Chapter II: Part 2

The waiting interval proved to be short. Maxwell had just thrown his roll-top desk open, and the Government man had planted his big bulk solidly in the half-shadowed window-seat, when the door opened and Connolly came in, his full-moon face a frightened blank and his hands still ink-blackened. Tarbell was only a step behind the despatcher, and the reporter from _The Tribune_ office was at Tarbell’s heels. When the three were inside, Tarbell shut the door and put his back against it.

“Here’s your man, Mr. Maxwell,” he said briefly; and Sprague, who had started to his feet at the door opening, sat down again in the shadow and said nothing.

Maxwell pointed brusquely to a chair at the desk end. “Sit down, Dan,” he snapped. And then: “I suppose you know what you’re here for?”

Connolly fell into the chair as if the sharp command had been a blow.

“Know what I’m here for?” he stammered.

“Yes. Nothing will be gained by dodging. You may as well make a clean breast of it. You’ve been faking these scare wreck reports--don’t lie about it; we’ve got the evidence. I want to know who is behind you. Who bribed you to do this thing?”

“Before God, Mr. Maxwell!” the culprit began, with the sweat rolling down his face; but Maxwell stopped him with a quick gesture.

“I’ve told you it was no use to try to lie out of it. I have here on my desk a letter which was taken from your coat pocket to-night, since you came on duty; a letter from which you were careful enough to tear the signature, but on which you were not careful enough to destroy the date line. In that letter the writer threatens to give you away to the New York police if you don’t get busy and give the newspapers a string of Nevada Short Line wrecks to write about. That is enough to send you over the road, but there’s more. The working wires east and west have been cut under the roof of this building, and leads taken off. The leads disappear in the wall back of your bunk-room. I don’t ask you what you have to say for yourself; I want you to tell us, right here and now, who planned the thing, and what it was intended to accomplish.”

Connolly had been slowly collapsing in his chair under the merciless fire of accusation, and a pasty pallor was driving the pink out of his round face.

“My God!” he gasped thickly; and then he repeated, “My God!” A silence crammed with threatenings settled down upon the small office-room. Suddenly it was broken by the sound of hurried footfalls in the corridor, and Tarbell was hurled half-way across the room when the door was flung open from without.

It was young Cargill, the engineer, who burst into the private office, and his lips were white.

“The Limited!” he broke out. “She’s overrun her orders at Corona and she’s due to meet Second Eighteen on the single track!”

It was the Government man who led the rush to the despatcher’s room, a rush in which even the fat culprit joined. In the wire office Davis had the key; his jaw was set and the perspiration was standing thickly on his forehead, but he had not lost his nerve. Calmaine, the chief clerk, was hanging over his shoulder, and outside of the railing the group of trainmen had grown to a breathless crowd, pressing to hear the latest word.

When Maxwell’s party pushed through the gate, Sprague was still in the lead, and his quick glance took in every detail of the scene. Like a flash he turned upon Tarbell, who was fumbling a pair of handcuffs in his pocket, and pinioned him in a grip that was like the nip of a vice.

“Not yet!” he whispered in Tarbell’s ear; and then Davis snapped his switch and spoke.

“It’s no use,” he said, and his harsh tone was only a thin mask for the break in his voice. “It’s the real thing this time. First Eighteen was ready to pull out of Corona when the Limited went by. Corringer left his wire and chased the freight, hoping to get its engine to cut loose and run after the passenger. He couldn’t catch it.”

A low murmur ran through the crowd packed against the counter railing and somebody whispered, “It’s got the boss; his wife and babies are on that train. Look at him!”

Maxwell had gripped the back of a chair and he was staring hot-eyed at the despatcher.

“Do something, Davis,” he pleaded. “Don’t sit there and let those trains come together! For Christ’s sake, think of something!”

The chief despatcher ducked his head as if he were dodging a blow and swallowed hard.

“There isn’t anything to do, Mr. Maxwell--you know there isn’t anything,” he began in low tones. “If there was----”

It was Connolly who made the break. Twisting away from Tarbell’s grip on his arm he flung himself upon Davis.

“Get out o’ that chair and let me have the key,” he wheezed; and when Davis did not move quickly enough he pounced upon the key standing. Davis got up and quietly slid the chair under the night man who sank heavily into it without missing a letter in the call he was insistently clicking out, over and over again in endless repetition.

“What is it?” whispered the newspaper man, who was standing aside with Tarbell and Sprague; and Tarbell answered:

“It’s the Corcoran coal mine--about half-way between Corona and the first station this side, and a half-mile up the gulch. They’ve got a private wire, but they ain’t got any night operator.”

Davis overheard the whisper and shook his head.

“Dan’s got his wits with him,” he said, in open admiration. “There’s a young time-keeper that sleeps in the coal company’s office shack, and he’s learning to plug in on the wire a little. If Dan can only wake him----” And then, in sudden sharp self-accusation: “God forgive me! why didn’t I think of it and save all the time that’s been wasted?” Then, as Connolly closed the circuit and a halting reply clicked through the receiving instrument: “He’s got him! Thank the Lord, he’s got him! If he can only make him understand what’s wanted, there’s a chance--just one chance in a thousand!”

With the very seconds now freighted with disaster, and with only the crudest of amateur telegraphers at the other end of the wire, nine men out of ten would have blown up and lost the thousandth part of a chance remaining. But Connolly was the tenth man. With his left hand shaking until it was beating a tattoo on the glass table top he hitched his chair closer and began to spell out, letter by letter, the brief call for help upon which so much depended. Tarbell translated for Sprague, word by word. “Hurry--down--to--main-line--and--throw--your--switch--to--red. Then--run--west--and--flag--passenger.”

