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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wreckers
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2012 [EBook #38846]
+Last updated: April 22, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE WRECKERS
+
+                          BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+    WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
+    ARTHUR E. BECHER
+
+
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+    NEW YORK           1920
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+    Published March, 1920
+
+
+
+
+To a certain grave and reverend official of the Union Pacific System
+who, in his younger days, might well have played the part of _Jimmie
+Dodds_, this book is affectionately inscribed by
+
+THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "You have spoken only of the difficulties and
+responsibilities, Graham, but there is another side to it."]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+    I. AT SAND CREEK SIDING                            1
+
+    II. A TANK PARTY                                  11
+
+    III. MR. CHADWICK'S SPECIAL                       23
+
+    IV. THE TIPPING OF THE SCALE                      36
+
+    V. THE DIRECTORS' MEETING                         51
+
+    VI. THE ALEXA GOES EAST                           60
+
+    VII. "HEADS OFF, GENTLEMEN!"                      65
+
+    VIII. WITH THE STRINGS OFF                        75
+
+    IX. AND SATAN CAME ALSO                           90
+
+    X. THE BIG SMASH                                  96
+
+    XI. WHAT EVERY MAN KNOWS                         102
+
+    XII. WITH THE WHEELS TRIGGED                     112
+
+    XIII. THE LOST 1016                              123
+
+    XIV. A CLOSE CALL                                140
+
+    XV. THE MACHINE                                  155
+
+    XVI. IN THE COAL YARD                            169
+
+    XVII. THE MAN AT THE WINDOW                      185
+
+    XVIII. THE NAME ON THE REGISTER                  200
+
+    XIX. THE HOODOO                                  206
+
+    XX. THE HELPLESS WIRES                           216
+
+    XXI. BILLY MORRIS EXPLAINS                       225
+
+    XXII. WHAT THE PILOT ENGINE FOUND                232
+
+    XXIII. THE MAJOR'S PREMONITION                   247
+
+    XXIV. THE DEAD-LINE                              262
+
+    XXV. FLAGGED DOWN                                274
+
+    XXVI. THE DIPSOMANIAC                            292
+
+    XXVII. THE DESERTER                              312
+
+    XXVIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END                 319
+
+    XXIX. THE MURDER MADMAN                          334
+
+    XXX. "UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY"             349
+
+    XXXI. P. S. L. COMES HOME                        365
+
+
+
+
+THE WRECKERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Sand Creek Siding
+
+
+As a general proposition, I don't believe much in the things called
+"hunches." They are bad for the digestion, and as often as not are like
+those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it
+is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to all rules, and
+we certainly uncovered the biggest one of the lot--the boss and I--the
+night we left Portland and the good old Pacific Coast.
+
+It was this way. We had finished the construction work on the Oregon
+Midland; had quit, cleaned up the offices, drawn our last pay-checks,
+told everybody good-by, and were on our way to the train, when I had one
+of those queer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew
+just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to
+Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason--if you'll call
+it a reason--was that, just before we came to the railroad station, the
+boss walked calmly under a ladder standing in front of a new building;
+and besides that, it was the thirteenth day of the month, a Friday, and
+raining like the very mischief.
+
+Just to sort of toll us along, maybe, the fates didn't begin on us that
+night. They waited until the next day, and then proceeded to shove us in
+behind a freight-train wreck at Widner, Idaho, where we lost twelve
+hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't
+due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a
+little visit with his folks in Illinois, and beyond that he was going to
+meet a bunch of Englishmen in Montreal, and maybe let them make him
+General Manager of one of the Canadian railroads.
+
+So Mr. Norcross was in no special hurry, and neither was I. I wasn't
+under pay, but I expected to be when we reached Canada. I had been
+confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland
+construction, and he was taking me along partly because he knows a
+cracking good stenographer when he sees one, but mostly because I was
+dead anxious to go anywhere he was going.
+
+But to come back to the Widner delay: if it hadn't been for that
+twelve-hour lay-out we would have caught the Saturday night train on the
+Pioneer Short Line, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there
+would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram
+from Mr. Chadwick, because it wouldn't have found us; no hold-up at Sand
+Creek Siding; in short, nothing would have happened that did happen. But
+I mustn't get ahead of my story.
+
+It was on Sunday that the jolt began to get ready to land on us. Mr.
+Norcross had been a railroad man for so long that he had forgotten how
+to knock off on Sundays, and right soon after breakfast, with the help
+of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our
+section into a business office, saying that now we had a good quiet day,
+we'd clean up the million or so odds and ends of correspondence he'd
+been letting go while we were tussling for the Midland right-of-way
+through the Oregon mountains.
+
+By this time, you will understand, we were rocketing along over the
+Pioneer Short Line, and were supposed to be due at Portal City at
+half-past seven that evening. From where he sat dictating to me the boss
+was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his
+eyes while he was talking off his letters, and it puzzled me because it
+wasn't like him. I may as well say here as anywhere that one of his
+strong points is to be always "at himself" under all sorts of
+conditions.
+
+So, as I say, I was sort of puzzled; and one of the times after he had
+given me a full grist of letters and had gone off to smoke while I
+typed a few thousand lines from my notes to catch up, I made a
+discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a
+young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the
+old-fashioned kind, with low seat-backs. I put it up that in those
+absent-eyed intervals Mr. Norcross had been studying the back of the
+young woman's neck. I was measurably sure it wasn't the little girl's.
+
+Along in the forenoon I made an excuse to go and get a drink of water
+out of the forward cooler, and on the way back I took a good square look
+at our neighbors in Number Five. At that I didn't wonder at the boss's
+temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to
+start a stopped clock--only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there
+wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. And the little girl was
+simply a peach--a nice, downy, rosy peach; chunky, round-faced,
+sunny-haired, jolly; with a neat little turned-up nose and big sort of
+boyish laughing eyes that fairly dared the world.
+
+I made a good half-dozen mistakes when I got in behind the old writing
+machine again and went on with the letters; but never mind about that.
+As I began to say, things rocked along until we had about worn the day
+out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up
+the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though
+I was only his stenographer, and a kid at that, he was big enough and
+Western enough not to let the buck-private-to-officer gap make any
+difference, and always when we were knocking about together he made me
+sit at his table.
+
+Sometimes, when it happened that way, he'd ditch the rank-and-file
+dignities and talk to me as if the thousand miles or so between his job
+and mine were wiped out. But this Sunday evening he was pretty quiet,
+breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a
+forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for
+a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of the Pioneer Short Line.
+Farther along, pretty well into the ice-cream and black coffee, he came
+to life again to ask me if I had noticed the young lady and the girl in
+the Pullman section next to ours.
+
+I told him I had, and then, because I had never known him to bother his
+head for two minutes in succession about any woman, he gave me a shock;
+said they were ticketed to Portal City--and to find that out he must
+have asked the train conductor--adding that when we reached Portal it
+would be the neighborly thing for me to do to help them off with their
+hand-bags and see that they got a cab if they wanted one.
+
+"Sure I will," says I. "That is, if the lady's husband isn't there to
+meet them."
+
+"What?" he snaps out. "You know her? She is married?"
+
+"No, I don't exactly _know_ her," I shuffled. "But she is married, all
+right."
+
+"How can you tell if you don't know her?" he barked; just like that.
+
+I had to make good, right quick, as everybody does who goes up against
+Mr. Graham Norcross. But it so happened that I was able to.
+
+"Her suit case is standing in the aisle, and I saw the tag. It has her
+name, 'Mrs. Sheila Macrae,' on it."
+
+The boss has a way of making two up-and-down wrinkles and a little
+curved horse-shoe line come between his eyes when he is going to reach
+for you.
+
+"There are times, Jimmie, when you see altogether too much," he said,
+sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to the far side of his
+ice-cream pyramid before he began again.
+
+"'Macrae,' you say: that is Scotch. And so is 'Sheila.' Most likely the
+names, both of them, are only hand-downs. She looks straight American to
+me."
+
+"She is pretty enough to look anything," I threw in, just to see how he
+would take it.
+
+"Right you are, Jimmie," he agreed. "I've been looking at the back of
+her neck all day. I don't know whether you've ever noticed it--you are
+only a boy and probably you haven't--but there are so many women who
+don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em from behind.
+You catch a glimpse of a pretty neck, and when you get around to the
+face you find out that the neck was only a bit of bluff."
+
+If I had been eating anything in the world but ice-cream I believe it
+would have choked me. What he said led up to the admission that he had
+been making these face-and-neck comparisons for goodness knows how long,
+and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a
+picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a
+hard-hitter, right from the jump. And for a man of that sort women are
+usually no more than fluffy little side-issues, as Eve said when they
+told her she was made out of Adam's rib.
+
+That ended the dining-car part of it. The sure-enough, knock-out round
+was fought at the rear end of our Pullman, which happened to be the last
+car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a
+cigar and said we'd go out to the observation platform to smoke, because
+the smoking-room was full up with apple-raisers, and sheep-feeders and
+cattlemen, all talking at once.
+
+As we went down the aisle I noticed that Section Five was empty, and
+when we reached the door we found the young lady and the girl standing
+at the rear railing to watch the track unroll itself under the trucks
+and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what
+they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm
+collar, but the girl had a fur thing around her neck, and her stocky,
+chunky little arms were elbow deep in a big pillow muff to match, though
+the April night wasn't even half-way chilly.
+
+The boss growled out something about waiting until the ladies should go
+in; and then, for pure safety's sake, he stepped out on the platform to
+close the side trap door which, with the railing gate on that side, had
+been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific
+type" that was pulling us let out a whistle screech that would have
+waked the dead, and the air-brakes went on with a jerk that showed how
+beautifully reckless the railroading was on the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+Mr. Norcross was reaching for the catch on the floor trap and the jerk
+didn't throw him. But it snapped the young woman and the girl away from
+the railing so suddenly that the little one had to grab for hand-holds;
+and when she did that, of course the big muff went overboard.
+
+At this, a bunch of things happened, all in an eye-wink. The train
+ground and jiggled to a stop; the girl squealed, "Oh, my muff!" and
+skipped down the steps to disappear in the general direction of the
+Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie _Ann_!--come
+back here--you'll be _left_!" and then took her turn at disappearing by
+the same route; and, on top of it all, the boss jumped off and sprinted
+after both of them, leaving a string of large, man-sized comments on the
+foolishness of women as a sex trailing along behind him as he flew.
+
+Right then it was my golden moment to play safe and sane. With three of
+them off and lost in the gathering night, somebody with at least a grain
+of sense ought to have stood by to pull the emergency cord if the train
+should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy
+all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a
+mountain desert, and when I squinted up ahead and saw that the engine
+was taking water, it looked as if there were going to be plenty of time
+for a bit of a promenade under the stars. So I swung off and went to
+join the muff hunt.
+
+Amongst them, they had found the pillow thing before I had a chance to
+horn in. They were coming up the track, and the boss had each of the two
+by an arm and was telling them that they'd be left to a dead moral
+certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts
+were too fashionably narrow, and there were still three or four
+car-lengths to go when the tank spout went up with a clang and a
+clatter of chains and the old "Pacific type" gave a couple of hisses and
+a snort.
+
+"They're going!" gritted the boss, sort of between his teeth, and
+without another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under
+his arms, just as if they'd been a couple of sacks of meal, and broke
+into a run.
+
+It wasn't a morsel of use, you know. Mr. Norcross stands six feet two in
+his socks, and I've heard that he was the best all-around athlete in his
+college bunch. But old Hercules himself couldn't have run very far or
+very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half
+a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail
+lights of the train were vanishing to pin points in the night. We were
+like the little tad that went out to the garden to eat worms. Nobody
+loved us, and we were beautifully and artistically left.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A Tank Party
+
+
+When he saw that it was no manner of use, the boss quit on the handicap
+race and put his two armfuls down while he still had breath enough left
+to talk with.
+
+"Well," he said, in his best rusty-hinge rasp, "you've done it! Why, in
+the name of common sense, couldn't you have let me go back after that
+muff thing?"
+
+The young woman was panting as if she had been doing the running, and
+the girl was choking and making a noise that made me think that she was
+crying. If I had been as well acquainted with her as I got to be a
+little later on, I would have known that she was only trying to bottle
+up a laugh that was too beautifully big to be wasted upon just three
+people and a treeless desert.
+
+It was the young woman who answered the boss.
+
+"I--I didn't stop to think!" she fluttered, taking the blame as if she
+had been the one to head the procession. "Isn't there _any_ way we can
+stop that train?"
+
+The boss said there wasn't, and I know the only reason why he didn't say
+a lot of other things was because he was too much of a gentleman to say
+them in the presence of a couple of women.
+
+"But what shall we do?" the young woman went on, gasping a little.
+"Isn't there any telegraph station, or--or anything?"
+
+There wasn't. So far as we could see, the surroundings consisted of a
+short side-track, a spur running off into the hills, and the water tank.
+The siding switches had no lights, which argued that there wasn't even a
+pump-man at the tank--as there was not, the tank being filled
+automatically by a gravity pipe line running back to a natural reservoir
+in the mountains.
+
+Before the boss had a chance to answer her question about the telegraph
+office he got his eye on me, and then I knew that he hadn't noticed me
+before.
+
+"You here, too?" he ripped out, and I know it did him a lot of good to
+be able to unload on somebody in trousers. "Why in blue blazes didn't
+you stay on that train and keep it from running away from us?"
+
+That's it: why didn't I? What made the dog stop before he caught the
+rabbit? I was trying to frame up some sort of an excuse that would sound
+just a few degrees less than plumb foolish, when the young woman took up
+for me. She'd had the clatter of my typewriter dinned into her pretty
+ears all day, and she knew who I was, even if it was dark.
+
+"Don't take it out on the poor boy!" she said, kind of crisp, and yet
+sort of motherly. "If you feel obliged to bully some one, I'm the one
+who is to blame."
+
+"Indeed, you're not!" chipped in the stocky little girl. "_I_ was the
+one who jumped off first. And I don't care: I wasn't going to lose my
+perfectly good muff."
+
+By this time the boss was beginning to get a little better grip on
+himself and he laughed.
+
+"We've all earned the leather medal, I guess," he chuckled. "It's done
+now, and it can't be helped. We're stuck until another train comes
+along, and perhaps we ought to be thankful that we've got Jimmie Dodds
+along to chaperon us."
+
+"But isn't there anything else we can do?" said the young woman. "Can't
+we walk somewhere to where there is a station or a town with people in
+it?"
+
+I saw Mr. Norcross look down at her skirts and then at the girl's.
+
+"You two couldn't walk very far or very fast in those things you are
+wearing," he grunted. "Besides, we are in one of the desert strips, and
+it is probably miles to a night wire station in either direction."
+
+"And how long shall we have to wait for another train?" This time it was
+the little girl who wanted to know.
+
+"I wish I could tell you, but I can't," said the boss. "I'm not familiar
+with the Short Line schedules." Then to the young woman: "Shall we go
+and sit under the water tank? That seems to be about the nearest
+approach to a waiting-room that the place affords."
+
+We trailed off together up the track, two and two, the boss walking with
+the young woman. After we'd counted a few of the cross-ties, the girl
+said: "Is your name Jimmie Dodds?" And when I admitted it: "Mine is
+Maisie Ann. I'm Sheila's cousin on her mother's side. I think this is a
+great lark; don't you?"
+
+"I can tell better after it's over," I said. "Maybe we'll have to stay
+here all night."
+
+"I shouldn't mind," she came back airily. "I haven't been up all night
+since I was a little kiddie and our house burned down. You're just a
+boy, aren't you? You must excuse me; it's so dark that I can't see you
+very well."
+
+I told her I had been shaving for three years and more, and she let out
+a little gurgling laugh, as though I had said something funny. By that
+time we had reached the big water tank, and the boss picked out one of
+the square footing timbers for a seat. It seemed as if he were finding
+it a good bit harder to get acquainted with his half of the combination
+than I was with mine, but after a little the young women thawed out a
+bit and made him talk--to help pass away the time, I took it--and the
+little girl and I sat and listened. When the young woman finally got him
+started, the boss told her all about himself, how he'd been railroading
+ever since he left college, and a lot of things that I'd never even
+dreamed of. It's curious how a pretty woman can make a man turn himself
+inside out that way, just for her amusement.
+
+Maisie Ann and I sat on the end of the timber; not too near to be
+butt-ins, nor so far away that we couldn't hear all that was said. I
+still had the cigar the boss had given me, and I sure wanted to smoke
+mighty bad, only I thought it wouldn't look just right--me being the
+chaperon. Along in the middle of things, Mr. Norcross broke off short
+and begged the young woman's pardon for boring her with so much shop
+talk.
+
+"Oh, you're not boring me at all; I like to hear it," she protested. And
+then: "You have been telling me the story of a man who has done things,
+Mr. Norcross. It has been my misfortune to have to associate chiefly
+with men who only play at doing things."
+
+He switched off at that and asked her if she were warm enough, saying
+that if she were not, he and I would scrap up some sage-brush or
+something and make a fire. She replied that she didn't care for a fire,
+that the night wasn't at all cold--which it wasn't. Then she showed that
+she was human, clear down to the tips of her pretty fingers.
+
+"You may smoke if you want to," she told the boss. "I sha'n't mind it in
+the least."
+
+At that, my little girl turned on me and said, in exactly the same tone:
+"You may smoke if you want to, Mr. Dodds. I sha'n't mind it in the
+least." I heard a sort of smothered chuckle from the other end of the
+timber seat, and the boss lighted his cigar. Then there was more talk,
+in which it turned out that the young woman and her cousin were to have
+been met at Portal City by somebody she called "Cousin Basil," but there
+wouldn't be any scare, because she had written ahead to say that
+possibly they might stop over with some friends in one of the apple
+towns.
+
+Then Mr. Norcross said _he_ wouldn't miss anything by the drop-out but
+an appointment he had with an old friend, and he guessed that could
+wait. I listened, thinking maybe he would mention the name of the
+friend, and after a while he did. The forwarded Portal City telegram the
+boss had gotten just before we went to dinner in the dining-car was from
+"Uncle John" Chadwick, the Chicago wheat king, and that left me
+wondering what the mischief Mr. Chadwick was doing away out in the wild
+and woolly western country where they raise more apples than they do
+wheat, and more mining stock schemes than they do either.
+
+There was another thing that I listened for, too, but it didn't come.
+That was some little side mention of the young woman's husband. So far
+as that under-the-tank talk went, there needn't have been any "Mr.
+Macrae" at all, and I was puzzled. If she'd been wearing mourning--but
+she wasn't, so I told myself that she simply couldn't be a widow.
+Anyway, she was a lot too light-hearted for that.
+
+We had been marooned for nearly an hour when I struck a match and looked
+at my watch. Mr. Norcross was still doing his best to kill time for the
+young woman, and he was just in the exciting part of another railroad
+story, telling about a right-of-way fight on the Midland, where we had
+to smuggle in a few cases of Winchesters and arm the track-layers to
+keep from being shut out of the only canyon there was by the P. & S. F.,
+when the little girl grabbed my arm and said: "Listen!"
+
+I did, and broke in promptly. "Excuse me," I called to the other two,
+"but I think there's a train coming."
+
+The boss cut his story short and we all listened. It seemed that I was
+wrong. The noise we heard was more like an auto running with the
+cut-out open than a train rumbling.
+
+"What do you make it, Jimmie?" came from the boss's end of the timber.
+
+"Motor car. It's out that way," I said, pointing in the darkness toward
+the east.
+
+My guess was right. In less than a minute we saw the lights of the car,
+which was turning in a wide circle to come up beside the main line track
+so it would head back to the east. It stopped a little way below the
+water tank and about a hundred yards north of the track, or maybe less;
+anyway, we could see it quite well even when the lamps were switched off
+and four men came tumbling out of it. If I had been alone on the job I
+should probably have called to the men as they came tramping over to the
+side-track. But Mr. Norcross had a different think coming.
+
+"Out of sight--quick, Jimmie!" he whispered, and in another second he
+had whipped the young woman over the big footing timber to a standing
+place under the tank among the braces, and I had done the same for the
+girl.
+
+What followed was as mysterious as a chapter out of an Anna Katherine
+Green detective story. After doing something to the switch of the unused
+spur track, the four men separated. One of them went back to the auto,
+and the other three walked down the main track to the lower switch of
+the short siding which was on the same side of the main line as the
+spur. Here the fourth man rejoined them, and the girl at my elbow told
+us what he had gone back to the car for.
+
+"He has lighted a red lantern," she whispered. "I saw it when he took it
+out of the auto."
+
+I guess it was pretty plain to all of us by this time that there was
+something decidedly crooked on the cards, but if we had known what it
+was, we couldn't very well have done anything to prevent it. There were
+only two of us men to their four; and, besides, there wasn't any time.
+The lantern-carrying man had barely reached the lower switch when we
+heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was a train coming from the
+west, and a few seconds later an electric headlight showed up on the
+long tangent beyond the siding.
+
+It was a bandit hold-up, all right. We saw the four men at the switch
+stop the train, which seemed to be a special, since it had only the
+engine and one passenger car. One of the men stood on the track waving
+the red lantern; we could see him plainly in the glare of the headlight.
+There wasn't much of a scrap. There were two or three pistol shots, and
+then, as near as we could make out, the hold-up men, or some of them,
+climbed into the engine.
+
+What they did next was as blind as a Chinese puzzle. Before you could
+count ten they had made a flying switch with the single car, kicking it
+in on the siding. Before the car had come fully to a stop, the engine
+was switched in behind it, coupled on, and the reversed train, with the
+engine pushing the car, rattled away on the old spur that led off into
+the hills; clattered away and was lost to sight and hearing in less than
+a minute.
+
+It was not until after the train was switched and gone that we
+discovered that two of the bandits had been left behind. These two reset
+the switches for the main track, leaving everything as they had found
+it, and then crossed over to the auto. Pretty soon we saw match flares,
+and two little red dots that appeared told us that they were smoking.
+
+"What are they doing, Jimmie?" asked the boss, under his breath.
+
+"They are waiting for the other two to come back," I ventured, taking a
+chance shot at it. Then I asked him if he knew where the old spur track
+led to. He said he didn't; that there used to be some bauxite mines back
+in the hills, somewhere in this vicinity, but he understood they had
+been worked out and abandoned.
+
+I was just thinking that all this mystery and kidnapping and gun play
+must be sort of hard on the young woman and the girl, but though my half
+of the allotment was shivering a little and snuggling up just a grain
+closer to me, she proved that she hadn't lost her nerve.
+
+"Did you see the name on that car when the engine went past to get in
+behind it?" she asked, turning the whispered question loose for anybody
+to answer.
+
+"No," said the boss; and I hadn't, either.
+
+"I did," she asserted, showing that her eyes, or her wits, were quicker
+than ours. "I had just one little glimpse of it. The name is
+'A-l-e-x-a,'" spelling it out.
+
+Mr. Norcross started as if he had been shot.
+
+"The _Alexa_? That is Mr. Chadwick's private car--they've kidnapped
+him!" Then he whirled short on me. "Jimmie, are you man enough to go
+with me and try a tackle on those fellows over there in that auto?"
+
+I said I was; but I didn't add what I thought--that it would probably be
+a case of double suicide for us two to go up against a pair of armed
+thugs with our bare hands. The boss would have done it in the hollow
+half of a minute; he's built just that way. But now the young woman put
+in her word.
+
+"You mustn't think of doing such a thing!" she protested; and she was
+still telling him all the different reasons why he mustn't, when we
+heard the creak and grind of the stolen engine coming back down the old
+spur.
+
+After that there was nothing to do but to wait and see what was going to
+happen next. What did happen was as blind as all the rest. The engine
+was stopped somewhere in the gulch back of us and out of sight from our
+hiding-place, and pretty soon the two men who had gone with her came
+hurrying across out of the hill shadows, making straight for the auto. A
+minute or two later they had climbed into the machine, the motor had
+sputtered, and the car was gone.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Mr. Chadwick's Special
+
+
+Of course, as soon as the skip-out of the four hold-up men gave us a
+free hand we knew it was up to us to get busy and do something. It was a
+safe bet that the _Alexa_ was carrying her owner, and in that case Mr.
+John Chadwick and his train crew were somewhere back in the hills,
+without an engine, and with a good prospect of staying "put" until
+somebody should go and hunt them up.
+
+Mr. Norcross had our part in the play figured out before the retreating
+auto had covered its first mile.
+
+"We've got to find out what they've done with Mr. Chadwick," he broke
+out. And then: "It can't be very far to where they have left the engine,
+and if they haven't crippled it--" He stopped short and slung a question
+at the two women: "Will you two stay here with Jimmie while I go and see
+what I can find in that gulch?"
+
+They both paid me the compliment of saying that they'd stay with me, but
+the young woman suggested that it might be just as well if we should all
+go up the gulch together. So we piked out in the dark, the boss helping
+Mrs. Sheila to hobo along over the cross-ties of the spur, and the
+little girl stumbling on behind with me. She had got over her scare, if
+she had any, and when I asked her if she didn't want an arm to grab at,
+she laughed and said, No, and that it was grand; that she wouldn't miss
+a single stumble for worlds.
+
+"In all my life I've never had anything half as exciting as this happen
+to me," was the way she put it, and she sure acted as if she meant to
+make the most of it.
+
+We had followed the spur track up the gulch for maybe a short quarter of
+a mile when we came to the engine. There was nobody on it, and the
+brigands had been good-natured enough to leave the fire-door open so
+that the steam would run down gently and let the boiler cool off by
+degrees. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert on engines, just as he
+is on everything else belonging to a railroad, and he struck matches and
+looked our find over carefully before he tried to move it. As we had
+feared it might be, the big machine was crippled. There was a key gone
+out of one of the connecting-rod crank-pin straps; one miserable little
+piece of steel, maybe eight inches long and tapering one way, and half
+an inch or so thick the other; but that was a-plenty. We couldn't make a
+move without it.
+
+I thought we were done for, but Mr. Norcross chased me up into the cab
+for a lantern. With the light we began to hunt around in the short
+grass, all four of us down on our hands and knees doing the
+needle-in-the-haystack stunt. I had been sensible enough to show the
+little girl the other connecting-rod key, so she knew exactly what to
+look for, and it did me a heap of good when it turned out that she was
+the one who found the lost bit of steel.
+
+"I've got it--I've got it!" she cried; and sure enough she had. The
+hold-up people had merely taken it out and thrown it aside on the
+extremely probable chance that nobody would be foolish enough to look
+for it so near at hand, or, looking, would be able to find it in the
+dark.
+
+It didn't take more than a minute or two, with a wrench from the
+engineer's box, to put the key back in place. Then, with one to boost
+and the other to pull, we got our two passengers up into the high cab,
+and Mr. Norcross made them as comfortable as he could on the fireman's
+box, showing them how to brace and hang on when the machine should begin
+to bounce over the rough track of the old spur.
+
+While he was doing this, I threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the
+firebox and put the blower on; and when we were all set, the boss opened
+the throttle and we went carefully nosing ahead over the old track,
+feeling our way up the gulch and keeping a sharp lookout for the _Alexa_
+as we ground and squealed around the curves.
+
+It must have been four or five miles back in the hills to the place
+where we found the private car, and a little way short of it we picked
+up Mr. Chadwick's conductor, walking the ties to try to get in touch
+with the civilized world once more. He looked a trifle suspicious when
+he found the engine in the hands of still another bunch of strangers,
+and two of them women; but as soon as he heard Mr. Norcross's name he
+quit being offish and got suddenly respectful. Young as he was for a
+top-rounder, the boss had a "rep," and I guess there were not very many
+railroad men west of the Rockies who didn't know him, or know of him.
+
+The conductor told us where we'd find the car, and we found it just as
+he said we would: pushed in on an old mine-loading track at the end of
+the spur. The other members of the crew were off and waiting for us; and
+standing out on the back platform, in the full glare of the headlight as
+we nosed up for a coupling, there was a big, gray-haired man, bareheaded
+and dressed in rough-looking old clothes like a mining prospector.
+
+The big man was "Uncle John" Chadwick, and if he was properly astonished
+at seeing us turn up with his lost engine, he didn't let it interfere
+with our welcome when we took our passengers around to the car and
+lifted them one at a time over the railing and climbed up after them.
+Mr. Chadwick seemed to know Mrs. Sheila; at any rate, he shook hands
+with her and called her by name. Then he grabbed for the boss and fairly
+shouted at him: "Well, well, Graham!--of all the lucky things this side
+of Mesopotamia! How the dev--how in thunder did you manage to turn up
+here?" And all that, you know.
+
+The explanations, such as they were, came later, after the young lady,
+confessing herself a bit excited and fussed up, had taken her cousin
+under her arm and they had both gone to lie down in one of the
+staterooms. With the women out of the way, the boss and Mr. Chadwick sat
+together in the open compartment while the train crew was trundling us
+back to the main line. Mr. Norcross had put me in right by telling the
+wheat king who I was, so they didn't pay any attention to me.
+
+As a matter of course, the talk jumped first to the mysterious hold-up
+and kidnapping and the reason why. All either of them could say didn't
+serve to throw any light on the mystery, not a single ray. There had
+been no violence--the pistol shots had been merely meant to scare the
+trainmen--and there had been no attempt at robbery; for that matter,
+Mr. Chadwick hadn't even seen the kidnappers, and hadn't known what was
+going on until after it was all over.
+
+Mr. Norcross told what we had seen, and how we had come to be where we
+were able to see it, but that didn't help out much, either. From any
+point of view it seemed perfectly foolish, and the boss made mention of
+that. If we hadn't happened to be there to bring the engine back, the
+worst that could have befallen Mr. Chadwick and the crew of the special
+would have been a few hours' bother and delay. In the course of time the
+conductor would have walked out and got to a wire station somewhere,
+though it might have taken him all night, and then some, to get another
+engine.
+
+Naturally, Mr. Chadwick was red-hot about it, on general principles. I
+guess he wasn't used to being kidnapped. But, after all, the thing that
+bothered him most was the fact that he couldn't account for it.
+
+"I can't help thinking that it is connected with what is due to happen
+to-morrow morning, Graham," he said, at the end of things. "There are
+some certain scoundrels in Portal City at the present moment who
+wouldn't stop at anything to gain their ends, and I am wondering now if
+Dawes wasn't mixed up in it."
+
+The boss laughed and said:
+
+"You'll have to begin at the beginning with me: I'm too new in this
+region to know even the names. Who is Dawes?"
+
+"Dawes is a mining man in Portal City, and before I'd been an hour in
+town yesterday he hunted me up and wanted me to go over to Strathcona to
+look at some gold prospects he's trying to finance. I said 'No' at
+first, because I was expecting you, and thought you'd reach Portal City
+this morning. When you didn't show up, I knew I had twelve hours more on
+my hands, and as Dawes was still hanging on, I had our trainmaster give
+me a special over to Strathcona, on a promise that I'd be brought back
+early this evening, ahead of the 'Flyer' from the west--the train you
+were on."
+
+Mr. Norcross nodded. "And the promise wasn't kept."
+
+"No promise is ever kept on the Pioneer Short Line," growled the big
+magnate. And then, with a beautiful disregard for the mixed figures of
+speech: "Once in a blue moon the chapter of accidents hits the
+bull's-eye whack in the middle, Graham. When Hardshaw wired me from
+Portland, I knew you couldn't reach Portal City before this morning, at
+the very earliest. That was going to cut my time pretty short, with the
+big gun due to be fired to-morrow morning, and you cut it still shorter
+by losing twelve hours somewhere along the road--they told me in the
+despatcher's office that your train was behind a wreck somewhere up in
+Oregon. But it has turned out all right, in spite of everything. You're
+here, and we've got the night before us."
+
+Again Mr. Norcross said something about beginning at the beginning.
+"Just remember that I am entirely in the dark," he went on. "I didn't
+see Hardshaw at all before leaving Portland; he merely forwarded your
+wire, asking me to stop over in Portal City, to me on the train--and it
+was handed to me just before dinner this evening. Of course, that was
+enough--from anybody who has been as good a friend to me as you have."
+
+"We'll see presently just how far that friendship rope is going to
+reach," returned the wheat king, and though my back was turned to them,
+I could easily imagine the quizzical twinkle of the shrewd old eyes that
+went with it. Then I suppose he nodded toward me, for the boss said:
+
+"Oh, Jimmie's all right; he knew what I had for dinner this evening, and
+he'll know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning."
+
+With the bridle off, the big man went ahead abruptly, cutting out all
+the frills.
+
+"You finished your building contract on the Oregon Midland, Graham, and
+after the road was opened for business you refused an offer of the
+general managership. Would you mind telling me why you did that?"
+
+"Not in the least. I'm rather burnt out on trying to operate American
+railroads; at any rate, when it comes to trying to operate one of them
+for a legitimate profit. There is nothing in it. An operating head is
+now nothing more than a score-keeper for a national gambling game. The
+boss gamblers around the railroad post in the Stock Exchange tell him
+what he has to do and where he has to get off. Stock gambling, under
+whatever name it masquerades--boosting values, buying and selling
+margins, reorganizations, with their huge rake-offs for the
+underwriters--is the incubus which is crushing the life out of the
+nation's industries, especially in the railroad field. It makes me wish
+I'd never seen a railroad track."
+
+"Yet it is your trade, isn't it?" asked the wheat king.
+
+"It is; but luckily I can build railroads as well as operate them; and
+there are other countries besides the United States of America. I'm on
+my way home to Illinois for a little visit with my mother and sisters;
+and after that I think I shall close with an offer I've had from one of
+the Canadian companies."
+
+"Good boy!" chuckled the Chicago magnate. "In due time we might hope to
+be reading your name in the newspapers--'Sir Graham Norcross, D.S.O.,'
+or something of that sort." Then, with a sharp return to the sort of
+gritting seriousness: "You've been riding over the Pioneer Short Line
+since early this morning, Graham: what do you think of it?"
+
+I couldn't see the boss's smile, but I could figure it pretty well when
+he said: "There may be worse managed, worse neglected pieces of railroad
+track in some of the great transcontinental lines, but if there are I
+haven't happened to notice them. I suppose it is capitalized to death,
+like many of the others."
+
+"Fictitious values doubtless have something to do with it at the present
+stage of the game," Mr. Chadwick admitted. "The Pioneer Short Line is
+'under suspicion' on the books of the commissions, both State and
+Interstate, as a heavily 'watered' corporation--which it is. Do you know
+the history of the road?"
+
+When I got up to get a match, Mr. Norcross was shaking his head and
+saying: "Not categorically; no."
+
+"Then I'll brief it for you," said the big man in the stuffed wicker
+chair. "It has always been a good earning property, being largely, even
+yet, without much local competition. But from the day it was completed
+its securities have figured in the market only for their speculative
+values. The property itself has never been considered, save as a means
+to an end; the end being to enable one bunch of the Wall Street
+gamesters you speak of to make a 'killing' and unload on another bunch."
+
+"The old story," said Mr. Norcross.
+
+"We are bumping over the net result, right now," Mr. Chadwick went on.
+"The property is bled white; there is no money for betterments; we are
+tied hand and foot by all sorts of legal restrictions and regulations;
+and, worse than all, the people we are supposed to serve hate us until
+you can smell it and taste it in every town and hamlet on the
+right-of-way."
+
+"So I have heard," put in the boss, calmly.
+
+"That brings us down to the nib of the matter. Pioneer Short Line is
+practically in the last ditch. The stock has slumped to forty and worse;
+Shaffer, the general manager and the only able man we have had for
+years, has resigned in disgust; and if something isn't done to-morrow
+morning in Portal City, I know of at least one minority stockholder who
+is going to throw the whole mess into the courts and try for a
+receivership."
+
+Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
+
+"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting
+himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat
+pit.
+
+"I am--more's the pity. I had a little lapse of sanity one fine morning
+a few years ago and bought in for an investment. I've done everything I
+could think of, Graham, to persuade Breck Dunton and his Wall Street
+accomplices to spend just one dollar in ten of their reorganization and
+recapitalization stealings on the road itself, but it's no good. All
+they want is to get one more rise out of the securities, so they can
+unload."
+
+"Is there to be a stockholders' meeting in Portal City to-morrow
+morning?"
+
+"No; a directors' meeting. Dunton has been making an inspection trip
+over the system with a dozen or so of his New York cronies. It's a
+junketing excursion, pure and simple, but while they're here they'll get
+together and go through the form of picking out a new general manager.
+I'm on the board and they had to send me notice, though it's an even bet
+they hoped I'd stay away. In fact, I think they scheduled the meeting
+out here on the chance that the distance from Chicago would keep me from
+attending it."
+
+All this talk had taken up a good bit of time, and just as Mr. Chadwick
+said that about the "even bet," our engineer was whistling for Portal
+City. From where I was sitting I could see the electric lights dotting
+the wide valley between the two gateway buttes from which the city gets
+its name. Mr. Norcross was looking at the lights, too, when he said:
+
+"Are you really going to spring the receivership on the Dunton people
+to-morrow?"
+
+"I'm going to give Dunton his chance. He can appoint the man I want
+appointed as general manager, with full power to act, and ratify a
+little plan I've got up my sleeve for providing a bit of working capital
+for the road, or--he can turn me down."
+
+"And if he does turn you down?"
+
+"Then, by George, I'll see if I can't persuade the courts to put the
+property into bankruptcy and install my man as receiver!"
+
+"I don't envy your man his job, either way around; not the least little
+morsel in the world," said the boss, quietly. And then: "Who is he,
+Uncle John?"
+
+The wheat king gave a great laugh.
+
+"Don't tell me you haven't guessed it," he chuckled. "You're the man,
+Graham."
+
+But now Mr. Norcross had something to say for himself, sitting up
+straight and shaking his head sort of sorrowfully at the big man in the
+padded chair.
+
+"No you don't, my good old friend; not in a thousand years! You'd lose
+out in the end, and I'd lose out; and besides, I'm not quite ready to
+commit suicide." And then to me: "Jimmie, suppose you go and tap on the
+door and tell the ladies we're pulling into Portal City."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Tipping of the Scale
+
+
+After all, it wasn't so very late in the night when our special pulled
+up to the Portal City station platform and I turned myself into a
+messenger-boy escort for the lady and the little girl whose muff had
+been responsible for so many different flip-flaps in the short space of
+a few hours.
+
+I hadn't hung around while the boss was telling Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann good-by. Our conductor had wired ahead from the first telegraph
+station we came to and had asked to have our dunnage--the two women's,
+the boss's, and mine--taken out of the "Flyer" Pullman and sent back to
+Portal City on a local, and I was in the baggage-room, digging up the
+put-off stuff, at the good-by minute. But I guess they didn't quarrel
+any--the boss and Mrs. Sheila. She was laughing a little to herself as I
+helped her down from the car, and when I asked her where she wanted to
+go, she said I might ask one of the porters to carry the traps, and we'd
+walk to the hotel, which was only a few blocks up the main street.
+
+She took Maisie Ann on the other side of her and let two of the blocks
+go by without saying anything more, and then she gave that quiet little
+laugh again and said, "Your Mr. Norcross amuses me, Jimmie. He says I
+have no business to travel without a guardian. What do you think about
+it?"
+
+I told her I hadn't any thinks coming, and she seemed to take that for a
+joke and laughed some more. Then she asked me if I'd ever been in New
+York, and I felt sort of small when I had to tell her that I had never
+been east of Omaha in all my life. With that, she told me not to worry;
+that if I stayed with Mr. Norcross I'd probably get to go anywhere I
+wanted to.
+
+Something in the way she said it made it sound like a little slam on the
+boss, and of course I wasn't going to stand for that.
+
+"There is one thing about it: the boss will make good wherever he goes,"
+I hit back. "You can bet on that."
+
+"I like your loyalty," she flashed out. "It is a fine thing in a day
+that is much too careless of such qualities. And I agree with you that
+your Mr. Norcross is likely to succeed; more than likely, if he will
+only learn to combine a little gentle cleverness with the heavy hand."
+
+There was no doubt about it this time; she _was_ slamming the boss, and
+I meant to get at the bottom of it, right there and then.
+
+"I don't think you have any cause to blacklist Mr. Norcross," I said.
+"Hasn't he been right good and brotherly to both of you this evening?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean that," she said real earnestly. "But in the stateroom
+in Mr. Chadwick's car: the ventilator was open, you know, until Maisie
+Ann got up and shut it, and we couldn't very well help hearing what was
+said about the kidnapping. Neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Norcross seemed
+to be able to account for it."
+
+"Can you account for it?" I asked, bluntly enough, I guess.
+
+At this she smiled and said, "It would be rather presumptuous for me to
+try where Mr. Norcross and Mr. Chadwick failed, wouldn't it? But maybe I
+can give you just a wee little hint. If you are not well enough
+acquainted with Mr. Chadwick to ask him yourself, you might tell Mr.
+Norcross to ask him if there isn't some strong reason why somebody, or
+perhaps a number of somebodies, wanted to keep him out of Portal City
+over Sunday night and possibly a part of the Monday."
+
+We were coming to the big electric sign that was winking out the letters
+to spell "Hotel Bullard," and I was bound to have it out with her before
+my chance was gone.
+
+"See here," I put in; "you saw something more than I did, and more than
+Mr. Norcross did. What was it?"
+
+This time she took the motherly tone with me again and told me I must
+learn not to be rude and masterful, like the boss. Then she gave me what
+I was reaching for.
+
+"You saw the two men who went over to the auto and smoked while they
+were waiting for the other two to come back?"
+
+I told her that I hadn't seen them very well; couldn't, with nothing but
+the starlight to help out.
+
+"Neither did I," she admitted. "But if I am not mistaken, I have seen
+them many times before, and they are very well known here in Portal
+City. One of them, the smaller one with the derby hat and the short
+overcoat, was either Mr. Rufus Hatch or his double; and the other, the
+heavy-set one, might have been Mr. Gustave Henckel, Mr. Hatch's partner
+in the Red Tower Company."
+
+This didn't help out much, but you can bet that I made a note of the two
+names. We were just going into the hotel, so I didn't have a chance to
+ask any more questions; and after I had paid the porter for lugging the
+grips, Mrs. Sheila had made whatever arrangement she wanted to with the
+clerk, and she and Maisie Ann were ready to take the elevator.
+
+"You are going back to Mr. Chadwick's car?" she asked, when she was
+telling me good-by and thanking me for coming up to the hotel with them.
+
+I told her I was, and then she came around to the kidnapping business
+again of her own accord.
+
+"You may give Mr. Norcross the hint I gave you, if you wish," she said;
+"only you must be a good boy, Jimmie, and not drag me into it. I
+couldn't be positively certain, you know, that the two men were really
+Mr. Hatch and Mr. Henckel. But if there is any reason why those two
+wouldn't want Mr. Chadwick to reach the city at the time he was counting
+on----"
+
+"I see," I nodded; "it just puts the weight of the inference over on
+that side. I'll tell the boss, when I get a good chance, and you can bet
+your last dollar he won't tangle you up in it--he isn't put together
+that way."
+
+"Well, then, good-night," she smiled, giving me her hand. And then: "Mr.
+Norcross says you'll be going on East to-morrow, and in that case it may
+be a long time before we meet again. After a while, after he has
+forgotten all about it, you may tell him from me--" She stopped and gave
+me that funny little laugh again that made her look so pretty, and said:
+"No, I guess you needn't, either." And with that she sort of edged the
+little girl into the elevator before we could get a chance to shake
+hands, and I heard her tell the boy to take them up to the mezzanine
+landing.
+
+Since I didn't have any reason to suppose that the boss was needing me,
+I took my own time about going back to hunt for Mr. Chadwick's car in
+the railroad yards, loafing for a while in the Bullard lobby to rubber
+and look on at the people coming and going. You can tell pretty well how
+a town stacks up for business if you hit it between ten and eleven
+o'clock of a Sunday night and hang around its best hotel. If the town is
+dead, there won't be anybody stirring around the hotel at that hour. But
+Portal City seemed to be good and alive. There were lots of people
+knocking about on the sidewalks and drifting in and out of the lobby.
