Chapter VI: Part 6

“Weer onto you with both feet. keep youre fingers out ov the geers or maybe youll git em mashed.

“A WELL-WISHUR.”

“Where did that come from?” asked the superintendent, plainly amused.

“It was pushed under the door of my room upstairs about half an hour ago. The man who left it was short, thick-set, smooth-shaven, and he wore a pepper-and-salt suit and a slouch hat. Also, his breath smelled of whiskey.”

“You expect me to recognize the description?”

“I didn’t know but you might.”

“I don’t,” Maxwell denied. Then his smile of amusement changed to one of amazement. “How could you know all these things about this man if you were on the other side of a closed door, Calvin?”

Sprague laughed. “See how easy it is to jump to conclusions,” he derided. “I wasn’t on the other side of a closed door; I was in the corridor when the fellow passed me, looking for the number on the door. I saw him leave the note. I’ll ask one question, and then we’ll dismiss that phase of the case. Is the wrecking-train back from Lobo yet?”

“Yes; it came in about four o’clock with the string of crippled cars. But you say you have found the germ; does that mean that you are going to prove up on your assertion about the epidemic?”

“I can’t tell what it means yet; but I can tell you the name of the germ. It’s whiskey.”

“Drinking among the men?”

“Worse than that; drunkenness among the men. Enough of it, I should say, to account for all of your troubles and then some.”

“Oh, you’re off--’way off!” objected the harassed one irritably. “I know there is some drinking; in a wide-open country like this it is almost impossible to stamp it out entirely. But to account for the epidemic in that way, you’d have to imagine every other man in the service carrying a pocket-pistol on the job!”

“And you think that couldn’t happen without your knowing it, eh? A little farther along I may have some statistics to show you; but just now I’m looking not so much for the germ as for the germ-carrier.”

Maxwell smiled wearily.

“Still sticking to the theory that the blight is imported, are you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to be ‘yellow,’ Calvin. I can imagine some wild-eyed newspaper reporter hatching such an idea, but not you. Think of the absurdity of a bunch of Wall Street stock-jobbers trying to get at us in any such indirect way as that--shipping whiskey in here to demoralize our working force! Pshaw! When these fellows get busy and go to work, they want action--quick action.”

The expert put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.

“You are so close to the thing that you are continually losing the perspective, Dick,” he said earnestly. “You are going on the supposition that those New York looters are trying first one thing and then another. That doesn’t follow at all. For all you know, they may be gunning for you in half a dozen different ways this blessed minute--as they probably are. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that this whiskey scheme could be worked; I know you say it can’t, but suppose it could: can you conceive of any expedient that would be more certain to kill your traffic, wipe out your earnings, smash your securities, and put you on the toboggan slide generally?”

“Oh, no; if it could be worked.” Maxwell’s answer this time was less confidently derisive.

“All right; now that you’ve come that far, I’ll say this: it can be worked, and I’m here to tell you that it has been worked. Your railroad is practically an inebriate asylum in the making, right now, Richard. Half of your force has already fallen off the water chariot, and the other half is scared to death at the thought of what the drunken half may do.”

Maxwell pushed away his dessert untasted.

“You have the proof of this, Calvin?” he broke out.

“I have some proof, and Tarbell is getting more. You’ve been blind. You didn’t want to admit that your house of discipline was tumbling about your ears, and you’ve been shutting your eyes to the plain facts. For example: you may or may not be the only man in the service who doesn’t know that those two freight engineers--the one who was killed and the other--who overran their orders and smashed into the passenger at Lobo Cut this morning were just plain drunk!”

“What’s that? It--it can’t be, Calvin!”

“But it _is_,” insisted the big man across the table. “It is common talk among your own men; so common that it reached out and hit me--an outsider.”

The superintendent drank his small coffee at a single gulp and flung his napkin aside.

“I’ll get ’em!” he gritted savagely. “I’ll get the last damned booze-fighter in the bunch!” And then: “Good God, Sprague; how could anything like this go on without my knowing it?”

“You would have found it out, sooner or later, of course. But you’re a railroad man yourself, and you ought to know railroad men well enough to take into consideration that sort of loyalty among them which keeps them from ‘peaching’ on one another. Even Tarbell had to be jarred before he would admit that he knew about it. I can imagine that there has been a sort of generous conspiracy among the men to keep you from finding out.”

“That’s all right; I know now, and I’ll sift them out; I’ll go through the whole blamed outfit with a club! I’ll----”

The man who had called out this upbubbling of righteous wrath was chuckling softly.

“You won’t do anything that you say you will,” he interrupted good-naturedly. “You stumped me to take the case, and I’ve taken it; which means that you’re under the doctor’s orders. When you have cooled down a bit, you’ll see very clearly that the worst thing you could do at this particular crisis would be to start a division-wide scrap with the rank and file.”

“But, good Lord, Sprague; I’ve got to do something, haven’t I?”

“You surely have; and that something is to help me find the germ-carrier. Somebody has been taking down the bars for your men; who is it?”

“I don’t know any more than a goat. I can’t yet believe that it is the work of any one man.”

“Possibly it isn’t; there may be a good many. But I’ll chance a guess that some one in authority is setting the pace. Leave that for a moment and we’ll take up something else. You have two daily papers here in Brewster: I’ve noticed that one of them, _The Tribune_, is friendly to your road. How about the other, _The Times-Record_?”

