IV
The Mystery of the Black Blight
THE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in the advertising folders as "The Fast Mail," had collided in the early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time, had run past Angels without heeding the "stop for orders" signal plainly displayed.
Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had shot around the hill curve to hurl itself, a six-thousand-ton, steel-pointed projectile, into the rear end of the first section, and the disaster was complete. Somewhere under the smoking mountain of wreckage marking the spot where the Mail and first-section locomotives had locked themselves together, reared, and fallen over into the ditch, two firemen and an engineer were buried. Out of one of the crushed mail-cars two postal clerks were taken; one of them to die a few minutes after his rescue, and the other bruised and broken, with an arm and a leg dangling, as he was carried out to safety.
At the other point of impact there had been no loss of life, though the material damage was almost as great. The engine of the second section had split its way sheer through the first-section caboose—which, in the nature of things, had no one in it to be killed—and through two of the three merchandise-cars next in its plunging path. With a mixed chaos of groceries, farming implements, and splintered timbers for its monument, the big mogul had burrowed into the soft side bank of the cutting as if in some blind attempt to bury itself out of sight of the havoc it had wrought.
On the Thursday morning of this, the worst of a series of accidents thickly bestudding that fateful month of August, Maxwell, the general superintendent, chanced to be two hundred miles away to the eastward. His service-car was in the Copah yards, and he was asleep in it when the night watchman came down from the despatcher's office to rouse him with the bad news.
What could be done at such long range was done instantly and with good generalship. The wires were working with Brewster, the division head-quarters in Timanyoni Park. With his own hand Maxwell sent the orders to Connolly, the despatcher, to Fordyce, the trainmaster, and to Bascom, the master mechanic. A relief train was to be made up with all haste to take the doctors to the wreck, and to convey the passengers of Number Six back to Brewster. Following the relief train, but giving it precedence, should go the wrecking-train. The superintendent even went so far as to specify the equipment which should be taken: the heavier of the two wrecking-cranes, a car-load of rails for temporary tracking, and two or three water-cars for the extinguishing of the fire.
These things done, and the arrangements made to start his own special immediately for the scene of disaster, the superintendent had the fine courage, in the face of this last and most unnerving of many disheartenments, to return to his car and to go back to bed. He had been up very late in conference with his president, Ford, and he knew that the demands awaiting him at the end of the five-hour run to Lobo Cut would call for all the reserves of strength and energy he could hope to store up during the distance-covering interval.
Much good work had already been accomplished when Maxwell's special, feeling its way past the four long freights and the midnight passenger, all held up at Angels, came upon the scene of destruction among the foot-hills at an early hour in the forenoon. The relief train had come and gone, bearing away the unhurt, the injured, and the dead. A temporary working-track had been laid through the cut, and the mighty one-hundred-and-fifty-ton steam crane, its movements directed by a big, rather flashily dressed man with an accurately creased brown hat pulled down over his brows, was reaching its steel finger here and there in the débris and plucking the derelict freight-cars out of the way.
Up at the other end Fordyce, the trainmaster, was working with another crew, using a mammoth block-and-tackle, with a detached locomotive for its pulling power. When Maxwell came on the ground, Fordyce, a gnarled little man with a twist in his jaw and a temper like the sparks from an emery wheel, was alternately cajoling and cursing his men in a praiseworthy attempt to make his block-and-tackle outheave the master mechanic's powerful crane.
"Yank 'em—yank 'em, men! Get that rail under there and heave! Wig it—wig it! Now get that grab-hook in here—lively! Don't let them fellows at the other end snake two to our ONE!"
Maxwell stopped to exchange a word or two with the sweating trainmaster and then passed on down the wreck-strewn line. At the master mechanic's end of things he came upon Benson, chief of construction, who had accompanied the wrecking-train from Brewster only because he had happened to be on the way to Angels and saw no other probable means of reaching his destination.
"Pretty bad medicine—the worst of the lot," commented the young chief of construction, when, tramping soberly, they came to the place where the two great locomotives, locked in their death grapple, were nuzzling the clay bank of the cutting.
Maxwell's teeth came together with a savage little click.
"A few weeks ago, Jack, we were scared stiff for fear the 'Big-Nine crowd of stock-jobbers would succeed in doing something to put us on the panic-slide. Now we are doing it ourselves, just about as fast as we can. Is it true that there were four killed?"
"Yes; both firemen, and Bamberg, the engineer of the freight. The other man was a postal clerk; and his mate had an arm and a leg broken."
"Many injuries?"
"Astonishingly few, when there was such a good chance for a general massacre. Both men on the second-section engine jumped, and both were hurt, though not badly. There was nobody in the split caboose when it was hit. On the Mail, Cargill, who was running, got off with a pretty bad scalp wound. An express messenger had his foot jammed; and the train baggageman had a lot of trunks shaken down on him. In the coaches there were a few people thrown out of their seats and hurt by the sudden stop; but in the sleepers there were a good many who slept straight through it, incredible as that may sound."
"I know," said Maxwell; "I've seen that happen more than once, when the Pullmans stayed on the rails." Then, with a slight backward nod of his head he changed the subject abruptly. "Bascom—has he been handling it all right?"
"He's a dandy!" said Benson. "Personally, I'd about as soon associate with any one of a dozen Copah tin-horns that I could name as to foregather with Mr. Judson Bascom. But he's onto his job, all right. He laid this temporary track himself; I haven't butted in at all, either here or at Fordyce's end."
"How did you happen to get here? I thought you were up Red Butte way," said the superintendent.
"I was; but I came down to Brewster on Six last night, meaning to go through to Angels. While we were changing engines I ran upstairs to get some maps and papers out of my office, and took too long about it; the train got away from me and I chased out with the wreck-wagons. That's how near I came to being mixed up in this thing myself."
"And you want to go on to Angels now?"
"Yes; when I get a chance. Those irrigation people in Mesquite Valley are howling to have an unloading spur built up from the old copper-mine track, and I thought I'd go and look the ground over."
The superintendent's frown was expressive of impatient dissatisfaction.
"That Mesquite project is another of the grafts that are continually giving this country a black eye, Jack. It's 'bunk,' pure and simple. Everybody who has ever been in the Mesquite knows that you couldn't raise little white beans in that disintegrated sandstone!"
"It'll do for an excuse to rake in a few hundred thousand Eastern shekels," Benson remarked. "There will be plenty of 'come-ons' to buy the land when the dam is built."
Bascom's great crane was poising a crushed and mangled box-car in air, and when the crooking steel finger swung its burden aside and dropped it with a crash out of the way, Maxwell turned upon his heel.
"I have my car here, and I'm going back to Angels to do some wiring, " he said. "Come along, if you want to see those irrigation people. But I'll tell you right now, I won't approve any recommendation for more track-laying for them."
They had walked possibly half the length of the long blockade when a noisy automobile, dust-covered and filled with men, drew up on the mesa flat above the wreck. Benson looked up with a scowl.
"There's another gang of those newspaper ghouls!" he commented, as two of the three men in the tonneau got out and began to unlimber their cameras and tripods. "It's no picnic to drive a car from Brewster over the range, to say nothing of the danger; and this is the second squad since daylight. There have been enough pictures taken of this wreck to fill all the newspapers between New York and San Francisco for a week!"