+
+By and by, I went down to the station and began to hunt for the _Alexa_.
+The yard crew had side-tracked it on a spur down by the freight-house,
+and when I had stumbled over to it the negro porter remembered me well
+enough to let me in.
+
+The boss and Mr. Chadwick were facing each other across the table, which
+was all littered up with papers and maps and reports, and they hardly
+noticed me when I blew in and sat down a little to one side. I had known
+well enough, when Mr. Norcross had turned the new offer down, that Mr.
+Chadwick wasn't going to let it go at that. It seemed that he hadn't; he
+had got the boss sufficiently interested to go over the papers with
+him, anyhow.
+
+But just after I broke in, Mr. Norcross jumped up and began to pace back
+and forth before the table, with his hands in his pockets.
+
+"No, I can't see it, Uncle John," he said, still sort of stubborn and
+determined. "You are trying to make me believe that I ought to take the
+biggest job that has ever been set before the expert in any field: to
+demonstrate, on this rotten corpse of a railroad, the solution of a
+problem that has the entire country guessing at the present time;
+namely, the winning of success, and public--and industrial--approval for
+a carrier corporation which had continuously and persistently broken
+every commandment in all the decalogues--of business; of fair-dealing
+with its employees; of common honesty with everybody."
+
+Mr. Chadwick nodded. "That is about the size of it," he said.
+
+"I wouldn't say that it can't be done," the boss went on. "Perhaps it is
+possible, for the right man. But I'm not the right man. You need
+somebody who can combine the qualities of a pretty brutal slugger with
+those of a fine-haired, all-things-to-all-men, diplomatic peacemaker. I
+can do the slugging; I've proved it a time or two in the past. But I'm
+no good at the other end of the game. When it comes to handling the
+fellow with a 'pull,' I've either got to smash him or quit."
+
+At that Mr. Chadwick nodded again and said: "That is one of the reasons
+why I have reached out and picked you for the job. There will be a good
+bit of the slugging needed, at first, and I guess you can acquire the
+other things as you go along, can't you?"
+
+"Not at this late day, I'm afraid. People who know me best call me a
+scrapper, and I've been living up to my reputation. Yesterday, when we
+were held up behind the freight wreck at Widner, I got off to see what
+we were in for. The conductor of our train had spotted me from seeing my
+pass, and I happened to hear him docketing me for the wrecking boss. He
+said I was known on the Midland as 'Hell-and-repeat' Norcross; that it
+was a habit with me to have a man for breakfast every morning."
+
+"I can add a little something to that," Mr. Chadwick put in,
+quizzically. "Lepaige, your Oregon Midland president, says you need
+humanizing, and wonders why you haven't married some good woman who
+would knock the rough corners off. Why haven't you, Graham?"
+
+The boss gave a short laugh. "Too busy," he said. "Past that, we might
+assume that the good woman hasn't presented herself. Let it go. The
+facts still stand. I am too heavy-handed for this job of yours. I
+should probably mix up with some of these grafters you've been telling
+me about and get a knife in my back. That would be all in the day's
+work, of course, but it would leave you right where you are now. And as
+for this other thing--the industrial side of it: that's a large order; a
+whaling big order. I'm not even prepared to say, off-hand, that it's the
+right thing to do."
+
+"Right or wrong, it's a thing that is coming, Graham," was the sober
+reply. "If we don't meet it half-way--well, the time will come when we
+of the hiring-and-firing side won't be given any option in the matter.
+You may call it Utopian if you please, and add that I'm growing old and
+losing my grip. But that doesn't obliterate the fact that the days of
+the present master-and-man relations in the industries are numbered."
+
+The boss shook his head. "As I say, I can't go that far with you,
+off-hand; and if I could, I should still doubt that I am the man to head
+your procession."
+
+I thought that settled it, but that was because I didn't know Mr.
+Chadwick very well. The big wheat king just smiled up at the boss, sort
+of fatherly, and said:
+
+"We'll let it rest until morning and give you a chance to sleep on it.
+You have spoken only of the difficulties and the responsibilities,
+Graham; but there is another side to it. In a way, it's an opportunity,
+carrying with it the promise of the biggest kind of a reward."
+
+"I don't see it," said the boss, briefly.
+
+"Don't you? I do. I have an idea rambling around in my head that it is
+about time some bright young fellow was demonstrating that problem you
+speak of--showing the people of the United States that a railroad
+needn't be regarded as an outlaw among the industries; needn't have the
+enmity of everybody it serves; needn't be the prey of a lot of disloyal
+and dissatisfied employees who are interested only in the figure of the
+pay-day check; needn't be shot at as a wolf with a bounty on its scalp.
+Let it rest at that for the present. Get your hat and we'll walk up-town
+to the hotel. I want to have a word with Dunton to-night, if I can shake
+him loose from his junketing bunch long enough to listen to it. Beyond
+that, I want to get hold of the sheriff and put him on the track of
+those hold-ups."
+
+Here was a chance for me to butt in with the hint Mrs. Sheila had given
+me, but I didn't see how I was going to do it without giving her away.
+So I said the little end of nothing, just as hard as I could; and when
+we got out of the car, Mr. Norcross told me to go by the station and
+have our luggage sent to the hotel, and that killed whatever chance I
+might have had farther along.
+
+It was some time after eleven o'clock when I got around to the hotel
+with the traps. The stir in the lobby had quieted down to make it seem a
+little more like Sunday night, but an automobile party had just come in,
+and some of the men were jawing at the clerk because the house wasn't
+serving a midnight theater supper in the café on the Sunday.
+
+Mr. Chadwick had disappeared, but I saw the boss at the counter waiting
+for his chance at the clerk. The quarrelsome people melted away at last,
+all but one--a young swell who would have been handsome if he hadn't had
+the eyes of a maniac and a color that was sort of corpse-like with the
+pallor of a booze-fighter. He had his hat on the back of his head, and
+he was ripping it off at the clerk like a drunken hobo.
+
+His ravings were so cluttered up with cuss-words that I couldn't get any
+more than the drift of them, but it seemed that he had caught a glimpse
+of somebody he knew--a woman, I took it, because he said "she"--looking
+down from the rail of the mezzanine, and he wanted to go up to her. And
+it appeared that the clerk had told the elevator man not to take him up
+in his present condition.
+
+The boss was growing sort of impatient; I could tell it by the way the
+little side muscles on his jaw were working. When he got the ear of the
+clerk for a second or so between cusses, he asked what was the matter
+with the lunatic. I caught only broken bits of the clerk's half-whisper:
+"Young Collingwood ... President Dunton's nephew ... saw lady ...
+mezzanine ... wants to go up to her."
+
+The boss scowled at the young fellow, who was now handing himself around
+the corner of the counter to get at the clerk again, and said: "Why
+don't you ring for an officer and have him run in?"
+
+The night clerk was evidently scared of his job. "I wouldn't dare to do
+that," he chittered. "He's one of the New York crowd--the railroad
+people--President Dunton's nephew--guest of the house."
+
+The young fellow had pulled himself around to our side of the counter by
+this time and was hooking his arm to make a pass at Mr. Norcross,
+trimming things up as he came with a lot more language. The boss said,
+right short and sharp, to the clerk, "Get his room key and give it to a
+boy who can show me the way," and the next thing we knew he had bashed
+that lunatic square in the face and was cuffing him along to the nearest
+elevator.
+
+I guess it sort of surprised the clerk, and everybody else who happened
+to see it--but not me. It was just like the boss. He came back in a few
+minutes, looking as cool as a cucumber.
+
+"What did you do with him?" asked the clerk, kind of awed and half
+scared.
+
+"Got a couple of the corridor sweepers to put him in a bath and turn the
+cold water on him. That'll take the whiskey out of him. Now, if you have
+a minute to spare, I'd like to get my assignment."
+
+We hadn't more than got our rooms marked off for us when I saw Mr.
+Chadwick coming across from the farther of the three elevators. He was
+smiling sort of grim, as if he'd made a killing of some sort with Mr.
+Dunton, and instead of heading back for his car he took the boss over to
+a corner of the lobby and sat down to smoke with him.
+
+I circled around for a while, and after a bit Mr. Norcross held up a
+finger at me to bring him a match. They didn't seem to be talking
+anything private, so I sat down just beyond them, so sleepy that I could
+hardly see straight. Mr. Chadwick was telling about his early
+experiences in Portal City, how he blew in first on top of the
+Strathcona gold boom, and how he had known mighty near everybody in the
+region in those days.
+
+While he was talking, a taxi drove up and one of the old residenters
+came in from the street and crossed to the elevators; a mighty handsome,
+stately old gentleman, with fierce white mustaches and a goatee, and
+"Southern Colonel" written all over him.
+
+"There's one of them now; Major Basil Kendrick--Kentucky born and
+raised, as you might guess," Mr. Chadwick was saying. "Old-school
+Southern 'quality,' and as fine as they make 'em. He is a lawyer, but
+not in active practice: owns a mine or two in Strathcona Gulch, and is
+neither too rich nor too poor."
+
+I grabbed at the name, "Basil," right away: it isn't such a very common
+name, and Mrs. Sheila had said something--under the water tank, you
+recollect--about a "Cousin Basil" who was to have met her at the train.
+I was putting two or three little private guesses of my own together,
+when one of the elevators came down and here came our two, the young
+lady and the chunky little girl, with the major chuckling and smiling
+and giving an arm to each. They had apparently stopped at the Bullard
+only to wait until he could come after them and take them home. Mrs.
+Sheila was looking just as pretty as ever, only now there wasn't a bit
+of color in her face, and her eyes seemed a good deal brighter, some
+way.
+
+"Yes, indeed; the major is all right; as you'd find out for yourself if
+you'd make up your mind to stay in Portal City and get acquainted with
+him," Mr. Chadwick was going on; and by that time the major and the two
+pretty ones had come on to where the boss and Mr. Chadwick could see
+them.
+
+I saw the boss sit up in his chair and stare at them. Then he said:
+"That's Mrs. Macrae with him now. Is she a member of his family?"
+
+"A second cousin, or something of that sort," said Mr. Chadwick. "I met
+her once at the major's house out in the northern suburb last summer,
+and that's how I came to know her when you put her aboard of the _Alexa_
+back yonder in the gulch."
+
+Mr. Norcross let the three of them get out and away, and we heard their
+taxi speed up and trundle off before he said, "She is married, I'm told.
+Where is her husband?"
+
+Mr. Chadwick looked up as if he'd already forgotten the three who had
+just crossed the lobby.
+
+"Who--Sheila Macrae? Yes, she has been married. But there isn't any
+husband--she's a widow."
+
+For quite a while the boss sat staring at his cigar in a way he has when
+he is thinking right hard, and Mr. Chadwick let him alone, being busy, I
+guess, with his own little scrap that lay just ahead of him in the
+coming directors' meeting. Then, all of a sudden, the boss got up and
+shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
+
+"I've changed my mind, Uncle John," he said, looking sort of absent-like
+out of the window to where the major's taxi had been standing. "If you
+can pull me into that deal to-morrow morning--with an absolutely free
+hand to do as I think best, mind you--I'll take the job."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Directors' Meeting
+
+
+I was up bright and early the next morning--that is, a good bit brighter
+and earlier than Mr. Norcross was--and after breakfast I took a little
+sashay down Nevada Avenue to have a look at _our_ railroad. Of course, I
+knew, after what the boss had said to Mr. Chadwick the night before,
+just before we went to bed, that we weren't ever going to see Canada, or
+even Illinois.
+
+I'll have to admit that the look I got didn't make me feel as if we'd
+found a Cullinan diamond. Down in the yards everything seemed to be at
+the loosest kind of loose ends. A switching crew was making up a
+freight, and the way they slammed the boxes together, regardless of
+broken drawheads and the like, was a sin and a shame. Then I saw some
+grain cars with the ends started and the wheat running out all along the
+track, and three or four more with the air hose hanging so it knocked
+along on the ties, and a lot of things like that--and nobody caring a
+hoot.
+
+There was a big repair shop on the other side of the yard tracks, and
+though it was after seven o'clock, the men were still straggling over to
+go to work. Down at the round-house, a wiper was spotting a big
+freight-puller on the turn-table, and I'm blessed if he didn't actually
+run her forward pair of truck-wheels off the edge of the table, right
+while I was looking on, just as if it were all in the day's work.
+
+In the course of time I drifted back to the office headquarters, which
+were at the end of the passenger station and in a part of the same
+building, down-stairs and up. A few clerks were dribbling in, and none
+of them seemed to have life enough to get out of the way of an ox-team.
+One fellow recognized me for a member of the big railroad family, I
+guess, for he stopped and asked me if I was looking for a job.
+
+I told him I wasn't, and gave him a cigar--just on general principles.
+He took it, and right away he began to loosen up.
+
+"If you should change your mind about the job, you just make it a case
+of 'move on, Joey,' and don't stay here and try to hit this
+agglomeration," he said.
+
+"Why not?" I asked.
+
+"It's a frost. I'm off of the Pennsy myself, and I'm ashamed to look in
+the looking-glass since I came out here. The P. S. L. isn't a railroad,
+at all; it's just making a bluff at being one. Besides, we're slated to
+have a new general manager, and if he's any good he'll fire the last
+living man of us."
+
+"Maybe, if I change my mind, I might get a job with the new man," I
+said. "Who is he?"
+
+"Search me! I don't believe they've found anybody yet. The big people
+from New York are all here now, and maybe they'll pick somebody before
+they go away. If I had the nerve of a rabbit, I'd take the next train
+back for Pittsburgh."
+
+"What's your job?" I quizzed.
+
+He grinned at me sort of good-naturedly. "You wouldn't think it to look
+at me, but I'm head stenographer in the general super's office."
+
+"You haven't got much of a boss, if he can't command any more loyalty
+than you are giving him," I offered; and at that he spat on the platform
+and made a face like a kid that had been taking a dose of asafoetida.
+
+"Yah!" he snorted. "We haven't a man in the outfit, on any job where the
+pay amounts to anything, that isn't somebody's cousin or nephew or
+brother-in-law or something. They shoot 'em out here from New York in
+bunches. You may be a spotter, for all I know, but I don't care a hang.
+I'm quitting at the end of the month, anyhow--if I don't get fired this
+side of that."
+
+I grinned; I couldn't help it.
+
+"Tell me," I broke in, "are there many more like you in the Pioneer
+Short Line service?"
+
+"Scads of 'em," he retorted cheerfully. "I can round you up a couple of
+dozen fellows right here at headquarters who would go on a bat and paint
+this town a bright vermilion if the new G. M., whoever he is going to
+be, would clean out the whole rookery, cousins, nephews, and all."
+
+"I think I'll have to take your name," I told him, fishing out a pencil
+and a notebook--just to see what he would do.
+
+"Huh! so you _are_ a spotter, after all, are you? All right, Mr.
+Spotter. My name's May, Frederic G. May. And when you want my head, you
+can find it just exactly where I told you--in the general super's
+office. You're a stranger and you took me in. So long."
+
+Wouldn't that jar you? A man out of the general offices talking that way
+about his road and his own boss? I couldn't help seeing how rotten the
+thing must be if it smelled that way to the men on its own pay-rolls.
+
+After a while, after I'd loafed through the shops and around the yard
+and got a few more whiffs of the decay, I strolled on back to the hotel.
+Seen by daylight, Portal City seemed to be a right bright little burg,
+with a cut-stone post-office and a new court house built out of pink
+lava, and three or four office buildings big enough to be called
+sky-scrapers anywhere outside of a real city like Portland or Seattle.
+The streets were paved, and on the main one, Nevada Avenue, there was
+plenty of business. Also, I tipped off a mining exchange and two pretty
+nice-looking club-houses right in sight from the Bullard entrance.
+
+There wasn't much of a crowd in the lobby, and as I didn't see anything
+of Mr. Norcross or Mr. Chadwick, I sat down in a corner to wear out some
+more time. Though it was now after nine o'clock, there were still a good
+many people breakfasting in the café, the entrance to which was only a
+few feet away from my corner.
+
+I was wondering a little what had become of the boss--who was generally
+the earliest riser on the job--when two men came bulging through the
+screen doors of the café, picking their teeth and feeling in their
+pockets for cigars. Right on the dot, and in the face of knowing that it
+couldn't reasonably be so, I had a feeling that I'd seen those men
+before. One of them was short and rather stocky, and his face had a sort
+of hard, hungry look; and the other was big and barrel-bodied. The short
+one was clean-shaven, but the other had a reddish-gray beard clipped
+close on his fat jaws and trimmed to a point at the chin.
+
+After they had lighted up they came along and sat down three or four
+chairs away from me. They paid no attention to me, but for fear they
+might, I tried to look as sleepy as an all-night bell-hop in a busy
+hotel.
+
+"The Dunton bunch got together in one of the committee rooms up-stairs a
+little after eight o'clock," said the short man, in a low, rasping voice
+that went through you like a buzz-saw, and it was evident that he was
+merely going on with a talk which had been begun over the
+breakfast-table. "Thanks to those infernal blunderers Clanahan sent us
+last night, Chadwick was with them."
+
+"I think that was choost so," said the big man, speaking slowly and with
+something more than a hint of a German accent. "Beckler was choost what
+you call him--a tam blunderer."
+
+Like a flash it came over me that I was "listening in" to a talk between
+the same two men who had sat in the auto at Sand Creek Siding and smoked
+while they were waiting for the actual kidnappers to return. You can bet
+high that I made myself mighty small and unobtrusive.
+
+After a while the big man spoke again.
+
+"What has Uncle Chon Chadwick up his sleeve got, do you think?"
+
+"I don't think--I know!" was the snappy reply. "It's one of two things:
+a receivership--which will knock us into a cocked hat because we can't
+fool with an officer of the United States court--or a new deal all
+around in the management."
+
+"Vich of the two will it be that will come out of that commiddee room
+up-stairs?"
+
+"A new management. Dunton can't stand for a receivership, and Chadwick
+knows it. Apart from the fact that a court officer would turn up a lot
+of side deals that wouldn't look well for the New York crowd if they got
+into the newspapers, the securities would be knocked out and the
+majority holders--Dunton and his bunch--couldn't unload. Chadwick has
+got him by the neck and can dictate his own terms."
+
+"Vich will be?"
+
+"That he will name the man who is to take Shaffer's place as general
+manager of the railroad outfit. We might have stood it off for a while,
+just as I said yesterday, if we could have kept Chadwick from attending
+this meeting."
+
+"But now we don't could stand it off--what then?"
+
+"We'll have to wait and see, and size up the new man when he blows in.
+He'll be only human, Henckel. And if we get right down to it we can pull
+him over to our side--or make him wish he'd never been born."
+
+The big man got up ponderously and brushed the cigar ashes off of his
+bay-window. "You vait and see what comes mit the commiddee-room out. I
+go up to the ovvice."
+
+When I was left alone in the row of lobby chairs with the snappy one I
+was scared stiff for fear, now that he didn't have anything else to
+think of, he'd catch on to the fact that I might have overheard. But
+apart from giving me one long stare that made my blood run cold, he
+didn't seem to notice me much, and after a little he got up and went to
+sit on the other side of the big rotunda where he could watch the
+elevators going and coming.
+
+I guess he had lots of patience, for I had to have. It was after eleven
+o'clock, and I had been sitting in my corner for two full hours, when I
+saw the boss coming down the broad marble stair with Mr. Chadwick. I
+don't think the Hatch man saw them, or, if he did, he didn't let on.
+
+Mr. Norcross held up a finger for me, and when I jumped up he gave me a
+sheet of paper; a Pioneer Short Line president's letter-head with a few
+lines written on it with a pen and a sort of crazy-looking signature
+under them.
+
+"Take that to the _Mountaineer_ job office and have five hundred of them
+printed," was the boss's order. "Tell the foreman it's a rush job and we
+want it to-day. Then make a copy and take it to Mr. Cantrell, the
+editor, and ask him to run it in to-morrow's paper as an item of news,
+if he feels like it. When you are through, come down to Mr. Chadwick's
+car."
+
+Since the thing was going to be published, and I was going to make a
+copy of it, I didn't scruple to read it as I hurried out to begin a hunt
+for the _Mountaineer_ office. It was the printer's copy for an official
+circular, dated at Portal City and addressed to all officers and
+employees of the Pioneer Short Line. It read:
+
+     "Effective at once, Mr. Graham Norcross is appointed General
+     Manager of the Pioneer Short Line System, with headquarters at
+     Portal City, and his orders will be respected accordingly.
+
+     "BRECKENRIDGE DUNTON,
+
+     "_President_."
+
+We had got our jolt, all right; and leaving the ladder and the Friday
+start out of the question, I grinned and told myself that the one other
+thing that counted for most was the fact that Mrs. Sheila Macrae was a
+widow.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The _Alexa_ Goes East
+
+
+I chased like the dickens on the printing job, because, apart from
+wanting to absorb all the dope I could as I went along on the new job, I
+knew I would be needed every minute right at Mr. Norcross's elbow, now
+that the actual work was beginning.
+
+He and Mr. Chadwick were deep in reports and figures and plans of all
+sorts when I got back to the _Alexa_. Luncheon was served in the car,
+and they kept the business talk going like a house afire while they were
+eating, the hurry being that Mr. Chadwick wanted to start back for
+Chicago the minute he could find out if our connecting line east would
+run him special.
+
+I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was
+soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could
+go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a
+gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock
+a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the
+private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick
+were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.
+
+"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he
+said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand,
+not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the
+policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has
+promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."
+
+"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the
+first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors'
+meeting in the Bullard.
+
+"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick
+and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had
+to swallow you whole or take the consequences--and the consequences were
+going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled
+the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have
+some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time
+notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."
+
+The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when
+he has got hold of the gist of a thing.
+
+"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that
+the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and
+relatives. I'll have to clean house."
+
+"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to
+draw from?"
+
+"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully.
+"There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college,
+and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store
+his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies--I'll try
+it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around
+traffic man this side of the Missouri--only his present employers don't
+seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place
+at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good
+lawyer, Uncle John."
+
+"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young
+fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in
+Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local
+graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it,
+but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called
+Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its
+subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries,
+the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber
+yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."
+
+The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the
+railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."
+
+A road engine was backing down the spur to take the _Alexa_ in tow for
+the eastward run, and what was said had to be said in a hurry.
+
+"Dig it out," barked the wheat king. "If you find that we are in on it,
+it's your privilege to cut loose. The two men who will give you the most
+trouble are right here in Portal City: Hatch, the president of Red
+Tower, and Henckel, its vice-president. They say either of them would
+commit murder for a ten-dollar bill, and they stand in with Pete
+Clanahan, the city boss, and his gang of political thugs. That's all,
+Graham; all but one thing. Write me after you've climbed into the saddle
+and have found out just what you're in for. If you say you can make it
+go, I'll back you, if it takes half of next year's wheat crop."
+
+A minute or so later the boss and I stood out in the yard and watched
+the _Alexa_ roll away toward the sunrise country, and perhaps we both
+felt a little bit lonesome, just for a second or two. At least, I know I
+did. But when the special had become a black smudge of coal smoke in the
+distance, Mr. Norcross turned on me with the grim little smile that
+goes with his fighting mood.
+
+"You are private secretary to the new general manager of the Pioneer
+Short Line, Jimmie, and your salary begins to-day," he said, briskly.
+"Now let's go up to the hotel and get our fighting clothes on."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"Heads Off, Gentlemen!"
+
+
+Gosh all Friday--say! but the next few days did see a tear-up to beat
+the band on the old Short Line! With the printing of his appointment
+circular, Mr. Norcross took the offices in the headquarters building
+lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way
+the heads went into the basket. One by one he called the Duntonites in;
+the traffic manager, the general superintendent, the roadmaster, the
+master-mechanic--clear on down to the round-house foreman and the
+division heads.
+
+Some few of them were allowed to take the oath of allegiance and stay,
+but the place-fillers and pay-roll parasites, the cousins and the
+nephews and the brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk
+under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van
+Burgh, great-great-grandnephew of some Revolutionary big-wig and our
+figurehead general superintendent, was the first man called in, and Mr.
+Norcross shot him dead in half a minute.
+
+"Mr. Van Burgh, what railroad experience did you have before you came to
+the P. S. L.?" was the first bullet.
+
+Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired
+eyes, looked at his finger-nails.
+
+"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left
+Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.
+
+"And how long have you been here?"
+
+"I came out lawst October."
+
+"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't
+learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the
+Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be
+accepted. Good-day."
+
+Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.
+
+"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was
+appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."
+
+"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his
+desk. And that was all there was to it.
+
+Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack,
+the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery
+man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr.
+Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.
+
+"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the
+house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four
+of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a
+lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't
+all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which
+to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."
+
+"That's me," said Kirgan, who knew the boss up one side and down the
+other. "You give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And
+with that he went across the yard and took hold, before he had even
+hunted up a place to sleep in.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was the next man to show up. He was fine; a square-built,
+stocky little gentleman who looked as if he's always had the world by
+the ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men
+went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped,
+and while his jaw looked as if he could bite a nail in two, he had a
+pair of twinkling, good-natured eyes that sort of took the edge off the
+hard jaw.
+
+"Well, I'm here," he said, dropping into a chair and sitting with his
+legs wide apart. And then, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there:
+"Graham, what the devil have you got against me, that you should drag me
+out here on the edge of nowhere and make me go to work for a living?"
+
+The boss just grinned at him and said: "It's for the good of your soul,
+Upton. You've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the
+corridor and your chair is empty and waiting for you. Your appointment
+circular has already been mailed out."
+
+Mr. Hornack was the last of the new office staff to fall in, though he
+didn't have nearly as far to come as some of the others. He was
+red-headed and wore glasses. They used to say of him on the Overland
+Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then
+hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that
+he had a sort of meat-axe temper to go with his red hair. But they also
+used to say that he could make business grow where none ever grew
+before, and that's what a traffic man lives for.
+
+When the new staff was made up, Mr. Norcross gathered all the department
+heads together in his office and laid down the lines of the new policy.
+He put it in just eight words: "Clean house, and make friends for the
+company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had
+found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed.
+It was a large order, and both Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack said as
+much, but the boss said it had to go just that way. There would be a
+little money for betterments, but it must be spent as if every dollar
+were ten.
+
+Naturally, the big turn-over brought all sorts of disturbances at the
+send-off. Some of the relieved cousins and nephews stayed in town and
+jumped in to stir up trouble for the new management. The _Herald_, which
+was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there
+wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new
+appointees. Then the employees got busy and the grievance committees
+began to pour in. Mr. Norcross never denied himself to anybody. The
+office-door stood wide open and the kickers were welcomed, as you might
+say, with open arms.
+
+"You men are going to get the squarest deal you have ever had, and a
+still squarer one a little farther along, if you will only stay on the
+job and keep your clothes on," was the way the boss went at the
+trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for
+service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri
+River. I want your loyalty; the loyalty of every man in the service.
+I'll go further and say that the new management will stand if you and
+the other pay-roll men stand by it in good faith, or it will fall if you
+don't."
+
+"You'll meet the grievance committees and talk things over with them
+when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McClure, the passenger
+conductor who was acting as spokesman.
+
+"Sure I will--every time. More than that, I'll take a leaf out of
+Colonel Goethal's book and keep open house here in this office every
+Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thinks he has a grievance may
+come here and state it, and if he has a case, he'll get justice."
+
+Naturally, a few little talks like this, face to face with the men
+themselves, soon began to put new life into the rank and file. Mr.
+Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from
+Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it began to be used in the sense
+that most railroad men use the phrase, "The Old Man," in speaking of a
+big boss that they like.
+
+This winning of the service _esprit de corps_--if that's the
+word--commenced to show results right away. The first time Mr.
+Norcross's special went over the line anybody could see with half an eye
+that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better
+time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place we
+actually found a section foreman going along and picking up the spikes
+and bolts and fish-plates that the wasters ahead of him had strewn all
+along the right-of-way.
+
+There was so much crowded into these first few weeks that I've forgotten
+half of it. The work we did, pulling and hauling things into shape, was
+a fright, and my end of the job got so big that the boss had to give me
+help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd
+had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who
+had been so disgusted with his job under Van Burgh. Frederic of
+Pittsburgh was all right; a little too tonguey, perhaps, but a worker
+from away back, and that was what we were looking for.
+
+Out of this frantic hustle to get things started and moving right,
+anybody could have pulled a couple of conclusions that stuck up higher
+than any of the rest. The boss and Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning
+the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on
+the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were paying the
+freight a solid unit against us, hating us like blazes and entirely
+unwilling to believe that any good thing could come out of the Nazareth
+of the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+This hatred manifested itself in a million different ways, and all of
+them saw-toothed. On that first trip over the line I heard a Lesterburg
+banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would never
+believe that any measure of reform undertaken by the Dunton management
+would be accepted as sincere.
+
+"You talk like an honest man, Mr. Norcross," he said, and he was saying
+it right in the boss's own private car, too, mind you, "but this region
+has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be
+won over now by a little shoulder-patting in the way of better train
+schedules and things of that sort. You'll have to dig a good bit deeper,
+and that you won't be allowed to do."
+
+The boss just smiled at this, and offered the banker man a cigar--which
+he took.
+
+"When the time comes, Mr. Bigelow, I'm going to show you that I can dig
+as deep as the next fellow. Where shall I begin?"
+
+The banker laughed. "If you had a spade with a handle a mile long you
+might begin on the Red Tower people," he suggested. "But, of course, you
+can't do that: your New York people won't let you. There is the real nib
+of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will
+stick to its own proper business--the carrying of freight and
+passengers. What we have is a gigantic holding corporation which fathers
+every extortionate side-issue that can pay it a royalty!"
+
+"Excuse me," said the boss, still as pleasant as a basket of chips,
+"that may be what you have had in the past; we won't try to go behind
+the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on, the
+Short Line proposes to be just what you said it should be--a carrier
+corporation, pure and simple."
+
+"Do you mean to say that you are going to cut loose from Hatch and
+Henckel and their thousand-and-one robber subsidiary companies?"
+demanded the banker.
+
+At this the boss stood up and looked the big banker gentleman squarely
+in the eye.
+
+"Mr. Bigelow, at the present moment I represent Pioneer Short Line, in
+management and in its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you
+emphatically that the railroad management has nothing whatever to do
+with Red Tower Consolidated or any of its subsidiaries."
+
+"Then you've broken with Hatch?"
+
+"No; simply because there hasn't been anything to break, so far as I am
+concerned."
+
+The banker man dropped into the nearest chair.
+
+"But, man alive! you can't stay here if you don't pull with the Hatch
+crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipped you off
+beforehand and not let you come here to commit suicide!"
+
+After that they went out together; up-town to Mr. Bigelow's bank, I
+guess, and as they pushed the corridor door open I heard the banker
+say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit
+will get you, one way or another, as sure as the devil's a hog. If it
+can't break you, it will hire a gang of gunmen--I wouldn't put it an
+inch beyond Rufus Hatch; not a single inch."
+
+There it was again; but as he went out the boss was laughing easily and
+saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the fear of a fight
+was the least of his troubles at the present moment.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+With the Strings Off
+
+
+As soon as we returned from the inspection trip, the boss pulled off his
+coat--figuratively speaking--and rolled up his sleeves. It wasn't his
+way to talk much about what he was going to do: he'd jump in and do it
+first, and then talk about it afterward--if anybody insisted on knowing
+the reason why.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was given swift orders to fill up his engineering staff
+and get busy laying new steel, building new bridges and modernizing the
+permanent way generally. Mr. Hornack was told to put on an extra office
+force to ransack the traffic records and make reports showing the
+fairness or unfairness of existing tariffs and rates, and a widespread
+invitation was given to shippers to come in and air their
+grievances--which you bet they did!
+
+Sandwiched in between, there were long private conferences with Mr.
+Ripley, the bright young lawyer Mr. Chadwick had sent us from Chicago,
+and with a young fellow named Juneman, an ex-newspaper man who was on
+the pay-rolls as "Advertising Manager," but whose real business seemed
+to be to keep the Short Line public fully and accurately informed of
+everything that most railroad companies try to keep to themselves.
+
+The next innovation that came along was another young Chicago man named
+Billoughby, and _his_ title on the pay-roll was "Special Agent." What he
+did to earn his salary was the one thing that Juneman didn't publish
+broadcast in the newspapers; it was kept so dark that not a line of it
+got into the office records, and even I, who was as close to the boss as
+anybody in our outfit, never once suspected the true nature of
+Billoughby's job until the day he came in to make his final report--and
+Mr. Norcross let him make it without sending me out on an errand.
+
+"Well, I think I'm ready to talk Johnson, now," was the way Billoughby
+began. "I've been into all the deals and side deals, and I've had it out
+with Ripley on the legal points involved. Red Tower is the one outfit
+we'll have to kill off and put out of business. Under one name or
+another, it is engineering every graft in this country; it is even
+backing the fake mining boom at Saw Horse--to which, by the way, this
+railroad company is now building a branch line."
+
+Mr. Norcross turned to me:
+
+"Jimmie, make a note to tell Mr. Van Britt to have the work stopped at
+once on the Saw Horse branch, and all the equipment brought in." And
+then to Billoughby: "Go on."
+
+"The main graft, of course, is in the grain elevators, the fruit
+packeries, the coal and lumber yards and the stock yards and handling
+corrals. In these public, or _quasi_-public, utilities Red Tower has
+everybody else shut out, because the railroad has given them--in fee
+simple, it seems--all the yard room, switches, track facilities, and the
+like. Wherever local competition has tried to break in, the railroad
+company has given it the cold shoulder and it has been either forced out
+or frozen out."
+
+"Exactly," said the boss. "Now tell me how far you have gone in the
+other field."
+
+"We are pretty well shaped up and are about ready to begin business.
+Juneman has done splendid work, and so has Ripley. Public sentiment is
+still incredulous, of course. It's mighty hard to make people believe
+that we are in earnest; that we have actually gone over to their side in
+the fight. They're all from Missouri, and they want to be shown."
+
+"Naturally," said Mr. Norcross.
+
+"We have succeeded, in a measure, though the opposition has been keeping
+up a steady bombardment. Hatch and his people haven't been idle. They
+have a strong commercial organization and a stout pull with the machine
+element, or rather the gang element, in politics. They own or control a
+dozen or more prominent newspapers in the State, and, as you know, they
+are making an open fight on you and your management through these
+papers. The net result so far has been merely to keep the people stirred
+up and doubtful. They know they can't trust Hatch and his crowd, and
+they're afraid they can't trust you. They say that the railroad has
+never played fair--and I guess it hasn't, in the past."
+
+"Not within a thousand miles," was the boss's curt comment. "But go on
+with your story."
+
+"We pulled the new deal off yesterday, simultaneously in eleven of the
+principal towns along the line. Meetings of the bankers and local
+capitalists were held, and we had a man at each one of them to explain
+our plan and to pledge the backing of the railroad. Notwithstanding all
+the doubt and dust that's been kicked up by the Hatch people, it went
+like wild-fire."
+
+"With money?" queried the boss.
+
+"Yes; with real money. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse was launched, as
+you might say, on the spot, and enough capital was subscribed to make it
+a going concern. Of course, there were some doubters, and some few
+greedy ones. The doubters wanted to know how much of the stock was going
+to be held by officials of the railroad company, and it was pretty hard
+to convince them that no Short Line official would be allowed to
+participate, directly or indirectly."
+
+"And the greedy ones?"
+
+"They kicked on that part of the plan which provides for the local
+apportionment of the stock to cover the local needs of each town only;
+they wanted more than their share. Also, they protested against the
+fixed dividend scheme; they didn't see why the new company shouldn't be
+allowed to cut a melon now and then if it should be fortunate enough to
+grow one."
+
+Mr. Norcross smiled. "That is precisely what the Hatch people have been
+doing, all along, and it is the chief grievance of these same people who
+now want a chance to outbid their neighbors. The lease condition was
+fully explained to them, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes; Ripley saw to that, and copies of the lease were in the
+exhibits. The new company is to have railroad ground to build on, and
+ample track facilities in perpetuity, conditioned strictly upon the
+limited dividend. If the dividend is increased, the leases terminate
+automatically."
+
+The boss drew a long breath.
+
+"You've done well, and better than well, Billoughby," he said. "Now we
+are ready to fire the blast. How was the proposal to take over the Red
+Tower properties at a fair valuation received?"
+
+"There was some opposition. Lesterburg, and three of the other larger
+towns, want to build their own plants. They are bitter enough to want to
+smash the big monopoly, root and branch. But they agreed to abide by a
+majority vote of the stock on that point, and my wire reports this
+morning say that a lump-sum offer will be made for the Red Tower plants
+to-day."
+
+Mr. Norcross sat back in his chair and blew a cloud of cigar smoke
+toward the ceiling.
+
+"Hatch won't sell," he predicted. "He'll be up here before night with
+blood in his eye. I'm rather glad it has come down to the actual give
+and take. I don't play the waiting game very successfully, Billoughby.
+Keep in touch, and keep me in touch. And tell Ripley to keep on pushing
+on the reins. The sooner we get at it, the sooner it will be over."
+
+After Billoughby had gone, Mr. Norcross dictated a swift bunch of
+letters and telegrams and had me turn my shorthand notes over to Fred
+May for transcription. With the desk cleaned up he came at me on a
+little matter that had been allowed to sleep ever since the day, now
+some time back, when I had given him Mrs. Sheila's hint about the
+identity of the two men who had sat and smoked in the auto that Sunday
+night at Sand Creek Siding, and about the talk between the same two that
+I had overheard the following morning.
+
+"We are going to have sharp trouble with a gentleman by the name of
+Hatch before very long, Jimmie," was the way he began. "I don't want to
+hit him below the belt, if I can help it; but on the other hand, it's
+just as well to be able to give the punch if it is needed. You remember
+what you told me about that Monday morning talk between Hatch and
+Henckel in the Bullard lobby. Would you be willing to go into court as a
+witness and swear to what you heard?"
+
+"Sure I would," I said.
+
+"All right. I may have to pull that little incident on Mr. Hatch before
+I get through with him. The train hold-up was a criminal act, and you
+are the witness who can convict the pair of them. Of course, we'll leave
+Mrs. Macrae and the little girl entirely out of it. Nobody knows that
+they were there with us, and nobody need know."
+
+I agreed to that, and this mention of Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann makes
+me remember that I've been leaving them out pretty severely for a good
+long while. They weren't left out in reality-not by a jugful. In spite
+of all the rush and hustle, the boss had found time to get acquainted
+with Major Basil Kendrick and had been made at home in the transplanted
+Kentucky mansion in the northern suburb. I'd been there too, sometimes
+to carry a box of flowers when the boss was suddenly called out of
+town, and some other evenings when I had to go and hunt him up to give
+him a bunch of telegrams. Of course, I didn't play the butt-in; I didn't
+have to. Maisie Ann usually looked out for me, and when she found out
+that I liked pumpkin pie, made Kentucky fashion, we used to spend most
+of those errand-running evenings together in the pantry.
+
+But to get back on the firing line. I wasn't around when Mr. Norcross
+had his "declaration of war" talk with Hatch. Mr. Norcross, being pretty
+sure he wasn't going to have that evening off, had sent me out to
+"Kenwood" with a note and a box of roses, and when I got back to the
+office about eight o'clock, Hatch was just going away. I met him on the
+stair.
+
+The boss was sitting back in his big swing chair, smoking, when I broke
+in. He looked as if he'd been mixing it up good and plenty with Mr.
+Rufus Hatch--and enjoying it.
+
+"We've got 'em going, Jimmie," he chuckled; and he said it without
+asking me how I had found Mrs. Sheila, or how she was looking, or
+anything.
+
+I told him I had met Mr. Hatch on the stair going down.
+
+"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" he asked.
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"I had to pull that Sand Creek business on him, and I'm rather sorry,"
+he went on. "He and his people are going to fight the new company to a
+finish, and he merely came up here to tell me so--and to add that I
+might as well resign first as last, because, in the end, he'd get my
+goat. When I laughed at him he got abusive. He's an ugly beggar,
+Jimmie."
+
+"That's what everybody says of him."
+
+"It's true. He and his crowd have plenty of money--stolen money, a good
+deal of it--and they stand in with every political boss and gangster in
+the State. There is only one way to handle such a man, and that is
+without gloves. I told him we had the goods on him in the matter of Mr.
+Chadwick's kidnapping adventure. At first he said I couldn't prove it.
+Then he broke out cursing and let your name slip. I hadn't mentioned you
+at all, and so he gave himself away. He knows who you are, and he
+remembered that you had overheard his talk with Henckel in the Bullard
+lobby."
+
+I heard what he was saying, but I didn't really sense it because my head
+was ram jam full of a thing that was so pitiful that it had kept me
+swallowing hard all the way back from Major Kendrick's. It was this way.
+When I had jiggled the bell out at the house it was Maisie Ann who let
+me in and took the box of flowers and the boss's note. She told me that
+Aunt Mandy, the cook, hadn't made any pie that day, so we sat in the
+dimly lighted hall and talked for a few minutes.
+
+One thing she told me was that Mrs. Sheila had company and the name of
+it was Mr. Van Britt. That wasn't strictly news because I had known that
+Mr. Van Britt was dividing time pretty evenly with the boss in the Major
+Kendrick house visits. That wasn't anything to be scared up about. I
+knew that all Mr. Norcross asked, or would need, would be a fair field
+and no favor. But my chunky little girl didn't stop at that.
+
+"I think we can let Mr. Van Britt take care of himself," she said. "He
+has known Cousin Sheila for a long time, and I guess they are only just
+good friends. But there is something you ought to know, Jimmie--for Mr.
+Norcross's sake. He has been sending lots of flowers and things, and
+Cousin Sheila has been taking them because--well, I guess it's just
+because she doesn't know how not to take them."
+
+"Go on," I said, but my mouth had suddenly grown dry.
+
+"Such things--flowers, you know--don't mean anything in New York, where
+we've been living. Men send them to their women friends just as they
+pass their cigar-cases around among their men friends. But I'm afraid
+it's different with Mr. Norcross."
+
+"It is different," I said.
+
+Then she told me the thing that made me swell up and want to burst.
+
+"It mustn't be different, Jimmie. Cousin Sheila's married, you know."
+
+"I know she has been married," I corrected; and then she gave me the
+sure-enough knock-out.
+
+"She is married now, and her husband is still living."
+
+For a little while I couldn't do anything but gape like a chicken with
+the pip. It was simply fierce! I knew, as well as I knew anything, that
+the boss was gone on Mrs. Sheila; that he had fallen in love, first with
+the back of her neck and then with her pretty face and then with all of
+her; and that the one big reason why he had let Mr. Chadwick persuade
+him to stay in Portal City was the fact that he had wanted to be near
+her and to show her how he could make a perfectly good spoon out of the
+spoiled horn of the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+When I began to get my grip back a little I was right warm under the
+collar.
+
+"She oughtn't to be going around telling people she is a widow!" I
+blurted out.
+
+"She doesn't," was the calm reply. "People just take it for granted, and
+it saves a lot of talk and explanations that it wouldn't be pleasant to
+have to make. They've separated, you know--years ago, and Cousin Sheila
+has taken her mother's maiden name, Macrae. If we were going to live
+here always it would be different. But we are only visiting Cousin
+Basil, or I suppose we are, though we've been here now for nearly a
+year."
+
+There wasn't much more to be said, and pretty soon I had staggered off
+with my load and gone back to the office. And this was why I couldn't
+get very deep into the Hatch business with Mr. Norcross when he told me
+what he had been obliged to do about the Sand Creek hold-up.
+
+He didn't say anything further about it, except to tell me to be careful
+and not let any of the Hatch people tangle me up so that my evidence, if
+I should have to give it, would be made to look like a faked-up story;
+and a little before nine o'clock Mr. Ripley dropped in and he and the
+boss went up-town together.
+
+I might have gone, too. Fred May had got through and gone home, and
+there was nothing much that I could do beyond filing a few letters and
+tidying up a bit around my own desk. But I couldn't make up my mind
+either to work or to go to bed. I wanted a chance to think over the
+horrible thing Maisie Ann had told me; time to cook up some scheme by
+which the boss could be let down easy.
