Chapter III: Part 3

It was; and when the train shrilled to a stand at the station the company ambulance was waiting to take the wounded express messenger out to the hospital. Also, there was a young man from _The Tribune_ office, who was anxious to get the latest story of the sensational hold-up of the “Flying Plainsman.” Tarbell was detailed to give the reporter the facts in the case, so far as they had developed, and Maxwell and his guest climbed the stair to the despatcher’s room in the second story. Connolly was rattling his key in the sending of a train-order when they entered, but he “broke” long enough to hand the superintendent a freshly written telegram.

It was from McCarty, the “Plainsman” conductor, and it was dated from Angels.

“To R. MAXWELL, G. S.,

“Brewster:

“Can’t find that anybody lost anything. Hold-up in Pullmans was probably meant to keep passengers bluffed while the others went through express-car.

“McCARTY.”

Sprague nodded slowly when the telegram was handed him. “That is what I suspected; in fact, I was morally certain of it, but I thought it would do no harm to make sure.” Then he turned to the chubby despatcher who had finished sending his train-order. “Mr. Connolly, has any one been here to ask questions about this hold-up--since we left, I mean?”

Connolly looked his astonishment and nodded an affirmative.

“Two men from out of town, weren’t they?” Sprague suggested.

Again the despatcher nodded, and it was only his respect for the big man that kept him from asking how the incident could possibly be known to one who had been thirty miles away at the moment of its happening.

“Go on and tell us about it,” Sprague directed; and at this Connolly found his tongue.

“It was them two fellows that are operating the Molly Baldwin mine, Calthrop and Higgins. They’d heard of the hold-up through the operator at Little Butte, they said, and they drove down in their auto. They seemed to be a whole lot stirred up about the taking of Murtrie’s body; said they felt responsible to his friends in the East. They wanted to know particularly what we were doing about it, and if there was any chance of our catching up with the body-snatchers.”

Sprague waved his cigar in token of his complete satisfaction. Then he went abruptly to something else.

“Mr. Connolly, where can you catch that eastbound train again for us by wire?”

Connolly glanced at his train-sheet.

“She’s due at Arroyo in eight minutes. It ain’t a stop, but I can have the operator flag her down.”

“Good. Do it, and send this message to McCarty, conductor. Are you ready?” And when the despatcher, quickly calling the station in question, signalled his readiness, Sprague went on, dictating slowly: “‘Hold your train and have Calmaine, chief clerk, come to the wire.’ Sign Mr. Maxwell’s name--that’s all right, isn’t it, Maxwell?”

“Anything you say is all right,” was the quick response.

“It won’t ball things up--holding your train a few minutes at Arroyo?”

“Connolly will see to that. It’s off time now and running on orders, anyway.”

“Then we can sit down quietly and wait to hear from the exceedingly capable-looking young man who has the honor to be your chief clerk,” said the Government man, and he calmly planted himself in the nearest chair.

“Calmaine will probably be abed and asleep in the Pullman,” Maxwell suggested. “I suppose your call is important enough to warrant his getting up and dressing?”

“It is--fully important enough; as I think you will be ready to admit when we hear from Arroyo.” Then he extended a handful of cigars. “Have a fresh smoke; oh, you needn’t look cross-eyed at them; they’re your own, you know. I swiped them out of your private box in the car when you weren’t looking.”

Maxwell took a cigar half-absently. His mind was dwelling upon the mystery surrounding the unexplainable hold-up, with the surface current of thought directed toward Connolly’s sounder, through which would presently come the expected message from Arroyo.

It was while he was holding the lighted match to the cigar that the sounder began to click. He translated for Sprague: “Train here. McCarty gone to wake Mr. Calmaine.” After that there was a trying wait of perhaps five minutes. Then the sounder began to chatter rapidly, and Maxwell bounded from his chair.

“Good God!” he ejaculated, “he says Calmaine isn’t on the train!”

“Ah!” breathed the big-bodied expert, rising and stretching his huge arms over his head. “Again we get the expected precipitation in the test-tube. Mr. Connolly, suppose you ask McCarty if Mr. Calmaine has been on the train at all.”

Connolly hastily tapped out the question, and a moment afterward vocalized the answer.

“He was on the train when it left Brewster. Nobody seems to remember seeing him after that.”

Sprague turned to his host.

“I think we can let Mr. McCarty go in peace now, with a promise that we sha’n’t bother him again to-night. Tarbell is the man we shall need from this on. Where has he gone?”

Tarbell was at that moment opening the corridor door, having but now got rid of the newspaper reporter. Sprague began on him briskly.

“Archer, the muddle is cleared up, and I’m minded to take that bit of recreation we spoke of a while back--at this Mr. Bart Holladay’s show place, you know. How far did you say it is?”

The ex-cowboy looked dazed, but he made shift to answer the direct question.

“About two mile, I reckon.”

“Outside of the city limits?”

“Yep.”

“Then we can’t take a policeman along for protection--I’m a tenderfoot, and all tenderfoots are nervous, you know. That’s too bad. And Mr. Harding isn’t here to let us have the backing of the county officers. Dear, dear! Are they _very_ bad men out there, Archer?”

Tarbell grinned sheepishly, feeling sure that the big man was in some way making game of him.

“They’d eat you alive if they thought you was an officer headin’ a raid on ’em. Otherwise, I reckon they wouldn’t bite you none.”

“Well, I suppose we shall have to risk it--without the policeman,” said the expert with a good-natured laugh. “Perhaps we can persuade them that we are just ‘lookers,’” he suggested. And then: “I suppose you have your artillery with you?”