The key-switch clicked on the final word, and for five long, dragging seconds the silence was a keen agony. Then the sounder began hesitantly: dot--pause--dot; dash--dot--dash, it spelled; and Tarbell translated under his breath, “He says ‘O K’. Now, if he can only chase his feet fast enough----”

How Maxwell managed to live and not die through the interminable twenty minutes that followed; how Davis and Tarbell and Connolly hung breathless over the wire-table, while the throng outside of the railing, augmented now to a jammed crowd of sympathetic watchers, rustled and moved and whispered in awed undertones--are themes upon which the rank and file of the Nevada Short Line still enlarge in the roundhouse tool-rooms and in the switch shanties when the crews are waiting for a delayed train.

The dreadful interval seemed as if it would never be outworn, but the end came at last when the hesitant clicking of the sounder was resumed.

“Call it out, Dan,” shouted somebody among the waiting trainmen, and Connolly pronounced the words slowly as the amateur at the end of the private wire ticked them off.

“Both--trains--safe--freight--backing--to--blind--siding--at-- Quentin--switch--passenger--following--under--flag.”

A shout went up that drowned the feeble patter of the telegraph instruments and made the windows rattle. “Bully for the kid at the coal mine!” “Bully for Danny Connolly!” “Come out here, Danny, till we get a chanst at you!”

Maxwell fought his way stubbornly through the crowd, with the newspaper man, Sprague, Tarbell, and Connolly following in his wake. When the five were once more behind the closed door of the private office across the hall, the superintendent turned morosely upon the night despatcher, and he was so full of the thing he was about to do that he did not notice that his guest had taken Tarbell aside for a whispered conference.

“You’ve drawn the teeth of the law, this time, Connolly,” he said sharply. “After what you’ve just done I’m not going to send you to jail. But the least you can do is to tell me who hired you and sent you out here to make trouble for us. If you’ll do that----”

It was Sprague’s hand on his shoulder that stopped him, and then he noticed that Tarbell had disappeared. “Just a minute--until Tarbell gets back,” said the guest, in low tones; and while he was saying it, the door opened suddenly and the ex-cowboy returned, thrusting a sallow-faced young fellow, shirt-sleeved and livid with fear, into the office ahead of him. Then the Government man went on in the same low tone, “You can say to this young man all the things you were going to say to Mr. Connolly. There was a little miscue on Tarbell’s part, and I was just going to tell you about it when the train trouble butted in.” Then to the fat despatcher, “Mr. Connolly, sit down. You’ve jolly well earned the right to look on and listen.”

Connolly sat down heavily, and so did the superintendent. Thereupon the man from Washington slipped easily into the breach, turning briskly upon the yellow-faced car-record operator.

“Step up here, Bolton, and make a clean sweep of it to Mr. Maxwell. Tell him how a certain firm of New York brokers--you needn’t give the names now--sent you, a convicted bucket-shop wire-tapper, out here to disarrange things on this railroad for stock-jobbing purposes. Then tell him how you tapped the despatcher’s wires and put a set of concealed keys under your car-record table in the other room. Tell him how, after you’d faked that wreck message last night, you ran a bluff for sympathy, and how, when it had worked, your nerve flickered and you dropped from the wrecking-train in the yard and sent a stop-order from the yard office. Come to the front and loosen up!”

Bolton was shuffling forward and was beginning a tremulous confession when Maxwell stopped him harshly.

“You can keep all that to tell in court!” he snapped. And then to Tarbell: “Take him away, Archer. And you go back to your job, Dan, and let Davis go to bed. What I’ve got to say to you will keep.” Then to the young man from the _Tribune_, who had his note-book out and was scribbling down his story at breakneck speed: “Write out what you please, Scanlan, but tell Mr. Kendall that I’ll be up to the office presently, and that I’d like to see the story before it goes to the linotypes.”

When the room was cleared, the snappy little superintendent spun his chair around to face his guest.

“Calvin,” he said solemnly, “you’ll never know how near you came to making me break my heart to-night. If I’d had to send Dan Connolly to jail after what he did in the other room a little while ago----”

The chemistry expert was grinning joyously.

“It was a curious little slip,” he commented. “I thought Tarbell was on; never suspected for a moment that he wasn’t until he butted Connolly in here and shot him at you.”

“But you knew Connolly wasn’t the man? How on top of earth did you run it down, in a single day? I can’t surround it, even yet.”

“It wasn’t much of a nut to crack,” laughed the expert easily. “I hope you’ll have a harder one for me the next time I happen along. I got my pointer last night--before I knew anything at all about the nature of your trouble. You see, Bolton was the only man in the outfit who wasn’t sincerely jarred and horrified by that fake message. I saw it the minute I’d had a look into his eyes. From that on it was easy enough.”

“I don’t see it,” objected Maxwell.

“Don’t you? I merely argued backward from the results your wire-devil was trying to obtain and sent a cipher message to a friend of mine in New York. He put me next to a nice little plot in the Street to hamper Ford and break down your company credit. Then I loafed around your shack here until I found Bolton’s wire machinery. Bolton didn’t catch on, but he was suspicious enough of a stranger like me to take a little measure of precaution by slipping that incriminating letter into Connolly’s coat pocket. I supposed Tarbell knew that, or I’d have told him.”

