Chapter V: Part 5

Starbuck was watching Stribling’s face when the young electrical engineer shook hands with the big man from Washington. There was a query in the younger man’s eyes, and Starbuck saw it. Also, he marked the half-second of hesitation which came between the introduction and its acknowledgment. But a moment later they were all on their way to the black-mouthed tunnel, Stribling walking ahead with the superintendent and Sprague, and Starbuck following with Benson.

For convenience in his work Stribling had set up a small steam-driven dynamo at his camp and had strung the tunnel with incandescents, hence there was plenty of light in the long bore for the examination of the power wiring. When they plunged underground the construction man was still walking ahead with Maxwell and Sprague, explaining, for the benefit of the superintendent’s guest, the design of the catenary brackets and the double set of insulators.

“I’m betting on every detail in the mile and a quarter,” the young engineer was saying, as the two laggards closed up. “It’s my first big job, as Mr. Maxwell knows”--this also for the guest--“and I’ve simply got to make good on it. I could have had that waiting motor-engine out there pulling trains through the mountain this morning, but I made up my mind that we wouldn’t turn a wheel until Mr. Maxwell had seen everything for himself.”

“That’s business,” said Sprague, encouragingly. “Old Davy Crockett’s maxim, eh? ‘Be sure you’re right, and then go ahead.’ But let me tell you, Mr. Stribling: Mr. Maxwell will look wise and say, ‘Yes, yes,’ but he’ll have to take your word for it, after all. What we average people don’t know about modern electrical installations would fill a--” he looked around as if in search of a measure of capacity--“would fill a tank as big as that one across the track--the one you’ve dipped your wires into over there in that side cave.”

“The oil-switch, you mean? Yes, that is a little safety wrinkle we’re putting in wherever there’s a chance of an accident breaking down the power wires. I’ll explain it as we come back.”

When the young engineer led the way onward again a glance to the rear would have shown him that only three of the four were at his heels. Starbuck had seen his chance, and in a quick withdrawal he dodged into the side cavern housing the oil-switch. Two of the empty dynamite boxes enabled him to breast the top of the tall iron tank. What he saw was a little puzzling. Oil-switch tanks are usually left open to the air, but this one was fitted with a galvanized-iron cover made in the form of a shallow pan with double sides spaced about six inches apart. The inner compartment of the pan was half-filled with a transparent oily liquid, and the outer annular space around it was closely packed with chopped ice. Hastily breaking the seals of the package he had been carrying under his coat, he dumped the contents into the central receptacle and fled without waiting to prove Sprague’s assertion that nothing alarming would happen. When he rejoined the inspection party Sprague was still holding Stribling in talk, and the young mine owner made sure it was done to cover his own momentary absence.

The remainder of the trip through the tunnel was made without incident, and on the way back Stribling halted the party at the safety switch side cavern which, oddly enough, was charged with a curiously acrid odor that made breathing in it chokingly difficult. Coughing and gasping, Stribling explained the mechanism briefly. An electro-magnet, energized by the power current itself, held the switch in contact. If the current should be interrupted, as in the case of a breakage due to a wreck, the switch would be thrown and all the tunnel wires rendered instantly harmless.

“And these boxes are what your machinery came in?” said Sprague, pointing to a litter of small dust-covered packing-cases scattered about the tank.

“Oh, no; those are dynamite boxes,” was the hoarse reply. “They are empty--at least, Mr. Benson says they are, and he ought to know, since they are some of his leavings.” And then: “Suppose we move on. The air is frightfully bad in here. The engineer must have stopped the ventilating fans.”

Sprague had picked up a rusty bolt left by the timber-framers.

“You’ve got a good solid oil-tank here,” he said, hammering lustily on the iron with the bolt.

Starbuck was watching Stribling, and he would have sworn that the young engineer’s jump took him two feet clear into the air.

“Great Scott! Don’t do that, Mr. Sprague!” he cried. “You might break some of the--some of the adjustments, you know!”

Sprague’s mellow laugh echoed hollowly in the timbered cavern.

“If they’re that delicate, perhaps we’d better take your suggestion and move on,” he said. “I guess we’ve seen enough, anyway, eh, Maxwell?”

The superintendent acquiesced and the tunnel-threading was resumed to the portal, and beyond to the little shack where Stribling had his office. Here the young man became the hospitable host.

“Sit down, gentlemen, and I’ll call Canby at the power plant and ask him if he is all ready to ‘cut in.’ If he says yes, you can take the ’phone and give the order, Mr. Maxwell. It’s your railroad.”

The four disposed themselves as they pleased in the cramped little office fronting the tunnel. Sprague took his stand at the single window to stare absently at the black hole in the mountain side--an unrelieved spot of gloom now that the incandescents had been turned off. Starbuck chose a corner, and did not take his eyes from Stribling, who was sitting at his desk with Maxwell opposite.

With the receiver at his ear the young engineer exchanged a few words with the company’s electrician at the power-house three miles away. Then he pushed the ’phone across the desk to Maxwell.

“Canby says he’s ready,” he announced, in a voice that was strangely sharp and tremulous. “Give him the word, and then watch this volt-meter on the wall behind me. It will tell you when the current comes on.”

Maxwell hesitated for a single instant and looked across at Sprague. But the expert’s back was turned and he was still staring fixedly at the distant tunnel mouth. The superintendent took the receiver and spoke crisply.