Tarbell nodded. “A couple o’ forty-fives. I’d hardly go huntin’ train-robbers without ’em.”

“Of course not. Suppose you divide up with Mr. Maxwell here, and then go and find us an auto; just the bare car; we’ll manage to drive it ourselves. And, Archer, get a good big one, with easy springs. If there is any one thing I dislike more than another it is to be jammed up in a little, hard-riding car. I need plenty of room. I guess I grew too much when I was a boy.”

The young man with the sober face went away, still more or less dazed; and Maxwell dropped the weapon that Tarbell had given him into the outside pocket of his top-coat.

“I am completely and totally in the dark as yet, Calvin,” he ventured. “Did you mean what you said when you told Tarbell just now that the muddle was cleared up?”

“I did, indeed. And it is as pretty a piece of off-hand plotting as I have ever come across, Dick. Don’t you see daylight by this time?”

“Not a ray. It may be just natural stupidity; or it may be only a bad case of rattle. I blew up and went to pieces when that wire came about Calmaine. Why, good heavens, think of it, Calvin! If the boy’s gone, those proxies are gone, too!”

“Quite so. And you are wondering why a good, steady, well-balanced young fellow like your chief clerk should get himself lost in the shuffle when his mission was so vitally important. What do you suppose has become of him?”

“I can’t begin to guess. That is what is driving me mad. Of course, the supposition is that he got mixed up in this body-snatching business in some way. But why should he? Why the devil should he, Calvin, when he had every possible reason for dodging and keeping out of it?”

“I don’t know,” rejoined the big man, with a head-wagging of doubt, real or simulated. “One of the most difficult things to prefigure--you might say the only one which refuses to come under the test-tube formulas--is just what a given man will do under certain suddenly sprung conditions. It is the only problematical element which ever enters into these puzzle-solvings of mine. I haven’t the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with your chief clerk, but from the little I’ve seen of him I should say unhesitatingly that he is a young man for an emergency, quick to think, and fully as quick to act. I’m banking on that impression and hoping that he hasn’t disappointed me.”

“Then you know what has become of him?”

Sprague smiled impassively. “I shouldn’t be able to convince you that it is knowledge,” he admitted. “You’d call it nothing more than a wild guess. Isn’t that our auto that I hear?”

Maxwell stepped to a window and looked down upon the plaza.

“It’s somebody’s auto,” he said. “There are two men in it.” And a moment later--“They are coming up here.”

The demonstrator of scientific principles hooked his elbows on the counter railing and laughed gently. “Our two nervous friends from the Molly Baldwin,” he predicted. “They are still worrying about the loss of their corpse.” And even as he spoke the two young lessees of the mine came tramping in, their faces sufficiently advertising their anxiety.

Maxwell nodded to the file-leader of the pair.

“Hello, Calthrop,” he said. “What do you know?”

“Nothing more than we did. We heard that you’d got back from Cromarty and thought maybe you could tell us something.”

“Not anything definite,” was the superintendent’s brief rejoinder. “You know the facts; Murtrie’s body was taken out of its coffin and carried off. There were auto tracks on the mesa at the head of Cromarty Gulch, and Harding and his posse are following them. That’s all.”

“Wh-where is that coffin, now?” It was the younger of the two who wanted to know.

Without looking around, Maxwell felt that Sprague’s eyes were signalling him, but he could hardly determine why he was moved to tell only part of the truth.

“It was taken off at Corona.”

The one who answered to the name of Calthrop swore morosely. “It’s the Scott Weber gang, ain’t it, Mr. Maxwell?” he asked.

“I think so; and Harding thinks so. But why they should steal only a dead body is beyond me--or any of us.”

The two young men exchanged a whispered word or two and went out, with the anxiety in their faces thickly shot with fresh perplexity. At the door Higgins turned for another asking.

“If we pay the freight on it, can we have that coffin back, Mr. Maxwell? We bought it and paid for it.”

This time Maxwell caught Sprague’s eye and read the warning in it. “We’ll see about that later,” he said.

When the door slammed at the outgoing of the pair, Sprague was laughing again.

“After those two young fellows have turned a few more sharp corners in the rather crooked course they’re steering, they’ll learn to take their medicine without making faces over it,” he remarked. “Any signs of Archer yet?”

Maxwell turned back to the window.

“Yes; he’s coming. He’s pulling up on the other side of the plaza--doesn’t want to run afoul of these mining friends of ours, I suppose.”

“Archer has a head on him, all right, and I like him. You want to swing onto that young fellow, Dick. He’ll make a good man for you some day. Let’s go down and join him.”

Tarbell waited when he saw the boss and his guest coming across the plaza, and when his two fares were stowed in the roomy tonneau of the big car he let the clutch in for the short run to the western suburb. The night was clear and starlit, but there was no moon. Since the hour was well past midnight, the streets were practically deserted. Beyond the last of the street-crossing arc-lamps the western road led away through a forest of dwarf pine, a broad white pathway winding among the trees and roughly paralleling the railroad.

At one of the shorter turns in the pike they came upon the brilliantly lighted road-house. In appearance it was a modern roadside tavern, one of the many which owe their sudden recrudescence to the automobile. It was withdrawn a little from the highway, and was surrounded by ample stables and shelter sheds opening upon a great square yard with wide carriage gates. Tarbell backed the auto to a stand among a number of others in the yard, and a man with a lantern came, ostensibly to offer help, but probably to make sure that the new-comers were harmless.