“It is supposed to be independent, with a slant against corporations and ‘the system,’ whatever that may be.”

“Um,” said the scientist. “Before I went out on this last trip with Billy, I remarked that this other paper was giving a good bit of space to your road troubles in its news columns, and a good bit of its editorial space to criticisms of the Ford management. It occurred to me then that there might be a reason. How is the paper organized?”

“It is owned by one of our near-millionaires; a retired ranchman named Parker Higginson, who has dabbled in real-estate, in mines, and latterly in politics. His grouch against the railroad is purely personal. He has asked favors that I couldn’t legally grant; and on one occasion he took offence because I told him that a newspaper man should be the last person in the world to invite us to become law-breakers.”

“And his editor?” queried the expert.

“Is a bird of the same feather; a rather ‘yellow’ little fice named Healy.”

Sprague looked rather dubiously at the two cigars which the waiter was tendering on a server. “No, I think not, George,” he said, waving the cigars aside and feeling for his own pocket-case of stronger ones. And then to Maxwell: “This is all very nourishing. It may help out more than you suspect. Later in the evening I may ask you to call with me at the office of _The Times-Record_--though we may not have to go that far up the ladder to find what we are looking for. In the meantime, Tarbell is waiting for us out yonder in the lobby. Suppose we go and see what he wants.”

They found the young man, who looked like a younger brother to Starbuck, and who had made his record chasing cattle thieves in Montana, methodically rolling a cigarette in the loggia alcove, and Sprague began on him briskly.

“Spit it out, Archer; what have you found?”

“I didn’t make out to find what you sent me after,” was the half-evasive reply.

“All right; tell us what you did find.”

The young man dropped his cigarette and looked up with a glint of stubbornness in his stone-gray eyes.

“If it’s just the same to you, Mr. Sprague, I’d a heap ruther not,” he said.

Sprague reached out and turned the lapel of Tarbell’s coat, exposing the small silver star of a deputy sheriff.

“You took an oath when you got that, Archer; and Mr. Maxwell pays you for wearing it.”

Tarbell threw up his head defiantly. “Deputy or no deputy, I ain’t goin’ to name no names,” he began slowly. “But here’s what I found out: I been in twenty-three saloons and dives since you told me to go chase, and I counted thirty-one railroad men in ’em. Not all of ’em was drinkin’ or gamblin’, but some of ’em was.”

Sprague turned to Maxwell.

“You see, I knew what I was talking about.”

The superintendent was shaking his head.

“As openly as that!” he exclaimed. “I must have been the blindest fool in all this hill country!”

Tarbell chipped in quickly. “It ain’t been that bad for very long. But it’s just as Mr. Sprague says; it’s spreadin’ like murrain on a dry range. I saw men in them places this evenin’ that I’d a swore never got off the water-wagon. I ain’t namin’ no names.”

“Mr. Maxwell isn’t asking you to give anybody away,” the expert qualified. And then: “Had your supper?”

Tarbell nodded. “I had a hand-out in one o’ the saloons.”

“Good. Then I’ll give you another job. Look around town for a man about Mr. Maxwell’s build, only about twenty pounds heavier. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, wears a slouch hat soft gray in color, dresses in pepper-and-salt, is clean-shaven, red-faced, blue-eyed, and walks with a little hitch to his left leg which isn’t quite a limp. When you catch up with him, find out who he is and come and tell me. I’ll be over at Mr. Maxwell’s office.”

Tarbell vanished, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went, and Sprague thrust his arm in Maxwell’s.

“I’ll go over to your shop with you,” he said. “I know you’re anxious to climb back into the working saddle. I’m not going to bore you; I merely want to have a little talk with that irreproachable chief clerk of yours, Harvey Calmaine.”

A little later they climbed the stair to the office floor of the railroad building together, and Maxwell went on down the corridor to the despatcher’s room. When he came back to his own office a half-hour later and found Sprague and young Calmaine figuring together at the chief clerk’s desk in the outer room, he went on to his own inner sanctum without disturbing them.

It was perhaps another half-hour farther along when the expert, who had been patiently going over a mass of statistics with the alert, well-groomed young fellow who served as the superintendent’s right hand, sat back in his chair and relighted the fat black cigar which had been suffered to go out many times during the figuring process.

“It seems that a good many things besides wrecks have been happening in the past few weeks, Mr. Calmaine,” he suggested musingly. “In that short interval you have had many changes in the force, especially in the motive-power department. I don’t know whether you have remarked it, but fully half of the men in the shops and roundhouses are new men. And that is the department in which the sickness seems to be the worst. Your maintenance costs have increased three hundred per cent. over the same period last year.”

“I know it,” admitted the chief clerk. “It is the more marked because Dawson, our former master mechanic, made such phenomenally good records.”

“I remember Dawson,” said the big man, slipping easily from the statistics into the humanities. “He was here the first time I came over the road, early in the summer. Has he left the Short Line?”

“He has been promoted. He is superintendent of motive-power on the east end of the Southwestern.”

“That is recent, isn’t it?”

“Yes; it was only a few weeks ago.”

“And you have a new man as department chief?”

“We have--Judson Bascom. You may remember him as the man who ran the special train for you and Mr. Maxwell the day you made the blind trip to Tunnel Number Three. He is a sort of slave-driver and seems to have a good deal of trouble with his men--is continually hiring and firing, you’d say, from the appearance of his pay-rolls.”