“This is Maxwell: if you’re ready, turn on the power.”

At the word, Sprague faced about quickly and fixed his gaze upon Stribling. The young man had turned aside in his chair and his face was ghastly. Benson and Maxwell were watching the indicator on the wall; but Starbuck was rising noiselessly from his seat on the cot, with one hand buried in the side-pocket of his coat. For ten dragging seconds the index finger of the volt-meter remained motionless. Stribling was twitching in his chair, and finally he burst out.

“Those dynamite boxes! We ought to have taken them out! What if they shouldn’t happen to be empty--all of them?”

As he spoke, the index of the volt-meter began to jump like a thing suddenly endowed with life, and Benson cried out, “There she comes!” Stribling crouched in his chair as if shrinking from a blow and covered his face with his hands. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, ticked themselves off on the little desk clock at Maxwell’s elbow, and then Sprague’s voice broke into the tense silence.

“It’s all over, Stribling. You can sit up now and take your medicine. The end of the world is still safely in the future.”

The young man whirled in his chair and his right hand shot toward a half-opened drawer of the desk. It was Starbuck who interposed.

“Nixie,” he said sharply; “it isn’t time for you to pass out yet. Keep your hands out of that drawer, or I’ll put these on,” jingling a pair of handcuffs before the culprit’s staring eyes.

Stribling leaped from his chair and took one long haggard look through the open door at the tunnel mouth where nothing was happening. Then he dropped back and became the trapped animal fighting for life.

“What have you got on me?--or what is it you think you’ve got?” he rasped.

It was the man from Washington who replied.

“Don’t make it harder for yourself than you have to,” he said gently. “We’ve got it all. We know that you had that train stopped last night so that you could unload those empty dynamite boxes--they are empty, you know--without discovery. We also know that this morning you placed a quantity of nitro-glycerine in that safety switch, and that you have the wiring rigged to fire the stuff and destroy the tunnel.”

The young man looked up and his smile showed his teeth.

“But the current is on and the tunnel isn’t destroyed,” he interrupted.

“No; you overdid it a little in asking Benson to help you handle the nitro-glycerine and in letting him spill it on his clothes; also you skipped a stitch when you thought that by smuggling those dynamite boxes in and calling everybody’s attention to them, you’d put the blame of the explosion upon Benson and the railroad people. You forgot that all makers of dynamite nowadays stamp the date on the boxes. The tunnel was completed two years ago; and the date on one of the boxes, at least, is January of the present year. You are down and out, Mr. Stribling, and there is only one way in which you can dodge the stripes. That is by telling us who hired you to do this.”

A silence, tense like the silence of the court-room when the judge pronounces the sentence, fell upon the group gathered in the little shack-office, and it lasted for a full minute. At the end of it Stribling jerked his head up and spoke.

“I’m a man again now, Mr. Sprague, if I haven’t been for the past two months,” he said steadily. “I’ll tell you this: you can give me the third degree, if you want to--there are enough of you here to do it--and after that you can send me to the pen if you feel like it. But, so help me God, you’ll never make me welsh on the man for whom I did this: never, so long as I have the breath to say no!”

Again the tense silence supervened, and Starbuck held up the handcuffs tentatively. Sprague shook his head, and spoke again.

“You’ve considered this resolution well, have you, Stribling?”

“I have. I owe that man everything I’ve got in this world: education, the chance to hold my head up with others and, more than that, he once saved my father from going where you mean to send me--over the road. I’ll admit all you have charged. I did set the trap, and I don’t know yet why it hasn’t gone off. All I ask is that you’ll remember that I picked a time when there wouldn’t be any lives lost.”

“I discovered that last night,” said Sprague quietly; adding, with a glance for the superintendent’s brother-in-law, “I guess we’ll have to turn him over to you, Mr. Starbuck.” Then, turning once more upon the culprit: “Why did you find it necessary to cross the power wires with the telegraph lines early this afternoon, and so to destroy the instruments on a hundred miles of railroad, Stribling?”

The young engineer looked up hardily. “It was necessary. I took care to have Canby and the railroad electricians all over at the power plant, and I couldn’t take the chance of leaving them in communication with head-quarters at Brewster.”

Maxwell, who had sat as a silent listener, shook his head sadly and got up and went out, followed by Benson. A little later Sprague, standing at the window, saw them trying out the electric locomotive in short runs up and down the tunnel approach. Starbuck came out of his corner and snapped the manacles on Stribling’s wrists, and the young man made no resistance. Sprague turned at the click of the handcuffs, standing to frown down thoughtfully upon the self-confessed wrecker.

“I was in hopes we were going to get the men higher up this time; get them so they would stay got,” he said, half to himself. “But it seems that a bit of common human gratitude is going to blunder around and get in the way. Stribling, I’m honestly sorry for you. I’m afraid we made a mistake in not letting you get hold of that gun a few minutes ago.”

The young man with the honest eyes looked up quickly. “You did, indeed, Mr. Sprague. It’s the simplest way out of it for me.”

“You are still determined not to do the larger justice by giving us the information we need?”

The young man raised his manacled hands.

“Think of it a minute,” he pleaded. “You wouldn’t do it yourself; you know you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know--I don’t know; perhaps I shouldn’t,” admitted the big man thoughtfully. Then he went on with visible reluctance: “I’m afraid we shall have to pinch you, and pinch you hard, my boy. And it’s a shame, when you were only a tool in the hands of the men who ought to do time for this thing. I suppose we shall be taking the seven o’clock passenger back to Brewster. Is there anything you’d like to do before it comes along?”