“It’s all right, Jerry,” said Tarbell, hopping out. “Mr. Maxwell and a friend o’ his from the East. Games goin’?”

The man nodded and held his lantern so that Maxwell and his guest could see to get out of the tonneau. Then he turned away and left them.

Tarbell led the way to the porch entrance and on the step explained the sight-seeing process to the one who was supposed to be inexperienced.

“It’s an open game, as I let on to you,” he told Sprague. “You go into the bar and buy. After that you do as you please.”

Sprague paused for a single question.

“What do we find?” he asked.

“A lot of young bloods from town, mostly,” was Tarbell’s reply. “Holladay’s got sense enough to keep his own gang in the quiet and take his rake-off as it comes--from the bank and the tables and the roulette wheels.”

Sprague made the single question a little more comprehensive.

“I didn’t mean the people, so much as the place; if we should want to get out in a hurry--how about that?”

Tarbell indicated a hall door at the side of the main entrance, adding the information, however, that it was usually kept locked.

“Good. After we get to going, inside, you make it your job to unlock that door, Archer, and to put the key in your pocket. Now I’m ready, and I want to see it all.” And they went in.

The bar-room proved to be typical of its kind: plainly furnished, with a wide country-house fireplace and a sanded floor. As the night was close and warm, the card-tables were ranged beneath the open windows; only two or three of them were occupied, and the bar itself was empty. Maxwell and his guest sat down at one of the unoccupied tables, and Tarbell ordered for the three. When the liquor was served, he said: “You don’t need to sop it up inside of you if you don’t want to; it’s none too good.”

With this for a caution the two who were warned carefully spilled their portions on the sanded door, and Sprague ordered cigars, skilfully juggling them when they came and substituting three of his own--or rather of Maxwell’s. Then he made a sign to Tarbell and they began to make a slow tour of the open game-rooms.

The first-floor rooms, where a pair of roulette wheels were spinning and a faro game was running, were well filled. Brewster had lately passed an anti-gambling ordinance, and the vice had been temporarily driven beyond the corporation limits. Maxwell saw a few men whom he knew, and many who were well known to the Brewster police. Under the archway dividing the red-and-black wheels from the faro table Sprague whispered in his ear.

“I’m looking for a man whose New York name is ‘Tapper’ Givens,” he said. “He has a red face, black hair and eyes, and weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds. He may, or may not, be wearing a heavy black mustache, and----”

Maxwell looked up with a puzzled frown. “Say, Calvin; you’re describing the dead man,” he broke in.

“Am I? Never mind if I am. If you should happen to see any one filling the requirements, just point him out to me. I might overlook him in such a crowd as this, you know.” And then to Tarbell, who had just found them again: “Got that key, Archer?”

The ex-cowboy showed the hall door key cautiously in his palm and returned it to his pocket. Sprague smiled and whispered again.

“How about the rooms upstairs? Are they open to inspection, too?”

Tarbell shook his head. “No; private poker games, most of ’em.”

“Nevertheless, I think we shall have to have a look-in,” said the big man quietly. “Can’t you arrange it?”

“Not without riskin’ a scrap.”

“We don’t want to start anything, but we’ve just naturally got to have that look-in, Archer,” persisted the guest.

The grave-faced young Tennessean thrust out his jaw. “What you say goes as she lays,” he returned, and thereupon he showed them the way upstairs.

At the stair-head there was a guard, a bullet-headed ring-fighter posing as a waiter, with a square patch of an apron and a napkin thrown over one arm.

“Mr. Maxwell’s lookin’ for one of his men,” said Tarbell, realizing that some sort of an excuse must be offered; and the ring-fighter, who knew the railroad superintendent by sight, nodded and said:

“That’s aw right; who is ut?”

“Harvey Calmaine,” said Tarbell, giving the first name that came into his head.

To the astoundment of at least two of the three, the bullet-headed guard stood aside and pointed to a door at the farther end of the upper hall.

“He’s in there,” he grunted. “Somebody’s been givin’ him th’ knock-out drops, an’ they’re workin’ over him.” Then he spun around and put a ham-like hand flat against Maxwell’s chest. “Ye’ll gimme yer wor-rd, Misther Maxwell, that ye haven’t got the sheriff’s posse at yer back?”

“No,” said Maxwell, and he managed to say it with a degree of coolness which he was very far from feeling. “We’re all here; all there are of us.”

“Aw right; gwan in. But there’ll be no scrappin’, mind ye. If there does be anny, I’ll be takin’ a hand, meself.”

Sprague took the lead in the silent march to the indicated door, his big bulk looming colossal in the narrow, low-studded hallway. Reaching the door, he turned the knob noiselessly. “Locked,” he muttered, and then he drew back and put his shoulder to it.

The lock gave way with a report like a muffled pistol shot and the door flew open. The room was lighted by a single incandescent bulb swinging on its cord from the ceiling. On a cot which had been dragged out from its place beside the wall lay the chief clerk, bare-footed, gagged, and securely bound with many wrappings of cotton clothes-line. Standing over him, one of them with the lighted match he had been holding to the bare foot-soles still blazing, were two others; a red-headed, yellow-faced man with one eye missing, and a thick-shouldered athlete aptly answering to Sprague’s description whispered to the superintendent in the room below.

Maxwell sprang forward with an oath when he recognized the man with the burning match. “_Murtrie!_” he exploded; and the torturer with the black eyes and puffy face dropped the match-end and grabbed for his weapon. He was a fraction of a second too slow. Tarbell had covered him with a movement which was too quick for the eye to follow and was reaching backward for the other gun--which Maxwell gave him--while Sprague closed the door and set his back against it.