Maxwell's smile was a mere teeth-baring.
"Yes; we're getting the advertising all right," he said. "We've been getting it for a month or more." Then, as they tramped on out of the wreck raffle and headed for the waiting office-car: "I had a talk with Ford last night; that is what took me to Copah. We're in bad, Benson. Ford says they've taken to calling us 'the sick railroad' on the Stock Exchange, and our securities are simply going to the puppies. Another month like this one we've just stumbled through will either wipe us from the map or clean us up definitely and put us into the hands of a receiver."
"Does Ford say that?" gasped the young chief engineer.
"He said a good bit more than that. He still insists that these troubles of ours are helped along from the outside; that they are in reality just so many moves in the game that a certain Wall Street pool is playing to get control of our road. I tried to show him how impossible it was; how the entire slump in discipline which causes all the trouble is merely one of those crazy epidemics that now and then sweep over the length of the best-managed railroads on earth."
"And he wouldn't believe it?" queried Benson.
"No; the last thing he said to me as his train was pulling out proved that he didn't. He intimated that there wasn't any 'act-of-God' verdict to be brought in, in our case, and told me to go back to Brewster and dig until I found the real cause."
By this time they had reached the service-car special, and Maxwell passed the word to his engineer to back up the line to Angels. When the wreck and the wreckers had vanished beyond the hill curves, Benson filled his short pipe and at the lighting of it asked another question.
"I've been wondering if we couldn't get a little expert help on this thing, Maxwell. Have you tried to interest Mr. Sprague in this discipline business?"
The superintendent shook his head.
"Sprague isn't going around doing odd jobs in psychology for anybody and everybody," he deprecated. "He is a Government chemist, and he is out here on the Government's business. Besides, it isn't a case for a detective; even for the best amateur detective in the bunch—which is easily what Sprague might claim to be, you'd say. You see, there isn't anything special to detect. What we need is a doctor; not a plain-clothes man."
Benson's left eye closed itself slowly in qualified dissent.
"What does Mr. Sprague himself have to say about it?" he queried.
"He hasn't said anything. In fact, I haven't seen him for over two weeks. He's been out with Billy Starbuck, gathering soil specimens; they are still out somewhere, I don't know just where."
Neither of the two men riding the rear platform of the backing service-car spoke again until the car stopped with a jerk at the edge-of-the-desert station with the celestial name, which had once been the head-quarters of the original Red Butte Western Railroad. Then Benson summed up the situation in a couple of terse sentences.
"If we don't do something, and do it quick, there is a bunch of us so-called railroad bosses on this high-line who may as well pack our duffle-bags and fade away into the landscape. Three wrecks within a week; and this last one will cost a hundred thousand cold iron dollars before we're through with the lawyers; I'll be hanged if I wouldn't call in the doctor—some doctor—any doctor, Maxwell. That's my ante. So long; see you a little later about this Mesquite business, if you're still here." And he put a leg over the platform railing and went away.
Three minutes later, when the superintendent had crossed the station platform and was on his way around to the door opening into the operator's office, two men mounted upon wiry range horses rode down the single remaining street of the dead-alive former railroad town, pointing for the station.
One of them, a good-looking youngish man with a preternaturally grave face and the shrewd thoughtful eyes that tell of days and nights spent afield and alone with the desert immensities, was the superintendent's brother-in-law by courtesy. The other, a gigantic athlete of a man, whose weight fairly bowed the back of the stout horse he rode, was Mr. Calvin Sprague.
Maxwell paused when he saw and recognized the two horsemen. But when they came up, the weight of the recent disaster made his greeting a rather dismal attempt at friendly jocularity.
"Well, well!" he said, gripping hands with the athlete; "Billy certainly had it in for you this time! Rode you over the range, did he? I'll bet you'll never have the nerve to look a horse in the face again, after this. Where on top of earth have you two been keeping yourselves for the last fortnight?"
"Oh, just sashayin' round on the edges," drawled Starbuck, replying for both; "gettin' acquainted with the luminous landscape, and chewin' off chunks of the scenery, and layin' awake nights to soak up some of the good old ozone."
"Ozone!" chuckled the big man; "I'm jammed gullet-full of it, Dick, and I have a hunch that it's going to settle somewhere below the waist line and make me bow-legged for life. King David said that a horse is a vain thing for safety, but I can go him one better and say that it's the vainest possible thing for just plain, ordinary, every-day comfort. I'm a living parenthesis-mark—or a pair of 'em, if you like that better." Then without warning and almost without a break: "Where is the wreck, this time?"
Maxwell's frown was a little brow-wrinkling of curious perplexity.
"You've just ridden down from the hills, haven't you? How do you know there is a wreck?"
"That's too easy," laughed the expert, waving a Samsonic arm toward the five side-tracked trains held up in the Angels yard. "If you didn't have your track cluttered up somewhere, those trains wouldn't be hanging up here, I'm sure. Is it a bad one?—but you needn't answer that; I can see at least one dead man in your eyes."
"There are four of them," said the superintendent soberly, "and some others desperately hurt. We're in a bad way, Sprague. This is the third smash within a week."
Sprague dismounted stiffly and secured his saddle-bags containing the soil specimens gathered at the price of so much discomfort.
"Starbuck," he said whimsically, "I'm willing to pay the price of a hundred-dollar guinea-pig, if necessary, to have this razor-back mustang shipped home in a palace stock-car to his stable in Brewster. Mr. Maxwell's office-car is good enough for me from this on."
Starbuck smiled grimly and took the abandoned horse in charge. "I'll take care of the bronc'," he agreed; and the big man limped around the station to board the service-car while Maxwell went into the office to do his telegraphing.
When the superintendent returned half an hour later he found his self-invited guest lounging luxuriously in the easiest of the big wicker chairs in the open compartment of the car, smoking the fattest of black cigars and reading a two-days-old Denver paper.
"This is something like," he said. "I was never cut out for a pioneer, Richard; Starbuck has proved that to my entire satisfaction in these last two weeks. But that's enough of me and my knockings. Sit down and tell me your troubles. I see the papers are making space-fillers out of your railroad to beat the band. Are you ready to come around to my point of view yet?"
Maxwell sat down like a man who was both worried and wearied.
"The Lord knows, I wish I could come around to your point of view, Calvin. If I could see any possibility of charging these things to outside influences. . . . But there isn't any. The trouble is purely local and internal—and as unaccountable as the breaking out of an epidemic when the strictest kind of quarantine has been maintained."
Sprague smiled incredulously.
"There never was a case of typhoid yet without its germ to account for it, Dick," he asserted dogmatically.
"I know; but that theory doesn't hold good in the psychological field. We've got a good set of men, Sprague. To a degree which you don't often find in modern railroad consolidations, we've had that precious thing called esprit de corps. We've never had any labor troubles since Lidgerwood's time, and there are no grievances in the air to account for the present let-down. Yet the let-down is with us. Almost every day some man who has hitherto proved trustworthy falls down on his job, and there you are."
"You've tried all the usual remedies, I suppose?"
"I should say I had! I've stormed and cursed and pleaded and reasoned until I'm worn out! If I fire a bunch of them, I have to hire a new bunch, and inside of a week the new men have caught the disease for themselves. One bad wreck will make a hundred trainmen uncertain and jumpy, and a second one will turn half of the hundred into irresponsible lunatics. You'd have to mix and mingle with the force as I do to understand the condition things have gotten into. It's horrible, Calvin. It is like the black blight that you have seen spread through a well-kept orchard."
