Chapter 14

The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the hold of the brass fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."

The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.

"Any other orders?" he asked.

"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been recognized here by any of our local people?"

"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of them caught on to me."

"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain anything to them."

Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008," to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a question at the two who were waiting.

"You got my message?"

Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders have been carried out. The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a few of our own men, knows that your car is here."

The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box on the flat-topped desk, and passed the box to his two lieutenants.

"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change in the situation since your last report?"

Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done, nobody seems to know."

"Well, what came of it?"

"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager. "Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got away."

"Did Blount lose anything?"

"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the fellow even if he was caught."

To a disinterested observer it might have seemed a little singular that the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.

"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.

"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at Hellersville. I understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to election day."

"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"

"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which to file the public notice of the change in rates."

"What did you do?"

"I filed the notice--taking care that the only copy should be the one I sent to Blount's office."

The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.

"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"

"I had to take a chance--I've had to take a good many chances," protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he has worn out three of my best office men on the job."

"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-president's comment. "It was the best move in the entire campaign--putting him in the field. Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning our way, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that we got hold of him at a time when the Honorable Senator was getting ready to turn us down."

"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I don't know whether it's all sentiment or not. There's a sort of mystery mixed up in this speech-making business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his sudden popularity was due to some word sent out from your Chicago office; but when you told me it wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it is pure popularity, or whether it's the assisted kind."

"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting of the heavy eyebrows.

"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a trustworthy man in Blount's up-town office, and he says the invitations have fluttered in like autumn leaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled continuously. Kittredge's men report that the speech-making has been a triumphant progress all over the State; bands, receptions, committees, and banquets wherever Blount goes."

Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been all that anybody could ask. I've been reading them."

Kittredge shook his head.

"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended. "There is such a thing as putting too much sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it; he's putting the whitewash on so thick that any little handful of mud that happens to be thrown will stick and look bad."

"Of course, we have to take chances on that," was the vice-president's qualifying clause. "Nevertheless, young Blount's talk has undoubtedly had its effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful not to let the opposition newspapers get hold of anything that would tend to nullify it."

"They are moving heaven and earth to do it," said the superintendent. "The Honorable David is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross. That is the explanation of this safe-blowing scrape, as I put it up."

Again the vice-president failed to comment further on the burglary. "What I am most afraid of, now, is that our young man may be, as you say, Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly. "We have discovered that he is something of a fanatic."

"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly. "One of the men I've had following him--Farnsworth--is as good as any Pinkerton that ever walked. He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks and acts. The speech-making has taken him into every corner of the State, and Farnsworth says he has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and investigating on the side."

"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a beautiful mix-up we should have if the senator and his son should both conclude to pull out and get together at the last moment."

The master plotter shook his head. "You have no sense of perspective, Gantry. Young Blount is with us solely because he is too straightforward to countenance his father's political methods. On the other hand, if the Honorable Dave should turn upon us now, he would be obliged to do it at the expense of his son's reputation. Anything he could say against us would simply have the effect of holding his son up to public exprobration as a common campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well; he won't do anything like that."

Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful admiration crept up to the Irish eyes.

"When it comes to the real fine-haired work, you have us all feeling for hand-holds, Mr. McVickar," he said. "Now I know why you made a place for Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a free hand on the whitewashing. It's the biggest thing that has ever been pulled off in Western politics!"

"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick reply. "We are holding old David in a noose that may turn into a rope of sand at any minute; don't forget that. During the few days intervening before the election we must preserve the present status at any cost. Young Blount is the only man who may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way. If he doesn't have speaking invitations enough to busy him, see to it that he gets them. As long as you can keep him talking he won't have any time for side issues. Now about this Gryson business: you want to handle that yourselves, and I don't want any more telegrams like the one you sent me last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"

Gantry outlined the Gryson "condition" briefly. The man Gryson, who had developed into a heeler of sorts, had been growing restive, wanting more money.

"What can he swing?" was the curt question.

"Six out of seven pretty close counties. I don't pretend to know how he has done it, but he has got the goods; I've taken the trouble to check up on him. With his pull, we can swing the vote of the capital itself."

The vice-president frowned thoughtfully. "The old game of stuffing the registration lists, I suppose," he said. And then: "Young Blount hasn't got wind of this, has he?"

Gantry laughed. "You may be sure he hasn't. He has it in for Gryson on general principles--made us take him off the shop pay-rolls. If he thought we were dickering with him now, he'd be down on us like a thousand of brick."

"Well, why don't you fix Gryson, once for all, and have it over with? You oughtn't to expect me to come here and tell you what to do!"

It was at this point that Kittredge broke in.

"Gryson isn't safe. I have it straight that he is getting ready to sell us out. That's why he wants his pay in advance."

