Part 9

Big and leisurely-looking as he was, the master mechanic made good time. In a minute or two he had the smart, light eight-wheeler on the turntable, with the blower roaring, a red-headed pit-boy to fire, and half a dozen roundhouse men to put their shoulders to the table-levers. The shifting took five minutes more; and by that time a switching-engine, with Starbuck hanging from the step, came racing down the yard from the mile-away head-quarters.

Starbuck swung off before the switcher came to a stop, and joined the three who were waiting at the step of the caboose.

“Hell’s a-poppin’,” he said laconically. “Davis hasn’t got a single west wire that he can use. They all went out, blink, about twenty minutes ago.”

“What’s that?” demanded Maxwell. “Not all of them, surely!”

“Every blamed one--commercial wires and all. Can’t get a whisper out of anything west of Little Butte. He says it acts like a general ‘ground,’ and then again it don’t.”

The nattily dressed master mechanic had dropped from his engine-step to come and join the group at the caboose. Maxwell put him in possession of the blockading fact in a brief sentence.

“The wires are dead and we’ll have to bluff our way from siding to siding. Are you game for it, Bascom?”

The big man inclined his head. “I guess so,” he said.

“All right. Go to Little Butte for the first lap. There is nothing in the way between here and the junction. All aboard, gentlemen.”

The start was made briskly enough, but two miles beyond the yard-limits the caboose-car chucked noisily as Bascom slowed for the single-span bridge over the Gloria.

“Good Gad!” raged Maxwell, jumping up and jerking the air-whistle cord for full speed ahead. “If he’s going to slow up for every trestle we come to, we’ll never get anywhere!”

“We can prod him,” said Benson.

For the few miles intervening between the bridge and Little Butte the master mechanic did not need prodding. Taking the air-whistle hint for what it meant, he hurled the wild train around the curves and over the tangents wholly without regard for the comfort of the four men who vainly tried to keep their seats on the bunk benches in the caboose. At Silver Switch the landscape was merely a blur; and in rounding the great side-cut at the Butte bluff the short car shrieked and groaned and seemed to be riding like a toe-balancer on the outer rail.

At the Little Butte stop the four made a dash for the operator’s office, where Bascom presently joined them. There was no information to be got out of Wooffert, the station agent. His wires were working north on the Red Butte branch, but there was a dead “ground” somewhere to the westward. Broken snatches were still coming through from Caliger, ten miles up the main line west, and the instruments acted as if somebody had been pouring cold molasses into them.

Maxwell had his pocket time-card out, though he did not need to consult it. “Sixteen and Eighteen are somewhere between here and Nophi,” he announced. “We’ve got to find and pass them as we can. Let her go, Bascom.”

A half-minute later the up-valley race was begun. In the lower reaches the tangents were long, giving the volunteer engineer measurably safe sights ahead; and there was no occasion for Maxwell to jerk the whistle cord. Again the big man in the engine cab was hurling the train along with small regard for anything but speed.

At Caliger another stop was made. Like the man at Little Butte, the operator knew nothing save that his wires were dead. At his last report both of the down-coming freight trains had been on time. Maxwell did some quick figuring.

“We’re pretty safe to run to Hatcher’s,” he told Bascom. “That will give us five minutes against Sixteen, provided she’s not running ahead of her schedule. Can you make Hatcher’s in forty minutes?”

“I’ll make it or land this outfit in hell,” said the master mechanic grittingly. And once again the wheels began to spin.

It proved to be a close call at Hatcher’s, the little “blind” siding in the upper valley. One mile short of the passing track Bascom began to blow his whistle like a madman, and the four on the caboose, leaning far out on the platforms, saw a long freight lumbering down from the west. A short, stabbing puff of steam from the freight locomotive’s whistle, soundless because of the din of hammering wheels and shrieking flanges, told them that the freight engineer had seen and heard and was trying to stop. Also, it was apparent to the two who looked on with railroad knowledge that the stop could not be made within the siding’s switch limits.

