The Wreckers
by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #38846 · 481,113 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Wreckers
Author: Francis Lynde
Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
Release date: February 12, 2012 [eBook #38846]
Most recently updated: April 22, 2012
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38846
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKERS ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)
THE WRECKERS
BY FRANCIS LYNDE
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
ARTHUR E. BECHER
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1920
To a certain grave and reverend official of the Union Pacific System
who, in his younger days, might well have played the part of _Jimmie
Dodds_, this book is affectionately inscribed by
THE AUTHOR.
[Illustration: "You have spoken only of the difficulties and
responsibilities, Graham, but there is another side to it."]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. AT SAND CREEK SIDING 1
II. A TANK PARTY 11
III. MR. CHADWICK'S SPECIAL 23
IV. THE TIPPING OF THE SCALE 36
V. THE DIRECTORS' MEETING 51
VI. THE ALEXA GOES EAST 60
VII. "HEADS OFF, GENTLEMEN!" 65
VIII. WITH THE STRINGS OFF 75
IX. AND SATAN CAME ALSO 90
X. THE BIG SMASH 96
XI. WHAT EVERY MAN KNOWS 102
XII. WITH THE WHEELS TRIGGED 112
XIII. THE LOST 1016 123
XIV. A CLOSE CALL 140
XV. THE MACHINE 155
XVI. IN THE COAL YARD 169
XVII. THE MAN AT THE WINDOW 185
XVIII. THE NAME ON THE REGISTER 200
XIX. THE HOODOO 206
XX. THE HELPLESS WIRES 216
XXI. BILLY MORRIS EXPLAINS 225
XXII. WHAT THE PILOT ENGINE FOUND 232
XXIII. THE MAJOR'S PREMONITION 247
XXIV. THE DEAD-LINE 262
XXV. FLAGGED DOWN 274
XXVI. THE DIPSOMANIAC 292
XXVII. THE DESERTER 312
XXVIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END 319
XXIX. THE MURDER MADMAN 334
XXX. "UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY" 349
XXXI. P. S. L. COMES HOME 365
THE WRECKERS
I
At Sand Creek Siding
As a general proposition, I don't believe much in the things called
"hunches." They are bad for the digestion, and as often as not are like
those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it
is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to all rules, and
we certainly uncovered the biggest one of the lot--the boss and I--the
night we left Portland and the good old Pacific Coast.
It was this way. We had finished the construction work on the Oregon
Midland; had quit, cleaned up the offices, drawn our last pay-checks,
told everybody good-by, and were on our way to the train, when I had one
of those queer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew
just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to
Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason--if you'll call
it a reason--was that, just before we came to the railroad station, the
boss walked calmly under a ladder standing in front of a new building;
and besides that, it was the thirteenth day of the month, a Friday, and
raining like the very mischief.
Just to sort of toll us along, maybe, the fates didn't begin on us that
night. They waited until the next day, and then proceeded to shove us in
behind a freight-train wreck at Widner, Idaho, where we lost twelve
hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't
due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a
little visit with his folks in Illinois, and beyond that he was going to
meet a bunch of Englishmen in Montreal, and maybe let them make him
General Manager of one of the Canadian railroads.
So Mr. Norcross was in no special hurry, and neither was I. I wasn't
under pay, but I expected to be when we reached Canada. I had been
confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland
construction, and he was taking me along partly because he knows a
cracking good stenographer when he sees one, but mostly because I was
dead anxious to go anywhere he was going.
But to come back to the Widner delay: if it hadn't been for that
twelve-hour lay-out we would have caught the Saturday night train on the
Pioneer Short Line, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there
would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram
from Mr. Chadwick, because it wouldn't have found us; no hold-up at Sand
Creek Siding; in short, nothing would have happened that did happen. But
I mustn't get ahead of my story.
It was on Sunday that the jolt began to get ready to land on us. Mr.
Norcross had been a railroad man for so long that he had forgotten how
to knock off on Sundays, and right soon after breakfast, with the help
of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our
section into a business office, saying that now we had a good quiet day,
we'd clean up the million or so odds and ends of correspondence he'd
been letting go while we were tussling for the Midland right-of-way
through the Oregon mountains.
By this time, you will understand, we were rocketing along over the
Pioneer Short Line, and were supposed to be due at Portal City at
half-past seven that evening. From where he sat dictating to me the boss
was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his
eyes while he was talking off his letters, and it puzzled me because it
wasn't like him. I may as well say here as anywhere that one of his
strong points is to be always "at himself" under all sorts of
conditions.
So, as I say, I was sort of puzzled; and one of the times after he had
given me a full grist of letters and had gone off to smoke while I
typed a few thousand lines from my notes to catch up, I made a
discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a
young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the
old-fashioned kind, with low seat-backs. I put it up that in those
absent-eyed intervals Mr. Norcross had been studying the back of the
young woman's neck. I was measurably sure it wasn't the little girl's.
Along in the forenoon I made an excuse to go and get a drink of water
out of the forward cooler, and on the way back I took a good square look
at our neighbors in Number Five. At that I didn't wonder at the boss's
temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to
start a stopped clock--only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there
wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. And the little girl was
simply a peach--a nice, downy, rosy peach; chunky, round-faced,
sunny-haired, jolly; with a neat little turned-up nose and big sort of
boyish laughing eyes that fairly dared the world.
I made a good half-dozen mistakes when I got in behind the old writing
machine again and went on with the letters; but never mind about that.
As I began to say, things rocked along until we had about worn the day
out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up
the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though
I was only his stenographer, and a kid at that, he was big enough and
Western enough not to let the buck-private-to-officer gap make any
difference, and always when we were knocking about together he made me
sit at his table.
Sometimes, when it happened that way, he'd ditch the rank-and-file
dignities and talk to me as if the thousand miles or so between his job
and mine were wiped out. But this Sunday evening he was pretty quiet,
breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a
forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for
a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of the Pioneer Short Line.
Farther along, pretty well into the ice-cream and black coffee, he came
to life again to ask me if I had noticed the young lady and the girl in
the Pullman section next to ours.
I told him I had, and then, because I had never known him to bother his
head for two minutes in succession about any woman, he gave me a shock;
said they were ticketed to Portal City--and to find that out he must
have asked the train conductor--adding that when we reached Portal it
would be the neighborly thing for me to do to help them off with their
hand-bags and see that they got a cab if they wanted one.
"Sure I will," says I. "That is, if the lady's husband isn't there to
meet them."
"What?" he snaps out. "You know her? She is married?"
"No, I don't exactly _know_ her," I shuffled. "But she is married, all
right."
"How can you tell if you don't know her?" he barked; just like that.
I had to make good, right quick, as everybody does who goes up against
Mr. Graham Norcross. But it so happened that I was able to.
"Her suit case is standing in the aisle, and I saw the tag. It has her
name, 'Mrs. Sheila Macrae,' on it."
The boss has a way of making two up-and-down wrinkles and a little
curved horse-shoe line come between his eyes when he is going to reach
for you.
"There are times, Jimmie, when you see altogether too much," he said,
sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to the far side of his
ice-cream pyramid before he began again.
"'Macrae,' you say: that is Scotch. And so is 'Sheila.' Most likely the
names, both of them, are only hand-downs. She looks straight American to
me."
"She is pretty enough to look anything," I threw in, just to see how he
would take it.
"Right you are, Jimmie," he agreed. "I've been looking at the back of
her neck all day. I don't know whether you've ever noticed it--you are
only a boy and probably you haven't--but there are so many women who
don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em from behind.
You catch a glimpse of a pretty neck, and when you get around to the
face you find out that the neck was only a bit of bluff."
If I had been eating anything in the world but ice-cream I believe it
would have choked me. What he said led up to the admission that he had
been making these face-and-neck comparisons for goodness knows how long,
and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a
picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a
hard-hitter, right from the jump. And for a man of that sort women are
usually no more than fluffy little side-issues, as Eve said when they
told her she was made out of Adam's rib.
That ended the dining-car part of it. The sure-enough, knock-out round
was fought at the rear end of our Pullman, which happened to be the last
car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a
cigar and said we'd go out to the observation platform to smoke, because
the smoking-room was full up with apple-raisers, and sheep-feeders and
cattlemen, all talking at once.
As we went down the aisle I noticed that Section Five was empty, and
when we reached the door we found the young lady and the girl standing
at the rear railing to watch the track unroll itself under the trucks
and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what
they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm
collar, but the girl had a fur thing around her neck, and her stocky,
chunky little arms were elbow deep in a big pillow muff to match, though
the April night wasn't even half-way chilly.
The boss growled out something about waiting until the ladies should go
in; and then, for pure safety's sake, he stepped out on the platform to
close the side trap door which, with the railing gate on that side, had
been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific
type" that was pulling us let out a whistle screech that would have
waked the dead, and the air-brakes went on with a jerk that showed how
beautifully reckless the railroading was on the Pioneer Short Line.
Mr. Norcross was reaching for the catch on the floor trap and the jerk
didn't throw him. But it snapped the young woman and the girl away from
the railing so suddenly that the little one had to grab for hand-holds;
and when she did that, of course the big muff went overboard.
At this, a bunch of things happened, all in an eye-wink. The train
ground and jiggled to a stop; the girl squealed, "Oh, my muff!" and
skipped down the steps to disappear in the general direction of the
Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie _Ann_!--come
back here--you'll be _left_!" and then took her turn at disappearing by
the same route; and, on top of it all, the boss jumped off and sprinted
after both of them, leaving a string of large, man-sized comments on the
foolishness of women as a sex trailing along behind him as he flew.
Right then it was my golden moment to play safe and sane. With three of
them off and lost in the gathering night, somebody with at least a grain
of sense ought to have stood by to pull the emergency cord if the train
should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy
all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a
mountain desert, and when I squinted up ahead and saw that the engine
was taking water, it looked as if there were going to be plenty of time
for a bit of a promenade under the stars. So I swung off and went to
join the muff hunt.
Amongst them, they had found the pillow thing before I had a chance to
horn in. They were coming up the track, and the boss had each of the two
by an arm and was telling them that they'd be left to a dead moral
certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts
were too fashionably narrow, and there were still three or four
car-lengths to go when the tank spout went up with a clang and a
clatter of chains and the old "Pacific type" gave a couple of hisses and
a snort.
"They're going!" gritted the boss, sort of between his teeth, and
without another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under
his arms, just as if they'd been a couple of sacks of meal, and broke
into a run.
It wasn't a morsel of use, you know. Mr. Norcross stands six feet two in
his socks, and I've heard that he was the best all-around athlete in his
college bunch. But old Hercules himself couldn't have run very far or
very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half
a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail
lights of the train were vanishing to pin points in the night. We were
like the little tad that went out to the garden to eat worms. Nobody
loved us, and we were beautifully and artistically left.
II
A Tank Party
When he saw that it was no manner of use, the boss quit on the handicap
race and put his two armfuls down while he still had breath enough left
to talk with.
"Well," he said, in his best rusty-hinge rasp, "you've done it! Why, in
the name of common sense, couldn't you have let me go back after that
muff thing?"
The young woman was panting as if she had been doing the running, and
the girl was choking and making a noise that made me think that she was
crying. If I had been as well acquainted with her as I got to be a
little later on, I would have known that she was only trying to bottle
up a laugh that was too beautifully big to be wasted upon just three
people and a treeless desert.
It was the young woman who answered the boss.
"I--I didn't stop to think!" she fluttered, taking the blame as if she
had been the one to head the procession. "Isn't there _any_ way we can
stop that train?"
The boss said there wasn't, and I know the only reason why he didn't say
a lot of other things was because he was too much of a gentleman to say
them in the presence of a couple of women.
"But what shall we do?" the young woman went on, gasping a little.
"Isn't there any telegraph station, or--or anything?"
There wasn't. So far as we could see, the surroundings consisted of a
short side-track, a spur running off into the hills, and the water tank.
The siding switches had no lights, which argued that there wasn't even a
pump-man at the tank--as there was not, the tank being filled
automatically by a gravity pipe line running back to a natural reservoir
in the mountains.
Before the boss had a chance to answer her question about the telegraph
office he got his eye on me, and then I knew that he hadn't noticed me
before.
"You here, too?" he ripped out, and I know it did him a lot of good to
be able to unload on somebody in trousers. "Why in blue blazes didn't
you stay on that train and keep it from running away from us?"
That's it: why didn't I? What made the dog stop before he caught the
rabbit? I was trying to frame up some sort of an excuse that would sound
just a few degrees less than plumb foolish, when the young woman took up
for me. She'd had the clatter of my typewriter dinned into her pretty
ears all day, and she knew who I was, even if it was dark.
"Don't take it out on the poor boy!" she said, kind of crisp, and yet
sort of motherly. "If you feel obliged to bully some one, I'm the one
who is to blame."
"Indeed, you're not!" chipped in the stocky little girl. "_I_ was the
one who jumped off first. And I don't care: I wasn't going to lose my
perfectly good muff."
By this time the boss was beginning to get a little better grip on
himself and he laughed.
"We've all earned the leather medal, I guess," he chuckled. "It's done
now, and it can't be helped. We're stuck until another train comes
along, and perhaps we ought to be thankful that we've got Jimmie Dodds
along to chaperon us."
"But isn't there anything else we can do?" said the young woman. "Can't
we walk somewhere to where there is a station or a town with people in
it?"
I saw Mr. Norcross look down at her skirts and then at the girl's.
"You two couldn't walk very far or very fast in those things you are
wearing," he grunted. "Besides, we are in one of the desert strips, and
it is probably miles to a night wire station in either direction."
"And how long shall we have to wait for another train?" This time it was
the little girl who wanted to know.
"I wish I could tell you, but I can't," said the boss. "I'm not familiar
with the Short Line schedules." Then to the young woman: "Shall we go
and sit under the water tank? That seems to be about the nearest
approach to a waiting-room that the place affords."
We trailed off together up the track, two and two, the boss walking with
the young woman. After we'd counted a few of the cross-ties, the girl
said: "Is your name Jimmie Dodds?" And when I admitted it: "Mine is
Maisie Ann. I'm Sheila's cousin on her mother's side. I think this is a
great lark; don't you?"
"I can tell better after it's over," I said. "Maybe we'll have to stay
here all night."
"I shouldn't mind," she came back airily. "I haven't been up all night
since I was a little kiddie and our house burned down. You're just a
boy, aren't you? You must excuse me; it's so dark that I can't see you
very well."
I told her I had been shaving for three years and more, and she let out
a little gurgling laugh, as though I had said something funny. By that
time we had reached the big water tank, and the boss picked out one of
the square footing timbers for a seat. It seemed as if he were finding
it a good bit harder to get acquainted with his half of the combination
than I was with mine, but after a little the young women thawed out a
bit and made him talk--to help pass away the time, I took it--and the
little girl and I sat and listened. When the young woman finally got him
started, the boss told her all about himself, how he'd been railroading
ever since he left college, and a lot of things that I'd never even
dreamed of. It's curious how a pretty woman can make a man turn himself
inside out that way, just for her amusement.
Maisie Ann and I sat on the end of the timber; not too near to be
butt-ins, nor so far away that we couldn't hear all that was said. I
still had the cigar the boss had given me, and I sure wanted to smoke
mighty bad, only I thought it wouldn't look just right--me being the
chaperon. Along in the middle of things, Mr. Norcross broke off short
and begged the young woman's pardon for boring her with so much shop
talk.
"Oh, you're not boring me at all; I like to hear it," she protested. And
then: "You have been telling me the story of a man who has done things,
Mr. Norcross. It has been my misfortune to have to associate chiefly
with men who only play at doing things."