The big expert’s eyes narrowed.

“Was he also promoted from some other place on the system?” he asked.

“No; he is a new man. I don’t know where he got his experience; somewhere in the East, I suppose.”

“Another question,” put in Sprague. “Does Mr. Maxwell have the appointment of his own motive-power chief?”

“No; this appointment was made in New York--by the executive committee, I imagine.”

“Somebody’s nephew or brother-in-law?” queried the chemist, with a twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t know about that. I guess it happens that way, once in a while, on any railroad. But Bascom is all kinds of capable.”

Sprague shook his head. “The true test of capability is always in the final result, my son,” he said reflectively; adding, “and results nowadays are usually measured in dollars and cents. As an outsider, I should say that this Mr. Bascom is a pretty expensive man to have around, judging from his cost sheets. He drinks some, doesn’t he?”

The young chief clerk closed one eye gravely.

“I’m not supposed to know anything about that, Mr. Sprague.”

“No, of course not. As you might say, it’s nobody’s business but Mr. Bascom’s. By the way, what is that whistle blowing so persistently for?”

Calmaine leaped out of his chair as if it had been suddenly connected with the grounding wire of a forty-kilowatt generator.

“By George! it’s a fire!” he exclaimed; and the sound of hurrying feet in the corridor confirmed the surmise. Maxwell’s door opened at the same instant, and the three rushed out to join the crowd which was already streaming across the yard tracks toward the company’s shops.

The fire was in the shops, originating in the boiler-room; and, thanks to the timely alarm and the comparative earliness of the hour, it was soon extinguished. Investigation, promptly instituted on the spot by the superintendent, proved that it was the result of pure carelessness. Some of the mechanics had washed their overalls and had hung them too near the sheet-iron stack in the fire-room; that was all.

Sprague lingered at Maxwell’s elbow while the investigation was going on, and he appeared to be a more or less perfunctory listener when Bascom, oozing wrathful profanity at every pore, told the superintendent what he would do to the careless clothes-driers when they should show up in the morning. But later, after the return to the head-quarters offices, the man from Washington sat for a long time in Maxwell’s easiest chair, smoking steadily and with his gaze fixed upon the disused gas chandelier marking the exact centre of the ceiling.

It was not until after Maxwell had finished his quota of night work and was closing his desk that Tarbell came in to make a whispered report to the big man apparently dreaming in the easy-chair.

Sprague listened, nodded, and rose to join the office-closing retreat.

“That is about what I thought, Archer,” he said soberly. “Now I have one more little job for you, and when it is done we’ll call it a go for to-night. Come around to my laboratory with me and I’ll explain it to you.” And when the four of them reached the plaza-fronting street he excused himself to Maxwell and the chief clerk and went, with Tarbell at his elbow, to the little second-floor den in the Kinzie Building where his experiments in soil analysis were conducted.

Reaching the back room which served as the laboratory proper, Sprague provided his follower with half a dozen small bottles, empty and tightly corked.

“There you are,” he said, from which it may be inferred that the nature of the remaining “job” had been explained on the way up from the railroad head-quarters. “Do it neatly, Archer, and don’t let them catch you at it. Everything will have quieted down by this time, and you shouldn’t have any trouble. I’ll wait for you here.”

Tarbell was gone possibly half an hour, and when he returned the bottles they were filled, two of them with a black-brown liquid, thick and viscous, and four with what appeared to be specimens of more or less dirty water. Each bottle was carefully marked on the blank label pasted upon it. Sprague stood them in a row on the laboratory working-table.

“I shall be busy here for twenty or thirty minutes,” he said. “I don’t want to ride a willing horse to death, but I’d be glad if you’d go by the hotel and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait up for me. I want to see him before he goes to bed.”

Tarbell nodded, but he hesitated about going.

“I got a hunch that we ain’t doin’ all the shadow work by our little lonesomes, Mr. Sprague,” he ventured to say. But before he could go on, Sprague lifted a finger for silence, made a whirling half-turn with a swiftness marvellous in so huge a body, and flung himself through the open door into the unlighted outer office-room to which the laboratory was an inner extension.

There were sounds of a collision, a fall, and a brief struggle before Tarbell could get action. At the end of it Sprague came back into the lighted laboratory, dragging a thick-set, square-shouldered man in pepper-and-salt clothes; a man with a clean-shaven red face down the side of which a thin line of blood was trickling.

“You were eminently correct, Archer,” said the expert, slamming his unresisting burden into a corner of the room after he had deftly gone through the pepper-and-salt pockets for weapons with the result of turning out a cheap revolver and a wicked-looking knife. “I’m sorry I can’t keep my word and let you go to bed, but the plot has thickened a little too rapidly. Go around to the Topaz and ask Mr. Maxwell to wait. Then come back here and keep this fellow quiet while I do my work.”

When Tarbell went out, Sprague quickly stripped his coat and went to work at his laboratory table. For some little time the man in the corner lay as he had been cast, and the worker at the table paid no attention to him. But a few minutes before Tarbell’s return, the red-faced man gasped, gurgled, and sat up to hold his head in his hands as one trying to remember what had happened to him. Presently he looked up, and after a long stare at the big figure of the man at the work table, he found his voice.