Bascom took a chance and a risky one. Speeding like a fiend, he sent his one-car train onward to what promised to be a smashing head-on collision with the freight. But at the lower switch, with the slowing freight less than three hundred yards away, he made a grinding stop; his fireman leaped from the gangway and ran to turn the switch; and an instant later the wild train was snatched in on the siding and the freight was rolling past in safety over the reset switch.

“Good work!” said Sprague, speaking for the first time since the departure from Little Butte. “This man Bascom may not be the heavy villain that he looks to be, but he is certainly carrying his nerve with him this afternoon.”

Maxwell was leaning out and shouting to the volunteer in the cab.

“Easy, Bascom!” he yelled; “they’re carrying green!”

Bascom looked back and nodded; and the red-headed fireman strolled on ahead to take his stand at the upper switch.

“Anything significant about the St. Patrick’s Day color?” queried Sprague; and Maxwell said there was.

“It means another section following,” he explained; and then: “Here it comes!” And as he said it, another freight came into view, plunging around the curves toward the siding.

Unhappily for the speed-making purpose, this train, too, was carrying green, and Maxwell swore impatiently to the universe in general. “Three sections to this; and Eighteen’s pretty sure to have two or more. It’s three fifty-five, right now, and we’ve got thirty miles to go!”

Benson laughed.

“Stribling will wait until the last minute for you, never fear. With two hours we could mighty near get out and walk it.”

“I reckon we’re going to get a chance to walk a piece of the way,” said Starbuck in his slow drawl. “That maverick choo-choo wrangler up ahead will have us in the ditch before he hits the Nophi grades, if he keeps up his lick.”

“I don’t want to call him down,” said Maxwell, dubiously. “He’s probably got a grouch because I pulled the string on him back yonder at the Gloria bridge.”

“There comes the third section!” Benson called out; and a minute afterward the third and last division of the overland freight went hurtling past on the main track.

Bascom’s makeshift fireman was promptly on his job. While the tail-end of the third section was clanking over the frogs he jerked the switch, and at the same instant the master mechanic jerked the throttle of the Nine-fifteen. The wild train shot out into position on the main line, halted for the fraction of a minute needed to enable the fireman to run up and scramble to the footboard, and the breakneck race was continued.

By this time none of the four thought of going back into the caboose. They were crowded together upon the front platform, ready to make the leap for life which seemed momentarily imminent as Bascom snatched the short car recklessly around the curves and over the switches at the various stations. Train Number Eighteen, also a through freight, was scheduled one hour behind Sixteen; but in the absence of all wire reports of its progress, nobody knew just where it would be found.

As a matter of fact, it was met between two sidings, ten miles on the hither side of Nophi; and, happily for the safety of all concerned, the meeting with the first section chanced upon a piece of straight track--one of the exceedingly few tangents in the rough, gulch-like valley known as Tumble-Tree Canyon. As before, Bascom held his whistle open, and, thanks to the brakes and a liberal sanding of the rails, a collision was averted.

When the two locomotives were nose to nose, and a flagman was racing frantically back to flag the following section, Maxwell sprang off and fell upon the conductor of the freight.

“How many sections of you?” he demanded explosively.

“Two,” said the man, putting up an arm as if he expected to be hit.

“How close are you?” was the next shot-like question.

“That’s them, comin’ now,” said the conductor, as a hoarse whistle bellow answered the racing flagman’s stop signal.

Two miles back of the halted freights there was a disused saw-mill spur, not over a hundred feet long, to be sure, but it would serve. Maxwell’s decision was made instantly.

“Back up, both of you, until we can get in on Crawford’s spur,” he ordered; and as the conductor started to run to the rear; “Don’t waste time doing that! Whistle for ’em, you blockhead!” and he made impatient motions as of an engineer pulling the whistle-lever.

The first-section engineer, leaning from his cab window, heard, saw, and understood. Three shrieks of his whistle were answered by three of the hoarse bellows from the rear, and the two long freights began to pound heavily in the reverse motion up the grade.

“Push ’em, Bascom!” shouted Maxwell, as his own engine crept up after the retreating first section. “We’ll go in at Crawford’s and let ’em by.”

The two miles to the passing point, worried out slowly at the pace set by the laboring freights, seemed to stretch themselves out into ten. Sprague was looking at his watch.