He switched off at that and asked her if she were warm enough, saying
that if she were not, he and I would scrap up some sage-brush or
something and make a fire. She replied that she didn't care for a fire,
that the night wasn't at all cold--which it wasn't. Then she showed that
she was human, clear down to the tips of her pretty fingers.
"You may smoke if you want to," she told the boss. "I sha'n't mind it in
the least."
At that, my little girl turned on me and said, in exactly the same tone:
"You may smoke if you want to, Mr. Dodds. I sha'n't mind it in the
least." I heard a sort of smothered chuckle from the other end of the
timber seat, and the boss lighted his cigar. Then there was more talk,
in which it turned out that the young woman and her cousin were to have
been met at Portal City by somebody she called "Cousin Basil," but there
wouldn't be any scare, because she had written ahead to say that
possibly they might stop over with some friends in one of the apple
towns.
Then Mr. Norcross said _he_ wouldn't miss anything by the drop-out but
an appointment he had with an old friend, and he guessed that could
wait. I listened, thinking maybe he would mention the name of the
friend, and after a while he did. The forwarded Portal City telegram the
boss had gotten just before we went to dinner in the dining-car was from
"Uncle John" Chadwick, the Chicago wheat king, and that left me
wondering what the mischief Mr. Chadwick was doing away out in the wild
and woolly western country where they raise more apples than they do
wheat, and more mining stock schemes than they do either.
There was another thing that I listened for, too, but it didn't come.
That was some little side mention of the young woman's husband. So far
as that under-the-tank talk went, there needn't have been any "Mr.
Macrae" at all, and I was puzzled. If she'd been wearing mourning--but
she wasn't, so I told myself that she simply couldn't be a widow.
Anyway, she was a lot too light-hearted for that.
We had been marooned for nearly an hour when I struck a match and looked
at my watch. Mr. Norcross was still doing his best to kill time for the
young woman, and he was just in the exciting part of another railroad
story, telling about a right-of-way fight on the Midland, where we had
to smuggle in a few cases of Winchesters and arm the track-layers to
keep from being shut out of the only canyon there was by the P. & S. F.,
when the little girl grabbed my arm and said: "Listen!"
I did, and broke in promptly. "Excuse me," I called to the other two,
"but I think there's a train coming."
The boss cut his story short and we all listened. It seemed that I was
wrong. The noise we heard was more like an auto running with the
cut-out open than a train rumbling.
"What do you make it, Jimmie?" came from the boss's end of the timber.
"Motor car. It's out that way," I said, pointing in the darkness toward
the east.
My guess was right. In less than a minute we saw the lights of the car,
which was turning in a wide circle to come up beside the main line track
so it would head back to the east. It stopped a little way below the
water tank and about a hundred yards north of the track, or maybe less;
anyway, we could see it quite well even when the lamps were switched off
and four men came tumbling out of it. If I had been alone on the job I
should probably have called to the men as they came tramping over to the
side-track. But Mr. Norcross had a different think coming.
"Out of sight--quick, Jimmie!" he whispered, and in another second he
had whipped the young woman over the big footing timber to a standing
place under the tank among the braces, and I had done the same for the
girl.
What followed was as mysterious as a chapter out of an Anna Katherine
Green detective story. After doing something to the switch of the unused
spur track, the four men separated. One of them went back to the auto,
and the other three walked down the main track to the lower switch of
the short siding which was on the same side of the main line as the
spur. Here the fourth man rejoined them, and the girl at my elbow told
us what he had gone back to the car for.
"He has lighted a red lantern," she whispered. "I saw it when he took it
out of the auto."
I guess it was pretty plain to all of us by this time that there was
something decidedly crooked on the cards, but if we had known what it
was, we couldn't very well have done anything to prevent it. There were
only two of us men to their four; and, besides, there wasn't any time.
The lantern-carrying man had barely reached the lower switch when we
heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was a train coming from the
west, and a few seconds later an electric headlight showed up on the
long tangent beyond the siding.
It was a bandit hold-up, all right. We saw the four men at the switch
stop the train, which seemed to be a special, since it had only the
engine and one passenger car. One of the men stood on the track waving
the red lantern; we could see him plainly in the glare of the headlight.
There wasn't much of a scrap. There were two or three pistol shots, and
then, as near as we could make out, the hold-up men, or some of them,
climbed into the engine.
What they did next was as blind as a Chinese puzzle. Before you could
count ten they had made a flying switch with the single car, kicking it
in on the siding. Before the car had come fully to a stop, the engine
was switched in behind it, coupled on, and the reversed train, with the
engine pushing the car, rattled away on the old spur that led off into
the hills; clattered away and was lost to sight and hearing in less than
a minute.
It was not until after the train was switched and gone that we
discovered that two of the bandits had been left behind. These two reset
the switches for the main track, leaving everything as they had found
it, and then crossed over to the auto. Pretty soon we saw match flares,
and two little red dots that appeared told us that they were smoking.
"What are they doing, Jimmie?" asked the boss, under his breath.
"They are waiting for the other two to come back," I ventured, taking a
chance shot at it. Then I asked him if he knew where the old spur track
led to. He said he didn't; that there used to be some bauxite mines back
in the hills, somewhere in this vicinity, but he understood they had
been worked out and abandoned.
I was just thinking that all this mystery and kidnapping and gun play
must be sort of hard on the young woman and the girl, but though my half
of the allotment was shivering a little and snuggling up just a grain
closer to me, she proved that she hadn't lost her nerve.
"Did you see the name on that car when the engine went past to get in
behind it?" she asked, turning the whispered question loose for anybody
to answer.
"No," said the boss; and I hadn't, either.
"I did," she asserted, showing that her eyes, or her wits, were quicker
than ours. "I had just one little glimpse of it. The name is
'A-l-e-x-a,'" spelling it out.
Mr. Norcross started as if he had been shot.
"The _Alexa_? That is Mr. Chadwick's private car--they've kidnapped
him!" Then he whirled short on me. "Jimmie, are you man enough to go
with me and try a tackle on those fellows over there in that auto?"
I said I was; but I didn't add what I thought--that it would probably be
a case of double suicide for us two to go up against a pair of armed
thugs with our bare hands. The boss would have done it in the hollow
half of a minute; he's built just that way. But now the young woman put
in her word.
"You mustn't think of doing such a thing!" she protested; and she was
still telling him all the different reasons why he mustn't, when we
heard the creak and grind of the stolen engine coming back down the old
spur.
After that there was nothing to do but to wait and see what was going to
happen next. What did happen was as blind as all the rest. The engine
was stopped somewhere in the gulch back of us and out of sight from our
hiding-place, and pretty soon the two men who had gone with her came
hurrying across out of the hill shadows, making straight for the auto. A
minute or two later they had climbed into the machine, the motor had
sputtered, and the car was gone.
III
Mr. Chadwick's Special
Of course, as soon as the skip-out of the four hold-up men gave us a
free hand we knew it was up to us to get busy and do something. It was a
safe bet that the _Alexa_ was carrying her owner, and in that case Mr.
John Chadwick and his train crew were somewhere back in the hills,
without an engine, and with a good prospect of staying "put" until
somebody should go and hunt them up.
Mr. Norcross had our part in the play figured out before the retreating
auto had covered its first mile.
"We've got to find out what they've done with Mr. Chadwick," he broke
out. And then: "It can't be very far to where they have left the engine,
and if they haven't crippled it--" He stopped short and slung a question
at the two women: "Will you two stay here with Jimmie while I go and see
what I can find in that gulch?"
They both paid me the compliment of saying that they'd stay with me, but
the young woman suggested that it might be just as well if we should all
go up the gulch together. So we piked out in the dark, the boss helping
Mrs. Sheila to hobo along over the cross-ties of the spur, and the
little girl stumbling on behind with me. She had got over her scare, if
she had any, and when I asked her if she didn't want an arm to grab at,
she laughed and said, No, and that it was grand; that she wouldn't miss
a single stumble for worlds.
"In all my life I've never had anything half as exciting as this happen
to me," was the way she put it, and she sure acted as if she meant to
make the most of it.
We had followed the spur track up the gulch for maybe a short quarter of
a mile when we came to the engine. There was nobody on it, and the
brigands had been good-natured enough to leave the fire-door open so
that the steam would run down gently and let the boiler cool off by
degrees. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert on engines, just as he
is on everything else belonging to a railroad, and he struck matches and
looked our find over carefully before he tried to move it. As we had
feared it might be, the big machine was crippled. There was a key gone
out of one of the connecting-rod crank-pin straps; one miserable little
piece of steel, maybe eight inches long and tapering one way, and half
an inch or so thick the other; but that was a-plenty. We couldn't make a
move without it.
I thought we were done for, but Mr. Norcross chased me up into the cab
for a lantern. With the light we began to hunt around in the short
grass, all four of us down on our hands and knees doing the
needle-in-the-haystack stunt. I had been sensible enough to show the
little girl the other connecting-rod key, so she knew exactly what to
look for, and it did me a heap of good when it turned out that she was
the one who found the lost bit of steel.
"I've got it--I've got it!" she cried; and sure enough she had. The
hold-up people had merely taken it out and thrown it aside on the
extremely probable chance that nobody would be foolish enough to look
for it so near at hand, or, looking, would be able to find it in the
dark.
It didn't take more than a minute or two, with a wrench from the
engineer's box, to put the key back in place. Then, with one to boost
and the other to pull, we got our two passengers up into the high cab,
and Mr. Norcross made them as comfortable as he could on the fireman's
box, showing them how to brace and hang on when the machine should begin
to bounce over the rough track of the old spur.
While he was doing this, I threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the
firebox and put the blower on; and when we were all set, the boss opened
the throttle and we went carefully nosing ahead over the old track,
feeling our way up the gulch and keeping a sharp lookout for the _Alexa_
as we ground and squealed around the curves.
It must have been four or five miles back in the hills to the place
where we found the private car, and a little way short of it we picked
up Mr. Chadwick's conductor, walking the ties to try to get in touch
with the civilized world once more. He looked a trifle suspicious when
he found the engine in the hands of still another bunch of strangers,
and two of them women; but as soon as he heard Mr. Norcross's name he
quit being offish and got suddenly respectful. Young as he was for a
top-rounder, the boss had a "rep," and I guess there were not very many
railroad men west of the Rockies who didn't know him, or know of him.
The conductor told us where we'd find the car, and we found it just as
he said we would: pushed in on an old mine-loading track at the end of
the spur. The other members of the crew were off and waiting for us; and
standing out on the back platform, in the full glare of the headlight as
we nosed up for a coupling, there was a big, gray-haired man, bareheaded
and dressed in rough-looking old clothes like a mining prospector.
The big man was "Uncle John" Chadwick, and if he was properly astonished
at seeing us turn up with his lost engine, he didn't let it interfere
with our welcome when we took our passengers around to the car and
lifted them one at a time over the railing and climbed up after them.
Mr. Chadwick seemed to know Mrs. Sheila; at any rate, he shook hands
with her and called her by name. Then he grabbed for the boss and fairly
shouted at him: "Well, well, Graham!--of all the lucky things this side
of Mesopotamia! How the dev--how in thunder did you manage to turn up
here?" And all that, you know.
The explanations, such as they were, came later, after the young lady,
confessing herself a bit excited and fussed up, had taken her cousin
under her arm and they had both gone to lie down in one of the
staterooms. With the women out of the way, the boss and Mr. Chadwick sat
together in the open compartment while the train crew was trundling us
back to the main line. Mr. Norcross had put me in right by telling the
wheat king who I was, so they didn't pay any attention to me.
As a matter of course, the talk jumped first to the mysterious hold-up
and kidnapping and the reason why. All either of them could say didn't
serve to throw any light on the mystery, not a single ray. There had
been no violence--the pistol shots had been merely meant to scare the
trainmen--and there had been no attempt at robbery; for that matter,
Mr. Chadwick hadn't even seen the kidnappers, and hadn't known what was
going on until after it was all over.
Mr. Norcross told what we had seen, and how we had come to be where we
were able to see it, but that didn't help out much, either. From any
point of view it seemed perfectly foolish, and the boss made mention of
that. If we hadn't happened to be there to bring the engine back, the
worst that could have befallen Mr. Chadwick and the crew of the special
would have been a few hours' bother and delay. In the course of time the
conductor would have walked out and got to a wire station somewhere,
though it might have taken him all night, and then some, to get another
engine.
Naturally, Mr. Chadwick was red-hot about it, on general principles. I
guess he wasn't used to being kidnapped. But, after all, the thing that
bothered him most was the fact that he couldn't account for it.
"I can't help thinking that it is connected with what is due to happen
to-morrow morning, Graham," he said, at the end of things. "There are
some certain scoundrels in Portal City at the present moment who
wouldn't stop at anything to gain their ends, and I am wondering now if
Dawes wasn't mixed up in it."
The boss laughed and said:
"You'll have to begin at the beginning with me: I'm too new in this
region to know even the names. Who is Dawes?"
"Dawes is a mining man in Portal City, and before I'd been an hour in
town yesterday he hunted me up and wanted me to go over to Strathcona to
look at some gold prospects he's trying to finance. I said 'No' at
first, because I was expecting you, and thought you'd reach Portal City
this morning. When you didn't show up, I knew I had twelve hours more on
my hands, and as Dawes was still hanging on, I had our trainmaster give
me a special over to Strathcona, on a promise that I'd be brought back
early this evening, ahead of the 'Flyer' from the west--the train you
were on."
Mr. Norcross nodded. "And the promise wasn't kept."
"No promise is ever kept on the Pioneer Short Line," growled the big
magnate. And then, with a beautiful disregard for the mixed figures of
speech: "Once in a blue moon the chapter of accidents hits the
bull's-eye whack in the middle, Graham. When Hardshaw wired me from
Portland, I knew you couldn't reach Portal City before this morning, at
the very earliest. That was going to cut my time pretty short, with the
big gun due to be fired to-morrow morning, and you cut it still shorter
by losing twelve hours somewhere along the road--they told me in the
despatcher's office that your train was behind a wreck somewhere up in
Oregon. But it has turned out all right, in spite of everything. You're
here, and we've got the night before us."
Again Mr. Norcross said something about beginning at the beginning.
"Just remember that I am entirely in the dark," he went on. "I didn't
see Hardshaw at all before leaving Portland; he merely forwarded your
wire, asking me to stop over in Portal City, to me on the train--and it
was handed to me just before dinner this evening. Of course, that was
enough--from anybody who has been as good a friend to me as you have."
"We'll see presently just how far that friendship rope is going to
reach," returned the wheat king, and though my back was turned to them,
I could easily imagine the quizzical twinkle of the shrewd old eyes that
went with it. Then I suppose he nodded toward me, for the boss said:
"Oh, Jimmie's all right; he knew what I had for dinner this evening, and
he'll know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning."
With the bridle off, the big man went ahead abruptly, cutting out all
the frills.
"You finished your building contract on the Oregon Midland, Graham, and
after the road was opened for business you refused an offer of the
general managership. Would you mind telling me why you did that?"
"Not in the least. I'm rather burnt out on trying to operate American
railroads; at any rate, when it comes to trying to operate one of them
for a legitimate profit. There is nothing in it. An operating head is
now nothing more than a score-keeper for a national gambling game. The
boss gamblers around the railroad post in the Stock Exchange tell him
what he has to do and where he has to get off. Stock gambling, under
whatever name it masquerades--boosting values, buying and selling
margins, reorganizations, with their huge rake-offs for the
underwriters--is the incubus which is crushing the life out of the
nation's industries, especially in the railroad field. It makes me wish
I'd never seen a railroad track."