+
+If he had been like other men it wouldn't have been so hard. But I had a
+feeling that he had gone into this love business just as he did into
+everything--neck or nothing--burning his bridges behind him, and having
+no notion of ever turning back. I had once heard our Oregon Midland
+president, Mr. Lepaige, say that it was not good for a man always to
+succeed; never to be beaten; that without a setback, now and then, a man
+never learned how to bend without breaking. The boss had never been
+beaten, and Mr. Lepaige was talking about him when he said this. What
+was it going to do to him when he learned the truth about Mrs. Sheila?
+
+On top of this came the still harder knock when I saw that it was up to
+me to tell him. I remembered all the stories I'd ever heard about how
+the most cold-blooded surgeon that ever lived wouldn't trust himself to
+stick a knife into a member of his own family, and I knew now just how
+the surgeon felt about it. It was up to me to whet my old Barlow and
+stick it into the boss, clear up to the handle.
+
+While I was still sweating under the big load Maisie Ann had dumped upon
+me, the night despatcher's boy came in with a message. It was from Mr.
+Chadwick, and I read it with my eyes bugging out. This is what it said:
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "P. S. L. Common dropped to thirty-four to-day, and banks lending
+     on short time notes for betterment fund are getting nervous. Wire
+     from New York says bondholders are stirring and talking
+     receivership. General opinion in financial circles leans to idea
+     that new policy is foregone failure. Are you still sure you can
+     make it win?
+
+     "CHADWICK."
+
+Right on the heels of this, and before I could get my breath, in came
+the boy again with another telegram. It was a hot wire from President
+Dunton, one of a series that he had been shooting in ever since Mr.
+Norcross had taken hold and begun firing the cousins and nephews.
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City. RUSH.
+
+     "See stock quotations for to-day. Your policy is a failure. Am
+     advised you are now fighting Red Tower. Stop it immediately and
+     assure Mr. Hatch that we are friendly, as we have always been. If
+     something cannot be done to lift securities to better figure, your
+     resignation will be in order.
+
+     "DUNTON."
+
+They say that misfortunes never come singly. Here were two new griefs
+hurling themselves in over the wires all in the same quarter-hour,
+besides the one I had up my sleeve. But there was no use dallying. It
+was up to me to find the boss as quickly as I could and have the
+three-cornered surgical operation over with. I knew the telegrams
+wouldn't kill him--or I thought they wouldn't. I thought they'd probably
+make him take a fresh strangle hold on things and be fired--if he had to
+be fired--fighting it out grimly on his own line. But I wasn't so sure
+about the Mrs. Sheila business. That was a horse of another color.
+
+I had just reached for my hat and was getting ready to snap the
+electrics off when I heard footsteps in the outer office. At first I
+thought it was the despatcher's boy coming with another wire, but when I
+looked up, a stocky, hard-faced man in a derby hat and a short overcoat
+was standing in the doorway and scowling across at me.
+
+It was Mr. Rufus Hatch, and I had a notion that the hot end of his black
+cigar glared at me like a baleful red eye when he came in and sat down.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+And Satan Came Also
+
+
+"I saw your office lights from the street," was the way the Red Tower
+president began on me, and his voice took me straight back to the Oregon
+woods and a lumber camp where the saw-filers were at work. "Where is Mr.
+Norcross?"
+
+I told him that Mr. Norcross was up-town, and that I didn't suppose he
+would come back to the office again that night, now that it was so late.
+Instead of going away and giving it up, he sat right still, boring me
+with his little gray eyes and shifting the black cigar from one corner
+of his mouth to the other.
+
+"My name is Hatch, of the Red Tower Company," he grated, after a minute
+or two. "You're the one they call Dodds, aren't you?"
+
+I admitted it, and he went on.
+
+"Norcross brought you here with him from the West, didn't he?"
+
+I nodded and wondered what was coming next. When it did come it nearly
+bowled me over.
+
+"What pay are you getting here?"
+
+It was on the tip of my tongue to cuss him out right there and then and
+tell him it was none of his business. But the second thought (which
+isn't always as good as it's said to be) whispered to me to lead him on
+and see how far he would go. So I told him the figures of my pay check.
+
+"I'm needing another shorthand man, and I can afford to pay a good bit
+more than that," he growled. "They tell me you are well up at the top in
+your trade. Are you open to an offer?"
+
+I let him have it straight then. "Not from you," I said.
+
+"And why not from me?"
+
+Here was where I made my first bad break. All of a sudden I got so angry
+at the thought that he was actually trying to buy me that I couldn't see
+anything but red, and I blurted out, "Because I don't hire out to work
+for any strong-arm outfit--not if I know it!"
+
+For a little while he sat blinking at me from under his bushy eyebrows,
+and his hard mouth was drawn into a straight line with a mean little
+wrinkle coming and going at the corners of it.
+
+When he got ready to speak again he said, "You're only a boy. You want
+to get on in the world, don't you?"
+
+"Supposing I do: what then?" I snapped.
+
+"I'm offering you a good chance: the best you ever had. You don't owe
+Norcross anything more than your job, do you?"
+
+"Maybe not."
+
+"That's better. Put on your hat and come along with me. I want to show
+you what I can do for you in a better field than railroading ever was,
+or ever will be. It'll pay you--" and he named a figure that very nearly
+made me fall dead out of my chair.
+
+Of course, it was all plain enough. The boss had him on the hip with
+that kidnapping business, with me for a witness. And he was trying to
+fix the witness. It's funny, but the only thing I thought of, just then,
+was the necessity of covering up the part that Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann had had in the hold-up affair that he was so anxious to bury and put
+out of sight.
+
+"I guess we needn't beat about the bushes any longer, Mr. Hatch," I
+said, bracing up to him. "I haven't told the sheriff, or anybody but Mr.
+Norcross, what I know about a certain little train hold-up that happened
+a few weeks ago down at Sand Creek Siding; but that isn't saying that
+I'm not going to."
+
+At this he flung the stump of the black cigar out of the window, found
+another in his pocket, and lighted it. If I had had the sense of a field
+mouse, I might have known that I was no match for such a man; but I
+lacked the sense--lacked it good and hard.
+
+"You're like your boss," he said shortly. "You'd go a long distance out
+of your way to make an enemy when there is no need of it. That hold-up
+business was a joke, from start to finish. I don't know how you and
+Norcross came to get in on it; the joke was meant to be on John
+Chadwick. The night before, at a little dinner we were giving him at the
+railroad club, he said there never was a railroad hold-up that couldn't
+have been stood off. A few of us got together afterward and put up a job
+on him; sent him over to Strathcona and arranged to have him held up on
+the way back."
+
+Again I lost my grip on all the common, every-day sanities. My best
+play--the only reasonable play--was to let him go away thinking that he
+had made me swallow the joke story whole. But I didn't have sense enough
+to do that.
+
+"Mr. Chadwick didn't take it as a joke!" I retorted.
+
+"I know he didn't; and that's why we're all anxious now to dig a hole
+and bury the thing decently. Perhaps we had all been taking a drop too
+much at the club dinner that night."
+
+At that I swelled up man-size and kicked the whole kettle of fat into
+the fire.
+
+"Of course, it was a joke!" I ripped out. "And your coming here to-night
+to try to hire me away from Mr. Norcross is another. The woods are full
+of good shorthand men, Mr. Hatch, but for the present I think I shall
+stay right where I am--where a court subpoena can find me when I'm
+wanted."
+
+"That's all nonsense, and you know it--if you're not too much of a kid
+to know anything," he snapped, shooting out his heavy jaw at me. "I
+merely wanted to give you a chance to get rid of the railroad collar, if
+you felt like it. And there'll be no court and no subpoena. The
+poorest jack-leg lawyer we've got in Portal City would make a fool of
+you in five minutes on the witness-stand. Nevertheless, my offer holds
+good. I like a fighting man; and you've got nerve. Take a night and
+sleep on it. Maybe you'll think differently in the morning."
+
+Here was another chance for me to get off with a whole skin, but by this
+time I was completely lost to any sober weighing and measuring of the
+possible consequences. Leaning across the desk end I gave him a final
+shot, just as he was getting up to go.
+
+"Listen, Mr. Hatch," I said. "You haven't fooled me for a single minute.
+Your guess is right; I heard every word that passed between you and Mr.
+Henckel that Monday morning in the Bullard lobby. As I say, I haven't
+told anybody yet but Mr. Norcross; but if you go to making trouble for
+him and the railroad company, I'll go into court and swear to what I
+know!"
+
+He was half-way out of the door when I got through, and he never made
+any sign that he heard what I said. After he was gone I began to sense,
+just a little, how big a fool I had made of myself. But I was still mad
+clear through at the idea that he had taken me for the other kind of a
+fool--the kind that wouldn't know enough to be sure that the president
+of a big corporation wouldn't get down to tampering with a common clerk
+unless there was some big thing to be stood off by it.
+
+Stewing and sizzling over it, I puttered around with the papers on my
+desk for quite a little while before I remembered the two telegrams, and
+the fact that I'd have to go and stick the three-bladed knife into Mr.
+Norcross. When I did remember, I shoved the messages into my pocket,
+flicked off the lights and started to go up-town and hunt for the boss.
+
+After closing the outer door of the office I don't recall anything
+particular except that I felt my way down the headquarters stair in the
+dark and groped across the lower hall to the outside door that served
+for the stair-case entrance from the street. When I had felt around and
+found the brass knob, something happened, I didn't know just what. In
+the tiny little fraction of a second that I had left, as you might say,
+between the hearse and the grave, I had a vague notion that the door was
+falling over on me and mashing me flat; and after that, everything went
+blank.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Big Smash
+
+
+When I came to life out of what seemed like an endless succession of bad
+dreams it was broad daylight and the sun was shining brightly through
+some filmy kind of curtain stuff in a big window that looked out toward
+the west. I was in bed, the room was strange, and my right hand was
+wrapped up in a lot of cotton and bandaged.
+
+I hadn't more than made the first restless move before I saw a sort of
+pie-faced woman in a nurse's cap and apron start to get up from where
+she was sitting by the window. Before she could come over to the bed,
+somebody opened a door and tip-toed in ahead of nursey. I had to blink
+hard two or three times before I could really make up my mind that the
+tip-toer was Maisie Ann. She looked as if she might be the nurse's
+understudy. She had a nifty little lace cap on her thick mop of hair,
+and I guess her apron was meant to be nursey too, only it was frilled
+and tucked to a fare-you-well.
+
+I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it before, but she was always
+an awfully wholesome, jolly little girl, with a laugh so near the
+surface that it never took much of anything to make it come rippling up
+through. But now she was as sober as a deacon--and about fourteen times
+as pretty as I had ever seen her before.
+
+"You poor, poor boy!" she cooed, patting my pillow just like my
+grandmother used to when I was a little kid and had the mumps or the
+measles. "Are you still roaming around in the Oregon woods?"
+
+That brought my dream, or one of them, back; the one about wandering
+around in a forest of Douglas fir and having to jump and dodge to keep
+the big trees from falling on me and smashing me.
+
+"No more woods for mine," I said, sort of feebly. And then: "Where am
+I?"
+
+"You are in bed in the spare room at Cousin Basil's. They wanted to take
+you to the railroad hospital that night, but when they telephoned up
+here to try to find Mr. Norcross, Cousin Basil went right down and
+brought you home with him in the ambulance."
+
+"'That night,' you say?" I parroted. "It was last night that the door
+fell on me, wasn't it?"
+
+"I don't know anything about a door, but the night that they found you
+all burnt and crippled, lying at the foot of your office stairs, was
+three days ago. You have been out of your head nearly all the time ever
+since."
+
+"Burnt and crippled? What happened to me, Maisie Ann?"
+
+"Nobody knows; not even the doctors. We've been hoping that some day
+you'd be able to tell us. Can't you tell me now, Jimmie?"
+
+I told her all there was to tell, mumbling around among the words the
+best I could. When she saw how hard it was for me to talk, I could have
+sworn that I saw tears in the big, wide-open eyes, but maybe I didn't.
+
+Then she told me how the headquarters watchman had found me about
+midnight; with my right hand scorched black and the rest of me
+apparently dead and ready to be buried. The ambulance surgeon had
+insisted, and was still insisting, that I had been handling a live wire;
+but there were no wires at all in the lower hall, and nothing stronger
+than an incandescent light current in the entire office building.
+
+"And you say I've been here hanging on by my eyelashes for three days?
+What has been going on in all that time, Maisie Ann? Hasn't anybody been
+here to see me?"
+
+She gave a little nod. "Everybody, nearly. Mr. Van Britt has been up
+every day, and sometimes twice a day. He has been awfully anxious for
+you to come alive."
+
+"But Mr. Norcross?" I queried. "Hasn't he been up?"
+
+She shook her head and turned her face away, and she was looking
+straight out of the window at the setting sun when she asked, "When was
+the last time you saw Mr. Norcross, Jimmie?"
+
+I choked a little over a big scare that seemed to rush up out of the
+bed-clothes to smother me. But I made out to answer her question,
+telling her how Mr. Norcross had left the office maybe half an hour or
+so before I did, that night, going up-town with Mr. Ripley. Then I asked
+her why she wanted to know.
+
+"Because nobody has seen him since a little later that same night," she
+said, saying it very softly and without turning her head. And then: "Mr.
+Van Britt found a letter from Mr. Norcross on his desk the next morning.
+It was just a little typewritten note, on a Hotel Bullard letter sheet,
+saying that he had made up his mind that the Pioneer Short Line wasn't
+worth fighting for, and that he was resigning and taking the midnight
+train for the East."
+
+I sat straight up in bed; I should have had to do it if both arms had
+been burnt to a crisp clear to the shoulders.
+
+"Resigned?--gave up and ran away? I don't believe that for a single
+minute, Maisie Ann!" I burst out.
+
+She was shaking her head again, still without turning her face so that I
+could see it.
+
+"I--I'm afraid it's all true, Jimmie. There were two telegrams that came
+to Mr. Norcross the night he went away; one from Mr. Chadwick and the
+other from Mr. Dunton. I heard Mr. Van Britt telling Cousin Sheila what
+the messages were. He'd seen the copies of them that they keep in the
+telegraph office."
+
+It was on my tongue's end to say that Mr. Norcross never had seen those
+two telegrams, because I had them in my pocket and was on my way to
+deliver them when I got shot; but I didn't. Instead, I said: "And you
+think that was why Mr. Norcross threw up his hands and ran away?"
+
+"No; I don't think anything of the sort. I know what it was, and you
+know what it was," and at that she turned around and pushed me gently
+down among the pillows.
+
+"What was it?" I whispered, more than half afraid that I was going to
+hear a confirmation of my own breath-taking conviction. And I heard it,
+all right.
+
+"It was what I was telling you about, that same evening, you
+remember--down in the hall when you brought the flowers for Cousin
+Sheila? You told him what I told you, didn't you?"
+
+"No; I didn't have a chance--not any real chance."
+
+"Then somebody else told him, Jimmie; and that is the reason he has
+resigned and gone away. Mr. Van Britt thinks it was on account of the
+two messages from Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Dunton, and that is why he wants
+to talk to you about it. But you know, and I know, Jimmie, dear; and for
+Cousin Sheila's sake and Mr. Norcross's, we must never lisp it to a
+human soul. A new general manager has been appointed, and he is on his
+way out here from New York. Everything has gone to pieces on the
+railroad, and all of Mr. Norcross's friends are getting ready to resign.
+Isn't it perfectly heart-breaking?"
+
+It was; it was so heart-breaking that I just gasped once or twice and
+went off the hooks again, with Maisie Ann's frightened little shriek
+ringing in my ears as she tried to hold me back from slipping over the
+edge.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+What Every Man Knows
+
+
+I wasn't gone very long on this second excursion into the woozy-woozies,
+though it was night-time, and the shaded electric light was turned on
+when I opened my eyes and found Mrs. Sheila sitting by the bedside. The
+pie-faced nurse was gone; or at least I didn't see her anywhere; and the
+change in Mrs. Sheila sort of made me gasp. She wasn't any less pretty
+as she sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, but she was
+different; sober, and with the laugh all gone out of the big gray eyes,
+and a look in them as if she had suddenly become so wise that nobody
+could ever fool her.
+
+"You are feeling better now?" she asked, when she found me staring at
+her.
+
+I told her I guessed I was, but that my hand hurt me some.
+
+"You have had a great shock of some kind--besides the burn, Jimmie," she
+rejoined, folding up the bed covers so that the bandaged hand would rest
+easier. "The doctors are all puzzled. Does your head feel quite clear
+now--so that you can think?"
+
+"It feels as if I had a crazy clock in it," I said. "But the thinking
+part is all right. Have you heard anything from Mr. Norcross yet?"
+
+"Not a word. It is all very mysterious and perplexing. We have been
+hoping that you could tell us something when you should recover
+sufficiently to talk. Can't you, Jimmie?"
+
+Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the
+hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't
+do. So I just said:
+
+"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office
+some little time before I did--with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they
+were going."
+
+"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in
+the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his
+rooms."
+
+Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but
+if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of
+me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who
+always knew everything that was going on.
+
+"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening,
+wasn't there?" she asked.
+
+"Hatch had some trouble--yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I
+replied.
+
+"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I
+could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the
+evening, while I was away.
+
+"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.
+
+"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken
+idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross
+has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say
+that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he
+should do as he has done--or at least as everybody believes he has
+done."
+
+I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would
+clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell
+her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as
+right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let
+her down easy.
+
+"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after
+Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that
+the telegrams hadn't been delivered--that they were probably in the
+pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to
+make any man throw up his hands and quit, _I_ should say."
+
+"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not
+telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of
+us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out
+and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing
+anything like that before?"
+
+I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very
+thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang
+on to my sham belief that it was the thing he _had_ done: either that,
+or tell her the truth.
+
+"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr.
+Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out,
+and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"
+
+"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his
+friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it
+out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"
+
+There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said
+that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard.
+I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just
+why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out,
+but that was out of the question.
+
+"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said;
+not knowing what else to say.
+
+"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so
+that you can help me trace it out."
+
+"Me?" I queried.
+
+"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr.
+Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr.
+Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day
+after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at
+some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him,
+and that is why they don't hear anything from him."
+
+"What do _you_ think?" I asked.
+
+She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of
+frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to
+hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."
+
+"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."
+
+"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs
+with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as
+you were able to talk. May I send him up?"
+
+Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and
+only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had
+that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and
+polish a man till he shines.
+
+"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again.
+Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"
+
+I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows
+of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put
+me on the question rack. I gave him all I had--except that thing about
+the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give
+him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:
+
+"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this
+new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie.
+I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys
+together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."
+
+"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.
+
+"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me
+a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to
+stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general
+manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head
+of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse organization were scared plumb
+out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the
+newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had
+expected--that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a
+good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.
+
+"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.
+
+He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and
+neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."
+
+"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"
+
+"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of
+Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the
+telegraph."
+
+"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I
+ventured.
+
+"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any
+trace of him."
+
+"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."
+
+"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an
+envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would
+say.
+
+"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us,
+Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a
+little more light on this damnable blow-up?"
+
+I hadn't--outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about--and I told him
+so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his
+own mind.
+
+"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm
+new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd
+is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that
+there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when
+Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"
+
+"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."
+
+"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"
+
+"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats--in a business
+way."
+
+"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"
+
+I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.
+
+"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well
+resign one time as another?"
+
+"Something like that, yes."
+
+"Can you add anything more?"
+
+I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about
+the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't
+want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was
+beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and
+unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and
+quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband
+living. So I just said:
+
+"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while
+longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.
+
+It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them
+time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together.
+Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I
+had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the
+wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.
+
+After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been
+trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of
+what I knew--or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that
+there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to
+give the possibility standing-room.
+
+In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a
+sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my
+lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley
+that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed.
+That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time
+and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs.
+Sheila?
+
+Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing
+somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it
+was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out
+early in the morning and get busy.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+With the Wheels Trigged
+
+
+I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr.
+Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the
+office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after
+telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand,
+she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.
+
+"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the
+others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away
+because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you
+know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand
+by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."
+
+It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be
+the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering
+after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside
+out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible;
+she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting
+ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling
+him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I
+saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled
+me over to her side again.
+
+So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her
+posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of
+kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's
+auto.
+
+Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still
+in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains
+were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was
+still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole
+business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for
+the roof to fall in--as I guess it was.
+
+Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had
+moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand
+work. They wouldn't let me do anything much--I couldn't do much with my
+right arm in a sling--so I had a chance to hang around and size up the
+situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me
+that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr.
+Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to
+be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the
+public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of
+callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead
+anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive
+programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked
+as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.
+
+Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off
+a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and
+thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these
+private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds
+of all four of them about the boss's drop-out--as to whether it was
+voluntary or not.
+
+Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no
+"company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man
+named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him
+and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of
+Mr. Norcross's disappearance.
+
+Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so
+far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were
+still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the
+night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the
+boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his
+rooms.
+
+Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast
+Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next
+witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr.
+Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly
+have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that,
+the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big
+and too well known by this time to the rank and file.
+
+Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the
+Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad
+office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had
+asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van
+Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition
+that had been made to him the day before--the offer of the new Citizens'
+Storage & Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments
+and plants.
+
+Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch
+had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had
+gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new
+company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said
+that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk
+straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors
+together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to
+Citizens' Storage & Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.
+
+This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a
+new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and
+Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition;
+was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first
+been to fight everything in sight.
+
+By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say,
+just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and
+had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and
+Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory,
+and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were
+with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was
+quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two
+days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which
+was proof positive, you'd say, that the boss _had_ resigned and had so
+notified the New York office.
+
+When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we
+went to the Bullard café. It was pretty rich for our blood at two
+dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt
+reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little
+threshing on our own account--and got a lot more chaff and no grain.
+
+Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't
+seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in
+mind all the time--the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss
+after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed
+him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.
+
+By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had
+at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that.
+The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the
+headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb--as I knew. It had
+burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I
+went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with
+the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had
+explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light
+current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.
+
+The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of
+the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked
+and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss
+coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the
+afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr.
+Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It
+just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.
+
+Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking
+train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour
+or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of
+the _Mountaineer_, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he
+found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the
+private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good
+cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.
+
+I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to
+be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him
+that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of
+you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After
+the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then
+switched over to the big puzzle.
+
+"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.
+
+I told him there wasn't.
+
+"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie?--or do you?"
+
+"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.
+
+"Branderby"--he was one of the _Mountaineer_ reporters--"tells me that
+you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"
+
+"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and
+I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."
+
+The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and
+he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall.
+When he got good and ready, he began again.
+
+"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you
+need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if
+there ever were such a miracle."
+
+"You think it is a case for a detective?"
+
+"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If
+I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help
+that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."
+
+Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was,
+I jumped into the hole pretty quick.
+
+"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.
+
+"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus
+Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are
+hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From
+the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been
+published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during
+the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a
+thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also
+by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you
+suspicious--very suspicious, Jimmie."
+
+"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to
+think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross--reason in
+fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to
+sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in
+a day."
+
+The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old
+saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the
+Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr.
+Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job--and I shouldn't let much
+grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at the
+_Mountaineer_ office if I can help." And with that he went away.
+
+It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled
+across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an
+old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job
+with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything
+special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I
+loafed in on Kirgan.
+
+I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up
+anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered
+into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance
+by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot
+eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers
+used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.
+
+Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have
+to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother.
+As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or
+other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through
+he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen
+a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.
+
+"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the
+general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair
+and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night
+that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good
+Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur
+below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman
+went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The Lost 1016
+
+
+When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all
+sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the
+boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left
+standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves
+together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't
+wedge them apart.
+
+"An engine--even a little old Atlantic-type--is a pretty big thing to
+lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.
+
+Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.
+
+"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!"
+he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the
+headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been
+advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That
+engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for
+four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every
+hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's
+gone!"
+
+"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't
+pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported.
+And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild
+engine over the main line without orders."
+
+"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst
+us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."
+
+I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of
+the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in
+some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to
+let go.
+
+"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason
+why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had
+quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change
+his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"
+
+After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it
+back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.
+
+"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But
+where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody
+findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway?
+Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was
+to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and _go_."
+
+"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the
+same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and
+the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and
+twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross
+went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find
+_him_!"
+
+Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little
+space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best
+boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a
+clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go
+alone he turned on me.
+
+"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its
+scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he
+demanded.
+
+I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of
+things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had
+taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking
+the wheels of reform.
+
+"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it
+ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods
+is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the
+bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked;
+you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to
+look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and
+turn in and help him."
+
+"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land,
+Mart?"
+
+"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the
+whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces--as it's doin', right now.
+They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if
+it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all
+up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could
+bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you
+could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a
+that."
+
+"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"
+
+"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I
+did, Jimmie, and not think it--and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o'
+Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we
+belonged to 'em!--orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs,
+helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need,
+usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."
+
+"You stopped all this?"
+
+"You bet I did--between two days! They've been makin' seventeen
+different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the
+Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."
+
+What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on
+their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if
+they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and
+Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.
+
+"Say, Jimmie, boy--you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when
+you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about
+as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose
+end."
+
+"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I
+asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."
+
+He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy
+stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown
+and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home.
+When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study
+it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.
+
+At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map
+was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations
+and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western
+end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get
+out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the
+shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at
+that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.
+
+Tracing the other way--westward--we had a clear track for ten miles to
+Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen
+engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down.
+Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west
+of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been
+seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and
+the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station
+shouldn't have been.
+
+"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or
+other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be
+considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been
+running--without orders, we must remember--against the Fast Mail coming
+east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere--not officially, at least; if it
+had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's
+office."
+
+At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the
+"meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at
+twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making
+due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the
+missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before
+ten-forty-five.
+
+The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta
+was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the
+opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or
+thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time
+to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In
+other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed,
+would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.
+
+When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay
+in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the
+diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise.
+West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around
+among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand
+Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.
+
+Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing
+point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have
+been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a
+blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand
+Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was
+nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served
+for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would
+surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And
+they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the
+following morning.
+
+Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any
+number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail
+topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything
+about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.
+
+"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by
+without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"
+
+The big master-mechanic shook his head.
+
+"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is
+part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the
+mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in
+for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for
+their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch
+somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut
+off."
+
+This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.
+
+"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is
+one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that
+gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"
+
+"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there
+yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of
+that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."
+
+You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a
+root.
+
+"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just
+around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we
+can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And
+the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the
+stolen engine!"
+
+"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or,
+leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding,
+just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."
+
+Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our
+guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles
+west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van
+Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.
+
+"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the
+map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there.
+But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."
+
+"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you
+and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work
+on," I retorted.
+
+I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest
+of the way to save my life.
+
+"If there was the least little scrap--a reason even to imagine that Mr.
+Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be
+different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know
+doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to
+eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square
+meal inside o' your clothes."
+
+We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard,
+by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew
+shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait
+for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop
+track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.
+
+This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the
+turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing
+down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the
+step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the
+table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a
+reformed cow-punch'--with a record for getting out of more tight places
+with a heavy train than any other man on the division.
+
+"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy
+Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet,
+among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost
+in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."
+
+"What's that--where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like
+the pop of a whip-lash.
+
+"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the
+old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the
+far end o' that gravel track, cold _and_ dead."
+
+"When did you see her?"
+
+"Just now--comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber
+Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin'
+more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big
+as a house."
+
+"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.
+
+"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into
+the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."
+
+Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"
+
+"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."
+
+"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not
+to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"
+
+"I ain't kickin' none."
+
+"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and
+report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go
+down along and get that runaway."
+
+This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the
+gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on
+the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had
+been opened some time after the map had been made.
+
+When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his
+fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for
+town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he
+patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more
+said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen
+engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr.
+Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to
+quit; and, so far as we knew--or didn't know, rather--he had done it and
+had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.
+
+Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive
+assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more
+infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a
+train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have
+made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story
+at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.
+
+I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie--which
+wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the
+major's--when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the
+grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When
+he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a
+telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it
+was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There
+were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point:
+"What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
+
+I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr.
+Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody--the New York
+people, perhaps--had wired him that a new general manager had been
+appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our
+office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had
+become of him, _Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago_!
+
+Gee! but that brought on more talk--a whaling lot of it. I meant to find
+out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek
+wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption
+butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head
+waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came
+over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
+
+It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice
+sounded that she was mightily excited.
+
+"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she
+began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
+
+I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back
+yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient,
+"Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from
+Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the _Mountaineer_. He called the house to
+try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain
+about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
+
+That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the _Mountaineer_
+office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail,
+I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third
+floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
+
+"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper
+aside.
+
+"Yes; just a minute ago."
+
+"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One
+of our young men--Branderby--has a clue; a very slight one. He has
+discovered--in some way that he didn't care to explain over the
+phone--that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of
+a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared.
+From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in
+part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it
+entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's
+men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a
+locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"
+
+"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our
+master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in
+hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir
+about it."
+
+"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly
+muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an
+attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending
+a note to somebody at the Bullard--a note that 'would do the business,'
+was the way it was put."
+
+"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a
+running jump at the guess.
+
+"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you
+more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good
+gosh!--I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able
+to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that
+engine-rescuing trip.
+
+"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two
+flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the
+round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher
+and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were
+filling her with water.
+
+It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high
+foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the
+tender.
+
+"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could
+say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay
+for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over
+into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.
+
+Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the
+fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was
+on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light
+engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight
+piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+A Close Call
+
+
+Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight
+track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its
+good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at
+Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes,
+shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight
+was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
+
+From Banta on, we took it a bit easier--had to. The track was pretty
+crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew
+his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
+
+At the "Y" siding we stopped--without going on to the gravel track where
+Gorcher had seen the lost 1016--and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern.
+This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big
+master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in
+making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just
+the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was
+trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out
+toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as
+nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman
+when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet,
+physically.
+
+"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped
+along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find
+anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail
+connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
+
+He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there
+was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was
+still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch
+rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it
+hadn't been used in years.
+
+"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan
+said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail
+connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them
+thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came
+down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps
+there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel
+track."
+
+I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and
+its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we
+were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the
+two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter
+saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole;
+fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new
+splinter of the wood sticking up beside it--a splinter that had been
+broken out when the spike was pulled.
+
+I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there
+waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the
+saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were
+fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But
+that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the
+rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
+
+"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new
+holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track
+that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over
+them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.
+
+Kirgan didn't say a word--not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed
+rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What
+followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a
+driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen
+were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with
+his pocket tape.
+
+"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in
+the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up
+and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.
+
+Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with
+Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing
+was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way
+cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained
+anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going,
+but we were on our way.
+
+I suppose we poked along into the black heart of the Timber range for as
+much as five or six miles before the engine headlight showed us the
+remains of the old saw-mill camp lying in a little pocket-like valley
+from the sides of which all the mill timber had been cut. The camp had
+been long deserted. There were perhaps a dozen shacks of all sizes and
+shapes, and with a single exception they were all dilapidated and
+dismantled, some with the roofs falling in.
+
+The one exception was the stout log building which had probably served
+as the mill-gang commissary and store. It stood a little back on the
+slope, and was on the opposite side of the creek from the mill site and
+sleeping-shacks. The ties at this end of the line were so rotten with
+age that our engine was grinding a good half of them to powder as she
+edged up, and a little below the switch that had formerly led in to the
+mill, Kirgan gave Gorcher the stop signal.
+
+After we had piled off, there wasn't any question raised as to what we
+should do. Kirgan had taken a hammer from Gorcher's tool-box, and he was
+the one who led the way straight across the little creek and up the hill
+to the commissary. I had the lantern, but it wasn't needed. From where
+the engine was standing, the headlight flooded the whole gulch basin
+with its electric beam, picking out every detail of the deserted
+saw-mill camp.
+
+When we reached the log commissary we found the windows all boarded up
+and the door fastened with a strong hasp and a bright new brass
+padlock--the only new thing in sight. Kirgan swung his hammer just once
+and the lock went spinning off down the slope and fell with a splash
+into the creek. Then he pushed the door open with his foot, and shoved
+in; and for just one half-second I was afraid to follow--afraid of what
+we might find in that gloomy looking log warehouse, with its blinded
+windows and locked door.
+
+I thank the good Lord I had my scare for nothing. While I was nerving
+myself and stumbling over the threshold behind Kirgan with the lantern,
+I heard the boss's voice, and it wasn't the voice of any dead man, not
+by a long shot! From what he said, and the way he was trimming it up
+with hot ones, it was evident that he took us for some other crowd that
+he'd been cussing out before.
+
+The light of the lantern showed us a long room, bare of furnishings, and
+dark and musty from having been shut up so tight. In the far end there
+were a couple of bunks built against the log wall. On what had once been
+the counter of the commissary there was a lot of canned stuff and a box
+of crackers that had been broken open, and on a bench by the door there
+was a bucket of water and a tin cup.
+
+The boss was sitting up in one of the bunks, and he was still tearing
+off language in strips at us when we closed in on him. He recognized
+Kirgan first, and then Gorcher. I guess he couldn't see me very well
+because I was holding the lantern. When he found out who we were, he
+stopped swearing and got up out of the bunk to put his hand on Mart
+Kirgan's shoulder. That was the only break he made to show that he was a
+man, like the rest of us. The next minute he was the Big Boss again,
+rapping out his orders as if he had just pushed his desk button to call
+us in.
+
+"You've got an engine here, I suppose?" he snapped, at Kirgan. "Then
+we'll get out of this quick. What day of the week is it?"
+
+I told him it was Friday, and by his asking that, I knew he must have
+been so roughly handled that he had lost count of time. The next order
+was shot at the two firemen.
+
+"You boys kick that packing-box to pieces and then pull the straw out of
+that bunk and touch a match to it. We'll make sure that they'll never
+lock anybody else up in this damned dog-hole."
+
+The two young huskies obeyed the order promptly. In half a minute the
+dry slab stuff that the bunks were built of was ablaze and the boss
+herded us to the door. In the open he stopped and looked around as if he
+had half a mind to burn the rest of the deserted lumber camp, but if he
+had any such notion he thought better of it, and a minute or so later we
+were all climbing into the cab of the waiting engine.
+
+I had one last glimpse of the commissary as Gorcher released the air and
+the backing engine slid away around the first curve. It was sweating
+smoke through the split-shingle roof, and the open door framed a square
+of lurid crimson. I guess the boss was right. "They," whoever they were,
+wouldn't ever lock anybody else up in that particular shack.
+
+We had to run so slowly down the old track to the "Y" that there was
+plenty of chance for the boss to talk, if he had wanted to. But
+apparently he didn't want to. He sat on the fireman's seat, with an arm
+back of me to hold me on, just as Kirgan had sat on the way up, and
+never opened his head except once to ask me what was the matter with my
+wrapped-up hand. When I told him, he made no comment, and didn't speak
+again until we had stopped on the leg of the "Y" to let Kirgan and his
+three helpers put the borrowed rails back into place. That left just the
+two of us in the cab, and I thought maybe he would tell me some of the
+particulars, but he didn't. Instead, he made me tell him.
+
+"You say it's Friday," he began abruptly. "What's been going on since
+Monday night, Jimmie?"
+
+I boiled it down for him into just as few words as possible; about the
+letter he had left for Mr. Van Britt, how everybody thought he had
+resigned, how Mrs. Sheila and the major were two of the few who weren't
+willing to believe it, how Mr. Chadwick had been out of reach, how the
+railroad outfit was flopping around like a chicken with its head chopped
+off, how President Dunton had appointed a new general manager who was
+expected now on any train, how Gorcher had discovered the lost 1016 on
+the old disused gravel-pit track a mile below us, and, to wind up with,
+I slipped him Mr. Chadwick's telegram which had come just as I was
+finishing my supper in the Bullard grill-room, and those two others that
+had come on the knock-out night, and which had been in my pocket ever
+since.
+
+He heard me through without saying a word, and when I gave him the
+telegrams he read them by the light of the gauge lamp--also without
+saying anything. But when the men had the "Y" rails replaced he took
+hold of things again with a jerk.
+
+"Kirgan, you'll want to see to getting that dead engine out of the
+gravel pit yourself. Take one of the firemen and go to it. It's a short
+mile and you can walk it. Jimmie and I want to get back to Portal City
+in a hurry, and Gorcher will take us." And then to Gorcher: "We'll run
+to Banta ahead of Number Eighteen and get orders there. Move lively,
+Billy; time's precious."
+
+The orders were carried out precisely as they were given. Kirgan took
+one of the huskies and tramped off in the darkness down the main line,
+and Gorcher, turning our engine on the "Y," headed back east. This time
+he wasn't so awfully careful of the curves and sags as he had been
+coming up, and we made Banta at a record clip. While he was in the Banta
+wire office, getting orders for Portal City, Mr. Norcross took the
+time-card out of its cage in the cab and fell to studying it by the
+light of the gauge lamp. Gorcher came back pretty soon with his
+clearance, which gave him the right to run to Arroyo as first section of
+Number Eighteen.
+
+The boss blew up like a Roman candle when he saw that train order. It
+meant that we were to take the siding at Arroyo with the freight that
+was just behind us, and wait there for the westbound "Flyer," the
+"Flyer" being due in Portal City from the east at 9:15, and due to leave
+there, coming west, at 9:20. I didn't realize at the moment why the boss
+was so sizzling anxious to cut out the delay which would be imposed on
+us by the wait at Arroyo, but the anxiety was there, all right.
+
+"Billy, it's eighteen miles to Portal, and you've got twenty minutes to
+make it against the 'Flyer's' leaving time," he ripped out. "Can you do
+it?"
+
+Gorcher said he could, if he didn't have to lose any more time getting
+his order changed.
+
+"Let her go!" snapped the boss. "I'm taking all the responsibility."
+
+That was enough for Gorcher, and the way we hustled out of the Banta
+yard was a caution. By the time we hit the last set of switches the old
+"Pacific-type" was lurching like a ship at sea, and once out on the long
+grass-country tangents she went like a shot out of a gun. Of course,
+with nothing to pull but her own weight she had plenty of steam, and all
+Gorcher had to do was to keep her from choking herself with too much of
+it.
+
+He did it to the queen's taste; and in exactly eight minutes out of
+Banta we tore over the switches at Arroyo. That left us ten miles to go,
+and twelve minutes in which to make them. It looked pretty easy, and it
+would have been if the night crew hadn't been switching in the lower
+Portal City yard when we finished the race and Gorcher was whistling for
+the town stop. There was a hold-out of perhaps two minutes while the
+shifter was getting out of our way, and when we finally went clattering
+up through the yard, the "Flyer," a few minutes late, was just pulling
+in from the opposite direction.
+
+A yardman let us in on the spur at the end of the headquarters building,
+and the boss was off in half a jiffy. "Come along with me, Jimmie," he
+commanded quickly, and I couldn't imagine why he was in such a tearing
+hurry. Pushing through the platform crowd, made up of people who were
+getting off the "Flyer" and those who were waiting to get on, he led the
+way straight up-stairs to our offices.
+
+Of course, there was nobody there at that time of night, and the place
+was all dark until we switched the electrics on. There was a little
+lavatory off the third room of the suite, and Mr. Norcross went in and
+washed his face and hands. In a minute or two he came out, put on his
+office coat, opened up his desk, lighted a cigar and sat down at the
+desk as though he had just come in from a late dinner at the club. And
+still he had me guessing.
+
+The guess didn't have to wait long. While I was making a bluff at
+uncovering my typewriter and getting ready for business there was a
+heavy step in the hall, and a red-faced, portly gentleman with fat eyes
+and little close-cropped English side-whiskers came bulging in. He had a
+light top-coat on his arm, and his tan gloves were an exact match for
+his spats.
+
+"Good evening," he said, nodding sort of brusquely at the boss. "I'm
+looking for the general manager's office."
+
+"You've found it," said the boss, crisply.
+
+The tan-gloved gentleman looked first at me and then at Mr. Norcross.
+
+"You are the chief clerk, perhaps?" he suggested, pitching the query in
+the general direction of the big desk.
+
+"Hardly," was the curt rejoinder. "My name is Norcross. What can I do
+for you?"
+
+If I didn't hate slang so bad, I should say that the portly man looked
+as if he were going to throw a fit.
+
+"Not--not Graham Norcross?" he stammered.
+
+"Well, yes; I am 'Graham'--to my friends. Anything else?"
+
+The portly gentleman subsided into a chair.
+
+"There is some misunderstanding about this," he said, his voice
+thickening a little--with anger, I thought. "My name is Dismuke, and I
+am the general manager of this railroad."
+
+"I wouldn't dispute the name, but your title is away off," said Mr.
+Norcross, as cool as a handful of dry snow. "Who appointed you, if I may
+ask?"
+
+"President Dunton and the board of directors, of course."
+
+"The same authority appointed me, something like three months ago," was
+the calm reply. "So far as I know, I am still at the head of the
+company's staff in Portal City."
+
+The gentleman who had named himself Dismuke puffed out his cheeks and
+looked as if he were about to explode.
+
+"This is a devil of a mess!" he rapped out. "I understood--we all
+understood in New York--that you had resigned!"
+
+"Well, I haven't," retorted the boss shortly. And then he stuck the
+knife in good and deep and twisted it around. "There is a commercial
+telegraph wire in the Hotel Bullard, where I suppose you will put up,
+Mr. Dismuke, and I'm sure you will find it entirely at your service. If
+you have anything further to say to me I hope it will keep until after
+this office opens in the morning. I am very busy, just now."
+
+I mighty nearly gasped. This Dismuke was the new general manager,
+appointed, doubtless in all good faith, by the president and sent out
+to take charge of things. And here was the boss practically ordering him
+out of the office--telling him that his room was better than his
+company!
+
+The portly man got out of his chair, puffing like a steam-engine.
+
+"We'll see about this!" he threatened. "You've been here three months
+and you haven't done anything but muddle things until the stock of the
+company isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on! If I can
+get a clear wire to New York, you'll have word from President Dunton
+to-morrow morning telling you where you get off!"
+
+To this Mr. Norcross made no reply whatever, and the heavy-footed
+gentleman stumped out, saying things to himself that wouldn't look very
+well in print. When the hall door below gave a big slam to let us know
+that he was still going, the boss looked across at me with a sour grin
+wrinkling around his eyes.
+
+"Now you know why I made Gorcher break all the rules of the service
+getting here, Jimmie," he said. "From what you told me down yonder on
+the old 'Y,' I gathered that my successor was not yet on the ground, but
+that he was likely to be at any minute. That's why I wanted to beat the
+'Flyer' in. Possession is nine points of the law, and in this case it
+was rather important that Mr. Dismuke shouldn't find the outfit without
+a head and these offices of ours unoccupied." He rose, stretched his
+arms over his head like a tired boy, and reached for the golf cap he
+kept to wear when he went out to knock around in the shops and yard.
+"Let's go up to the hotel and see if we can break into the café, Jimmie,"
+he finished up. "Later on, we'll wire Mr. Chadwick; but that can wait.
+I haven't had a square meal in four days."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+The Machine
+
+
+With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess
+there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all
+along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back
+on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally,
+because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt
+there was plenty of it: the more since the boss--a bit grimmer than
+usual--hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members
+of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke
+over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but
+these were all in the family, too, as you might say.
+
+After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent
+a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President
+Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr.
+Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our
+track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all
+the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump
+themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.
+
+We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the
+tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him
+occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table
+with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess
+he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying
+on made it look as if there might be more to follow.
+
+I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that
+Branderby, the _Mountaineer_ reporter, had given us and tear loose on
+the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the
+first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the
+new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business,
+and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.
+
+Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about
+selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage & Warehouse people
+after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and
+the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes,
+and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. & W. with all sorts of legal
+obstacles.
+
+Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions
+were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a
+week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around
+and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. & W. folks, out of jail
+for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he
+could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side
+could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the
+local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case
+out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.