“Yes; I’d like to write a letter or two.”

“You shall do it, and you shall have privacy.” And then to Starbuck: “Fix him so that he can.”

Starbuck unlocked the manacle from Stribling’s right wrist and locked it again around the arm of the office chair. “Will that give you room enough?” he asked.

“More than enough,” was the quiet reply. And when Starbuck had taken the pistol from the half-opened desk drawer the two who were free went out and closed the door against any possible intrusion upon the captive’s privacy.

“I’ll stay round,” Starbuck volunteered, when they were outside. “You go over and ride the engine with Mr. Maxwell, if you want to.”

It was half an hour later when the three who had been trying out the electric locomotive side-tracked the big machine at the sound of the down passenger’s whistle signal at the western tunnel approach, and crossed the tracks to where Starbuck was standing guard at the reopened door of the office-shack.

“Still writing?” asked Sprague of the silent guard.

“No; for the last ten minutes he’s been sitting there with his head on the table, just as you see him. He asked me to open the door a while ago, so he could see better.”

Moved by a common impulse they entered the office-room, stepping softly. But the young man at the desk was far beyond all earthly disturbances. One letter, addressed to a girl in New York, lay on the desk, stamped and sealed. Hanging beside the chair, and ingeniously strung and weighted so that they could touch nothing, were the two heavily insulated power wires which he had somehow managed to disconnect from the volt-meter switch-board at his back; these and a freshly burned shrivel on the hand of the arm that was crooked for a pillow told how it had been done.

“Good God!” Maxwell exclaimed; “we might have thought of that! Poor fellow! He couldn’t face it out, after all!”

Starbuck gently released the handcuffs and slipped them into his pocket. Then he helped Benson put the body of the man who could not face it out upon the cot in the corner. The train was coming, and Benson pushed the others toward the door.

“Don’t stay here and miss your train,” he said. “I’ll do what there is to be done. I was going to stay, anyway.”

* * * * *

The evening train was feeling its way down over the wireless line and was half-way to Brewster before the three men sitting in the otherwise unoccupied smoking-compartment of the sleeper broke the silence which the sudden tragedy had laid upon them. But at the lighting of his third cigar Maxwell could contain himself no longer.

“It’s another of your miracles, Calvin,” he said. “By this time I’m so well used to them that nothing you do fazes me any more. But I’m sure Billy will sleep better to-night if you tell him how you did it.”

The big man grunted softly.

“I think both of you have put the broken bits of the puzzle together before this,” he returned. “The motive was the chief thing; what I call the ‘nucleus thought,’ and we had that all ready-made. We knew that this ‘Big Nine,’ as Ford names it, was out after your scalp; and as soon as you told me about the tunnel and the Grafton Brothers’ contract the probable point of attack was no longer in doubt. You see, I happen to know that the Graftons have always been hand-in-glove with your principal competitor--had installed all the block signals for it, cutting a fine melon for themselves in the process, too.”

“Still,” said Maxwell, “it’s a long way from that to this.”

“It was only taking one step after another, and Benson gave me three or four of them. The details of Stribling’s exceedingly simple plot became very plain after Benson had told us about the train-stopping, the empty dynamite boxes, the safety switch--which could have been just as easily and effectively placed at either end of the tunnel as in that hole in the middle of it--and finally about the pouring of the sirupy stuff into the oil-tank. There was a bit of fine work on Stribling’s part. Benson doubtless knows nitro-glycerine when he sees it; but under the circumstances he would be completely disarmed--as he was.”

“But how did you know that there would be a false cover on the tank?” queried Starbuck.

“A bit of pure reasoning. The specific gravity of glycerine is greater than that of the heaviest of the earth oils; hence the explosive would sink to the bottom of the tank and mix with the oil to some extent. I reasoned that Stribling would not take the risk of the mixture.”

“He didn’t,” said the mine owner; “the pan was there and it was packed in ice.”

“But the laboratory experiment?” put in Maxwell.

“Was a simple test for nitro-glycerine, of course. You saw it blow up the test-tube, but even then only one of you,--Mr. Starbuck here,--suspected the truth. You did, didn’t you, Mr. Starbuck?”

“I had a guess comin’,” said the young mine owner quietly; adding: “That was why I took the trouble to hunt me up a pair of handcuffs when I went to get the train-orders.”

“But if there was nitro-glycerine in that tank, why didn’t it go off when the current was turned on?” queried Maxwell.

“For the very simple reason that Mr. Starbuck, at my direction, dumped a large dose of neutralizing chemical into it as we passed the tank on our way through the tunnel, and so saponified it. That was why I had the courage to hammer on the tank with my bolt, and why Stribling, not dreaming that his touchy explosive’s teeth had been drawn, nearly had a fit.”

“One other thing,” Maxwell put in. “You asked Stribling why he burned the telegraph wires out; how did you know they had been burned out?”

Sprague chuckled good-naturedly.

“I knew that at Little Butte; you might have known it if you hadn’t been so excited as to forget that you had a nose. That office, as well as the next one,--I’ve forgotten its name,--fairly reeked with the smell of burnt rubber and insulation, and I said to myself that there were only two torches in these mountains that could heat things hot enough to burn the instruments: namely, lightning and the high-voltage current from your plant in Lopez Canyon.”