Maxwell had been listening in appreciative admiration, but gratitude came quickly to the fore when Sprague paused.

“Calvin, there’s no telling how many lives you’ve saved by this little stop-over of yours here in Timanyoni Park!” he broke out. “You’ve done it. When that story, properly trimmed down, comes out in the _Tribune_ to-morrow morning, the bare-nerves strain will go off like that”--snapping his fingers. “I wish I could show you.... By George! there’s the Limited pulling in. I’ve got to go down and meet the wife and kiddies!”

The big-bodied man who called himself a chemistry sharp and confessed to the riding of many hobbies rose up with a laugh.

“You want to show me? All right: take me downstairs with you and show me Mrs. Maxwell and the babies. As for the other, you know as well as I do that it’s all in the day’s work. Pitch out or we’ll miss the folks--and that would be worse than getting another message from the wire-devil.”

II

High Finance in Cromarty Gulch

IT was a warm night for altitude five thousand feet, and the last few lingerers in the dining-car on the eastbound “Flying Plainsman” had their windows open. Midway of the car a quartette of light-hearted young people were exchanging guesses as to the proper classification of a big man with laughing eyes and a fighting jaw who was dining alone at one of the end tables.

“He looks like money--nice, large, ready money--to me,” commented the prettiest of the three young women; but her seat-mate, a handsome young fellow with the badge of his college athletic association worn conspicuously in his button-hole, thought differently. “You’ve fumbled the ball this time, Kitty,” he dissented. “If he isn’t the champion of all the amateur heavy-weights, you can put him down as a ’varsity coach out scouting for talent. Jehu! what a ‘back’ he’d make under the new rules!”

“Vaudeville is my guess,” chimed in the next-to-the-prettiest girl mockingly; “the strong man who puts up the dumb-bells, and all that, you know. If you could break into his luggage, I’d wager a box of chocolates that you’d find a perfectly beautiful suit of pink tights with spangled trunks and resined slippers.”

A little later the big man in the far corner took his change from the waiter and left the car. As he passed the joyous party at the double table there was a good-natured twinkle in his gray eyes and he dropped a neatly engraved card at the collegian’s plate.

“Heavens and earth!--he heard us!” gasped the prettiest girl. And then, feminine curiosity overcoming shame, “What does it say, Tommy?”

The young man held the card so that all could see, and admitted himself a loser in the classification game.

CALVIN W. SPRAGUE,
Washington, D. C.
_Chemist, Dept. of Agriculture_

was what they read; and the fourth member of the group, a young woman with fine eyes and an adorable chin, who was neither pretty nor prettier, but something far more transcendent, took the card and studied it thoughtfully.

“You’ve all missed the most astonishing thing--how he contrived to overhear us at this distance,” she commented musingly. And then, addressing the vanished card-owner through his bit of pasteboard: “So you’re a chemist, are you, Mr. Sprague? You don’t look it, not the least little bit, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I say that I doubt it; doubt it very much indeed.”

While the young people were debating among themselves as to whether or no there might not be an apology due, the big man who had dined alone passed quite through the string of vestibuled Pullmans and went to light his cigar on the rear platform of the combination buffet and observation car.

Shortly after he had seated himself in one of the platform camp-chairs, the train, which had been rocketing down a wide valley with an isolated ridge on one hand and a huge mountain range on the other, came to a stand at one of the few-and-far-between stations. The pause, one would say, should have been only momentary; but after it had lasted for a full minute or more the solitary smoker on the rear platform left his chair and went to lean over the platform railing for a forward glance.

Looking down the length of the long train, he saw the lights of the small station, with other lights beyond it which seemed to mark a railroad crossing or junction. On the station platform there were a number of lanterns held high to light a group of men who were struggling to lift a long, ominous-looking box into the express-car.

A little later the wheels of the train began to trundle again, and as his car-end passed the station the smoker on the observation platform had a fleeting glimpse of the funeral party, and of the heavy four-mule mountain-wagon which had apparently served as its single equipage. Also, he remarked what a less observant person might have missed: that the lantern-bearers were roughly clothed, and that they were armed.

A hundred yards beyond the station the train stopped again; and when it presently began to back slowly the platform watcher understood that it was preparing to take on a lighted coach standing on a siding belonging to the junction railroad. When the coupling was made and the “Flying Plainsman,” with the picked-up car in tow, was once more gathering headway in its eastward flight up the valley of a torrenting mountain river, the big man read the number “04” over the door of the newly added coach. After he had made out the number he coolly put a leg over the barrier railing, brushed the guarding porter aside, and pushed his way through the narrow side corridor of the trailer.

In the rear half of the car the corridor opened into a comfortable working-room fitted with easy-chairs, lounges, and a desk; otherwise, the office in transit of the Nevada Short Line’s general superintendent, Mr. Richard Maxwell. Maxwell was at his desk when the big-bodied intruder shouldered himself into the open compartment, but he sprang up joyfully when he recognized his unannounced visitor.

“Why, Calvin, old man! Where in thunder did you drop from?” he demanded, wringing the hand of greeting in a vain endeavor to match the big man’s crushing grip. “Sit down and tell it out. I thought you’d gone back east over the Transcontinental a full month ago.”

The man whose card named him as a Government chemist picked out the easiest of the lounging-chairs and planted himself comfortably in it.

“Jarred you, did I? That’s nothing; I’ve jarred worse men than you are in my time. Your thinking machinery is all right; I was due to go back a month ago, but I got interested in a little laboratory experiment on the coast and couldn’t tear myself away. How are Mrs. Maxwell and the kiddies?”

“Fine! And I’m hurrying to get home to them. I’ve been out for a week and had begun to think I was never going to get back to the Brewster office again. I’ve been having the busiest little ghost dance you ever heard of during the past few days.”

The big man settled himself still more comfortably in his chair and relighted the cigar, which, being of the dining-car brand, had sulked for a time and then gone dejectedly out.

“Will the busy story bear telling?” he asked.

“Yes--to you,” was the half-guarded reply. “You’ll be interested when I tell you that I’m inclined to believe that it’s ‘a little more of the same’--a continuation of our round-up with the ‘wire-devil’ that you straightened out for us a few weeks ago.”

The listener nodded. “Begin back a bit,” he suggested; and Maxwell did it.

“After you went west, we put our wire-devil through the courts, and President Ford served notice on the New York high-finance pirates; told them he had their numbers, and that they’d better let up on us. That was the end of it for the time. But a week ago Thursday I got a hot wire from Ford, telling me to secure voting proxies on every possible share of Short Line stock held locally, firing the proxies to him in New York by special messenger, who should reach him, he said, not later than the night of the fifteenth.”

“Um,” commented the smoker thoughtfully. “Is there much of the stock held out here in your Timanyoni wilderness?”

“A good bit of it, first and last. When the Pacific Southwestern, with Ford at its head, took over the Red Butte Western, the R. B. W. was strictly a local line, and the reorganization plan was based upon an exchange of stock--the new for the old. Then, when we built the extension and issued more stock, quite a block of it was taken up by local capitalists, bankers, mineowners, and ranchmen; not a majority, of course, but a good, healthy balance of power.”

Again the giant in the lounging-chair nodded. “I see,” he cut in. “There is doubtless a stockholders’ meeting looming up in the near future--say on the day after the all-important fifteenth--and the Wall Street people are going after Ford’s scalp again, this time in a strictly legal way. He will probably need your Western proxies, and need them bad.”

“I’ve got them right here,” said Maxwell, tapping a thick bunch of papers on his desk. “And believe me, I’ve had a sweet time rounding them up. Every moneyed man in this country is a friend of Ford’s, and yet I’ve had to wrestle with every individual one of them for these proxies as if I’d been asking them to shed their good red blood.”

“Of course,” was the quiet comment. “The fellows on the other side would stack the cards on you--or try to. What’s in the wind this time? Just a stock-breaking raid for speculation, or is it something bigger than that?”

The young superintendent shook his head doubtfully.

“I don’t know, certainly; I haven’t had a chance to talk with Ford since early in the summer. But I have my own guess. If the Transcontinental could control this five-hundred-mile stretch of ours from Copah to Lorchi, it would have the short line to southern California.”

“Therefore and wherefore, if Mr. Ford doesn’t happen to have the votes in the coming stockholders’ meeting, you’ll be out of a job. Is that about the size of it?”

“Probably,” admitted Maxwell. “Not that it makes any special difference to me, personally. As you know, I have a mine up on the Gloria that beats railroading out of sight. But I’d fight like a dog for Ford, and for my own rank and file here on the Short Line. Of course, Transcontinental control would mean a clean sweep of everybody: there wouldn’t be baskets enough this side of the main range to hold the heads that would be cut off.”

“I suppose not. But, as you say, you have the ‘come-back’ right there under your hand in those proxies. How will you get them to New York?”

“My chief clerk, Calmaine, will deliver them in person. He’ll meet us at Brewster and go right along on this train, which, by the way, is the next to the last one he could take and make New York on time. It’s all arranged.”

The guest smoked on in silence for a little time and when he spoke again it was to ask the name of the junction station at which the late stop had been made.

“It’s Little Butte--where our Red Butte branch comes in from the north.”

“You’d been stopping over there?” Sprague asked.

“No; I had my car brought down from Red Butte on the local, which doubles back on the branch.”

“Um; Little Butte; good name. You people out here run pretty persistently to ‘Buttes,’ don’t you? Did I, or didn’t I, see a funeral at this particular Butte as we came along?”

“You did. It’s Murtrie; a mining engineer who has been doing a sort of weigh-master’s stunt at the Molly Baldwin mine. Died pretty suddenly last night, they say.”

“Large man?” queried the Government chemist, half-absently; and Maxwell looked up quickly.

“Beefy rather than big, yes. How could you tell?”

Sprague waved his cigar as if the question were childish and the answer obvious. “It took a dozen of them, more or less, to put him into the express-car.”

Maxwell turned back to his desk. “Metallic casket, probably,” he suggested. “They had our agent wire Brewster for the best that could be had. Said they were going to ship the body to some little town in Kentucky. They’re a rather queer lot.”

“Who?--the Kentuckians?”

“No; the Molly Baldwin outfit. The mine was opened by a syndicate of New York people four years ago, and after the New Yorkers had put two or three hundred thousand into it without taking anything out, they gave up in disgust. Then a couple of young fellows from Cripple Creek came along and leased the property. There was a crooked deal somewhere, for the young fellows began to take out pay--big pay--right from the start. Then the New York people wanted to ‘renig’ on the lease, and dragged the thing into the courts.”

“And the courts said no?”

“The courts straddled. I didn’t follow the fight in detail, but the final decision was that the lessees were to keep all they could take out each month up to a certain amount. If they exceeded that amount, the excess was to be shared equally with the New Yorkers.”

“Lots of room for shenanigan in that,” was the big man’s passing comment. “Unless these young Cripple Creekers are more honest than the average, they’ll stand a good bit of watching, you’d say.”

Maxwell laughed. “That was what the New Yorkers seemed to think. They secured a court order allowing them to put an expert of their own on the job. And nobody seems to enjoy the watch-dog stunt. They’ve had to send in a new man every few weeks.”

“Do the Cripple Creekers kill them off?”

“No; they buy ’em off, I guess. Anyway, they don’t stay. Murtrie was the last.”

“And apparently he hasn’t stayed,” said Sprague reflectively; and just then a long-drawn wail of the locomotive whistle announced the approach of the train to Brewster. At the signal the guest rose and tossed the remains of the bad cigar out of the window. “Here’s where I have to quit you, Dick,” he was beginning; but Maxwell would not have it that way.

“Not much, you don’t, Calvin, old man,” he protested. “You’re going to stop over one day with me, at least. No; I won’t listen to any excuses. Give me your berth check and I’ll send my boy up ahead to get your traps out of the sleeper. Sit down right where you are and take it easy. You’ll find a box of cigars--real cigars--in this lower drawer. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve seen Calmaine.”

Apparently, the man from Washington did not require much urging. He sat down in Maxwell’s chair as the train was slowing into the division station, and was rummaging in the desk drawer for the box of cigars when an alert, carefully groomed young man came in through the forward corridor and met the superintendent as he was going out. There was a hurried conference, a passing of papers, and the two, Maxwell and his chief clerk, went out together, leaving the big man to go on with his rummaging alone.

Shortly afterward came the bump of a coupling touch, and the office-car, in the grip of a switching-engine, raced backward through the yards; backward and forward again, and when it came to rest it was standing on the short station spur at the end of the railroad head-quarters building. From the open windows Sprague could see the long through train, with its two big mountain-pulling locomotives coupled on, drawn up for its farther flight. It was after it had steamed away into the night that Maxwell returned to his side-tracked car to find his guest, half-asleep, as it seemed, in the depths of the big wicker easy-chair.

“I hope you didn’t think I’d deserted you,” he said, drawing up another of the wicker chairs. “I took time to telephone home. Mrs. Maxwell’s dining out at her sister’s, and, if you don’t mind, we’ll sit here a while and go out to the house later.”

There was enough to talk about. The two, who had been college classmates, had seen little of each other for a number of years. Maxwell told how he had gone into railroading under Ford, and how in his first summer in the Timanyoni he had acquired a gold mine and a wife. Sprague’s recounting was less romantic. After leaving college he had coached the ’varsity foot-ball team for two years and had afterward gone in for original research in chemistry, which had been his “major” in college. Later he had drifted into the Washington bureau as an expert, taking the job, as he explained, because it gave him time and frequent leisurely intervals for the pursuit of his principal hobby, which was the lifting of detective work to the plane of pure theory, treating each case as a mathematical problem to be demonstrated by logical reasoning.

“You ought to drop everything else and take up the man-hunting business as a profession,” laughed Maxwell, when the hour-long talk had come around to the big man’s pet among the hobbies.

“No,” was the instant objection. “That is where you’re wrong. A man does his best work as an amateur--in any line. As long as the man-hunting comes in the way of a recreation, I enjoy it keenly. But if I had to make a business of it, it would be different.” Then he changed the subject by asking about Tarbell, Maxwell’s ex-cowboy division detective, who had served as his understudy in the “wire-devil” case a few weeks earlier.

“Archer is all right,” was the reply; “only he’d like to break away from me and go with you. He thinks you are about the one only top-notcher; says he’d like to take lessons of you for a year or so.”

Sprague was gazing absently out of the near-by window. “Speaking of angels,” he broke in, “there is Tarbell, right now; coming down your office stair three steps at a jump,” and a moment later the young man in question had dashed across to the service-car and was thrusting his face in at the open window.

“Trouble, Mr. Maxwell!” he blurted out. “The ‘Plainsman’s’ just been held up and robbed at Cromarty Gulch! Connolly’s getting the wire from Corona, and he started me out to see if I could find you.”

The superintendent leaped up as if his easy-chair had been suddenly electrified.

“What’s that you say?” he demanded; “a hold-up?” Then he went into action promptly, as a trained emergency captain should. “Call Sheriff Harding on the ’phone, and tell him to rustle up a posse and report here, quick! Then get the yard office and turn me out an engine and a coach for Harding’s men. Hustle it!”

While he was closing his desk he made hurried explanation to Sprague. “It’s probably the Scott Weber gang. They held up a train on the main line over in Utah ten days ago. Come on upstairs with me and we’ll get the facts.”

When the superintendent, accompanied by his broad-shouldered guest, climbed the stair and entered the despatched office, fat, round-faced Daniel Connolly was rattling the key at the train-sheet table. He glanced up at the door opening.

“I’m mighty glad Tarbell found you,” he broke out, with a gasp of relief. “I was afraid you’d gone home.” And then he recognized the square-shouldered one: “How are you, Mr. Sprague? Glad to see you again.”

Maxwell went quickly around to the wire-table.

“Whom have you got?” he asked.

“Allen, night operator at Corona. The train is there, and I’ve been holding it to give you a chance to talk with McCarty, the conductor.”

“Tell me the story as you’ve got it; then I’ll tell you what to say to Mac,” was the brisk command.

“It was in Cromarty Gulch, just at the elbow where the track makes the ‘U’ curve. Cruger’s on the pilot-engine, and Jenkins is running the train puller. Cruger saw somebody throwing a red light at him. They stopped, and four of the hold-ups climbed on the engines and made them cut off the postal- and express-cars and pull on around the curve. Then a bunch of ’em broke in the end door of the express-car and scragged little Johnny Galt, the messenger. While they were doing that, another bunch went through the train and held up the passengers. After they’d gone through Galt’s car and taken what they wanted, they made Cruger and Jenkins couple up again and go on.”

“What did they take?” Maxwell asked.

“Some little money and jewelry from the passengers, McCarty says; not very much.”

“But from the express-car?”

The fat despatcher made a queer face and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“That’s the part of it that’s hard to believe. Galt was carrying considerable money, but they didn’t try to blow his safe. They--they smashed up a coffin and took the dead man out of it.”

“What!” ejaculated the superintendent; “Murtrie’s body?”

“I don’t know who it was--Mac didn’t say. But that’s what they did. When the boys got together and pulled Galt out from under the express stuff where they’d buried him, they found the coffin open and the body gone.”

Sprague had been listening intently.

“This seems to be something worth while, Maxwell,” he cut in. “How much time do we have to waste here?”

“Just a minute. Go on, Connolly.”

“That’s all,” said the fat despatcher. “The train’s at Corona now, and they’ve put Johnny Galt off; and--and the coffin. Mac’s asking for orders.”

“Give them their orders and let them go, and then clear for my special. I’ve sent for Harding and a posse, and we’ll chase out after this thing while the trail is warm. You’ll go along, won’t you, Calvin?” turning to the stop-over guest.

The man from Washington laughed genially.

“You couldn’t scare me off with a fire-hose--not until I have seen this little mystery of yours cleared up. Let’s be doing.”

Five minutes farther along the two-car special train had been made up and was clanking out over the switches in the eastern yard. As the last of the switch-lights were flicking past the windows, a big bearded man came in from the car ahead and Maxwell introduced him.

“Sprague, this is Sheriff Harding. Harding, shake hands with my friend, Mr. Sprague, of the Department of Agriculture, Washington, and then sit down and we’ll thrash this thing out. You’ve heard the story?”

The sheriff nodded. “I’ve heard what Tarbell could tell me. He says the biggest part of the haul was a dead man. Is that right?”

“It seems to be. The dead man is Murtrie, who was supposed to be representing the New York owners of the Molly Baldwin mine. The report goes that he died last night, and his body was put on the train at Little Butte to be taken east to some little town in Kentucky. What’s your guess?”

“I’d guess that the whole blamed outfit was locoed--plumb locoed,” said Harding. “You couldn’t carve it out any other way, could you?”

It was Sprague who broke in with a quiet suggestion. “Try once more, Mr. Harding,” he said.

The big sheriff put his head in his hands and made the effort. When he looked up again there was the light of a new discovery in his eye.

“Say!” he exploded. “Murtrie’s the last of a string of five or six ‘watchers’ they’ve had up at that cussed hole-in-the-ground gold mine--and he’s dead. By gravy! I believe they killed him!”

Maxwell’s smile was grim.

“It seems to me we’re just about as far off as ever,” he commented; “unless you can carry it along to the body-snatching in some way. Why should they----”

“Hold on,” Harding cut in; “I wasn’t through. It’s one thing to kill a man, and another to get rid of the body so it won’t show up and get somebody hanged. Murtrie was sick; that much I know, because Doc Strader went out to the mine to see him day before yesterday. I was talking with Strader about it, and he said it looked like a case of ptomaine poisoning.”

“Well?” said Maxwell.

“Supposin’ it wasn’t natural; supposin’ it was the other kind o’ poison: they’d have to get rid o’ the body, some way or other, wouldn’t they,--or run the risk of havin’ it dug up and looked into, after Murtrie’s friends took hold?”

“Go on.”

“That bein’ the case, they’d have to call in some sort of outside help; they couldn’t handle it alone. Two or three of Scott Weber’s gang’ve been seen hanging around in Brewster within the last few days. Supposin’ these fellows at the Molly Baldwin put up a job with Scott to make this play with Murtrie’s body?”

“By Jove, Harding--I half believe you’ve got it!” Maxwell exclaimed; but the chemistry expert said nothing.

“We can tell better after we get on the ground, maybe,” the sheriff went on. “I had Follansbee bring his dogs along. There’s a trail up through the head of Cromarty Gulch leadin’ out to the old Reservation road on the mesa. If they had anything as heavy as Murtrie’s body to tote, that’s about the way they went with it.”

Maxwell had been absently marking little squares on his desk blotter as Harding talked. The sheriff’s theory was ingenious, but it failed to account for all the facts.

“There’s more to it than that,” he said, at length. And then he appealed to the silent guest. “Don’t you think so, Sprague?”

“I’m waiting to hear how Mr. Harding accounts for the raid on the passengers,” said the big man modestly. “One would think that a gang of body-snatchers would have been willing to do one thing at a time.”

“By George! that’s so,” the sheriff acknowledged. “I hadn’t thought of that. But then,” he added, after a second thought, “a gang that was tryin’ to cover up a killin’ wouldn’t be any too good to throw in a little hold-up business on the side.”

“No,” said Sprague; but he made no further comment. So far from it, he sat back in his chair and smoked patiently while Maxwell and the sheriff went on with the theory-building, a process which continued in some desultory fashion until Maxwell, glancing out of a window, said:

“We’re coming to it; this is the gulch.”

A few minutes later the two-car train slowed down and came to a stand on a sharp curve at the head of a densely wooded ravine in the foot-hills. Harding ran forward to get his posse out, and by the time Maxwell and Sprague had debarked the ground at the track-side was black with men. Sprague laughed softly.

“It’s lucky we’re not depending upon the old Indian method of ‘reading the sign,’” he said. “Whatever the ground might have told us is a story spoiled by this time.” Then he laughed again when a man broke out of the crowd, with a couple of dogs towing him furiously at the end of their leashes. “We gabble a good bit about our civilization and the advances we’ve made,” he went on. “Yet, in the relatively simple matter of running down a criminal, we haven’t got very far beyond the methods of the Stone Age. The idea of an intelligent being, with a human brain to rely upon, falling back upon the instincts of a couple of brute beasts!”

“Oh, hold on,” Maxwell protested. “Those dogs have run down a good many crooks, first and last. Follansbee will take any bet you want to make, right now.”

“And he would lose,” was the confident answer. “But come on; let’s see what’s going to happen.”

The chase, with the dogs running upon a comparatively fresh scent, led up through the pine wood at the head of the gulch. Beyond the wood was a bare, high-lying mesa table-land, with its summer-baked soil dried out to almost rocky hardness. A hundred yards from the gulch head an indistinct road skirted the mesa edge, and here the dogs began to run in circles.

Sprague was chuckling again, but Maxwell counselled patience.

“Wait a minute,” he suggested. “The body-snatchers probably had a team here. The dogs will get the scent of the horses presently.”

“Think so?” queried the expert. Then he drew his companion aside. “Do you know anything about this road, Dick?”

“Yes, it’s the old wagon road from the Reservation into the park.”

“Which way would you go toward Brewster?”

“That way,” said the superintendent, pointing.

“All right; let’s go a little way toward Brewster, and perhaps I can show you why Mr. Follansbee would lose his bet on his dogs.”

When they were well out of the dog-circling area, the chemistry expert stooped and struck a match. “See here,” he said; and Maxwell, squatting beside him, saw the broad track of an automobile tire. Sprague gurgled softly. “Do you think the dogs will get the scent of that?” he inquired.

Maxwell stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Calvin, the way you hop across and light upon the one only sure thing, comes mighty near being uncanny, at times. How the devil did you find out that those fellows came in an auto?”

“If I should tell you that it was pure reasoning, you’d doubt it. But never mind the whys and wherefores just now; they can come later. Tell me how long we’re going to stay here losing time on Follansbee and his dogs.”

“Not a minute longer than you care to stay. What do you want to do?”

“I want to see that crippled express messenger who was put off the train at Corona. Also, I’d like to have a look at the dead man’s coffin.”

“You shall do both. If you’re taking the case, you are very pointedly the only doctor there is in it,” Maxwell asserted. Then he called to the sheriff: “O Harding!” and when the county officer came up: “I’m going to take the train and run on to Corona after Galt. We’ll stop here for your orders when we come back.”

During the short run around the hills to the small mining-town station, Sprague sat quietly in his chair, puffing steadily at his cigar, and saying nothing. When Maxwell announced their arrival he got up and followed the superintendent into the Corona office.

Galt, the express messenger, was lying on the night operator’s cot in the telegraph office. Some physician passenger on the held-up train had dressed his wounds, and he had fully recovered consciousness. His story was a mere amplification of the wire report which had gone to Brewster. He had marked, and wondered at, the unscheduled stop on the gulch curve, but before he could open his door to look out, the postal- and express-cars had been pulled on ahead, his end door had been battered in, and he had found himself trying to fight back a couple of masked men who were forcing an entrance. Then somebody hit him on the head and that was the end of it, so far as he was concerned.

Following this, the Corona night operator was put upon the question rack. He knew only what the trainmen had told him. No; there was nothing missing out of the express-car save the dead man’s body. While the train was waiting, he, the operator, and the conductor had made a careful check of the contents of the car from Galt’s waybills, and, with the single exception noted, everything was undisturbed. No, there was no panic; the scare was pretty well quieted down by the time the train reached Corona. Of course, a good many of the passengers had got out at the station stop, and everybody was curious to see the coffin.

“You took the coffin off?” Maxwell questioned.

“Yes, it’s in the freight-room.”

Sprague had taken no part in the examination of the man, and had listened only cursorily to Galt’s story. But now he became as curious as any of the morbid passengers had been. Allen, the operator, lighted a lantern and led the way to the freight-room. The coffin was lying upon a baggage-truck. It was encased in an ordinary shipping-box, half of the cover of which had been torn off. The lid of the coffin had been broken, split into three pieces; and one of the pieces was missing. It was a rather expensive affair, wooden and not metallic, of the kind known as a “casket,” silk-lined, and with a sliding glass face-plate. The glass had been broken, and the fragments were lying inside on the small silken pillow.

Sprague bent to examine the silent witness of the mysterious robbery and the operator offered his lantern. But the Government man took a small electric flash-light from his pocket and made it serve a better purpose. Only once, while he was flashing the tiny beam of the electric into the coffin’s interior, did he speak, and then it was to say to Maxwell: “I thought you said this was a metallic coffin.”

“That was the inference, when you spoke of the weight and the number of men required to handle it. Of course, I didn’t know anything definite about it.”

Once more Sprague peered into the silk-lined interior, stooping to send the light ray to the foot of the casket, which was still hidden under the undestroyed half of the outer case. Then, snapping the switch of the flash-light and carefully replacing the broken box cover, he nodded briskly to Maxwell.

“That’s all, for the present. If I were you, I’d have this coffin nailed up in its box, just as it is, without disturbing anything. You can manage that, can’t you, young man?” turning short upon the operator.

Allen said he could and proceeded to do it; after which, under Sprague’s direction, the case was trundled out to the platform, and the three of them, with Maxwell’s private-car porter to help, loaded the coffin upon the front platform of Maxwell’s car.

“We’ll take it back with us,” said the Government man, with a sober twinkle in his eyes. “It’s a passably good coffin, you know, and with a little repairing it will do to use again--say, when we have found the man it belongs to.”

While the night operator, the porter, and the two enginemen were carrying the wounded express messenger to the private car and making him comfortable in Maxwell’s own state-room, the superintendent’s curiosity got the better of him.

“You’re not saying much, Calvin,” he offered. “Have you found any clew to the mystery?”

“Clews?--yes; I’ve found plenty of them. They’re slightly tangled as yet, but we’ll get hold of the proper thread in a little while. When do we start back?”

“Any time, if you’ve seen all you want to. I’ll have Allen get orders for us right now, if you say so.”

The big-bodied Government man stood aside while the Corona operator called the despatcher and obtained the order for the return of the two-car special to Brewster. But after the bit of routine was finished he made another suggestion.

“I’d like to know, in so many words, exactly what was taken from the passengers on the train, Dick,” he said. “Can’t you have this young man catch the train somewhere and instruct the conductor to find out for us?”

Maxwell nodded and gave Allen the necessary directions. “Tell McCarty to wire his answer direct to me at Brewster,” he added; and then, as the train was ready, the start was made for the return.

At the curve in Cromarty Gulch they found only Tarbell awaiting them. When the ex-cowboy had climbed aboard and the homeward run was resumed, Tarbell made his report. Harding and his posse were following the automobile tracks on foot. It was the sheriff’s theory that, sooner or later, the men in the machine would have to stop somewhere, whereupon the dogs would once more be able to take up the trail. Harding was convinced now that he was trailing the Weber gang, and he believed that the start toward Brewster was only a blind.

Sprague smiled again at the mention of the dogs.

“How far is it to Brewster?” he asked.

“About thirty miles, by the wagon road,” Maxwell guessed.

“Good; we’re safely rid of Mr. Harding and his people, and of Follansbee and his dogs, for some little time, I take it. Now we are free to do a little business on our own account. I want to know everything you can tell me about this man Murtrie; what he looked like, what he did, and all the rest.”

“It’s a sort of thankless job to backcap a dead man,” Maxwell demurred. “Just the same, Murtrie always looked to me like a hired assassin--the kind you see on the vaudeville stage, you know. He was a big, beefy fellow, with a puffy face and a bad eye.”

“Light or dark?”

“Dark; black eyes and a heavy, drooping mustache. To tell the truth, he looked as little like an expert mining engineer as anything you can imagine. Wouldn’t you say so, Tarbell?”

The sober-faced young man who had made his record running down cattle thieves in Montana nodded gravely.

“What time he put in up at the Molly Baldwin wouldn’t count for much,” was Tarbell’s comment. “Mighty near any hour o’ the day or night you could find him tryin’ out his ‘system’ at Bart Holladay’s faro game; leastways, when he wasn’t hangin’ round the railroad depot.”

“Yet you say, Maxwell, that he was sent out here by the New York mineowners to keep cases on the gold output?” questioned Sprague.

“Why, yes; that is what everybody said.”

“It’s what he said himself,” Tarbell put in.

“But you didn’t believe it?” queried Sprague, turning upon the ex-cowboy.

“I didn’t know just what to believe,” was the frank admission. “He was mighty thick with Calthrop and Higgins, the two fellows that are operatin’ the Molly Baldwin under the lease; but, as I say, he didn’t stay there none to speak of. And as for his bein’ a minin’ sharp--I don’t know about that, but I do know that he was a brass-pounder.”

“A telegraph operator, you mean?” said Sprague quickly. “How do you happen to know that, Archer?”

“’Cause I caught him more than once ‘listenin’ in’ at the commercial office downstairs in the depot.”

“How could you tell?” demanded the chemist shrewdly.

“If you was an operator yourself, you’d know, Mr. Sprague. You can take my word for it, all right.”

The man whose recreative hobby was the application of scientific principles to the detection of crime, smoked in reflective silence for a minute or two. Finally he said: “You are a much better spotter than you think you are, Archer. It is a pity that this man Murtrie is dead. If he wasn’t, I’d like to have you shadow him a bit more for us. Where did you say he kept himself chiefly--in Brewster, I mean?”

“At Bart Holladay’s road-house, on the Little Butte pike. It’s a tough joint, with faro and roulette runnin’ continuous in the back rooms, and half a dozen poker games workin’ overtime upstairs.”

“I see,” said Sprague thoughtfully; “or rather, I’d like to see. Maybe, before I go home, you’ll take a little time off some evening, Archer, and drive me out to this road-house. It’s a free-for-all, isn’t it?”

Tarbell grinned. “All you got to do is to give the barkeep’ the high sign and go in and blow yourself. Anybody’s money’s as good as anybody else’s, to Bart.”

“All right; we’ll put that down as one of our small recreations, after this dead-man muddle is straightened out for Mr. Maxwell. Is this Brewster we’re coming to?”