“Say, guv’ner, wot am I doin’ here?” he asked huskily.

Sprague, who was skilfully dropping a fuming yellow liquor from a glass-stoppered bottle into a beaker, replied without turning his head.

“If anybody should ask, I should say you are waiting for an officer to come and take you to jail.”

“Who, me? Wot have I been doin’?” queried the husky one, in the anxious rasp of a deeply aggrieved victim of circumstances.

“You’ve been shoving threatening letters under my door in the Hotel Topaz, for one thing,” said Sprague, still busy with his experiment.

“Who, me? My Gawd--just lissen to ’im!” wheezed the red-faced man, as if appealing to some third person invisible.

A silence followed during which the crouching man’s feet drew themselves by imperceptible fractions of an inch at a time into position for a tackling spring. Sprague did not look aside, but when the leg muscles of the man began to bulge as if testing themselves for the leap, the worker at the table spoke again.

“I shouldn’t try it if I were you. This stuff that I am fooling with is nitric acid, ninety-eight per cent. pure. If any of it should happen to get spilled on you, there wouldn’t be sweet oil enough in this town to put the fire out.”

“My Gawd!” gasped the red-faced one, suddenly sticking his feet out in front of him again; and just then Tarbell came in.

“I’ll be through in a minute, Archer,” said the experimenter at the work-table, still without looking around. “Did you find your man?”

“Yes; and Starbuck is with him. What do you want me to do with this geezer?”

“Nothing. I’ll fix him when we’re ready to go.”

“I’ve got a pair of handcuffs,” Tarbell suggested.

“They won’t be needed--not for this one.”

Tarbell dragged out a chair and sat down, tilting comfortably against the wall and staring half-absently at the man in the corner. “Before I’d let any bare-handed man take my arsenal away from me and slam me around like that,” he murmured, quite impersonally.

The man on the floor lifted the challenge promptly.

“Lemme git up and gimme half a chanst,” he croaked. “I won’t hurt you none if you don’t git in the way o’ that door.”

“Not this evenin’,” said Tarbell succinctly; and there the matter rested until Sprague put his beakers and test-tubes aside, and, resuming his coat, took a flat black box from a shelf and slipped it into his pocket.

“Now we’re ready,” he announced; and then he turned to the captured spy. “We’re going to leave you here in the dark for a little while, and there will be nothing between you and a get-away but a small matter of fear. After we turn the lights off I shall leave a few bottles of stuff around where they will do the most good. If you should happen to upset one of them in moving about, it’s good-by. If it doesn’t burn you to death, you’ll stifle.”

“My Gawd!” said the captive; and he was still saying it over softly to himself when they switched off the lights, shut the office doors, and went away.

“There is a good example of the power of matter over mind, Archer,” said Sprague whimsically, when they reached the street. “If that fellow would use his reason even a little bit he’d know that I hadn’t made any very elaborate preparations to hold him; there wasn’t time between the turning off of the lights and our leaving. Yet I’ll bet a small chicken worth twenty-five dollars that we find him still crouching in his corner and afraid to move when we go back. He saw me using acid in my little experiment; saw the fumes and probably got a whiff of them. That was enough.”

They found Maxwell and Starbuck sitting on the hotel porch, smoking. Sprague took the superintendent aside.

“It’s rather worse than I thought it was, Dick,” he began, when they had drawn their chairs a little apart. “That is my excuse for keeping you up so late. We have one of the conspirators under a sort of mental lock and key over at my place in the Kinzie Building, but he is only a hired striker, and I’d like to flush the big game. Are you good for a watch-meeting--you and Starbuck? It may last all night, and nothing may come of it, but it’s worth trying.”

Maxwell spread his hands.

“Whatever you say, Calvin,” he acquiesced. “After the jolt you’ve given me to-night, I can only get into the harness and pull when you give the word.”

“All right. We’ll take Tarbell for a guide. Tarbell, you know your way around in the shops pretty well, don’t you?”

“I reckon so,” was the young man’s reply.

“We want to go to the foundry, or to some place near by where we can keep an eye on the pickle shed. Can you get us there without arousing anybody’s curiosity?”

“Sure,” said Tarbell.

“Good. Pitch out,” was the curt command, and the four of them left the hotel to make a circuit through ill-lighted streets and around the lower end of the eastern railroad yard to come at the long line of shop buildings from the rear.

On the way Maxwell inquired curiously: “What do you know about pickling-sheds, Calvin?”

“I know that every well-regulated foundry has one where castings which are to be machined are treated with acid to take the hard sand-scale off.”

“And why, just why, are you anxious to get a near-hand view of ours, at this time of night?”

“I’m hoping we shall find the answer to that in your foundry yard, Dick. If we don’t, the joke will be on me.”

The approach to the locomotive-repairing section of the railroad plant was made through a river-bank yard littered with slag dumps, piled flasks, and heaps of scrap iron. There was no moon, and when they got among the lumber sheds in the rear of the car-shops the darkness was almost tangible. But Tarbell knew the ground, and when he finally called a halt the twin cupola stacks of the foundry loomed before them in the darkness and the acrid smell of the warm, moist moulding sand was in the air.