“The jig is up--definitely up, Givens,” said the Government man pleasantly. And then to Tarbell: “Herd those two into a corner, Archer, while we take some of these impediments off of Mr. Calmaine.”

When the chief clerk was freed he tried to sit up; tried and would have fallen if Maxwell had not caught him. “They’ve burked me,” he mumbled; “but--they didn’t make me tell, and they didn’t get--the papers.”

“Take it easy,” said Maxwell soothingly; “You’ll be all right in a minute or so.” Then, in a fresh access of rage: “They’ll pay for this, Harvey, if it takes every dollar I’ve got in the world!”

Calmaine tried sitting up again, found that he could compass it, and reached feebly for his shoes and socks.

“The--the proxies are safe--if it doesn’t rain,” he quavered, his mind still running on the precious papers of which he had been the bearer. “Get--get me out of this and into an auto and I’ll find them for you. We might--might catch Number Six, if we hurry.”

Tarbell, with Sprague’s help, had deftly handcuffed the two men whom he had backed into a corner. It was the one-eyed man who first found speech in an outpouring of profanity venomous and horrible. “You ain’t got us out o’ here yet,” he spat, trailing the defiance out in more of the cursings.

“But we’re going to get you out if we have to throw you through the window,” said Sprague quietly. Then to Maxwell: “Help the boy with his shoes, Dick. We’re due to have a jail delivery here, any minute.”

It took some little time to get the maltreated chief clerk shod and afoot, and even then he was well-nigh crippled. But he was game to the last. “They took my gun away from me,” he complained. “If I only had something to fight with--Archer, give me that black devil’s pistol.”

Sprague’s warning had not been baseless. The stair-head guard had doubtless seen Sprague shoulder the locked door open, and had sprung a still alarm. There was a hurrying of many feet in the hall, marking the gathering of the gambling-house fighting force. While Calmaine was asking for a weapon, the crowd in the hall began to batter at the door, against which Sprague had once more put his huge bulk, and were calling to Murtrie to open to them.

Sprague gave his directions snappily, as if he were signalling his foot-ball squad. “Draw that cot a little this way--that’s right. Now then, Archer, stand here against the wall with your two jail-birds, and when I give the word, rush ’em for the yard by the stairway entrance. If they don’t obey, plug ’em, and plug ’em quick. Maxwell, you and the boy get over on this side. When you’re ready, turn off that light. Quick! They’re going to charge us!”

The simple programme was carried out precisely and to the letter. When the rush came the room was in darkness, and Sprague stepped lightly aside. Thereupon a dozen charging men, finding no resistance in the suddenly released door, piled themselves in cursing confusion over the barricading cot.

“Now!” shouted Sprague, and the dash for liberty was made, with the big man in the lead clearing the hall of its stragglers, brushing them aside with his mighty weight or driving them before him like chaff in the fury of his onset. At the stair-head there were more coming up from below: Sprague caught the bullet-headed ring-fighter around the waist, and using him as a missile, cleared the stairway at a single throw. “Come on!” he yelled to those who were behind; and a moment later the unlocked door at the stair-foot gave them egress to the open air and to the yard where the automobiles were parked.

Quite naturally, the din of the battle had precipitated a panic in the unlicensed road-house, and the building was disgorging, through doors and windows, and even over the roofs of the shelter sheds. Tarbell drove his two prisoners into the tonneau of the hired car, while Maxwell promptly cranked the motor and Sprague lifted Calmaine bodily to the front seat. Ten seconds beyond this, while the panic was still at its height, the hired car, leading all others in the townward rush, was leaving a dense dust trail to befog its followers, and the capture and rescue were facts accomplished.

With Tarbell at the steering-wheel, the car sped silently through the western suburb and came into the deserted, echoing streets of the city. Without asking any questions, the ex-cowboy drove straight to the county jail and pulled up at the curb in front of the grim building, with its heavily grilled windows showing their steel barrings in the street light. Sprague passed the two prisoners out to him, jerking even the bigger of the two clear of the auto step as if he had been a feather-weight. But when Tarbell would have marched the pair across the sidewalk, Sprague called out.

“Just one question, Givens,” he said brusquely. “You know what you’re in for; you know that you are still wanted in Cleveland on that charge of counterfeiting. But if you’ll answer one question straight, we’ll forget the Ohio indictment for the present. What did you do with the swag that you lifted a few hours ago?”

For five full seconds the black-haired man kept silence. Then he spoke as the spirit moved him.

“It’s where you won’t get it--you n’r them make-believe crooks up at the Molly Baldwin!” he rasped.

“Oho!” Sprague laughed. “So you planned it to give your side partners in this little game the double-cross, did you? It’s like you. Take them away, Archer.”

“And--and hurry back!” whispered Calmaine hoarsely. “We’ve simply _got_ to catch Number Six, I tell you!”

Thus urged, Tarbell expedited matters with the night jailer and came running back to take his place behind the steering-wheel.

“Where now?” he asked, dropping the clutch in; and it was Calmaine who gave the direction.

“The Reservation Road east; it’s the one we came in over.”

Tarbell easily broke all the speed records, to say nothing of speed limits, in the race to the eastward over the dry mesa country. Twenty-odd miles from town they met the sheriff’s party, and there was a momentary halt for explanations. “Camp down right where you are, and we’ll go back pretty soon and send a bunch of autos out after you,” was Maxwell’s word of encouragement; and then the big car sped on its way toward Cromarty Gulch.