+
+Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days,
+as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we
+acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow
+named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in
+from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an
+"extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his
+being sent out to relieve anybody.
+
+I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort,
+and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped
+in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man
+who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and
+a half farther than he had bargained to.
+
+"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket,"
+he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the
+boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're
+stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is
+only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens'
+Storage & Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the
+Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."
+
+"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about
+our C. S. & W. friends? Are they still game?"
+
+"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host
+in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out
+and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere,
+now, and C. S. & W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I
+venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the
+different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this
+moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original
+scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."
+
+The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his
+cigar, which had gone out.
+
+"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is
+not mine?" he said, after a little pause.
+
+"Not yours?"
+
+"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman
+who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white
+elephants."
+
+"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a
+tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere
+lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."
+
+"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt
+in his voice that fairly made me sick--knowing what I did; and knowing
+that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About
+the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had
+Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"
+
+"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the
+bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."
+
+The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the
+catch against interruptions.
+
+"Let's have it," he directed.
+
+Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the
+engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower
+Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all
+the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An
+election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be
+whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution
+was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger
+would vanish.
+
+Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been
+ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political
+headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been
+turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's
+gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot
+climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept
+our messages and keep in touch.
+
+The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an
+anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang
+of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard
+for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail,
+which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for
+it--as he did, when the time came--and go in person to stop the raid, he
+was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to
+be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a
+fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President
+Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the
+night.
+
+"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been
+listening soberly while the lawyer talked.
+
+"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer.
+The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona
+accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands
+overnight in the same place--on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence,
+it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk
+with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of
+the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr.
+Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped
+wires."
+
+Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
+
+"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"
+
+"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in
+on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent
+you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place,
+and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew
+very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be
+your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they
+would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and
+would stay off until the other man could take hold."
+
+"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I
+haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to
+find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's
+recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley.
+Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line
+as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."
+
+"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.
+
+"Oh, yes; you have it all--or practically all. I fell for the anonymous
+letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily,
+ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment.
+The obvious thing to do--if any attention whatever was to be paid to the
+anonymous warning--was to telephone the police and the round-house. I
+did neither because I thought it might be too slow. The letter was
+urgent, of course; it said that Black Ike Bradley and his gang were
+already in the railroad yard, preparing to steal the engine."
+
+"So you made a straight shoot for the scene of action?"
+
+"I did; down the back streets and across the lower end of the plaza. As
+it appeared--or rather as it was made to appear--I was barely in time.
+There were men at the engine, and when I sprinted across the yard they
+were ready to move it out to the main line. I yelled at them and ran
+in."
+
+"You must have been beautifully rattled; to go up against a gang of
+thugs that way, alone and unarmed," was the lawyer's comment.
+
+"I was," the boss confessed soberly. "Of course, I didn't have a ghost
+of a show. Three of them tackled me the moment I came within reach. I
+got one of the three on the point of the jaw, and they had to leave him
+behind; but there were enough more of them. Before I fairly realized
+what was happening, they had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey,
+gagged with my own handkerchief, and loaded into the cab of the engine.
+From that on, it was all plain sailing."
+
+"Then they took you to the old lumber camp?"
+
+"As fast as the engine could be made to turn her wheels. They were
+running against the Mail, and they knew it. Arroyo has no night
+operator, and when we sneaked through the Banta yard and past the
+station, the operator there was asleep. I saw him, with his head in the
+crook of his arm, at the telegraph table in the bay window as we
+passed."
+
+Ripley grinned. "We've been giving that young fellow the third
+degree--Van Britt and I. He claims that he was doped; that somebody
+dropped something into his supper coffee at the station lunch counter.
+His story didn't hang together and Van Britt fired him. But go on."
+
+"We ran out to the Timber Mountain 'Y'," the boss resumed, "and from
+that on up the old saw-mill line. The rail connections were all in
+place, and I knew from this that preparations had been made beforehand.
+At the mill stop they untied my legs and made me walk up the hill to the
+commissary. When they took the gag out, I said a few things and asked
+them what they were going to do with me. They wouldn't tell me anything
+except that I was to be locked up for a few days."
+
+"You knew what that meant?"
+
+"Perfectly. My drop-out would be made to look as if I had jumped the
+job, and Dunton would appoint a new man. After that, I could come back,
+if I wanted to. Whatever I might do or try to do would cut no figure,
+and no explanation I could make would be believed. I had most obligingly
+dug my own official grave, and there could be no resurrection."
+
+"What then?" pressed Ripley, keenly interested, as anybody could see.
+
+"When they took the clothes-line from my arms there was another scrap.
+It didn't do any good. They got the door shut on me and got it locked.
+After that, for four solid days, Ripley, I was made to realize how
+little it takes to hold a man. I had my pocket-knife, but I couldn't
+whittle my way out. The floor puncheons were spiked down, and I couldn't
+dig out. They had taken all my matches, and I couldn't burn the place. I
+tried the stick-rubbing, and all those things you read about: they're
+fakes; I couldn't get even the smell of smoke."
+
+"The chimney?"
+
+"There wasn't any. They had heated the place, when it was a commissary,
+with a stove, and the pipe hole through the ceiling had a piece of sheet
+iron nailed over it. And I couldn't get to the roof at all. They had
+me."
+
+Ripley nodded and said, snappy-like: "Well, we've got them now--any time
+you give the word. Tarbell has a pinch on one of the Clanahan men and he
+will turn State's evidence. We can railroad every one of those fellows
+who carried you off."
+
+"And the men higher up?" queried the boss.
+
+"No; not yet."
+
+"Then we'll drop it right where it is. I don't want the hired tools; no
+one of them, unless you can get the devil that crippled Jimmie Dodds,
+here."
+
+They went on, talking about my burn-up. Listening in, I learned for the
+first time just how it had been done. Tarbell, through his hold upon the
+welshing Clanahan striker, had got the details at second-hand. Hatch's
+assassin--or Clanahan's--must have had it all doped out and made ready
+before Hatch had made the break at trying to bribe me.
+
+Anyway, a lead had been taken from a power wire at the corner of the
+street and hooked over the outer door-knob. And inside I had been given
+a sheet of copper to stand on for a good "ground," the copper itself
+being wired to a water pipe running up through the hall. Tarbell had
+afterward proved up on all this, it seemed, finding the insulated wire
+and the copper sheet with its connections hidden in a small rubbish
+closet under the hall stair, just where a fellow in a hurry might chuck
+them.
+
+"Tarbell is a striking success," Mr. Norcross put in, along at the end
+of things. "We'll keep him on with us, Ripley."
+
+"You'd better," said the level-eyed young attorney, significantly. "From
+the way things are stacking up, you'll presently need a personal
+body-guard. I suppose it's no use asking you to carry a gun?"
+
+"Hardly," laughed the boss. "I've never done it yet, and it's pretty
+late in the day to begin."
+
+Past this there was a little more talk about the C. S. & W. deal, and
+about what the Hatch crowd would be likely to try next; and when it was
+finished, and Ripley was reaching for his hat, the boss said: "There is
+no change in the orders: we've got 'em going now, and we'll keep 'em
+going. Drive it, Ripley; drive it for every ounce there is in you. Never
+mind the election talk or the stock quotations. This railroad is going
+to be honest, if it never earns another net dollar. We'll win!"
+
+"It's beginning to look a little that way, now," the lawyer admitted,
+with his hand on the door knob. "Just the same, Norcross, there is
+safety in numbers, and our numbers are precisely one; one man"--holding
+up a single finger. "As before, the pyramid is standing on its head--and
+you are the head. The other people have shown us once what happens when
+you are removed. For God's sake, be careful!"
+
+I don't know whether the boss took that last bit of advice to heart or
+not. If he didn't, he was a bigger man than even I had been taking him
+for--with the crooks of a whole State reaching out for him, and with the
+knowledge which he must have had, that the next time they came gunning
+for him they'd shoot to kill.
+
+It was late in the afternoon when Ripley made his visit, and pretty soon
+after he went away the boss and I closed up our end of the shop and left
+May pecking away at his typewriter on a lot of routine stuff. I don't
+know what made me do it, but as I was passing Fred's desk on the way
+out, stringing along behind the boss, I stopped and jerked open one of
+the drawers. I knew beforehand what was in the drawer, and pointed to
+it--a new .38 automatic. Fred nodded, and I slipped the gun into my
+left-hand pocket, wondering as I did it, if I could make out to hit the
+broad side of a barn, shooting with that hand, if I had to.
+
+A half-minute later I had caught up with Mr. Norcross, and together we
+left the building and went up to the Bullard for dinner.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+In the Coal Yard
+
+
+I knew, just as well as could be--without being able to prove it--that
+we were shadowed on the trip up from the railroad building to the hotel,
+and it made me nervous. There could be only one reason now for any such
+dogging of the boss. The grafters were not trying to find out what he
+was doing; they didn't need to, because he was advertising his
+doings--or Juneman was--in the newspapers. What they were trying to do
+was to catch him off his guard and do him up--this time to stay done up.
+
+It was safe to assume that they wouldn't fumble the ball a second time.
+Mr. Ripley had stood the thing fairly on its feet when he said that our
+campaign was purely a one-man proposition, so far as it had yet gone.
+People who had met the boss and had done business with him liked him;
+but the old-time prejudice against the railroad was so widespread and so
+bitter that it couldn't be overcome all at once. Juneman, our publicity
+man, was doing his best, but as yet we had no party following in the
+State at large which would stand by us and see that we got justice.
+
+I was chewing these things over while we sat at dinner in the Bullard
+café, and I guess Mr. Norcross was, too, for he didn't say much. It
+isn't altogether comfortable to be a marked man in a more or less
+unfriendly country, and I shouldn't wonder if the boss, big and
+masterful as he was, felt the pressure of it. I don't know whether he
+knew anything about the shadowing business I speak of or not, but he
+might have. We hadn't more than given our dinner order when one of
+Hatch's clerks, a cock-eyed chap named Kestler, came in and took a table
+just far enough from ours to be out of the way, and near enough to
+listen in if we said anything.
+
+When we finished, Kestler was just getting his service of ice-cream; but
+I noticed that he left it untouched and got up and followed us to the
+lobby. It made me hot enough to want to turn on him and knock his
+crooked eye out, but of course, that wouldn't have done any good.
+
+After Mr. Norcross had bought some cigars at the stand he said he
+guessed he'd run out to Major Kendrick's for a little while; and with
+that he went up to his rooms. Though the major was the one he named, I
+knew he meant that he was going to see Mrs. Sheila. I remembered what he
+had said to Ripley about a woman's giving him germ ideas and such
+things, and I guess it was really so. Every time he spent an evening at
+the major's he'd come back with a lot of new notions for popularizing
+the Short Line.
+
+When he said that, about going out to the major's, Kestler was near
+enough to overhear it, and so he waited, lounging in the lobby and
+pretending to read a paper. About half-past seven the boss came down and
+asked me to call a taxi for him. I did it; and Kestler loafed around
+just long enough to see him start off. Then he lit out, himself, and
+something in the way he did it made me take out after him.
+
+I expected to see him turn up-town to the second cross street where the
+Red Tower had its general offices on the fourth floor of the Empire
+Building. But instead, he turned the other way, and the first thing I
+knew I was trailing him through the railroad yard and on down past the
+freight house toward the big, fenced-in, Red Tower coal yards.
+
+At the coal yard he let himself in through a wicket in the wagon gates,
+and I noticed that he used a key and locked the wicket after he got
+inside. I put my eye to a crack in the high stockade fence and saw that
+the little shack office that was used for a scale-house was lighted up.
+My burnt hand was healing tolerably well by this time and I could use it
+a little. There was a slack pile just outside of the big gate, and by
+climbing to the top of it I got over the fence and crept up to the
+scale-house.
+
+A small window in one end of the shack, opened about two inches at the
+bottom, answered well enough for a peep-hole. Three men were in the
+little box of a place--three besides Kestler; Hatch, his barrel-bodied
+partner, Henckel, and one other. The third man looked like a glorified
+barkeep'. He was of the type I have heard called "black Irish," fat,
+sleek, and well-fed, with little pin-point black eyes half buried in the
+flesh of his round face, and the padded jaw and double chin shaved to
+the blue. The night was warm and he had his hat off. Through the crack
+in the window I could smell the pomatum with which his hair was
+plastered into barkeep' waves to match the tightly curled black
+mustaches.
+
+I knew this third man well enough, by sight; everybody in Portal City
+knew him--decent people only too well when it came to an election
+tussle. He was the redoubtable Pete Clanahan, dive-keeper, and political
+boss.
+
+Kestler was talking when I glued eye and ear to the window crack; was
+telling the three how he had shadowed Mr. Norcross from the railroad
+headquarters to the Bullard, and how he stayed around until he had seen
+the boss take a taxi for Major Kendrick's. This seemed to be all that
+was wanted of him, for when he was through, Hatch told him he might go
+home. After the cock-eyed clerk was gone, Hatch lighted a fresh cigar
+and put it squarely up to the Irishman.
+
+"It's no use being mealy-mouthed over this thing, Pete," he grated in
+that saw-mill voice of his. "We've got to get rid of this man. You've
+asked us to shadow him and keep you posted, and we have--and you've done
+nothing. Every day's delay gives him that much better hold. We can choke
+him off by littles in the business game, of course; we have Dunton and
+the New Yorkers on our side, and this coöperative scheme he has launched
+can be broken down with money. Such things never hold together very
+long. But that doesn't help you political people out; and your stake in
+the game is even bigger than ours."
+
+Clanahan looked around the little dog-kennel of a place suspiciously.
+
+"'Tis not here that we can talk much about thim things, Misther Hatch,"
+he said cautiously.
+
+"Why not?" was the rasping question. "There's nobody in the yard, and
+the gates are locked. It's a damned sight safer than a back room in one
+of your dives--as we know now to our cost."
+
+Clanahan threw up his head with a gesture that said much. "Murphy's the
+man that leaked on that engine job--and he'll leak no more."
+
+"Well," said Hatch, with growing irritation, "what are you holding back
+for now? We stood to win on the first play, and we would have won if
+your people hadn't balled it by talking too much. One more day and
+Dismuke would have been in the saddle. That would have settled it."
+
+"Yah; and Mister Dismuke still here in Portal City remains," put in
+Henckel.
+
+The dive-keeper locked his pudgy fingers across a cocked knee.
+
+"'Tis foine, brave gintlemen ye are, you two, whin ye've got somebody
+else to pull th' nuts out av th' fire for ye!" he said. "Ye'd have us
+croak this felly f'r ye, and thin ye'd stand back and wash yer hands
+while some poor divil wint to th' rope f'r it. Where do we come in, is
+what I'd like to know?"
+
+"You are already in," snapped Hatch. "You know what the Big Fellow at
+the capital thinks about it, and where you'll stand in the coming
+election if you don't put out this fire that Norcross is kindling.
+You're yellow, Clanahan. That's all that is the matter with you. Put
+your wits to work. There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking
+it to death with butter."
+
+"Tell me wan thing!" insisted the dive-keeper, boring the chief grafter
+with his pin-point eyes. "Do you stand f'r it if we do this thing up
+right?"
+
+Hatch's eyes fell, and Henckel's big body twisted uneasily in the chair
+that was groaning under his beer-barrel weight. There was silence for a
+little space, and I could feel the cold sweat starting out all over me.
+I hadn't dreamed of stumbling upon anything like this when I started
+out to shadow Kestler. They were actually plotting to murder the boss!
+
+It was Hatch who broke the stillness.
+
+"It's up to you, Clanahan, and you know it," he declared. "You've had
+your tip from the Big Fellow. The railroad people must be made to get
+into the fight in the coming election, and get in on the right side. If
+they don't; and if Norcross stays and keeps his fire burning; you
+fellows lose out. So shall we; but what we lose will be a mere drop in
+the bucket; and, as I have said, we stand to get it back, after this
+coöperative scheme has had time to burn itself out."
+
+Clanahan sat back in his chair and shoved his hands into his pockets.
+
+"Ye'd sthring me as if I was a boy!" he scoffed. "'Tis your own game
+fr'm first to last. D'ye think I'm not knowing that? 'Tis bread and
+butther and th' big rake-off for you, and little ye care how th'
+election goes. Suppose we'd croak this man in th' hot par-rt av th'
+p'litical fight; what happens? Half th' noospaypers in th' State'd play
+him up f'r a martyr to th' cause av good governmint, and we'd all go to
+hell in a hand-basket!"
+
+I was cramped and sore and one of my legs had gone to sleep, but I
+couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. My heart was skipping beats
+right along while I waited for Hatch's answer. When it came, the
+drumming in my ears pretty nearly made me lose it.
+
+"Clanahan," he began, as cold as an icicle. "I didn't get you down here
+to argue with you. We've got your number--all your different
+numbers--and they are written down in a book. You've bungled this thing
+once, and for that reason you've got it to do over again. We haven't
+asked you to 'croak' anybody, as you put it, and we are not asking it
+now."
+
+"'Tis domned little you lack av asking it," retorted the dive-keeper.
+
+"Listen," said Hatch, leaning forward with his hands on his knees.
+"Besides keeping cases on Norcross here, we've been digging back into
+his record a few lines. Every man has his sore spot, if you can only
+find it, Clanahan--just as you have yours. What if I should tell you
+that Norcross is wanted in another State--for a crime?"
+
+"Nobody would believe ut," was the prompt rejoinder. "If he's wanted he
+c'u'd be had."
+
+"Wait," Hatch went on. "Before he came here he was chief of construction
+on the Oregon Midland. There was a right-of-way fight back in the
+mountains--fifty miles from the nearest sheriff--with the P. & S. F.
+Norcross armed his track-layers, and in the bluffing there was a man
+killed."
+
+Though it was a warm night, as I have said, the cold chills began to
+chase themselves up and down my back. What Hatch said was perfectly
+true. In the right-of-way scrap he was talking about, there had been a
+few wild shots fired, and one of them had found a P. & S. F. grade
+laborer. I don't believe anybody had ever really blamed the boss for it.
+He had given strict orders that we were only to make a show of force;
+and, besides, the other fellows were armed, too, and had armed first.
+But there _had_ been a man killed.
+
+While I was shivering, Clanahan said: "Well, what av it?"
+
+"Norcross was responsible for that man's death. If he was having trouble
+over his right-of-way, his recourse was to the law, and he took the law
+into his own hands. Nothing was ever done about it, because nobody took
+the trouble to prosecute. A week ago we sent a man to Oregon to look up
+the facts. He succeeded in finding a brother of the dead man, and a
+warrant has now been sworn out for Norcross's arrest."
+
+"Well?" said Clanahan again. "Ye have the sthring in yer own hand; why
+don't ye pull it?"
+
+"That's where you come in," was the answer. "The Oregon justice issued
+the warrant because it was demanded, but he refused to incur, for his
+county, the expense of sending a deputy sheriff to another State, or to
+take the necessary steps to have Norcross extradited. If Norcross could
+be produced in court, he would try him and either discharge him or bind
+him over, as the facts might warrant. He took his stand upon the ground
+that Norcross was only technically responsible, and told the brother
+that in all probability nothing would come of an attempt to prosecute."
+
+"Thin ye've got nothing on him, after all," the Irishman grunted.
+
+"Yes," Hatch came back; "we have the warrant, and, in addition to that,
+we have you, Pete. A word from you to the Portal City police
+headquarters, and our man finds himself arrested and locked up--to wait
+for a requisition from the Governor of Oregon."
+
+"But you said th' requisition wouldn't come," Clanahan put in.
+
+Hatch was sitting back now and stroking his ugly jaw.
+
+"It might come, Pete, if it had to: there's no knowing. In the meantime
+we get delay. There'll be _habeas corpus_ proceedings, of course, to get
+him out of jail, but there's where you'll come in again; you've got your
+own man in for City Attorney. And, after all, the delay is all we need.
+With Norcross in trouble, and in jail on a charge of murder, the
+railroad ship'll go on the rocks in short order. The Norcross management
+is having plenty of trouble--wrecks and the like. With Norcross locked
+up, New York will be heard from, and Dismuke will step in and clean
+house. That will wind up the reform spasm."
+
+"'Tis a small chance," growled the chief of the ward heelers. "Th'
+high-brow vote is stirrin', and there'll be some to say it's
+persecution--and say it where it'll be heard. I'll talk it over with the
+Big Fellow."
+
+Again Hatch leaned forward and put his hands on his knees.
+
+"You'll do nothing of the sort, Pete. You'll act, and act on your own
+responsibility. If you don't, somebody may wire the sheriff of Silver
+Bow County, Montana, that the man he knew in Butte as Michael Clancy
+is...."
+
+The dive-keeper put up both hands as if to ward off a blow.
+
+"'Tis enough," he mumbled, speaking as if he had a bunch of dry cotton
+in his mouth. "Slip me th' warrant."
+
+Hatch went to a small safe and worked the combination. When the door was
+opened he passed a folded paper to Clanahan. Through all this talk,
+Henckel had said nothing, and I suspected that Hatch had him there
+solely for safety's sake, and to provide a witness. With the paper in
+his pocket, Clanahan got up to go. It was time for me to make a move.
+
+It's curious how an idea will sometimes lay hold of you and knock out
+reason and common sense and everything else. Clanahan had in his pocket
+a piece of paper that simply meant ruin to Mr. Norcross, and the blowing
+up of all the plans that had been made and all the work that had been
+done. If he should be allowed to get up-town with that warrant, the end
+of everything would be in sight. But how was I to prevent it?
+
+I saw where the Irishman had put the warrant; in the right-hand, outside
+pocket of his coat. The pocket wasn't deep enough, and about an inch of
+the folded paper showed white against the black of his coat. The three
+men were on their feet, and Hatch was reaching for the wall switch which
+controlled the single incandescent lamp hanging from the ceiling of the
+scale-house. If I could only think of some way to blow the place up and
+snatch the paper in the confusion.
+
+Up to that minute I had never thought once of the pistol I had taken
+from Fred May's drawer, though it was still sagging in my left hip
+pocket. When I did think of it I dragged it out with some silly notion
+of trying to hold the three men up at the door of the shack as they came
+out. Hatch's stop to light a cigar and to hand out a couple to the
+other two gave me time to chuck that notion and grab another. With the
+muzzle of the automatic resting in the crack of the opened window I took
+dead aim at the incandescent lamp in the ceiling and turned her loose
+for the whole magazineful.
+
+Since the first bullet got the lamp and left the place black dark, I
+couldn't see what was happening in the close little room. But whatever
+it was, there was plenty of it. I could hear them gasping and yelling
+and knocking one another down as they fought to get the door open.
+Sticking the empty pistol back into my pocket I jumped to get action,
+hurting my sore hand like the mischief in doing it.
+
+Hatch was the first man out, but the big German was so close a second
+that he knocked his smaller partner down and fell over him. Clanahan
+kept his feet. He had a gun in his hand that looked to me, in the
+darkness, as big as a cannon. I was flattened against the side of the
+scale shack, and when the dive-keeper tried to side-step around the two
+fallen men who were blocking the way, I snatched the folded paper from
+his pocket; snatched it and ran as if the dickens was after me.
+
+That was a bad move--the runaway. If I had kept still there might have
+been a chance for me to make a sneak. But when I ran, and fell over a
+pile of loose coal, and got up and ran again, they were all three after
+me, Clanahan taking blind shots in the dark with his cannon as he came.
+
+Naturally, I made straight for the wagon gate, and forgot, until I was
+right there, that it, and the wicket through one of the leaves, were
+both locked. As I shook the wicket, a bullet from Clanahan's gun spatted
+into the woodwork and stuck a splinter into my hand, and I turned and
+sprinted again, this time for the gates where the coal cars were pushed
+in from the railroad yard. These, too, were shut and locked, and when I
+ducked under the nearest gondola I realized that I was trapped. Before I
+could climb the high fence anywhere, they'd get me.
+
+They came up, all three of them, puffing and blowing, while I was hiding
+under the gondola.
+
+"It's probably that cow-boy spotter of Norcross's, but he can't get
+away," Hatch was gritting--meaning Tarbell, probably. "The gates are
+locked and we can plug him if he tries to climb the fence. There's a gun
+in the scale-house. You two look under these cars while I go and get
+it!"
+
+It was up to me to move again. Henckel was striking matches and holding
+them so that Clanahan could look under the cars, and I could feel, in
+anticipation, the shock of a bullet from the big gun in the
+dive-keeper's fat fist as I crawled cautiously out on the far side.
+Creeping along behind the string of coal cars I came presently to the
+great gantry crane used for unloading the fuel. It was a huge traveling
+machine, straddling the tracks and a good part of the yard, and the
+clam-shell grab-bucket was down, resting on its two lips on the ground.
+
+At first I thought of climbing to the frame-work of the crane and trying
+to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the
+clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze
+in. If they were looking for a full-sized man--Tarbell, for instance,
+who was as husky as a farm-hand--they'd never think of that crack in the
+bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped
+opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the
+clam-shell.
+
+That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they
+combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch
+had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man
+might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.
+
+As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the
+three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack
+between the bucket halves and touched them.
+
+"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel.
+And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"
+
+Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner
+or later.
+
+"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."
+
+Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And
+I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out
+when he whirled upon the Irishman.
+
+"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a
+thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this
+country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And
+what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a
+belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and
+wanting to know what all the shooting was about.
+
+It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in
+silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all
+bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and
+make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done.
+With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance
+offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of
+murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal
+tangle and had put him in peril of his life.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+The Man at the Window
+
+
+Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in
+the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy
+enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say
+much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask
+the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland
+right-of-way squabble.
+
+But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning
+up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it
+that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding
+Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know
+anything about that part of it--he was such a square fighter himself
+that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.
+
+Meanwhile, things grew warmer and warmer in the tussle we were making to
+pull the old Short Line out of the mud; warmer in a number of ways,
+because, in addition to the fight for the public confidence, we began
+just then to have a perfect epidemic of wrecks.
+
+The boss turned the material trouble over to Mr. Van Britt and devoted
+himself pretty strictly to the public side of things. Everywhere, and on
+every occasion--at dinners at the different chambers of commerce, and
+public banquets given to this, that, or the other visiting big-wig--he
+was always ready to get on his feet and tell the people that the true
+prosperity of the country carried with it the prosperity of the
+railroads; that the two things were one and inseparable; and that, when
+it came right down to basic facts, the railroads were really a part of
+the progress machinery of the country at large and should be regarded,
+not as alien tax-collectors, but as contributors to the general
+prosperity and welfare.
+
+I went with him on a good many of the trips he made to be "among those
+present" at these gatherings--and so, by the way, did Tarbell--and it
+was plain to be seen that the new idea was gradually gathering a little
+headway. By this time, also, Red Tower Consolidated was beginning to
+find out what it meant to have active competition. The C. S. & W. people
+were hammering their new plants into working shape, and they were
+getting the patronage, both of the producers and consumers, hand over
+fist.
+
+Engineered by Billoughby, the railroad was simply playing the part of
+the good big brother to these new middlemen. Track facilities and yard
+service were granted freely; and while no discrimination was permitted
+as against the Red Tower people, the friendly attitude of the road
+counted for something, as it was bound to; hence, the C. S. & W. got the
+business right from the jump, enlarging its field as it went along, and
+gathering in all the little side monopolies like the ice-plants, and
+city lighting installations, and so on. This, by the way, was in line
+with the new slogan put out by the boss and his boosters: "Own your own
+Utilities."
+
+As to the political struggle which was now ripping the State wide open
+from end to end, the boss was steel and iron on the side of
+non-interference. He never allowed himself to say a public word on
+either side; never spoke of the campaign at all except to assert
+everywhere and at all times that the railroad was not in politics, and
+never would be again.
+
+This was the key-word given to the different members of the staff to be
+passed on down the line to every official in authority. We were to be
+like Cæsar's wife--above suspicion. We were neither to make nor meddle
+in the campaign, and any department head or other officer or employee
+caught trying to swing the railroad vote would be fired on the spot.
+
+On one of our trips over the road we had a call from Mr. Anson Burrell,
+the gubernatorial candidate who was making the race against the
+machine. He was a cattle magnate of the modern sort; a big,
+viking-looking man, with a Yale degree, and with a record as clean as a
+hound's tooth. When he came into the private car he seemed to fill it,
+not only with his presence, but with the fresh keen air of the grazing
+uplands.
+
+"I'm glad to have a chance to meet you on your own ground, Mr.
+Norcross," he said, giving the boss a hand-grip that looked mighty
+hearty and sincere. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell you
+how much we appreciate the stand you have taken. For the first time in
+its history, the railroad is keeping out of the political fight; I know
+it, and the people are beginning to find it out, too. You may not mean
+it that way, but it is the strongest card you could play. You need just
+legislation, and there is no better way to get it than by not trying to
+influence it."
+
+The boss met him half-way on that, of course, and said what he ought to;
+and they talked along that line for the full half-hour that our special
+stopped in the town where Mr. Burrell had caught us. In a way, it was a
+sort of temptation to take sides. Mr. Burrell made it pretty plain that
+if the railroad continued to behave itself, and if the reform party got
+in, there would be easier legislation, and perhaps some of the old
+hard-and-fast intrastate rate laws repealed. But the boss wasn't the
+man to drop his candy in the dirt, and he kept right on laying down the
+law to everybody in the service; we were to let the campaign absolutely
+alone, and every man was to vote as he thought best.
+
+As time went on, I was a little surprised to see that Hatch and his
+gunmen side partners under Pete Clanahan made no further move; at least,
+not toward keeping cases on Mr. Norcross. Though Tarbell and I still
+went everywhere with him, we saw no more shadowers. I put it up that
+perhaps they were lying quiet because they knew that somebody had
+overheard their talk in the coal yard scale-house and they were waiting
+for the thing to blow over a little. All of us who were on the inside
+felt that the move was only postponed, and that when it did come it
+would be a center shot. But there was nothing we could do. We could only
+hang on and keep a sharp eye to windward.
+
+During those few pre-election weeks the New York end of us seemed to
+have petered out completely. We heard nothing more from President
+Dunton, worse than an occasional wire complaint about the number of
+wrecks we were having, though the stock was still going down, point by
+point, and, so far as a man up a tree could see, we were making no
+attempt to show net earnings--were turning all our money into
+betterments as fast as it came in. I knew that couldn't go on. Without a
+flurry of some sort, the New Yorkers would never be able to break even,
+to say nothing of a profit, and I looked every day for a howl that would
+tear things straight up the back.
+
+While all these threads were weaving along, I'm sorry to say that I
+hadn't yet drummed up the courage to tell the boss the truth about Mrs.
+Sheila. He kept on going to the major's every chance he had, and Maisie
+Ann was making life miserable for me because I hadn't told him--calling
+me a coward and everything under the sun. I told her to tell him
+herself, and she retorted that I knew she couldn't: that it was my job
+and nobody else's. We fussed over it a lot; and because I most always
+contrived some excuse to chase out to the Kendrick house at the boss's
+heels--merely to help Tarbell keep cases on him--there were plenty of
+chances for the fussing.
+
+It was on one of these chasing trips to "Kenwood" that the roof fell in.
+The major had gone out somewhere--to the theater, I guess--taking his
+wife and Maisie Ann, and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together
+in the major's den, with a little coal blaze in the basket grate because
+the nights were beginning to get a bit chilly.
+
+As usual when they were together, they made no attempt at privacy: the
+den doorway had no door, nothing but one of those Japanese curtains
+made out of bits of bamboo strung like beads on a lot of strings. I had
+butted in with a telegram--which might just as well have stood over
+until the next morning, if you want to know. After I had delivered it,
+Mrs. Sheila gave me that funny little laugh of hers and told me to go
+hunt in the pantry and see if I could find a piece of pie, and the boss
+added that if I'd wait, he'd go back to town with me pretty soon.
+
+I found the pie, and ate it in the dining-room, making noise enough
+about it so that they could know I was there if they wanted to. But they
+went right on talking, and paid no attention to me.
+
+"Do you know, Sheila"--they had long since got past the "Mr." and
+"Mrs."--"you've been the greatest possible help to me in this
+rough-house, all the way along," the boss was saying. "And I don't
+understand how you, or any woman, can plan so clearly and logically to a
+purely business end. I was just thinking to-night as I came out here:
+you have given me nearly every suggestion I have had that was worth
+anything; more than that, you have held me up to the rack, time and
+again, when I have been ready to throw it all up and let go. Why have
+you done it?"
+
+I heard the little laugh again, and she said: "It is worth something to
+have a friend. Odd as it may seem, Graham, I have been singularly
+poverty-stricken in that respect. And I have wanted to see you succeed.
+Though you are still calling it merely a 'business deal,' it is really a
+mission, you know, crammed full of good things to a struggling world. If
+you do succeed--and I am sure you are going to--you will leave this
+community, and hundreds of others, vastly the better for what you are
+doing and demonstrating."
+
+"But that is a man's point of view," the boss persisted. "How do you get
+it? You are all woman, you know; and your mixing and mingling--at least,
+since I have known you--has all been purely social. How do you get the
+big overlook?"
+
+"I don't know. I was foolish and frivolous once, like most young girls,
+I suppose. But we all grow older; and we ought to grow wiser. Besides,
+the woman has the advantage of the man in one respect; she has time to
+think and plan and reason things out as a busy man can't have. Your
+problem has seemed very simple to me, from the very beginning. It asked
+only for a strong man and an honest one. You were to take charge of a
+piece of property that had been abused and knocked about and used as a
+means of extortion and oppression, and you were to make it good."
+
+"Again, that is a man's point of view."
+
+"Oh, no," she protested quickly. "There is no sex in ethics. Women are
+the natural house-cleaners, perhaps, but that isn't saying that a man
+can't be one, too, if he wants to be."
+
+At this, the boss got up and began to tramp up and down the room; I
+could hear him. I knew she'd been having the biggest kind of a job to
+keep him shut up in this sort of abstract corral, when all the time he
+was loving her fit to kill, but apparently she had been doing it,
+successfully. There wasn't the faintest breath of sentiment in the air;
+not the slightest whiff. When she began again, I could somehow feel that
+she was just in time to prevent his breaking out into all sorts of
+love-making. I shouldn't wonder if that was the way it had been from the
+beginning.
+
+"The time has come, now, when you must take another leaf out of my
+book," she said, with just the proper little cooling tang in her voice.
+"Up to the present you have been hammering your way to the end like a
+strong man, and that was right. But you have been more or less
+reckless--and that isn't right or fair or just to a lot of other
+people."
+
+The tramping stopped and I heard him say: "I don't know what you mean."
+
+"I mean that matters have come to such a pass now that you can't afford
+to take any risks--personal risks. The enmity that caused you to be
+kidnapped and carried away into the mountains still exists, and exists
+in even greater measure. It hasn't stopped fighting you for a single
+minute, and if the plan it is now trying doesn't work, it will try
+another and a more desperate one."
+
+"You've been talking to Ripley," he laughed. "Ripley wants me to become
+a gun-toter and provide myself with a body-guard. I'd look well,
+wouldn't I? But what do you mean by 'the plan it is now trying'?"
+
+She hesitated a little, and then said: "I shall make no charges, because
+I have no proof. But I read the newspapers, and Mr. Van Britt tells me
+something, now and then. You are having a terrible lot of wrecks."
+
+"That is merely bad luck," he rejoined easily, adding: "And the wrecks
+have nothing to do with my personal safety."
+
+"Rashness is no part of true courage," she interpolated, calmly. "As a
+private individual you might say that your life is your own, and that
+you have a perfect right to risk it as you please. But as the general
+manager of the railroad, with a lot of your friends holding office under
+you, you can't say that. Besides, you are fighting for a cause, and that
+cause will stand or fall with you."
+
+"You ought to be a member of this new reform legislature that some of
+our good friends think is coming up the pike," he chuckled; but she
+ignored the good-natured gibe and made him listen.
+
+"I was visiting a day or two at the capital last week, and there are
+influences at work that you don't know about. It has grown away past and
+beyond any mere fight with the Hatch people. If the opposition can't
+make your administration a failure, it won't hesitate to get rid of you
+in the easiest way that offers."
+
+There was silence in the major's den for a minute or so, and then the
+boss said:
+
+"As usual, you know more than you are willing to tell me."
+
+"Perhaps not," was the prompt answer. "Perhaps I am only the
+onlooker--who can usually see things rather better than the persons
+actually involved. Hitherto I have urged you to be bold, and then again
+to be bold. Now I am begging you to be prudent."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"Careful for yourself. For example: you walked out here this evening;
+don't do that any more. Come in a taxi--and don't come alone."
+
+I couldn't see his frown of disagreement, but I knew well enough it was
+there.
+
+"There spoke the woman in you," he said. "If I should show the white
+feather that way, they'd have some excuse for potting me."
+
+There was a silence again, and I got up quietly and crossed the
+dining-room to the big recessed window where I stood looking out into
+the darkness of the tree-shaded lawn. It was pretty evident that Mrs.
+Sheila knew a heap more than she was telling the boss, just as he had
+said, and I couldn't help wondering how she came to know it. What she
+said about the increased number of wrecks looked like a pointer. Was she
+in touch with the enemy in some way?
+
+I knew that Major Kendrick heard all the gossip of the streets and the
+clubs, and that he carried a good bit of it home; but that wouldn't
+account for much inside knowledge of the real thing in Mrs. Sheila. Then
+my mind went back in a flash to what Maisie Ann had told me. Was the
+husband who ought to be dead, and wasn't, mixed up in it in any way?
+Could it be possible that he was one of those who were in the fight on
+the other side, and that she was still keeping in touch with him?
+
+Pretty soon I heard the murmur of their voices again, but now I was so
+far away from the bamboo-screened door that I couldn't hear what they
+were saying. I wished they would break it off so the boss could go. It
+was getting late, and there had been enough said to make me wish we were
+both safely back in the hotel. It's that way sometimes, you know, in
+spite of all you can do. You hear a talk, and you can't help reading
+between the lines. I knew, as well as I knew that I was alive, that
+Mrs. Sheila meant more than she had said: perhaps more than she had
+dared to say.
+
+It was while I was standing there in the big window, sweating over the
+way the talk in the other room was dragging itself out, that I saw the
+man on the lawn. At first I thought it was Tarbell, who was never very
+far out of reach when the boss was running loose. But the next minute I
+saw I was mistaken. The man under the trees looked as if he might be an
+English tourist. He had on a long traveling coat that came nearly to his
+heels, and his cap was the kind that has two visors, one in front and
+the other behind.
+
+Realizing that it wasn't Tarbell, I stood perfectly still. The house was
+lighted with gas, and the dining-room chandelier had been turned down,
+so there was a chance that the skulker under the trees wouldn't see me
+standing in the corner of the box window. To make it surer, I edged away
+until the curtain hid me. I was just in time. The man had crept out of
+his hiding-place and was coming up to the window on the outside. As he
+passed through the dim beam of light thrown by the turned-down
+chandelier, I saw that he had a pistol in his hand, or a weapon of some
+kind; anyway, I caught the glint of the gas-light on dull steel.
+
+That stirred me up good and plenty. I still had the gun I had taken out
+of Fred May's drawer; I had carried it ever since the night when it had
+mighty nearly got me killed off in the Red Tower coal yard. I fished it
+out and made ready, thinking, of course, that the skulker must certainly
+be one of Clanahan's gunmen. I still had that idea when I felt, rather
+than saw, that the man was pulling himself up to the window so that he
+could take a look into the dining-room.
+
+The look satisfied him, apparently, for the next second I heard him drop
+among the bushes; and when I stood up and looked out again I could just
+make him out going around toward the back of the house. Thanks to Maisie
+Ann and the pantry excursions, I knew the house like a book, and without
+making any noise about it I slipped through the butler's pantry and got
+a look out of a rear window. My man was there, and he was working his
+way sort of blindly around to the den side of the place.
+
+I guess maybe I ought to have given the alarm. But I knew there was only
+one window in the major's den room, and that was nearly opposite the
+screened doorway. So I ducked back into the dining-room and took a stand
+where I could see the one window through the door-curtain net-work of
+bamboo beads. I was so excited that I caught only snatches of what Mrs.
+Sheila was saying to the boss, but the bits that I heard were a good
+deal to the point.
+
+"No, I mean it, Graham ... it is as I told you at first ... there is no
+standing room for either of us on that ground ... and you must not come
+here again when you know that I am alone.... No, Jimmie _isn't_ enough!"
+
+I wrenched the half-working ear-sense aside and jammed it into my eyes,
+concentrating hard on the window at which I expected every second to see
+a man's face. If the man was a murderer, I thought I could beat him to
+it. He would have to look in first before he could fire; and the boss
+and Mrs. Sheila were at the other end of the room, sitting before the
+little blaze in the grate.
+
+The suspense didn't last very long. A hand came up first to push the
+window vines aside. It was a white hand, long and slender, more like a
+woman's than a man's. Then against the glass I saw the face, and it gave
+me such a turn that I thought I must be going batty.
+
+Instead of the ugly mug of one of Clanahan's gunmen, the haggard face
+framed in the window sash was a face that I had seen once--and only
+once--before; on a certain Sunday night in the Bullard when the
+loose-lipped mouth belonging to it had been babbling drunken curses at
+the night clerk. The man at the window was the dissipated young rounder
+who had been pointed out as the nephew of President Dunton.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+The Name on the Register
+
+
+So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one
+of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought
+I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I
+really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough
+question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the
+sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the
+other side of that window--and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw
+that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.
+
+What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major
+Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and
+peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the
+beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the
+sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end
+of the room where the fireplace was.
+
+Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he
+should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either
+the boss or Mrs. Sheila--if that was what he was aiming to do. All the
+same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the
+door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's
+nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.
+
+While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his
+cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the
+boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as
+usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."
+
+Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and
+stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick
+padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the
+rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major
+and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol
+and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt
+the boss's hand on my shoulder.
+
+"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a
+minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs.
+Kendrick, we got out.
+
+At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With
+the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I
+grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for
+us.
+
+"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man
+stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something
+to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on
+the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and
+started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and
+put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.
+
+When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I
+had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it
+over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names
+written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I
+found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y."
+Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had
+come in from the West--which was a bit puzzling, since it left the
+inference that he wasn't direct from New York.
+
+Waiting for a good chance at the night clerk, I ventured a few
+questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwood
+_had_ come in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week
+earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now,
+but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on
+the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk
+didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for
+me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the
+badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr.
+Bullock was a lawyer.
+
+I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all
+conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising,
+early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same,
+after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box,
+I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my
+eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder
+should show up.
+
+That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep
+habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or
+whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage
+porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express
+westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with
+two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.
+
+When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night
+clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his
+grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto
+so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone
+for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next
+got a sight of him--from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of
+the bar-room colonnade--he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if
+it were water and he on fire inside.
+
+That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to
+the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train
+auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had
+found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of
+nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was
+getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and
+made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open
+register.
+
+A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying
+lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never
+showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash.
+When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our
+maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to
+obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master
+of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what
+the name was.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The Hoodoo
+
+
+It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard
+café--the boss and I--that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck.
+The story was red-headlined in the _Morning Herald_--the Hatch-owned
+paper--and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns,
+there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the
+track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a
+delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no
+lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal
+clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.
+
+The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the
+Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such
+thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the
+rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with
+this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried
+department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college
+friends--which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only
+millionaire.
+
+Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As
+I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With
+the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new
+"public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a
+single week without smashing something.
+
+Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross
+management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and
+nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors
+into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising
+storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.
+
+Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and
+afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office,
+Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.
+
+"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own
+copy of the _Herald_. "Did you read that editorial?"
+
+The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see
+in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."
+
+"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.
+
+"Never mind the newspaper talk," the boss interjected. "How bad is the
+trouble this time?"
+
+"Pretty bad. I've just had Brockman on the wire from Alicante. The
+freight is practically a total loss; a good half of it is in the river.