The vice-president's heavy brows met in a frown, and the muscles of his square jaw hardened.

"Put Gryson on the rack and show him what you've got on him in that Montana bank robbery. That will bring him to book. It will be time enough to talk about terms when he delivers the goods. Now another thing--that Shonoho Inn matter that I wired about--what has been done?"

"It is all arranged," said the big superintendent. "The house was closed for the season last month, and we have taken a short lease. One of our dining-car managers will take charge of the service."

"And the wires?"

"We have made a cut-in from the old Shoshone Mine wire, which wasn't taken down when the mine was abandoned. That let us out very neatly, and no one outside of our own line-men know anything about the job. We have four instruments in the hotel writing-room; two on the commercial and two on the railroad wires. Will that be enough?"

Mr. McVickar nodded and reached over to press the bell-push which signalled to his train conductor.

"That is about all I have to say," he said, in dismissal of the two local officials. "Just nail Gryson up to the cross, where he belongs, and keep young Blount busy and out of town; I leave the details to you. Get orders for me as you go up to your office, Kittredge, and have the despatcher let me out as soon as possible. I ought to be half-way to Alkali by this time."

XVIII

THE CHASM

It was young Ranlett, a reporter for _The Plainsman_, who told Evan Blount of the arrival of the vice-president's car, running as second section of the Overland, and the scene of the telling was the lobby of the Inter-Mountain Hotel, where Blount was smoking a pipe of disappointment filled and lighted upon hearing that his father, Mrs. Honoria, and Patricia had gone out to dinner somewhere--place unknown to the obliging room clerk.

Ranlett had tried ineffectually to get to the private car, having for his object the interviewing of the vice-president, but there had been curious obstructions. The lower yard was apparently carefully guarded, since the reporter had been turned back at three or four different points when he had attempted to cross the tracks. Blount thought it a little singular that the vice-president should come to the capital secretly, but he did not stop to speculate upon this.

Having something more than a suspicion that Gantry had not properly passed the threat of exposure up to McVickar, he determined at once to seek an interview with the vice-president. Walking rapidly down to the Sierra Avenue station, he saw a light in Gantry's office, and meaning to be fair first and severe afterward, if needful, he ran up the stair and tried the door of the traffic manager's office. It opened under his hand, and he found Gantry sitting at his desk.

"Ranlett tells me that Mr. McVickar is in town," he began abruptly. "Where is he?"

"Ranlett is mistaken--about twenty minutes mistaken," was Gantry's reply. "Mr. McVickar passed through here a few minutes ago on his way to Twin Canyons City. His special has been gone some little time."

"When is he coming back?"

"I don't know."

"Did you see him?"

"I did."

"Did you take up with him the matter of issuing new tariffs to do away with the preferentials, or to level the public rates down to them?"

Gantry shifted uneasily in his chair, and tried to evade. "There was very little time," he said. "Mr. McVickar was in a great hurry, and his special was held only a few minutes."

Blount crossed the room and sat down.

"Dick, we've come to the last round-up," he said gravely. "In the nature of things, I can't give you any more time. You've been playing with me all along, and your last move in the game was a very childish one--sending me what purported to be a copy of a new freight tariff notice to the public. Did you suppose for a moment that I wouldn't have sense enough to see that the thing wasn't official, that it had no signatures and lacked even the name of the railroad company? I'm here now to tell you that you've got to do some real thing, and do it quickly. Let's go up and see the editor of _The Capital_."

"What for?" demanded Gantry.

"It is the railroad paper, and I want you to give Brinkley, the editor, an interview to the effect that a revision of the freight rates is in process, and that shippers having grievances should present them at once. That will at least start the ball to rolling in the right direction."

"I should think it would!" scoffed the traffic manager. "What you don't know about the making of freight tariffs would sink a ship, Evan. These things can't be done while you wait!"

"But they must be, in this instance," Blount insisted. "If you won't withdraw the preferentials given to the corporations, you must do the other thing. Post your legal notice of a reduction of the rates on the commodities upon which you are now allowing rebates, and I'll fight straight through on the line I've been taking all along."

"And if we don't?" queried Gantry.

"What is the use of making me say it for the hundredth time, Dick? If you don't do one or the other, there will be an explosion, just as I've told you. Of course, you know that my safe was broken open last night--wrecked with dynamite?"

"Yes."

"Well, unluckily for you, the packet of papers which might otherwise have been taken or destroyed, didn't happen to be in the safe. The documents are still where they can be used at an hour's notice. And, by heaven, Dick, I'll use them if you don't play fair!"

Gantry, long-suffering and patient to a fault in a business affair, was not altogether superhuman.