When the pickling-shed had been located for him, Sprague chose the waiting-place under a flask shelter directly opposite and the silent watch began. For a weary half-hour nothing happened. Though the month was August, a cool wind crept down from the Timanyoni snow peaks, and the splash and gurgle of the near-by river added its suggestion of chill to the moonless night. Over in the western yards the night crew was making up the midnight freights; but with the buildings of the plant intervening, the noises of the shifter’s exhaust and the clankings and crashings of the shunted cars came faintly to the ears of the watchers.

On the even hour of one the watchman made his round. They could see his lantern twinkling through the windows of the shops, and later he made a circuit of the outbuildings. His route led him finally through the foundry, and as he came out the light of his lantern fell upon the piled castings and the pickling-troughs, and on the carboys of vitriol. There were four of the boxed acid-holders standing under the shed. Sprague drew down his left cuff and made pencil marks on it in the darkness when the watchman passed on.

It was possibly fifteen minutes after the watchman had disappeared when Maxwell broke the strained silence with a whisper.

“Duck!” he said to Starbuck, who was standing up. “Dunkell’s coming back--without his lantern!”

Sprague spread his arms and crushed the other three back into the shadows. “It isn’t the watchman this time--be ready!” he whispered; and as he said it the figure of a man appeared coming down the littered roadway from the blacksmith shop.

Though he walked in darkness there was no incertitude about the man’s movements. Turning abruptly out of the material-road he went straight to the foundry shed. A moment later a beam of white light played steadily upon the acid carboys, a sheltered beam which seemed to come from a tiny electric search-light. Plainly they saw a pair of hands place a large bottle on the ground, remove the stopper, and fix a tin funnel in the neck. Then one of the carboys was tilted, presumably by the same pair of hands, though the hands were invisible now, and a thin stream of the yellow acid gurgled through the funnel.

When the bottle was filled the carboy slowly righted itself; the hands came in view again to remove the funnel and to replace the stopper; and then the search-light went out with the faint snap of an electric switch. Almost at the same instant the watchers saw the figure of the man fading away into the inner and darker blackness of the foundry.

“We’ve got to follow him, Tarbell,” said Sprague, hurriedly; “and we lose out if he discovers us. Can you pilot us?”

“I can,” asserted Maxwell, and under the superintendent’s lead the shadow race was begun.

Happily, there was a noisy diversion to make the secret pursuit feasible. The train-making clamor had come down from the western yards, and for the moment the yard crew was working on the freight-house tracks opposite the shops. Under cover of the out-door clamor the four pursuers were able to close up on the bottle-carrier until they were treading almost in his footsteps. The route led through the foundry floor to the machine shop. On the erecting pits were two locomotives, apparently ready to be hauled out and put into service after their period of back-shop repairs.

Into the cab of one of the engines the bottle-bearer climbed, first placing his burden carefully in the gangway. A little later they heard him climbing over the coal in the tender, heard him remove the cover of the water manhole, and heard the _glug-glug_ of liquid issuing from a bottle-neck.

Sprague silently drew a small square object from his pocket, the little flat black box he had caught up as he was leaving his office in the Kinzie Building. Then he whispered to Tarbell: “Cover him, Archer, and don’t hesitate to shoot if you need to: ready!” At the word there was a blinding burst of illumination and the report of a flash-light cartridge, followed instantly by the crash of the breaking bottle, silence, and black darkness. Then Sprague’s mellow voice boomed into the stillness.

“Come down, Mr. Bascom. We’ve got your picture, and a man who doesn’t often miss what he shoots at is covering you with his gun.”

It was a grim little group of five which gathered in the master mechanic’s room in the office wing of the machine shop a few minutes after the flash-light photograph had been taken in the erecting shop. Bascom’s ruddy flush was gone when he sat down heavily in his desk chair; but his natty brown crush hat was pushed back, and the gleam in his small, lynx-like eyes was not of fear.

“Just name the kind of a hand-spring you’d like to have me turn, gentlemen,” he said, half-sardonically, when Tarbell had switched on the second circuit of incandescents. “I’m not much of an acrobat, but I’ll do the best I can to amuse you.”

It was Sprague who did the talking for the prosecution.

“We want to know first who is with you in this job of inside worm-eating, Mr. Bascom,” he said coolly.

“Nobody,” came the prompt lie.

Sprague’s smile was affable. “I’m sure you’ll make one exception,” he urged; “a man named Murtagh, who was for a little time one of your shop machinists and who is now a press-repairer on _The Times-Record_.”

Bascom sat up and swore a savage oath.

“So that damned scab has welshed, has he?” he grated.

Sprague branched off and began again, this time in the straitly criminal field.

“How many locomotives have you treated with the acid cure, first and last, Mr. Bascom?”

“Enough so you’ll still be resetting flues in ’em a year from now.”

This time it was Maxwell’s turn to swear, and for a minute or two the air of the office was sulphurous. When the atmosphere had cleared again, Sprague went on.

“I presume that your defence in court will be that you were trying an experiment to neutralize the effect of the alkaline water of this region?”

Bascom grinned appreciatively. “You’re an expert chemist yourself, Mr. Sprague. The water in this country, outside of the Park, is pretty badly alkali, as you probably know.”

“But that defence will scarcely explain why you put acid in the oil which is used for lubricating the internal parts of the engines--cylinders and valves,” Sprague cut in quietly.

The master mechanic’s chair righted itself with a crash, and the crash punctuated another blast of bad language directed at the man who had been left crouching in the corner in Sprague’s uptown laboratory.