"There is a cause," said the expert, settling himself solidly in his chair. "I tell you, Dick, there's a germ in the air, and that second mentality of mine that you are so fond of poking fun at tells me that in the case of your railroad orchard the germ has been deliberately planted. You say it's impossible: I've a good notion to let the soil-testing rest for a few minutes and show you."
"If I thought there was the least chance in the world that you could show me"
"Is that a challenge? By Jove! I'll take you. When can you get me back to Brewster?"
"As soon as the track is cleared. We ought to be able to get through by noon."
The expert got up, shook the riding kinks out of his legs, and threw the newspaper aside.
"I'm going out to walk around for a bit, and after a while I'll ask you to take me down to this wreck," he said; and Maxwell, who had a deskful of work awaiting him, nodded.
"Say, in an hour?"
"An hour will do; I'll show up within that time."
Later, the superintendent, wading through the files of business correspondence which always accompanied him in his goings to and fro on the line, had window glimpses of Sprague strolling up and down beside the waiting trains in the yard or standing to chat with some member of the loafing crews.
The glimpses were provocative of good-natured incredulity on the part of the desk-worker. Thrice during the summer of warfare Sprague had been able to step into the breach, each time with signal success. But in each of the three former instances there had been tangible causes with which to grapple; flesh-and-blood criminals to be ferreted out and apprehended. Maxwell, glancing out of the window again, shook his head despondently. What could the keenest intelligence avail in the case of an entire railroad suffering from an acute attack of nervous disintegration and recklessness? Nothing, the superintendent decided; there was nothing for it but to settle down upon a grim determination to outlive and worry through the period of disaster; and he was still grinding away at his desk with that thought in the back part of his mind when Sprague came in and announced his willingness to be taken on to the wreck.
Maxwell gave the necessary order, and in due time the one-car special had repassed the few miles intervening between Angels and Lobo Cut, to come to a stand on the curve of hazard. Sprague was lighting a fresh cigar preparatory to a plunge into the track-clearing activities, and Maxwell looked up from his work.
"Want me to get off with you?" he asked.
"No; it's the very thing I don't want," declared the expert briefly; and therewith he went out to drop from the car-step and to take the plunge alone.
In the two hours which had elapsed since the departure of the superintendent's car the track-clearers at both ends of the wreck had made astonishingly good progress. Step by step the master mechanic had worked his big crane up the line, tossing the derelicts aside or righting them upon the rails, as their condition warranted; and farther along Fordyce, with his huge tackle and its pulling locomotive, had been equally enthusiastic.
It was Sprague's boast that his methods of investigation, in the field of his hobby, as in all others, were purely scientific; and he insisted that the true scientist and the most successful is the one who can best qualify as a shrewd and wholly impartial observer.
Where another man might have asked questions, he stood aside and looked on and listened. In the fierce toil of track-clearing no one seemed to pay any attention to him, and the picture which presented itself was a life-sketch of the railroad force in petto and in the raw. The big onlooker took his time and made his mental jottings thoughtfully, strolling from one group to another and lingering longest near the hot boiler-cab of the great crane where a wizened human automaton in dirty overalls and jumper jerked the levers and spun the wheels of the hoist in obedience to the signals given by the flashily dressed master mechanic.
It wanted less than a quarter of an hour of noon when the final obstruction was heaved aside, and the track gang, which had been following the wreckers, trued and spiked the distorted rails of the main line into place. Sprague closed his mental note-book and went back to join Maxwell.
In the office-car the porter-cook had laid the table for the mid-day meal; and the superintendent and his guest ate it in transit, the office-car special being the first of the halted trains to pass westward over the newly cleared line.
"Well?" said Maxwell interrogatively, when the meal had progressed to the meat and vegetables without comment on the part of the one who had lifted the challenge.
"You've got the disease, all right; it's with you, and in the epidemic form, too. Its expression came out emphatically every now and then in that track-clearing hustle. One little snappy, snarly fellow lying under a box-car to make the hoisting-hitch voiced it precisely when his mate yelled at him to come out, that the hitch might slip. He yapped back, 'Who the hell and blinkety-blank blankation cares!' That's one form your disease is taking, and you'd say it would account for a good many of the smashes."
"Well?" queried the superintendent again. "You didn't stop at that?"
"No; I made a few other preliminary observations which may or may not prove up. Give me a little time; and when we get back to Brewster, detail that ex-cowboy 'relief operator' of yours, Tarbell, to run errands for me. If I can't show you good, tangible results within the next forty-eight hours or so, you may discharge me and hire a Pinkerton."
"You'll fail," said Maxwell gloomily. "I've been through a sickness of this kind before. There's no cure for it. It has simply got to run its course and wear itself out."
"That's what they used to say about cholera and the plague and yellow-fever, and all those things," laughed the man from Washington; but he did not go any farther into the matter of theories.
The run of the special train to Brewster was made without incident, and from the station Sprague went directly across to his hotel.
"I'm going over to clean up," he announced. "By and by, when you get around to it, send Tarbell over and tell him to wait in the lobby for me."
It was possibly an hour later when the young man who resembled William Starbuck sufficiently to pass for the mine owner's younger brother, got out of his chair in the quietest corner of the Hotel Topaz lobby and crossed to the elevators to meet the Government chemist.
"How are you, Archer?" was the renovated soil-gatherer's greeting. And then, as he led the way back to the quiet corner from which the young man had been keeping his watch upon the elevators: "We're up against it good and hard, this time, young man. Your boss has stumped us to prove a thing which he says can't be proved. Sit down and let's see if we can't start the thin edge of a wedge. I'll do the hammering and let you hold the wedge, and you can squeal if I strike off and hit you. How long has this case of bad railroading, which is smashing things right and left, been going on?"
The young fellow who was on the railroad pay-rolls as a "relief operator" took time to consider.
"A month or better."
"How did it begin?"
"I don't know. One way 'r another, the boys 've just seemed to be gettin' sort o' careless and losin' their grip. After two or three wrecks had happened, it was all off. Half o' the men 've taken to runnin' on their nerve, and the other half act like they don't care a durn."
"Is it only in the train service?"
"Lord, no; it's mighty near everywhere. It's sort of a dry rot; cars go without repairin', engines burn out, and twice within the last week the round-house has caught fire. You'd think every man on the road had just turned loose all holts and didn't give a cuss whether he ever got 'em again or not."
"What do the men themselves say about it?"
"There's a heap o' kickin' and knockin'. Some say it's Mr. Maxwell. When he gets good and mad and fires a bunch of 'em, they raise a rookus about it; and when he lets the next bunch down easy, they kick the other way."
Sprague sat back in the big leather-upholstered lobby chair and for a time seemed to be absorbed in a study of the rather over-massive, beam arrangement of the ceiling. Suddenly he turned to ask: "How much of a prohibition country is this, Archer?"
Tarbell laughed.
"I reckon you don't need to ask that, with three saloons in every block in Brewster. We haven't got the water-wagon bug much out here. They say it don't breed well this side o' the main range."
"Much drinking among the railroad men?"