“Sixteen miles yet, you say, and we have an hour and twenty minutes in which to make them. That looks as if we were still margined well enough to pull through.”

“I guess so,” said Maxwell. The laboring freights were at last backing around the curve from which the saw-mill spur branched off, and again the red-headed fireman was on hand with his switch-key. Luckily the unused lock did not refuse to work, and presently the light rails of the abandoned spur were buckling and bending ominously under the Nine-fifteen, as Bascom trundled the wild train out upon them.

Almost immediately the whistles screamed again, and the two freights slid away down the grade. “’Right!” yelled the red-headed one, shifting the rusty switch again; and once more the race was resumed.

When the Nophi smelter stacks came in sight in the vista opened up by the flying swing around the mountain of approach, four watches were out.

“We’re nearly an hour to the good yet,” cried Benson.

“Yes; and we ain’t there yet,” said Starbuck, who seemed to have acquired a pessimistic slant.

Maxwell swung far out as they were rounding the great curve and got a clear view of the small smelter-town yard. Straightening up, he pulled the whistle cord to attract Bascom’s attention, and then leaned out and made the necessary hand-signal to run through the small town without stopping.

In some inexplicable way the signal, or rather the giving and receiving of it, proved fatal. Bascom looked back to nod his understanding, and when he faced about again he saw, too late, that a box-car, set out by one of the lately passing freights on the smelter-loading track, had “drifted” down the siding to a point at which it would not clear the main line. There was a ripping crash, a roar of steam escaping through a broken cylinder, and the race, so far as Engine Nine-fifteen was concerned, was over.

When the four passengers had picked themselves up out of the heap into which the sudden stop had piled them, they went forward to see what was to be done. There was nothing to be done locomotive-wise; but there was still plenty of time, even if the six remaining miles should have to be covered by a picked-up team borrowed from the smelter folk.

But the team expedient proved unnecessary. At the Nophi station they found a section gang at work, with a hand-car available; and on the “pump special” they made their entry, some thirty minutes past five, into the Grafton Brothers’ camp at the eastern tunnel approach.

Stribling, a handsome young fellow with a frank, open face and honest eyes, was on hand to meet them.

“By Jove, Mr. Maxwell!” he said, with what was apparently a most palpable relieving of anxious strain, “I was afraid you weren’t coming, and I’d just about made up my mind to ’phone over to Lopez to tell Canby and the rest of them that we’d postpone. I’ve got my record to make yet, most of it, and I couldn’t afford to turn that power on and start an engine through until after you and Benson have gone over the completed installation with me.”

“Well,” Maxwell rejoined, “that’s what we’re here to do. You know Starbuck, my brother-in-law? I thought so. Now shake hands with my friend Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, and we’ll go through with you.”

Starbuck was watching Stribling’s face when the young electrical engineer shook hands with the big man from Washington. There was a query in the younger man’s eyes, and Starbuck saw it. Also, he marked the half-second of hesitation which came between the introduction and its acknowledgment. But a moment later they were all on their way to the black-mouthed tunnel, Stribling walking ahead with the superintendent and Sprague, and Starbuck following with Benson.

For convenience in his work Stribling had set up a small steam-driven dynamo at his camp and had strung the tunnel with incandescents, hence there was plenty of light in the long bore for the examination of the power wiring. When they plunged underground the construction man was still walking ahead with Maxwell and Sprague, explaining, for the benefit of the superintendent’s guest, the design of the catenary brackets and the double set of insulators.

“I’m betting on every detail in the mile and a quarter,” the young engineer was saying, as the two laggards closed up. “It’s my first big job, as Mr. Maxwell knows”--this also for the guest--“and I’ve simply got to make good on it. I could have had that waiting motor-engine out there pulling trains through the mountain this morning, but I made up my mind that we wouldn’t turn a wheel until Mr. Maxwell had seen everything for himself.”