“So Murtagh gave you that, too, did he?” Bascom finished. “It’s your lead, Mr. Sprague; what do you want me to play?”

“Names,” said the expert curtly.

“But if I say I was playing a lone hand?”

“We should know you were lying. This acid business may be all your own; but there are other things. You’ve had plenty of help in the drink-fest and the demoralization game, Bascom.”

The big master mechanic’s lips shut like the jaws of a steel trap. But after a time he said: “What do I get if I spout on the others?”

“A chance to get out of the country--eh, Maxwell?”

The superintendent nodded. “Yes; if he can get away before I can find a gun to kill him with.”

Bascom reached into his desk, found a scratch-pad and tossed it over to Starbuck. “Take ’em down,” he said briefly; and then followed a black-list that was simply heart-breaking to Richard Maxwell, a man who had built his reputation as a railroad executive, and would have staked it instantly, upon the loyalty of his rank and file. Shop foremen, roundhouse bosses, bridge men, yard foremen, section bosses, a travelling engineer, a clerk here and a telegraph operator there--the list seemed endless.

When Bascom paused, Sprague began again.

“What was the plan, Bascom, as it was outlined to these others?”

The master mechanic’s smile showed his fine even teeth.

“To make this jerk-water railroad a little easier to work for,” he sneered. “When we found the right kind of a man we made him believe that the discipline was keyed up too damned tight and showed him how he could loosen up a little, if he felt like it. Murtagh was barkeep’ and handed out the bug-juice. That’s all there was to it.”

“Not quite all,” said Sprague evenly. “You got Murtagh his job on _The Times-Record_ in order to have him handy without being too much in the way or too much in evidence. How much do the _Times-Record_ people know about the scheme for smashing the Nevada Short Line securities from the inside?”

Bascom laughed hardily.

“You’ll never catch a newspaper man,” he said. “But I’ll tell you this: Parker Higginson is a pretty smooth politician, and he’s got a mighty long arm when it comes to reaching for the thing he wants. He was the man who got me my job here, and I’ll bet those New York people who appointed me don’t know yet why they did it. Another thing: when I’m gone, Higginson will still be here--don’t you forget that!”

“We’ll try to remember it,” Sprague promised. Then he looked at his watch. “The overland passenger, westbound, will be here in a few minutes, and when it goes, you may go with it, Mr. Bascom. But first we want a few more names, the names of the New York people who are behind both you and Mr. Higginson.”

Bascom got up, went to a wardrobe in one corner of the office, and dragged out two heavy suit-cases.

“I’ve been fixed for this for some little time,” he volunteered. “Send Murtagh to the stone-pile for splitting on us, and I won’t make any claim for the half-month’s salary that’s due me. As to the names of the big fellows, I only wish I knew them, Mr. Sprague. If I did, I’d go east instead of west and make somebody come across with big money. As it is, I guess it’s South America for mine. Good-night, all. I wish you luck with the booze-fighters, Mr. Maxwell. You’ll have a bully good time loading some of them back onto the water-automobile.” And he went out into the night with a suit-case in either hand.

“Talk about cold gall!” said Starbuck, when the door closed behind the retreating figure of the big master mechanic; “Great Cat! that fellow’s got enough to swim in.” Then he turned to Sprague. “Is the show over?”

The man from Washington laughed genially.

“That is for Maxwell to say. We might go uptown and give those newspaper people a bad quarter of an hour, though I doubt if we’d make any money at it.”

Maxwell looked up quickly.

“You think they’re in it, Calvin? Bascom wasn’t lying about that part of it?”

“Yes; they are in it up to their necks. I suppose it’s politics for Higginson. Haven’t I heard somewhere that he is one of the State bosses?”

“You might have,” drawled Starbuck. “He’s It, all right.”

Sprague stood up and yawned sleepily.

“Perhaps, a little later on, we can throw a scare into this Mr. Parker Higginson,” he suggested. “Just now, I’m for the hotel and a few winks of much-needed sleep. Tarbell, you go up to my office and get Murtagh. Have him locked up on a charge of--oh, any old charge will do; breaking into my office to-night, if you can’t think of anything better. If we can manage to hold onto him for a while, we may be able to keep this Mr. Higginson quiet while Maxwell is straightening out his booze-fighters. Let’s go.”

“Hold on, just a minute,” pleaded Maxwell. “There are three of us here who have seen the wheels go round, and I don’t forget that I was the one who said there weren’t any wheels. How in the name of all that is wonderful have you been able to work this puzzle out in less than twelve hours, Sprague?”

The big chemistry expert sat down again and locked his hands behind his head.

“My gosh!” he said; “have I got to open up a kindergarten for you fellows when I’m so sleepy that I don’t know what I’m going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning? It was easy, dead easy. Half an hour with those delayed train crews at Angels this morning showed me that the discipline strings were all off; one of the freight conductors even offered me a nip out of his pocket-flask when I intimated that I was thirsty. With that for a pointer, I had my eyes open at the wreck, and what I saw there you all know. Moreover, I noticed that the pocket-flasks were all alike, as if they’d all been handed out over the same bar. All straight, so far?”

“Go on,” said Maxwell.