Calmaine seemed to have preserved his sense of locality marvellously. A few hundred yards short of the spot at the gulch head where Follansbee’s dogs had begun their aimless circlings, he told Tarbell to pull up.

“They are right along here, somewhere,” he said, getting out to hobble painfully ahead of the others when Tarbell took off a side-lamp to serve for a lantern. “They had me blindfolded, at first, and I didn’t know what they were trying to do with me. When they chucked me into the auto, I tried to make a get-away. While they were knocking me silly again, I managed to get the papers out of my pocket and fire them into the sagebrush. It was right along here, somewhere.”

It was Sprague who discovered the thick packet upon which so much depended. It was lying cleverly chance-hidden under a clump of the greasewood bushes. “Found!” he announced. And then he gave the young chief clerk his due meed of commendation. “You’re a young man to bet on, Mr. Calmaine. What we’ve been able to do, thus far, wouldn’t amount to much if you hadn’t kept your head.” Then he turned quickly to the superintendent. “How do we stand for time, now, Maxwell?”

Maxwell held his watch to the light and shook his head dejectedly.

“Number Six, the Fast Mail, is due at Corona in five minutes. We can never make it in this world!”

“You bet we can!” shouted Tarbell. “Help Mr. Calmaine, and pile into the car--quick!”

The short race to the near-by mining-camp was a sheer breakneck dash, but Tarbell made good. When the four of them leaped from the car and stormed into Allen’s office, the Fast Mail had already whistled for the “clear” signal, and the operator was reaching for the cord of his semaphore to give the “go-by” wigwag. They yelled at him as one man; and a few seconds later the fast train slid to a shrieking stop at the station.

Maxwell would have sent Tarbell on to New York with the precious proxies, but Calmaine pleaded pathetically for his chance to finish that which he had begun.

“I’ll be all right as soon as I can get into the sleeper and get these infernal shoes off,” he protested. “It’s my job, Mr. Maxwell; for pity’s sake don’t make me a quitter!”

“Let him go,” said Sprague; “he’s earned his chance to stay in the game--and this time he’ll make a touch-down.” And so it was decided.

When the Fast Mail, with its lately added passenger, had slid away among the hills to the eastward, the three who remained at Corona climbed into the hired auto and Tarbell drove another record race to town, pausing only once, when they reached the sheriff’s roadside camp, to take on Harding and as many of his deputies as the car would hold.

By Maxwell’s direction, Tarbell drove first to the railroad head-quarters, where the superintendent and his guest got out. At the office entrance another dusty car was drawn up; and in the upper corridor they found the two young men from the Molly Baldwin mine, still seeking for information. Sprague disposed of them, and he did it with business-like brevity.

“Your dead man has been found,” he told them crisply. “He is at present in the county jail, with one of his accomplices; and when he is given the third degree, he will probably tell all he knows. It’s a weakness he has--not to be able to hold out against a bit of rough handling. If you two fellows will make a clean breast of your part in the swindle to the prosecuting attorney, and promise to play fair with your lessors in future, it is likely that you’ll be let off with a fine, and you’ll probably be able to bag the remainder of the gang and to recover your lost gold.”

The two young men heard, gasped, and backed away. When they were gone, Maxwell unlocked the door of his business office, snapped on the lights, opened his desk, and pressed the electric button which summoned Connolly, the night despatcher.

“I thought you’d like to know that we’ve caught up with the dead man, Dan,” he said, when the fat despatcher came in; and then he briefed the story of the chase, winding up with a peremptory order to be sent to the division despatcher at the Copah end of the line not to let the eastbound connection get away from the Fast Mail at the main line junction.

When Connolly had gone back to his key, Maxwell wheeled upon his guest.

“It’s late, Calvin, and by all the laws of hospitality I ought to take you home and put you to bed. But I’ll be hanged if you shall close an eye until you’ve told me how you did all this!”

The expert chemist ex-foot-ball coach planted himself in the easiest of the office chairs and chuckled joyously.

“Gets you, does it?” he said; and then: “I’m not sure that I can explain it so that you will understand, but I’ll try. In the first place, it is necessary to go at these little problems with a perfectly open mind--the laboratory mind, which is neither prejudiced nor prepossessed nor in any way concerned with anything but the bare facts. Reason, and the proper emphasis to be placed upon each fact as it comes to bat, are the two needful qualities in any problem-solving--and about the only two.”

“You are soaring around about a mile over my head; but go on,” said Maxwell.

“All right; I’ll set out the facts in the order in which they came to me. First, I see a dozen men loading a coffin into an express-car. I note the extreme weight, and wonder how a dead man, any dead man who doesn’t have to have his coffin built to order, can be so infernally heavy. Next, you tell me about your proxy fact--which doesn’t have any bearing at the moment--and then you tell me about the dead man, and how his friends were shipping him to Kentucky. Then comes the news of the bizarre hold-up in Cromarty Gulch. Instantly the reasoning mind, the laboratory mind, if you prefer, goes to work, with the two foreknown facts--the heavy-dead-man fact, and the fact that your chief clerk is on that train with his valuable papers--clamoring each for its hearing. Don’t let me bore you.”

“Heavens--you’re not boring me! What next?”

“Reason, the laboratory brand of it, tells me immediately that your proxy fact has the emphasis. You had told me that your Wall Street opponents had been throwing stumbling-blocks in your way in the obtaining of the proxies. Here, said I, is the last desperate resort. Nevertheless, there were complications. I was pretty sure that the hold-ups had taken Calmaine and his papers; that this was what the hold-up was for. But in order to get track of them--and of Calmaine--other facts must be added. We added them on the trip with the special train; all we needed, and a few more thrown in for good measure.”

“I don’t see it,” Maxwell objected.

“Don’t you? When we reached the scene of the hold-up, I was already doubting the heavy-dead-man theory; doubting it extremely. Also, my reason told me that the robbers, carrying some weight which was heavier than any dead person, would not trust to a team which could be overtaken, if need be, by pursuers on foot. Hence the automobile track that we found. Then we came to the coffin, and half of the mystery vanished at once. If you hadn’t been excited and--well, let us say, prepossessed, you would have noticed that there was no smell of disinfectants, that the coffin pillow wasn’t dented with the print of a head, that the broken glass was lying on the pillow, as it wouldn’t have been if the man’s head had been there when the plate was smashed, that----”

“Great Scott,” Maxwell broke in, in honest self-depreciation, “what blind bats we are--most of us!”

“Oh, no; I was bringing the specially trained mind to bear, you must remember; the scientifically trained mind. You couldn’t afford to cultivate it; it wouldn’t leave room for your business of railroad managing. But I’ll cut it short. I saw that there had been no corpse in the coffin, and that there had been something else in it--something heavy enough to leave its marks on the silk lining, which was torn and soiled. Also, I saw, away down in the foot end of the thing, an ingot-shaped chunk of something that looked like a bar of gold bullion; one piece of the heavy coffin load that had been overlooked in the hurried emptying. That’s why I advised you to bring the coffin back on your train. There’s a ten-thousand-dollar gold brick in it, right now!”

“Heavens and earth!” gasped the listener; but Sprague went on rapidly.

“Just here is where your machine-made detective would have missed the emphasis. But the scientist, having once for good and sufficient reasons placed his emphasis, never has occasion to change it. The main thing yet was the stopping of your messenger to Ford. I was convinced that the gold robbery, in which, of course, not only the two young lessees, but the man Murtrie as well, must be implicated, was only a side-issue, intended either to divert attention from the main thing, or as a double-cross theft on the part of Murtrie. When you and Tarbell described Murtrie for me on the way back to town, I had it all, simply because I happened to know the man. He is a counterfeiter, whom I have twice run down for the Department of Justice; but who, both times, contrived to break jail and get away.”

“But how were you able to strike so sure and hard at Holladay’s?”

“Just a bit more reasoning; as you’ll see presently. After we had established the fact that Calmaine wasn’t on the train--but argue it out for yourself. They’d take him somewhere where he could be kept safe and out of the way until the criminals concerned were all securely out of the country. And where would they take him if not to the unlawful den out yonder on the pike where Murtrie was best known, and from which, no doubt, he secured his helpers for the hold-up job?”

“But hold on,” Maxwell interrupted. “I haven’t got it entirely clear yet. If Murtrie put up this job with Calthrop and Higgins----”

Sprague shook his head.

“You have no imagination, Dick. Murtrie came here to do you up in the proxy business--as the Wall Street crowd’s last resort. He got in with Calthrop and Higgins and showed them how to beat their game, meaning to put the double-cross on them--as he did--when the time came. He was merely killing two birds with one stone; but your bird was the big one. I don’t know what sort of a dodge he put up with Calthrop and Higgins, but I can suppose that there is a trusty confederate at the Kentucky end of the string who is doubtless waiting now for a corpse that will never come.”

“Of course!” said the unimaginative one disgustedly. “Just the same, it’s all mighty miraculous to me, Calvin--how you can reason out these things hot off the bat, as you do. Why, Great Jonah! I had all the opportunities you had, and then some; and I didn’t see an inch ahead of my nose at any stage of the game!”

The big man rose and yawned good-naturedly.

“It’s my hobby--not yours,” he laughed; and then, as the telephone buzzer went off with a purring noise under Maxwell’s desk: “That will be Mrs. Maxwell, calling up to ask why in the world you don’t come home. Tell her all right, and let’s go. It will be the biggest miracle of all if you succeed in getting me up in time for breakfast to-morrow--or rather, I should say, to-day, since it’s three o’clock, and worse, right now.”

Maxwell put the receiver to his ear and exchanged a few words with some one at the other end of the wire. When he closed his desk and made ready to go, a little frown of reflective puzzlement was gathering between his eyes.

“You know too much--too thundering much, Calvin. As I said a while back, it’s uncanny. It was Alice; and she said the very words you said she would: ‘Why in the world don’t you come home, Dick?’ If you weren’t so blooming big and beefy and good-natured--but, pshaw! who ever heard of a fat wizard? Come on; let’s go and hunt a taxi. It’s too far to walk.”

III

The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three

AT ten o’clock on the second Tuesday after the return of the lately promoted chief night despatcher, Dan Connolly, from his wedding trip, the business of the Brewster wire office had settled down, momentarily at least, into the comfortable rut of routine. Everything was moving smoothly on the double division, and between the leisurely inscribing of the figured entries on the train-sheet, the fat, jolly-looking night chief had a chance to fill his corn-cob pipe and to swap a word of gossip now and then with Johnson, the car-record operator who, as “Wire-Devil” Bolton’s successor, was clattering at his type-writer in the far corner of the bare room.

It was after he had finished typing the long “record” report from Red Butte that Johnson twisted himself in his chair to say: “Who is that fellow ‘Scientific Sprague’ that I’ve been hearing so much about since I came on the job, Dan?”