Again a silence, broken only by the train clamor, settled down upon the three in the Pullman smoking-room. After a time Maxwell drew a long breath and said:

“It was a narrow squeak; a horribly narrow squeak, Calvin. We have a good deal to say nowadays about the lawlessness of the mob and the individual; but big money doesn’t seem to know that there are any such things as justice and equity and a square deal.”

Sprague sat up and methodically relighted his cigar.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he demurred. “You can’t say that all big money is lawless. Of course, there are buccaneers in every chapter of the world’s history, and we have ours, neatly labelled with the dollar-mark instead of the skull and cross-bones. Good big money is an undoubted blessing; it is only bad big money that is a curse.”

Maxwell’s smile was mirthless.

“When a man puts a gun in your face and holds you up, it isn’t very consoling to remember that there are a good many other men in the world who wouldn’t treat you that way,” he commented. And then: “I hope we’ve seen the last of this fight in the dark with that stock-jobbing gang in New York.”

“You haven’t,” Sprague declared definitely. “They’ll come back at you, and keep on coming back, until you get a fair grand-jury underhold on the men at the top. I counted confidently upon being able to give you that underhold to-day. I thought we had Stribling where he would be obliged to turn state’s evidence. It was our misfortune that he happened to be too good a man; that he was only the tool of a villain and not a villain himself. They’ll hit you again, Maxwell, and go on hitting you until you can strike back hard enough to put some of the men higher up in the prisoner’s dock.”

This might have stood for the final word; but the true finality was reached a couple of hours later when the superintendent and the Government expert were smoking their bedtime pipes in the Topaz lobby.

“We haven’t fully grasped the real pity of this thing yet, Dick,” said Sprague, at the end of the ends. “It is this: that greed, the infernal lust of money that has laid hold upon our day and generation, can take so fine a thing as that poor boy’s gratitude, transform it into criminality, and make him pay the price with his life. Isn’t that enough to make your blood run cold? Let’s turn in and forget it if we can. Good-night. I’m going to bed.”

IV

The Mystery of the Black Blight

THE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in the advertising folders as “The Fast Mail,” had collided in the early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time, had run past Angels without heeding the “stop for orders” signal plainly displayed.

Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had shot around the hill curve to hurl itself, a six-thousand-ton, steel-pointed projectile, into the rear end of the first section, and the disaster was complete. Somewhere under the smoking mountain of wreckage marking the spot where the Mail and first-section locomotives had locked themselves together, reared, and fallen over into the ditch, two firemen and an engineer were buried. Out of one of the crushed mail-cars two postal clerks were taken; one of them to die a few minutes after his rescue, and the other bruised and broken, with an arm and a leg dangling, as he was carried out to safety.

At the other point of impact there had been no loss of life, though the material damage was almost as great. The engine of the second section had split its way sheer through the first-section caboose--which, in the nature of things, had no one in it to be killed--and through two of the three merchandise-cars next in its plunging path. With a mixed chaos of groceries, farming implements, and splintered timbers for its monument, the big mogul had burrowed into the soft side bank of the cutting as if in some blind attempt to bury itself out of sight of the havoc it had wrought.

On the Thursday morning of this, the worst of a series of accidents thickly bestudding that fateful month of August, Maxwell, the general superintendent, chanced to be two hundred miles away to the eastward. His service-car was in the Copah yards, and he was asleep in it when the night watchman came down from the despatcher’s office to rouse him with the bad news.

What could be done at such long range was done instantly and with good generalship. The wires were working with Brewster, the division head-quarters in Timanyoni Park. With his own hand Maxwell sent the orders to Connolly, the despatcher, to Fordyce, the trainmaster, and to Bascom, the master mechanic. A relief train was to be made up with all haste to take the doctors to the wreck, and to convey the passengers of Number Six back to Brewster. Following the relief train, but giving it precedence, should go the wrecking-train. The superintendent even went so far as to specify the equipment which should be taken: the heavier of the two wrecking-cranes, a car-load of rails for temporary tracking, and two or three water-cars for the extinguishing of the fire.

These things done, and the arrangements made to start his own special immediately for the scene of disaster, the superintendent had the fine courage, in the face of this last and most unnerving of many disheartenments, to return to his car and to go back to bed. He had been up very late in conference with his president, Ford, and he knew that the demands awaiting him at the end of the five-hour run to Lobo Cut would call for all the reserves of strength and energy he could hope to store up during the distance-covering interval.

Much good work had already been accomplished when Maxwell’s special, feeling its way past the four long freights and the midnight passenger, all held up at Angels, came upon the scene of destruction among the foot-hills at an early hour in the forenoon. The relief train had come and gone, bearing away the unhurt, the injured, and the dead. A temporary working-track had been laid through the cut, and the mighty one-hundred-and-fifty-ton steam crane, its movements directed by a big, rather flashily dressed man with an accurately creased brown hat pulled down over his brows, was reaching its steel finger here and there in the débris and plucking the derelict freight-cars out of the way.

Up at the other end Fordyce, the trainmaster, was working with another crew, using a mammoth block-and-tackle, with a detached locomotive for its pulling power. When Maxwell came on the ground, Fordyce, a gnarled little man with a twist in his jaw and a temper like the sparks from an emery wheel, was alternately cajoling and cursing his men in a praiseworthy attempt to make his block-and-tackle outheave the master mechanic’s powerful crane.