“I got my first pointer on Bascom at the wreck, too. I saw that the men in the trainmaster’s gang didn’t drink when the boss was looking, a condition which didn’t apply in the other crew. Again, I noticed that Bascom took his track-clearing privilege with a large and handsome disregard for the salvage. He didn’t care how much property was destroyed in the process, and once I saw him give the signal to the crane engineer to drop a car loaded with automobiles--which was promptly done and the autos properly smashed.”

“The cold-blooded devil!” growled the superintendent.

“When we reached town, Tarbell here promptly confirmed my guess about the whiskey; and in the evening Calmaine helped some more by going with me over the pay-rolls for new names, and over the cost-sheets for increases. Naturally, we dwelt longest upon the motive-power and repair department, with its huge increases, and it so happened that my eye fell upon the various charges for vitriol in carboys. I asked Calmaine what use a railroad shop had for so much sulphuric acid, and he told me it was used to pickle castings. Afterward I sent Tarbell out to bring me samples of water from the tanks of the crippled locomotives on the shop track and of the oil in their cylinder-cups. Analyses of both, which I made on the spot, showed the presence of sulphuric acid in the water, and also in the oil.”

“Still, you didn’t have any cinch on Bascom,” Starbuck put in.

“No, but things were leaning pretty heavily his way. Tarbell had traced Murtagh for me and had found out the one thing that I needed to know; namely, that Murtagh had been ‘placed’ on _The Times-Record_ by Bascom’s recommendation. Murtagh was the man who put the threatening note under my door; the note was printed on a scrap of scratch-paper--copy paper--of the sort that you rarely find outside of a newspaper office. Here I simply put two and two together. Bascom had been conferring with Higginson, or his editor, or both of them, and telling them of my rubbernecking at the wreck. They had agreed among themselves that I’d better be warned off the grass, and they took about the stupidest possible way they could think of to do it.”

“Still, you didn’t have Bascom,” reiterated Starbuck.

“No; but he was the man who had been signing the requisitions for the big purchases of acid, and I was far enough along to chance a jump at him. I knew that if he were the man who was poisoning the locomotives, he wasn’t trusting anybody else; he was doing it himself, often and by littles. I wasn’t at all sure of catching him to-night, of course; but we saw him down here at the fire, and I thought there was an even chance that he might stay and do a little more devilment.”

Maxwell stood up and shook himself into his coat.

“I’m onto you now, Sprague,” he chuckled, in a brave attempt to jolly himself out of the depressive nightmare which had been weighing him down for weeks. “You’re a guesser--a bold, bad four-flusher, with a perfectly miraculous knack of drawing the other card you need when you reach for it. Now, if you could only guess me out some way in which I can straighten up these poor fellows of mine who have been pulled neck and heels off of the water-wagon----”

“Pshaw! that’s a cinch,” said the big man, yawning sleepily again. “We’ll just put our heads together and get out a little circular letter, talking to the boys just as you’d talk to a bunch of them in your office. Tell ’em it’s all off, and the bar is closed and padlocked, and you’ll have ’em all eating out of your hand again, same as they used to. You don’t believe it can be done? You let me write the letter and I’ll show you. All you have to do is to apply the scientific principle; surround the whole subject and look at it calmly and dispassionately, and--ye-ow! Say, I’m going to chance another guess--the last in the box. If you don’t head me over to the hotel and my room, you’ll have to carry me over and put me to bed. And that’s no joke, with a man of my size. Let’s go.”

V

The Cloud-Bursters

IT was an article in the news columns of _The Brewster Morning Tribune_ which first called attention--the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general--to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.

Connabel, a hard-working reporter on _The Tribune_, had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s place, the one remaining Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the construction camp of the Mesquite Company.

Being short of “copy” on the fight story, the reporter had written up the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on the job whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which, to Connabel’s unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.

Kendall, managing editor of _The Tribune_, had run the story, partly because real news happened to be scarce at the moment, and partly out of sheer astonishment that an enterprise of the magnitude of the Mesquite project had not already flooded the country with the brass-band publicity literature which is supposed to attract investors.

That a land and irrigation company should actually wait until its dam was three-fourths completed before it began to advertise was a thing sufficiently curious to call for editorial comment. Why Editor Kendall did not comment on the news item as a matter of singular interest is a query which had its answer on the loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz in the evening of the day on which Connabel’s write-up appeared.

It was Kendall’s regular habit to close his desk at seven o’clock and to spend a leisurely hour over his dinner at the Topaz before settling down to his night’s work. On the evening in question he had chanced to sit at table with Maxwell, the general superintendent of the railroad, and with Maxwell’s friend and college classmate, Sprague. After dinner the three had gone out to the loggia porch to smoke, and it was the big chemistry expert who spoke of the Mesquite news story which had appeared that morning in _The Tribune_.

“Yes,” said the editor; “Connabel got on to that yesterday. I sent him over to Angels to write up a shooting scrape, and he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. We’ve all known, in a general way, that an Eastern company was doing something over there, but I had no idea that they’d got their dam pretty nearly done and were about ready to open up for business.”

“It’s wild-cat, pure and unadulterated!” cut in the railroad man snappily. “What they are going to do to a lot of woolly investors will be good and plenty. That Mesquite Mesa land is just about as fertile as this street pavement here.”

Kendall was a dried-up little wisp of a man, with tired eyes and a face the color of old oak-tanned leather.

“That is what you would think--that they are out for the easy money,” he agreed. “But there is something a little queer about it. They haven’t advertised.”