The fat despatcher chuckled reminiscently and sat back in his tilting chair.

“Mr. Sprague? He’s a whole team, and an extra horse hitched on behind, Shorty; that’s about what he is. Don’t you ever go around advertising your freshness in the Timanyoni by giving it out that you don’t know Mr. Calvin Sprague.”

“I reckon I’ve already done done it, haven’t I?” laughed the car-record man. “What if you fix me so I won’t have to do it again?”

Connolly held a lighted match to the blackened bowl of the corn-cob, and then put both match and pipe aside to take the “train-passing” report of the incoming westbound “Quick-step” as it was clicked through the sounder from the first telegraph station east of Brewster.

“Mr. Sprague is about the biggest man that ever walked into this office, Shorty,” he averred, after he had made the proper train-sheet entry for the approaching train. “Big up and down, big through the middle, big sideways, and biggest of all in his think-tank. He can look you over twice and tell you the exact size of the yellow spot on your liver; and if that won’t do, he’ll look you over again and tell you how all-fired near you came to breaking your bond record one night up at that little shack station you’ve been running in the mining country.”

The newly appointed car-record man bounded out of his chair as if he had been shot.

“I--I didn’t, Dan!” he protested, dry-lipped; “so help me God, I didn’t!” And then, curiosity getting the better of the sudden shock: “How in Sam Hill did you know?”

Connolly grinned good-naturedly and made a motion with the flat of his hand as if he would reach across the room and push Johnson back into his chair.

“Take it plumb easy, kid,” he laughed. “I was only talking through my hat--just hitting out in the dark to show you how Mr. Sprague could size you up if he wanted to. But you asked who he is: he’s a friend of Mr. Maxwell’s, and he lives in Washington when he’s at home--does chemical stunts in one of the Government offices. He’s happened to soak in here a couple of times when we were needing a bushel or two more brains than we could make out to rustle up among ourselves, and----”

The break came in an importunate chattering of the west-line sounder on Connolly’s table, and the despatcher righted his tilted chair with a thump and fell upon his key. The car-record man sat back with his hands locked at the nape of his neck and looked on absently. Out of the din and clatter of the several sounders he could easily have picked the story that was coming from the west over Connolly’s wire, but the trained operator’s habit of ignoring the irrelevant wire chatter was upon him, and his first intimation of the nature of the story came in the fading of the ruddy flush in Connolly’s full-moon cheeks and the uncontrollable trembling of the despatcher’s left and unbusied hand.

Instantly the short-legged car-record operator left his chair and crossed the room to hang over Connolly’s shoulder.

“What’s the trouble, Dan?” he asked.

“It’s just a little more of the same,” breathed the fat one vindictively. “I don’t know what in the devil has got into the trainmen lately; this dog-blasted railroad’s getting so it runs itself! Here’s Seventeen overrunning her orders and trying to make the west end of Tunnel Number Three against the Fast Mail. Nophi says he argued with ’em, but they said they had plenty of time and went on. By grabs! if I was Mr. Maxwell I’d make a sizzlin’ red-hot example of some of these crazy chance-takers!”

Johnson was running his eye down the columns of figures in the time-table.

“I wouldn’t worry till I had to,” he put in. “The Mail’s twenty minutes off her schedule, and that gives Seventeen thirty minutes to make the six miles from Nophi to the tunnel and the mile and a quarter more to take her through to the west end siding. She’ll make it all right.”

“I know. But by Jasher! that ain’t railroading,” insisted Connolly. “Two months ago you wouldn’t find a single train crew on the Short Line that’d take chances stealing sidings this way, and now they’re all doing it. Besides, the tunnel’s all tore up, with that electric-wiring gang working in it, and every crew on the west end knows it.”

As he fumed, the despatcher rattled his key in the call for Junico, the only night station west of the tunnel at which there would be any chance of communicating with the off time eastbound Fast Mail. He knew it was only a chance. If the Mail had made up no more than five of the twenty minutes, it would already have passed Junico.

At the close of the impatient call the circuit broke and Junico “signed in.” Connolly asked his question in clipped abbreviations, and got his answer shot-like. “Number Six passing now.” “_Hold Six_,” snapped the despatcher hurriedly. For a full minute the sounder was silent. Then it began again. “Chased out quick as I could, but couldn’t catch ’em,” was Junico’s incident-closing reply.

Connolly pounded with a fat fist upon the plate-glass top of his table in impotent wrath.

“There it is!” he gritted. “Now if anything happens to get in the way of them cussed chance-takers on Seventeen, there you are!”

Apparently there was nothing to be done but to await the event and to hope for an auspicious outcome. As Connolly had said, it wasn’t railroading; and yet he knew well enough that on many railroads the stealing of sidings, the crawling up upon meeting-points by train crews hard pressed to make their schedules, is a violation of rules which is constantly winked at, and punished only when trouble ensues.

In the present case there should have been no trouble. With a clear thirty minutes in which to make less than eight miles, the time freight should be safely in on the siding at the west end of Tunnel Number Three some minutes before the Fast Mail could possibly cover its own intervening distance.

But on this particular Tuesday night the fates were inauspicious. Fifteen minutes farther along, after Johnson had gone back to his table in the corner, Connolly’s west-wire sounder began to chatter furiously. The fat despatcher broke in promptly, and again the trembling fit seized upon the unbusied half of him.

