Part 13

It was on the third day after the election, rather late in the afternoon, that the boss had a call from a mining promoter named Dawes, representing a bunch of mine owners at Strathcona who were having trouble with the smelter.

I was busy at the time and didn't pay much attention to what was said, but I got the drift of it. The smelter, one of the few Hatch monopolies which hadn't been shaken loose as yet, was located in the gulch six miles below Strathcona, and it was served exclusively by its own industrial railroad, which it was using as a lever to pry an excessive hauling charge out of the mine owners. Wouldn't Mr. Norcross try to do something about it?

The boss said he'd do anything he could, and asked what the mine owners wanted. Dawes said they wanted help; that they were going to hold a mass meeting in Strathcona the following morning at nine o'clock. Would it, or wouldn't it, be possible for Mr. Norcross to be present at that meeting?

Of course, the boss said he'd go. It meant the better part of a night's run, special, in the private car, but that didn't make any difference. Dawes went away, and before we broke off to go to dinner at the railroad club, I was given a memorandum order for the special.

At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest--Major Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a guest at anybody's table.

For a while the table talk--in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any part whatever--circled around the late landslide election, and what Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by and by it got around to the railroad situation.

"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't over yet--not by a jugful, suh"--this isn't just the way the major said it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs, and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't lose sight of that, Graham."

The boss looked up kind of curiously.

"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more than any other," he commented.

The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.

"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin' at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame--she has, for a fact, suh."

"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand how she can do it."

They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then some.

The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.

"I'm sorry I can't stay and smoke with you, major," he said, pushing his chair back. "But the business grind never lets up. I'm obliged to go to Strathcona to-night."

I don't know what the major was going to say to this abrupt break-away: the after-dinner social cigar was a sort of religious ceremony with him. But whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it, for at that moment a telegraph boy came in and handed him a message. He put on his other glasses and read the telegram, with his big goatee looking more than ever like a dagger and the fierce white mustaches twitching. At the end of things he folded the message and put it into his pocket, saying, sort of soberly:

"Graham, there are times when Sheila's intuhferences are mighty neah uncanny; they are, for a fact, suh. This wire is from her. What do you suppose it says?"

Of course, the boss said he couldn't suppose anything about it, and the major went on.

"She tells me, in just seven words, not to let you go to Strathcona to-night. Now what do you make of that? How on top of God's green earth did she know, away off yondeh at the capital, that you were meaning to go to Strathcona to-night?"

Mr. Norcross shook his head. Then he said: "There are wires--both kinds--though I don't know why anybody should telegraph or telephone the capital that I expect to attend a mine-owners' meeting to-morrow morning in the big gold camp. That's why I'm going, you know."

"But this warning," the major insisted. "There's a reason for it, Graham, as sure as you are bawn!"

Again the boss shook his head.

"Between you two, you and Sheila, I'm due to acquire a case of nerves. I don't know what she has heard, but I can't afford to dodge a business appointment. I have wired the Strathcona people that I shall be there to-morrow morning, and it is too late to make other arrangements. Sheila has merely overheard an echo of the threats that are constantly being made by the Hatch sympathizers. It's the aftermath of the election, but it's all talk. They're down and out, and they haven't the nerve to strike back, now."

That ended matters at the club, and the boss and I walked down to the headquarters. The special, with Buck Chandler on the smart little eight-wheeler that we always had for the private-car trips, was waiting, and at the last minute I thought I wasn't going to get to go.

"There's no need of your putting in a night on the road, Jimmie," said the boss, with the kindly thought for other people's comfort that never failed him. But after I had begged a little, telling him that he'd need somebody to take notes in the mine meeting, he said, "All right," and we got aboard and gave the word to Maclise, the conductor, to get his clearance and go.

A few minutes later we pulled out and the night run was begun. Like every other car the boss had ever owned, the "05" was fitted up as a working office, and since he had me along, he opened up a lot of claim papers upon which the legal department was giving him the final say-so, and we went to work.

For the next two hours I was so busy that I didn't know when we passed the various stations. There were no passenger trains to meet, and the despatcher was apparently giving us "regardless" rights over everything else, since we made no stops. At half-past nine, Mr. Norcross snapped a rubber band over the last of the claim files, lighted a pipe, and told me I might go to bed if I wanted to; said that he was going himself after he'd had a smoke. Just then, Chandler whistled for a station, and, looking out of a window, I saw that we were pulling into Bauxite, the little wind-blown junction from which the Strathcona branch led away into the northern mountains.

Wanting a bite of fresh air before turning in, I got off when we made the stop and strolled up to the engine. Maclise was in the office, getting orders for the branch, and Chandler was squatting in the gangway of the 815 and waiting. Up ahead of us, and too far away for me to read the number on her tender, there was a light engine. I thought at first it was the pusher which was kept at Bauxite to help heavy freights up the branch grades, and I wondered what it was doing out on the branch "Y" and in our way.

"What's the pusher out for, Buck?" I asked.

Chandler grinned down at me.

"You ain't so much of a railroad man as you might be, Jimmie," he said. "That ain't the pusher."