“Yank ’em--yank ’em, men! Get that rail under there and heave! Wig it--_wig it_! Now get that grab-hook in here--lively! Don’t let them fellows at the other end snake two to our ONE!”

Maxwell stopped to exchange a word or two with the sweating trainmaster and then passed on down the wreck-strewn line. At the master mechanic’s end of things he came upon Benson, chief of construction, who had accompanied the wrecking-train from Brewster only because he had happened to be on the way to Angels and saw no other probable means of reaching his destination.

“Pretty bad medicine--the worst of the lot,” commented the young chief of construction, when, tramping soberly, they came to the place where the two great locomotives, locked in their death grapple, were nuzzling the clay bank of the cutting.

Maxwell’s teeth came together with a savage little click.

“A few weeks ago, Jack, we were scared stiff for fear the ‘Big Nine’ crowd of stock-jobbers would succeed in doing something to put us on the panic-slide. Now we are doing it ourselves, just about as fast as we can. Is it true that there were four killed?”

“Yes; both firemen, and Bamberg, the engineer of the freight. The other man was a postal clerk; and his mate had an arm and a leg broken.”

“Many injuries?”

“Astonishingly few, when there was such a good chance for a general massacre. Both men on the second section engine jumped, and both were hurt, though not badly. There was nobody in the split caboose when it was hit. On the Mail, Cargill, who was running, got off with a pretty bad scalp wound. An express messenger had his foot jammed; and the train baggageman had a lot of trunks shaken down on him. In the coaches there were a few people thrown out of their seats and hurt by the sudden stop; but in the sleepers there were a good many who slept straight through it, incredible as that may sound.”

“I know,” said Maxwell; “I’ve seen that happen more than once, when the Pullmans stayed on the rails.” Then, with a slight backward nod of his head he changed the subject abruptly. “Bascom--has he been handling it all right?”

“He’s a dandy!” said Benson. “Personally, I’d about as soon associate with any one of a dozen Copah tin-horns that I could name as to foregather with Mr. Judson Bascom. But he’s onto his job, all right. He laid this temporary track himself; I haven’t butted in at all, either here or at Fordyce’s end.”

“How did you happen to get here? I thought you were up Red Butte way,” said the superintendent.

“I was; but I came down to Brewster on Six last night, meaning to go through to Angels. While we were changing engines I ran upstairs to get some maps and papers out of my office, and took too long about it; the train got away from me and I chased out with the wreck-wagons. That’s how near I came to being mixed up in this thing myself.”

“And you want to go on to Angels now?”

“Yes; when I get a chance. Those irrigation people in Mesquite Valley are howling to have an unloading spur built up from the old copper-mine track, and I thought I’d go and look the ground over.”

The superintendent’s frown was expressive of impatient dissatisfaction.

“That Mesquite project is another of the grafts that are continually giving this country a black eye, Jack. It’s ‘bunk,’ pure and simple. Everybody who has ever been in the Mesquite knows that you couldn’t raise little white beans in that disintegrated sandstone!”

“It’ll do for an excuse to rake in a few hundred thousand Eastern shekels,” Benson remarked. “There will be plenty of ‘come-ons’ to buy the land when the dam is built.”

Bascom’s great crane was poising a crushed and mangled box-car in air, and when the crooking steel finger swung its burden aside and dropped it with a crash out of the way, Maxwell turned upon his heel.

“I have my car here, and I’m going back to Angels to do some wiring,” he said. “Come along, if you want to see those irrigation people. But I’ll tell you right now, I won’t approve any recommendation for more track-laying for them.”

They had walked possibly half the length of the long blockade when a noisy automobile, dust-covered and filled with men, drew up on the mesa flat above the wreck. Benson looked up with a scowl.

“There’s another gang of those newspaper ghouls!” he commented, as two of the three men in the tonneau got out and began to unlimber their cameras and tripods. “It’s no picnic to drive a car from Brewster over the range, to say nothing of the danger; and this is the second squad since daylight. There have been enough pictures taken of this wreck to fill all the newspapers between New York and San Francisco for a week!”

Maxwell’s smile was a mere teeth-baring.

“Yes; we’re getting the advertising all right,” he said. “We’ve been getting it for a month or more.” Then, as they tramped on out of the wreck raffle and headed for the waiting office-car: “I had a talk with Ford last night; that is what took me to Copah. We’re in bad, Benson. Ford says they’ve taken to calling us ‘the sick railroad’ on the Stock Exchange, and our securities are simply going to the puppies. Another month like this one we’ve just stumbled through will either wipe us from the map or clean us up definitely and put us into the hands of a receiver.”

“Does Ford say that?” gasped the young chief engineer.

“He said a good bit more than that. He still insists that these troubles of ours are helped along from the outside; that they are in reality just so many moves in the game that a certain Wall Street pool is playing to get control of our road. I tried to show him how impossible it was; how the entire slump in discipline which causes all the trouble is merely one of those crazy epidemics that now and then sweep over the length of the best-managed railroads on earth.”

“And he wouldn’t believe it?” queried Benson.

“No; the last thing he said to me as his train was pulling out proved that he didn’t. He intimated that there wasn’t any ‘act-of-God’ verdict to be brought in, in our case, and told me to go back to Brewster and dig until I found the real cause.”