"Yet it is your trade, isn't it?" asked the wheat king.
"It is; but luckily I can build railroads as well as operate them; and
there are other countries besides the United States of America. I'm on
my way home to Illinois for a little visit with my mother and sisters;
and after that I think I shall close with an offer I've had from one of
the Canadian companies."
"Good boy!" chuckled the Chicago magnate. "In due time we might hope to
be reading your name in the newspapers--'Sir Graham Norcross, D.S.O.,'
or something of that sort." Then, with a sharp return to the sort of
gritting seriousness: "You've been riding over the Pioneer Short Line
since early this morning, Graham: what do you think of it?"
I couldn't see the boss's smile, but I could figure it pretty well when
he said: "There may be worse managed, worse neglected pieces of railroad
track in some of the great transcontinental lines, but if there are I
haven't happened to notice them. I suppose it is capitalized to death,
like many of the others."
"Fictitious values doubtless have something to do with it at the present
stage of the game," Mr. Chadwick admitted. "The Pioneer Short Line is
'under suspicion' on the books of the commissions, both State and
Interstate, as a heavily 'watered' corporation--which it is. Do you know
the history of the road?"
When I got up to get a match, Mr. Norcross was shaking his head and
saying: "Not categorically; no."
"Then I'll brief it for you," said the big man in the stuffed wicker
chair. "It has always been a good earning property, being largely, even
yet, without much local competition. But from the day it was completed
its securities have figured in the market only for their speculative
values. The property itself has never been considered, save as a means
to an end; the end being to enable one bunch of the Wall Street
gamesters you speak of to make a 'killing' and unload on another bunch."
"The old story," said Mr. Norcross.
"We are bumping over the net result, right now," Mr. Chadwick went on.
"The property is bled white; there is no money for betterments; we are
tied hand and foot by all sorts of legal restrictions and regulations;
and, worse than all, the people we are supposed to serve hate us until
you can smell it and taste it in every town and hamlet on the
right-of-way."
"So I have heard," put in the boss, calmly.
"That brings us down to the nib of the matter. Pioneer Short Line is
practically in the last ditch. The stock has slumped to forty and worse;
Shaffer, the general manager and the only able man we have had for
years, has resigned in disgust; and if something isn't done to-morrow
morning in Portal City, I know of at least one minority stockholder who
is going to throw the whole mess into the courts and try for a
receivership."
Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting
himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat
pit.
"I am--more's the pity. I had a little lapse of sanity one fine morning
a few years ago and bought in for an investment. I've done everything I
could think of, Graham, to persuade Breck Dunton and his Wall Street
accomplices to spend just one dollar in ten of their reorganization and
recapitalization stealings on the road itself, but it's no good. All
they want is to get one more rise out of the securities, so they can
unload."
"Is there to be a stockholders' meeting in Portal City to-morrow
morning?"
"No; a directors' meeting. Dunton has been making an inspection trip
over the system with a dozen or so of his New York cronies. It's a
junketing excursion, pure and simple, but while they're here they'll get
together and go through the form of picking out a new general manager.
I'm on the board and they had to send me notice, though it's an even bet
they hoped I'd stay away. In fact, I think they scheduled the meeting
out here on the chance that the distance from Chicago would keep me from
attending it."
All this talk had taken up a good bit of time, and just as Mr. Chadwick
said that about the "even bet," our engineer was whistling for Portal
City. From where I was sitting I could see the electric lights dotting
the wide valley between the two gateway buttes from which the city gets
its name. Mr. Norcross was looking at the lights, too, when he said:
"Are you really going to spring the receivership on the Dunton people
to-morrow?"
"I'm going to give Dunton his chance. He can appoint the man I want
appointed as general manager, with full power to act, and ratify a
little plan I've got up my sleeve for providing a bit of working capital
for the road, or--he can turn me down."
"And if he does turn you down?"
"Then, by George, I'll see if I can't persuade the courts to put the
property into bankruptcy and install my man as receiver!"
"I don't envy your man his job, either way around; not the least little
morsel in the world," said the boss, quietly. And then: "Who is he,
Uncle John?"
The wheat king gave a great laugh.
"Don't tell me you haven't guessed it," he chuckled. "You're the man,
Graham."
But now Mr. Norcross had something to say for himself, sitting up
straight and shaking his head sort of sorrowfully at the big man in the
padded chair.
"No you don't, my good old friend; not in a thousand years! You'd lose
out in the end, and I'd lose out; and besides, I'm not quite ready to
commit suicide." And then to me: "Jimmie, suppose you go and tap on the
door and tell the ladies we're pulling into Portal City."
IV
The Tipping of the Scale
After all, it wasn't so very late in the night when our special pulled
up to the Portal City station platform and I turned myself into a
messenger-boy escort for the lady and the little girl whose muff had
been responsible for so many different flip-flaps in the short space of
a few hours.
I hadn't hung around while the boss was telling Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
Ann good-by. Our conductor had wired ahead from the first telegraph
station we came to and had asked to have our dunnage--the two women's,
the boss's, and mine--taken out of the "Flyer" Pullman and sent back to
Portal City on a local, and I was in the baggage-room, digging up the
put-off stuff, at the good-by minute. But I guess they didn't quarrel
any--the boss and Mrs. Sheila. She was laughing a little to herself as I
helped her down from the car, and when I asked her where she wanted to
go, she said I might ask one of the porters to carry the traps, and we'd
walk to the hotel, which was only a few blocks up the main street.
She took Maisie Ann on the other side of her and let two of the blocks
go by without saying anything more, and then she gave that quiet little
laugh again and said, "Your Mr. Norcross amuses me, Jimmie. He says I
have no business to travel without a guardian. What do you think about
it?"
I told her I hadn't any thinks coming, and she seemed to take that for a
joke and laughed some more. Then she asked me if I'd ever been in New
York, and I felt sort of small when I had to tell her that I had never
been east of Omaha in all my life. With that, she told me not to worry;
that if I stayed with Mr. Norcross I'd probably get to go anywhere I
wanted to.
Something in the way she said it made it sound like a little slam on the
boss, and of course I wasn't going to stand for that.
"There is one thing about it: the boss will make good wherever he goes,"
I hit back. "You can bet on that."
"I like your loyalty," she flashed out. "It is a fine thing in a day
that is much too careless of such qualities. And I agree with you that
your Mr. Norcross is likely to succeed; more than likely, if he will
only learn to combine a little gentle cleverness with the heavy hand."
There was no doubt about it this time; she _was_ slamming the boss, and
I meant to get at the bottom of it, right there and then.
"I don't think you have any cause to blacklist Mr. Norcross," I said.
"Hasn't he been right good and brotherly to both of you this evening?"
"Oh, I didn't mean that," she said real earnestly. "But in the stateroom
in Mr. Chadwick's car: the ventilator was open, you know, until Maisie
Ann got up and shut it, and we couldn't very well help hearing what was
said about the kidnapping. Neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Norcross seemed
to be able to account for it."
"Can you account for it?" I asked, bluntly enough, I guess.
At this she smiled and said, "It would be rather presumptuous for me to
try where Mr. Norcross and Mr. Chadwick failed, wouldn't it? But maybe I
can give you just a wee little hint. If you are not well enough
acquainted with Mr. Chadwick to ask him yourself, you might tell Mr.
Norcross to ask him if there isn't some strong reason why somebody, or
perhaps a number of somebodies, wanted to keep him out of Portal City
over Sunday night and possibly a part of the Monday."
We were coming to the big electric sign that was winking out the letters
to spell "Hotel Bullard," and I was bound to have it out with her before
my chance was gone.
"See here," I put in; "you saw something more than I did, and more than
Mr. Norcross did. What was it?"
This time she took the motherly tone with me again and told me I must
learn not to be rude and masterful, like the boss. Then she gave me what
I was reaching for.
"You saw the two men who went over to the auto and smoked while they
were waiting for the other two to come back?"
I told her that I hadn't seen them very well; couldn't, with nothing but
the starlight to help out.
"Neither did I," she admitted. "But if I am not mistaken, I have seen
them many times before, and they are very well known here in Portal
City. One of them, the smaller one with the derby hat and the short
overcoat, was either Mr. Rufus Hatch or his double; and the other, the
heavy-set one, might have been Mr. Gustave Henckel, Mr. Hatch's partner
in the Red Tower Company."
This didn't help out much, but you can bet that I made a note of the two
names. We were just going into the hotel, so I didn't have a chance to
ask any more questions; and after I had paid the porter for lugging the
grips, Mrs. Sheila had made whatever arrangement she wanted to with the
clerk, and she and Maisie Ann were ready to take the elevator.
"You are going back to Mr. Chadwick's car?" she asked, when she was
telling me good-by and thanking me for coming up to the hotel with them.
I told her I was, and then she came around to the kidnapping business
again of her own accord.
"You may give Mr. Norcross the hint I gave you, if you wish," she said;
"only you must be a good boy, Jimmie, and not drag me into it. I
couldn't be positively certain, you know, that the two men were really
Mr. Hatch and Mr. Henckel. But if there is any reason why those two
wouldn't want Mr. Chadwick to reach the city at the time he was counting
on----"
"I see," I nodded; "it just puts the weight of the inference over on
that side. I'll tell the boss, when I get a good chance, and you can bet
your last dollar he won't tangle you up in it--he isn't put together
that way."
"Well, then, good-night," she smiled, giving me her hand. And then: "Mr.
Norcross says you'll be going on East to-morrow, and in that case it may
be a long time before we meet again. After a while, after he has
forgotten all about it, you may tell him from me--" She stopped and gave
me that funny little laugh again that made her look so pretty, and said:
"No, I guess you needn't, either." And with that she sort of edged the
little girl into the elevator before we could get a chance to shake
hands, and I heard her tell the boy to take them up to the mezzanine
landing.
Since I didn't have any reason to suppose that the boss was needing me,
I took my own time about going back to hunt for Mr. Chadwick's car in
the railroad yards, loafing for a while in the Bullard lobby to rubber
and look on at the people coming and going. You can tell pretty well how
a town stacks up for business if you hit it between ten and eleven
o'clock of a Sunday night and hang around its best hotel. If the town is
dead, there won't be anybody stirring around the hotel at that hour. But
Portal City seemed to be good and alive. There were lots of people
knocking about on the sidewalks and drifting in and out of the lobby.
By and by, I went down to the station and began to hunt for the _Alexa_.
The yard crew had side-tracked it on a spur down by the freight-house,
and when I had stumbled over to it the negro porter remembered me well
enough to let me in.
The boss and Mr. Chadwick were facing each other across the table, which
was all littered up with papers and maps and reports, and they hardly
noticed me when I blew in and sat down a little to one side. I had known
well enough, when Mr. Norcross had turned the new offer down, that Mr.
Chadwick wasn't going to let it go at that. It seemed that he hadn't; he
had got the boss sufficiently interested to go over the papers with
him, anyhow.
But just after I broke in, Mr. Norcross jumped up and began to pace back
and forth before the table, with his hands in his pockets.
"No, I can't see it, Uncle John," he said, still sort of stubborn and
determined. "You are trying to make me believe that I ought to take the
biggest job that has ever been set before the expert in any field: to
demonstrate, on this rotten corpse of a railroad, the solution of a
problem that has the entire country guessing at the present time;
namely, the winning of success, and public--and industrial--approval for
a carrier corporation which had continuously and persistently broken
every commandment in all the decalogues--of business; of fair-dealing
with its employees; of common honesty with everybody."
Mr. Chadwick nodded. "That is about the size of it," he said.
"I wouldn't say that it can't be done," the boss went on. "Perhaps it is
possible, for the right man. But I'm not the right man. You need
somebody who can combine the qualities of a pretty brutal slugger with
those of a fine-haired, all-things-to-all-men, diplomatic peacemaker. I
can do the slugging; I've proved it a time or two in the past. But I'm
no good at the other end of the game. When it comes to handling the
fellow with a 'pull,' I've either got to smash him or quit."
At that Mr. Chadwick nodded again and said: "That is one of the reasons
why I have reached out and picked you for the job. There will be a good
bit of the slugging needed, at first, and I guess you can acquire the
other things as you go along, can't you?"
"Not at this late day, I'm afraid. People who know me best call me a
scrapper, and I've been living up to my reputation. Yesterday, when we
were held up behind the freight wreck at Widner, I got off to see what
we were in for. The conductor of our train had spotted me from seeing my
pass, and I happened to hear him docketing me for the wrecking boss. He
said I was known on the Midland as 'Hell-and-repeat' Norcross; that it
was a habit with me to have a man for breakfast every morning."
"I can add a little something to that," Mr. Chadwick put in,
quizzically. "Lepaige, your Oregon Midland president, says you need
humanizing, and wonders why you haven't married some good woman who
would knock the rough corners off. Why haven't you, Graham?"
The boss gave a short laugh. "Too busy," he said. "Past that, we might
assume that the good woman hasn't presented herself. Let it go. The
facts still stand. I am too heavy-handed for this job of yours. I
should probably mix up with some of these grafters you've been telling
me about and get a knife in my back. That would be all in the day's
work, of course, but it would leave you right where you are now. And as
for this other thing--the industrial side of it: that's a large order; a
whaling big order. I'm not even prepared to say, off-hand, that it's the
right thing to do."
"Right or wrong, it's a thing that is coming, Graham," was the sober
reply. "If we don't meet it half-way--well, the time will come when we
of the hiring-and-firing side won't be given any option in the matter.
You may call it Utopian if you please, and add that I'm growing old and
losing my grip. But that doesn't obliterate the fact that the days of
the present master-and-man relations in the industries are numbered."
The boss shook his head. "As I say, I can't go that far with you,
off-hand; and if I could, I should still doubt that I am the man to head
your procession."
I thought that settled it, but that was because I didn't know Mr.
Chadwick very well. The big wheat king just smiled up at the boss, sort
of fatherly, and said:
"We'll let it rest until morning and give you a chance to sleep on it.
You have spoken only of the difficulties and the responsibilities,
Graham; but there is another side to it. In a way, it's an opportunity,
carrying with it the promise of the biggest kind of a reward."
"I don't see it," said the boss, briefly.
"Don't you? I do. I have an idea rambling around in my head that it is
about time some bright young fellow was demonstrating that problem you
speak of--showing the people of the United States that a railroad
needn't be regarded as an outlaw among the industries; needn't have the
enmity of everybody it serves; needn't be the prey of a lot of disloyal
and dissatisfied employees who are interested only in the figure of the
pay-day check; needn't be shot at as a wolf with a bounty on its scalp.
Let it rest at that for the present. Get your hat and we'll walk up-town
to the hotel. I want to have a word with Dunton to-night, if I can shake
him loose from his junketing bunch long enough to listen to it. Beyond
that, I want to get hold of the sheriff and put him on the track of
those hold-ups."
Here was a chance for me to butt in with the hint Mrs. Sheila had given
me, but I didn't see how I was going to do it without giving her away.
So I said the little end of nothing, just as hard as I could; and when
we got out of the car, Mr. Norcross told me to go by the station and
have our luggage sent to the hotel, and that killed whatever chance I
might have had farther along.
It was some time after eleven o'clock when I got around to the hotel
with the traps. The stir in the lobby had quieted down to make it seem a
little more like Sunday night, but an automobile party had just come in,
and some of the men were jawing at the clerk because the house wasn't
serving a midnight theater supper in the café on the Sunday.
Mr. Chadwick had disappeared, but I saw the boss at the counter waiting
for his chance at the clerk. The quarrelsome people melted away at last,
all but one--a young swell who would have been handsome if he hadn't had
the eyes of a maniac and a color that was sort of corpse-like with the
pallor of a booze-fighter. He had his hat on the back of his head, and
he was ripping it off at the clerk like a drunken hobo.
His ravings were so cluttered up with cuss-words that I couldn't get any
more than the drift of them, but it seemed that he had caught a glimpse
of somebody he knew--a woman, I took it, because he said "she"--looking
down from the rail of the mezzanine, and he wanted to go up to her. And
it appeared that the clerk had told the elevator man not to take him up
in his present condition.
The boss was growing sort of impatient; I could tell it by the way the
little side muscles on his jaw were working. When he got the ear of the
clerk for a second or so between cusses, he asked what was the matter
with the lunatic. I caught only broken bits of the clerk's half-whisper:
"Young Collingwood ... President Dunton's nephew ... saw lady ...
mezzanine ... wants to go up to her."
The boss scowled at the young fellow, who was now handing himself around
the corner of the counter to get at the clerk again, and said: "Why
don't you ring for an officer and have him run in?"
The night clerk was evidently scared of his job. "I wouldn't dare to do
that," he chittered. "He's one of the New York crowd--the railroad
people--President Dunton's nephew--guest of the house."
The young fellow had pulled himself around to our side of the counter by
this time and was hooking his arm to make a pass at Mr. Norcross,
trimming things up as he came with a lot more language. The boss said,
right short and sharp, to the clerk, "Get his room key and give it to a
boy who can show me the way," and the next thing we knew he had bashed
that lunatic square in the face and was cuffing him along to the nearest
elevator.
I guess it sort of surprised the clerk, and everybody else who happened
to see it--but not me. It was just like the boss. He came back in a few
minutes, looking as cool as a cucumber.
"What did you do with him?" asked the clerk, kind of awed and half
scared.
"Got a couple of the corridor sweepers to put him in a bath and turn the
cold water on him. That'll take the whiskey out of him. Now, if you have
a minute to spare, I'd like to get my assignment."
We hadn't more than got our rooms marked off for us when I saw Mr.
Chadwick coming across from the farther of the three elevators. He was
smiling sort of grim, as if he'd made a killing of some sort with Mr.
Dunton, and instead of heading back for his car he took the boss over to
a corner of the lobby and sat down to smoke with him.
I circled around for a while, and after a bit Mr. Norcross held up a
finger at me to bring him a match. They didn't seem to be talking
anything private, so I sat down just beyond them, so sleepy that I could
hardly see straight. Mr. Chadwick was telling about his early
experiences in Portal City, how he blew in first on top of the
Strathcona gold boom, and how he had known mighty near everybody in the
region in those days.
While he was talking, a taxi drove up and one of the old residenters
came in from the street and crossed to the elevators; a mighty handsome,
stately old gentleman, with fierce white mustaches and a goatee, and
"Southern Colonel" written all over him.
"There's one of them now; Major Basil Kendrick--Kentucky born and
raised, as you might guess," Mr. Chadwick was saying. "Old-school
Southern 'quality,' and as fine as they make 'em. He is a lawyer, but
not in active practice: owns a mine or two in Strathcona Gulch, and is
neither too rich nor too poor."
I grabbed at the name, "Basil," right away: it isn't such a very common
name, and Mrs. Sheila had said something--under the water tank, you
recollect--about a "Cousin Basil" who was to have met her at the train.
I was putting two or three little private guesses of my own together,
when one of the elevators came down and here came our two, the young
lady and the chunky little girl, with the major chuckling and smiling
and giving an arm to each. They had apparently stopped at the Bullard
only to wait until he could come after them and take them home. Mrs.
Sheila was looking just as pretty as ever, only now there wasn't a bit
of color in her face, and her eyes seemed a good deal brighter, some
way.
"Yes, indeed; the major is all right; as you'd find out for yourself if
you'd make up your mind to stay in Portal City and get acquainted with
him," Mr. Chadwick was going on; and by that time the major and the two
pretty ones had come on to where the boss and Mr. Chadwick could see
them.
I saw the boss sit up in his chair and stare at them. Then he said:
"That's Mrs. Macrae with him now. Is she a member of his family?"
"A second cousin, or something of that sort," said Mr. Chadwick. "I met
her once at the major's house out in the northern suburb last summer,
and that's how I came to know her when you put her aboard of the _Alexa_
back yonder in the gulch."
Mr. Norcross let the three of them get out and away, and we heard their
taxi speed up and trundle off before he said, "She is married, I'm told.
Where is her husband?"
Mr. Chadwick looked up as if he'd already forgotten the three who had
just crossed the lobby.
"Who--Sheila Macrae? Yes, she has been married. But there isn't any
husband--she's a widow."
For quite a while the boss sat staring at his cigar in a way he has when
he is thinking right hard, and Mr. Chadwick let him alone, being busy, I
guess, with his own little scrap that lay just ahead of him in the
coming directors' meeting. Then, all of a sudden, the boss got up and
shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
"I've changed my mind, Uncle John," he said, looking sort of absent-like
out of the window to where the major's taxi had been standing. "If you
can pull me into that deal to-morrow morning--with an absolutely free
hand to do as I think best, mind you--I'll take the job."
V
The Directors' Meeting
I was up bright and early the next morning--that is, a good bit brighter
and earlier than Mr. Norcross was--and after breakfast I took a little
sashay down Nevada Avenue to have a look at _our_ railroad. Of course, I
knew, after what the boss had said to Mr. Chadwick the night before,
just before we went to bed, that we weren't ever going to see Canada, or
even Illinois.
I'll have to admit that the look I got didn't make me feel as if we'd
found a Cullinan diamond. Down in the yards everything seemed to be at
the loosest kind of loose ends. A switching crew was making up a
freight, and the way they slammed the boxes together, regardless of
broken drawheads and the like, was a sin and a shame. Then I saw some
grain cars with the ends started and the wheat running out all along the
track, and three or four more with the air hose hanging so it knocked
along on the ties, and a lot of things like that--and nobody caring a
hoot.
There was a big repair shop on the other side of the yard tracks, and
though it was after seven o'clock, the men were still straggling over to
go to work. Down at the round-house, a wiper was spotting a big
freight-puller on the turn-table, and I'm blessed if he didn't actually
run her forward pair of truck-wheels off the edge of the table, right
while I was looking on, just as if it were all in the day's work.
In the course of time I drifted back to the office headquarters, which
were at the end of the passenger station and in a part of the same
building, down-stairs and up. A few clerks were dribbling in, and none
of them seemed to have life enough to get out of the way of an ox-team.
One fellow recognized me for a member of the big railroad family, I
guess, for he stopped and asked me if I was looking for a job.
I told him I wasn't, and gave him a cigar--just on general principles.
He took it, and right away he began to loosen up.
"If you should change your mind about the job, you just make it a case
of 'move on, Joey,' and don't stay here and try to hit this
agglomeration," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's a frost. I'm off of the Pennsy myself, and I'm ashamed to look in
the looking-glass since I came out here. The P. S. L. isn't a railroad,
at all; it's just making a bluff at being one. Besides, we're slated to
have a new general manager, and if he's any good he'll fire the last
living man of us."
"Maybe, if I change my mind, I might get a job with the new man," I
said. "Who is he?"
"Search me! I don't believe they've found anybody yet. The big people
from New York are all here now, and maybe they'll pick somebody before
they go away. If I had the nerve of a rabbit, I'd take the next train
back for Pittsburgh."
"What's your job?" I quizzed.
He grinned at me sort of good-naturedly. "You wouldn't think it to look
at me, but I'm head stenographer in the general super's office."
"You haven't got much of a boss, if he can't command any more loyalty
than you are giving him," I offered; and at that he spat on the platform
and made a face like a kid that had been taking a dose of asafoetida.
"Yah!" he snorted. "We haven't a man in the outfit, on any job where the
pay amounts to anything, that isn't somebody's cousin or nephew or
brother-in-law or something. They shoot 'em out here from New York in
bunches. You may be a spotter, for all I know, but I don't care a hang.
I'm quitting at the end of the month, anyhow--if I don't get fired this
side of that."
I grinned; I couldn't help it.
"Tell me," I broke in, "are there many more like you in the Pioneer
Short Line service?"
"Scads of 'em," he retorted cheerfully. "I can round you up a couple of
dozen fellows right here at headquarters who would go on a bat and paint
this town a bright vermilion if the new G. M., whoever he is going to
be, would clean out the whole rookery, cousins, nephews, and all."
"I think I'll have to take your name," I told him, fishing out a pencil
and a notebook--just to see what he would do.
"Huh! so you _are_ a spotter, after all, are you? All right, Mr.
Spotter. My name's May, Frederic G. May. And when you want my head, you
can find it just exactly where I told you--in the general super's
office. You're a stranger and you took me in. So long."
Wouldn't that jar you? A man out of the general offices talking that way
about his road and his own boss? I couldn't help seeing how rotten the
thing must be if it smelled that way to the men on its own pay-rolls.
After a while, after I'd loafed through the shops and around the yard
and got a few more whiffs of the decay, I strolled on back to the hotel.
Seen by daylight, Portal City seemed to be a right bright little burg,
with a cut-stone post-office and a new court house built out of pink
lava, and three or four office buildings big enough to be called
sky-scrapers anywhere outside of a real city like Portland or Seattle.
The streets were paved, and on the main one, Nevada Avenue, there was
plenty of business. Also, I tipped off a mining exchange and two pretty
nice-looking club-houses right in sight from the Bullard entrance.
There wasn't much of a crowd in the lobby, and as I didn't see anything
of Mr. Norcross or Mr. Chadwick, I sat down in a corner to wear out some
more time. Though it was now after nine o'clock, there were still a good
many people breakfasting in the café, the entrance to which was only a
few feet away from my corner.
I was wondering a little what had become of the boss--who was generally
the earliest riser on the job--when two men came bulging through the
screen doors of the café, picking their teeth and feeling in their
pockets for cigars. Right on the dot, and in the face of knowing that it
couldn't reasonably be so, I had a feeling that I'd seen those men
before. One of them was short and rather stocky, and his face had a sort
of hard, hungry look; and the other was big and barrel-bodied. The short
one was clean-shaven, but the other had a reddish-gray beard clipped
close on his fat jaws and trimmed to a point at the chin.
After they had lighted up they came along and sat down three or four
chairs away from me. They paid no attention to me, but for fear they
might, I tried to look as sleepy as an all-night bell-hop in a busy
hotel.
"The Dunton bunch got together in one of the committee rooms up-stairs a
little after eight o'clock," said the short man, in a low, rasping voice
that went through you like a buzz-saw, and it was evident that he was
merely going on with a talk which had been begun over the
breakfast-table. "Thanks to those infernal blunderers Clanahan sent us
last night, Chadwick was with them."
"I think that was choost so," said the big man, speaking slowly and with
something more than a hint of a German accent. "Beckler was choost what
you call him--a tam blunderer."
Like a flash it came over me that I was "listening in" to a talk between
the same two men who had sat in the auto at Sand Creek Siding and smoked
while they were waiting for the actual kidnappers to return. You can bet
high that I made myself mighty small and unobtrusive.
After a while the big man spoke again.
"What has Uncle Chon Chadwick up his sleeve got, do you think?"
"I don't think--I know!" was the snappy reply. "It's one of two things:
a receivership--which will knock us into a cocked hat because we can't
fool with an officer of the United States court--or a new deal all
around in the management."
"Vich of the two will it be that will come out of that commiddee room
up-stairs?"
"A new management. Dunton can't stand for a receivership, and Chadwick
knows it. Apart from the fact that a court officer would turn up a lot
of side deals that wouldn't look well for the New York crowd if they got
into the newspapers, the securities would be knocked out and the
majority holders--Dunton and his bunch--couldn't unload. Chadwick has
got him by the neck and can dictate his own terms."
"Vich will be?"
"That he will name the man who is to take Shaffer's place as general
manager of the railroad outfit. We might have stood it off for a while,
just as I said yesterday, if we could have kept Chadwick from attending
this meeting."
"But now we don't could stand it off--what then?"
"We'll have to wait and see, and size up the new man when he blows in.
He'll be only human, Henckel. And if we get right down to it we can pull
him over to our side--or make him wish he'd never been born."
The big man got up ponderously and brushed the cigar ashes off of his
bay-window. "You vait and see what comes mit the commiddee-room out. I
go up to the ovvice."
When I was left alone in the row of lobby chairs with the snappy one I
was scared stiff for fear, now that he didn't have anything else to
think of, he'd catch on to the fact that I might have overheard. But
apart from giving me one long stare that made my blood run cold, he
didn't seem to notice me much, and after a little he got up and went to
sit on the other side of the big rotunda where he could watch the
elevators going and coming.
I guess he had lots of patience, for I had to have. It was after eleven
o'clock, and I had been sitting in my corner for two full hours, when I
saw the boss coming down the broad marble stair with Mr. Chadwick. I
don't think the Hatch man saw them, or, if he did, he didn't let on.
Mr. Norcross held up a finger for me, and when I jumped up he gave me a
sheet of paper; a Pioneer Short Line president's letter-head with a few
lines written on it with a pen and a sort of crazy-looking signature
under them.
"Take that to the _Mountaineer_ job office and have five hundred of them
printed," was the boss's order. "Tell the foreman it's a rush job and we
want it to-day. Then make a copy and take it to Mr. Cantrell, the
editor, and ask him to run it in to-morrow's paper as an item of news,
if he feels like it. When you are through, come down to Mr. Chadwick's
car."
Since the thing was going to be published, and I was going to make a
copy of it, I didn't scruple to read it as I hurried out to begin a hunt
for the _Mountaineer_ office. It was the printer's copy for an official
circular, dated at Portal City and addressed to all officers and
employees of the Pioneer Short Line. It read:
"Effective at once, Mr. Graham Norcross is appointed General
Manager of the Pioneer Short Line System, with headquarters at
Portal City, and his orders will be respected accordingly.
"BRECKENRIDGE DUNTON,
"_President_."
We had got our jolt, all right; and leaving the ladder and the Friday
start out of the question, I grinned and told myself that the one other
thing that counted for most was the fact that Mrs. Sheila Macrae was a
widow.
VI
The _Alexa_ Goes East
I chased like the dickens on the printing job, because, apart from
wanting to absorb all the dope I could as I went along on the new job, I
knew I would be needed every minute right at Mr. Norcross's elbow, now
that the actual work was beginning.
He and Mr. Chadwick were deep in reports and figures and plans of all
sorts when I got back to the _Alexa_. Luncheon was served in the car,
and they kept the business talk going like a house afire while they were
eating, the hurry being that Mr. Chadwick wanted to start back for
Chicago the minute he could find out if our connecting line east would
run him special.
I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was
soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could
go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a
gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock
a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the
private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick
were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.
"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he
said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand,
not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the
policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has
promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."
"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the
first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors'
meeting in the Bullard.
"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick
and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had
to swallow you whole or take the consequences--and the consequences were
going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled
the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have
some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time
notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."
The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when
he has got hold of the gist of a thing.
"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that
the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and
relatives. I'll have to clean house."
"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to
draw from?"
"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully.
"There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college,
and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store
his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies--I'll try
it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around
traffic man this side of the Missouri--only his present employers don't
seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place
at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good
lawyer, Uncle John."
"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young
fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in
Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local
graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it,
but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called
Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its
subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries,
the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber
yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."