"What is it, then?"

"It's our first section, runnin' light to Strathcona."

Maybe Chandler was right, that I wasn't much of a railroad man, but I savvied the Short Line operating rules well enough to know that it wasn't usual to run a light engine, deadheading over the road, as a section of a special. Also, I knew that Buck knew it.

With that last little talk over the club dinner-table fresh in mind, I began to wonder, but instead of asking Chandler any more questions about the engine out ahead, I asked him if I might ride a piece with him up the branch; and when he said "Sure," I climbed up and humped myself on the fireman's box.

Maclise got his orders in due time and we pulled out. I noticed that when he gave Chandler the word, he also made motions with his lantern to the engine up ahead and it promptly steamed away, speeding up until it had about a half-mile lead and then holding it. That seemed funny, too. Though it is a rule that is often broken on all railroads, the different sections of a train are supposed to keep at least five minutes apart, and our "first" wasn't much more than a minute away from us at any time.

Another thing that struck me as being funny was the way Chandler was running. It was only sixty mountain miles up the branch to the big gold camp, and we ought to have been able to make it by one o'clock, taking it dead easy. But the way Buck was niggling along it looked as if it might be going to take us all night.

Just the same, nothing happened. The first ten miles was across a desert stretch with only a slightly rising grade, and it was pretty much all tangent--straight line. Beyond the ten-mile station of Nippo we hit the mountain proper, climbing it through a dry canyon, with curves that blocked off everything fifty feet ahead of the engine, and grades that would have made pretty good toboggan slides. The night was fine and starlit, but there was no moon and the canyon shadows loomed like huge walls to shut us in.

On the reverse curves I could occasionally get a glimpse of the red tail lights of the engine which ought, by rights, to have been five full minutes ahead of us. It was still holding its short lead, jogging along as leisurely as we were.

With nothing to do and not much to see, I got sleepy after a while, and about the time when I was thinking that I might as well climb back over the tender and turn in, I dozed off right there on the fireman's box--which was safe enough, at the snail's pace we were running. When I awoke it was with the feeling that I hadn't been asleep more than a minute or two, but the facts were against me. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning, and we had worried through the thirty-five miles of canyon run and were climbing the steep talus of Slide Mountain.

At first I didn't know what it was that woke me. On my side of the engine the big mountain fell away, miles it seemed, on a slope on which a man could hardly have kept his footing, and where a train, jumping the track, would roll forever before it would stop in the gorges at the bottom. While I was rubbing my eyes, the eight-wheeler gave another little jerk, and I saw that Chandler was slowing for a stop; saw this and got a glimpse of somebody on the track ahead, flagging us down with a lantern.

A minute later the brakes had been set and Buck and I were off. As we swung down from the engine step, Maclise joined us, and we went to meet the man with the lantern. He was the fireman of the engine ahead, and when we got around on the track I saw that our "first section" was stopped just a little way farther on.

"What is it, Barty?" said Maclise, when we came up to the fireman.

"It's them hell-fired wreckers again," was the gritting reply. "Rail joint disconnected and sprung out so's to let us off down the mountain."

I thought it was up to me to go back and tell the boss, but there wasn't any need of it. The stop or the slow running or something had roused him, and he was up and dressed and coming along beside the engine. When he came up, Maclise told him why we were stopping. He didn't say anything about the rail break, but he did ask, sort of sharp and quick, what engine that was up ahead.

I don't know what Maclise told him. Chandler turned to go back to his engine, and the rest of us were moving along the other way, the boss setting the pace with Maclise at his elbow. Three rail-lengths ahead of the stopped light engine we came to the break. The head engineer and another man were down on their hands and knees examining it, and when they stood up at our coming, I saw that the other man was Mr. Van Britt.

"What?" said the boss; "you here?"

Our only millionaire nodded.

"I ride the line once in a while--just to see how things are going," he returned crisply.

The boss didn't say anything more, but he knelt to look at the break. It was a trap, all right, set, beyond all question of doubt, to catch the private-car special. The fish-plates had been removed from a joint in the left-hand rail and the end of the downhill rail had been sprung out to make a derailing switch, which was held in position by the insertion of one of the fish-plates between the rail-webs. If we had hit the trap, going at even ordinary mountain-climbing speed, there would have been nothing left to tell the tale but a heap of scrap at the bottom of the thousand-foot dump.

There wasn't very much talk made by anybody. Under Mr. Van Britt's directions the engineer and fireman of the pilot engine brought tools and the break was repaired. All they had to do was to spring the bent rail back into place and spike it, and bolt the fish-plates on again.

While they were doing it the boss stood aside with Mr. Van Britt, and I heard what was said. Mr. Van Britt began it by saying, "We don't need any detectives this time. You are on your way to Strathcona to put a crimp in the smelter squeeze--the last of the Red Tower monopolies--so Dawes told me. He was probably foolish enough to tell others, and the word was pasted to scrag you before you could get to it. This trap was set to catch your special."

"Evidently," barked the boss; and then: "How did you happen to be here on that engine, Upton?"

"I've been ahead of you all the way up from Portal City," was the calm reply. "I thought it might be safer if you had a pilot to show you the way. I guess I must have had a hunch."

The boss turned on him like a flash.

"You had something more than a hunch: what was it--a wire?"

Mr. Van Britt gritted his teeth a little, but he told the truth.

"Yes; a friend of ours tipped me off--not about the broken track, of course, but just in a general way. I knew you'd bully me if I should tell you that I was going to run a pilot ahead of you, so I didn't tell you."

The break was repaired and the men were taking the tools back to the engine. As we turned to follow them, Mr. Norcross said: "Just one more question, Upton. Did your wire come from the capital?"

But at this Mr. Van Britt seemed to forget that he was talking to his general manager.

"It's none of your damned business where it came from," he snapped back; and that ended it.

XXIII

The Major's Premonition

Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning; and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their relief--and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out--by promising that our traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.

They tried to give him an ovation for that--the Strathcona men--did give him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon before we got away for the return to Portal City.

We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's box.

The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk. Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window, smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.

I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be killed if he didn't let go.

On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.

There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is trying his best to walk straight.

Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations--the laws about headlights, and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and I had heard him say:

"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to act both ways--for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."

Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.

That was the way Mrs. Sheila had put it to the boss, one evening along in the summer when they were sitting out on the Kendricks' porch, and I had butted in, as usual, with a bunch of telegrams that didn't matter. She had said that the experiment _couldn't_ be a success unless the conditions could be changed in some way; that so long as the railroads were owned or controlled by men of the Mr. Dunton sort and used as counters in the money-making game, there would never be any real peace between the companies and the people at large.

I knew that the boss had taken that saying of hers for another of the inspirations, and that he believed it clear through to the bottom. But I guess he didn't see any way as yet in which the Duntons could be shaken out, or just what could be made to happen if they were shaken out.

It was at Bauxite Junction that we picked up Mr. Hornack. He had been down in the sugar-beet country on a business trip, and had come up as far as Bauxite on a freight, after the Sedgwick operator had told him that our special was on the way home from Strathcona, and that he could catch it at the Junction.

I was glad when I saw him come in. I had just been thinking that it wasn't healthy for the boss to be grilling there at the car window so long alone, and I knew Mr. Hornack would keep him talking about something or other all the rest of the way in.

For a little while they talked business, and I took my chance to stretch out on the leather lounge behind their chairs and kind of half doze off. By and by the business talk wound itself up and I heard Mr. Hornack say: "I saw Ripley going in on Number Six this morning, and he had company; Mrs. Macrae, and the major's wife, and the husky little-girl cousin. They've been visiting at the capital, so they told me, and I expect the major will be mighty glad to see them back."

I didn't hear what Mr. Norcross said, if he said anything at all, but if I had been stone deaf I think I should have heard the thing that Mr. Hornack said when he went on.

"I heard something the other day in Portal City that seems pretty hard to believe, Norcross. It was at one of Mrs. Stagford's 'evenings,' and I was sitting out a dance with a certain young woman who shall be nameless. We were speaking of the Kendricks, and she gave me a rather broad hint that Mrs. Macrae isn't a widow at all; that her husband is still living."

My heavens! I had figured out a thousand ways in which the boss might get wised up to the dreadful truth, but never anything like this; to have it dropped on him that way out of a clear sky!

For a minute or two he didn't say anything, but when he did speak, I saw that the truth wasn't going to take hold.

"That is gossip, pure and simple, Hornack. The Kendricks are my friends, and I have been as intimate in their household as any outsider could be. It's merely idle gossip, I can assure you."

"Maybe so," said Mr. Hornack, sort of drawing in his horns when he saw how positive the boss was about it. "I'm not beyond admitting that the young woman who told me is a little inclined that way. But the story was pretty circumstantial: it went so far as to assert that 'Macrae' wasn't Mrs. Sheila's married name at all, and to say that her long stay with her Western cousins was--and still is--really a flight from conditions that were too humiliating to be borne."

"I don't care what was said, or who said it," the boss cut in brusquely. "It's ridiculous to suppose that any woman, and especially a woman like Sheila Macrae, would attempt to pass herself off as a widow when she wasn't one."

"I know," said the traffic manager, temporizing a little. "But on the other hand, I've never heard the major, or any one else, say outright that she was a widow. It seems to be just taken for granted. It stirred me up a bit on Van Britt's account. You don't go anywhere to mix and mingle socially, but it's the talk of the town that Upton is in over his head in that quarter."

I shut my eyes and held my breath. Mr. Hornack hadn't the slightest idea what thin ice he was skating over, or how this easy mention of Mr. Van Britt might be just like rubbing salt into a fresh cut. By this time it was growing dark, and we were running into Portal City, and I was mighty glad that it couldn't last much longer. The boss didn't speak again until the yard switches were clanking under the car, and then he said:

"Upton is well able to take care of himself, Hornack, and I don't think we need worry about him," and then over his shoulder to me: "Jimmie, it's time to wake up. We're pulling in."