"Well—m—m—not so you could notice it. There's a rule against it."
"While they're on duty, you mean?"
"Any old time."
"Is that rule enforced?"
"Mr. Maxwell allows it is. He's sure some Ranahan when it comes to buckin' the booze-fighters."
"Still, there is more or less drinking among the men; you know there is, don't you, Archer?"
The young man grinned soberly.
"I ain't tellin' no tales out o' school, Mr. Sprague, not me," he drawled.
"Get rid of that notion," said the big man sharply. "You are working for Mr. Maxwell and his rules are your law and gospel. I'll tell you what I've seen, and then you can tell me what you've seen. I counted sixteen men in one place on this railroad to-day who, within the half-hour that I was looking on, stopped work either to hit or to pass a pocket-flask. Now go on."
"If you hold me up that-away, I reckon maybe there is a good many empty bottles layin' round on the right-o'-way—more'n what the passengers throw out o' the car windows," was the reluctant admission.
"And more than there used to be, say, two or three months ago?"
"Yes; right smart more."
"I thought so. We don't need to look any further, Archer, for the disease itself. Your 'dry rot' is very pointedly a wet rot. Booze and the running of a railroad are two things that won't mix. Now we'll come to the nib of it. Why is there more drinking now than there used to be?"
The younger man took time to think about it before he said: "You got me goin'; I don't know the answer to that."
"I didn't suppose you did," was the curt rejoinder. "But you are going to learn the answer, Archer, my son. It is now four o'clock; by half-past seven this evening I want you to be back here prepared to tell me who has been letting down the fences for the railroad men in this matter of drinking."
"Holy Smoke!" exclaimed the ex-cowboy, jarred for once out of his plainsman calm, "how am I goin' to do that, Mr. Sprague?"
"That is for you to find out, my boy. If you don't use your brain you'll never know whether or no you've got any. That's all—until half-past seven. You'll find me here at the hotel."
It was an even hour before the time appointed for Tarbell's return when Maxwell joined the chemistry expert at the table in the Topaz café where they usually sat when they could dine together.
At the unfolding of the napkins Sprague said: "I've found your germ, Dick, and things are beginning to develop. What do you think of that?"—passing a bit of dingy coarse-fibred paper across the table.
Maxwell opened the paper and read the ill-spelled type-written note it bore.
"Mr. Spraig:
"Weer onto you with both feet, keep youre fingers out ov the geers or maybe youll git em mashed.
"A well-Wishur."
"Where did that come from?" asked the superintendent, plainly amused.
"It was pushed under the door of my room upstairs about half an hour ago. The man who left it was short, thick-set, smooth-shaven, and he wore a pepper-and-salt suit and a slouch hat. Also, his breath smelled of whiskey."
"You expect me to recognize the description?"
"I didn't know but you might."
"I don't," Maxwell denied. Then his smile of amusement changed to one of amazement. "How could you know all these things about this man if you were on the other side of a closed door, Calvin?"
Sprague laughed. "See how easy it is to jump to conclusions," he derided. "I wasn't on the other side of a closed door; I was in the corridor when the fellow passed me, looking for the number on the door. I saw him leave the note. I'll ask one question, and then we'll dismiss that phase of the case. Is the wrecking-train back from Lobo yet?"
"Yes; it came in about four o'clock with the string of crippled cars. But you say you have found the germ; does that mean that you are going to prove up on your assertion about the epidemic?"
"I can't tell what it means yet; but I can tell you the name of the germ. It's whiskey."
"Drinking among the men?"
"Worse than that; drunkenness among the men. Enough of it, I should say, to account for all of your troubles and then some."
"Oh, you're off—'way off!" objected the harassed one irritably. "I know there is some drinking; in a wide-open country like this it is almost impossible to stamp it out entirely. But to account for the epidemic in that way, you'd have to imagine every other man in the service carrying a pocket-pistol on the job!"
"And you think that couldn't happen without your knowing it, eh? A little farther along I may have some statistics to show you; but just now I'm looking not so much for the germ as for the germ-carrier."
Maxwell smiled wearily.
"Still sticking to the theory that the blight is imported, are you? It's the only time I've ever known you to be 'yellow,' Calvin. I can imagine some wild-eyed newspaper reporter hatching such an idea, but not you. Think of the absurdity of a bunch of Wall Street stock-jobbers trying to get at us in any such indirect way as that—shipping whiskey in here to demoralize our working force! Pshaw! When these fellows get busy and go to work, they want action—quick action."
The expert put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.
"You are so close to the thing that you are continually losing the perspective, Dick," he said earnestly. "You are going on the supposition that those New York looters are trying first one thing and then another. That doesn't follow at all. For all you know, they may be gunning for you in half a dozen different ways this blessed minute—as they probably are. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that this whiskey scheme could be worked; I know you say it can't, but suppose it could: can you conceive of any expedient that would be more certain to kill your traffic, wipe out your earnings, smash your securities, and put you on the toboggan slide generally?"
"Oh, no; if it could be worked." Maxwell's answer this time was less confidently derisive.
"All right; now that you've come that far, I'll say this: it can be worked, and I'm here to tell you that it has been worked. Your railroad is practically an inebriate asylum in the making, right now, Richard. Half of your force has already fallen off the water chariot, and the other half is scared to death at the thought of what the drunken half may do."
Maxwell pushed away his dessert untasted.
"You have the proof of this, Calvin?" he broke out.
"I have some proof, and Tarbell is getting more. You've been blind. You didn't want to admit that your house of discipline was tumbling about your ears, and you've been shutting your eyes to the plain facts. For example: you may or may not be the only man in the service who doesn't know that those two freight engineers—the one who was killed and the other—who overran their orders and smashed into the passenger at Lobo Cut this morning were just plain drunk!"
"What's that? It—it can't be, Calvin!"
"But it is," insisted the big man across the table. "It is common talk among your own men; so common that it reached out and hit me—an outsider."
The superintendent drank his small coffee at a single gulp and flung his napkin aside.
"I'll get 'em!" he gritted savagely. "I'll get the last damned booze-fighter in the bunch!" And then: "Good God, Sprague; how could anything like this go on without my knowing it?"
"You would have found it out, sooner or later, of course. But you're a railroad man yourself, and you ought to know railroad men well enough to take into consideration that sort of loyalty among them which keeps them from 'peaching' on one another. Even Tarbell had to be jarred before he would admit that he knew about it. I can imagine that there has been a sort of generous conspiracy among the men to keep you from finding out."
"That's all right; I know now, and I'll sift them out; I'll go through the whole blamed outfit with a club! I'll"
The man who had called out this upbubbling of righteous wrath was chuckling softly.
"You won't do anything that you say you will," he interrupted good-naturedly. "You stumped me to take the case, and I've taken it; which means that you're under the doctor's orders. When you have cooled down a bit, you'll see very clearly that the worst thing you could do at this particular crisis would be to start a division-wide scrap with the rank and file."
"But, good Lord, Sprague; I've got to do something, haven't I?"
"You surely have; and that something is to help me find the germ-carrier. Somebody has been taking down the bars for your men; who is it?"
"I don't know any more than a goat. I can't yet believe that it is the work of any one man."