The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the
railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."
A road engine was backing down the spur to take the _Alexa_ in tow for
the eastward run, and what was said had to be said in a hurry.
"Dig it out," barked the wheat king. "If you find that we are in on it,
it's your privilege to cut loose. The two men who will give you the most
trouble are right here in Portal City: Hatch, the president of Red
Tower, and Henckel, its vice-president. They say either of them would
commit murder for a ten-dollar bill, and they stand in with Pete
Clanahan, the city boss, and his gang of political thugs. That's all,
Graham; all but one thing. Write me after you've climbed into the saddle
and have found out just what you're in for. If you say you can make it
go, I'll back you, if it takes half of next year's wheat crop."
A minute or so later the boss and I stood out in the yard and watched
the _Alexa_ roll away toward the sunrise country, and perhaps we both
felt a little bit lonesome, just for a second or two. At least, I know I
did. But when the special had become a black smudge of coal smoke in the
distance, Mr. Norcross turned on me with the grim little smile that
goes with his fighting mood.
"You are private secretary to the new general manager of the Pioneer
Short Line, Jimmie, and your salary begins to-day," he said, briskly.
"Now let's go up to the hotel and get our fighting clothes on."
VII
"Heads Off, Gentlemen!"
Gosh all Friday--say! but the next few days did see a tear-up to beat
the band on the old Short Line! With the printing of his appointment
circular, Mr. Norcross took the offices in the headquarters building
lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way
the heads went into the basket. One by one he called the Duntonites in;
the traffic manager, the general superintendent, the roadmaster, the
master-mechanic--clear on down to the round-house foreman and the
division heads.
Some few of them were allowed to take the oath of allegiance and stay,
but the place-fillers and pay-roll parasites, the cousins and the
nephews and the brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk
under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van
Burgh, great-great-grandnephew of some Revolutionary big-wig and our
figurehead general superintendent, was the first man called in, and Mr.
Norcross shot him dead in half a minute.
"Mr. Van Burgh, what railroad experience did you have before you came to
the P. S. L.?" was the first bullet.
Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired
eyes, looked at his finger-nails.
"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left
Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.
"And how long have you been here?"
"I came out lawst October."
"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't
learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the
Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be
accepted. Good-day."
Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.
"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was
appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."
"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his
desk. And that was all there was to it.
Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack,
the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery
man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr.
Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.
"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the
house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four
of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a
lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't
all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which
to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."
"That's me," said Kirgan, who knew the boss up one side and down the
other. "You give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And
with that he went across the yard and took hold, before he had even
hunted up a place to sleep in.
Mr. Van Britt was the next man to show up. He was fine; a square-built,
stocky little gentleman who looked as if he's always had the world by
the ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men
went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped,
and while his jaw looked as if he could bite a nail in two, he had a
pair of twinkling, good-natured eyes that sort of took the edge off the
hard jaw.
"Well, I'm here," he said, dropping into a chair and sitting with his
legs wide apart. And then, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there:
"Graham, what the devil have you got against me, that you should drag me
out here on the edge of nowhere and make me go to work for a living?"
The boss just grinned at him and said: "It's for the good of your soul,
Upton. You've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the
corridor and your chair is empty and waiting for you. Your appointment
circular has already been mailed out."
Mr. Hornack was the last of the new office staff to fall in, though he
didn't have nearly as far to come as some of the others. He was
red-headed and wore glasses. They used to say of him on the Overland
Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then
hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that
he had a sort of meat-axe temper to go with his red hair. But they also
used to say that he could make business grow where none ever grew
before, and that's what a traffic man lives for.
When the new staff was made up, Mr. Norcross gathered all the department
heads together in his office and laid down the lines of the new policy.
He put it in just eight words: "Clean house, and make friends for the
company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had
found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed.
It was a large order, and both Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack said as
much, but the boss said it had to go just that way. There would be a
little money for betterments, but it must be spent as if every dollar
were ten.
Naturally, the big turn-over brought all sorts of disturbances at the
send-off. Some of the relieved cousins and nephews stayed in town and
jumped in to stir up trouble for the new management. The _Herald_, which
was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there
wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new
appointees. Then the employees got busy and the grievance committees
began to pour in. Mr. Norcross never denied himself to anybody. The
office-door stood wide open and the kickers were welcomed, as you might
say, with open arms.
"You men are going to get the squarest deal you have ever had, and a
still squarer one a little farther along, if you will only stay on the
job and keep your clothes on," was the way the boss went at the
trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for
service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri
River. I want your loyalty; the loyalty of every man in the service.
I'll go further and say that the new management will stand if you and
the other pay-roll men stand by it in good faith, or it will fall if you
don't."
"You'll meet the grievance committees and talk things over with them
when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McClure, the passenger
conductor who was acting as spokesman.
"Sure I will--every time. More than that, I'll take a leaf out of
Colonel Goethal's book and keep open house here in this office every
Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thinks he has a grievance may
come here and state it, and if he has a case, he'll get justice."
Naturally, a few little talks like this, face to face with the men
themselves, soon began to put new life into the rank and file. Mr.
Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from
Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it began to be used in the sense
that most railroad men use the phrase, "The Old Man," in speaking of a
big boss that they like.
This winning of the service _esprit de corps_--if that's the
word--commenced to show results right away. The first time Mr.
Norcross's special went over the line anybody could see with half an eye
that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better
time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place we
actually found a section foreman going along and picking up the spikes
and bolts and fish-plates that the wasters ahead of him had strewn all
along the right-of-way.
There was so much crowded into these first few weeks that I've forgotten
half of it. The work we did, pulling and hauling things into shape, was
a fright, and my end of the job got so big that the boss had to give me
help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd
had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who
had been so disgusted with his job under Van Burgh. Frederic of
Pittsburgh was all right; a little too tonguey, perhaps, but a worker
from away back, and that was what we were looking for.
Out of this frantic hustle to get things started and moving right,
anybody could have pulled a couple of conclusions that stuck up higher
than any of the rest. The boss and Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning
the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on
the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were paying the
freight a solid unit against us, hating us like blazes and entirely
unwilling to believe that any good thing could come out of the Nazareth
of the Pioneer Short Line.
This hatred manifested itself in a million different ways, and all of
them saw-toothed. On that first trip over the line I heard a Lesterburg
banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would never
believe that any measure of reform undertaken by the Dunton management
would be accepted as sincere.
"You talk like an honest man, Mr. Norcross," he said, and he was saying
it right in the boss's own private car, too, mind you, "but this region
has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be
won over now by a little shoulder-patting in the way of better train
schedules and things of that sort. You'll have to dig a good bit deeper,
and that you won't be allowed to do."
The boss just smiled at this, and offered the banker man a cigar--which
he took.
"When the time comes, Mr. Bigelow, I'm going to show you that I can dig
as deep as the next fellow. Where shall I begin?"
The banker laughed. "If you had a spade with a handle a mile long you
might begin on the Red Tower people," he suggested. "But, of course, you
can't do that: your New York people won't let you. There is the real nib
of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will
stick to its own proper business--the carrying of freight and
passengers. What we have is a gigantic holding corporation which fathers
every extortionate side-issue that can pay it a royalty!"
"Excuse me," said the boss, still as pleasant as a basket of chips,
"that may be what you have had in the past; we won't try to go behind
the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on, the
Short Line proposes to be just what you said it should be--a carrier
corporation, pure and simple."
"Do you mean to say that you are going to cut loose from Hatch and
Henckel and their thousand-and-one robber subsidiary companies?"
demanded the banker.
At this the boss stood up and looked the big banker gentleman squarely
in the eye.
"Mr. Bigelow, at the present moment I represent Pioneer Short Line, in
management and in its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you
emphatically that the railroad management has nothing whatever to do
with Red Tower Consolidated or any of its subsidiaries."
"Then you've broken with Hatch?"
"No; simply because there hasn't been anything to break, so far as I am
concerned."
The banker man dropped into the nearest chair.
"But, man alive! you can't stay here if you don't pull with the Hatch
crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipped you off
beforehand and not let you come here to commit suicide!"
After that they went out together; up-town to Mr. Bigelow's bank, I
guess, and as they pushed the corridor door open I heard the banker
say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit
will get you, one way or another, as sure as the devil's a hog. If it
can't break you, it will hire a gang of gunmen--I wouldn't put it an
inch beyond Rufus Hatch; not a single inch."
There it was again; but as he went out the boss was laughing easily and
saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the fear of a fight
was the least of his troubles at the present moment.
VIII
With the Strings Off
As soon as we returned from the inspection trip, the boss pulled off his
coat--figuratively speaking--and rolled up his sleeves. It wasn't his
way to talk much about what he was going to do: he'd jump in and do it
first, and then talk about it afterward--if anybody insisted on knowing
the reason why.
Mr. Van Britt was given swift orders to fill up his engineering staff
and get busy laying new steel, building new bridges and modernizing the
permanent way generally. Mr. Hornack was told to put on an extra office
force to ransack the traffic records and make reports showing the
fairness or unfairness of existing tariffs and rates, and a widespread
invitation was given to shippers to come in and air their
grievances--which you bet they did!
Sandwiched in between, there were long private conferences with Mr.
Ripley, the bright young lawyer Mr. Chadwick had sent us from Chicago,
and with a young fellow named Juneman, an ex-newspaper man who was on
the pay-rolls as "Advertising Manager," but whose real business seemed
to be to keep the Short Line public fully and accurately informed of
everything that most railroad companies try to keep to themselves.
The next innovation that came along was another young Chicago man named
Billoughby, and _his_ title on the pay-roll was "Special Agent." What he
did to earn his salary was the one thing that Juneman didn't publish
broadcast in the newspapers; it was kept so dark that not a line of it
got into the office records, and even I, who was as close to the boss as
anybody in our outfit, never once suspected the true nature of
Billoughby's job until the day he came in to make his final report--and
Mr. Norcross let him make it without sending me out on an errand.
"Well, I think I'm ready to talk Johnson, now," was the way Billoughby
began. "I've been into all the deals and side deals, and I've had it out
with Ripley on the legal points involved. Red Tower is the one outfit
we'll have to kill off and put out of business. Under one name or
another, it is engineering every graft in this country; it is even
backing the fake mining boom at Saw Horse--to which, by the way, this
railroad company is now building a branch line."
Mr. Norcross turned to me:
"Jimmie, make a note to tell Mr. Van Britt to have the work stopped at
once on the Saw Horse branch, and all the equipment brought in." And
then to Billoughby: "Go on."
"The main graft, of course, is in the grain elevators, the fruit
packeries, the coal and lumber yards and the stock yards and handling
corrals. In these public, or _quasi_-public, utilities Red Tower has
everybody else shut out, because the railroad has given them--in fee
simple, it seems--all the yard room, switches, track facilities, and the
like. Wherever local competition has tried to break in, the railroad
company has given it the cold shoulder and it has been either forced out
or frozen out."
"Exactly," said the boss. "Now tell me how far you have gone in the
other field."
"We are pretty well shaped up and are about ready to begin business.
Juneman has done splendid work, and so has Ripley. Public sentiment is
still incredulous, of course. It's mighty hard to make people believe
that we are in earnest; that we have actually gone over to their side in
the fight. They're all from Missouri, and they want to be shown."
"Naturally," said Mr. Norcross.
"We have succeeded, in a measure, though the opposition has been keeping
up a steady bombardment. Hatch and his people haven't been idle. They
have a strong commercial organization and a stout pull with the machine
element, or rather the gang element, in politics. They own or control a
dozen or more prominent newspapers in the State, and, as you know, they
are making an open fight on you and your management through these
papers. The net result so far has been merely to keep the people stirred
up and doubtful. They know they can't trust Hatch and his crowd, and
they're afraid they can't trust you. They say that the railroad has
never played fair--and I guess it hasn't, in the past."
"Not within a thousand miles," was the boss's curt comment. "But go on
with your story."
"We pulled the new deal off yesterday, simultaneously in eleven of the
principal towns along the line. Meetings of the bankers and local
capitalists were held, and we had a man at each one of them to explain
our plan and to pledge the backing of the railroad. Notwithstanding all
the doubt and dust that's been kicked up by the Hatch people, it went
like wild-fire."
"With money?" queried the boss.
"Yes; with real money. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse was launched, as
you might say, on the spot, and enough capital was subscribed to make it
a going concern. Of course, there were some doubters, and some few
greedy ones. The doubters wanted to know how much of the stock was going
to be held by officials of the railroad company, and it was pretty hard
to convince them that no Short Line official would be allowed to
participate, directly or indirectly."
"And the greedy ones?"
"They kicked on that part of the plan which provides for the local
apportionment of the stock to cover the local needs of each town only;
they wanted more than their share. Also, they protested against the
fixed dividend scheme; they didn't see why the new company shouldn't be
allowed to cut a melon now and then if it should be fortunate enough to
grow one."
Mr. Norcross smiled. "That is precisely what the Hatch people have been
doing, all along, and it is the chief grievance of these same people who
now want a chance to outbid their neighbors. The lease condition was
fully explained to them, wasn't it?"
"Oh, yes; Ripley saw to that, and copies of the lease were in the
exhibits. The new company is to have railroad ground to build on, and
ample track facilities in perpetuity, conditioned strictly upon the
limited dividend. If the dividend is increased, the leases terminate
automatically."
The boss drew a long breath.
"You've done well, and better than well, Billoughby," he said. "Now we
are ready to fire the blast. How was the proposal to take over the Red
Tower properties at a fair valuation received?"
"There was some opposition. Lesterburg, and three of the other larger
towns, want to build their own plants. They are bitter enough to want to
smash the big monopoly, root and branch. But they agreed to abide by a
majority vote of the stock on that point, and my wire reports this
morning say that a lump-sum offer will be made for the Red Tower plants
to-day."
Mr. Norcross sat back in his chair and blew a cloud of cigar smoke
toward the ceiling.
"Hatch won't sell," he predicted. "He'll be up here before night with
blood in his eye. I'm rather glad it has come down to the actual give
and take. I don't play the waiting game very successfully, Billoughby.
Keep in touch, and keep me in touch. And tell Ripley to keep on pushing
on the reins. The sooner we get at it, the sooner it will be over."
After Billoughby had gone, Mr. Norcross dictated a swift bunch of
letters and telegrams and had me turn my shorthand notes over to Fred
May for transcription. With the desk cleaned up he came at me on a
little matter that had been allowed to sleep ever since the day, now
some time back, when I had given him Mrs. Sheila's hint about the
identity of the two men who had sat and smoked in the auto that Sunday
night at Sand Creek Siding, and about the talk between the same two that
I had overheard the following morning.
"We are going to have sharp trouble with a gentleman by the name of
Hatch before very long, Jimmie," was the way he began. "I don't want to
hit him below the belt, if I can help it; but on the other hand, it's
just as well to be able to give the punch if it is needed. You remember
what you told me about that Monday morning talk between Hatch and
Henckel in the Bullard lobby. Would you be willing to go into court as a
witness and swear to what you heard?"
"Sure I would," I said.
"All right. I may have to pull that little incident on Mr. Hatch before
I get through with him. The train hold-up was a criminal act, and you
are the witness who can convict the pair of them. Of course, we'll leave
Mrs. Macrae and the little girl entirely out of it. Nobody knows that
they were there with us, and nobody need know."
I agreed to that, and this mention of Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann makes
me remember that I've been leaving them out pretty severely for a good
long while. They weren't left out in reality-not by a jugful. In spite
of all the rush and hustle, the boss had found time to get acquainted
with Major Basil Kendrick and had been made at home in the transplanted
Kentucky mansion in the northern suburb. I'd been there too, sometimes
to carry a box of flowers when the boss was suddenly called out of
town, and some other evenings when I had to go and hunt him up to give
him a bunch of telegrams. Of course, I didn't play the butt-in; I didn't
have to. Maisie Ann usually looked out for me, and when she found out
that I liked pumpkin pie, made Kentucky fashion, we used to spend most
of those errand-running evenings together in the pantry.
But to get back on the firing line. I wasn't around when Mr. Norcross
had his "declaration of war" talk with Hatch. Mr. Norcross, being pretty
sure he wasn't going to have that evening off, had sent me out to
"Kenwood" with a note and a box of roses, and when I got back to the
office about eight o'clock, Hatch was just going away. I met him on the
stair.
The boss was sitting back in his big swing chair, smoking, when I broke
in. He looked as if he'd been mixing it up good and plenty with Mr.
Rufus Hatch--and enjoying it.
"We've got 'em going, Jimmie," he chuckled; and he said it without
asking me how I had found Mrs. Sheila, or how she was looking, or
anything.
I told him I had met Mr. Hatch on the stair going down.
"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" he asked.
"Not a word."
"I had to pull that Sand Creek business on him, and I'm rather sorry,"
he went on. "He and his people are going to fight the new company to a
finish, and he merely came up here to tell me so--and to add that I
might as well resign first as last, because, in the end, he'd get my
goat. When I laughed at him he got abusive. He's an ugly beggar,
Jimmie."
"That's what everybody says of him."
"It's true. He and his crowd have plenty of money--stolen money, a good
deal of it--and they stand in with every political boss and gangster in
the State. There is only one way to handle such a man, and that is
without gloves. I told him we had the goods on him in the matter of Mr.
Chadwick's kidnapping adventure. At first he said I couldn't prove it.
Then he broke out cursing and let your name slip. I hadn't mentioned you
at all, and so he gave himself away. He knows who you are, and he
remembered that you had overheard his talk with Henckel in the Bullard
lobby."
I heard what he was saying, but I didn't really sense it because my head
was ram jam full of a thing that was so pitiful that it had kept me
swallowing hard all the way back from Major Kendrick's. It was this way.
When I had jiggled the bell out at the house it was Maisie Ann who let
me in and took the box of flowers and the boss's note. She told me that
Aunt Mandy, the cook, hadn't made any pie that day, so we sat in the
dimly lighted hall and talked for a few minutes.
One thing she told me was that Mrs. Sheila had company and the name of
it was Mr. Van Britt. That wasn't strictly news because I had known that
Mr. Van Britt was dividing time pretty evenly with the boss in the Major
Kendrick house visits. That wasn't anything to be scared up about. I
knew that all Mr. Norcross asked, or would need, would be a fair field
and no favor. But my chunky little girl didn't stop at that.
"I think we can let Mr. Van Britt take care of himself," she said. "He
has known Cousin Sheila for a long time, and I guess they are only just
good friends. But there is something you ought to know, Jimmie--for Mr.
Norcross's sake. He has been sending lots of flowers and things, and
Cousin Sheila has been taking them because--well, I guess it's just
because she doesn't know how not to take them."
"Go on," I said, but my mouth had suddenly grown dry.
"Such things--flowers, you know--don't mean anything in New York, where
we've been living. Men send them to their women friends just as they
pass their cigar-cases around among their men friends. But I'm afraid
it's different with Mr. Norcross."
"It is different," I said.
Then she told me the thing that made me swell up and want to burst.
"It mustn't be different, Jimmie. Cousin Sheila's married, you know."
"I know she has been married," I corrected; and then she gave me the
sure-enough knock-out.
"She is married now, and her husband is still living."
For a little while I couldn't do anything but gape like a chicken with
the pip. It was simply fierce! I knew, as well as I knew anything, that
the boss was gone on Mrs. Sheila; that he had fallen in love, first with
the back of her neck and then with her pretty face and then with all of
her; and that the one big reason why he had let Mr. Chadwick persuade
him to stay in Portal City was the fact that he had wanted to be near
her and to show her how he could make a perfectly good spoon out of the
spoiled horn of the Pioneer Short Line.
When I began to get my grip back a little I was right warm under the
collar.
"She oughtn't to be going around telling people she is a widow!" I
blurted out.
"She doesn't," was the calm reply. "People just take it for granted, and
it saves a lot of talk and explanations that it wouldn't be pleasant to
have to make. They've separated, you know--years ago, and Cousin Sheila
has taken her mother's maiden name, Macrae. If we were going to live
here always it would be different. But we are only visiting Cousin
Basil, or I suppose we are, though we've been here now for nearly a
year."
There wasn't much more to be said, and pretty soon I had staggered off
with my load and gone back to the office. And this was why I couldn't
get very deep into the Hatch business with Mr. Norcross when he told me
what he had been obliged to do about the Sand Creek hold-up.
He didn't say anything further about it, except to tell me to be careful
and not let any of the Hatch people tangle me up so that my evidence, if
I should have to give it, would be made to look like a faked-up story;
and a little before nine o'clock Mr. Ripley dropped in and he and the
boss went up-town together.
I might have gone, too. Fred May had got through and gone home, and
there was nothing much that I could do beyond filing a few letters and
tidying up a bit around my own desk. But I couldn't make up my mind
either to work or to go to bed. I wanted a chance to think over the
horrible thing Maisie Ann had told me; time to cook up some scheme by
which the boss could be let down easy.
If he had been like other men it wouldn't have been so hard. But I had a
feeling that he had gone into this love business just as he did into
everything--neck or nothing--burning his bridges behind him, and having
no notion of ever turning back. I had once heard our Oregon Midland
president, Mr. Lepaige, say that it was not good for a man always to
succeed; never to be beaten; that without a setback, now and then, a man
never learned how to bend without breaking. The boss had never been
beaten, and Mr. Lepaige was talking about him when he said this. What
was it going to do to him when he learned the truth about Mrs. Sheila?
On top of this came the still harder knock when I saw that it was up to
me to tell him. I remembered all the stories I'd ever heard about how
the most cold-blooded surgeon that ever lived wouldn't trust himself to
stick a knife into a member of his own family, and I knew now just how
the surgeon felt about it. It was up to me to whet my old Barlow and
stick it into the boss, clear up to the handle.
While I was still sweating under the big load Maisie Ann had dumped upon
me, the night despatcher's boy came in with a message. It was from Mr.
Chadwick, and I read it with my eyes bugging out. This is what it said:
"To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
"Portal City.
"P. S. L. Common dropped to thirty-four to-day, and banks lending
on short time notes for betterment fund are getting nervous. Wire
from New York says bondholders are stirring and talking
receivership. General opinion in financial circles leans to idea
that new policy is foregone failure. Are you still sure you can
make it win?
"CHADWICK."
Right on the heels of this, and before I could get my breath, in came
the boy again with another telegram. It was a hot wire from President
Dunton, one of a series that he had been shooting in ever since Mr.
Norcross had taken hold and begun firing the cousins and nephews.
"To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
"Portal City. RUSH.
"See stock quotations for to-day. Your policy is a failure. Am
advised you are now fighting Red Tower. Stop it immediately and
assure Mr. Hatch that we are friendly, as we have always been. If
something cannot be done to lift securities to better figure, your
resignation will be in order.
"DUNTON."
They say that misfortunes never come singly. Here were two new griefs
hurling themselves in over the wires all in the same quarter-hour,
besides the one I had up my sleeve. But there was no use dallying. It
was up to me to find the boss as quickly as I could and have the
three-cornered surgical operation over with. I knew the telegrams
wouldn't kill him--or I thought they wouldn't. I thought they'd probably
make him take a fresh strangle hold on things and be fired--if he had to
be fired--fighting it out grimly on his own line. But I wasn't so sure
about the Mrs. Sheila business. That was a horse of another color.
I had just reached for my hat and was getting ready to snap the
electrics off when I heard footsteps in the outer office. At first I
thought it was the despatcher's boy coming with another wire, but when I
looked up, a stocky, hard-faced man in a derby hat and a short overcoat
was standing in the doorway and scowling across at me.
It was Mr. Rufus Hatch, and I had a notion that the hot end of his black
cigar glared at me like a baleful red eye when he came in and sat down.
IX
And Satan Came Also
"I saw your office lights from the street," was the way the Red Tower
president began on me, and his voice took me straight back to the Oregon
woods and a lumber camp where the saw-filers were at work. "Where is Mr.
Norcross?"
I told him that Mr. Norcross was up-town, and that I didn't suppose he
would come back to the office again that night, now that it was so late.
Instead of going away and giving it up, he sat right still, boring me
with his little gray eyes and shifting the black cigar from one corner
of his mouth to the other.
"My name is Hatch, of the Red Tower Company," he grated, after a minute
or two. "You're the one they call Dodds, aren't you?"
I admitted it, and he went on.
"Norcross brought you here with him from the West, didn't he?"
I nodded and wondered what was coming next. When it did come it nearly
bowled me over.
"What pay are you getting here?"
It was on the tip of my tongue to cuss him out right there and then and
tell him it was none of his business. But the second thought (which
isn't always as good as it's said to be) whispered to me to lead him on
and see how far he would go. So I told him the figures of my pay check.
"I'm needing another shorthand man, and I can afford to pay a good bit
more than that," he growled. "They tell me you are well up at the top in
your trade. Are you open to an offer?"
I let him have it straight then. "Not from you," I said.
"And why not from me?"
Here was where I made my first bad break. All of a sudden I got so angry
at the thought that he was actually trying to buy me that I couldn't see
anything but red, and I blurted out, "Because I don't hire out to work
for any strong-arm outfit--not if I know it!"
For a little while he sat blinking at me from under his bushy eyebrows,
and his hard mouth was drawn into a straight line with a mean little
wrinkle coming and going at the corners of it.
When he got ready to speak again he said, "You're only a boy. You want
to get on in the world, don't you?"
"Supposing I do: what then?" I snapped.
"I'm offering you a good chance: the best you ever had. You don't owe
Norcross anything more than your job, do you?"
"Maybe not."
"That's better. Put on your hat and come along with me. I want to show
you what I can do for you in a better field than railroading ever was,
or ever will be. It'll pay you--" and he named a figure that very nearly
made me fall dead out of my chair.
Of course, it was all plain enough. The boss had him on the hip with
that kidnapping business, with me for a witness. And he was trying to
fix the witness. It's funny, but the only thing I thought of, just then,
was the necessity of covering up the part that Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
Ann had had in the hold-up affair that he was so anxious to bury and put
out of sight.
"I guess we needn't beat about the bushes any longer, Mr. Hatch," I
said, bracing up to him. "I haven't told the sheriff, or anybody but Mr.
Norcross, what I know about a certain little train hold-up that happened
a few weeks ago down at Sand Creek Siding; but that isn't saying that
I'm not going to."
At this he flung the stump of the black cigar out of the window, found
another in his pocket, and lighted it. If I had had the sense of a field
mouse, I might have known that I was no match for such a man; but I
lacked the sense--lacked it good and hard.
"You're like your boss," he said shortly. "You'd go a long distance out
of your way to make an enemy when there is no need of it. That hold-up
business was a joke, from start to finish. I don't know how you and
Norcross came to get in on it; the joke was meant to be on John
Chadwick. The night before, at a little dinner we were giving him at the
railroad club, he said there never was a railroad hold-up that couldn't
have been stood off. A few of us got together afterward and put up a job
on him; sent him over to Strathcona and arranged to have him held up on
the way back."
Again I lost my grip on all the common, every-day sanities. My best
play--the only reasonable play--was to let him go away thinking that he
had made me swallow the joke story whole. But I didn't have sense enough
to do that.
"Mr. Chadwick didn't take it as a joke!" I retorted.
"I know he didn't; and that's why we're all anxious now to dig a hole
and bury the thing decently. Perhaps we had all been taking a drop too
much at the club dinner that night."
At that I swelled up man-size and kicked the whole kettle of fat into
the fire.
"Of course, it was a joke!" I ripped out. "And your coming here to-night
to try to hire me away from Mr. Norcross is another. The woods are full
of good shorthand men, Mr. Hatch, but for the present I think I shall
stay right where I am--where a court subpoena can find me when I'm
wanted."
"That's all nonsense, and you know it--if you're not too much of a kid
to know anything," he snapped, shooting out his heavy jaw at me. "I
merely wanted to give you a chance to get rid of the railroad collar, if
you felt like it. And there'll be no court and no subpoena. The
poorest jack-leg lawyer we've got in Portal City would make a fool of
you in five minutes on the witness-stand. Nevertheless, my offer holds
good. I like a fighting man; and you've got nerve. Take a night and
sleep on it. Maybe you'll think differently in the morning."
Here was another chance for me to get off with a whole skin, but by this
time I was completely lost to any sober weighing and measuring of the
possible consequences. Leaning across the desk end I gave him a final
shot, just as he was getting up to go.
"Listen, Mr. Hatch," I said. "You haven't fooled me for a single minute.
Your guess is right; I heard every word that passed between you and Mr.
Henckel that Monday morning in the Bullard lobby. As I say, I haven't
told anybody yet but Mr. Norcross; but if you go to making trouble for
him and the railroad company, I'll go into court and swear to what I
know!"
He was half-way out of the door when I got through, and he never made
any sign that he heard what I said. After he was gone I began to sense,
just a little, how big a fool I had made of myself. But I was still mad
clear through at the idea that he had taken me for the other kind of a
fool--the kind that wouldn't know enough to be sure that the president
of a big corporation wouldn't get down to tampering with a common clerk
unless there was some big thing to be stood off by it.
Stewing and sizzling over it, I puttered around with the papers on my
desk for quite a little while before I remembered the two telegrams, and
the fact that I'd have to go and stick the three-bladed knife into Mr.
Norcross. When I did remember, I shoved the messages into my pocket,
flicked off the lights and started to go up-town and hunt for the boss.
After closing the outer door of the office I don't recall anything
particular except that I felt my way down the headquarters stair in the
dark and groped across the lower hall to the outside door that served
for the stair-case entrance from the street. When I had felt around and
found the brass knob, something happened, I didn't know just what. In
the tiny little fraction of a second that I had left, as you might say,
between the hearse and the grave, I had a vague notion that the door was
falling over on me and mashing me flat; and after that, everything went
blank.
X
The Big Smash
When I came to life out of what seemed like an endless succession of bad
dreams it was broad daylight and the sun was shining brightly through
some filmy kind of curtain stuff in a big window that looked out toward
the west. I was in bed, the room was strange, and my right hand was
wrapped up in a lot of cotton and bandaged.
I hadn't more than made the first restless move before I saw a sort of
pie-faced woman in a nurse's cap and apron start to get up from where
she was sitting by the window. Before she could come over to the bed,
somebody opened a door and tip-toed in ahead of nursey. I had to blink
hard two or three times before I could really make up my mind that the
tip-toer was Maisie Ann. She looked as if she might be the nurse's
understudy. She had a nifty little lace cap on her thick mop of hair,
and I guess her apron was meant to be nursey too, only it was frilled
and tucked to a fare-you-well.
I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it before, but she was always
an awfully wholesome, jolly little girl, with a laugh so near the
surface that it never took much of anything to make it come rippling up
through. But now she was as sober as a deacon--and about fourteen times
as pretty as I had ever seen her before.
"You poor, poor boy!" she cooed, patting my pillow just like my
grandmother used to when I was a little kid and had the mumps or the
measles. "Are you still roaming around in the Oregon woods?"
That brought my dream, or one of them, back; the one about wandering
around in a forest of Douglas fir and having to jump and dodge to keep
the big trees from falling on me and smashing me.
"No more woods for mine," I said, sort of feebly. And then: "Where am
I?"
"You are in bed in the spare room at Cousin Basil's. They wanted to take
you to the railroad hospital that night, but when they telephoned up
here to try to find Mr. Norcross, Cousin Basil went right down and
brought you home with him in the ambulance."
"'That night,' you say?" I parroted. "It was last night that the door
fell on me, wasn't it?"
"I don't know anything about a door, but the night that they found you
all burnt and crippled, lying at the foot of your office stairs, was
three days ago. You have been out of your head nearly all the time ever
since."
"Burnt and crippled? What happened to me, Maisie Ann?"
"Nobody knows; not even the doctors. We've been hoping that some day
you'd be able to tell us. Can't you tell me now, Jimmie?"
I told her all there was to tell, mumbling around among the words the
best I could. When she saw how hard it was for me to talk, I could have
sworn that I saw tears in the big, wide-open eyes, but maybe I didn't.
Then she told me how the headquarters watchman had found me about
midnight; with my right hand scorched black and the rest of me
apparently dead and ready to be buried. The ambulance surgeon had
insisted, and was still insisting, that I had been handling a live wire;
but there were no wires at all in the lower hall, and nothing stronger
than an incandescent light current in the entire office building.
"And you say I've been here hanging on by my eyelashes for three days?
What has been going on in all that time, Maisie Ann? Hasn't anybody been
here to see me?"
She gave a little nod. "Everybody, nearly. Mr. Van Britt has been up
every day, and sometimes twice a day. He has been awfully anxious for
you to come alive."
"But Mr. Norcross?" I queried. "Hasn't he been up?"
She shook her head and turned her face away, and she was looking
straight out of the window at the setting sun when she asked, "When was
the last time you saw Mr. Norcross, Jimmie?"
I choked a little over a big scare that seemed to rush up out of the
bed-clothes to smother me. But I made out to answer her question,
telling her how Mr. Norcross had left the office maybe half an hour or
so before I did, that night, going up-town with Mr. Ripley. Then I asked
her why she wanted to know.
"Because nobody has seen him since a little later that same night," she
said, saying it very softly and without turning her head. And then: "Mr.
Van Britt found a letter from Mr. Norcross on his desk the next morning.
It was just a little typewritten note, on a Hotel Bullard letter sheet,
saying that he had made up his mind that the Pioneer Short Line wasn't
worth fighting for, and that he was resigning and taking the midnight
train for the East."
I sat straight up in bed; I should have had to do it if both arms had
been burnt to a crisp clear to the shoulders.
"Resigned?--gave up and ran away? I don't believe that for a single
minute, Maisie Ann!" I burst out.
She was shaking her head again, still without turning her face so that I
could see it.
"I--I'm afraid it's all true, Jimmie. There were two telegrams that came
to Mr. Norcross the night he went away; one from Mr. Chadwick and the
other from Mr. Dunton. I heard Mr. Van Britt telling Cousin Sheila what
the messages were. He'd seen the copies of them that they keep in the
telegraph office."
It was on my tongue's end to say that Mr. Norcross never had seen those
two telegrams, because I had them in my pocket and was on my way to
deliver them when I got shot; but I didn't. Instead, I said: "And you
think that was why Mr. Norcross threw up his hands and ran away?"
"No; I don't think anything of the sort. I know what it was, and you
know what it was," and at that she turned around and pushed me gently
down among the pillows.
"What was it?" I whispered, more than half afraid that I was going to
hear a confirmation of my own breath-taking conviction. And I heard it,
all right.
"It was what I was telling you about, that same evening, you
remember--down in the hall when you brought the flowers for Cousin
Sheila? You told him what I told you, didn't you?"
"No; I didn't have a chance--not any real chance."
"Then somebody else told him, Jimmie; and that is the reason he has
resigned and gone away. Mr. Van Britt thinks it was on account of the
two messages from Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Dunton, and that is why he wants
to talk to you about it. But you know, and I know, Jimmie, dear; and for
Cousin Sheila's sake and Mr. Norcross's, we must never lisp it to a
human soul. A new general manager has been appointed, and he is on his
way out here from New York. Everything has gone to pieces on the
railroad, and all of Mr. Norcross's friends are getting ready to resign.
Isn't it perfectly heart-breaking?"
It was; it was so heart-breaking that I just gasped once or twice and
went off the hooks again, with Maisie Ann's frightened little shriek
ringing in my ears as she tried to hold me back from slipping over the
edge.
XI
What Every Man Knows
I wasn't gone very long on this second excursion into the woozy-woozies,
though it was night-time, and the shaded electric light was turned on
when I opened my eyes and found Mrs. Sheila sitting by the bedside. The
pie-faced nurse was gone; or at least I didn't see her anywhere; and the
change in Mrs. Sheila sort of made me gasp. She wasn't any less pretty
as she sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, but she was
different; sober, and with the laugh all gone out of the big gray eyes,
and a look in them as if she had suddenly become so wise that nobody
could ever fool her.
"You are feeling better now?" she asked, when she found me staring at
her.
I told her I guessed I was, but that my hand hurt me some.
"You have had a great shock of some kind--besides the burn, Jimmie," she
rejoined, folding up the bed covers so that the bandaged hand would rest
easier. "The doctors are all puzzled. Does your head feel quite clear
now--so that you can think?"
"It feels as if I had a crazy clock in it," I said. "But the thinking
part is all right. Have you heard anything from Mr. Norcross yet?"
"Not a word. It is all very mysterious and perplexing. We have been
hoping that you could tell us something when you should recover
sufficiently to talk. Can't you, Jimmie?"
Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the
hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't
do. So I just said:
"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office
some little time before I did--with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they
were going."
"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in
the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his
rooms."
Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but
if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of
me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who
always knew everything that was going on.
"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening,
wasn't there?" she asked.
"Hatch had some trouble--yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I
replied.
"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I
could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the
evening, while I was away.
"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.
"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.
She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken
idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross
has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say
that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he
should do as he has done--or at least as everybody believes he has
done."
I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would
clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell
her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as
right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let
her down easy.
"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after
Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that
the telegrams hadn't been delivered--that they were probably in the
pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to
make any man throw up his hands and quit, _I_ should say."
"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not
telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of
us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out
and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing
anything like that before?"
I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very
thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang
on to my sham belief that it was the thing he _had_ done: either that,
or tell her the truth.
"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr.
Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out,
and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"
"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his
friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it
out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"
There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said
that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard.
I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just
why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out,
but that was out of the question.
"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said;
not knowing what else to say.
"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so
that you can help me trace it out."
"Me?" I queried.
"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr.
Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr.
Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day
after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at
some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him,
and that is why they don't hear anything from him."
"What do _you_ think?" I asked.
She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of
frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to
hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."
"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."
"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs
with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as
you were able to talk. May I send him up?"
Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and
only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had
that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and
polish a man till he shines.
"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again.
Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"
I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows
of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put
me on the question rack. I gave him all I had--except that thing about
the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give
him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:
"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this
new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie.
I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys
together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."
"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.
"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me
a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to
stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general
manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head
of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse organization were scared plumb
out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the
newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had
expected--that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a
good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.
"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.
He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and
neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."
"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"
"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of
Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the
telegraph."
"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I
ventured.
"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any
trace of him."
"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."
"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an
envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would
say.
"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us,
Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a
little more light on this damnable blow-up?"
I hadn't--outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about--and I told him
so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his
own mind.
"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm
new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd
is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that
there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when
Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"
"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."
"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"
"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats--in a business
way."
"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"
I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.
"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well
resign one time as another?"
"Something like that, yes."
"Can you add anything more?"
I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about
the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't
want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was
beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and
unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and
quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband
living. So I just said:
"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while
longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.
It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them
time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together.
Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I
had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the
wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.
After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been
trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of
what I knew--or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that
there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to
give the possibility standing-room.
In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a
sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my
lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley
that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed.
That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time
and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs.
Sheila?
Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing
somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it
was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out
early in the morning and get busy.
XII
With the Wheels Trigged
I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr.
Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the
office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after
telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand,
she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.
"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the
others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away
because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you
know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand
by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."
It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be
the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering
after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside
out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible;
she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting
ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling
him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I
saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled
me over to her side again.
So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her
posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of
kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's
auto.
Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still
in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains
were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was
still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole
business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for
the roof to fall in--as I guess it was.
Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had
moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand
work. They wouldn't let me do anything much--I couldn't do much with my
right arm in a sling--so I had a chance to hang around and size up the
situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me
that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr.
Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to
be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the
public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of
callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead
anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive
programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked
as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.
Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off
a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and
thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these
private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds
of all four of them about the boss's drop-out--as to whether it was
voluntary or not.
Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no
"company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man
named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him
and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of
Mr. Norcross's disappearance.
Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so
far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were
still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the
night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the
boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his
rooms.
Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast
Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next
witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr.
Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly
have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that,
the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big
and too well known by this time to the rank and file.
Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the
Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad
office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had
asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van
Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition
that had been made to him the day before--the offer of the new Citizens'
Storage & Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments
and plants.
Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch
had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had
gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new
company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said
that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk
straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors
together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to
Citizens' Storage & Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.
This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a
new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and
Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition;
was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first
been to fight everything in sight.
By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say,
just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and
had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and
Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory,
and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were
with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was
quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two
days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which
was proof positive, you'd say, that the boss _had_ resigned and had so
notified the New York office.
When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we
went to the Bullard café. It was pretty rich for our blood at two
dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt
reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little
threshing on our own account--and got a lot more chaff and no grain.
Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't
seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in
mind all the time--the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss
after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed
him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.
By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had
at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that.
The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the
headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb--as I knew. It had
burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I
went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with
the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had
explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light
current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.
The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of
the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked
and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss
coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the
afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr.
Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It
just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.
Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking
train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour
or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of
the _Mountaineer_, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he
found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the
private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good
cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.
I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to
be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him
that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of
you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After
the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then
switched over to the big puzzle.
"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.
I told him there wasn't.
"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie?--or do you?"
"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.
"Branderby"--he was one of the _Mountaineer_ reporters--"tells me that
you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"
"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and
I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."
The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and
he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall.
When he got good and ready, he began again.
"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you
need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if
there ever were such a miracle."
"You think it is a case for a detective?"
"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If
I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help
that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."
Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was,
I jumped into the hole pretty quick.
"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.
"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus
Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are
hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From
the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been
published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during
the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a
thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also
by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you
suspicious--very suspicious, Jimmie."
"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to
think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross--reason in
fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to
sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in
a day."
The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old
saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the
Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr.
Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job--and I shouldn't let much
grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at the
_Mountaineer_ office if I can help." And with that he went away.
It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled
across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an
old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job
with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything
special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I
loafed in on Kirgan.
I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up
anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered
into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance
by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot
eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers
used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.
Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have
to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother.
As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or
other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through
he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen
a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.
"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the
general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair
and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night
that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good
Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur
below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman
went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."
XIII
The Lost 1016
When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all
sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the
boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left
standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves
together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't
wedge them apart.
"An engine--even a little old Atlantic-type--is a pretty big thing to
lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.
Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.
"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!"
he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the
headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been
advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That
engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for
four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every
hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's
gone!"
"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't
pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported.
And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild
engine over the main line without orders."
"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst
us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."
I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of
the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in
some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to
let go.
"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason
why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had
quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change
his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"
After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it
back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.
"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But
where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody
findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway?
Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was
to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and _go_."
"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the
same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and
the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and
twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross
went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find
_him_!"
Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little
space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best
boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a
clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go
alone he turned on me.
"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its
scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he
demanded.
I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of
things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had
taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking
the wheels of reform.
"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it
ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods
is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the
bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked;
you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to
look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and
turn in and help him."
"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land,
Mart?"
"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the
whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces--as it's doin', right now.
They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if
it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all
up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could
bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you
could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a
that."
"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"
"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I
did, Jimmie, and not think it--and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o'
Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we
belonged to 'em!--orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs,
helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need,
usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."
"You stopped all this?"
"You bet I did--between two days! They've been makin' seventeen
different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the
Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."
What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on
their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if
they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and
Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.
"Say, Jimmie, boy--you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when
you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about
as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose
end."
"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I
asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."
He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy
stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown
and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home.
When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study
it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.
At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map
was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations
and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western
end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get
out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the
shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at
that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.
Tracing the other way--westward--we had a clear track for ten miles to
Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen
engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down.
Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west
of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been
seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and
the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station
shouldn't have been.
"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or
other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be
considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been
running--without orders, we must remember--against the Fast Mail coming
east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere--not officially, at least; if it
had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's
office."
At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the
"meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at
twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making
due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the
missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before
ten-forty-five.
The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta
was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the
opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or
thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time
to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In
other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed,
would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.
When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay
in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the
diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise.
West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around
among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand
Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.
Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing
point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have
been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a
blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand
Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was
nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served
for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would
surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And
they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the
following morning.
Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any
number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail
topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything
about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.
"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by
without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"
The big master-mechanic shook his head.
"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is
part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the
mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in
for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for
their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch
somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut
off."
This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.
"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is
one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that
gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"
"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there
yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of
that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."
You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a
root.
"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just
around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we
can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And
the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the
stolen engine!"
"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or,
leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding,
just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."
Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our
guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles
west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van
Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.
"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the
map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there.
But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."
"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you
and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work
on," I retorted.
I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest
of the way to save my life.
"If there was the least little scrap--a reason even to imagine that Mr.
Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be
different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know
doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to
eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square
meal inside o' your clothes."
We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard,
by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew
shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait
for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop
track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.
This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the
turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing
down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the
step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the
table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a
reformed cow-punch'--with a record for getting out of more tight places
with a heavy train than any other man on the division.
"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy
Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet,
among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost
in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."
"What's that--where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like
the pop of a whip-lash.
"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the
old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the
far end o' that gravel track, cold _and_ dead."
"When did you see her?"
"Just now--comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber
Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin'
more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big
as a house."
"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.
"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into
the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."
Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"
"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."
"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not
to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"
"I ain't kickin' none."
"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and
report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go
down along and get that runaway."
This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the
gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on
the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had
been opened some time after the map had been made.
When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his
fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for
town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he
patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more
said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen
engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr.
Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to
quit; and, so far as we knew--or didn't know, rather--he had done it and
had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.
Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive
assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more
infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a
train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have
made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story
at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.
I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie--which
wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the
major's--when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the
grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When
he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a
telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it
was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There
were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point:
"What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr.
Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody--the New York
people, perhaps--had wired him that a new general manager had been
appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our
office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had
become of him, _Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago_!
Gee! but that brought on more talk--a whaling lot of it. I meant to find
out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek
wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption
butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head
waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came
over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice
sounded that she was mightily excited.
"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she
began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back
yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient,
"Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from
Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the _Mountaineer_. He called the house to
try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain
about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the _Mountaineer_
office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail,
I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third
floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper
aside.
"Yes; just a minute ago."
"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One
of our young men--Branderby--has a clue; a very slight one. He has
discovered--in some way that he didn't care to explain over the
phone--that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of
a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared.
From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in
part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it
entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's
men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a
locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"
"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our
master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in
hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir
about it."
"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly
muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an
attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending
a note to somebody at the Bullard--a note that 'would do the business,'
was the way it was put."
"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a
running jump at the guess.
"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you
more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good
gosh!--I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able
to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that
engine-rescuing trip.
"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two
flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the
round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher
and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were
filling her with water.
It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high
foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the
tender.
"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could
say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay
for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over
into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.
Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the
fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was
on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light
engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight
piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.
XIV
A Close Call
Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight
track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its
good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at
Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes,
shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight
was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
From Banta on, we took it a bit easier--had to. The track was pretty
crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew
his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
At the "Y" siding we stopped--without going on to the gravel track where
Gorcher had seen the lost 1016--and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern.
This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big
master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in
making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just
the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was
trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out
toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as
nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman
when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet,
physically.
"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped
along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find
anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail
connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there
was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was
still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch
rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it
hadn't been used in years.
"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan
said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail
connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them
thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came
down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps
there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel
track."
I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and
its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we
were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the
two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter
saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole;
fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new
splinter of the wood sticking up beside it--a splinter that had been
broken out when the spike was pulled.
I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there
waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the
saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were
fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But
that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the
rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new
holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track
that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over
them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.
Kirgan didn't say a word--not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed
rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What
followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a
driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen
were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with
his pocket tape.
"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in
the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up
and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.
Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with
Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing
was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way
cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained
anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going,
but we were on our way.
I suppose we poked along into the black heart of the Timber range for as
much as five or six miles before the engine headlight showed us the
remains of the old saw-mill camp lying in a little pocket-like valley
from the sides of which all the mill timber had been cut. The camp had
been long deserted. There were perhaps a dozen shacks of all sizes and
shapes, and with a single exception they were all dilapidated and
dismantled, some with the roofs falling in.
The one exception was the stout log building which had probably served
as the mill-gang commissary and store. It stood a little back on the
slope, and was on the opposite side of the creek from the mill site and
sleeping-shacks. The ties at this end of the line were so rotten with
age that our engine was grinding a good half of them to powder as she
edged up, and a little below the switch that had formerly led in to the
mill, Kirgan gave Gorcher the stop signal.
After we had piled off, there wasn't any question raised as to what we
should do. Kirgan had taken a hammer from Gorcher's tool-box, and he was
the one who led the way straight across the little creek and up the hill
to the commissary. I had the lantern, but it wasn't needed. From where
the engine was standing, the headlight flooded the whole gulch basin
with its electric beam, picking out every detail of the deserted
saw-mill camp.
When we reached the log commissary we found the windows all boarded up
and the door fastened with a strong hasp and a bright new brass
padlock--the only new thing in sight. Kirgan swung his hammer just once
and the lock went spinning off down the slope and fell with a splash
into the creek. Then he pushed the door open with his foot, and shoved
in; and for just one half-second I was afraid to follow--afraid of what
we might find in that gloomy looking log warehouse, with its blinded
windows and locked door.
I thank the good Lord I had my scare for nothing. While I was nerving
myself and stumbling over the threshold behind Kirgan with the lantern,
I heard the boss's voice, and it wasn't the voice of any dead man, not
by a long shot! From what he said, and the way he was trimming it up
with hot ones, it was evident that he took us for some other crowd that
he'd been cussing out before.
The light of the lantern showed us a long room, bare of furnishings, and
dark and musty from having been shut up so tight. In the far end there
were a couple of bunks built against the log wall. On what had once been
the counter of the commissary there was a lot of canned stuff and a box
of crackers that had been broken open, and on a bench by the door there
was a bucket of water and a tin cup.
The boss was sitting up in one of the bunks, and he was still tearing
off language in strips at us when we closed in on him. He recognized
Kirgan first, and then Gorcher. I guess he couldn't see me very well
because I was holding the lantern. When he found out who we were, he
stopped swearing and got up out of the bunk to put his hand on Mart
Kirgan's shoulder. That was the only break he made to show that he was a
man, like the rest of us. The next minute he was the Big Boss again,
rapping out his orders as if he had just pushed his desk button to call
us in.
"You've got an engine here, I suppose?" he snapped, at Kirgan. "Then
we'll get out of this quick. What day of the week is it?"
I told him it was Friday, and by his asking that, I knew he must have
been so roughly handled that he had lost count of time. The next order
was shot at the two firemen.
"You boys kick that packing-box to pieces and then pull the straw out of
that bunk and touch a match to it. We'll make sure that they'll never
lock anybody else up in this damned dog-hole."
The two young huskies obeyed the order promptly. In half a minute the
dry slab stuff that the bunks were built of was ablaze and the boss
herded us to the door. In the open he stopped and looked around as if he
had half a mind to burn the rest of the deserted lumber camp, but if he
had any such notion he thought better of it, and a minute or so later we
were all climbing into the cab of the waiting engine.
I had one last glimpse of the commissary as Gorcher released the air and
the backing engine slid away around the first curve. It was sweating
smoke through the split-shingle roof, and the open door framed a square
of lurid crimson. I guess the boss was right. "They," whoever they were,
wouldn't ever lock anybody else up in that particular shack.
We had to run so slowly down the old track to the "Y" that there was
plenty of chance for the boss to talk, if he had wanted to. But
apparently he didn't want to. He sat on the fireman's seat, with an arm
back of me to hold me on, just as Kirgan had sat on the way up, and
never opened his head except once to ask me what was the matter with my
wrapped-up hand. When I told him, he made no comment, and didn't speak
again until we had stopped on the leg of the "Y" to let Kirgan and his
three helpers put the borrowed rails back into place. That left just the
two of us in the cab, and I thought maybe he would tell me some of the
particulars, but he didn't. Instead, he made me tell him.
"You say it's Friday," he began abruptly. "What's been going on since
Monday night, Jimmie?"
I boiled it down for him into just as few words as possible; about the
letter he had left for Mr. Van Britt, how everybody thought he had
resigned, how Mrs. Sheila and the major were two of the few who weren't
willing to believe it, how Mr. Chadwick had been out of reach, how the
railroad outfit was flopping around like a chicken with its head chopped
off, how President Dunton had appointed a new general manager who was
expected now on any train, how Gorcher had discovered the lost 1016 on
the old disused gravel-pit track a mile below us, and, to wind up with,
I slipped him Mr. Chadwick's telegram which had come just as I was
finishing my supper in the Bullard grill-room, and those two others that
had come on the knock-out night, and which had been in my pocket ever
since.
He heard me through without saying a word, and when I gave him the
telegrams he read them by the light of the gauge lamp--also without
saying anything. But when the men had the "Y" rails replaced he took
hold of things again with a jerk.
"Kirgan, you'll want to see to getting that dead engine out of the
gravel pit yourself. Take one of the firemen and go to it. It's a short
mile and you can walk it. Jimmie and I want to get back to Portal City
in a hurry, and Gorcher will take us." And then to Gorcher: "We'll run
to Banta ahead of Number Eighteen and get orders there. Move lively,
Billy; time's precious."
The orders were carried out precisely as they were given. Kirgan took
one of the huskies and tramped off in the darkness down the main line,
and Gorcher, turning our engine on the "Y," headed back east. This time
he wasn't so awfully careful of the curves and sags as he had been
coming up, and we made Banta at a record clip. While he was in the Banta
wire office, getting orders for Portal City, Mr. Norcross took the
time-card out of its cage in the cab and fell to studying it by the
light of the gauge lamp. Gorcher came back pretty soon with his
clearance, which gave him the right to run to Arroyo as first section of
Number Eighteen.
The boss blew up like a Roman candle when he saw that train order. It
meant that we were to take the siding at Arroyo with the freight that
was just behind us, and wait there for the westbound "Flyer," the
"Flyer" being due in Portal City from the east at 9:15, and due to leave
there, coming west, at 9:20. I didn't realize at the moment why the boss
was so sizzling anxious to cut out the delay which would be imposed on
us by the wait at Arroyo, but the anxiety was there, all right.
"Billy, it's eighteen miles to Portal, and you've got twenty minutes to
make it against the 'Flyer's' leaving time," he ripped out. "Can you do
it?"
Gorcher said he could, if he didn't have to lose any more time getting
his order changed.
"Let her go!" snapped the boss. "I'm taking all the responsibility."
That was enough for Gorcher, and the way we hustled out of the Banta
yard was a caution. By the time we hit the last set of switches the old
"Pacific-type" was lurching like a ship at sea, and once out on the long
grass-country tangents she went like a shot out of a gun. Of course,
with nothing to pull but her own weight she had plenty of steam, and all
Gorcher had to do was to keep her from choking herself with too much of
it.
He did it to the queen's taste; and in exactly eight minutes out of
Banta we tore over the switches at Arroyo. That left us ten miles to go,
and twelve minutes in which to make them. It looked pretty easy, and it
would have been if the night crew hadn't been switching in the lower
Portal City yard when we finished the race and Gorcher was whistling for
the town stop. There was a hold-out of perhaps two minutes while the
shifter was getting out of our way, and when we finally went clattering
up through the yard, the "Flyer," a few minutes late, was just pulling
in from the opposite direction.
A yardman let us in on the spur at the end of the headquarters building,
and the boss was off in half a jiffy. "Come along with me, Jimmie," he
commanded quickly, and I couldn't imagine why he was in such a tearing
hurry. Pushing through the platform crowd, made up of people who were
getting off the "Flyer" and those who were waiting to get on, he led the
way straight up-stairs to our offices.
Of course, there was nobody there at that time of night, and the place
was all dark until we switched the electrics on. There was a little
lavatory off the third room of the suite, and Mr. Norcross went in and
washed his face and hands. In a minute or two he came out, put on his
office coat, opened up his desk, lighted a cigar and sat down at the
desk as though he had just come in from a late dinner at the club. And
still he had me guessing.
The guess didn't have to wait long. While I was making a bluff at
uncovering my typewriter and getting ready for business there was a
heavy step in the hall, and a red-faced, portly gentleman with fat eyes
and little close-cropped English side-whiskers came bulging in. He had a
light top-coat on his arm, and his tan gloves were an exact match for
his spats.
"Good evening," he said, nodding sort of brusquely at the boss. "I'm
looking for the general manager's office."
"You've found it," said the boss, crisply.
The tan-gloved gentleman looked first at me and then at Mr. Norcross.
"You are the chief clerk, perhaps?" he suggested, pitching the query in
the general direction of the big desk.
"Hardly," was the curt rejoinder. "My name is Norcross. What can I do
for you?"
If I didn't hate slang so bad, I should say that the portly man looked
as if he were going to throw a fit.
"Not--not Graham Norcross?" he stammered.
"Well, yes; I am 'Graham'--to my friends. Anything else?"
The portly gentleman subsided into a chair.
"There is some misunderstanding about this," he said, his voice
thickening a little--with anger, I thought. "My name is Dismuke, and I
am the general manager of this railroad."
"I wouldn't dispute the name, but your title is away off," said Mr.
Norcross, as cool as a handful of dry snow. "Who appointed you, if I may
ask?"
"President Dunton and the board of directors, of course."
"The same authority appointed me, something like three months ago," was
the calm reply. "So far as I know, I am still at the head of the
company's staff in Portal City."
The gentleman who had named himself Dismuke puffed out his cheeks and
looked as if he were about to explode.
"This is a devil of a mess!" he rapped out. "I understood--we all
understood in New York--that you had resigned!"
"Well, I haven't," retorted the boss shortly. And then he stuck the
knife in good and deep and twisted it around. "There is a commercial
telegraph wire in the Hotel Bullard, where I suppose you will put up,
Mr. Dismuke, and I'm sure you will find it entirely at your service. If
you have anything further to say to me I hope it will keep until after
this office opens in the morning. I am very busy, just now."
I mighty nearly gasped. This Dismuke was the new general manager,
appointed, doubtless in all good faith, by the president and sent out
to take charge of things. And here was the boss practically ordering him
out of the office--telling him that his room was better than his
company!
The portly man got out of his chair, puffing like a steam-engine.
"We'll see about this!" he threatened. "You've been here three months
and you haven't done anything but muddle things until the stock of the
company isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on! If I can
get a clear wire to New York, you'll have word from President Dunton
to-morrow morning telling you where you get off!"
To this Mr. Norcross made no reply whatever, and the heavy-footed
gentleman stumped out, saying things to himself that wouldn't look very
well in print. When the hall door below gave a big slam to let us know
that he was still going, the boss looked across at me with a sour grin
wrinkling around his eyes.
"Now you know why I made Gorcher break all the rules of the service
getting here, Jimmie," he said. "From what you told me down yonder on
the old 'Y,' I gathered that my successor was not yet on the ground, but
that he was likely to be at any minute. That's why I wanted to beat the
'Flyer' in. Possession is nine points of the law, and in this case it
was rather important that Mr. Dismuke shouldn't find the outfit without
a head and these offices of ours unoccupied." He rose, stretched his
arms over his head like a tired boy, and reached for the golf cap he
kept to wear when he went out to knock around in the shops and yard.
"Let's go up to the hotel and see if we can break into the café, Jimmie,"
he finished up. "Later on, we'll wire Mr. Chadwick; but that can wait.
I haven't had a square meal in four days."
XV
The Machine
With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess
there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all
along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back
on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had
happened.
We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally,
because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt
there was plenty of it: the more since the boss--a bit grimmer than
usual--hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members
of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke
over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but
these were all in the family, too, as you might say.
After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent
a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President
Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr.
Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our
track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all
the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump
themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.
We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the
tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him
occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table
with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess
he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying
on made it look as if there might be more to follow.
I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that
Branderby, the _Mountaineer_ reporter, had given us and tear loose on
the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the
first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the
new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business,
and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.
Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about
selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage & Warehouse people
after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and
the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes,
and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. & W. with all sorts of legal
obstacles.
Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions
were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a
week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around
and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. & W. folks, out of jail
for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he
could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side
could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the
local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case
out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.
Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days,
as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we
acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow
named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in
from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an
"extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his
being sent out to relieve anybody.
I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort,
and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped
in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man
who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and
a half farther than he had bargained to.
"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket,"
he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the
boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're
stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is
only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens'
Storage & Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the
Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."
"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about
our C. S. & W. friends? Are they still game?"
"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host
in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out
and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere,
now, and C. S. & W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I
venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the
different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this
moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original
scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."
The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his
cigar, which had gone out.
"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is
not mine?" he said, after a little pause.
"Not yours?"
"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman
who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white
elephants."
"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a
tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere
lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."
"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt
in his voice that fairly made me sick--knowing what I did; and knowing
that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About
the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had
Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"
"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the
bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."
The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the
catch against interruptions.
"Let's have it," he directed.
Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the
engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower
Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all
the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An
election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be
whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution
was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger
would vanish.
Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been
ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political
headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been
turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's
gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot
climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept
our messages and keep in touch.
The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an
anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang
of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard
for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail,
which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for
it--as he did, when the time came--and go in person to stop the raid, he
was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to
be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a
fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President
Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the
night.
"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been
listening soberly while the lawyer talked.
"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer.
The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona
accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands
overnight in the same place--on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence,
it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk
with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of
the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr.
Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped
wires."
Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"
"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in
on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent
you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place,
and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew
very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be
your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they
would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and
would stay off until the other man could take hold."
"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I
haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to
find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's
recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley.
Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line
as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."
"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.
"Oh, yes; you have it all--or practically all. I fell for the anonymous
letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily,
ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment.
The obvious thing to do--if any attention whatever was to be paid to the
anonymous warning--was to telephone the police and the round-house. I
did neither because I thought it migh
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