+Kirgan says he can pick the freight engine up and rebuild it; but the
+passenger machine is a wreck."
+
+"How did it happen?"
+
+"It's like a good many of the others. Nobody seems to know. Brockman put
+the freight engine crew on the rack, and they say there was a small
+boulder on the track--that it rolled down the canyon slope just ahead of
+them as they were turning a curve. They struck it, and both men say that
+the engine knocked it off into the river apparently without hurting
+anything. But two seconds later the entire train left the track and
+piled up all over the right-of-way."
+
+"The engineer and fireman weren't hurt?"
+
+"No; they both jumped on the high side. But, of course, they were pretty
+badly shaken up. Riggs, the fireman, got out of the raffle first and
+tried to flag the passenger train, but he was too late."
+
+The boss was sitting back in his chair and making little rings on the
+desk blotter with the point of his letter-opener.
+
+"Upton, these knock-outs have got to be stopped."
+
+"Good Lord!" exclaimed the little millionaire; "you don't have to tell
+me that! If we can't stop 'em, Uncle Dunton will have plenty of good
+reasons for cleaning us all out, lock, stock, and barrel! I was talking
+with Carter, in the claim office, this morning. Our loss and damage
+account for the past month is something frightful!"
+
+"It is," said the boss gravely. And then: "Upton, we're not altogether
+as bright as we might be. Has it never occurred to you that we are
+having too much bad luck to warrant us in charging it all up to the
+chapter of accidents?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt blew his cheeks out until the stubby, cropped mustache
+bristled like porcupine quills.
+
+"So you've been getting your pointer, too, have you?" he threw in.
+
+Mr. Norcross didn't answer the question directly.
+
+"Put Tarbell on the job, and if he needs help, let him pick his own
+men," he directed. "We want to know why that boulder tumbled down ahead
+of Number Seventeen, and I want to see Tarbell's report on it. Keep at
+it night and day, Upton. The infection is getting into the rank and file
+and it's spreading like a sickness. You've railroaded long enough to
+know what that means. If it becomes psychological, we shall have all the
+trouble we need."
+
+"I know," nodded the superintendent. "I went through a siege of that
+kind on the Great Southwestern, one winter. It was horrible. Men who had
+been running trains year in and year out, and never knowing that they
+had any nerves, went to pieces if you'd snap your fingers at them."
+
+"That's it," said the boss. "We don't want to fall into that ditch.
+Things are quite bad enough, as they are."
+
+This ended it for the time. The Petrolite Canyon wreck was picked up,
+the track was cleared, and once more our trains were moving on time. But
+anybody could see that the entire Short Line had a case of "nerves."
+Kirgan, Kirgan the cold-blooded, showed it one afternoon when I went
+over to his office to return a bunch of blue-prints sent in for the
+boss's approval. The big master-mechanic had a round-house foreman "on
+the carpet" and was harrying him like the dickens for letting an engine
+go out with one of her truck safety chains hanging loose.
+
+Ever since we had gone together on the rescue run to Timber Mountain,
+Mart and I had been sort of chummy, and after the foreman had gone away
+with his foot in his hand, I joshed Kirgan a little about the way he had
+hammered the round-house man.
+
+"Maybe I did, Jimmie," he said, half as if he were already sorry for the
+cussing out. "But the shape we're getting into is enough to make an
+angel bawl. Why, Great Moses! a crew can't take an engine out here in
+the yard to do a common job o' switchin' without breakin' something 'r
+hurtin' somebody!"
+
+"Bad medicine," I told him. "It's worrying the bosses, too. What's doing
+it, Mart?"
+
+"Maybe you can tell," he growled. "It's a hoodoo--that's what _it_ is.
+Seven engines in the shops in the last nine days, and three more that
+haven't been fished out-a the ditch yet. I wish Mr. Van Britt 'd fire
+the whole jumpy outfit!"
+
+It didn't seem as though firing was needed so much as a dose of nerve
+tonic of some sort. Tarbell was working hard on the problem, quietly,
+and without making any talk about it, and Kirgan was giving him all the
+men he asked for from the shops; quick-witted fellows who were up in all
+the mechanical details, and who made better spotters than outsiders
+would because they knew the road and the ropes. But it was no use. I saw
+some of Tarbell's reports, and they didn't show any crookedness. It
+seemed to be just bad luck--one landslide after another of it.
+
+Meanwhile, New York had waked up again. President Dunton had been off
+the job somewhere, I guess, but now he was back, and the things he wired
+to the boss were enough to make your hair stand on end. I looked every
+day to see Mr. Norcross pitch the whole shooting-match into the fire
+and quit, cold.
+
+He'd never taken anything like Mr. Dunton's abuse from anybody before,
+and he couldn't seem to get hardened to it. But he was loyal to Mr.
+Chadwick; and, of course, he knew that Mr. Dunton's hot wires were meant
+to nag him into resigning. Then there was Mrs. Sheila. I sort of
+suspected she was holding him up to the rack, every day and every minute
+of the day. No doubt she was.
+
+It was one evening after he had been out to the major's for just a
+little while, and had come back to the office, that he sent for Mr. Van
+Britt, who was also working late. There was blood on the moon, and I saw
+it in the way the boss's jaw was working.
+
+"Upton," he began, as short as pie-crust, "have you thought of any way
+to break this wreck hoodoo yet?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt sat down and crossed his solid little legs.
+
+"If I had, I shouldn't be losing sleep at the rate of five or six hours
+a night," he rasped.
+
+"There's one thing that we haven't tried," the boss shot back. "We've
+been advertising it as bad luck, keeping our own suspicions to ourselves
+and letting the men believe what they pleased. We'll change all that. I
+want you to call your trainmen in as fast as you can get at them. Tell
+them--from me, if you want to--that there isn't any bad luck about it;
+that the enemies of this management are making an organized raid on the
+property itself for the purpose of putting us out of the fight. Tell
+them the whole story, if you want to: how we're trying our best to make
+a spoon out of a spoiled horn, and how there is an army of grafters and
+wreckers in this State which is doing its worst to knock us out of the
+box."
+
+Mr. Van Britt uncrossed his legs and sat staring for a second or two.
+Then he whistled and said: "By Jove! Have you caught 'em with the goods,
+at last?"
+
+"No," was the curt reply. "Call it a ruse, if you like: it's
+justifiable, and it will work. If you give the force something tangible
+to lay hold of, it will work the needed miracle. It is only the
+mysterious that terrifies. Railroad employees, as a whole, are perfectly
+intelligent human beings, open to conviction. The management which
+doesn't profit by that fact is lame. If you do this and appeal to the
+loyalty of the men, you will make a private detective out of every man
+in the train service, and every one of them keen to be the first to
+catch the wreckers. You can add a bit of a reward for that, if you like,
+and I'll pay it out of my own bank account."
+
+For a full minute our captive millionaire didn't say a word. Then he
+grinned like a good-natured little Chinese god.
+
+"Who gave you this idea of taking the pay-roll into your confidence,
+Graham?" he asked softly.
+
+For the first time in all the weeks and months I'd been knowing him, the
+boss dodged; dodged just like any of us might.
+
+"I've been talking to Major Kendrick," he said. "He is a wise old man,
+Upton, and he hears a good many things that don't get printed in the
+newspapers."
+
+I could see that this excuse didn't fool Mr. Van Britt for a single
+instant, and there was a look in his eye that I couldn't quite
+understand. Neither could I make much out of what he said.
+
+"We'll go into that a little deeper some day, Graham--after this
+epileptic attack has been fought off. This idea--which you confess isn't
+your own--is a pretty shrewd one, and I shouldn't wonder if it would
+work, if we can get it in motion before the hoodoo breaks us wide open.
+And, as you say, the accusation is justifiable, even if we can't prove
+up against the Hatch outfit. That turned-over rail in Petrolite Canyon,
+for example, might have been helped along by----"
+
+It was Kelso, Mr. Van Britt's stenographer, who smashed in with the
+interruption. He was in his shirt-sleeves, as if he'd just got up from
+his typewriter, and he rushed in with his mouth open and his eyes like
+saucers.
+
+"They--they want you in the despatcher's office!" he panted, jerking the
+words out at Mr. Van Britt. "Durgin has let Number Five get by for a
+head-ender with the 'Flyer,' and he's gone crazy!"
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+The Helpless Wires
+
+
+When Bobby Kelso shot his news at us we all made a quick break for the
+despatcher's office, the boss in the lead. It was a big bare room
+flanking Mr. Van Britt's quarters at the western end of the second floor
+corridor and the windows looked out upon the yard twinkling with its red
+and yellow and green switch lights.
+
+Durgin, the night despatcher, had been alone on the train desk, and the
+only other operators on duty were the car-record man and the young
+fellow who acted as a relief on the commercial wire. When we got there,
+we found that Tarbell had happened to be in the office when Durgin blew
+up. He was sitting in at the train key, trying to get the one
+intermediate wire station between the two trains that had failed to get
+their "meet" orders, and this was the first I knew that he really was
+the expert telegraph operator that his pay-roll description said he was.
+
+Durgin looked like a tortured ghost. He was a thin, dark man with a
+sort of scattering beard and limp black hair; one of the clearest-headed
+despatchers in the bunch, and the very last man, you'd say, to get
+rattled in a tangle-up. Yet here he was, hunched in a chair at the
+car-record table in the corner, a staring-eyed, pallid-faced wreck, with
+the sweat standing in big drops on his forehead and his hands shaking as
+if he had the palsy.
+
+Morris, the relief man, gave us the particulars, such as they were,
+speaking in a hushed voice as if he was afraid of breaking in on
+Tarbell's steady rattling of the key in the Crow Gulch station call.
+
+"Number Four"--Four was the eastbound "Flyer"--"is five hours off her
+time," he explained. "As near as I can get it, Durgin was going to make
+her 'meet' with Number Five at the blind siding at Sand Creek tank. She
+ought to have had her orders somewhere west of Bauxite Junction, and
+Five ought to have got hers at Banta. Durgin says he simply forgot that
+the 'Flyer' was running late: that she was still out and had a 'meet' to
+make somewhere with Five."
+
+Brief as Morris's explanation was, it was clear enough for anybody who
+knew the road and the schedules. The regular meeting-point for the two
+passenger trains was at a point well east of Portal City, instead of
+west, and so, of course, would not concern the Desert Division crew of
+either train, since all crews were changed at Portal City. From Banta
+to Bauxite Junction, some thirty-odd miles, there was only one telegraph
+station, namely, that at the Crow Gulch lumber camp, seven miles beyond
+the Timber Mountain "Y" and the gravel pit where the stolen 1016 had
+been abandoned.
+
+Unluckily, Crow Gulch was only a day station, the day wires being
+handled by a young man who was half in the pay of the railroad and half
+in that of the saw-mill company. This young man slept at the mill camp,
+which was a mile back in the gulch. There was only one chance in a
+thousand that he would be down at the railroad station at ten o'clock at
+night, and it was on that thousandth chance that Tarbell was rattling
+the Crow Gulch call. If Five were making her card time, she was now
+about half-way between Timber Mountain "Y" and Crow Gulch. And Four, the
+"Flyer," had just left Bauxite--with no orders whatever. Which meant
+that the two trains would come together somewhere near Sand Greek, one
+of them, at least, running like the mischief to make up what time she
+could.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was as good a wire man as anybody on the line, but it was
+the boss who took things in hand.
+
+"There is a long-distance telephone to the Crow Gulch saw-mill; have you
+tried that?" he barked at Tarbell.
+
+The big young fellow who looked like a cow-boy--and had really been one,
+they said--glanced up and nodded: "The call's in," he responded.
+"'Central' says she can't raise anybody."
+
+"What was Four's report from Bauxite?"
+
+"Four hours and fifty-two minutes off time."
+
+"That will bring them together somewhere in the hill curves this side of
+Sand Creek," the boss said to Mr. Van Britt; "just where there is the
+least chance of their seeing each other before they hit." Then to
+Tarbell: "Try Bauxite and find out if there is a pusher engine there
+that can be sent out to chase the 'Flyer'."
+
+Tarbell nodded without breaking his monotonous repetition of the Crow
+Gulch call.
+
+"I did that first," he put in. "There's an engine there, and they're
+getting her out. But it's a slim chance; the 'Flyer' has too good a
+start."
+
+For the next three or four minutes the tension was something fierce. The
+boss and Mr. Van Britt hung over the train desk, and Tarbell kept up his
+insistent clatter at the key. I had an eye on Durgin. He was still
+hunched up in the record-man's chair, and to all appearances had gone
+stone-blind crazy. Yet I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was
+listening--listening as if all of his sealed-up senses had turned in to
+intensify the one of hearing.
+
+Just about the time when the suspense had grown so keen that it seemed
+as if it couldn't be borne a second longer, Morris, who was sitting in
+at the office phone, called out sharply: "Long-distance says she has
+Crow Gulch lumber camp!"
+
+Mr. Van Britt jumped to take the phone, and we got one side of the
+talk--our side--in shot-like sentences:
+
+"That you, Bertram? All right; this is Van Britt, at Portal City. Take
+one of the mules and ride for your life down the gulch to the station!
+Get that? Stop Number Five and make her take siding quick. Report over
+your own wire what you do. _Hurry!_"
+
+By the time Mr. Van Britt got back to the train desk, the boss had his
+pencil out and was figuring on Bertram's time margin. It was now
+ten-twelve, and Five's time at Crow Gulch was ten-eighteen. The Crow
+Gulch operator had just six minutes in which to get his mule and cover
+the rough mile down the gulch.
+
+"He'll never make it," said Tarbell, who knew the gulch road. "Our only
+chance on that lay is that Five may happen to be a few minutes late--and
+she was right on the dot at Banta."
+
+There was nothing to do but wait, and the waiting was savage. Tarbell
+had a nerve of iron, but I could see his hand shake as it lay on the
+glass-topped table. The boss was cool enough outwardly, but I knew that
+in his brain there was a heart-breaking picture of those two fast
+passenger trains rushing together in the night among the hills with no
+hint of warning to help them save themselves. Mr. Van Britt couldn't
+keep still. He had his hands jammed in the side pockets of his coat and
+was pacing back and forth in the little space between the train desk and
+the counter railing.
+
+At the different tables in the room the sounders were clicking away as
+if nothing were happening or due to happen, and above the spattering din
+and clatter you could hear the escapement of the big standard-time clock
+on the wall, hammering out the seconds that might mean life or death to
+two or three hundred innocent people.
+
+In that horrible suspense the six minutes pulled themselves out to an
+eternity for that little bunch of us in the despatcher's office who
+could do nothing but wait. On the stroke of ten-eighteen, the time when
+Five was due at Crow Gulch on her schedule, Tarbell tuned his relay to
+catch the first faint tappings from the distant day-station. Another
+sounder was silent. There was hope in the delay, and Morris voiced it.
+
+"He's there, and he's too busy to talk to us," he suggested, in a hushed
+voice; and Disbrow, the car-record man, added: "That's it; it'd take a
+minute or two to get them in on the siding."
+
+The second minute passed, and then a third, and yet there was no word
+from Bertram. "Call him," snapped the boss to Tarbell, but before the
+ex-cowboy's hand could reach the key, the sounder began to rattle out a
+string of dots and dashes; ragged Morse it was, but we could all read it
+only too plainly.
+
+"Too late--mule threw me and I had to crawl and drag a game leg--Five
+passed full speed at ten-nineteen--I couldn't make it."
+
+I saw the boss's hands shut up as though the finger nails would cut into
+the palms.
+
+"That ends it," he said, with a sort of swearing groan in his voice; and
+then to Tarbell: "You may as well call Kirgan and tell him to order out
+the wrecking train. Then have Perkins make up a relief train while
+you're calling the doctors. Van Britt, you go and notify the hospital
+over your own office wire. Have my private car put into the relief, and
+see to it that it has all the necessary supplies. And you'd better
+notify the undertakers, too."
+
+Great Joash! but it was horrible--for us to be hustling around and
+making arrangements for the funeral while the people who were to be
+gathered up and buried were still swinging along live and well, half of
+them in the crookings among the Timber Mountain foot-hills and the other
+half somewhere in the desert stretches below Sand Creek!
+
+Tarbell had sent Disbrow to the phone to call Kirgan, and Mr. Van Britt
+was turning away to go to his own office, when the chair in the corner
+by the car-record table fell over backwards with a crash and Durgin came
+staggering across the room. He was staring straight ahead of him as if
+he had gone blind, and the sweat was running down his face to lose
+itself in the straggling beard.
+
+When he spoke his voice seemed to come from away off somewhere, and he
+was still staring at the blank wall beyond the counter-railing.
+
+"Did I--did I hear somebody say you're sending for the undertakers?" he
+choked, with a dry rattle in his throat; and then, without waiting for
+an answer: "While you're at it, you'd better get one for me ... there's
+the money to pay him," and he tossed a thick roll of bank bills, wrapped
+around with a rubber band, over to Tarbell at the train desk.
+
+Naturally, the little grand-stand play with the bank roll made a
+diversion, and that is why the muffled crash of a pistol shot came with
+a startling shock to everybody. When we turned to look, the mischief was
+done. Durgin had crumpled down into a misshapen heap on the floor and
+the sight we saw was enough to make your blood run cold.
+
+You see, he had put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth, and--but
+it's no use: I can't tell about it, and the very thought of that thing
+that had just a minute before been a man, lying there on the floor
+makes me see black and want to keel over. What he had said about sending
+for an extra undertaker was right as right. With the top of his head
+blown off, the poor devil didn't need anything more in this world except
+the burying.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+Billy Morris Explains
+
+
+Somebody has said, mighty truthfully, that even a death in the family
+doesn't stop the common routine; that the things that have to be done
+will go grinding on, just the same, whether all of us live, or some of
+us die. Disbrow had jumped from the telephone at the crash of Durgin's
+shot, and for just a second or so we all stood around the dead
+despatcher, nobody making a move.
+
+Then Mr. Norcross came alive with a jerk, telling Disbrow to get back on
+his job of calling out the wreck wagons and the relief train, and
+directing Bobby Kelso to go to another 'phone and call an undertaker to
+come and get Durgin's body. Tarbell turned back to the train desk to
+keep things from getting into a worse tangle than they already were in,
+and to wait for the dreadful news, and the boss stood by him.
+
+This second wait promised to be the worst of all. The collision was due
+to happen miles from the nearest wire station; the news, when we should
+get it, would probably be carried back to Bauxite Junction by the pusher
+engine which had gone out to try to overtake the "Flyer." But even in
+that case it might be an agonizing hour or more before we could hear
+anything.
+
+In a little while Disbrow had clicked in his call to Kirgan, and when
+the undertaker's wagon came to gather up what was left of the dead
+despatcher, the car-record man was hurriedly writing off his list of
+doctors, and Mr. Van Britt had gone down to superintend the making up of
+the relief train. True to his theory, which, among other things, laid
+down the broad principle that the public had a right to be given all the
+facts in a railroad disaster, Mr. Norcross was just telling me to call
+up the _Mountaineer_ office, when Tarbell, calmly inking time reports
+upon the train sheet, flung down his pen and snatched at his key to
+"break" the chattering sounder.
+
+Mr. Van Britt had come up-stairs again, and he and the boss were both
+standing over Tarbell when the "G-S" break cleared the wire. Instantly
+there came a quick call, "G-S" "G-S," followed by the signature, "B-J"
+for Bauxite Junction. Tarbell answered, and then we all heard what
+Bauxite had to say:
+
+"_Pusher overtook Number Four three miles west of Sand Creek and has
+brought her back here. What orders for her?_"
+
+Somebody groaned, "Oh, thank God!" and Mr. Van Britt dropped into a
+chair as if he had been hit by a cannon ball. Only the boss kept his
+head, calling out sharply to Disbrow to break off on the doctors' list
+and to hurry and stop Kirgan from getting away with the wrecking train.
+Then, as curtly as if it were all merely a matter of routine, he told
+Tarbell what to do; how he was to give the "Flyer" orders to wait at
+Bauxite for Number Five, and then to proceed under time-card regulations
+to Portal City.
+
+When it was all over, and Tarbell had been given charge of the
+despatching while a hurry call was sent out for the night relief man,
+Donohue, to come down and take the train desk, there was a little
+committee meeting in the general manager's office, with the boss in the
+chair, and Mr. Van Britt sitting in for the other member.
+
+"Of course, you've drawn your own conclusions, Upton," the boss began,
+when he had asked me to shut the door.
+
+"I guess so," was the grave rejoinder. "I'm afraid it is only too plain
+that Durgin was hired to do it. What became of the money?"
+
+"I have it here," said the boss, and he took the blood-money bank-roll
+from his pocket and removed the rubber band. "Count it, Jimmie," he
+ordered, passing it to me.
+
+I ran through the bunch. It was in twenties and fifties, and there was
+an even thousand dollars.
+
+"That is the price of a man's life," said Mr. Van Britt, soberly, and
+then Mr. Norcross said, "Who knows anything about Durgin? Was he a
+married man?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt shook his head.
+
+"He had been married, but he and his wife didn't live together. He had
+no relatives here. I knew him in the southwest two years ago. He'd had
+domestic trouble of some kind, and didn't mix or mingle much with the
+other men. But he was a good despatcher, and two months ago, when we had
+an opening here, I sent for him."
+
+"You think there is no doubt but that he was bribed to put those trains
+together to-night?"
+
+"None in the least--only I wish we had a little better proof of it."
+
+"Where did he live?"
+
+"He boarded at Mrs. Chandler's, out on Cross Street. Morris boards
+there, too, I believe."
+
+The boss turned to me.
+
+"Jimmie, go and get Morris."
+
+I carried the call and brought Morris back with me. He was a cheerful,
+red-headed fellow, and everybody liked him.
+
+"It isn't a 'sweat-box' session, Morris," said the boss, quietly, when
+we came in and the relief operator sat down, sort of half scared, on the
+edge of a chair. "We want to know something more about Durgin. He
+roomed at your place, didn't he?"
+
+Morris admitted it, but said he'd never been very chummy with the
+despatcher; that Durgin wasn't chummy with anybody. Then the boss went
+straight to the point, as he usually did.
+
+"You were present and saw all that happened in the other room. Can you
+tell us anything about that money?" pointing to the pile of bills on my
+desk.
+
+Billy Morris wriggled himself into a little better chair-hold. "Nothing
+that would be worth telling, if things hadn't turned out just as they
+have," he returned. "But now I guess I know. I left Mrs. Chandler's this
+evening about seven o'clock to come on duty, and Durgin was just ahead
+of me. Some fellow--a man in a snuff-colored overcoat and with a soft
+hat pulled down so that I couldn't see his face--stopped Durgin on the
+sidewalk, and they talked together."
+
+"Go on," said Mr. Van Britt.
+
+"I didn't hear what was said; I was up on the stoop, trying to make Mrs.
+Chandler's broken door latch work to hold the door shut. But I saw the
+overcoated man pass something to Durgin, and saw Durgin put whatever it
+was into his pocket. Then the other man dodged and went away, and did it
+so quick that I didn't see which way he went or what became of him. I
+walked on down the steps after I had got the door to stay shut and tried
+to overtake Durgin--just to walk on down here with him. But I guess he
+must have run after he left the corner, for I didn't see anything more
+of him until I got to the office."
+
+"He was there when you came in?" It was Mr. Norcross who wanted to know.
+
+"Yes. He had his coat off and was at work on the train sheet."
+
+"That was a little after seven," said Mr. Van Britt. "What happened
+between that and ten o'clock?"
+
+"Nothing. Disbrow was busy at his table, and I had some work to do,
+though not very much. I don't think Durgin left his chair, or said
+anything to anybody until he jumped up and began to walk the floor,
+taking on and saying that he'd put Four and Five together on the single
+track. Just then, Tarbell came in and jumped for the train key, and I
+ran out to give the alarm."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and then the boss said, "That's
+all, Morris; all but one thing. Do you think you would recognize the man
+in the snuff-colored overcoat, if you should see him again?"
+
+"Yes, I might; if he had on the same coat and hat."
+
+"That will do, then. Keep this thing to yourself, and if the newspaper
+people come after you, send them to Mr. Van Britt or to me."
+
+After Morris had gone, Mr. Van Britt shook his head sort of savagely.
+
+"It's hell, Graham!" he ripped out, bouncing to his feet and beginning
+to tramp up and down the room. "To think that these devils would take
+the chance of murdering a lot of totally innocent people to gain their
+end! What are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I don't know yet, Upton; but I am going to do something. This state of
+affairs can't go on. The simplest thing is for me to throw up the job
+and let the Short Line drop back into the old rut. I'm not sure that it
+wouldn't save a good many lives in the end if I should do it. And yet it
+seems such a cowardly thing to do--to resign under fire."
+
+Mr. Van Britt had his hand on the door-knob, and what he said made me
+warm to my finger-tips.
+
+"We're all standing by you, Graham; all, you understand--to the last man
+and the last ditch. And you're not going to pitch it up; you're going to
+stay until you have thrown the harpoon into these high-binders, clear up
+to the hitchings. That's my prophecy. The trouble's over for to-night,
+and you'd better go up to the hotel and turn in. There is another day
+coming, or if there isn't, it won't make any difference to any of us.
+Good-night."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+What the Pilot Engine Found
+
+
+For a time after the suicide of the off-trick-despatcher the wreck
+epidemic paused. Acting upon Mr. Norcross's suggestion, Mr. Van Britt
+called his trainmen in, a crew at a time, and gave them the straight
+tip; and after that the hoodoo died a natural death, and a good many
+pairs of eyes all along the Short Line were keeping a sharp lookout for
+the trouble-makers.
+
+In the meantime, Tarbell, still digging faithfully, managed to turn up a
+few facts that were worth something. In the Petrolite case he found a
+lone prospector living in a shack high up on the farther side of the
+canyon who told him that late in the evening of the day preceding the
+wreck he had seen two men climbing the slope from which the boulder had
+been dislodged, and that one of them was carrying a pick. Also, further
+investigation seemed to prove that the rail which the blow of the rock
+was supposed to have knocked loose had been previously weakened, either
+by drawing some of the spikes, or by unscrewing the nuts on the bolts at
+the joints.
+
+In another field, and this time under Ripley's instructions, our
+ex-cow-punch' had been able to set and bait a trap. By diligent search
+he had found the man Murphy, the Clanahan henchman, who, under pressure,
+had given away the Timber Mountain plot which had climaxed in the
+kidnapping of the boss. This man had been deliberately shot in a
+bar-room brawl and left for dead. But he had crawled away and had got
+out of town to live and recover at a distant cattle ranch in the
+Limberton Hills.
+
+When Tarbell discovered him he had cut out the booze, had grown a beard,
+and was thirsting for vengeance. Tarbell brought him back to Portal
+City, and presently there began to be developments. Murphy knew all the
+ropes. In a little time, Ripley, with Tarbell's help, was loaded for
+bear. One chilly October afternoon the lawyer came down to our office to
+tell Mr. Norcross that the game was cornered.
+
+"All you have to do now is to give the word," was the way Ripley wound
+up. "You refused to do it on a former occasion because we couldn't get
+the men higher up. This time we can nail Clanahan, and a good few of the
+political gangsters and bosses in the other towns along the line. What
+do you say?"
+
+The boss looked up with the little horse-shoe frown wrinkling between
+his eyes.
+
+"Can we get Hatch and Henckel?"
+
+"No; not yet."
+
+"Very well; then you may lock those papers up in your safe and we'll
+wait. When you can see your way clear to a criminal trial, with Rufus
+Hatch and Gustave Henckel in the prisoner's dock, we'll start the legal
+machinery: but not before."
+
+By now we were right on the eve of the State election. As far as anybody
+could see, the railroad had stayed free and clear of the political
+fight. The boss had kept his promise to maintain neutrality and was
+still keeping it.
+
+At the appointed time the big day dawned, and the political wind-up held
+the center of the stage. So far as we were concerned, it passed off very
+quietly. From the wire gossip that dribbled in during the day it
+appeared that the railroad vote was heavy, though there were neither
+charges nor counter-charges to indicate which way it had been thrown.
+
+Along in the afternoon the newspaper offices began to put out bulletins,
+and by evening the result was no longer doubtful. For the first time in
+years the power of the political machine had been smashed decisively at
+the polls, and on the following morning the _Mountaineer_ announced the
+election of Governor Burrell, with a safe working majority in both
+houses of the Legislature for the Independents.
+
+Naturally, there was all sorts of a yell from the other side of the
+fence. Charges were freely made, now, that the railroad had deliberately
+ditched its friends, and all that. Also there were the bluest kind of
+predictions for the future, most of them winding up with the assertion
+that there could be no such thing as true prosperity for the country
+while the Short Line continued under its present management.
+
+It was on the third day after the election, rather late in the
+afternoon, that the boss had a call from a mining promoter named Dawes,
+representing a bunch of mine owners at Strathcona who were having
+trouble with the smelter.
+
+I was busy at the time and didn't pay much attention to what was said,
+but I got the drift of it. The smelter, one of the few Hatch monopolies
+which hadn't been shaken loose as yet, was located in the gulch six
+miles below Strathcona, and it was served exclusively by its own
+industrial railroad, which it was using as a lever to pry an excessive
+hauling charge out of the mine owners. Wouldn't Mr. Norcross try to do
+something about it?
+
+The boss said he'd do anything he could, and asked what the mine owners
+wanted. Dawes said they wanted help; that they were going to hold a mass
+meeting in Strathcona the following morning at nine o'clock. Would it,
+or wouldn't it, be possible for Mr. Norcross to be present at that
+meeting?
+
+Of course, the boss said he'd go. It meant the better part of a night's
+run, special, in the private car, but that didn't make any difference.
+Dawes went away, and before we broke off to go to dinner at the railroad
+club, I was given a memorandum order for the special.
+
+At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest--Major
+Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State
+capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good
+old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a
+guest at anybody's table.
+
+For a while the table talk--in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any
+part whatever--circled around the late landslide election, and what
+Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by
+and by it got around to the railroad situation.
+
+"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't
+over yet--not by a jugful, suh"--this isn't just the way the major said
+it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the
+smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs,
+and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been
+done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable
+reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't
+lose sight of that, Graham."
+
+The boss looked up kind of curiously.
+
+"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more
+than any other," he commented.
+
+The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.
+
+"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little
+gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin'
+at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame--she has, for a
+fact, suh."
+
+"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his
+plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of
+the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand
+how she can do it."
+
+They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good
+many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just
+then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear
+them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then
+some.
+
+The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought
+the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.
+
+"I'm sorry I can't stay and smoke with you, major," he said, pushing his
+chair back. "But the business grind never lets up. I'm obliged to go to
+Strathcona to-night."
+
+I don't know what the major was going to say to this abrupt break-away:
+the after-dinner social cigar was a sort of religious ceremony with him.
+But whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it, for at that moment a
+telegraph boy came in and handed him a message. He put on his other
+glasses and read the telegram, with his big goatee looking more than
+ever like a dagger and the fierce white mustaches twitching. At the end
+of things he folded the message and put it into his pocket, saying, sort
+of soberly:
+
+"Graham, there are times when Sheila's intuhferences are mighty neah
+uncanny; they are, for a fact, suh. This wire is from her. What do you
+suppose it says?"
+
+Of course, the boss said he couldn't suppose anything about it, and the
+major went on.
+
+"She tells me, in just seven words, not to let you go to Strathcona
+to-night. Now what do you make of that? How on top of God's green earth
+did she know, away off yondeh at the capital, that you were meaning to
+go to Strathcona to-night?"
+
+Mr. Norcross shook his head. Then he said: "There are wires--both
+kinds--though I don't know why anybody should telegraph or telephone the
+capital that I expect to attend a mine-owners' meeting to-morrow
+morning in the big gold camp. That's why I'm going, you know."
+
+"But this warning," the major insisted. "There's a reason for it,
+Graham, as sure as you are bawn!"
+
+Again the boss shook his head.
+
+"Between you two, you and Sheila, I'm due to acquire a case of nerves. I
+don't know what she has heard, but I can't afford to dodge a business
+appointment. I have wired the Strathcona people that I shall be there
+to-morrow morning, and it is too late to make other arrangements. Sheila
+has merely overheard an echo of the threats that are constantly being
+made by the Hatch sympathizers. It's the aftermath of the election, but
+it's all talk. They're down and out, and they haven't the nerve to
+strike back, now."
+
+That ended matters at the club, and the boss and I walked down to the
+headquarters. The special, with Buck Chandler on the smart little
+eight-wheeler that we always had for the private-car trips, was waiting,
+and at the last minute I thought I wasn't going to get to go.
+
+"There's no need of your putting in a night on the road, Jimmie," said
+the boss, with the kindly thought for other people's comfort that never
+failed him. But after I had begged a little, telling him that he'd need
+somebody to take notes in the mine meeting, he said, "All right," and we
+got aboard and gave the word to Maclise, the conductor, to get his
+clearance and go.
+
+A few minutes later we pulled out and the night run was begun. Like
+every other car the boss had ever owned, the "05" was fitted up as a
+working office, and since he had me along, he opened up a lot of claim
+papers upon which the legal department was giving him the final say-so,
+and we went to work.
+
+For the next two hours I was so busy that I didn't know when we passed
+the various stations. There were no passenger trains to meet, and the
+despatcher was apparently giving us "regardless" rights over everything
+else, since we made no stops. At half-past nine, Mr. Norcross snapped a
+rubber band over the last of the claim files, lighted a pipe, and told
+me I might go to bed if I wanted to; said that he was going himself
+after he'd had a smoke. Just then, Chandler whistled for a station, and,
+looking out of a window, I saw that we were pulling into Bauxite, the
+little wind-blown junction from which the Strathcona branch led away
+into the northern mountains.
+
+Wanting a bite of fresh air before turning in, I got off when we made
+the stop and strolled up to the engine. Maclise was in the office,
+getting orders for the branch, and Chandler was squatting in the gangway
+of the 815 and waiting. Up ahead of us, and too far away for me to read
+the number on her tender, there was a light engine. I thought at first
+it was the pusher which was kept at Bauxite to help heavy freights up
+the branch grades, and I wondered what it was doing out on the branch
+"Y" and in our way.
+
+"What's the pusher out for, Buck?" I asked.
+
+Chandler grinned down at me.
+
+"You ain't so much of a railroad man as you might be, Jimmie," he said.
+"That ain't the pusher."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"It's our first section, runnin' light to Strathcona."
+
+Maybe Chandler was right, that I wasn't much of a railroad man, but I
+savvied the Short Line operating rules well enough to know that it
+wasn't usual to run a light engine, deadheading over the road, as a
+section of a special. Also, I knew that Buck knew it.
+
+With that last little talk over the club dinner-table fresh in mind, I
+began to wonder, but instead of asking Chandler any more questions about
+the engine out ahead, I asked him if I might ride a piece with him up
+the branch; and when he said "Sure," I climbed up and humped myself on
+the fireman's box.
+
+Maclise got his orders in due time and we pulled out. I noticed that
+when he gave Chandler the word, he also made motions with his lantern to
+the engine up ahead and it promptly steamed away, speeding up until it
+had about a half-mile lead and then holding it. That seemed funny, too.
+Though it is a rule that is often broken on all railroads, the different
+sections of a train are supposed to keep at least five minutes apart,
+and our "first" wasn't much more than a minute away from us at any time.
+
+Another thing that struck me as being funny was the way Chandler was
+running. It was only sixty mountain miles up the branch to the big gold
+camp, and we ought to have been able to make it by one o'clock, taking
+it dead easy. But the way Buck was niggling along it looked as if it
+might be going to take us all night.
+
+Just the same, nothing happened. The first ten miles was across a desert
+stretch with only a slightly rising grade, and it was pretty much all
+tangent--straight line. Beyond the ten-mile station of Nippo we hit the
+mountain proper, climbing it through a dry canyon, with curves that
+blocked off everything fifty feet ahead of the engine, and grades that
+would have made pretty good toboggan slides. The night was fine and
+starlit, but there was no moon and the canyon shadows loomed like huge
+walls to shut us in.
+
+On the reverse curves I could occasionally get a glimpse of the red tail
+lights of the engine which ought, by rights, to have been five full
+minutes ahead of us. It was still holding its short lead, jogging along
+as leisurely as we were.
+
+With nothing to do and not much to see, I got sleepy after a while, and
+about the time when I was thinking that I might as well climb back over
+the tender and turn in, I dozed off right there on the fireman's
+box--which was safe enough, at the snail's pace we were running. When I
+awoke it was with the feeling that I hadn't been asleep more than a
+minute or two, but the facts were against me. It was nearly one o'clock
+in the morning, and we had worried through the thirty-five miles of
+canyon run and were climbing the steep talus of Slide Mountain.
+
+At first I didn't know what it was that woke me. On my side of the
+engine the big mountain fell away, miles it seemed, on a slope on which
+a man could hardly have kept his footing, and where a train, jumping the
+track, would roll forever before it would stop in the gorges at the
+bottom. While I was rubbing my eyes, the eight-wheeler gave another
+little jerk, and I saw that Chandler was slowing for a stop; saw this
+and got a glimpse of somebody on the track ahead, flagging us down with
+a lantern.
+
+A minute later the brakes had been set and Buck and I were off. As we
+swung down from the engine step, Maclise joined us, and we went to meet
+the man with the lantern. He was the fireman of the engine ahead, and
+when we got around on the track I saw that our "first section" was
+stopped just a little way farther on.
+
+"What is it, Barty?" said Maclise, when we came up to the fireman.
+
+"It's them hell-fired wreckers again," was the gritting reply. "Rail
+joint disconnected and sprung out so's to let us off down the mountain."
+
+I thought it was up to me to go back and tell the boss, but there wasn't
+any need of it. The stop or the slow running or something had roused
+him, and he was up and dressed and coming along beside the engine. When
+he came up, Maclise told him why we were stopping. He didn't say
+anything about the rail break, but he did ask, sort of sharp and quick,
+what engine that was up ahead.
+
+I don't know what Maclise told him. Chandler turned to go back to his
+engine, and the rest of us were moving along the other way, the boss
+setting the pace with Maclise at his elbow. Three rail-lengths ahead of
+the stopped light engine we came to the break. The head engineer and
+another man were down on their hands and knees examining it, and when
+they stood up at our coming, I saw that the other man was Mr. Van Britt.
+
+"What?" said the boss; "you here?"
+
+Our only millionaire nodded.
+
+"I ride the line once in a while--just to see how things are going," he
+returned crisply.
+
+The boss didn't say anything more, but he knelt to look at the break. It
+was a trap, all right, set, beyond all question of doubt, to catch the
+private-car special. The fish-plates had been removed from a joint in
+the left-hand rail and the end of the downhill rail had been sprung out
+to make a derailing switch, which was held in position by the insertion
+of one of the fish-plates between the rail-webs. If we had hit the trap,
+going at even ordinary mountain-climbing speed, there would have been
+nothing left to tell the tale but a heap of scrap at the bottom of the
+thousand-foot dump.
+
+There wasn't very much talk made by anybody. Under Mr. Van Britt's
+directions the engineer and fireman of the pilot engine brought tools
+and the break was repaired. All they had to do was to spring the bent
+rail back into place and spike it, and bolt the fish-plates on again.
+
+While they were doing it the boss stood aside with Mr. Van Britt, and I
+heard what was said. Mr. Van Britt began it by saying, "We don't need
+any detectives this time. You are on your way to Strathcona to put a
+crimp in the smelter squeeze--the last of the Red Tower monopolies--so
+Dawes told me. He was probably foolish enough to tell others, and the
+word was pasted to scrag you before you could get to it. This trap was
+set to catch your special."
+
+"Evidently," barked the boss; and then: "How did you happen to be here
+on that engine, Upton?"
+
+"I've been ahead of you all the way up from Portal City," was the calm
+reply. "I thought it might be safer if you had a pilot to show you the
+way. I guess I must have had a hunch."
+
+The boss turned on him like a flash.
+
+"You had something more than a hunch: what was it--a wire?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt gritted his teeth a little, but he told the truth.
+
+"Yes; a friend of ours tipped me off--not about the broken track, of
+course, but just in a general way. I knew you'd bully me if I should
+tell you that I was going to run a pilot ahead of you, so I didn't tell
+you."
+
+The break was repaired and the men were taking the tools back to the
+engine. As we turned to follow them, Mr. Norcross said: "Just one more
+question, Upton. Did your wire come from the capital?"
+
+But at this Mr. Van Britt seemed to forget that he was talking to his
+general manager.
+
+"It's none of your damned business where it came from," he snapped back;
+and that ended it.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Major's Premonition
+
+
+Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we
+had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning;
+and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The
+boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their
+relief--and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out--by promising that our
+traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter
+on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.
+
+They tried to give him an ovation for that--the Strathcona men--did give
+him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted
+up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on
+account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon
+before we got away for the return to Portal City.
+
+We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came
+to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the
+regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of
+us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a
+glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's
+box.
+
+The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to
+Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk.
+Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window,
+smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the
+branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.
+
+I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he
+had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole
+of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused
+public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it
+up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be
+killed if he didn't let go.
+
+On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down
+the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's
+tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without
+being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so
+much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact
+that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the
+Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the
+entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.
+
+There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be
+a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little
+farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the
+public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate
+Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man
+alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is
+trying his best to walk straight.
+
+Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations--the laws about headlights,
+and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making
+of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if
+enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with
+little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be
+substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had
+met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and
+I had heard him say:
+
+"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its
+history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without
+bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We
+are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to
+act both ways--for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers
+when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to
+your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this
+commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."
+
+Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the
+disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that
+no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no
+permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was
+controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a
+working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.
+
+That was the way Mrs. Sheila had put it to the boss, one evening along
+in the summer when they were sitting out on the Kendricks' porch, and I
+had butted in, as usual, with a bunch of telegrams that didn't matter.
+She had said that the experiment _couldn't_ be a success unless the
+conditions could be changed in some way; that so long as the railroads
+were owned or controlled by men of the Mr. Dunton sort and used as
+counters in the money-making game, there would never be any real peace
+between the companies and the people at large.
+
+I knew that the boss had taken that saying of hers for another of the
+inspirations, and that he believed it clear through to the bottom. But I
+guess he didn't see any way as yet in which the Duntons could be shaken
+out, or just what could be made to happen if they were shaken out.
+
+It was at Bauxite Junction that we picked up Mr. Hornack. He had been
+down in the sugar-beet country on a business trip, and had come up as
+far as Bauxite on a freight, after the Sedgwick operator had told him
+that our special was on the way home from Strathcona, and that he could
+catch it at the Junction.
+
+I was glad when I saw him come in. I had just been thinking that it
+wasn't healthy for the boss to be grilling there at the car window so
+long alone, and I knew Mr. Hornack would keep him talking about
+something or other all the rest of the way in.
+
+For a little while they talked business, and I took my chance to stretch
+out on the leather lounge behind their chairs and kind of half doze off.
+By and by the business talk wound itself up and I heard Mr. Hornack say:
+"I saw Ripley going in on Number Six this morning, and he had company;
+Mrs. Macrae, and the major's wife, and the husky little-girl cousin.
+They've been visiting at the capital, so they told me, and I expect the
+major will be mighty glad to see them back."
+
+I didn't hear what Mr. Norcross said, if he said anything at all, but if
+I had been stone deaf I think I should have heard the thing that Mr.
+Hornack said when he went on.
+
+"I heard something the other day in Portal City that seems pretty hard
+to believe, Norcross. It was at one of Mrs. Stagford's 'evenings,' and I
+was sitting out a dance with a certain young woman who shall be
+nameless. We were speaking of the Kendricks, and she gave me a rather
+broad hint that Mrs. Macrae isn't a widow at all; that her husband is
+still living."
+
+My heavens! I had figured out a thousand ways in which the boss might
+get wised up to the dreadful truth, but never anything like this; to
+have it dropped on him that way out of a clear sky!
+
+For a minute or two he didn't say anything, but when he did speak, I saw
+that the truth wasn't going to take hold.