By this time they had reached the service-car special, and Maxwell passed the word to his engineer to back up the line to Angels. When the wreck and the wreckers had vanished beyond the hill curves, Benson filled his short pipe and at the lighting of it asked another question.

“I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t get a little expert help on this thing, Maxwell. Have you tried to interest Mr. Sprague in this discipline business?”

The superintendent shook his head.

“Sprague isn’t going around doing odd jobs in psychology for anybody and everybody,” he deprecated. “He is a Government chemist, and he is out here on the Government’s business. Besides, it isn’t a case for a detective; even for the best amateur detective in the bunch--which is easily what Sprague might claim to be, you’d say. You see, there isn’t anything special to detect. What we need is a doctor; not a plain-clothes man.”

Benson’s left eye closed itself slowly in qualified dissent.

“What does Mr. Sprague himself have to say about it?” he queried.

“He hasn’t said anything. In fact, I haven’t seen him for over two weeks. He’s been out with Billy Starbuck, gathering soil specimens; they are still out somewhere, I don’t know just where.”

Neither of the two men riding the rear platform of the backing service-car spoke again until the car stopped with a jerk at the edge-of-the-desert station with the celestial name, which had once been the head-quarters of the original Red Butte Western Railroad. Then Benson summed up the situation in a couple of terse sentences.

“If we don’t do something, and do it quick, there is a bunch of us so-called railroad bosses on this high line who may as well pack our duffle-bags and fade away into the landscape. Three wrecks within a week; and this last one will cost a hundred thousand cold iron dollars before we’re through with the lawyers; I’ll be hanged if I wouldn’t call in the doctor--some doctor--any doctor, Maxwell. That’s my ante. So long; see you a little later about this Mesquite business, if you’re still here.” And he put a leg over the platform railing and went away.

Three minutes later, when the superintendent had crossed the station platform and was on his way around to the door opening into the operator’s office, two men mounted upon wiry range horses rode down the single remaining street of the dead-alive former railroad town, pointing for the station.

One of them, a good-looking youngish man with a preternaturally grave face and the shrewd thoughtful eyes that tell of days and nights spent afield and alone with the desert immensities, was the superintendent’s brother-in-law by courtesy. The other, a gigantic athlete of a man, whose weight fairly bowed the back of the stout horse he rode, was Mr. Calvin Sprague.

Maxwell paused when he saw and recognized the two horsemen. But when they came up, the weight of the recent disaster made his greeting a rather dismal attempt at friendly jocularity.

“Well, well!” he said, gripping hands with the athlete; “Billy certainly had it in for you this time! Rode you over the range, did he? I’ll bet you’ll never have the nerve to look a horse in the face again, after this. Where on top of earth have you two been keeping yourselves for the last fortnight?”

“Oh, just sashayin’ round on the edges,” drawled Starbuck, replying for both; “gettin’ acquainted with the luminous landscape, and chewin’ off chunks of the scenery, and layin’ awake nights to soak up some of the good old ozone.”

“Ozone!” chuckled the big man; “I’m jammed gullet-full of it, Dick, and I have a hunch that it’s going to settle somewhere below the waist line and make me bow-legged for life. King David said that a horse is a vain thing for safety, but I can go him one better and say that it’s the vainest possible thing for just plain, ordinary, every-day comfort. I’m a living parenthesis-mark--or a pair of ’em, if you like that better.” Then without warning and almost without a break: “Where is the wreck, this time?”

Maxwell’s frown was a little brow-wrinkling of curious perplexity.

“You’ve just ridden down from the hills, haven’t you? How do you know there is a wreck?”

“That’s too easy,” laughed the expert, waving a Samsonic arm toward the five side-tracked trains held up in the Angels yard. “If you didn’t have your track cluttered up somewhere, those trains wouldn’t be hanging up here, I’m sure. Is it a bad one?--but you needn’t answer that; I can see at least one dead man in your eyes.”

“There are four of them,” said the superintendent soberly, “and some others desperately hurt. We’re in a bad way, Sprague. This is the third smash within a week.”

Sprague dismounted stiffly and secured his saddle-bags containing the soil specimens gathered at the price of so much discomfort.

“Starbuck,” he said whimsically, “I’m willing to pay the price of a hundred-dollar guinea-pig, if necessary, to have this razor-back mustang shipped home in a palace stock-car to his stable in Brewster. Mr. Maxwell’s office-car is good enough for me from this on.”

Starbuck smiled grimly and took the abandoned horse in charge. “I’ll take care of the bronc’,” he agreed; and the big man limped around the station to board the service-car while Maxwell went into the office to do his telegraphing.

When the superintendent returned half an hour later he found his self-invited guest lounging luxuriously in the easiest of the big wicker chairs in the open compartment of the car, smoking the fattest of black cigars and reading a two-days-old Denver paper.

“This is something like,” he said. “I was never cut out for a pioneer, Richard; Starbuck has proved that to my entire satisfaction in these last two weeks. But that’s enough of me and my knockings. Sit down and tell me your troubles. I see the papers are making space-fillers out of your railroad to beat the band. Are you ready to come around to my point of view yet?”

Maxwell sat down like a man who was both worried and wearied.

“The Lord knows, I wish I could come around to your point of view, Calvin. If I could see any possibility of charging these things to outside influences.... But there isn’t any. The trouble is purely local and internal--and as unaccountable as the breaking out of an epidemic when the strictest kind of quarantine has been maintained.”

Sprague smiled incredulously.