"Possibly it isn't; there may be a good many. But I'll chance a guess that some one in authority is setting the pace. Leave that for a moment and we'll take up something else. You have two daily-papers here in Brewster: I've noticed that one of them, The Tribune, is friendly to your road. How about the other, The Times-Record?"
"It is supposed to be independent, with a slant against corporations and 'the system,' whatever that may be."
"Um," said the scientist. "Before I went out on this last trip with Billy, I remarked that this other paper was giving a good bit of space to your road troubles in its news columns, and a good bit of its editorial space to criticisms of the Ford management. It occurred to me then that there might be a reason. How is the paper organized?"
"It is owned by one of our near-millionaires; a retired ranchman named Parker Higginson, who has dabbled in real estate, in mines, and latterly in politics. His grouch against the railroad is purely personal. He has asked favors that I couldn't legally grant; and on one occasion he took offence because I told him that a newspaper man should be the last person in the world to invite us to become law-breakers."
"And his editor?" queried the expert.
"Is a bird of the same feather; a rather 'yellow' little fice named Healy."
Sprague looked rather dubiously at the two cigars which the waiter was tendering on a server. "No, I think not, George," he said, waving the cigars aside and feeling for his own pocket-case of stronger ones. And then to Maxwell: "This is all very nourishing. It may help out more than you suspect. Later in the evening I may ask you to call with me at the office of The Times-Record—though we may not have to go that far up the ladder to find what we are looking for. In the meantime, Tarbell is waiting for us out yonder in the lobby. Suppose we go and see what he wants."
They found the young man, who looked like a younger brother to Starbuck, and who had made his record chasing cattle thieves in Montana, methodically rolling a cigarette in the loggia alcove, and Sprague began on him briskly.
"Spit it out, Archer; what have you found?"
"I didn't make out to find what you sent me after," was the half-evasive reply.
"All right; tell us what you did find."
The young man dropped his cigarette and looked up with a glint of stubbornness in his stone-gray eyes.
"If it's just the same to you, Mr. Sprague, I'd a heap ruther not," he said.
Sprague reached out and turned the lapel of Tarbell's coat, exposing the small silver star of a deputy sheriff.
"You took an oath when you got that, Archer; and Mr. Maxwell pays you for wearing it."
Tarbell threw up his head defiantly. "Deputy or no deputy, I ain't goin' to name no names," he began slowly. "But here's what I found out: I been in twenty-three saloons and dives since you told me to go chase, and I counted thirty-one railroad men in 'em. Not all of 'em was drinkin' or gamblin ', but some of 'em was."
Sprague turned to Maxwell.
"You see, I knew what I was talking about."
The superintendent was shaking his head.
"As openly as that!" he exclaimed. "I must have been the blindest fool in all this hill country!"
Tarbell chipped in quickly. "It ain't been that bad for very long. But it's just as Mr. Sprague says; it's spreadin' like murrain on a dry range. I saw men in them places this evenin' that I'd a swore never got off the water-wagon. I ain't namin' no names."
"Mr. Maxwell isn't asking you to give anybody away," the expert qualified. And then: "Had your supper?"
Tarbell nodded. "I had a hand-out in one o' the saloons."
"Good. Then I'll give you another job. Look around town for a man about Mr. Maxwell's build, only about twenty pounds heavier. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, wears a slouch hat soft gray in color, dresses in pepper-and-salt, is clean-shaven, red-faced, blue-eyed, and walks with a little hitch to his left leg which isn't quite a limp. When you catch up with him, find out who he is and come and tell me. I'll be over at Mr. Maxwell's office."
Tarbell vanished, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went, and Sprague thrust his arm in Maxwell's.
"I'll go over to your shop with you," he said. "I know you're anxious to climb back into the working saddle. I'm not going to bore you; I merely want to have a little talk with that irreproachable chief clerk of yours, Harvey Calmaine."
A little later they climbed the stair to the office floor of the railroad building together, and Maxwell went on down the corridor to the despatcher's room. When he came back to his own office a half-hour later and found Sprague and young Calmaine figuring together at the chief clerk's desk in the outer room, he went on to his own inner sanctum without disturbing them.
It was perhaps another half-hour farther along when the expert, who had been patiently going over a mass of statistics with the alert, well-groomed young fellow who served as the superintendent's right hand, sat back in his chair and relighted the fat black cigar which had been suffered to go out many times during the figuring process.
"It seems that a good many things besides wrecks have been happening in the past few weeks, Mr. Calmaine," he suggested musingly. "In that short interval you have had many changes in the force, especially in the motive-power department. I don't know whether you have remarked it, but fully half of the men in the shops and round-houses are new men. And that is the department in which the sickness seems to be the worst. Your maintenance costs have increased three hundred per cent, over the same period last year."
"I know it," admitted the chief clerk. "It is the more marked because Dawson, our former master mechanic, made such phenomenally good records."
"I remember Dawson," said the big man, slipping easily from the statistics into the humanities. "He was here the first time I came over the road, early in the summer. Has he left the Short Line?"
"He has been promoted. He is superintendent of motive power on the east end of the South-western. "
"That is recent, isn't it?"
"Yes; it was only a few weeks ago."
"And you have a new man as department chief?"
"We have—Judson Bascom. You may remember him as the man who ran the special train for you and Mr. Maxwell the day you made the blind trip to Tunnel Number Three. He is a sort of slave-driver and seems to have a good deal of trouble with his men—is continually hiring and firing, you'd say, from the appearance of his pay-rolls."
The big expert's eyes narrowed.
"Was he also promoted from some other place on the system?" he asked.
"No; he is a new man. I don't know where he got his experience; somewhere in the East, I suppose."
"Another question," put in Sprague. "Does Mr. Maxwell have the appointment of his own motive-power chief?"
"No; this appointment was made in New York—by the executive committee, I imagine. "
"Somebody's nephew or brother-in-law?" queried the chemist, with a twinkle in his eye.
"I don't know about that. I guess it happens that way, once in a while, on any railroad. But Bascom is all kinds of capable."
Sprague shook his head. "The true test of capability is always in the final result, my son," he said reflectively; adding, "and results nowadays are usually measured in dollars and cents. As an outsider, I should say that this Mr. Bascom is a pretty expensive man to have around, judging from his cost sheets. He drinks some, doesn't he?"
The young chief clerk closed one eye gravely.
"I'm not supposed to know anything about that, Mr. Sprague."
"No, of course not. As you might say, it's nobody's business but Mr. Bascom's. By the way, what is that whistle blowing so persistently for?"
Calmaine leaped out of his chair as if it had been suddenly connected with the grounding wire of a forty-kilowatt generator.
"By George! it's a fire!" he exclaimed; and the sound of hurrying feet in the corridor confirmed the surmise. Maxwell's door opened at the same instant, and the three rushed out to join the crowd which was already streaming across the yard tracks toward the company's shops.
The fire was in the shops, originating in the boiler-room; and, thanks to the timely alarm and the comparative earliness of the hour, it was soon extinguished. Investigation, promptly instituted on the spot by the superintendent, proved that it was the result of pure carelessness. Some of the mechanics had washed their overalls and had hung them too near the sheet-iron stack in the fire-room; that was all.