“That’s business,” said Sprague, encouragingly. “Old Davy Crockett’s maxim, eh? ‘Be sure you’re right, and then go ahead.’ But let me tell you, Mr. Stribling: Mr. Maxwell will look wise and say, ‘Yes, yes,’ but he’ll have to take your word for it, after all. What we average people don’t know about modern electrical installations would fill a--” he looked around as if in search of a measure of capacity--“would fill a tank as big as that one across the track--the one you’ve dipped your wires into over there in that side cave.”

“The oil-switch, you mean? Yes, that is a little safety wrinkle we’re putting in wherever there’s a chance of an accident breaking down the power wires. I’ll explain it as we come back.”

When the young engineer led the way onward again a glance to the rear would have shown him that only three of the four were at his heels. Starbuck had seen his chance, and in a quick withdrawal he dodged into the side cavern housing the oil-switch. Two of the empty dynamite boxes enabled him to breast the top of the tall iron tank. What he saw was a little puzzling. Oil-switch tanks are usually left open to the air, but this one was fitted with a galvanized-iron cover made in the form of a shallow pan with double sides spaced about six inches apart. The inner compartment of the pan was half-filled with a transparent oily liquid, and the outer annular space around it was closely packed with chopped ice. Hastily breaking the seals of the package he had been carrying under his coat, he dumped the contents into the central receptacle and fled without waiting to prove Sprague’s assertion that nothing alarming would happen. When he rejoined the inspection party Sprague was still holding Stribling in talk, and the young mine owner made sure it was done to cover his own momentary absence.

The remainder of the trip through the tunnel was made without incident, and on the way back Stribling halted the party at the safety switch side cavern which, oddly enough, was charged with a curiously acrid odor that made breathing in it chokingly difficult. Coughing and gasping, Stribling explained the mechanism briefly. An electro-magnet, energized by the power current itself, held the switch in contact. If the current should be interrupted, as in the case of a breakage due to a wreck, the switch would be thrown and all the tunnel wires rendered instantly harmless.

“And these boxes are what your machinery came in?” said Sprague, pointing to a litter of small dust-covered packing-cases scattered about the tank.

“Oh, no; those are dynamite boxes,” was the hoarse reply. “They are empty--at least, Mr. Benson says they are, and he ought to know, since they are some of his leavings.” And then: “Suppose we move on. The air is frightfully bad in here. The engineer must have stopped the ventilating fans.”

Sprague had picked up a rusty bolt left by the timber-framers.

“You’ve got a good solid oil-tank here,” he said, hammering lustily on the iron with the bolt.

Starbuck was watching Stribling, and he would have sworn that the young engineer’s jump took him two feet clear into the air.

“Great Scott! Don’t do that, Mr. Sprague!” he cried. “You might break some of the--some of the adjustments, you know!”

Sprague’s mellow laugh echoed hollowly in the timbered cavern.

“If they’re that delicate, perhaps we’d better take your suggestion and move on,” he said. “I guess we’ve seen enough, anyway, eh, Maxwell?”

The superintendent acquiesced and the tunnel-threading was resumed to the portal, and beyond to the little shack where Stribling had his office. Here the young man became the hospitable host.

“Sit down, gentlemen, and I’ll call Canby at the power plant and ask him if he is all ready to ‘cut in.’ If he says yes, you can take the ’phone and give the order, Mr. Maxwell. It’s your railroad.”

The four disposed themselves as they pleased in the cramped little office fronting the tunnel. Sprague took his stand at the single window to stare absently at the black hole in the mountain side--an unrelieved spot of gloom now that the incandescents had been turned off. Starbuck chose a corner, and did not take his eyes from Stribling, who was sitting at his desk with Maxwell opposite.

With the receiver at his ear the young engineer exchanged a few words with the company’s electrician at the power-house three miles away. Then he pushed the ’phone across the desk to Maxwell.

“Canby says he’s ready,” he announced, in a voice that was strangely sharp and tremulous. “Give him the word, and then watch this volt-meter on the wall behind me. It will tell you when the current comes on.”

Maxwell hesitated for a single instant and looked across at Sprague. But the expert’s back was turned and he was still staring fixedly at the distant tunnel mouth. The superintendent took the receiver and spoke crisply.

“This is Maxwell: if you’re ready, turn on the power.”