“Not here,” supplemented Maxwell. “It would be a trifle too rank. Everybody in the Timanyoni knows what that land is over in the edge of the Red Desert.”

“They haven’t advertised anywhere, so far as I can ascertain,” put in the editor, quietly. “What is more, Jennings, who is the engineer in charge of the dam-building and who seems to be the only man in authority on the ground, came in this afternoon and raised sand with me for printing the news story. He said they were not exploiting the scheme here at all; that their money and their investors were all in the East, and they were asking no odds of the Brewster newspapers.”

“Bitter sort of devil, that fellow Jennings,” was Maxwell’s comment; but it was the big chemist who followed the main thread of the argument.

“What reason did he give for making such an extraordinary break as that, Mr. Kendall?”

“Oh, he had his reason pat enough,” rejoined the editor, with his tired smile. “He said he realized that we have irrigated land of our own over here in the Park upon which we are anxious to get settlers, and that public sentiment here would naturally be against the Mesquite project. He asked, as a matter of fairness, that we simply let the desert project alone. He claimed that it had been financed without taking a dollar out of the Timanyoni, so we could not urge that there were local investors to be protected.”

“Umph! that argument cuts both ways; it’s an admission that the Eastern investors might need protection,” scoffed the railroad superintendent. Then he added: “They certainly will if they expect to get any of the money back that they have been spending in Mesquite Valley. Why, Kendall, Mesquite Creek is bone-dry half the year!”

“And the other half?” inquired Sprague.

“It’s a cloud-burst proposition, like a good many of the foot-hill arroyos,” Maxwell explained. “Once, in a summer storm, I saw a wall of water ten feet high come down that stream-bed, tumbling twenty-ton bowlders in the thick of it as if they had been brook pebbles. Then, for a month, maybe, it would be merely a streak of dry sand.”

“Perhaps they are counting upon storing the cloud-burst water,” commented Kendall dryly. Then as he rose to go back to his work: “As you say, Maxwell, it has all the ear-marks of the wild-cat. But so long as it doesn’t stick its claws out at us, I suppose we haven’t much excuse for butting in. Good-night, gentlemen. Drop in on me when you’re up my way. Always glad to see you.”

The two who remained on the hotel porch after the editor went away smoked in comradely silence for a time. The night was enchantingly fine, with a first-quarter moon swinging low in a vault of velvety blackness, and a gentle breeze, fragrant with the breath of the mountain forests, creeping down upon the city from the backgrounding highlands. Across the plaza, and somewhere in the yards behind the long two-storied railroad head-quarters building and station, a night crew was making up trains, and the clank and crash of coupling cars mingled with the rapid-fire exhausts of the switching engine.

The big-bodied chemistry expert was the first to break the companionable silence, asking a question which had reference to the epidemic of disaster and demoralization which had recently swept over Maxwell’s railroad.

“Well, how are things coming by this time, Dick? Are the men responding fairly well to that little circular-letter, man-to-man appeal we concocted?”

“They are, for a fact,” was the hearty assurance. “I have never seen anything like it in railroading in all my knocking about. They’ve been coming in squads to ’fess up and take the pledge, and to assure me that it’s the water-wagon for theirs from now on. By George, Calvin, it’s the most mellowing experience I’ve ever had! It proves what you have always said, and what I have always wanted to believe: that the good in the mass definitely outweighs the bad, and that it will come to the front if you only know how to appeal to it.”

“That’s right,” averred the chemist. “It is the strong hope of the country that there is justice and fairness and sane common-sense at the American bottom of us, if you can only get at it. I think you can call the booze-fight and demoralization round-up a trouble past and begin to look around you for the signs and symptoms of the next biff you’re going to get.”

The stockily built little man who stood as the railroad company’s chief field-officer on the far-western fighting line moved uneasily in his chair.

“I have been hoping there wasn’t going to be any ‘next time,’” he said, chewing thoughtfully upon his cigar.

“I should hope with you, Dick, if we had been able, in any of the former scrimmages, to secure good, indubitable court evidence against the men who are backing these buccaneering raids on your securities. The one thing that big money really fears to-day is the law--the law as the Federal courts are likely to construe and administer it. But to obtain your day in court you’ve got to have evidence; and thus far we haven’t been able to sweat out anything that would implicate the man or men higher up. Therefore, you may continue to sleep on your arms, keeping a sharp eye out for surprises.”

“I guess that is pretty good advice,” was the ready admission; “but it is rather difficult to put into practice, Calvin. There are five hundred miles of this railroad, and my job of operating them is big enough to keep me busy without doing any detective stunts on the side.”

“I know,” Sprague nodded reflectively, “and for that reason I’ve been half-way keeping an eye out for you myself.”

“You have? Don’t tell me you’ve been finding more grief!”

Sprague threw away his outburned stub and found and lighted a fresh cigar.

“I don’t want to pose as an alarmist,” he offered at length, “but I’d like to dig a little deeper into this Mesquite irrigation scheme. How much or little do you know about it?”

“Next to nothing. About two months ago Jennings, the construction engineer, made application for the through handling, from Copah, of a train-load of machinery, tools, and camp outfit. He asked to have the stuff delivered at the end of the old copper-mine spur above Angels. We put the spur in shape for him and delivered the freight.”

“Well, what else?”