“Oh, good Lord!” he groaned; and again: “Oh, good _Lord_!” Then the corridor door opened and Maxwell, the superintendent, came in, looking as he always did, the square-shouldered, square-jawed fighter of transportation battles, with a few streaks of youthful gray beginning to show in his tightly curled mustaches--a militant figure of a man giving a truthful impression of the fit and purposeful railroad field officer.

“What’s the matter, Dan?” he demanded, making a quick push through the gate in the counter railing.

Connolly explained hastily.

“Seventeen tried to steal a siding on Six. Gallagher, the work-line operator at the electric gang’s camp, has just called up to say that the freight’s stuck in the tunnel--something off the track. A flagman has come back to the camp with the news, and he says the tunnel is blocked so they can’t get through with a flag for Six.”

“Good God, Dan--they’ve _got_ to get through!” Maxwell exploded; and pushing the despatcher aside he cut in on the wire himself. There was a brief and brittle colloquy in which the emphatic word was made to do duty for entire sentences, a wait, and when the clicking began again the superintendent translated audibly, quite as if Connolly, listening with all of his five senses concentrated in the single one of hearing, were not taking the hopeful information as it came from the sounder.

“Stribling’s there, and every sprinter in the camp is turning out to do a Marathon over the hill to the west end. Just the same, it will be touch and go if they make it in time to warn the Mail. How much late is Six?”

Connolly gave the time, making the proper deduction for the few minutes made up west of Junico. Maxwell glanced up at the time-standard clock on the wall.

“There is an even chance,” he asserted hopefully. “There ought to be somebody in that mob of wire-stringers who can run the two miles in time to head off the Mail. How did you come to let things get into such a snarl as this, Dan?”

Again Connolly explained, and he did not try to make it easy for the offending crew of Number Seventeen. “Jasper didn’t ask for orders at Nophi. He simply took snap judgment and went along, leaving the Nophi man to tell me after the thing was done.”

“Jasper and his engineer will get thirty days on this, no matter how it turns out!” snapped the boss. “There is a good deal too much of this rule-breaking lately, and it’s got to stop short. I won’t have it.... Suffering cats! I wish those sprinters would hurry up and get word to us! My God, Dan, if that fast train gets into the tunnel before they catch it----”

A thunderous clangor in the station yard below the office windows cut into the sentence, and again the superintendent looked up at the clock.

“That’s the ‘Quick-step,’ isn’t it?” he said. “She’s bringing an old friend of ours from the East, Dan--Mr. Sprague.”

For a moment Connolly was able to take his mind off of the tragedy or near-tragedy which was working itself out to some kind of a climax in the far-away Hophra Mountains to the westward.

“You asked him to come and tell us why we’re having this fit of extra cussedness all over the line?” he asked.

“Oh, no; the Department of Agriculture is sending him to make some soil tests in the Timanyoni. He writes that he is likely to be with us for a month or two.”

“I’m glad,” said Connolly simply. “Somehow, you feel as if you’d got a good solid mountain at your back when Mr. Sprague’s around. I wonder if he’ll come up here before he goes over to the hotel?”

Even as he spoke the door opened, and the man who looked like the elder brother of all the foot-ball “backs” in the intercollegiate try-out came in.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said jovially; “same old shop--same old worries, eh? How are you, Maxwell? And you, Mr. Connolly? Glad to see you both. What’s the trouble this time? Anything a journeyman chemist can help you out on?”

Maxwell’s mustaches took a sharper uptilt. “How did you know there was any trouble, Calvin?” he demanded quickly.

The big man leaned across the counter rail and laughed softly.

“There is nothing very occult about that,” he rejoined. “You have it written all over your faces, both of you; and it is also written in the face of that young man over in the corner, who would like to hear what we’re saying and can’t quite compass it.”

Maxwell explained briefly.

“Two of our trains are trying to get together on a single track up at Tunnel Number Three in the Hophras. There is a break-down in the tunnel, and half a hundred men are sprinting over the mountain to try to head off the other train.”

“What? half a hundred? There ought to be at least one or two good sprinters among that many--somebody who can make your touch-down for you. How does it come that you happened to have as big a crowd as that on the side-lines--at this time of night?”

The superintendent went into details far enough to account for the crowd of volunteer rescuers.

“We are electrifying Tunnel Number Three, and the contractors’ camp is at this end of the tunnel. It was the contractors’ operator who sent in the alarm, and his chief engineer turned out the entire camp for us when I told him what to do.”

“And you are waiting to get word?”

“Yes; waiting and hoping. By great good luck the Fast Mail is behind time. If it hasn’t made up----”

A fierce clattering of the sounder on Connolly’s table tore into the sentence, and in the midst of it Maxwell shot out his arms and drew a deep breath.

“Thank God!” he ejaculated, “they’ve caught the Mail! Now I’ll go with you, Calvin.” And then to Connolly: “Straighten things out for those fellows at the tunnel as quickly as you can, Dan, and get the wheels in motion again. Order up the engine from Second Seventeen if they need power to get that raffle out of the tunnel, and have somebody send over to Lopez Canyon for Benson to take charge. If you want to reach me, I’ll be over at the hotel.”

At the Hotel Topaz, across the plaza from the railroad head-quarters building, Maxwell saw his friend and sometime college classmate properly registered for a comfortable suite, and otherwise hospitably provided for before the pair of them went to smoke their bedtime pipes in the deserted writing-room facing the plaza.

“It’s just my luck, Calvin, to be homeless about every other time you happen along,” Maxwell apologized, when the pipes were lighted. “Alice’s father and mother came through from California a few days ago, and carried her and the children off with them to New York and the Long Island shore. I’m a widower.”