“There never was a case of typhoid yet without its germ to account for it, Dick,” he asserted dogmatically.

“I know; but that theory doesn’t hold good in the psychological field. We’ve got a good set of men, Sprague. To a degree which you don’t often find in modern railroad consolidations, we’ve had that precious thing called _esprit de corps_. We’ve never had any labor troubles since Lidgerwood’s time, and there are no grievances in the air to account for the present let-down. Yet the let-down is with us. Almost every day some man who has hitherto proved trustworthy falls down on his job, and there you are.”

“You’ve tried all the usual remedies, I suppose?”

“I should say I had! I’ve stormed and cursed and pleaded and reasoned until I’m worn out! If I fire a bunch of them, I have to hire a new bunch, and inside of a week the new men have caught the disease for themselves. One bad wreck will make a hundred trainmen uncertain and jumpy, and a second one will turn half of the hundred into irresponsible lunatics. You’d have to mix and mingle with the force as I do to understand the condition things have gotten into. It’s horrible, Calvin. It is like the black blight that you have seen spread through a well-kept orchard.”

“There is a cause,” said the expert, settling himself solidly in his chair. “I tell you, Dick, there’s a germ in the air, and that second mentality of mine that you are so fond of poking fun at tells me that in the case of your railroad orchard the germ has been deliberately planted. You say it’s impossible: I’ve a good notion to let the soil-testing rest for a few minutes and show you.”

“If I thought there was the least chance in the world that you could show me----”

“Is that a challenge? By Jove! I’ll take you. When can you get me back to Brewster?”

“As soon as the track is cleared. We ought to be able to get through by noon.”

The expert got up, shook the riding kinks out of his legs, and threw the newspaper aside.

“I’m going out to walk around for a bit, and after a while I’ll ask you to take me down to this wreck,” he said; and Maxwell, who had a deskful of work awaiting him, nodded.

“Say, in an hour?”

“An hour will do; I’ll show up within that time.”

Later, the superintendent, wading through the files of business correspondence which always accompanied him in his goings to and fro on the line, had window glimpses of Sprague strolling up and down beside the waiting trains in the yard or standing to chat with some member of the loafing crews.

The glimpses were provocative of good-natured incredulity on the part of the desk-worker. Thrice during the summer of warfare Sprague had been able to step into the breach, each time with signal success. But in each of the three former instances there had been tangible causes with which to grapple; flesh-and-blood criminals to be ferreted out and apprehended. Maxwell, glancing out of the window again, shook his head despondently. What could the keenest intelligence avail in the case of an entire railroad suffering from an acute attack of nervous disintegration and recklessness? Nothing, the superintendent decided; there was nothing for it but to settle down upon a grim determination to outlive and worry through the period of disaster; and he was still grinding away at his desk with that thought in the back part of his mind when Sprague came in and announced his willingness to be taken on to the wreck.

Maxwell gave the necessary order, and in due time the one-car special had repassed the few miles intervening between Angels and Lobo Cut, to come to a stand on the curve of hazard. Sprague was lighting a fresh cigar preparatory to a plunge into the track-clearing activities, and Maxwell looked up from his work.

“Want me to get off with you?” he asked.

“No; it’s the very thing I don’t want,” declared the expert briefly; and therewith he went out to drop from the car-step and to take the plunge alone.

In the two hours which had elapsed since the departure of the superintendent’s car the track-clearers at both ends of the wreck had made astonishingly good progress. Step by step the master mechanic had worked his big crane up the line, tossing the derelicts aside or righting them upon the rails, as their condition warranted; and farther along Fordyce, with his huge tackle and its pulling locomotive, had been equally enthusiastic.

It was Sprague’s boast that his methods of investigation, in the field of his hobby, as in all others, were purely scientific; and he insisted that the true scientist and the most successful is the one who can best qualify as a shrewd and wholly impartial observer.

Where another man might have asked questions, he stood aside and looked on and listened. In the fierce toil of track-clearing no one seemed to pay any attention to him, and the picture which presented itself was a life-sketch of the railroad force _in petto_ and in the raw. The big onlooker took his time and made his mental jottings thoughtfully, strolling from one group to another and lingering longest near the hot boiler-cab of the great crane where a wizened human automaton in dirty overalls and jumper jerked the levers and spun the wheels of the hoist in obedience to the signals given by the flashily dressed master mechanic.

It wanted less than a quarter of an hour of noon when the final obstruction was heaved aside, and the track gang, which had been following the wreckers, trued and spiked the distorted rails of the main line into place. Sprague closed his mental note-book and went back to join Maxwell.

In the office-car the porter-cook had laid the table for the mid-day meal; and the superintendent and his guest ate it in transit, the office-car special being the first of the halted trains to pass westward over the newly cleared line.

“Well?” said Maxwell interrogatively, when the meal had progressed to the meat and vegetables without comment on the part of the one who had lifted the challenge.

“You’ve got the disease, all right; it’s with you, and in the epidemic form, too. Its expression came out emphatically every now and then in that track-clearing hustle. One little snappy, snarly fellow lying under a box-car to make the hoisting-hitch voiced it precisely when his mate yelled at him to come out, that the hitch might slip. He yapped back, ‘Who the hell and blinkety-blank blankation cares!’ That’s one form your disease is taking, and you’d say it would account for a good many of the smashes.”

“Well?” queried the superintendent again. “You didn’t stop at that?”