Sprague lingered at Maxwell's elbow while the investigation was going on, and he appeared to be a more or less perfunctory listener when Bascom, oozing wrathful profanity at every pore, told the superintendent what he would do to the careless clothes-driers when they should show up in the morning. But later, after the return to the head-quarters offices, the man from Washington sat for a long time in Maxwell's easiest chair, smoking steadily and with his gaze fixed upon the disused gas chandelier marking the exact centre of the ceiling.
It was not until after Maxwell had finished his quota of night work and was closing his desk that Tarbell came in to make a whispered report to the big man apparently dreaming in the easy-chair.
Sprague listened, nodded, and rose to join the office-closing retreat.
"That is about what I thought, Archer," he said soberly. "Now I have one more little job for you, and when it is done we'll call it a go for to-night. Come around to my laboratory with me and I'll explain it to you." And when the four of them reached the plaza-fronting street he excused himself to Maxwell and the chief clerk and went, with Tarbell at his elbow, to the little second-floor den in the Kinzie Building where his experiments in soil analysis were conducted.
Reaching the back room which served as the laboratory proper, Sprague provided his follower with half a dozen small bottles, empty and tightly corked.
"There you are," he said, from which it may be inferred that the nature of the remaining "job" had been explained on the way up from the railroad head-quarters. "Do it neatly, Archer, and don't let them catch you at it. Everything will have quieted down by this time, and you shouldn't have any trouble. I'll wait for you here."
Tarbell was gone possibly half an hour, and when he returned the bottles they were filled, two of them with a black-brown liquid, thick and viscous, and four with what appeared to be specimens of more or less dirty water. Each bottle was carefully marked on the blank label pasted upon it.
Sprague stood them in a row on the laboratory working-table.
"I shall be busy here for twenty or thirty minutes," he said. "I don't want to ride a willing horse to death, but I'd be glad if you'd go by the hotel and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait up for me. I want to see him before he goes to bed."
Tarbell nodded, but he hesitated about going.
"I got a hunch that we ain't doin' all the shadow work by our little lonesomes, Mr. Sprague," he ventured to say. But before he could go on, Sprague lifted a finger for silence, made a whirling half-turn with a swiftness marvellous in so huge a body, and flung himself through the open door into the unlighted outer office-room to which the laboratory was an inner extension.
There were sounds of a collision, a fall, and a brief struggle before Tarbell could get action. At the end of it Sprague came back into the lighted laboratory, dragging a thick-set, square-shouldered man in pepper-and-salt clothes; a man with a clean-shaven red face down the side of which a thin line of blood was trickling.
"You were eminently correct, Archer," said the expert, slamming his unresisting burden into a corner of the room after he had deftly gone through the pepper-and-salt pockets for weapons with the result of turning out a cheap revolver and a wicked-looking knife. "I'm sorry I can't keep my word and let you go to bed, but the plot has thickened a little too rapidly. Go around to the Topaz and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait. Then come back here and keep this fellow quiet while I do my work."
When Tarbell went out, Sprague quickly stripped his coat and went to work at his laboratory table. For some little time the man in the corner lay as he had been cast, and the worker at the table paid no attention to him. But a few minutes before Tarbell's return, the red-faced man gasped, gurgled, and sat up to hold his head in his hands as one trying to remember what had happened to him. Presently he looked up, and after a long stare at the big figure of the man at the work table, he found his voice.
"Say, guv'ner, wot am I doin here?" he asked huskily.
Sprague, who was skilfully dropping a fuming yellow liquor from a glass-stoppered bottle into a beaker, replied without turning his head.
"If anybody should ask, I should say you are waiting for an officer to come and take you to jail."
"Who, me? Wot have I been doin'?" queried the husky one, in the anxious rasp of a deeply-aggrieved victim of circumstances.
"You've been shoving threatening letters under my door in the Hotel Topaz, for one thing," said Sprague, still busy with his experiment.
"Who, me? My Gawd—just lissen to 'im!" wheezed the red-faced man, as if appealing to some third person invisible.
A silence followed during which the crouching man's feet drew themselves by imperceptible fractions of an inch at a time into position for a tackling spring. Sprague did not look aside, but when the leg muscles of the man began to bulge as if testing themselves for the leap, the worker at the table spoke again.
"I shouldn't try it if I were you. This stuff that I am fooling with is nitric acid, ninety-eight per cent. pure. If any of it should happen to get spilled on you, there wouldn't be sweet oil enough in this town to put the fire out."
"My Gawd!" gasped the red-faced one, suddenly sticking his feet out in front of him again; and just then Tarbell came in.
"I'll be through in a minute, Archer," said the experimenter at the work-table, still without looking around. "Did you find your man?"
"Yes; and Starbuck is with him. What do you want me to do with this geezer?"
"Nothing. I'll fix him when we're ready to go."
"I've got a pair of handcuffs," Tarbell suggested.
"They won't be needed—not for this one."
Tarbell dragged out a chair and sat down, tilting comfortably against the wall and staring half-absently at the man in the corner. "Before I'd let any bare-handed man take my arsenal away from me and slam me around like that," he murmured, quite impersonally.
The man on the floor lifted the challenge promptly.
"Lemme git up and gimme half a chanst," he croaked. "I won't hurt you none if you don't git in the way o' that door."
"Not this evenin'," said Tarbell succinctly; and there the matter rested until Sprague put his beakers and test-tubes aside, and, resuming his coat, took a flat black box from a shelf and slipped it into his pocket.
"Now we're ready," he announced; and then he turned to the captured spy. "We're going to leave you here in the dark for a little while, and there will be nothing between you and a get-away but a small matter of fear. After we turn the lights off I shall leave a few bottles of stuff around where they will do the most good. If you should happen to upset one of them in moving about, it's good-by. If it doesn't burn you to death, you'll stifle."
"My Gawd!" said the captive; and he was still saying it over softly to himself when they switched off the lights, shut the office doors, and went away.
"There is a good example of the power of matter over mind, Archer," said Sprague whimsically, when they reached the street. "If that fellow would use his reason even a little bit he'd know that I hadn't made any very elaborate preparations to hold him; there wasn't time between the turning off of the lights and our leaving. Yet I'll bet a small, chicken worth twenty-five dollars that we find him still crouching in his corner and afraid to move when we go back. He saw me using acid in my little experiment; saw the fumes and probably got a whiff of them. That was enough."
They found Maxwell and Starbuck sitting on the hotel porch, smoking. Sprague took the superintendent aside.
"It's rather worse than I thought it was, Dick," he began, when they had drawn their chairs a little apart. "That is my excuse for keeping you up so late. We have one of the conspirators under a sort of mental lock and key over at my place in the Kinzie Building, but he is only a hired striker, and I'd like to flush the big game. Are you good for a watch-meeting—you and Starbuck? It may last all night, and nothing may come of it, but it's worth trying."
Maxwell spread his hands.
"Whatever you say, Calvin," he acquiesced. "After the jolt you've given me to-night, I can only get into the harness and pull when you give the word."
"All right. We'll take Tarbell for a guide. Tarbell, you know your way around in the shops pretty well, don't you?"
"I reckon so," was the young man's reply.
"We want to go to the foundry, or to some place near by where we can keep an eye on the pickle shed. Can you get us there without arousing anybody's curiosity?"
"Sure," said Tarbell.
"Good. Pitch out," was the curt command, and the four of them left the hotel to make a circuit through ill-lighted streets and around the lower end of the eastern railroad yard to come at the long line of shop buildings from the rear.
On the way Maxwell inquired curiously: "What do you know about pickling-sheds, Calvin?"
"I know that every well-regulated foundry has one where castings which are to be machined are treated with acid to take the hard sand-scale off."
"And why, just why, are you anxious to get a near-hand view of ours, at this time of night?"
"I'm hoping we shall find the answer to that in your foundry yard, Dick. If we don't, the joke will be on me."
The approach to the locomotive-repairing section of the railroad plant was made through a river-bank yard littered with slag dumps, piled flasks, and heaps of scrap iron. There was no moon, and when they got among the lumber sheds in the rear of the car-shops the darkness was almost tangible. But Tarbell knew the ground, and when he finally called a halt the twin cupola stacks of the foundry loomed before them in the darkness and the acrid smell of the warm, moist moulding sand was in the air.
When the pickling-shed had been located for him, Sprague chose the waiting-place under a flask shelter directly opposite and the silent watch began. For a weary half-hour nothing happened. Though the month was August, a cool wind crept down from the Timanyoni snow peaks, and the splash and gurgle of the near-by river added its suggestion of chill to the moonless night. Over in the western yards the night crew was making up the midnight freights; but with the buildings of the plant intervening, the noises of the shifter's exhaust and the clankings and crashings of the shunted cars came faintly to the ears of the watchers.
On the even hour of one the watchman made his round. They could see his lantern twinkling through the windows of the shops, and later he made a circuit of the outbuildings. His route led him finally through the foundry, and as he came out the light of his lantern fell upon the piled castings and the pickling-troughs, and on the carboys of vitriol. There were four of the boxed acid-holders standing under the shed. Sprague drew down his left cuff and made pencil marks on it in the darkness when the watchman passed on.
It was possibly fifteen minutes after the watchman had disappeared when Maxwell broke the strained silence with a whisper.
"Duck!" he said to Starbuck, who was standing up. "Dunkell's coming back—without his lantern!"
Sprague spread his arms and crushed the other three back into the shadows. "It isn't the watchman this time—be ready!" he whispered; and as he said it the figure of a man appeared coming down the littered roadway from the blacksmith shop.
Though he walked in darkness there was no incertitude about the man's movements. Turning abruptly out of the material-road he went straight to the foundry shed. A moment later a beam of white light played steadily upon the acid carboys, a sheltered beam which seemed to come from a tiny electric search-light. Plainly they saw a pair of hands place a large bottle on the ground, remove the stopper, and fix a tin funnel in the neck. Then one of the carboys was tilted, presumably by the same pair of hands, though the hands were invisible now, and a thin stream of the yellow acid gurgled through the funnel.
When the bottle was filled the carboy slowly righted itself; the hands came in view again to remove the funnel and to replace the stopper; and then the search-light went out with the faint snap of an electric switch. Almost at the same instant the watchers saw the figure of the man fading away into the inner and darker blackness of the foundry.
"We've got to follow him, Tarbell," said Sprague, hurriedly; "and we lose out if he discovers us. Can you pilot us?"
"I can," asserted Maxwell, and under the superintendent's lead the shadow race was begun.
Happily, there was a noisy diversion to make the secret pursuit feasible. The train-making clamor had come down from the western yards, and for the moment the yard crew was working on the freight-house tracks opposite the shops. Under cover of the out-door clamor the four pursuers were able to close up on the bottle-carrier until they were treading almost in his footsteps. The route led through the foundry floor to the machine shop. On the erecting pits were two locomotives, apparently ready to be hauled out and put into service after their period of back-shop repairs.
Into the cab of one of the engines the bottle-bearer climbed, first placing his burden carefully in the gangway. A little later they heard him climbing over the coal in the tender, heard him remove the cover of the water manhole, and heard the glug-glug of liquid issuing from a bottle-neck.
Sprague silently drew a small square object from his pocket, the little flat black box he had caught up as he was leaving his office in the Kinzie Building. Then he whispered to Tarbell: "Cover him, Archer, and don't hesitate to shoot if you need to: ready!" At the word there was a blinding burst of illumination and the report of a flash-light cartridge, followed instantly by the crash of the breaking bottle, silence, and black darkness. Then Sprague's mellow voice boomed into the stillness.
"Come down, Mr. Bascom. We've got your picture, and a man who doesn't often miss what he shoots at is covering you with his gun."
It was a grim little group of five which gathered in the master mechanic's room in the office wing of the machine shop a few minutes after the flash-light photograph had been taken in the erecting shop. Bascom's ruddy flush was gone when he sat down heavily in his desk chair; but his natty brown crush hat was pushed back, and the gleam in his small, lynx-like eyes was not of fear.
"Just name the kind of a hand-spring you'd like to have me turn, gentlemen," he said, half-sardonically, when Tarbell had switched on the second circuit of incandescents. "I'm not much of an acrobat, but I'll do the best I can to amuse you."
It was Sprague who did the talking for the prosecution.
"We want to know first who is with you in this job of inside worm-eating, Mr. Bascom," he said coolly.
"Nobody," came the prompt lie.
Sprague's smile was affable. "I'm sure you'll make one exception," he urged; "a man named Murtagh, who was for a little time one of your shop machinists and who is now a press-repairer on The Times-Record."
Bascom sat up and swore a savage oath.
"So that damned scab has welshed, has he?" he grated.
Sprague branched off and began again, this time in the straitly criminal field.
"How many locomotives have you treated with the acid cure, first and last, Mr. Bascom?"
"Enough so you'll still be resetting flues in 'em a year from now. "
This time it was Maxwell's turn to swear, and for a minute or two the air of the office was sulphurous. When the atmosphere had cleared again, Sprague went on.
"I presume that your defence in court will be that you were trying an experiment to neutralize the effect of the alkaline water of this region?"
Bascom grinned appreciatively. "You're an expert chemist yourself, Mr. Sprague. The water in this country, outside of the Park, is pretty badly alkali, as you probably know."
"But that defence will scarcely explain why you put acid in the oil which is used for lubricating the internal parts of the engines—cylinders and valves," Sprague cut in quietly.
The master mechanic's chair righted itself with a crash, and the crash punctuated another blast of bad language directed at the man who had been left crouching in the corner in Sprague's uptown laboratory.
"So Murtagh gave you that, too, did he?" Bascom finished. "It's your lead, Mr. Sprague; what do you want me to play?"
"Names," said the expert curtly.
"But if I say I was playing a lone hand?"
"We should know you were lying. This acid business may be all your own; but there are other things. You've had plenty of help in the drink-fest and the demoralization game, Bascom."
The big master mechanic's lips shut like the jaws of a steel trap. But after a time he said: "What do I get if I spout on the others?"
"A chance to get out of the country—eh, Maxwell?"
The superintendent nodded. "Yes; if he can get away before I can find a gun to kill him with."
Bascom reached into his desk, found a scratch-pad and tossed it over to Starbuck. "Take 'em down," he said briefly; and then followed a black-list that was simply heart-breaking to Richard Maxwell, a man who had built his reputation as a railroad executive, and would have staked it instantly, upon the loyalty of his rank and file. Shop foremen, roundhouse bosses, bridge men, yard foremen, section bosses, a travelling engineer, a clerk here and a telegraph operator there—the list seemed endless.
When Bascom paused, Sprague began again.
"What was the plan, Bascom, as it was outlined to these others?"
The master mechanic's smile showed his fine even teeth.
"To make this jerk-water railroad a little easier to work for," he sneered. "When we found the right kind of a man we made him believe that the discipline was keyed up too damned tight and showed him how he could loosen up a little, if he felt like it. Murtagh was barkeep' and handed out the bug-juice. That's all there was to it."
"Not quite all," said Sprague evenly. "You got Murtagh his job on The Times-Record in order to have him handy without being too much in the way or too much in evidence. How much do the Times-Record people know about the scheme for smashing the Nevada Short Line securities from the inside?"
Bascom laughed hardily.
"You'll never catch a newspaper man," he said. "But I'll tell you this: Parker Higginson is a pretty smooth politician, and he's got a mighty long arm when it comes to reaching for the thing he wants. He was the man who got me my job here, and I'll bet those New York people who appointed me don't know yet why they did it. Another thing: when I'm gone, Higginson will still be here—don't you forget that!"
"We'll try to remember it," Sprague promised. Then he looked at his watch. "The overland passenger, westbound, will be here in a few minutes, and when it goes, you may go with it, Mr. Bascom. But first we want a few more names, the names of the New York people who are behind both you and Mr. Higginson."
Bascom got up, went to a wardrobe in one corner of the office, and dragged out two heavy suit-cases.
"I've been fixed for this for some little time," he volunteered. "Send Murtagh to the stone-pile for splitting on us, and I won't make any claim for the half-month's salary that's due me. As to the names of the big fellows, I only wish I knew them, Mr. Sprague. If I did, I'd go east instead of west and make somebody come across with big money. As it is, I guess it's South America for mine. Good-night, all. I wish you luck with the booze-fighters, Mr. Maxwell. You'll have a bully good time loading some of them back onto the water-automobile." And he went out into the night with a suit-case in either hand.
"Talk about cold gall!" said Starbuck, when the door closed behind the retreating figure of the big master mechanic; "Great Cat! that fellow's got enough to swim in." Then he turned to Sprague. "Is the show over?"
The man from Washington laughed genially.
"That is for Maxwell to say. We might go uptown and give those newspaper people a bad quarter of an hour, though I doubt if we'd make any money at it."
Maxwell looked up quickly.
"You think they're in it, Calvin? Bascom wasn't lying about that part of it?"
"Yes; they are in it up to their necks. I suppose it's politics for Higginson. Haven't I heard somewhere that he is one of the State bosses?"
"You might have," drawled Starbuck. "He's It, all right."
Sprague stood up and yawned sleepily.
"Perhaps, a little later on, we can throw a scare into this Mr. Parker Higginson," he suggested. "Just now, I'm for the hotel and a few winks of much-needed sleep. Tarbell, you go up to my office and get Murtagh. Have him locked up on a charge of—oh, any old charge will do; breaking into my office to-night, if you can't think of anything better. If we can manage to hold onto him for a while, we may be able to keep this Mr. Higginson quiet while Maxwell is straightening out his booze-fighters. Let's go."
"Hold on, just a minute," pleaded Maxwell. "There are three of us here who have seen the wheels go round, and I don't forget that I was the one who said there weren't any wheels. How in the name of all that is wonderful have you been able to work this puzzle out in less than twelve hours, Sprague?"
The big chemistry expert sat down again and locked his hands behind his head.
"My gosh!" he said; "have I got to open up a kindergarten for you fellows when I'm so sleepy that I don't know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning? It was easy, dead easy. Half an hour with those delayed train crews at Angels this morning showed me that the discipline strings were all off; one of the freight conductors even offered me a nip out of his pocket-flask when I intimated that I was thirsty. With that for a pointer, I had my eyes open at the wreck, and what I saw there you all know. Moreover, I noticed that the pocket-flasks were all alike, as if they'd all been handed out over the same bar. All straight, so far?"
"Go on," said Maxwell.
"I got my first pointer on Bascom at the wreck, too. I saw that the men in the trainmaster's gang didn't drink when the boss was looking, a condition which didn't apply in the other crew. Again, I noticed that Bascom took his track-clearing privilege with a large and handsome disregard for the salvage. He didn't care how much property was destroyed in the process, and once I saw him give the signal to the crane engineer to drop a car loaded with automobiles—which was promptly done and the autos properly smashed."
"The cold-blooded devil!" growled the superintendent.
"When we reached town, Tarbell here promptly confirmed my guess about the whiskey; and in the evening Calmaine helped some more by going with me over the pay-rolls for new names, and over the cost-sheets for increases. Naturally, we dwelt longest upon the motive-power and repair department, with its huge increases, and it so happened that my eye fell upon the various charges for vitriol in carboys. I asked Calmaine what use a railroad shop had for so much sulphuric acid, and he told me it was used to pickle castings. Afterward I sent Tarbell out to bring me samples of water from the tanks of the crippled locomotives on the shop-track and of the oil in their cylinder-cups. Analyses of both, which I made on the spot, showed the presence of sulphuric acid in the water, and also in the oil."
"Still, you didn't have any cinch on Bascom," Starbuck put in.
"No, but things were leaning pretty heavily his way. Tarbell had traced Murtagh for me and had found out the one thing that I needed to know; namely, that Murtagh had been 'placed' on The Times-Record by Bascom's recommendation. Murtagh was the man who put the threatening note under my door; the note was printed on a scrap of scratch-paper—copy paper—of the sort that you rarely find outside of a newspaper office. Here I simply put two and two together. Bascom had been conferring with Higginson, or his editor, or both of them, and telling them of my rubber-necking at the wreck. They had agreed among themselves that I'd better be warned off the grass, and they took about the stupidest possible way they could think of to do it."
"Still, you didn't have Bascom," reiterated Starbuck.
"No; but he was the man who had been signing the requisitions for the big purchases of acid, and I was far enough along to chance a jump at him. I knew that if he were the man who was poisoning the locomotives, he wasn't trusting anybody else; he was doing it himself, often and by littles. I wasn't at all sure of catching him to-night, of course; but we saw him down here at the fire, and I thought there was an even chance that he might stay and do a little more devilment."
Maxwell stood up and shook himself into his coat.
"I'm onto you now, Sprague," he chuckled, in a brave attempt to jolly himself out of the depressive nightmare which had been weighing him down for weeks. "You're a guesser—a bold, bad four-flusher, with a perfectly miraculous knack of drawing the other card you need when you reach for it. Now, if you could only guess me out some way in which I can straighten up these poor fellows of mine who have been pulled neck and heels off of the water-wagon"
"Pshaw! that's a cinch," said the big man, yawning sleepily again. "We'll just put our heads together and get out a little circular letter, talking to the boys just as you'd talk to a bunch of them in your office. Tell 'em it's all off, and the bar is closed and padlocked, and you'll have 'em all eating out of your hand again, same as they used to. You don't believe it can be done? You let me write the letter and I'll show you. All you have to do is to apply the scientific principle; surround the whole subject and look at it calmly and dispassionately, and—ye-ow! Say, I'm going to chance another guess—the last in the box. If you don't head me over to the hotel and my room, you'll have to carry me over and put me to bed. And that's no joke, with a man of my size. Let's go."