+
+"That is gossip, pure and simple, Hornack. The Kendricks are my friends,
+and I have been as intimate in their household as any outsider could be.
+It's merely idle gossip, I can assure you."
+
+"Maybe so," said Mr. Hornack, sort of drawing in his horns when he saw
+how positive the boss was about it. "I'm not beyond admitting that the
+young woman who told me is a little inclined that way. But the story was
+pretty circumstantial: it went so far as to assert that 'Macrae' wasn't
+Mrs. Sheila's married name at all, and to say that her long stay with
+her Western cousins was--and still is--really a flight from conditions
+that were too humiliating to be borne."
+
+"I don't care what was said, or who said it," the boss cut in brusquely.
+"It's ridiculous to suppose that any woman, and especially a woman like
+Sheila Macrae, would attempt to pass herself off as a widow when she
+wasn't one."
+
+"I know," said the traffic manager, temporizing a little. "But on the
+other hand, I've never heard the major, or any one else, say outright
+that she was a widow. It seems to be just taken for granted. It stirred
+me up a bit on Van Britt's account. You don't go anywhere to mix and
+mingle socially, but it's the talk of the town that Upton is in over his
+head in that quarter."
+
+I shut my eyes and held my breath. Mr. Hornack hadn't the slightest idea
+what thin ice he was skating over, or how this easy mention of Mr. Van
+Britt might be just like rubbing salt into a fresh cut. By this time it
+was growing dark, and we were running into Portal City, and I was mighty
+glad that it couldn't last much longer. The boss didn't speak again
+until the yard switches were clanking under the car, and then he said:
+
+"Upton is well able to take care of himself, Hornack, and I don't think
+we need worry about him," and then over his shoulder to me: "Jimmie,
+it's time to wake up. We're pulling in."
+
+As he always did on a return from a trip, Mr. Norcross ran up to his
+office to see if there was anything pressing, before he did anything
+else. May was still at his desk, and in answer to the boss's question he
+shook his head.
+
+"No; nobody that couldn't wait," he said, referring to the day's
+callers. "Mr. Hatch was up with a couple of men that I didn't know, but
+he only wanted to inquire if you would be in the office this evening
+after dinner. I told him I'd find out when you came, and let him know by
+'phone."
+
+I thought, after all that had happened, Hatch certainly had his nerve to
+want to come and make a talk with the man his hired assassins were
+trying to murder. But if Mr. Norcross took that view of it, he didn't
+show it. On the contrary, he told Fred it would be all right to
+telephone Hatch; that he was coming down after dinner and the office
+would be open, as usual.
+
+When things got that far along I slipped out and went to Mr. Van Britt's
+office at the other end of the hall. Bobby Kelso was there, holding the
+office down, and I asked him where I could find Tarbell. Luckily, he was
+able to tell me that Tarbell was at that moment down in the station
+restaurant, eating his supper; so down I went and butted in with my
+story of the Hatch call, and how it was to be repeated a little later
+on.
+
+"I'll be there," said Tarbell; and with that load off my mind, I mogged
+off up-town to the club to get my own dinner.
+
+When I broke into the grill-room at the railroad club, I found that Mr.
+Norcross had beaten me to it by a few minutes; that he had already
+ordered his dinner at a table with Major Kendrick. I suppose, by good
+rights, I ought to have gone off into a corner by myself, but I saw that
+the boss had tipped a chair at the end of the table where I usually sat,
+so I just went ahead and took it.
+
+Coming in late, that way, I didn't get the first of the talk, but I took
+it that the boss had been saying something about his rare good luck in
+having the major for a table-mate two days in succession.
+
+"The honoh is mine, my deah boy," the genial old Kentuckian was telling
+him as I sat down. "They told me in the despatchuh's office that youh
+special was expected in, so I telephoned Sheila and the madam not to
+wait for me."
+
+"Then you stayed down town purposely to see me?" asked the boss.
+
+"In a manneh, yes. I was by way of picking up a bit of information late
+this afte'noon that I thought ought to be passed on to you without any
+great delay."
+
+The boss looked up quickly. "What is it, Major?" he inquired. "Are you
+going to tell me that something new has broken loose?"
+
+"I wish I might be that he'pfully definite--I do so, Graham. But I
+can't. It's me'uhly a bit of street talk. They're telling it, oveh at
+the Commercial Club, that Hatch and John Marshall--you know him,--that
+Sedgwick stock jobbeh who has been so active in this Citizens' Storage &
+Warehouse business--have finally come togetheh."
+
+"In a business way, you mean?"
+
+The major gave a right and left twist to his big mustaches and shrugged
+one shoulder.
+
+"They are most probably calling it business," he rejoined.
+
+The boss nodded. "I know what has happened. In spite of the fact that
+the local people know that their economic salvation depends upon a wide
+and even distribution of their C. S. & W. stock, there has been a good
+bit of buying and selling and swapping around. I remember you prophesied
+that in a little while we'd have another trust in the hands of a few
+men. You may recollect that I didn't dispute your prediction. I merely
+said that our ground leases--the fact that all of the C. S. & W. plants
+and buildings are on railroad land--would still give us the whip-hand
+over any new monopoly that might be formed."
+
+"Yes, suh; I remember you said that," the major allowed.
+
+"Very good. Marshall and his pocket syndicate may have acquired a voting
+control in C. S. & W., and they may be willing now to patch up an
+alliance with Hatch. But in that case the new monopoly will still lack
+the one vital ingredient: the power to fix prices. If there is a new
+combine, and it tries to make the producers and merchants pay more than
+the agreed percentages for storage and handling----"
+
+"I know," the major cut in. "You-all will rise up in the majesty of youh
+wrath and put it out of business by terminating the leases. I hope you
+may: I sutt'inly do hope you may. But you'll recollect that I didn't
+advise you on that point, suh. You took Misteh Ripley's opinion. Maybe
+the cou'ts will hold with you, but, candidly, Graham, I doubt it--doubt
+it right much."
+
+The boss didn't seem to be much scared up over the doubt. He just smiled
+and said we'd be likely to find out what was in the wind, and that
+before very long. Then he spoke of Hatch's afternoon call at our
+offices, and mentioned the fact that the Red Tower president would
+probably try again, later in the evening.
+
+The major let the business matter drop, and he was working his way
+patiently through the salad course when he looked up to say:
+
+"Was there anything in youh trip to Strathcona to warrant Sheila's
+little telegraphic dangeh signal, Graham?"
+
+"Nothing worth mentioning," said the boss, without turning a hair; doing
+it, as I made sure, because he didn't want Mrs. Sheila to be mixed up in
+the plotting business, even by implication.
+
+The major didn't press the inquiry any farther, and when he spoke again
+it was of an entirely different matter.
+
+"Away along in the beginning, somebody--I think it was John
+Chadwick--spoke of you as a man with a sawt of raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+tempeh, Graham: what have you done with that tempeh in these heah latteh
+days?"
+
+This time the boss's smile was a good-natured grin.
+
+"Temper is not always a matter of temperament, Major. Sometimes it is
+only a means to an end. Much of my experience has been in the
+construction camps, where I have had to deal with men in the raw. Just
+the same, there have been moments within the past six months when I have
+been sorely tempted to burn the wires with a few choice words of the
+short and ugly variety and throw up my job."
+
+"Which, as you may say, brings us around to President Dunton," put in
+the old lawyer shrewdly. "He is still opposing youh policies?"
+
+"Up to a few weeks ago he was still hounding me to do something that
+would boost the stock, regardless of what the something should be, or of
+its effect upon the permanent value of the property."
+
+Again the major held his peace, as if he were debating some knotty point
+with himself--the table-clearing giving him his chance.
+
+"Did I undehstand you to say that these--ah--suggestions from Dunton had
+stopped?" he inquired, after the little coffees had been served.
+
+"Temporarily, at least. I haven't heard anything from New York--not
+lately."
+
+"Then Dunton's nephew hasn't made himself known to you?"
+
+"Collingwood? Hardly. I'm not in Mr. Howie Collingwood's set--which is
+one of the things I have to be thankful for. But this is news: I didn't
+know he was out here."
+
+The news-giver bent his head gravely in confirmation of the fact.
+
+"He's heah, I'm sorry to say, Graham. He has been heah quite some little
+time, vibratin' round with the Grigsbys and the Gannons and a lot mo' of
+the new-rich people up at the capital."
+
+It was the boss's turn to go silent, and I could guess pretty well what
+he was thinking. The presence of President Dunton's nephew in the West
+might mean much or nothing. But I could imagine the boss was thinking
+that his own single experience with Collingwood was enough to make him
+wish that the nephew of Big Money would stay where he belonged--among
+the high-rollers and spenders of his own set in the effete East.
+
+"I can't quite get the proper slant on men of the Collingwood type," he
+remarked, after the pause. "The only time I ever saw him was on the
+night before the directors' meeting last spring. He was here with his
+uncle's party in the special train, and that night at the Bullard he had
+been drinking too much and made a braying ass of himself. I had to knock
+him silly before I could get him up to his room."
+
+"You did that, Graham?--for a strangeh?"
+
+"I did it for the comfort of all concerned. As I say, he was making an
+ass of himself."
+
+There was another break, and then the major looked up with a little
+frown.
+
+"That was befo' you had met Sheila?" he asked, thoughtfully.
+
+"Why, no; not exactly. It was the same night--the night we all dropped
+off the 'Flyer' and got left behind at Sand Creek. You may remember that
+we came in later on Mr. Chadwick's special."
+
+The major made no reply to this, and pretty soon the boss was on his
+feet and excusing himself once more on the after-dinner smoking stunt,
+saying that he was obliged to go back to the office. The major got up
+and shook hands with him as if he were bidding him good-by for a long
+journey.
+
+"You are going down to keep that appointment with Misteh Rufus Hatch?"
+he said. "You take an old man's advice, Graham, my boy, and keep youh
+hand--figuratively speaking, of cou'se--on youh gun. It runs in my mind,
+somehow, that you are going to be hit--and hit right hard. No, don't ask
+me why. Call it a rotten suspicion, and let it go at that. Come up to
+the house, afte'wards, if you have time, and tell me I'm a false
+prophet, suh; I hope you may."
+
+The boss promised plenty cheerfully as to the calling part, as you'd
+know he would since he hadn't seen Mrs. Sheila for I don't know how
+long; and a few minutes later we were on our way, walking briskly, to
+keep the Fred-May-made engagement with the chief of the grafters.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The Dead-Line
+
+
+We found the three disappointed afternoon callers already on hand when
+we reached the headquarters. Fred May was back from his dinner, and he
+had let them in as far as the ante-room. The boss said, "Good evening,
+gentlemen," as pleasant as a basket of chips; told Fred he might go, and
+invited the waiting bunch into the private office, snapping on the
+lights as he opened the door.
+
+In the big room he indicated the sitting possibilities, and the three
+callers planted themselves in a semicircle at the desk end. No
+introductions were needed. One of the pair Hatch had brought with him
+was a lawyer named Marrow, whose home town was Sedgwick; a sharp-nosed,
+ferret-eyed man who figured as one of the many "local counsels" for Red
+Tower. The other, Dedmon, was a political place-hunter who had once been
+sheriff of Arrowhead County.
+
+"You've kept us cooling our heels in your waiting-room for just about
+the last time, Mr. Norcross!" was the spiteful way in which Hatch opened
+fire. "We've come to talk straight business with you this trip, and it
+will be more to your interest than ours if you'll send your clerk away."
+
+While they had been dragging up their chairs and sitting down, I had
+heard Fred May lock up his typewriter and go, and had been listening
+anxiously for some noise that would tell me Tarbell was on deck. I
+thought I heard the door of the outer office open again just as Hatch
+spoke and it comforted me a whole lot.
+
+The boss didn't pay any attention to Hatch's suggestion about sending me
+away; acted as if he hadn't heard it. Opening his desk he took a box of
+cigars from a drawer and passed it. Dedmon, the ex-sheriff, helped
+himself, but the lawyer and Hatch both refused. With this concession to
+the small hospitalities the boss swung his chair to face the trio.
+
+"My time is yours, gentlemen," he said; and Hatch jumped in like a man
+fairly spoiling for a fight.
+
+"For six months, Norcross, you've been mowing a pretty wide swath out
+here in the tall hills. You've been posing as a little tin god before
+the people of this State, and all the while you've been knifing and
+slugging and black-jacking private capital and private business wherever
+and whenever they have happened to get in your way. Now, at the end of
+the lane, by Jupiter, we've got you dead to rights--you and your damned
+railroad!"
+
+"Cut out as many of the personalities as you can, and come to the
+point," suggested the boss quietly.
+
+"You think I haven't any point to come to?" barked the grafter, with
+rising anger. "I'll show you! You've beaten us in the courts, and your
+imported lawyers have----"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Hatch," was the curt interruption. "Abuse isn't
+argument. State your case, if you have one."
+
+"Oh, I've got the case, all right. You've been keeping your finger on
+the pulse, or you think you have, but I can wise you up to a few things
+that have got away from you. You thought you were the only original
+trust-buster when you started your scheme of locally owned elevators and
+warehouses and coal- and lumber-yards and ran us out of business. But
+I'm here to tell you that your fine-haired little deal to rob us began
+to die about as soon as it was born."
+
+"How so?" inquired the boss, just as though Major Kendrick hadn't
+already given him his pointer about the how.
+
+"In the way that everything of that kind is bound to die. It wasn't a
+month before your little local stockholders began to get together and
+swap stock and sell it. In a very short time the control of the whole
+string of local plants was in the hands of a hundred men. To-day it's in
+the hands of less than twenty, with John Marshall at the head of them."
+
+This time the boss let out a notch. "So far, you haven't told me
+anything new. Go on."
+
+"If I should name Marshall's bunch, you'd know what's coming to you. But
+we needn't go into statistics. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is now a
+consolidated property, and John Marshall, Henckel and I control a
+majority of its stock. How does that strike you?"
+
+"It strikes me that the people most deeply interested have been
+exceedingly foolish to sell their birthright. But that is strictly their
+own business, and not mine or the railroad company's."
+
+"Wait!" Hatch snarled. "It's going to be both yours and the railroad
+company's business, before you are through with it. Marrow, here,
+represents Marshall, and I represent Henckel and myself. What are you
+going to do about those ground leases?"
+
+"Nothing at all, except to insist upon the condition under which they
+were granted by the railroad company."
+
+"Meaning that you are going to try to hold us to the fixed percentage
+charge for handling, packing, loading, and transferring?"
+
+"Meaning just that. If you raise the proportional market-price charge
+on the producers and merchants, the leases will terminate."
+
+"I thought that was about where you'd land. Now listen: we're
+It--Marshall and Henckel and I--and what we say, goes as it lies. We are
+going to use the present C. S. & W. plants and equipment, charging our
+own storage and handling percentages, based on anything we see fit. If
+you pull that ground-lease business on us and try to drive us out, we'll
+fight you all the way up to the Supreme Court. If you beat us there,
+we'll merely move over to the other side of your tracks to our old Red
+Tower houses and yards and go on doing business at the old stand."
+
+The boss sat back in his chair, and I could tell by the set of his jaw
+that he was refusing to be panic-stricken.
+
+"You are taking altogether too much for granted, aren't you?" he put in
+mildly. "You are assuming that the courts will eventually nullify the
+terms of the ground-leases, or, if they do not, that the railroad
+company will do nothing to save its patrons from falling into this new
+graft trap."
+
+Hatch snapped his fingers. "Now you are coming to the milk in the
+cocoanut!" he rapped out. "That is exactly what we're assuming. You are
+going to let go, once for all, Norcross. You are not going to fight us
+in the courts, and neither are you going to harass us out of existence
+with short cars, over-charges, and the thousand and one petty
+persecutions that you railroad buccaneers make use of to line your own
+pockets!"
+
+"But if we refuse to lie down and let you walk over us and our
+patrons--what then?" the boss inquired.
+
+That brought the explosion. Hatch's eyes blazed and he smacked fist into
+palm.
+
+"Then we'll knife you, and we'll do it to a velvet finish! After so long
+a time, we've got you where you can't side-step, Norcross. You thought
+you played it pretty damned fine in that election deal; but we got the
+goods on you, just the same!"
+
+Again the boss refused to be panic-stricken; or, anyhow, he looked that
+way.
+
+"We have heard that kind of talk many times in the past," he said. "The
+way to make it effective is to produce the goods."
+
+"That's just what we're here to do!" snapped the Red Tower president
+vindictively. "You, and the Big Fellows in New York, want a lot of the
+State railroad laws repealed or amended. If you can't get that string
+untied, you can't gamble any more with your stock. Well and good. You
+came here six months ago and set out to manufacture public sentiment in
+favor of the railroad. You ran up your 'public-be-pleased' flag and beat
+the tom-tom and blew the hewgag until you got a lot of dolts and
+chuckle-heads and easy marks to believe that you really meant it."
+
+"Well, go on."
+
+"With all this humbug and hullaballoo you still couldn't be quite
+certain that you had made your point; that your measures would carry
+through the incoming Legislature. After the primaries you counted noses
+among the candidates and found it was going to be a tight squeak--a
+damned tight squeak. Then you did what you railroad people always do;
+you slipped out quietly and bought a few men--just to be on the safe
+side."
+
+So it was sprung at last. Hatch was accusing us of the one thing that we
+hadn't done; that the boss knew we hadn't done.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have to try again, Mr. Hatch," he said, with a sour
+little smile. Then he added: "Anybody can make charges, you know."
+
+Hatch jumped to his feet and he was almost foaming at the mouth.
+
+"Right there is where we've got you!" he shouted. "You were too cautious
+to put one of your own men in the field, so you sent outside for your
+briber. He was fly, too; he never came near you nor any of your
+officials--to start curious talk. But he was a stranger, and he had to
+have help in finding the right men to buy. Dedmon, here, was out of a
+job--thanks to you and your meddling--and the steering stunt offered
+good pay. Do you want any more?"
+
+The boss shook his head.
+
+"It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I don't know in the
+least what you are talking about, and you'll pardon me, I hope, if I say
+that it doesn't greatly interest me."
+
+"By heavens--I'll make it interest you! The easy-mark candidates were
+found and bought and paid for--and maybe they'll stay bought, and maybe
+they won't. But that isn't the point. For a little more money--my money,
+this time--each of these men has made an affidavit to the fact that
+railroad money was offered him. They don't say whether or not they
+accepted it, mind you, and that doesn't cut any figure. They have sworn
+that the money was tendered. That lets them out and lets you in. You
+don't believe it? I'll show you," and Hatch whipped a list of names from
+his pocket and slapped it upon the boss's desk. "Go to those men and ask
+them; if you want to carry it that far. They'll tell you."
+
+I could see that the boss barely glanced at the list. The glib story of
+the bribery was like the bite of a slipping crane-hitch--slow to take
+hold. So far as we were concerned, of course, the charge fell flat; and
+upon any other hypothesis it was blankly incredible, unbelievable,
+absurd.
+
+"The affidavits themselves would be much more convincing," I heard the
+boss say, "though even then I should wish to have reasonable proof that
+they were genuine."
+
+Hatch was sitting down again and his grin showed his teeth unpleasantly.
+
+"Do you think for a minute that I'd bring the papers here and trust them
+in your hands?" he rapped out insultingly. "Not much! But we've got them
+all right, as you'll find out if you balk and force us to use them."
+
+At this point I could see that something in the persistent assurance of
+the man was getting under the boss's skin and giving him a cold chill.
+What if it were not the colossal bluff it had looked like in the
+beginning? What if.... Like a blaze of lightning out of a clear sky a
+possible explanation hit me under the fifth rib, and I guess it hit the
+boss at about the same instant. What if President Dunton and the New
+York stock-jobbers, believing as they did that nothing but legislative
+favor would give them their trading capital in the depressed stock, had
+cut in and done this thing without consulting us?
+
+The boss stirred uneasily in his chair and picked up the paper-knife--a
+little unconscious trick of his when he wanted time to gather himself.
+
+"Perhaps you would be willing to give me the name of this briber, Mr.
+Hatch?" he said, after a little pause.
+
+"As if you didn't know it!" was the scoffing retort. "You drive us to
+the newspapers and everybody'll know it."
+
+"But I _don't_ know it," the boss insisted patiently. Then he seemed to
+take a sort of fresh grip on himself, for he added: "And I don't believe
+you do, either, Mr. Hatch. You are a pretty good bluffer, but----"
+
+Hatch broke in with a short laugh.
+
+"There were two of them; one who was hired to do the talking while the
+real wire-puller stood aside and held the coin bag. We'll skip the hired
+man." Then he turned to the ex-sheriff: "Write out the name of the
+bag-holder for him, Dedmon," he commanded, tearing a leaf from his
+pocket notebook and thrusting it, with a stubby pencil, into Dedmon's
+hands.
+
+The man from Arrowhead County bent over his knee and wrote a name on the
+slip of paper, laying the slip on the drawn-out slide of the boss's desk
+when he had finished the slow penciling. The effect of the thing was all
+that any plotter could have desired. I saw the boss's face go gray, saw
+him stare at the slip and heard him say, half to himself, "_Howard
+Collingwood!_"
+
+Hatch followed up his advantage promptly. He was afoot and struggling
+into his overcoat when he said:
+
+"You've got what you were after, Norcross, and it has got your goat.
+We've known all along that you were only bluffing and sparring to gain
+time. We've nailed you to the cross. You let this deal with Marshall and
+his people stand as it's made, or we'll show you up for what you are.
+That's the plain English of it."
+
+"You mean that you will go to the newspapers with this?" said the boss,
+and it was no wonder that his voice was a bit husky.
+
+"Just that. We'll give you plenty of time to think it over. The joint
+deal with C. S. & W. goes into effect to-morrow, and it's up to you to
+sit tight in the boat and let us alone. If you don't--if you butt in
+with the ground-leases, or in any other way--the story will go to the
+newspapers and every sucker on the line of the P. S. L. will know how
+you've been pulling the wool over his eyes with all this guff about
+'justice first,' and 'the public be pleased.' You're no fool, Norcross.
+You know they won't lay it to Dunton and the New Yorkers. You've taken
+pains to advertise it far and wide that you are running this railroad on
+your own responsibility, and the people are going to take you at your
+word."
+
+Dedmon, and the lawyer--who hadn't spoken a single word in all the
+talk--were edging toward the door. I heard just the faintest possible
+little noise in the ante-room, betokening Tarbell's withdrawal. The boss
+didn't make any answer to Hatch's wind-up except to say, "Is that all?"
+
+The other two were out, now, and Hatch turned to stick his ugly jaw out
+at the boss, and to say, just as if I hadn't been there to look on and
+hear him:
+
+"No, by Jupiter--it isn't all! In the past six months you've made Gus
+Henckel and me lose a cold half-million, Norcross. For a less
+provocation than that, many a man in this neck of woods has been sent
+back east in the baggage-car, wearing a wooden overcoat. You climb down,
+and do it while you can stay alive!"
+
+For some little time after the three men went away the boss sat staring
+at the slip of paper on the desk slide. At the long last he got up, sort
+of tired-like, I thought, and said to me: "Jimmie, you go down and see
+if you can find a taxi, and we'll drive out to Major Kendrick's. I
+promised him I'd go out to the house, you remember."
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Flagged Down
+
+
+When our taxi stopped at the major's gate, somebody was coming out just
+as we were getting ready to go in. The light from the street arc was broken
+a good bit by the sidewalk trees, and the man had the visor of his big
+flat golf cap pulled down well over his eyes, but I knew him just the
+same. It was Collingwood!
+
+This looked like more trouble. What was the president's nephew doing
+here? I wondered about that, and also, if the boss had recognized
+Collingwood. If he had, he made no sign, and a moment later I had
+punched the bell-push and Maisie Ann was opening the door for us.
+
+"Both of you? oh, how nice!" she said, with a smile for the boss and a
+queer little grimace for me. "Come in. This is our evening for callers.
+Cousin Basil is out, but he'll be back pretty soon, and he left word for
+you to wait if you got here before he did."
+
+That message was for the boss, and I lagged behind in the dimly lighted
+hall while she was showing him into the back parlor. I heard her wheel
+up a chair for him before the fire, and go on chattering to him about
+nothing, and by that I knew that there wasn't anybody else in the parlor
+and that she was just filling in the time until something else should
+happen.
+
+It wasn't long until the something happened. I had dropped down on the
+hall settee, in the end of it next to the coat-rack, and when Mrs.
+Sheila came down-stairs and went through the hall, she didn't see me. A
+second later I heard the boss jump up and say, "At last! It seems as if
+you had been gone a year rather than a fortnight," and then Maisie Ann
+came dodging out and plunked herself down on the settee beside me.
+
+You needn't tell me that we had no right to sit there listening; I know
+it well enough. On the other hand, I was just shirky enough to shift the
+responsibility to Maisie Ann. She didn't make any move to duck, so I
+didn't.
+
+"You came out to see Cousin Basil?" Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss.
+And then: "He had a telephone call from the Bullard, and he asked me to
+tell you to wait." After that, I guess she sat down to help him wait,
+for pretty soon we heard her say: "Cousin Basil has told me a little
+about the new trouble: have you been having another bad quarter of an
+hour?"
+
+"The worst of the lot," the boss said gravely, and from that he went on
+to tell her about the Hatch visit and what had come of it; how the
+grafters had a new claw hold on him, now, made possible by an
+unwarranted piece of meddling on the part of the New York people in the
+political game.
+
+It was while he was talking about this that Maisie Ann grabbed me by the
+wrist and dragged me bodily into the darkened front parlor, the door to
+which was just on the other side of the coat rack. I thought she had
+come to her right senses, at last, and was making the shift to break off
+the eavesdropping. That being the case, I was simply horrified when I
+found that she was merely fixing it so that we could both _see_ and
+hear. The sliding doors between the two parlors were cracked open about
+an inch, and before I realized what she was doing she had pulled me down
+on the floor beside her, right in front of that crack.
+
+"If you move or make a noise, I'll scream and they'll come in here and
+find us both!" she hissed in my ear; and because I didn't know what else
+to do with such a kiddish little termagent, I sat still. It was
+dastardly, I know; but what was I to do?
+
+The first thing we saw was that the two in the other room were sitting
+at opposite sides of the fire. Mrs. Sheila was awfully pretty; prettier
+than I had ever seen her, because she had a lot more color in her face,
+and her eyes had that warm glow in them that even the grayest eyes can
+get when there is a human soul behind them, and the soul has got itself
+stirred up about something.
+
+When the boss finished telling her about the Hatch talk, she said: "You
+mean that Mr. Dunton and his associates sent somebody out here to
+influence the election?"
+
+The boss looked up sort of quick.
+
+"Yes; that is it, precisely. But how did you know?"
+
+"You made the inference perfectly plain," she countered. "I have a
+reasoning mind, Graham; haven't you discovered it before this?"
+
+The boss nodded soberly. "I have discovered a good many things about you
+during the past six months: one of them is that there was never another
+woman like you since the world began."
+
+Knowing, as I did, that she had a husband alive and kicking around
+somewhere, it seemed as if I just couldn't stay there and listen to what
+a break of that kind on the boss's part was likely to lead up to. But
+Maisie Ann gripped my wrist until she hurt.
+
+"You _must_ listen!" she whispered fiercely. "You're taking care of him,
+and you've _got_ to know!"
+
+As on many other earlier occasions, Mrs. Sheila slid away from the
+sentimental side of things just as easy as turning your hand over.
+
+"You are too big a man to let an added difficulty defeat you now," she
+remarked calmly, going back to the business field. "You are really
+making a miraculous success. I have just spent two weeks in the capital,
+as you know, and everybody is talking about you. They say you are in a
+fair way to solve the big problem--the problem of bringing the railroads
+and the people together in a peaceable and profitable partnership--which
+is as it should be."
+
+"It can be done; and I could do it right here on the Pioneer Short Line
+if I didn't have to fight so many different kinds of devils at the same
+time," said the boss, scowling down at the fire in the grate. And then
+with a quick jerk of his head to face her: "You sent the major a wire
+from the capital last night, telling him to persuade me not to go to
+Strathcona. Why did you do it? And how did you know I was thinking of
+going?"
+
+For the first time in the whole six months I saw Mrs. Sheila get a
+little flustered, though she didn't show it much, only in a little more
+color in her cheeks.
+
+"Some day, perhaps, I may tell you, but I can't now," she said sort of
+hurriedly. And then: "You mustn't ask me."
+
+"But you did send the wire?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you also sent another to Upton Van Britt?"
+
+"I did."
+
+The boss smiled. "That second message was an after-thought. You were
+afraid I'd be stubborn and go, anyway. That was some more of your
+marvelous inner reasoning. Tell me, Sheila, did you know that there was
+going to be a broken rail-joint set to kill me on that trip?"
+
+That got her in spite of her heavenly calm and I could see her press her
+pretty lips together hard.
+
+"Was that what they did?" she asked, a bit trembly.
+
+He nodded. "Van Britt was on the pilot engine ahead of my car, and he
+found it. There was no harm done. It was bad enough, God knows, to set a
+trap that would have killed everybody on my train; but this other thing
+that has been pulled off to-night is even worse. Mr. Dunton and his
+unprincipled followers have set a thing on foot here which is due to
+grind us all to powder. Past that, they have contrived to handcuff me so
+that I can't make a move without pulling down consequences of a personal
+nature upon President Dunton, himself."
+
+"Now my 'marvelous inner reasoning' has gone quite blind," she said,
+with a queer little smile. "You'll have to explain."
+
+"It's simple enough," said the boss shortly. "If Mr. Dunton had sent
+only hired emissaries out here to bribe the members of the
+Legislature--but he didn't; he included a member of his own family."
+
+I was looking straight at Mrs. Sheila as he spoke, and I saw a sudden
+frightened shock jump into the slate-gray eyes. Just for a second.
+Before you could count one, it was gone and she was saying quietly:
+
+"A member of his own family? That is very singular, isn't it?"
+
+"It is, and it isn't. The man who was sent with the bribe money has
+every qualification for the job, I should say, save one--discretion. And
+I'm not sure that he may not be discreet enough, when he isn't drunk."
+
+Again I saw the curious look in her eyes, and this time it was almost
+like the shrinking from a blow.
+
+"Was there--was this thing that was done actually criminal?" she asked,
+just breathing it at him.
+
+"It was, indeed. The election laws of this State have teeth. It is a
+penitentiary offense to bribe either the electorate or the law-makers."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and she was no longer looking at
+him; she was staring into the heart of the glowing coals in the grate
+basket. By and by she said: "You haven't told me this man's name--the
+one who did the bribing; may I know it?"
+
+I knew just what the boss was going to do, and he did it; took the slip
+of paper that Dedmon had written on from his pocket and passed it across
+to her. If there was another shock for her none of us could see it. She
+had her face turned away when she looked at the name on the paper.
+Pretty soon she said, sort of drearily:
+
+"Once you told me that the true test of any human being came when he was
+asked to eliminate the personal factor; to efface himself completely in
+order that his cause might prosper. Do you still believe that?"
+
+"Of course. It's all in the day's work. Any cause worth while is vastly
+bigger than any man who is trying to advance it."
+
+"Than any man, yes; but for a woman, Graham; wouldn't you allow
+something for the woman?"
+
+"I thought we had agreed long ago that there is no double standard,
+either in morals or ethics--one thing for the man and another for the
+woman. That is your own attitude, isn't it?"
+
+She didn't say whether it was or not. She was holding the bit of paper
+he had given her so that the light from the fire fell upon it when she
+said: "I suppose your duty is quite clear. In the slang of the street,
+you must 'beat Mr. Hatch to it.' You must be the first to denounce this
+bribery, clearing yourself and letting the axe fall where it will. You
+owe that much to yourself, to the men who have fought shoulder to
+shoulder with you, and to that wider circle of the public which is
+beginning to believe that you are honest and sincere, don't you?"
+
+The boss was shaking his head a bit doubtfully.
+
+"It isn't quite so simple as that," he objected. "I don't know that I'd
+have any compunctions about sending Collingwood to the dump. If the half
+of what they say of him is true, he is a spineless degenerate and hardly
+worth saving. But to do as you suggest would be open rebellion, you
+know; while Dunton remains president, I am his subordinate, and if I
+should expose him and his nephew, the situation here would become simply
+impossible."
+
+"Well?" she prompted.
+
+"Such a move would rightly and properly bring a wire demand for my
+resignation, of a nature that couldn't be ignored--only it wouldn't,
+because I should anticipate it by resigning first. That is a small
+matter, introducing the personal element which we have agreed should be
+eliminated. But the results to others; to the men of my staff and the
+rank and file, and to the public, which, as you say, is just beginning
+to realize some of the benefits of a real partnership with its principal
+railroad; these things can't be so easily ignored."
+
+"You have thought of some other expedient?"
+
+"No; I haven't got that far yet. But I am determined that Hatch shall
+not be allowed to work his graft a second time upon the people who are
+trusting me. I believe in the new policy we are trying out. I'd fling my
+own fortune into the gap if I had one, and, more than that, I'd pull in
+every friend I have in the world if by so doing I could stand the
+Pioneer Short Line upon a solid foundation of honest ownership. That is
+all that is needed in the present crisis--absolutely all."
+
+He was on his feet now and tramping back and forth on the hearth rug. At
+one of his back-turnings I saw Mrs. Sheila reach out quickly and lay the
+bit of paper with its accusing scrawl on the glowing coals. Then she
+said, quite calm again:
+
+"In time to come you will accomplish even that, Graham--this change of
+ownership that we have talked of and dreamed about. It is the true
+solution of the problem; not Government ownership, but ownership by the
+people who have the most at stake--the public and the workers. You are a
+strong man, and you will bring it about. But this other man--who is not
+strong; the man whose name was written upon the bit of paper I have just
+thrown into the fire...."
+
+He wheeled quickly, and what he said made me feel as if a cold wind were
+blowing up the back of my neck, because I hadn't dreamed that he would
+remember Collingwood well enough to recognize him in that passing moment
+on the sidewalk.
+
+"That man," he muttered, sort of gratingly: "I had completely forgotten.
+He was here just a little while ago. I met him as I was coming in. Did
+he come to see your cousin--the major?"
+
+"No," she said, matching his low tone; "he came to see me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes. Finding himself in a pitfall which he has digged with his own
+hands, he is like other men of his kind; he would be very glad to climb
+out upon the shoulders of a woman."
+
+I guess the boss saw red for a minute, but the question he asked had to
+come.
+
+"By what right did he come to you, Sheila?"
+
+"By what he doubtless thinks is the best right in the world. He is my
+husband."
+
+It was out at last, and the boss's poor little house of cards that I
+knew he had been building all these months had got its knock-down in
+just those four quietly spoken words. Maisie Ann was still gripping my
+wrist, and I felt a hot tear go splash on my hand. "Oh, I could _kill_
+him!" she whispered, meaning Collingwood, I suppose.
+
+As well as I knew him, I couldn't begin to guess what the boss would do
+or say. But he was such a splendid fighter that I might have known.
+
+"I heard, no longer ago than this afternoon, that you were not--that
+your husband was still living," he said, speaking very gently. "I didn't
+believe it--not fully--though I saw that there might easily be room for
+the belief. It makes no difference, Sheila. You are my friend, and you
+are blameless. But before we go any farther I want you to believe that I
+wouldn't have been brutal enough to give you that bit of paper if I had
+remotely suspected that Collingwood was the man."
+
+She didn't make any answer to that, and after a while he said:
+
+"Having told me so much, can't you tell me a little more?"
+
+"There isn't much to tell, and even the little is commonplace and--and
+disgraceful," she replied, with a touch of weariness that was fairly
+heart-breaking. "Don't ask me why we were married; I can't explain that,
+simply because I don't know, myself. It was arranged between the two
+families, and I suppose Howie and I always took it for granted. I can't
+even plead ignorance, for I have known him all my life."
+
+"Go on," said the boss, still speaking as gently as a brother might
+have.
+
+"Howie was a spoiled child, an only son, and he is a spoiled man. I
+stood it as long as I could--I hope you will believe that. But there are
+some things that a woman cannot stand, and----"
+
+"I know," he broke in. "So you came out here to be free."
+
+"It is four years since we have lived together," she went on, "and for a
+long time I hoped he would never find out where I was. There was no
+divorce: I couldn't endure the thought of the publicity and the--the
+disgrace. When I came here to Cousin Basil's there was no attempt made
+to hide the facts; or at least the one chief fact that I was a married
+woman. But on the other hand, I had taken my mother's name, and only
+Cousin Basil and his wife knew that I was not what perhaps every one
+else took me to be,--a widow with a dead husband instead of a living
+one."
+
+"Did Collingwood try to find you?"
+
+"No, I think not. But when he was here last spring with his Uncle
+Breckenridge he saw me and found out that I was living here with Cousin
+Basil."
+
+"Did he try to persecute you?"
+
+"No, not then. I was afraid of only one thing: that he might drink too
+much and--and talk. Part of the fear was realized. He saw me that Sunday
+night in the Bullard. That was why he was trying to fight the hotel
+people--because they wouldn't let him come up-stairs. I saw what you
+did, and I was sorry. I couldn't help feeling that in some way it would
+prove to be the beginning of a tragedy."
+
+"You saw no more of him then?"
+
+"No; I neither saw him nor heard of him until about a month ago when he
+came west with a man named Bullock--a New York attorney. I didn't know
+why he came, but I thought it was to annoy me."
+
+"And he has annoyed you?"
+
+"Until this night he has never missed an opportunity of doing so when he
+could dodge Cousin Basil. Caring nothing for me himself, he has taken
+violent exceptions to my friendship with you and with Upton Van Britt,
+though that is chiefly when he has been drinking too much. It was his
+taunting boast yesterday at the capital that led me to telegraph Cousin
+Basil and Upton Van Britt about your trip to Strathcona. He knew that
+you were going to the gold camp, and he declared to me that you'd never
+come back alive."
+
+"But to-night," the boss persisted. "What did he want to-night?"
+
+"He wanted to--to use me. He said that he had 'put something across' for
+his uncle, that he had gotten into trouble for it, and that--to use his
+own phrase again, you were the man who would try to 'get his goat.'"
+
+"And his object in telling you this?"
+
+"Was entirely worthy of the man. He asked me, or rather I should say,
+commanded me, to 'choke you off.' And, of course, he added the insult.
+He said I was the one who could do it."
+
+The boss had gone to tramping again and when he stopped to face her I
+could see that he had threshed his way around to some sort of a
+conclusion.
+
+"Without intending to, you have tied my hands," he said gravely. "I
+wasn't meaning to spare Collingwood if there were any way in which I
+could use him as a club to knock Hatch out of the game."
+
+"But now you won't use him?"
+
+"You might justly write me down as a pretty poor friend of yours if I
+should--after what you have told me."
+
+"I haven't asked you to spare him."
+
+"No, I know you haven't. But the fact remains that he is your husband.
+I----"
+
+The interruption was the opening and closing of the front door and the
+heavy tread of the major in the hall. In a flash Mrs. Sheila was up and
+getting ready to vanish through the door that led to the dining-room.
+With her hand on the door-knob she shot a quick question at the boss.
+
+"How much will you tell Cousin Basil?"
+
+"Nothing of what you have told me."
+
+"Thank you," she whispered back; "you are as big in your friendship as
+you are in other ways." And with that she was gone.
+
+It was right along in the same half-minute, while the boss was standing
+with his back to the fire and the major was going in to talk to him,
+that I lost Maisie Ann. I don't know where she went, or how. She had let
+go of my wrist, and when I groped for her she was gone. Since I didn't
+see any good reason why I should stay and spy upon the boss and the
+major, I slipped out to the hall and curled up on the big settee beyond
+the coat rack; curled up, and after listening a while to the drone of
+voices in the farther room, went to sleep.
+
+It was away deep in the night when the boss took hold of me and shook me
+awake. The long talk was just getting itself finished, and the major had
+come to the door with his guest.
+
+"We must manage to pull Collingwood out of it in some way," the major
+was saying. "I don't love the damn' scoundrel any betteh than you do,
+Graham; but thah's a reason--a fam'ly reason, as you might say." Then he
+switched off quickly. "You haven't asked me yet why I ran away from home
+this evenin' when I was expecting you."
+
+"No," said the boss. "Sheila told me that you had a telephone call to
+the Bullard."
+
+The old Kentuckian chuckled.
+
+"Yes, suh; and you'd neveh guess in a thousand yeahs who sent the call,
+or what was wanted. It was ouh friend Hatch, and no otheh. And he had
+the face to offeh me ten thousand dollahs a yeah to act as consulting
+counsel for him against the railroad company!"
+
+"Of course you accepted," said the boss, meaning just the opposite.
+
+The major chuckled again. "I talked with him long enough to find out
+about where he stood. He thinks he's got you by the neck, but, like most
+men of his breed, he's a paltry coward, suh, at heart."
+
+The boss laughed. "What is he afraid of?"
+
+"He's afraid of his life. He told me, with his eyes buggin' out, that
+thah was one man heah in Portal City who would kill him to get
+possession of certain papehs that were locked up in the cash vault of
+the Security National."
+
+The boss was pulling on his gloves.
+
+"I didn't give him any reason to think that I was anxious to murder
+him," he said.
+
+"Oh, no, my deah boy; it isn't you, at all. It's Howie Collingwood.
+Thah's where we land afteh all is said and done. Youh hands are tied,
+and we've got this heah young maniac to deal with. If Collingwood gets
+about three fingehs of red likkeh under his belt, why, thah's one murder
+in prospect. And if Hatch has any reason to think that you can still get
+the underholt on him, why, thah's another. I'm glad you've seen fit to
+take Ripley's advice at last, and got you a body-guard."
+
+"What's that?" queried the boss. But the query was answered a minute
+later when we hit the sidewalk for the tramp back to town and Tarbell
+fell in to walk three steps behind us all the way to the door of the
+railroad club.
+
+It sure did look as if things were just about as bad as they could ever
+be, now. Hatch once more on top, the whole bottom knocked out of the
+railroad experiment, our good name for political honesty gone
+glimmering, and, worst of all, perhaps, the boss's big heart broken
+right in two over those four little words that nothing could ever rub
+out--"he is my husband." I didn't wonder that the boss said never a word
+in all that long walk down-town, or that he forgot to tell me good-night
+when he locked himself up in his room at the club.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+The Dipsomaniac
+
+
+In a day when bunched money, however arrogant it may be, has been taught
+to go sort of softly, the Hatch people were careful not to make any
+public announcement of the things they were doing or going to do. But
+bad news has wings of its own. Mr. Norcross was still in the midst of
+his mail dictation to me the morning after the bottom--all the different
+bottoms--fell out, when Mr. Hornack came bulging in.
+
+"What's all this fire-alarm that's been sprung about a new elevator
+trust?" he demanded, chewing on his cigar as if it were something he
+were trying to eat. "It's all over town that C. S. & W. has been
+secretly reorganized, with the Hatch crowd in control. I'm having a
+perfect cyclone of telephone calls asking what, and how, and why."
+
+The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he
+announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing
+when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps,
+and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical
+consolidation."
+
+"Is that the fact?--or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the
+traffic manager.
+
+"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also,
+to tell me where we were to get off."
+
+Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.
+
+"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down
+quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.
+
+"He does--just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up
+to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."
+
+"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"
+
+"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who
+ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went
+on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.
+
+Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for
+publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he
+got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between
+cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply
+_can't_!"
+
+"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can
+do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street
+owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only
+hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of
+its securities among the people it actually serves."
+
+Hornack's teeth met in the middle of the chewed cigar.
+
+"That's excellent logic--bully good logic, if anybody should ask you!
+But we're fighting a condition, not a theory. Nobody wants P. S. L.
+Common even at thirty-two. You wouldn't advise your worst enemy to buy
+it at that figure."
+
+"I don't know," said the boss, kind of musingly. "You're forgetting the
+water that's been put into it from time to time by the speculators and
+reorganizers; there has been a good deal of that, first and last.