“No; I made a few other preliminary observations which may or may not prove up. Give me a little time; and when we get back to Brewster, detail that ex-cowboy ‘relief operator’ of yours, Tarbell, to run errands for me. If I can’t show you good, tangible results within the next forty-eight hours or so, you may discharge me and hire a Pinkerton.”

“You’ll fail,” said Maxwell gloomily. “I’ve been through a sickness of this kind before. There’s no cure for it. It has simply got to run its course and wear itself out.”

“That’s what they used to say about cholera and the plague and yellow-fever, and all those things,” laughed the man from Washington; but he did not go any farther into the matter of theories.

The run of the special train to Brewster was made without incident, and from the station Sprague went directly across to his hotel.

“I’m going over to clean up,” he announced. “By and by, when you get around to it, send Tarbell over and tell him to wait in the lobby for me.”

It was possibly an hour later when the young man who resembled William Starbuck sufficiently to pass for the mine owner’s younger brother, got out of his chair in the quietest corner of the Hotel Topaz lobby and crossed to the elevators to meet the Government chemist.

“How are you, Archer?” was the renovated soil-gatherer’s greeting. And then, as he led the way back to the quiet corner from which the young man had been keeping his watch upon the elevators: “We’re up against it good and hard, this time, young man. Your boss has stumped us to prove a thing which he says can’t be proved. Sit down and let’s see if we can’t start the thin edge of a wedge. I’ll do the hammering and let you hold the wedge, and you can squeal if I strike off and hit you. How long has this case of bad railroading, which is smashing things right and left, been going on?”

The young fellow who was on the railroad pay-rolls as a “relief operator” took time to consider.

“A month or better.”

“How did it begin?”

“I don’t know. One way ’r another, the boys’ve just seemed to be gettin’ sort o’ careless and losin’ their grip. After two or three wrecks had happened, it was all off. Half o’ the men’ve taken to runnin’ on their nerve, and the other half act like they don’t care a durn.”

“Is it only in the train service?”

“Lord, no; it’s mighty near everywhere. It’s sort of a dry rot; cars go without repairin’, engines burn out, and twice within the last week the roundhouse has caught fire. You’d think every man on the road had just turned loose all holts and didn’t give a cuss whether he ever got ’em again or not.”

“What do the men themselves say about it?”

“There’s a heap o’ kickin’ and knockin’. Some say it’s Mr. Maxwell. When he gets good and mad and fires a bunch of ’em, they raise a rookus about it; and when he lets the next bunch down easy, they kick the other way.”

Sprague sat back in the big leather-upholstered lobby chair and for a time seemed to be absorbed in a study of the rather over-massive beam arrangement of the ceiling. Suddenly he turned to ask: “How much of a prohibition country is this, Archer?”

Tarbell laughed.

“I reckon you don’t need to ask that, with three saloons in every block in Brewster. We haven’t got the water-wagon bug much out here. They say it don’t breed well this side o’ the main range.”

“Much drinking among the railroad men?”

“Well--m--m--not so you could notice it. There’s a rule against it.”

“While they’re on duty, you mean?”

“Any old time.”

“Is that rule enforced?”

“Mr. Maxwell allows it is. He’s sure some Ranahan when it comes to buckin’ the booze-fighters.”

“Still, there is more or less drinking among the men; you know there is, don’t you, Archer?”

The young man grinned soberly.

“I ain’t tellin’ no tales out o’ school, Mr. Sprague, not me,” he drawled.

“Get rid of that notion,” said the big man sharply. “You are working for Mr. Maxwell and his rules are your law and gospel. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen, and then you can tell me what you’ve seen. I counted sixteen men in one place on this railroad to-day who, within the half-hour that I was looking on, stopped work either to hit or to pass a pocket-flask. Now go on.”

“If you hold me up that-away, I reckon maybe there _is_ a good many empty bottles layin’ round on the right-o’-way--more’n what the passengers throw out o’ the car windows,” was the reluctant admission.

“And more than there used to be, say, two or three months ago?”

“Yes; right smart more.”

“I thought so. We don’t need to look any further, Archer, for the disease itself. Your ‘dry rot’ is very pointedly a wet rot. Booze and the running of a railroad are two things that won’t mix. Now we’ll come to the nib of it. Why is there more drinking now than there used to be?”

The younger man took time to think about it before he said: “You got me goin’; I don’t know the answer to that.”

“I didn’t suppose you did,” was the curt rejoinder. “But you are going to learn the answer, Archer, my son. It is now four o’clock; by half-past seven this evening I want you to be back here prepared to tell me who has been letting down the fences for the railroad men in this matter of drinking.”

“Holy Smoke!” exclaimed the ex-cowboy, jarred for once out of his plainsman calm, “how am I goin’ to do that, Mr. Sprague?”

“That is for you to find out, my boy. If you don’t use your brain you’ll never know whether or no you’ve got any. That’s all--until half-past seven. You’ll find me here at the hotel.”

It was an even hour before the time appointed for Tarbell’s return when Maxwell joined the chemistry expert at the table in the Topaz café where they usually sat when they could dine together.

At the unfolding of the napkins Sprague said: “I’ve found your germ, Dick, and things are beginning to develop. What do you think of that?”--passing a bit of dingy coarse-fibred paper across the table.

Maxwell opened the paper and read the ill-spelled type-written note it bore.

“MR. SPRAIG: