the table he went in search of the superintendent and Benson, leaving his luncheon companion to go around to the Kinzie Building laboratory alone.

It was something less than half an hour after Sprague had stripped his coat and gone to work on the soil specimens of the morning’s gathering when Starbuck came in, bringing Maxwell and Benson. As Starbuck made it appear, the visit was merely a neighborly drop-in, with no better excuse than the expressed purpose of introducing Sprague to a possible helper.

“I thought you might be able to use Jack in some way, Mr. Sprague,” he said, after the introduction was a fact accomplished. “He sure knows a heap more about Timanyoni dirt than anybody else between the two ranges; carries right smart of it around on his clothes a good deal of the time.”

Benson took the joke in good part; and when Sprague had found and opened a box of his irreproachable cigars, the talk, touching lightly at first upon Sprague’s business in the West, came around, or was brought around, to Benson’s part in the electrification job. The big expert with the fighting jaw and the sympathetic gray eyes had a way of leading even a reticent man to tell of his troubles; and Benson, knowing the part Sprague had taken in defeating the two previous attempts to wreck the Short Line, felt free to unburden himself.

“I can’t make Maxwell, here, believe that Stribling is anything but the fine, open-handed young fellow that he seems to be; but I want to tell you three together what I have often told Maxwell: I’ve got a hunch. I don’t _know_ a blessed thing. Stribling has always treated me fine, and he is a fellow you can hardly help cottoning to, right from the jump. But some way something inside of me keeps on telling me that he’s too smooth--too damned smooth. Last night, for instance, in that derailment muddle--there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do, didn’t do, to help us out. He packed his men into the tunnel so thick that nobody could get near that derailed car; in fact, he had the car on the rails and the train backing out before I could get any action at all.”

“What caused the derailment, Mr. Benson?” Sprague put in quietly.

“That was one of the things that made me hot. Stribling’s messing in made it impossible for anybody to tell. There was nothing the matter with the track or with the car, so far as I could see after the thing was over. Bamberg, the engineer who was pulling the train, swears that somebody flagged him down with a red light when he was about half-way through the tunnel, and he stopped. Then the red changed to white and gave him the ‘go-ahead.’ When he tried to start his train, this box-car, somewhere along in the middle of things, jumped the track and blocked the tunnel. He felt the jerk and stopped again.”

Sprague waved a hand in token of his complete satisfaction.

“Suppose we ignore this train tangle for the present and come to other things,” he interposed. “I’ve been wondering if you could describe for me, briefly, the details of this tunnel installation, Mr. Benson?”

“Why, yes; it’s simple enough--it’s merely a trolley line on a big scale: two heavy copper trolley wires strung through on catenary brackets, with double insulation. That’s all, except the safety-switches--cut-outs--one at each end and one in the middle of the tunnel.”

“Ah?” said the expert, mildly interested at last; “one in the middle, you say? What is that for?”

“It is the real safety device, Stribling says; the others are merely mechanical cut-outs for the use of the wire repairers. He was explaining it to me this morning when he was connecting it in with the power wires. It’s an ordinary oil-protected switch so adjusted that in case an accident happens to a train in the tunnel the circuit will be broken automatically and the live-wire current cut out. It’s a good thing, you’d say. It would make your flesh creep to think what it would mean to have those high-power wires short-circuiting into a wreck.”

“We won’t think of it,” said the big man quizzically. “We’ll think rather of this Mr. Stribling and your--thus far--unexplained suspicions. How did he contrive to send you down here to-day?”

Benson looked up quickly.

“How did you know he sent me? I didn’t say he did, did I? But I guess that is what it amounts to. He made it a sort of personal matter; urged me to come and bring Mr. Maxwell back with me; said that on a job as big as ours he didn’t want to take any chances with his reputation as an electrical engineer or leave any room for a misunderstanding. He’d like to have Maxwell go foot by foot over the installation and see that everything is all right and safe before the power is turned on and the first electric train is sent through.”

Sprague put his face in his hands and for a few seconds the silence in the makeshift laboratory was unbroken. Then suddenly he came to life again.

“You were telling us about this internal safety device,” he broke out abruptly. “It’s an oil-switch, you say?”

“Yes; there is an iron tank to hold the oil, and----”

“Hold on; where do you find room in the tunnel for a tank?”

“In one of the side excavations. When we were driving the tunnel we left side niches every two hundred feet or so; safety-holes for the men in blasting, and places where we could store dynamite and tools out of danger and out of the way.”

“Stop. Was this particular dodge-hole where the safety switch is placed ever used for dynamite storing?”

“Yes; there are a lot of empty boxes in it now. In the arching, the timber-setters had covered them in, I suppose, and they were overlooked in the cleaning out.”

“You are sure they are empty?”

“Oh, yes; they’re empty all right. Stribling called my attention to them this morning, and I kicked over two or three of them, at his suggestion, just to make sure that they were empty.”

“I see; he called your attention to them, did he? That is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as this oil-switch you’ve been trying to describe for me. Go over it again, will you?”

The young chief engineer was evidently disappointed. The scientist of whose gifts he had heard so much seemed to have a brain in which pertinacity, the pertinacity which clings helplessly to trivial and perfectly obvious things, was the over-shadowing faculty.

“I don’t know that I can make it any plainer,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “It’s just an ordinary electric circuit-breaker, the same as they use on street-cars, and it is buried in oil to keep it from arcing--as all switches are when they’re under voltages as high as ours will be. The mechanism is suspended in a tank by its own wires, and the tank is filled with oil. I was there when they were filling the tank this morning, and Stribling poured a queer sirupy mess in on top of it--some patent stuff to keep the oil from thickening under exposure, he said.”