+Nevertheless, value for value, you know, and I know, that the property
+is worth more than thirty-two, including the bonds. What I mean is that
+if anybody would buy the control at that figure,--the control, mind you,
+and not merely a minority--and handle the road purely as a
+dividend-earning business proposition, he wouldn't lose money; he'd make
+money--a lot of it."
+
+"All of which doesn't get us anywhere in the present pinch," returned
+the traffic manager. "I suppose we'll have to wait until Hatch makes his
+first move, and I've still got fight enough left in me to hope that
+he'll make it suddenly. Punch the button for me if anything new
+develops. I'm going back to swing on to my telephone."
+
+Following this talk with Hornack there was a try-out with Billoughby and
+Juneman, but as this three-cornered conference was held in the private
+room of the suite, I don't know what was said. A little farther along,
+when the boss was once more whittling at the dictation, Mr. Van Britt
+strolled in. Mr. Norcross told me to take my bunch of notes to May and
+then he gave Mr. Van Britt his inning, starting off with: "Well, how is
+the general superintendent this fine morning?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt wrinkled his nose.
+
+"The general superintendent is wondering, one more time, why under the
+starry heavens he is out here in this country that God has forgotten,
+scrapping for a living on this one-horse railroad of yours when he might
+be in good little old New York, living easy and clipping coupons in the
+safety-deposit room of a Broad Street bank."
+
+The boss laughed at that, and I'm telling you right now that I was glad
+to know that he was still able to laugh.
+
+"You've never seen the day when you wanted to renege, Upton, and you
+know it," he hit back. "Think of the perfectly good technical education
+you were wasting when I took hold of you and jerked you out here."
+
+"Huh!" said our millionaire; "I've got other things to think of. I've
+just had two enginemen on the carpet for running over an old ranchman's
+pet cow. They said they couldn't help it; but I told them that under the
+'public-be-pleased' policy, they'd got to help it."
+
+Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral,
+Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."
+
+"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is
+due to have a strike on its hands. The management--which seems to have
+got itself consolidated in some way--shot out a lot of new bosses all
+along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the
+entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and
+everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty
+per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the
+wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C.
+S. & W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."
+
+"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that
+the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. & W.?"
+
+"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."
+
+"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one
+stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. & W., who have
+been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later
+on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local
+sympathizers."
+
+"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon,"
+Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that
+once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers
+will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will
+be asking us what _we_ are going to do about it; whether we are going to
+fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft,
+as our predecessors did."
+
+"We needn't go over that ground again--you and I, Upton," said Mr.
+Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We
+have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little
+operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the
+Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.
+
+Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his
+hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in
+wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:
+
+"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand
+the gaff--this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the
+people as the accuser of your president--and hope to hold your job. The
+one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."
+
+"Upton, if I thought you meant that--but I never know when to take you
+seriously."
+
+"The two enginemen who ran over the ranchman's pet cow had no such
+difficulty, I assure you. And isn't it good advice? You know, as well as
+I do, that Chadwick is holding you here by main strength; that you can
+never accomplish anything permanent while Dunton and his cronies are at
+the steering-wheel. It might be different if you had the local backing
+of your constituency--the people served by the Short Line. But you
+haven't that; up to date, the people are merely interested spectators."
+
+"Go on," said the boss, frowning again.
+
+"They have a stake in the game--the biggest of the stakes, as a matter
+of fact--but it isn't sufficiently apparent to make them climb in and
+fight for you. They are saying, with a good bit of reason, that, after
+all is said and done, Big Money--Wall Street--still has the call, and
+any twenty-four hours may see the whole thing slump back into graft and
+crooked politics."
+
+"It is so true that you might be reading it out of a book," was the
+boss's comment. And then: "What's the answer?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt shook his head. "I don't know. If you had money enough to
+buy the voting control in P. S. L. you might get somewhere; but as it
+is, you're like a cat in Hades without claws."
+
+"Tell me," said Mr. Norcross, after a little pause: "You're a native New
+Yorker: do you know this man Collingwood?"
+
+"Only by hearsay. He is what our English friends call a 'blooming
+bounder'; fast yachts, fast motor-cars, the fast set generally. It's a
+pretty bad case of money-spoil, I fancy. They say he wasn't always a
+total loss."
+
+"Did you ever hear that he was married?"
+
+"Oh, yes; he married a Kentucky girl some years ago: I don't remember
+her name. They say she stood him for about six months and then dropped
+out. I suppose he needs killing for that."
+
+At this the boss went a step farther, saying: "He does, indeed, Upton. I
+happen to know the young woman."
+
+That was when Mr. Van Britt fired his own little bomb-shell. "So do I,"
+he answered quietly.
+
+"But you said you had forgotten her name!"
+
+"So I have--her married name. And what's more, I mean to keep on
+forgetting it."
+
+There was no mistake about the boss's frown this time.
+
+"That won't do, Upton," he said, kind of warningly.
+
+"It will do well enough for the present. I'd marry her to-morrow,
+Graham, if she were free, and there were no other obstacles. Unhappily,
+there are two--besides the small legal difficulty; she doesn't care for
+my money--having a little of her own; and she happens to be in love with
+the other fellow."
+
+I guess the boss was remembering what Mrs. Sheila had told him in that
+confidence before the back-parlor fire, about its being all off between
+her and Collingwood, for he said: "I think you are mistaken as to that
+last."
+
+"No, I'm not mistaken. But that's neither here nor there. Neither you
+nor I can send Collingwood to the penitentiary--that's a cinch.
+Wherefore, I'm advising you to quit, walk out, jump the job."
+
+At that the boss took a fresh brace, righting his swing chair with a
+snap.
+
+"You know very little about me, Upton, if you think I'm going to throw
+up my hands now, when the real pinch has come. A while back I might have
+done it, but now I'll fight until I'm permanently killed. I have a
+scheme--if it could only be worked. But it can't be worked on a rising
+market. I suppose you have seen the morning's quotations. By some trick
+or other, the Dunton people are boosting the stock again. It went up
+three points yesterday."
+
+Mr. Van Britt grinned. "They're discounting the effect of this little
+political deal--which will at least rope your reform scheme down, if it
+doesn't do anything else. What you need is a good, old-fashioned
+cataclysm of some sort; something that would fairly knock the tar out of
+P. S. L. securities and send them skittering down the toboggan slide in
+spite of anything Uncle Breckenridge could do to stop them; down to
+where they could be safely and profitably picked up by the dear public.
+Unfortunately, those things don't happen outside of the story books. If
+they did, if the earthquake should happen along our way just now, I
+don't know but I'd be disloyal enough to get out and help it shake
+things up a bit."
+
+After Mr. Van Britt had gone, the boss put in the remainder of the day
+like a workingman, skipping the noon luncheon as he sometimes did when
+the work drive was extra heavy. Meanwhile, as you'd suppose, rumor was
+plentifully busy, on the railroad, and also in town.
+
+By noon it was well understood that there had been a radical change in
+the management of C. S. & W., and that there was going to be a general
+strike in answer to the slashing cut in wages. I slipped up-town to get
+a bite while Fred May was spelling me at the dictation desk, and I heard
+some of the talk. It was pretty straight, most of it--which shows how
+useless it is to try to keep any business secrets, nowadays.
+
+For example: the three men at my table in the Bullard grill-room--they
+didn't know me or who I was--knew that a council of war had been called
+in the railroad headquarters, and that Ripley had been pulled in by wire
+from Lesterburg, and that we were rushing around hurriedly to provide
+storage room for the wheat shippers in case of a tie-up, and that we
+were arranging to distribute railroad company coal in case the tie-up
+should bring on a fuel famine--knew all these things and talked about
+them.
+
+They were facts, as far as they went--these things. The boss hadn't been
+idle during the forenoon, and he kept up the drive straight through to
+quitting time. Word was brought in during the afternoon by Tarbell that
+the Hatch people were wiring the Kansas City and Omaha employment
+agencies and placing hurry orders for strike-breakers. The boss's answer
+to this was a peremptory wire to our passenger agents at both points to
+make no rate concessions whatever, of any kind, for the transportation
+of laborers under contract. It was a shrewd little knock. Labor of that
+kind is mighty hard to move unless it can get free transportation or a
+low rate of fare, and I could see that Mr. Norcross was hoping to keep
+the strike-breakers away.
+
+When six o'clock came, the boss asked May to stay and keep the office
+open while I could go down-stairs and get my dinner in the station
+restaurant, and he went off up-town--to the club, I suppose. After I'd
+had my bite, I let May go. Everything was moving along all right, so far
+as anybody could see. We had five extra fuel trains loading at the
+company's chutes at Coalville, and the despatcher was instructed to work
+them out on the line during the night, distributing them to the towns
+that had reported shortages. They were not to be turned over to the
+regular coal yards; they were to be side-tracked and held for
+emergencies.
+
+Mr. Norcross came back about eight o'clock, and I gave him my report of
+how things were going on the line. A little later Mr. Cantrell dropped
+in, and there was a quiet talk about the situation, and what it was
+likely to develop. The _Mountaineer_ editor was given all the facts,
+except the one big one about Hatch's death-grip on us, and in turn Mr.
+Cantrell promised the help of his paper to the last ditch--though, of
+course, he had no idea of how deep that last ditch was going to be. I
+had a lot of filing and indexing to do, and I kept at work while they
+were talking, wondering all the time if the boss would venture to tell
+the editor about the depth of that "last ditch." He didn't. I guess he
+thought he wouldn't until he had to.
+
+It was pretty nearly nine o'clock when the editor went away, and Mr.
+Norcross was just saying to me that he guessed we'd better knock off for
+the night, when we both heard a step in May's room. A second later the
+door was pushed open and a man came in, making for the nearest chair and
+flinging himself into it as if he'd reached the limit. It was
+Collingwood. He was chewing on a dead cigar and his face was like the
+face of a corpse. But he was sober.
+
+Naturally, I supposed he had come to make trouble with the boss on Mrs.
+Sheila's account, and I quietly edged open the drawer of my desk where I
+kept Fred May's automatic, so as to be ready. He didn't waste much time.
+
+"I saw you as I was coming away from Kendrick's last night," he began,
+with a bickering rasp in his voice. "Did you go up against the gun I had
+loaded for you?"
+
+Mr. Norcross cut straight through to the bottom of that little
+complication at a single stroke.
+
+"What Mrs. Collingwood said to me, or what I said to her, can have no
+possible bearing upon anything that you may have to say to me, or that I
+can consent to listen to, Mr. Collingwood."
+
+The derelict sat up in his chair.
+
+"But you've got to keep hands off, just the same; at Kendrick's, and in
+this other business, too. If you don't, there is going to be blood on
+the moon! Get me?"
+
+The boss never batted an eye. "I'm taking it for granted that you are
+sober, Mr. Collingwood," he said. "If you are, you must surely know that
+threats are about the poorest possible weapons you can use just now."
+
+"It's a plant, from start to finish!" gritted the man in the chair. "I
+haven't done a damned thing more than to cash a few checks for--for
+expenses, and turn the money over to Bullock. Now Hatch tells me that I
+was working with a spotter--his spotter--and that he can send me up for
+bribery. It's a lie. I don't know what Bullock did with the money, and I
+don't want to know."
+
+"But you had orders to give it to him when he required it, didn't you?"
+Mr. Norcross cut in.
+
+"That's none of your business. I want you to choke this man Hatch off of
+me!"
+
+The boss had picked up his paper-knife. "I don't know why you should
+come to me for help," he said. "You have been hand-in-glove with these
+conspirators ever since you came out here. You have known what they were
+doing to destroy the railroad property and wreck our trains, and two
+days ago you knew that they had set a trap for my special train on the
+Strathcona branch--a trap that was meant to kill me."
+
+It was a random shot, and I knew that Mr. Norcross was just guessing at
+where it might land when he fired it. But it went home; oh, you bet it
+went home!
+
+"Damn you!" gurgled the bounder, half starting to his feet. "Why
+shouldn't I want to see you killed? And what do I care what becomes of
+your cursed railroad? Haven't you done enough to me?"
+
+"No!" the word was slammed at him like a bullet. And then: "As I told
+you in the beginning, we won't go into any phase of it that involves
+Mrs. Collingwood. Get back into your own boat. Are you trying to tell me
+now that Hatch is threatening you?"
+
+"He's played me for a come-on. He says he's got the whole business down
+in black and white, with affidavits, and all that. He had the nerve to
+tell me less than an hour ago that he'd burn me alive if I didn't toe
+the mark."
+
+"What does he want you to do?"
+
+"He wants me to stick around here so that he can use me against you. He
+knows how you're mixed up with Sheila and that you can't turn a wheel
+without making it look as if you were going after me on your own
+personal account."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and the crackle of the match with
+which Mr. Norcross relighted his cigar smashed into the stillness like a
+tiny pistol shot. It was an awful muddle, with bloody murder sticking
+out of it on every side.
+
+"If you have come here with the idea that I can force Hatch's hand, you
+are very much misled," said the boss, at the close of the electric
+pause. And then: "Has he made it appear to you that he was merely trying
+to help you avenge your own fancied wrongs?"
+
+"He said I ought to get you; that any man who would make love to a
+married woman ought to be got."
+
+My chief was looking past the derelict and out through the darkened
+window.
+
+"You don't know me, Mr. Collingwood, but you do know your wife; and you
+know that she is as far above suspicion as the angels in heaven. Let
+that part of it go. Hatch was merely using you for his own ends. If he
+could persuade you to kill me off out of the way, it would be merely
+that much gained in the business fight. You haven't done it thus far,
+and now he is using your check-cashing excursion as a club with which he
+proposes to brain the entire railroad management, your uncle included,
+if we interfere with his plans."
+
+Collingwood scowled up at the ceiling, shifting the dead cigar from one
+corner of his mouth to the other.
+
+"So that's the way of it, is it?" he commented. "He was working for his
+own pocket all the time, and Uncle Breck stands pat and slips him the
+ace he was needing to make his hand a winner. Between you and me,
+Norcross, I believe this damned piker needs killing a few times,
+himself."
+
+The boss sat back in his swing chair and I could just imagine that he
+was trying to get some sort of proper angle on this young fellow who, in
+addition to his other scoundrelisms, big and little, had wrecked the
+life of Sheila Macrae. I knew what he was thinking. He had a theory that
+no man that was ever born was either all angel or all devil, and he was
+hunting for the redeeming streak in this one.
+
+When you looked right hard at the haggard face you could see something
+sort of half-appealing in it; something to make you think that perhaps,
+away back yonder before the spoiling began, there used to be a man;
+never a strong man, I guess, but one that might have been generous and
+free-hearted, maybe. I got a fleeting little glimpse of that back-number
+man when he turned suddenly and said:
+
+"One night a few weeks ago when I was full up, Hatch got hold of me and
+told me you were out at the Kendrick place with Sheila. He made me
+believe that I ought to go out there and kill you, and I started to do
+it. Do you know why I didn't do it?"
+
+"No," said the chief, mighty quietly.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. One night last spring up at the Bullard you
+slammed me one in the face and dragged me off to my room to keep me from
+making a bigger ass of myself than I'd already made. I haven't forgotten
+that. In all these crooked years, nobody else has ever taken the trouble
+to chuck me decently out of sight and give me a chance to brace. Drunk
+as I was, I remembered it that night when I was climbing up to a window
+in the major's house and trying to get a shot at you."
+
+Mr. Norcross shook his head, more than half sympathetically, I thought.
+
+"Let that part of it go and tell me about this other trouble," he said.
+"How badly are you tangled up in this political business?"
+
+"I've given it to you straight on the bribing proposition. Uncle Breck
+used me as a money carrier because--well, maybe it was because he
+couldn't trust Bullock. I didn't know definitely what Bullock was doing
+with the checks I cashed for him, though I supposed, of course, it was
+something that wouldn't stand daylight. It was only a side issue with
+me. I was coming out here anyway. I knew Sheila had made up her
+mind--God knows she's had cause enough; but I had a crazy notion that
+I'd like to be on the same side of the earth with her again for just a
+little while. Then this--" he trailed off in a babble of maledictions
+poured out upon the man who had trapped him and used him.
+
+The boss straightened himself in his chair, but he still was speaking
+gently when he said:
+
+"You are not asking my advice, and I don't owe you anything, personally,
+Mr. Collingwood. But I'll say to you what I might say to a better man in
+like circumstances. You have done all the harm you can, but, as I see
+it, there doesn't seem to be any need of your staying here to suffer the
+consequences. Why don't you go back to New York, taking your wife with
+you, if she will go?"
+
+Collingwood's smile was a mere teeth-baring grimace.
+
+"Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was just
+eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my funeral. Oh,
+I've earned it, and I'm not kicking. And about this other thing: I can't
+duck. You know what Hatch is holding me for. He told me just a little
+while ago that if I stepped aboard of a train, I'd be arrested before
+the train could pull out."
+
+It was a handsome little precaution on the part of the chief of the
+grafters. If a fight should be precipitated--if the boss should try to
+checkmate the C. S. & W. gobble--the arrest and indictment of President
+Dunton's nephew would serve bully good and well as a dramatic bit of
+side play to keep the newspapers from printing too much about the other
+thing.
+
+"If you really want to go, I think it can be arranged in some way, in
+spite of Hatch and his bluffing," Mr. Norcross put in quietly. "So far
+as our railroad troubles are concerned it will neither help nor hinder
+for you to stay on here, now."
+
+As if the helpful suggestion had been a lighted match to fire a hidden
+mine of rage, Collingwood sprang to his feet with his dull eyes ablaze.
+
+"No, by God!" he swore. "I'm going to make him come across with those
+affidavit papers first! You wait right here, Norcross. You think I'm all
+cur, but I'll show you. There isn't much left of me but hound dog, but
+even a hound dog will bite if you kick him hard enough. Lend me a gun,
+if you've got one and I'll----"
+
+"Hold on--none of that!" the boss broke in sternly, jumping out of his
+chair to enforce the command. But before he could make the grabbing move
+the corridor door slammed noisily and the madman was gone.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The Deserter
+
+
+Mr. Norcross chased out and tried to overtake Collingwood, going as far
+as the foot of the stairs. I went, too, but got only far enough to meet
+the boss coming up again. There was nothing doing. The station policeman
+had seen the crazy rounder jump into a taxi and go spinning off up-town.
+
+That settled the Collingwood business for the time being, but there was
+another jolt waiting for us when we got back to the office. While we
+were both out, Mr. Van Britt had blown in from his room at the foot of
+the hall and we found him lounging comfortably in the chair that
+Collingwood had just vacated.
+
+"I thought maybe you'd turn up again pretty soon, since you'd left the
+doors all open," was the way he started out. Then: "Sit down, Graham; I
+want to talk a few lines."
+
+Mr. Norcross took his own chair and twirled it to face the general
+superintendent. "Say it," he commanded briefly.
+
+Mr. Van Britt hooked his thumbs in his armholes.
+
+"I've just been figuring a bit on the general outlook: you have a
+decently efficient operating outfit here, what with Perkins and Brant
+and Conway handling the three divisions as self-contained units. You
+don't need a general superintendent any more than a monkey needs two
+tails."
+
+"What are you driving at?" was the curt demand.
+
+"Well, suppose we say retrenchment, for one thing. As I size it up, you
+might just as well be saving my salary. It would buy a good many new
+cross-ties in the course of a year."
+
+"That's all bunk, and you know it," snapped the boss. "The organization
+as it stands hasn't a single stick of dead wood in it. You know very
+well that a railroad the size of the Short Line can't run without an
+individual head of the operating department."
+
+Mr. Van Britt laughed a little at that.
+
+"If you should get some one of these new efficiency experts out here he
+would probably tell you that you could cut your staff right in two in
+the middle."
+
+I could see that the boss was getting mighty nearly impatient.
+
+"You are merely turning handsprings around the edges of the thing you
+have come to say, Upton," he barked out. "Come to the point, can't you?
+What have you got up your sleeve?"
+
+"Nothing that I could make you understand in a month of Sundays. I'm
+sore on my job and I want to quit."
+
+"Nonsense! You don't mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I do. I'm tired of wearing the brass collar of a soulless
+corporation. What's the use, anyway? I found a bunch of dividend checks
+from my bank at home in the mail to-day, and what good does the money do
+me? I can't spend it out here; can't even tip the servants at the hotel
+without everlastingly demoralizing them. I'm like the little boy who
+wanted to go out in the garden and eat worms."
+
+The boss was frowning thoughtfully.
+
+"You're not giving me a show, Upton," he protested. "Can't you blow the
+froth off and let me see what's in the bottom of the stein?"
+
+"Pledge you my word, it's all froth, Graham. I want to climb up on the
+mesa behind the shops and take a good deep breath of free air and shake
+my fist at your blamed old cow-track of a railroad and tell it to go to
+the devil. You shouldn't deny me a little pleasure like that."
+
+It was getting under the boss's skin at last. "I can't believe that you
+really want to resign," he broke out, sort of hopelessly. "It's simply
+preposterous!"
+
+"Pull it down out of the future and put it in the present, and you've
+got it," said Mr. Van Britt. "I _have_ resigned. I wrote it out on a
+piece of paper and dropped it into your mail box as I came through the
+outer office. It's signed, sealed, and delivered. You'll give me a
+testimonial, or something of that sort, 'To Whom It May Concern,' won't
+you? I've been obedient and faithful and honest and efficient, and all
+that, haven't I?"
+
+"I'd like to know first where you got your liquor, Upton. That is the
+most charitable construction I can put upon all this. Why, man alive!
+you're quitting me in the thick of the toughest fight the grafters have
+put up!"
+
+"Yes, I know; but a man's got only one life to live, and I've always had
+a sneaking sympathy for the high private in the front rank who didn't
+want to stand up and get himself shot full of holes. I'm running, and if
+you should ask me why, I'd tell you what the retreating soldier told
+Stonewall Jackson; he said he was running only because he couldn't fly."
+
+Once more the boss grew silently thoughtful. Out of the digging mental
+inquiry he brought this:
+
+"Has this sudden notion of yours anything to do with Sheila Macrae,
+Upton?"
+
+"Pledge you my word again. I met Sheila on the street to-day and
+promised her that I wouldn't so much as tip my hat to her while
+Collingwood is on this side of the Missouri River."
+
+"But if you quit, you'll go East yourself, won't you?"
+
+"Maybe, after a while. For the time being, I'd like to loaf on you for a
+week or so and watch the wheels go around without my having to prod
+them. It's running in my mind that this newest phase of the C. S. & W.
+business is going to stir up a mighty pretty shindy, and I had a foolish
+notion that I'd like to stick around and look on--as an innocent
+bystander."
+
+"The innocent bystander usually gets shot in the leg," the boss ripped
+out, with the brittlest kind of humor. And then: "I suppose I shall have
+to let you do what you want to--and let you pick your own time for
+giving me the real reason. But you're crippling me most savagely,
+Upton--and at a time when I am least able to stand it."
+
+Mr. Van Britt got up and edged his way toward the door.
+
+"It's a good reason, Graham; and sometime--say when we are walking
+through the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem together--maybe I'll tell
+you about it. If I were really a good scrapper, I'd stay and help you
+fight it out with Hatch; but you know the old saying--capital is always
+cowardly; and my present credit at the Portal City National is pretty
+well up to a quarter of a million, thanks to the dividends I deposited
+to-day. Good-night. I'll see you in the morning--if by that time you
+haven't decided to cut me cold."
+
+I kept right busy over the indexes after Mr. Van Britt went away, just
+to give the boss a little chance to catch up with himself. He sure was
+catching it hot and heavy on all sides. The way things had turned out,
+he couldn't go to the major's any more, and now his railroad
+organization was beginning to go to pieces on him. It certainly was
+tough. All we needed now was for President Dunton to come smashing in
+with one more good jolt and it would be all over but the obsequies, the
+monument and the epitaph. At least, that is the way it looked to me.
+
+It was along about ten o'clock when the boss closed his desk with a bang
+and said we'd better saw it off for the night. I walked up-town with him
+and as we were passing the Bullard he turned in to ask the night clerk
+if Collingwood was in his room. The answer was nix; that the young New
+Yorker hadn't been seen since dinner.
+
+On the way out we saw Mr. Van Britt at the telegraph alcove. He had
+apparently been making good use of his first half-hour or so of freedom.
+He was handing in a thick bunch of telegrams for transmission, and he
+rather pointedly turned the sheaf face down upon the marble slab when we
+came along, as much as to say "it's none of your business what I'm
+doing."
+
+It struck me as sort of curious that he should have so much wire
+correspondence when he claimed to be taking a rest, and why he was so
+careful not to let us get a glimpse of what it was all about. But the
+whole thing was now so horribly muddled that a little mystery more or
+less on anybody's part couldn't make much difference; and that was the
+thought I took to bed with me a little later after we reached our rooms
+in the railroad club.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+The Beginning of the End
+
+
+However much the Hatch people may have wanted to avoid publicity
+regarding the change of ownership and policies in the Storage &
+Warehouse reorganization, the prompt announcement of a general strike of
+the employees was enough to make every newspaper in the State sit up and
+take notice.
+
+We had the _Mountaineer_ at the breakfast-table in the club grill-room
+on the morning of the day when the strike was advertised to go into
+effect. There was a news story, with big headlines in red ink, and also
+an editorial. Cantrell didn't say anything against the railroad company.
+His comments were those of an observer who wished to be straight-forward
+and fair to all concerned, but his editorial did not spare the silly
+local stockholders whose swapping and selling had made the _coup_
+possible.
+
+Cantrell himself, mild-eyed and looking as if he'd got out of bed about
+three hours too early, drifted into the grill-room and took a seat at
+our table before we were through.
+
+"I wanted to be decent about it, Norcross," he said, forestalling
+anything that the boss might be going to say about the editorial in the
+_Mountaineer_. "I'm trying to believe that the men higher up in your
+railroad councils haven't fathered this Hatch scheme of
+consolidation--which is more than some of the other pencil-pushers will
+do for you, I'm afraid. Thanks to your publicity measures, everybody
+believes that you still hold the whip-hand over the combination with
+your ground leases. I'm not asking what you propose to do; I am merely
+taking it for granted that you are going to stick to your policy, and
+hoping that you will come and tell me about it when you are ready to
+talk."
+
+"I shall do just that," the boss promised; and I guess he would have
+been glad to let the matter drop at this, only Cantrell wouldn't.
+
+"I lost three good hours' sleep this morning on the chance of catching
+you here at table," the editor went on. "A little whisper leaked in over
+the wires last night, or, rather, early this morning, that set me to
+thinking. You haven't been having any trouble with your own employees
+lately, have you, Norcross?"
+
+"Not a bit in the world. Why?"
+
+"There is some little excitement, with the public taking a hand in it.
+There were indignation meetings held last night in a number of the
+towns along your lines, and resolutions were passed protesting against
+the action of the new combination in cutting wages, and asserting that
+public sentiment would be with the C. S. & W. employees if they are
+forced to carry out their threat of striking at noon to-day. The whisper
+that I spoke of intimated that the protest might extend to the railroad
+employees."
+
+"There's nothing in it," said the boss decisively. "I suppose you mean
+in the way of a sympathetic strike, and that is entirely improbable. I
+imagine very few of the C. S. & W. employees belong to any of the labor
+unions."
+
+"A strike on the railroad would hit you pretty hard just now, wouldn't
+it?" Cantrell asked.
+
+Mr. Norcross dodged the question. "We're not going to have a strike," he
+averred; and since we had finished our breakfast, he made a business
+excuse and we slid out.
+
+When we reached the office we found Fred May already there and at work,
+and in the middle room Mr. Van Britt was on hand, reading the morning
+paper.
+
+"You don't get around as early as you might," was the little
+millionaire's comment when the boss walked in and opened up his desk.
+"I've been waiting nearly a half-hour for you to show up. Seen the
+paper?"
+
+The boss nodded.
+
+"I don't mean the strike business; I mean the market quotations."
+
+"No; I didn't look at them."
+
+"They are interesting. P. S. L. Common went up another three points
+yesterday. It closed at 38 and a fraction. Do you know what that means,
+Graham?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It means that Uncle Breckenridge and his crowd are already joyfully
+discounting your coming resignation. Somebody has given them a wire tip
+that you are as good as down and out, and unless a miracle of some sort
+can be pulled off, I guess the tip is a straight one. Strong as he is,
+Chadwick can't carry you alone."
+
+"Drop it," snapped the boss irritably. And then: "Have you come to tell
+me that you have reconsidered that fool letter you wrote me last night?"
+
+"Not in a million years," returned the escaped captive airily. "I am
+here this morning as a paying patron of the Pioneer Short Line. I want
+to hire a special train to go--well, anywhere I please on your jerkwater
+railroad."
+
+"You don't mean it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. I want a car and a good, smart engine. The Eight-Fifteen
+will do, with Buck Chandler to run it."
+
+"Pshaw! take your own car and any crew you please. We are not selling
+transportation to you."
+
+"Yes you are; I'm going to pay for that train, and what's more, I want
+your written receipt for the money. I need it in my business. Then, if
+Chandler should happen to get gay and dump me into the ditch somewhere,
+I can sue you for damages."
+
+"All right; if you will persist in joking with me it's going to cost you
+something. How far do you want your train to run?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; anywhere the notion prods me--say to the west end and
+back, with as many stops as I see fit to make, and perhaps a run over
+the branches."
+
+I saw the boss make a few figures on a pad under his hand.
+
+"It would cost anybody else, roughly, something like five hundred
+dollars. On account of your little joke it's going to cost you a cold
+thousand."
+
+Mr. Van Britt took out his check-book and a fountain pen and solemnly
+made out the check.
+
+"Here you are," he said, flipping the check over to the boss's desk.
+"Now shell out that receipt, so that I'll have it to show if anybody
+wants to know how much you've gouged me. Since you're making the
+accommodation cost me a dollar a minute, how long have I got to wait?"
+
+The chief's answer was a push at Fred May's call button, and when
+Frederic of Pittsburgh came in:
+
+"Have Mr. Perkins order out my private car for Mr. Van Britt, with the
+Eight-Fifteen and Chandler, engineer. Tell Mr. Perkins to give Chandler
+and his conductor orders to run as Mr. Van Britt may direct, giving the
+special right-of-way over everything except first-class trains in the
+opposite direction." Then to Van Britt: "Will that do?"
+
+"Admirably; only I'm waiting for that receipt."
+
+Mr. Norcross said something that sounded like "damn," scribbled a
+memorandum of the thousand-dollar payment on a sheet of the scratch-pad
+and handed it over, saying: "The order for the car includes my cook and
+porter, and something to eat; we'll throw these in with the
+transportation, and if the car is ditched and you sue for damages, we'll
+file a cross-bill for hotel accommodations. Now go away and work off
+your little attack of lunacy. I'm busy."
+
+We had an easier day in the office than I had dared hope for, whatever
+the boss thought about it, though it was an exceedingly busy one. With
+the strike news in the papers, it seemed as if everybody in town wanted
+to interview the general manager of the railroad, and to ask him what he
+was going to do about it.
+
+Following his hard-and-fast rule, Mr. Norcross didn't deny himself to
+anybody. Patiently he told each fresh batch of callers that the railroad
+company had nothing whatever to do with the change in ownership of C. S.
+& W.; that the railroad's attitude was unaltered; and that, so far as it
+could be done legally, the Pioneer Short Line would stand firmly between
+its patrons and any extortion which might grow out of the new
+conditions.
+
+The C. S. & W. strike--as our wires told us--went into effect promptly
+on the stroke of noon, and a train from the west, arriving late in the
+afternoon, brought Ripley. For the first time that day, Mr. Norcross
+told me to snap the catch on the office door for privacy and then he
+told Ripley to talk. Our neat little general counsel was fresh from the
+actual fighting line, and his news amply confirmed the wire reports
+which had been trickling in.
+
+"The conditions all along the line are almost revolutionary," was
+Ripley's summing-up of the situation. "Generally speaking, the public is
+not holding us responsible as yet, though of course there are croakers
+who are saying that it is entirely a railroad move, and predicting that
+we won't do anything to interfere with the new graft."
+
+"Cantrell says that public sentiment is altogether on the side of the C.
+S. & W. strikers," the boss put in.
+
+"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to
+everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be
+any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of
+affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can
+starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a
+bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."
+
+"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those
+ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"
+
+"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life,"
+was the confident rejoinder.
+
+"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond
+and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is
+a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply
+your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it.
+Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third
+member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap
+into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the
+railroad management.
+
+Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but
+also less hopeful.
+
+"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his
+sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is
+all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately
+trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any
+surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl
+out of."
+
+"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a
+chance to sleep on it--as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in
+some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men
+who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the
+affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make
+them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those
+papers----"
+
+"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.
+
+"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these
+men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by
+Bullock for his vote."
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"Then I should make every mother's son of them come across with the full
+amount of the bribe, on pain of an exposure which the dirtiest
+politician in this State couldn't afford to face. That would settle it.
+Hatch couldn't work the same game a second time."
+
+Ripley let it go at that and spoke of something else.
+
+"I suppose you have seen how our stock is climbing. Has the new
+situation here anything to do with it?"
+
+Mr. Norcross said he thought not, and rather lamented that we didn't
+have better information about what was going on at the New York end of
+things. Also, he told Ripley something that I hadn't known; that he had
+wired Mr. Chadwick asking the wheat king to give him a line on what the
+stock-kiting meant. Then Ripley asked for orders.
+
+"There is nothing to be done until Hatch begins to raise his prices," he
+was told. "But I wanted to have you here in case anything should break
+loose suddenly." And at that Ripley went away.
+
+We were closing our desks to go to dinner when Fred May came in to say
+that a delegation of the pay-roll men was outside and wanting to have a
+word with the "Big Boss." Mr. Norcross stopped with his desk curtain
+half drawn down.
+
+"What is it, Fred?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," said the Pittsburgher. "I should call it a grievance
+committee, if it wasn't so big. And they don't seem to be mad about
+anything. Bart Hoskins is doing the talking for them."
+
+"Send them in," was the curt command, and a minute later the inner
+office was about three-fourths filled up with a shuffling crowd of P. S.
+L. men.
+
+The chief looked the crowd over. There was a bunch of train- and
+engine-men, a squad from the shops, and a bigger one from the yards.
+Also, the wire service had turned out a gang of linemen and half a dozen
+operators.
+
+"Well, men, let's have it," said Mr. Norcross, not too sharply. "My
+dinner's getting cold."
+
+"We'll not be keepin' you above the hollow half of a minute, Mister
+Norcross," said the big, bearded freight conductor who acted as
+spokesman. "About this C. S. & W. strike that went on to-day: we'd like
+to know, straight from you, if it's anything in the railroad company's
+pocket to have all these old men fired out and a lot of scabs put in on
+starvation wages to ball us all up when we try to work with 'em."
+
+"It's nothing to us; or rather, I should say, we are on the other side,"
+was the short reply. "You probably all know that C. S. & W. has changed
+hands, and the old Red Tower syndicate, with Mr. Rufus Hatch at its
+head, is now in control."
+
+Hoskins nodded. "That's about what we allowed, and we've come up here to
+say that we're almighty sorry for these poor cusses that have been
+dumped out o' their jobs. We ain't got no kick comin' with you, n'r with
+the company, Mister Norcross, but it looks like it's up to us to do
+somethin', and we didn't want to do it without hittin' square out from
+the shoulder."
+
+"I'm listening," said the chief.
+
+"The union locals have called a meetin' f'r to-night. There ain't nobody
+knows yet what's goin' to be done, but whatever it is, we want you to
+know that it ain't done ag'inst you n'r the railroad company."
+
+The boss had handled wage earners too long not to be able to suspect
+what was in the wind.
+
+"You men don't want to let your sympathies carry you too far," he
+cautioned. "When you take up another fellow's quarrel you want to be
+pretty sure that you're not going to hit your friends in the scrap."
+
+Hoskins grinned understandingly, and I guess the boss was a little
+puzzled by the nods and winks that went around among the silent members
+of the delegation; at least, I know I was.
+
+"That's all right," Hoskins said. "Bein' the Big Boss, you've got to
+talk that way. They might reach out and grab you fr'm New York if you
+didn't. But what I was aimin' to say is that there'll be a train-load 'r
+two of strike-breakers a-careerin' along here in a day 'r so, and we
+ain't figurin' on lettin' 'em get past Portal City, if that far."
+
+"That's up to you," said Mr. Norcross brusquely. "If you start anything
+in the way of a riot----"
+
+"Excuse _me_. There ain't goin' to be no riotin', and no company
+property mashed up. Mr. Van Britt, he----"
+
+It was right here that an odd thing happened. Con Corrigan, a big
+two-fisted freight engineer standing directly behind Hoskins, reached an
+arm around the speaker's neck and choked him so suddenly that Hoskins's
+sentence ended in a gasping chuckle. When the garroting arm was
+withdrawn the conductor looked around sort of foolishly and said: "I'm
+thinking that's about all we wanted to say, ain't it, boys?" and the
+deputation filed out as solemnly as it had come in.
+
+I guess Mr. Norcross wasn't left wholly in the dark when the tramping
+footfalls of the committee died away in the corridor. That unintentional
+mention of Mr. Van Britt's name looked as if it might open up some more
+possibilities, though what they were I couldn't imagine, and I don't
+believe the general manager could, either.
+
+After that, things rocked along pretty easy until after dinner. Instead
+of going right back to the office from the club, Mr. Norcross drifted
+into the smoking-room and filled a pipe. In the course of a few minutes,
+Major Kendrick dropped in and pulled up a chair. I don't know what they
+talked about, but after a little while, when the boss got up to go, I
+heard him say something that gave the key to the most of what had gone
+before, I guess.
+
+"Have you seen or heard anything of Collingwood since yesterday?"
+
+The good old major shook his head. "I haven't seen, but I have heard,"
+he said, sort of soberly. "They're tellin' me that he's oveh in his
+rooms at the Bullard, drinkin' himself to death. If he wasn't altogetheh
+past redemption, suh, he would have had the decency to get out of town
+befo' he turned loose all holts that way; he would, for a fact, Graham."
+
+At that, Mr. Norcross explained in just a few words why Collingwood
+hadn't gone--why he couldn't go. Whereupon the old Kentuckian looked
+graver than ever.
+
+"That thah spells trouble, Graham. Hatch is simply invitin' the
+unde'takeh. Howie isn't what you'd call a dangerous man, but he is
+totally irresponsible, even when he's sobeh."
+
+"We ought to get him away from here," was the boss's decision. "He is an
+added menace while he stays."
+
+I didn't hear what the major said to that, because little Rags, Mr.
+Perkins's office boy, had just come in with a note which he was asking
+me to give to Mr. Norcross. I did it; and after the note had been
+glanced at, the chief said, kind of bitterly, to the major:
+
+"You can never fall so far that you can't fall a little farther; have
+you ever remarked that, major?" And then he want on to explain: "I have
+a note here from Perkins, our Desert Division superintendent. He says
+that the 'locals' of the various railroad labor unions have just
+notified him of the unanimous passage of a strike vote--the strike to go
+into effect at midnight."
+
+"A strike?--on the _railroad_? Why, Graham, son, you don't mean it!"
+
+"The men seem to mean it--which is much more to the purpose. They are
+striking in sympathy with the C. S. & W. employees. I fancy that settles
+our little experiment in good railroading definitely, major. We'll go
+out of business as a common carrier at midnight, and it's the final
+straw that will break the camel's back. Dunton doesn't want a
+receivership, but he'll have to take one now."
+
+"Oh, my deah fellow!" protested the major. "Let's hope it isn't going to
+be so bad as that!"
+
+"It will. The bottom will drop out of the stock and break the market
+when this strike news gets on the wire, and that will end it. I wish to
+God there were some way in which I could save Mr. Chadwick: he has
+trusted me, major, and I--I've failed him!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+The Murder Madman
+
+
+I knew what we were up against when we headed down to the railroad
+lay-out, the chief and I, leaving the good old major thoughtfully
+puffing his cigar in the club smoking-room. With a strike due to be
+pulled off in a little more than three hours there were about a million
+things that would have to be jerked around into shape and propped up so
+that they could stand by themselves while the Short Line was taking a
+vacation. And there was only a little handful of us in the headquarters
+to do the jerking and propping.
+
+But it was precisely in a crisis like this that the boss could shine.
+From the minute we hit the tremendous job he was all there, carrying the
+whole map of the Short Line in his head, thinking straight from the
+shoulder, and never missing a lick; and I don't believe anybody would
+ever have suspected that he was a beaten man, pushed to the ropes in the
+final round with the grafters, his reputation as a successful railroad
+manager as good as gone, and his warm little love-dream knocked
+sky-winding forever and a day.
+
+Luckily, we found Fred May still at his desk, and he was promptly
+clamped to the telephone and told to get busy spreading the hurry call.
+In half an hour every relief operator we had in Portal City was in the
+wire-room, and the back-breaking job of preparing a thousand miles of
+railroad for a sudden tie-up was in full swing. Mr. Perkins, as division
+superintendent, was in touch with the local labor unions, and a
+conference was held with the strike leaders. Persuading and insisting by
+turns, Mr. Norcross fought out the necessary compromises with the
+unions. All ordinary traffic would be suspended at midnight, but
+passenger trains _en route_ were to be run through to our connecting
+line terminals east and west, live-stock trains were to be laid out only
+where there were feeding corrals, and perishable freight was to be taken
+to its destination, wherever that might be.
+
+In addition to these concessions, the strikers agreed to allow the mail
+trains to run without interruption, with our promise that they would not
+carry passengers. Hoskins and his committee bucked a little at this, but
+got down when they were shown that they could not afford to risk a clash
+with the Government. This exception admitted, another followed, as a
+matter of course. If the mail trains were to be run, some of the
+telegraph operators would have to remain on duty, at least to the extent
+of handling train orders.
+
+With these generalities out of the way, we got down to details.
+"Fire-alarm" wires were sent to the various cities and towns on the
+lines asking for immediate information regarding food and fuel supplies,
+and the strike leaders were notified that, for sheer humanity's sake,
+they would have to permit the handling of provision trains in cases
+where they were absolutely needed.
+
+By eleven o'clock the tangle was getting itself pretty well straightened
+out. Some of the trains had already been abandoned, and the others were
+moving along to the agreed-upon destinations. Kirgan had taken hold in
+the Portal City yard, and by putting on extra crews was getting the
+needful shifting and car sorting into shape; and the Portal City
+employees, acting upon their own initiative, were picketing the yard and
+company buildings to protect them from looters or fire-setters. Mr. Van
+Britt's special, so the wires told us, was at Lesterburg, and it was
+likely to stay there; and Mr. Van Britt, himself, couldn't be reached.
+
+It was at half-past eleven that we got the first real yelp from somebody
+who was getting pinched. It came in the shape of a wire from the
+Strathcona night operator. A party of men--"mine owners" the operator
+called them--had just heard of the impending railroad tie-up. They had
+been meaning to come in on the regular night train, but that had been
+abandoned. So now they were offering all kinds of money for a special to
+bring them to Portal City. It was represented that there were millions
+at stake. Couldn't we do something?
+
+Mr. Norcross had kept Hoskins and a few of the other local strike
+leaders where he could get hold of them, and he put the request up to
+them as a matter that was now out of his hands. Would they allow him to
+run a one-car special from the gold camp to Portal City after midnight?
+It was for them to say.
+
+Hoskins and his accomplices went off to talk it over with some of the
+other men. When the big freight conductor came back he was alone and was
+grinning good-naturedly.
+
+"We ain't aimin' to make the company lose any good money that comes
+a-rolling down the hill at it, Mister Norcross," he said. "Cinch these
+here Strathcona hurry-boys f'r all you can get out o' them, and if
+you'll lend us the loan of the wires, we'll pass the word to let the
+special come on through."
+
+It was sure the funniest strike I ever saw or heard of, and I guess the
+boss thought so, too--with all this good-natured bargaining back and
+forth; but there was nothing more said, and I carried the word to Mr.
+Perkins directing him to have arrangements made for the running of a
+one-car special from Strathcona for the hurry folks.