"Evan, you are a frost--a black frost! You harp on one string until you wear it to frazzles! Don't you know that the Transcontinental is big enough and strong enough to chivvy you from one end of this country to the other, if you turn traitor? I love a fighting man, but by God, I haven't any use for a fool!"

Blount laughed.

"If I have succeeded in making you angry, perhaps there is a chance that you will do something. You may curse me out all you want to, but the fact remains. I'm going to explode the bomb, and it will be touched off long enough before election to do the work, if you keep on refusing to make my word good to the people. That is all--_all_ the all. Now, will you go up to _The Capital_ office with me, and dictate that bit of information that I mentioned?"

"Not in a thousand years!" raged Gantry. "Not in ten thousand years!" Nevertheless he rose, closed his desk, and prepared to accompany the importunate political manager. Half-way up the first square he said: "There is no use in our going to _The Capital_ office at this time of night. Brinkley doesn't get around to his desk much before eleven. Let's go up to the club."

At the Railway Club the traffic manager developed a keen desire to kill the intervening time in a game of billiards. Blount indulged him, beat him three games in succession, and consistently refused to drink with him. At the end of the third game, Gantry gave a terse definition, abusively worded, of a man who would force his friend to go and drink alone, and went to the buffet. Ten minutes later, when Blount went after him, he had disappeared, and the visit to the newspaper office was postponed, perforce.

On the following morning, Blount found a telegram on his desk. It bore the vice-president's name, and the date-line was Twin Canyons City. It directed him to go to a remote portion of the State beyond the Lost River Mountains to examine the papers in a right-of-way case which was coming up for trial at the next term of court. This was in Kittredge's department, and Blount called the superintendent on the phone. Kittredge was in his office, and he evidently knew about the vice-president's telegram. Also, he seemed anxious to have the division counsel go to Lewiston at once; so anxious that he offered his own service-car to be run as a special train.

Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from the vice-president, but he was more than suspicious that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both of them, had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr. McVickar, in an attempt to get him away from the city and so to postpone a reiteration of the demand for a new freight tariff. What he did not suspect was that Mr. McVickar's telegram might possibly have originated in Kittredge's office.

Asking the superintendent to have the service-car made ready immediately, he packed his handbag, left a note for Patricia, who was not yet visible, and another for Gantry, who was not in his office, and began the roundabout journey.

In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything to equal the slowness of the special train. The noon meal, served by Kittredge's cook in the open compartment, found the special less than fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely siding. There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph. So far as he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week. It was all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor. The train crew had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was nothing to do but to keep on waiting.

Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along, and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office. The car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed. But in the morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the branch line.

At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for, as he had now come firmly to believe. The plaintiffs in the right-of-way case were out of town, and their lawyers had gone to the capital. Blount saw that he might wait a week without accomplishing anything, hence he immediately instructed his conductor to get orders for the return.

After having been gone a half-hour or more, the conductor came back to the service-car to say that the single telegraph-wire connecting Lewiston with the outer world was down, and that the orders for the return journey could not be obtained until the telegraph connection was restored. At that point Blount took matters into his own hands.

There was a mining company having its headquarters in the isolated town, and Blount had met the manager once in the capital--met him in a social way, and had been able to show him some little attention. Hiring a buckboard at the one livery stable in the place, he drove out to the "Little Mary," and found Blatchford, the friendly manager, smoking a black clay cutty pipe in his shack office. It did not take Blount over a minute to renew the pleasant acquaintance, and to state his dilemma.

"I'm hung up here with my special train, the wires are down and I can't get out," was his statement of the crude fact. "Didn't you tell me that you owned a motor-car?"

"I did," was the prompt reply. "Want to borrow it?"

"You beat me to it," said Blount, laughing. "That was precisely what I was going to beg for--the loan of your car. I believe you told me that you had driven it from here to the capital."

"Oh, yes; several times, and the road is fairly good by way of Arequipa and Lost River Canyon. It's only about half as far across country as it is around by the railroad. You ought to make it in six hours and a half, or seven at the longest. Drive me down to the burg, and I'll put you in possession."

Blount began to be audibly thankful, but the mine manager good-naturedly cut him short.

"It's all in the day's work, Mr. Blount, and I'm glad to be of service--not because you are the Transcontinental's lawyer, nor altogether because you are the Honorable David's son. I haven't forgotten your kindness to me when I was in town three weeks ago. Let's go and get out the chug-wagon."

A little later Blount found himself handling the wheel of a very serviceable knockabout car equipped for hard work on country roads. When he was ready to go, he drove down to the railroad yard and hunted up his conductor.

"After you have had your vacation, you may get orders from Mr. Kittredge and take his car back to the capital," he told the man. "When you do, you may give him my compliments, and tell him I preferred to run my own special train."

The conductor grinned and made no reply, and he was still grinning when he sauntered into the railroad telegraph office and spoke to the operator.