“A patent mixture, eh? I’m interested in patents,” said the listener, going off at another of the blind tangents. “How did it come--in a can?”

“Yes; in four square cans, holding about a gallon or so each, I should say. They were packed in a box--like varnish cans, you know--only they were taller and not so big in section.”

“I suppose you weren’t near enough to notice any name or advertisement on these cans, were you?”

Benson had by this time lost all hope of finding anything like continuity in the big man’s mind, but he answered the query.

“Yes, I was near enough; Stribling was up on the tank and I passed the cans up to him, one at a time--and spilled the stuff all over me doing it. There wasn’t any name on them. They were just plain square tin cans; that’s all.”

Sprague got up and crossed over to Benson’s chair.

“Spilled it on you, eh? Is this the stain of it on your coat?” he asked; and when Benson nodded: “It’s too bad to spoil a perfectly good working-coat that way. Suppose you let me have it and I’ll see if I can’t take those spots out of it.”

Benson obeyed, half-contemptuously, and, together with the two who had taken no part in the colloquy, looked on curiously while the expert, who had apparently lost all interest in everything save the coat-cleaning, swiftly treated the stained patches with various chemicals, put the resultant washings into a beaker and began to add ingredients from sundry bottles on the laboratory shelves, holding the beaker to the light after each fresh addition to note if there were changing colors in the solution.

At the close of the rapidly conducted experiment he poured a little of the solution into a tiny test-tube, which he proceeded to heat over the flame of a small alcohol lamp. This part of whatever experiment he was attempting appeared to be unsuccessful. Almost immediately the test-tube cracked with a miniature explosion, scattering bits of broken glass and extinguishing the flame of the little lamp.

Sprague tossed the neck of the shattered glass tube aside and returned the brown-duck shooting-coat to its owner. Benson put it on, and was curious enough to say: “Did you think you could find out what Stribling’s protective mixture was from those grease-spots?”

“Mere force of habit,” laughed the chemist, putting on his own coat. “I’m obliged to analyze everything I get hold of, you know; it’s a sort of disease with me, I guess.”

“But could you tell what it was, just from those discolored washings?” queried Maxwell.

“Perfectly. Mr. Stribling’s ‘patent’ is a compound in which the chief ingredient is a grease derived from the spent lye of the soap-makers, and one of the principal uses of which in the arts is, as Mr. Stribling says, to keep oils, and other things, from drying out.” Then, more pointedly to the superintendent: “I suppose you’ll go up to the tunnel and look the job over, making our careful young friend Stribling entirely happy, won’t you?”

Maxwell looked at his watch.

“Perhaps I’d better. Benson wants to get back, anyway. Will you two go along?”--to Sprague and Starbuck.

“I don’t mind,” said the expert, with a barely perceptible nod to Starbuck; and after he had rearranged the chemicals on his newly made shelves the four left the office and had themselves dropped to the ground floor of the building.

It was while they were walking two and two down the street that Sprague dropped a few steps behind with Starbuck and passed him a carefully wrapped package which he took from under his coat.

“I have another little experiment in mind, Mr. Starbuck,” he said in low tones. “When we are on our way through the tunnel, watch your opportunity to drop out of the procession long enough to empty the contents of that package into the patent grease, which you will find, not floating on the oil, but in some sort of a receptacle let into the top of the oil-tank of that safety contrivance which Mr. Benson has so accurately described for us. I’m curious enough to want to prove up on my analysis of a few minutes ago--to see if it was correct.”

“What will happen if it was correct?”

“Nothing; nothing alarming, I assure you. But be careful not to get any of the stuff in that package on your hands when you break the paraffin seals. And perhaps it might be as well if you don’t let our young electrical friend see you do it. He might think we were messing in where we had no business to.”

Starbuck made a sign of complete understanding, and a few minutes later, when they reached the main street, made a time-saving suggestion.

“Suppose you folks take a taxi to the roundhouse,” he said. “I’ll mosey up to the despatcher’s office and get your clear-track orders for you.”

Maxwell approved the suggestion and they separated, Starbuck catching a passing electric car for the plaza-fronting railroad head-quarters, and Maxwell impressing the first auto hack he could find to take the remaining three of them directly to the western yards. The hackman drove across the city and let them out at the nearest street-crossing, and from thence they walked the final hundred yards over the ties of the shop track.

At the roundhouse door they met a big, bearded man whose carefully creased brown hat and rather vociferous business suit would have marked him elsewhere as a gentleman of elegant, if somewhat precarious, leisure. Judson Bascom was this gentleman’s name, and he was comparatively a new-comer in the Short Line service; having been appointed to succeed Fred Dawson, master mechanic, promoted.

Bascom was stooping to pat a stray dog, but he rose to his feet when the three came down upon him.

“You’re the man we’re looking for, Bascom,” said Maxwell shortly. “I want a light engine to go up to Tunnel Number Three. What have you got in?”

The big master mechanic twiddled the bunch of charms on his watch-fob, and the stray dog began to sniff warily at Benson’s heels.

“The Nine-fifteen’s got fire in her; will she do?”

“Yes. Get me a crew as quickly as you can. I want a man who isn’t afraid to run.”

The man in the brown hat and the loud plaids dragged out a fat gold watch and shook his head.

“I guess that’ll be me. There’s nobody ’round, and I suppose you wouldn’t want to wait until I can send the caller out after somebody?”

“No; I’m in a hurry,” snapped the boss. “Let’s get a move. My car is in the shop, so you can couple onto that caboose over there on the split track. There are four of us to go, and we’d crowd you in the cab.”