At the word, Sprague faced about quickly and fixed his gaze upon Stribling. The young man had turned aside in his chair and his face was ghastly. Benson and Maxwell were watching the indicator on the wall; but Starbuck was rising noiselessly from his seat on the cot, with one hand buried in the side-pocket of his coat. For ten dragging seconds the index finger of the volt-meter remained motionless. Stribling was twitching in his chair, and finally he burst out.

“Those dynamite boxes! We ought to have taken them out! What if they shouldn’t happen to be empty--all of them?”

As he spoke, the index of the volt-meter began to jump like a thing suddenly endowed with life, and Benson cried out, “There she comes!” Stribling crouched in his chair as if shrinking from a blow and covered his face with his hands. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, ticked themselves off on the little desk clock at Maxwell’s elbow, and then Sprague’s voice broke into the tense silence.

“It’s all over, Stribling. You can sit up now and take your medicine. The end of the world is still safely in the future.”

The young man whirled in his chair and his right hand shot toward a half-opened drawer of the desk. It was Starbuck who interposed.

“Nixie,” he said sharply; “it isn’t time for you to pass out yet. Keep your hands out of that drawer, or I’ll put these on,” jingling a pair of handcuffs before the culprit’s staring eyes.

Stribling leaped from his chair and took one long haggard look through the open door at the tunnel mouth where nothing was happening. Then he dropped back and became the trapped animal fighting for life.

“What have you got on me?--or what is it you think you’ve got?” he rasped.

It was the man from Washington who replied.

“Don’t make it harder for yourself than you have to,” he said gently. “We’ve got it all. We know that you had that train stopped last night so that you could unload those empty dynamite boxes--they are empty, you know--without discovery. We also know that this morning you placed a quantity of nitro-glycerine in that safety switch, and that you have the wiring rigged to fire the stuff and destroy the tunnel.”

The young man looked up and his smile showed his teeth.

“But the current is on and the tunnel isn’t destroyed,” he interrupted.

“No; you overdid it a little in asking Benson to help you handle the nitro-glycerine and in letting him spill it on his clothes; also you skipped a stitch when you thought that by smuggling those dynamite boxes in and calling everybody’s attention to them, you’d put the blame of the explosion upon Benson and the railroad people. You forgot that all makers of dynamite nowadays stamp the date on the boxes. The tunnel was completed two years ago; and the date on one of the boxes, at least, is January of the present year. You are down and out, Mr. Stribling, and there is only one way in which you can dodge the stripes. That is by telling us who hired you to do this.”

A silence, tense like the silence of the court-room when the judge pronounces the sentence, fell upon the group gathered in the little shack-office, and it lasted for a full minute. At the end of it Stribling jerked his head up and spoke.

“I’m a man again now, Mr. Sprague, if I haven’t been for the past two months,” he said steadily. “I’ll tell you this: you can give me the third degree, if you want to--there are enough of you here to do it--and after that you can send me to the pen if you feel like it. But, so help me God, you’ll never make me welsh on the man for whom I did this: never, so long as I have the breath to say no!”

Again the tense silence supervened, and Starbuck held up the handcuffs tentatively. Sprague shook his head, and spoke again.

“You’ve considered this resolution well, have you, Stribling?”

“I have. I owe that man everything I’ve got in this world: education, the chance to hold my head up with others and, more than that, he once saved my father from going where you mean to send me--over the road. I’ll admit all you have charged. I did set the trap, and I don’t know yet why it hasn’t gone off. All I ask is that you’ll remember that I picked a time when there wouldn’t be any lives lost.”

“I discovered that last night,” said Sprague quietly; adding, with a glance for the superintendent’s brother-in-law, “I guess we’ll have to turn him over to you, Mr. Starbuck.” Then, turning once more upon the culprit: “Why did you find it necessary to cross the power wires with the telegraph lines early this afternoon, and so to destroy the instruments on a hundred miles of railroad, Stribling?”

The young engineer looked up hardily. “It was necessary. I took care to have Canby and the railroad electricians all over at the power plant, and I couldn’t take the chance of leaving them in communication with head-quarters at Brewster.”