+
+Past that, things rocked along until the hands of the big standard-time
+clock in the despatcher's room pointed to midnight. Mr. Norcross and I
+were both at Donohue's elbow when the men at the wires, east and west,
+clicked in their "Good-night," which was the signal that the Pioneer
+Short Line had laid down on the job and gone out of business. I couldn't
+compare it to anything but a funeral bell, and that's about what it was.
+No matter how short the strike might be, it was going to smash us good
+and plenty. And whatever else might come of it, it was a cinch that it
+would squeeze the last little breath of life out of the Norcross
+management for good and all.
+
+As if to confirm that sort of doleful foreboding of mine, Norris, who
+was holding down the commercial wire, came over to the counter railing
+just then with a New York message. I saw the boss's eyes flash and the
+little bunchy muscle-swellings of anger come and go on the edge of his
+jaw as he read it, and then he handed it to me.
+
+"You may endorse that 'No Answer' and file it when you go back to the
+office," he said shortly, and then he went on talking to Donohue,
+telling him how to handle the trains which were still out and moving to
+their tie-up destinations.
+
+Of course, I read the message; I knew there was nothing private about it
+so far as I was concerned, since it had been given me to put away in the
+files. It was dated from the Waldorf-Astoria at midnight, which,
+allowing for the difference in time between New York and Portal City,
+meant that it had been sent at nine o'clock by our time. Somebody in our
+neck of woods was evidently keeping in close wire touch with Mr. Dunton,
+for though the strike vote was only a little more than an hour old when
+he sent the telegram, he evidently knew all about it. This is what I
+read:
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "Your administration has been a conspicuous failure from the
+     beginning. Compromise with employees on any terms offered and
+     prevent strike at all costs. That done, you are hereby directed to
+     wire your resignation to take effect one week from to-day.
+
+     "B. DUNTON, _President_."
+
+It had hit us at last; not a decent request, mind you, but a blunt,
+brutal demand. The boss was fired. No word had come from Mr. Chadwick,
+and there could be but one reason for his silence. In some way, perhaps
+through the late boosting of the stock, the New Yorkers had squeezed
+him out. We were shot dead in the trenches.
+
+I didn't understand how the chief could take it so quietly, unless it
+was because he had been hammered so long and so hard that nothing
+mattered any more. Anyhow, he was just standing there, talking soberly
+to Donohue, when once more the Strathcona branch sounder began to click
+furiously, snipping out the headquarters call.
+
+Donohue cut in and we all heard the Strathcona man's new bleat. The way
+he told it, it seemed that one member of the party that had chartered
+the special to come to Portal City had got left, and this man was now in
+the Strathcona wire office, bidding high for an engine to chase the
+train and put him aboard.
+
+At first the boss said, "No," short off, just like that; adding that it
+wouldn't be keeping faith with the strike committee. But at that moment
+Hoskins blew in again, and when he was told what was on the cards, he
+took a little responsibility of his own.
+
+"Go to it, Mister Norcross, if there's any more money in it f'r the
+railroad," he told the boss. "I'll stand f'r it with the boys." And then
+to Donohue: "Who'll be runnin' this chaser engine?"
+
+"It'll be John Hogan and the Four-Sixteen," said Donohue. "There's
+nobody else at that end of the branch."
+
+The arrangement, such as it was, was fixed up quickly. The man who was
+putting up the money seemed to have plenty of it. He was offering five
+hundred dollars for the engine, and a thousand if it should overtake the
+special that side of Bauxite Junction.
+
+I guess the bleat unravelled itself pretty clearly for all of us; or at
+least, it seemed plain enough. A mining deal of some kind was on, and
+this man who was left behind was going to be left in another sense of
+the word if he couldn't butt in soon enough to break whatever
+combination the others were stacking up against him.
+
+In just a few minutes we got the word from the Strathcona operator that
+the money was paid and the chaser engine was out and gone. The special
+train had fully a half-hour's start, and with the hazardous grades of
+Slide Mountain and Dry Canyon to negotiate, it didn't seem probable that
+the light engine could overtake it anywhere north of Bauxite. That
+wasn't up to us, however. Kirgan had come in to say that our
+good-natured strikers had thrown a guard into the shops and were
+patroling the yard, when Fred May showed up, making signals to me. I
+heard him when he edged up to the boss and said: "There's a lady in the
+office, wanting to see you, Mr. Norcross."
+
+"Holy Smoke!" said I to myself. I knew it couldn't be anybody but Mrs.
+Sheila, at that time of night, and I saw seventeen different kinds of
+bloody murder looming up again when I tagged along after the boss on the
+trip down the hall to our offices.
+
+The guess was right, both ways around. It was Mrs. Sheila, and she had
+the major with her. And the air of the private office was so thick with
+tragedy that it made the very electrics look dim and ghostly. Mrs.
+Sheila didn't have a bit of color in her face, and her eyes had a big
+horror in them that was enough to make your flesh creep.
+
+I won't attempt to tell all that was said, partly by the good old major
+and partly by Mrs. Sheila. But the gist of it was this: Collingwood had
+continued his booze fight in his rooms at the Bullard until he had
+worked himself up to the crazy murder pitch. Then he had gone on the
+warpath, hunting for Hatch. Just how he had contrived to dodge Hatch's
+spotters, who were doubtless keeping cases on him, did not appear. But
+that was a detail. He had dodged them, had learned that Hatch and a
+bunch of his Red Tower backers had gone to Strathcona on a mining deal,
+and had started to drive to the gold camp in an auto to get his man.
+
+Before leaving Portal City he had written a letter to Mrs. Sheila,
+telling her what he was going to do, and that when he got through with
+it, she would be free. The letter, which had been left at the hotel,
+had been delayed in delivery--had, in fact, just been sent out to the
+major's house by the night clerk who had found it.
+
+Long before the story could get itself fully told, the different gaps in
+it were filling themselves up for me--and for Mr. Norcross, as well, I
+guess. When Mrs. Sheila came to the auto-drive part of it, the boss
+whirled and shot an order at me.
+
+"Jimmie, chase into the despatcher's office and find out the name of the
+man who chartered that following engine!" he snapped; and I went on the
+run, remembering that in the strike excitement and hustle it hadn't
+occurred to anybody to ask the man's name or that of the particular
+"mine owner" who had chartered the special train.
+
+Donohue got the Strathcona operator in less than half a minute after I
+fired my order at him, and the answer came almost without a break:
+
+"Charter of special train was to R. Hatch, of Portal City, and of engine
+416 to man named Collingwood."
+
+Gosh! but this did settle it! I didn't run back to the office with the
+news--I flew. It was like firing a gun in amongst the three who were
+waiting, but it had to be done. The major groaned and said, "Oh, good
+God!" and Mrs. Sheila sat down and put her face in her hands. The boss
+was the only one who knew what to do and he did it: vanished like a
+shot in the direction of the despatcher's office.
+
+In about fifteen of the longest minutes I ever lived he came back,
+shaking his head. I knew what he had been doing, or trying to do. There
+was one night telegraph station on the branch--at a mining-camp half-way
+down the grade on Slide Mountain--and he had been trying to get word
+there to stop the wild engine.
+
+"He has either bribed or bullied his engine crew," he told the major. "I
+wired and had a stop signal set for them at the Antonio Mine, but they
+overran it, going at full speed down the hill."
+
+It was plain enough now what Collingwood was trying to do. The murder
+mania had got a firm hold of its weapon. Collingwood knew that Hatch was
+on the special, and he was going to chase that one-car train until it
+made a stop somewhere and then smash into it for blood. After Mr.
+Norcross had talked hurriedly for a minute or two with the major he went
+back to the despatcher's room and I went with him. There was a word for
+Donohue, telling him to call all night stations ahead of the special.
+The operators were to give the special the "go-ahead," and after it had
+passed, to set their signals against the following engine.
+
+As Donohue cut in on the branch wire, Nippo, at the canyon mouth, broke
+in to say that the special had gone by fifteen minutes earlier, and
+that the following engine was now coming down the canyon. Donohue
+grabbed his key.
+
+"Throw signal against engine 416," he clicked; and a few seconds later
+we got the reply:
+
+"No good. Engine 416 overran signal."
+
+"Never mind," said the boss to Donohue; "keep it up at the other
+stations. That engine has got to be stopped. It's carrying a madman."
+This is what he said, but I knew well enough what he was thinking. He
+was remembering that the special now had a lead of only fifteen minutes,
+and that it would be obliged to stop at Bauxite for its orders over the
+main line.
+
+He did what he could to cut out the Bauxite stop for the special,
+ordering Donohue to tell the junction man to set his signals at "clear"
+for the train, and at "stop" for the 416. It was only a make-shift. In
+the natural order of things the engineer of the special would make the
+Bauxite stop anyway, signal or no signal, since it is a nation-wide
+railroad rule that no train shall pass a junction without stopping.
+
+Past that the boss grabbed up an official time-card and began to study
+it hurriedly and to jot down figures. I wondered if he wasn't
+tempted--just the least little bit in the world, you know.
+
+Here was a thing shaping itself up--a thing for which he wasn't in the
+least responsible--and if it should work out to the catastrophe that
+nobody seemed to be able to prevent, the chief of the grafters, and
+probably a number of his nearest backers, would be wiped off the books;
+and Collingwood's death, which, in all human probability, was equally
+certain, would set Mrs. Sheila free.
+
+He must be thinking of it, I argued; he couldn't be a human man and not
+be thinking of it. But he never stopped his hasty figuring for a single
+instant until he broke off to bark out at Kirgan, who was standing by:
+
+"Quick, Mart! I want a light engine, and somebody to run it! Jump for
+it, man!"
+
+Kirgan, big and slow-motioned at most times, was off like a shot. Then
+the boss hurried back down the hall to his own offices, and again I
+tagged him. The old major was standing at a window with his hands behind
+him, and Mrs. Sheila was sitting just as we had left her, with the big
+terror still in her eyes and her face as white as a sheet.
+
+"We can't stop him without throwing a switch in front of him, and that
+would mean death to him and his two enginemen," said the boss, talking
+straight at the major, and as if he were trying to ignore Mrs. Sheila.
+"I'm going to take a long chance and run down the line to meet them.
+There's a bare possibility that I can contrive to get between the train
+and the engine, and if I can----"
+
+Mrs. Sheila was on her feet and she had her hands clasped as if she were
+going to make a prayer to the boss. And it was pretty nearly that.
+
+"Take me!" she begged; "oh, _please_ take me. It's my _right_ to go!"
+
+Kirgan had found an engine somewhere in the yard and was backing it up
+to the station platform. We could hear it. I saw that the chief was
+going to turn Mrs. Sheila down--which was, of course, exactly the right
+thing to do. But just then the major shoved in.
+
+"Sheila knows what she's talking about, Graham," he said quietly. "When
+you-all find Howie, you'll have a madman on your hands--and she's the
+only one who can control him at such times--God pity her! Take us both,
+suh."
+
+I suppose Mr. Norcross thought there wasn't any time to stand there
+arguing about it.
+
+"As you will," he snapped at the major; and then to me: "Break for it,
+Jimmie, and tell Kirgan to get a car--any car--the first one he can
+find!"
+
+I broke, and came pretty near breaking my blessed neck tumbling down the
+stairs. Kirgan had found his engine and had picked up a yard man to fire
+it. I told him what was wanted, and in less than no time he had pulled
+out an empty day-coach from the washing track. While he was backing in
+with it, Mr. Norcross came down the platform with the major and Mrs.
+Sheila. He let the major help Mrs. Sheila up the steps of the coach and
+ran forward to call out to Kirgan:
+
+"Donohue is clearing for you, and there'll be nothing in the way. Run
+regardless to Timber Mountain 'Y.' You have six minutes on the special's
+time to that point, if you run like the devil!" And then, as he was
+climbing to the cab, he ripped out at me: "Jimmie, you go back and stay
+with them in the car. Hurry or you'll be left!"
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+Under the Wide and Starry Sky
+
+
+I sure had to be quick about obeying that "get-aboard" order of Mr.
+Norcross's. Kirgan had jerked the throttle open the minute the word was
+given. I missed the forward end of the car, and when the other end came
+along my grab at the hand-rod slammed me head over heels up the steps.
+Kirgan was holding his whistle valve open, and the guarding strikers in
+the yard gave us room and a clear track. By the time we had passed the
+"limit" switches we were going like a blue streak, and I could hardly
+keep my balance on the back platform of the day-coach.
+
+You can guess that I didn't stay out there very long. The night was
+clear as a bell and pretty coolish, with the stars burning like white
+diamonds in the black inverted bowl of the sky. It was mighty pretty
+scenery, but just the same, after Kirgan had fairly struck his gait on
+the long western tangent, I clawed my way inside. It was a lot too
+blustery and unsafe on that back platform.
+
+The major and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together, near the middle of the
+car. I staggered up and took the seat just ahead of them, and the major
+asked me if Mr. Norcross was on the engine. I told him he was, and that
+ended it. What with the rattle and bang of the coach, the howling of the
+speed-made wind in the ventilators, and the shrill scream of the
+spinning wheels, there wasn't any room for talk during the whole of that
+breath-taking race to the old "Y" in the hills beyond Banta.
+
+Knowing, from what Mr. Norcross had said, the point at which we were
+going to side-track and wait for the special and the wild engine, I grew
+sort of nervous and worked-up after we had crashed through the Banta
+yard and the day-coach began to sway and lurch around the hill curves.
+What if the special had been making better time than the boss had
+counted upon? In that case, we'd probably hit her in a head-ender
+somewhere on one of those very curves. And with the time we were making,
+and the time she'd be making, there wouldn't be enough left of either
+train to be worth picking up.
+
+A mile or so short of the "Y" siding I went up ahead and handed myself
+out to the forward platform to see if I couldn't get a squint past the
+storming engine. I got it now and then, on the swing of the curves, but
+there was nothing in sight. Just the same, it was mighty scary, and I
+took a relief breath so deep that it nearly made me sick at my stomach
+when I finally realized that Kirgan had shut off and was slowing for the
+stop at the farther switch of the old "Y."
+
+What was done at the switch was done swiftly, as men work when they have
+the fear of death gripping at them. If the special should come up while
+we were making the back-in, the result would be just about the same as
+it would have been if we had met it on the curves.
+
+The jerking tug of the self-preservation instinct is pretty strong,
+sometimes, and I tumbled off the steps of the car as it was backing in
+around the western curve of the "Y." Our picked-up fireman was at the
+switch, setting it again for the main line. With our own engine silent,
+I could hear a faint sound like the far-away fluttering of a
+safety-valve. We were not ten seconds too soon. The special was coming.
+
+Mr. Norcross, who was still in the engine cab, shot an order at Kirgan.
+
+"Fling your coat over the headlight, and then be ready to snatch it and
+get off!" he shouted. "If they see it as they come up, it may stop
+them!" Then, catching a glimpse of me on the ground: "Break the coupling
+on the coach, Jimmie--quick!"
+
+As I jumped to obey I understood what was to be done. The fireman at
+the switch was to let the special go by, and then the boss--just the
+boss alone on the engine--was to be let out on the main track to put
+himself between the chaser and the chased. It was a hair-raising
+proposition, but perhaps--just perhaps--not quite so suicidal as it
+looked. With skilful handling the interposed engine might possibly be
+kept out of the way by backing, and its warning headlight shining full
+into the eyes of the men in the 416's cab would surely be enough to stop
+them--if anything would.
+
+I got the coupling broken on the car to set our engine free before the
+distant flutter noise had grown to anything more than a humming like
+that of an overhead swarm of angry bees. Kirgan was standing on the
+front end, with his coat thrown over the headlight, ready to jerk it off
+and jump when he got the word. Out at the switch, our fireman was
+keeping out of sight so that the engineer of the special shouldn't see
+him, and maybe get rattled and stop. As usual, the boss had covered
+every little detail in his instructions, and had remembered that the
+sight of a man standing at a switch in a lonesome place like this might
+give an engineer a fit of "nerves" and make him shut off steam.
+
+I had just finished uncoupling the day-coach and the boss was easing our
+engine ahead a bit to make sure that she was loose, when the car-door
+opened behind me and the major and Mrs. Sheila came out in the front
+vestibule. It was Mrs. Sheila who spoke to me, and her voice had
+borrowed some of the big terror that I had seen in her eyes while she
+was sitting in the office at Portal City.
+
+"Where--whereabouts are we, Jimmie?" she asked.
+
+I didn't get a chance to tell her. Before I could open my mouth the
+black shadows of the crooked valley beyond the switch were shot through
+with the white, shimmering glow of a headlight beam, and a second later
+the special flicked into view on the curve of approach.
+
+When we first saw it, the engine was working steam, and she was running
+like a streak of lightning. But as we looked, there was a short, sharp
+whistle yelp, the brakes gripped the wheels, the one-car train, with
+fire grinding from every brake-shoe, came to a jerking stop a short
+car-length on our side of the switch, and a man dropped from the engine
+step to go sprinting to the rear. And it was plain that neither the
+engineer nor the man who was running back saw our outfit waiting on the
+leg of the old "Y."
+
+Kirgan was the first one to understand. With a shout of warning, he
+jumped and ran toward the stopped train, yelling at the engineer for
+God's sake to pull out and go on. Back in the hills beyond the curve of
+approach another hoarse murmur was jarring upon the air, and the
+special's fireman, who was the man we had seen jump off and go running
+back, and who, of course, didn't know that we had our man there, was
+apparently trying to reach the switch behind his train to throw it
+against the following engine to shoot it off on the "Y."
+
+By this time the boss was off of our engine and racing across the angle
+of the "Y" only a little way behind Kirgan. He realized that his plan
+was smashed by the stopping of the special, and that the very
+catastrophe we had come out to try to prevent was due to happen right
+there and then. Whatever our man waiting at the switch might do, there
+was bound to be a collision. If he left the points set for the main
+line, the wild engine would crash into the rear end of the stopped
+special; and if he did the other thing, our engine and coach standing on
+the "Y" would get it.
+
+"Get the people out of that car!" I heard the boss bellow, but even as
+he said it the pop-valve of the stopped engine went off with a roar,
+filling the shut-in valley with clamorings that nothing could drown.
+
+Two minutes, two little minutes more, and the sleep-sodden bunch of men
+in the special's car might have been roused and turned out and saved.
+But the minutes were not given us. While the racing fireman was still a
+few feet short of the switch the throwing of which would have saved the
+one-car train only to let the madman's engine in on our engine and
+coach, and our man--already at the switch--was too scared to know which
+horn of the dilemma to choose, the end came. There was the flash of
+another headlight on the curve, another whistle shriek, and I turned to
+help the Major take Mrs. Sheila off our car and run with her, against
+the horrible chance that we might get it instead of the special.
+
+But we didn't get it. Ten seconds later the chasing engine had crashed
+headlong into the standing train, burying itself clear up to the tender
+in the heart of the old wooden sleeper, rolling the whole business over
+on its side in the ditch, and setting the wreckage afire as suddenly as
+if the old Pullman had been a fagot of pitch-pine kindlings and only
+waiting for the match.
+
+If I could write down any real description of the way things stacked up
+there in that lonesome valley for the little bunch of us who stood
+aghast at the awful horror, I guess I wouldn't need to be hammering the
+keys of a typewriter in a railroad office. But never mind; no soldier
+sees any more of a battle than the part he is in. There were seven of us
+men, including the engineer and fireman of the special, who were able to
+jump in and try to do something, and, looking back at it now, it seems
+as if we all did what we could.
+
+That wasn't much. About half of the people in the sleeping-car--six by
+actual count, as we learned afterward--were killed outright in the crash
+or so badly hurt that they died pretty soon afterward; and the fire was
+so quick and so hot that after we had got the wounded ones out we
+couldn't get all of the bodies of the others.
+
+As you'd imagine, the boss was the head and front of that fierce rescue
+fight. He had stripped off his coat, and he kept on diving into the
+burning wreck after another and yet another of the victims until it
+seemed as if he couldn't possibly do it one more time and come out
+alive. He didn't seem to remember that these very men were the ones who
+had been trying to ruin him--that at least once they had set a trap for
+him and tried to kill him. He was too big for that.
+
+After we had got out all the victims we could reach, there was still one
+more left who wasn't dead; we could hear him above the hissing of the
+steam and the crackling of the flames, screaming and begging us to break
+in the side of the car and kill him before the fire got to him. Kirgan
+had found an axe in the emergency box of our day-coach, and was chopping
+away like a madman.
+
+The minute he got a hole big enough, the big master-mechanic dropped
+his axe and climbed down into the choking hell where the screams were
+coming from. Our fireman picked up the axe and ran around to the other
+side of the wreck where Jones, the engineer of the special, and his
+fireman were trying to break into the crushed cab of the 416.
+
+The old major, the boss, and I stood by to help Kirgan, and the minute
+his head came up through the chopped hole we saw that he needed help. He
+had pried the screaming man loose, somehow, and was trying to drag him
+up out of the smoking furnace. It was done, amongst us, some way or
+other. Kirgan had wrapped the man up in a Pullman blanket to keep the
+fire from getting at him any worse than it already had, and as we were
+taking him out the blanket slipped aside from his face and I saw who it
+was that the master-mechanic had risked his life for. It was Hatch,
+himself, and he died in our arms, the major's and mine, while we were
+carrying him out to where Mrs. Sheila was tearing one of the Pullman
+sheets that I had got hold of into strips to make bandages for the
+wounded.
+
+With the chance of saving maybe another one or two, we couldn't stay to
+help the brave little woman who was trying to be doctor and nurse to
+half a dozen poor wretches at once. But she took time to ask me one
+single breathless question:
+
+"Have they found him yet?--you know the one I mean, Jimmie?"
+
+"No," I said. "They're digging away at that side now," and then I ran
+back to jump in again.
+
+Though the fire was now licking at everything in sight, Kirgan, who had
+taken the axe from our fireman, had managed to cut some of the car
+timbers out of the way so that we could see down into the tangle of
+things where the cab of the 416 ought to have been. There wasn't much
+left of the cab. The water-gauge was broken, along with everything else,
+but in spite of the reek of smoke and steam we could see that Hogan and
+his fireman were not there. But down under the coal that had shifted
+forward at the impact of the collision we could make out the other
+man--the murder-maniac--lying on his back, black in the face and
+gasping.
+
+That was enough for the boss. It looked like certain death for anybody
+to crawl down into that hissing steam-bath, but he did it, wriggling
+through the hole that Kirgan had chopped, while two or three of us ran
+to the little creek that trickled down on the far side of the "Y" and
+brought back soaking Pullman blankets to try to delay the encroaching
+fire and smother the steam-jets.
+
+I couldn't see very well what the boss was doing; the smoke and steam
+were so blinding. But when I did get a glimpse I saw that he was digging
+frantically with his bare hands at the shifted coal, and that he had
+succeeded in freeing the head and shoulders of the buried man, who was
+still alive enough to choke and gasp in the furnace-like heat.
+
+Kirgan stood it as long as he could--until the licking flames were about
+to drive us all away.
+
+"You'll be burnt alive--come up out of that!" he yelled to the boss; but
+I knew it wouldn't do any good. With Collingwood still buried down there
+and still with the breath of life in him, the boss was going to stay and
+keep on trying to dig him out, even if he, himself, got burned to a
+crisp doing it. Loving Mrs. Sheila the way he did, he couldn't do any
+less.
+
+It was awful, those next two or three minutes. We were all running
+frantically back and forth, now, between the wreck and the creek,
+soaking the blankets and doing our level best to beat the fire back and
+keep it from cutting off the only way there was for the boss to climb
+out. But we could only fight gaspingly on the surface of things, as you
+might say. Down underneath, the fire was working around in front and
+behind in spite of all we could do. Some of it had got to the coal, and
+the heavy sulphurous smoke was oozing up to make us all choke and
+strangle.
+
+Honestly, you couldn't have told that the boss was a white man when he
+crawled up out of that pit of death, tugging and lifting the crushed
+and broken body of the madman, and making us take it out before he would
+come out himself. We got them both away from the fire as quickly as we
+could and around to the other side of things, Kirgan and Jones carrying
+Collingwood.
+
+The poor little lady we had left alone with the rescued ones had done
+all she could, and she was waiting for us. When we put Collingwood down,
+she sat down on the ground and took his head in her lap and cried over
+him just like his mother might have, and when the boss knelt down beside
+her I heard what he said: "That's right, little woman; that's just as it
+should be. Death wipes out all scores. I did my best--you must always
+believe that I did my best."
+
+She choked again at that, and said: "There is no hope?" and he said:
+"I'm afraid not. He was dying when I got to him."
+
+I tried to swallow the big lump in my throat and turned away, and so did
+everybody else but the major, who went around and knelt down on the
+other side of Mrs. Sheila. The wreck was blazing now like a mighty
+bonfire, lighting up the pine-clad hills all around and snapping and
+growling like some savage monster gloating over its prey. In the red
+glow we saw a man limping up the track from the west, and Kirgan and I
+went to meet him. It was Hogan, the missing engineer of the 416.
+
+He told us what there was to tell, which wasn't very different from the
+way we'd been putting it up. They--Hogan and his fireman--hadn't
+suspected that they were carrying a maniac until after they had passed
+Bauxite and Collingwood had told them both that what he wanted to do was
+to overtake the special and smash it. Then there had been a fight on the
+engine, but Collingwood had a gun and he had threatened to kill them
+both if they didn't keep on.
+
+"I kep' her goin'," said the Irishman, "thinkin' maybe Jonesy'd keep out
+of my way, or that at the lasht I'd get a chanst to shut the 'Sixteen
+off an' give her the brake. He kep' me fr'm doin' it, and whin I saw the
+tail-lights, I pushed Johnnie Shovel off an' wint afther him because
+there was nawthin' else to do. Johnnie's back yondher a piece, wid a
+broken leg."
+
+Just then Jones, the special's engineer, came up, and he pieced out
+Hogan's story. The wire to Bauxite had warned him that a crazy man was
+chasing him and overrunning stop-signals. He had thought to side-track
+the chaser at the old "Y" and that was what he had stopped for.
+
+Thereupon the three of us went after the crippled fireman, and when we
+got back to the "Y" with him it was all over. Collingwood had died with
+his head in Mrs. Sheila's lap, and the boss, fagged out and half dead as
+he must have been, was up and at work, getting the wreck victims into
+our day-coach, which had been backed up and taken around to the other
+leg of the "Y" to head for Portal City.
+
+When it came time for us to move Collingwood, Mrs. Sheila pulled her
+veil down and walked behind the body, with the good old major locking
+his arm in hers, and that choking lump came again in my throat when I
+remembered what Collingwood had said to the boss the night he came to
+our office: "Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was
+just eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my
+funeral."
+
+I guess there's no use stretching the agony out by telling about that
+mournful ride back to Portal City with the dead and wounded. We left the
+wreck blazing and roaring in the shut-in valley at the gulch mouth
+because there wasn't anything else to do; Kirgan and Jones and one of
+the firemen handled the engine and pulled out, while the rest of us rode
+in the day-coach and did what we could for the suffering.
+
+At Banta we made a stop long enough to let the boss send a wire to
+Portal City, turning out the doctors and the ambulances--and the
+undertakers; and though it was after three o'clock in the morning when
+we pulled in, it seemed as if the whole town had got the word and was
+down at the station to meet us.
+
+I couldn't see Mrs. Sheila's face when the major helped her off at the
+platform; her veil was still down. But I did hear her low-spoken word to
+the boss, whispered while they were carrying Collingwood and Hatch, and
+two of the others who were past help, out to the waiting string of
+dead-wagons.
+
+"I shall go East with the body to-morrow--to-day, I mean--if the
+strikers will let you run a train, and Cousin Basil will go with me. We
+may never meet again, Graham, and for that reason I must say what I have
+to say now. Your opportunity has come. The man who could do the most to
+defeat you is dead, and the strike will do the rest. If I were you, I
+should neither eat nor sleep until I had thought of some way to take the
+railroad out of the hands of those who have proved that they are not
+worthy to own it."
+
+I didn't know, just then, how much or little attention Mr. Norcross was
+paying to this mighty good, clear-headed bit of business advice. What he
+said went back to that saying of hers that they might never meet again.
+
+"We must meet again--sometime and somewhere," he said. And then: "I did
+my best: God knows I did my best, Sheila. I would have given my own
+life gladly if the giving would have saved Collingwood's. Don't you
+believe that?"
+
+"I shall always believe that you are one of God's own gentlemen,
+Graham," she said, soft and low; and then the major came to take her
+away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+P. S. L. Comes Home
+
+
+I didn't get more than five hours' sleep after the excitement was all
+over, and we had ourselves driven, Mr. Norcross and I, up to the club.
+But by nine o'clock the next morning, as soon as I'd swallowed a hurried
+bite of breakfast in the grill-room I swiped a camp-stool and a magazine
+out of the lounge and trotted up-stairs to plant myself before the
+boss's door, determined that nobody should disturb him until he was good
+and ready to get up.
+
+He turned out a little before twelve, looking sort of haggard and drawn,
+of course, and having some pretty bad burns on the side of his neck and
+on the backs of both hands. But he was all there, as usual, and he laid
+a good, brotherly hand on my shoulder when he saw what I was doing.
+
+"They don't make many of them like you, Jimmie," he said. And then:
+"Have you any news?"
+
+I had, a little, and I gave it to him. Fred May had come tip-toeing up
+into my sentry corridor about ten o'clock to tell me that Mr. Perkins
+had arranged with the strikers to have a special go east with the major
+and Mrs. Sheila and Collingwood's body to catch the Overland at
+Sedgwick; and I told the boss this, and that the train had been gone for
+an hour or more.
+
+Also, I gave him a sealed package that a strange boy had brought up just
+a little while after May went away. We took the elevator to the
+grill-room for something to eat, and at table Mr. Norcross opened the
+package. It contained a bunch of affidavits, eleven of them in all, and
+there was no letter or anything to tell where they had come from.
+
+He handed the papers over to me, after he had seen what they were, and
+told me to take care of them, and, when the waiter was bringing our
+bite--or rather after he had brought it and was gone--he sort of frowned
+across the table at me and said: "Do you know what it means--this
+surrender of those bribe affidavits, Jimmie?"
+
+I said I guessed I did; that Hatch being dead, and Collingwood, too,
+there wasn't nerve enough left in the Red Tower outfit to keep up the
+fight; that the surrender of the affidavits was kind of a plea for a
+let-up on our part.
+
+"We'll begin to show them, in just about fifteen minutes, Jimmie," was
+the short comment. "Reach over and get that telephone and tell Mr.
+Ripley and Mr. Billoughby that I want them to meet me at my office at
+half-past twelve. Any news from the strike?"
+
+"Nothing," I told him, while "Central" was getting me Mr. Ripley's
+number. "Fred May said it was going on just the same; everything quiet
+and nothing doing, except that the wrecking train had gone out to pick
+up the scraps at Timber Mountain 'Y'. Kirgan is bossing it, and the
+strikers manned it for him."
+
+Nothing more was said until after I had sent the two phone messages, and
+then the boss broke out in a new spot.
+
+"Has anything been heard from Mr. Van Britt?" he asked.
+
+"Not that I know of."
+
+Again he gave me that queer little scowl across the table.
+
+"Jimmie, have you found out yet why Mr. Van Britt insisted on quitting
+the service?"
+
+I guess I grinned a little, though I tried not to.
+
+"Mr. Van Britt is one of the best friends you've got," I said. "He
+thought you needed this strike, and he wanted to go out among the
+pay-roll men and sort of help it along. He couldn't do a thing like that
+while he was an officer of the company and drawing his pay like the rest
+of us."
+
+"I might have known--he as good as told me," was the reply, made kind of
+half-absently; and then, short and quick: "How's the stock market? Have
+you seen a paper?"
+
+I had seen both papers, at breakfast-time, but of course they had
+nothing startling in them except a last-minute account of the wreck at
+Timber Mountain "Y," grabbed off just before they went to press. They
+couldn't have anything later from New York than the day before. But Fred
+May had tipped me off when he came up to tell me about the Major
+Kendrick special. The newspaper offices were putting out bulletins by
+that time.
+
+I told Mr. Norcross about the bulletins and was brash enough to add:
+"We're headed for the receivership all right, I guess; our stock has
+tumbled to twenty-nine, and there's a regular dog-fight going on over it
+at the railroad post in the Exchange. Wall Street's afire and burning
+up, so they say."
+
+The chief hadn't eaten enough to keep a cat alive, but at that he pushed
+his chair back and reached for his hat.
+
+"Come on, Jimmie," he snapped. "We've got to get busy. And there isn't
+going to be any receivership."
+
+We reached the railroad headquarters--which were as dead and quiet as a
+graveyard--a little before Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got down. But Mr.
+Editor Cantrell was there, waiting to shoot an anxious question at the
+boss.
+
+"Well, Norcross, are you ready to talk now?"
+
+"Not just yet; to-morrow, maybe," was the good-natured rejoinder.
+
+"All right; then perhaps you will tell me this: Do you, yourself,
+believe that four or five thousand railroad men have gone on strike out
+of sheer sympathy for a few hundred C. S. & W. employees, most of whom
+are merely common laborers?"
+
+The boss spread his hands. "You have all the facts that anybody has,
+Cantrell."
+
+"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you haven't fomented this
+eruption on the quiet to get the better of the Red Tower crowd in some
+way?" demanded the editor.
+
+"I can, indeed," was the smiling answer.
+
+Cantrell looked as if he didn't more than half believe it.
+
+"Being a newspaper man, I'm naturally suspicious," he put in. "There are
+big doings down underneath all this that I can smell, but can't dig up.
+Everything about this strike is too blamed good-natured. I've talked
+with half a dozen of the leaders, and with any number of the rank and
+file. They all grin and give me the wink, as if it were the best joke
+that was ever pulled off."
+
+Again Mr. Norcross smiled handsomely. "If you push me to it, Cantrell, I
+may say that this is exactly their attitude toward me!"
+
+"Well," said the editor, getting up to go; "it's doing one thing to you,
+good and proper. Your railroad stock is tumbling down-stairs so fast
+that it can't keep up with itself."
+
+"I hope it will tumble still more," said the boss, pleasantly, with
+another sort of enigmatic smile; and with that Mr. Cantrell had to be
+content.
+
+As the editor went out, Fred May brought in the bunch of forenoon
+telegrams and laid them on the desk. They were quickly glanced at and
+tossed over to me as fast as they were read. Most of them were plaintive
+little yips from a strike-stricken lot of people along the Short Line
+who seemed to think that the world had come to an end, but there were
+three bearing the New York date line and signed "Dunton." The earliest
+had been sent shortly after the opening of the Stock Exchange, and it
+ran thus:
+
+"Morning papers announce strike and complete tie-up on P. S. L. Why no
+report from you of labor troubles threatening? Compromise at any cost
+and wire emphatic denial of strike. Answer quick."
+
+The second of the series had been filed for transmission an hour later
+and it was still more saw-toothed.
+
+"Later reports confirm newspaper story. Your failure to compromise
+instantly with employees will break stock market and subject you to
+investigation for criminal incompetency. Answer."
+
+The third message had been sent still later.
+
+"Your continued silence inexcusable. If no favorable report from you by
+six o'clock you may consider yourself discharged from the company's
+service and criminal proceedings on charge of conspiracy will be
+instituted at once."
+
+There was no mention of Collingwood, and I could only imagine that Major
+Kendrick's telegram had not yet reached the president. I thought things
+were beginning to look pretty serious for us if Mr. Dunton was going to
+try to drag us into the courts, but Mr. Norcross was still smiling when
+he handed me the last and latest telegram in the bunch that May had
+brought in. It was from Mr. Chadwick, and was good-naturedly laconic.
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "Just returned from trip to Seattle. What's doing on the Short
+     Line?
+
+     "CHADWICK."
+
+"A couple of telegrams, Jimmie," said the chief, as he passed this last
+wire over, and I got my notebook ready.
+
+"To B. Dunton, New York. Strike is sympathetic and not subject to
+compromise. Mails moving regularly, but all other traffic suspended
+indefinitely. My office closes to-day, and my resignation, effective at
+once, goes to you on Fast Mail to-night."
+
+"Now one to Mr. Chadwick, and you may send it in code," he directed
+crisply. Then he dictated:
+
+"See newspapers for account of strike. Hatch and eight of his associates
+were killed last night in railroad wreck. Dunton has demanded my
+resignation and I have given it. Have plan for complete reorganization
+along lines discussed in beginning, and need your help. At market
+opening to-morrow sell P. S. L. large blocks and repurchase in driblets
+as price goes down. Repeat until I tell you to stop. Wire quick if you
+are with us."
+
+Just as I was taking the last sentence, Mr. Ripley and Billoughby came
+in, and Mr. Norcross took them both into the third room of the suite and
+shut the door. An hour later when the door opened and they came out, the
+boss was summing up the new orders to Billoughby: "There's a lot to do,
+and you have my authority to hire all the help you need. See the bankers
+yourself, personally, and get them to interest other local buyers along
+the line, the more of them, and the smaller they are, the better. I'll
+take care of Portal City, myself. I've had Van Britt on the wire and he
+is taking care of the employees--yes, that goes as it lies, and is a
+part of the original plan; every man who works for P. S. L. is going to
+own a bit of stock, if we have to carry him for it and let him pay a
+dollar a week. More than that, they shall have representation on the
+board if they want it. And while you're knocking about, take time to
+show these C. S. & W. folks how they can climb back into the saddle. Red
+Tower is down and out, now, and they can keep it out if they want to."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I suppose I might rattle this old type-machine of mine indefinitely and
+tell the story of the financial fight that filled the next few days; of
+how the boss and Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got the bankers and
+practically everybody together all along the Short Line and sprung the
+big plan upon them, which was nothing less than the snapping up, on a
+tumbling stock market, of the opportunity now presented to them of
+owning--actually _owning_ in fee simple--their own railroad, the buying
+to be done quietly through Mr. Chadwick's brokers in Chicago and New
+York.
+
+There was some opposition and jangling and see-sawing back and forth, of
+course, but the newspapers, led by the _Mountaineer_, took hold, and
+then, pretty soon, everybody took hold; after which the only trouble was
+to keep people--our own rank and file among them--from buying P. S. L.
+Common so fast that the New Yorkers would catch on and run the price
+up.
+
+They didn't catch on--not until after it was too late; and the minute
+Mr. Chadwick wired us from Chicago that we were safe, the strike went
+off, as you might say, between two minutes, and Mr. Norcross called a
+meeting of stockholders, the same to be held--bless your heart!--in
+Portal City, the thriving metropolis of the region in which, counting
+Mr. Chadwick in as one of us, a good, solid voting majority of the stock
+was now held. The _Mountaineer_ printed the call, and it spoke of the
+railroad as "_our_ railroad company"!
+
+The meeting was held in due time, and Mr. Chadwick was there to preside.
+He made a cracking good chairman, and the way he dilated on the fact
+that now the country--and the employees--had a railroad of their own,
+and that the whole nation would be looking to see how we would
+demonstrate the problem we had taken over, actually brought
+cheers--think of it; cheers in a railroad stockholders' meeting.
+
+Following Mr. Chadwick's talk there was the usual routine business;
+reports were read and it was shown that the Short Line, notwithstanding
+all the stealings and mismanagements was still a good going proposition
+at the price at which it had been bought in. A new board of directors
+was chosen, and as soon as the new board got together, Mr. Norcross
+went back to his office in the headquarters, not as general manager,
+this time--not on your life!--but as the newly elected president of
+Pioneer Short Line. And by the same token, the first official circular
+that came out--a copy of which I sent, tied up with a blue ribbon, to
+Maisie Ann--read like this:
+
+     "To all Employees:
+
+     "Effective this day, Mr. James F. Dodds is appointed Assistant to
+     the President with headquarters in Portal City.
+
+     "G. NORCROSS, _President_."
+
+That's all; all but a little talk between the boss and Mr. Upton Van
+Britt that took place in our office on the day after Mr. Van Britt,
+still kicking about the hard work that the boss was always piling upon
+him, had been appointed general manager.
+
+"You've made the riffle, Graham--just as I said you would," said our own
+and only millionaire, after he had got through abusing the fates that
+wouldn't let him go back East and play with his coupon shears and his
+yachts and polo ponies. "You're going to be the biggest man this side of
+the mountains, some day; and the day isn't so very far off, either."
+
+It was just here that the boss got out of his chair and walked to the
+other end of the room. When he came back it was to say:
+
+"You think I have won out, Upton, and so does everybody else. I suppose
+it looks that way to the man in the street. But I haven't, you know. I
+have lost the one thing for which I would gladly give all the business
+success I have ever made or hope to make."
+
+Mr. Van Britt's smile was more than half a grin.
+
+"It isn't lost, Graham: it's only gone before. Can't you wait a decent
+little while?"
+
+"If I should wait all my life it wouldn't be long enough, Upton," was
+the reply. "What you said to me--that time when we first spoke of
+Collingwood--was true. You said she loved the other man--and so she
+did."
+
+This time Mr. Van Britt's smile was a whole grin.
+
+"I said it, and I'll say it again. She didn't realize it or admit it,
+even to herself you know; she's too good and clean-hearted for anything
+like that. But I could see it plainly enough, and so could everybody
+else except the two people most nearly concerned. I didn't mean Howie
+Collingwood: you were the 'other man,' Graham."
+
+At this the boss whirled short around and tramped to the other end of
+the room again, standing for quite a little while with one foot on the
+low window-sill and making out like he was looking down at the traffic
+clattering along in Nevada Avenue. But I'll bet a quarter he never saw a
+single wheel of it. When he came back our way his eyes were shining and
+he put his hand on Mr. Van Britt's shoulder.
+
+"It ought to have been you, Uppy," he said, dropping back to the old
+college nickname. "You're by long odds the better man. When--when do you
+think I might venture to take a little run across to New York?"
+
+At that, Mr. Van Britt laughed out loud.
+
+"Ho! ho!" he said. "I suppose I ought to say a year. You can wait one
+little year, can't you, Graham?"
+
+"Not on your life!" rasped the boss. And then: "I'll tell you what I'll
+do; I'll compromise with the proprieties, or whatever it is that you're
+insisting on, and make it six months. But that's the limit--the absolute
+limit!"
+
+And so it was.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+_BY FRANCIS LYNDE_
+
+    THE WRECKERS
+    DAVID VALLORY
+    BRANDED
+    STRANDED IN ARCADY
+    AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
+    THE REAL MAN
+    THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
+    THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+    SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUÉ
+    THE PRICE
+    THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN
+    A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
+
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+    text-decoration:
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+
+/* Poetry */
+.poem {
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+    margin-right:10%;
+    text-align: left;
+}
+
+.poem br {display: none;}
+
+.poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+
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+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wreckers
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2012 [EBook #38846]
+Last updated: April 22, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h1>THE WRECKERS</h1>
+
+<h2>BY FRANCIS LYNDE</h2>
+
+
+<p class="center">WITH FRONTISPIECE BY<br />
+ARTHUR E. BECHER</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+NEW YORK 1920</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1920, by</span><br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</p>
+
+<p class="center">Published March, 1920</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>To a certain grave and reverend official of the Union Pacific System
+who, in his younger days, might well have played the part of <i>Jimmie
+Dodds</i>, this book is affectionately inscribed by</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">The Author</span>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/front.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+
+<h4>"You have spoken only of the difficulties and
+responsibilities, Graham, but there is another side to it."</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="contents">
+<tr><td align="right">CHAPTER                                </td><td>            </td><td align="right">      PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I. </td><td><a href="#I"><span class="smcap">At Sand Creek Siding</span></a></td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II. </td><td><a href="#II"><span class="smcap">A Tank Party</span></a></td><td align="right">11</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III. </td><td><a href="#III"><span class="smcap">Mr. Chadwick's Special</span></a></td><td align="right">23</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV. </td><td><a href="#IV"><span class="smcap">The Tipping of the Scale</span></a></td><td align="right">36</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V. </td><td><a href="#V"><span class="smcap">The Directors' Meeting</span></a></td><td align="right">51</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI. </td><td><a href="#VI"><span class="smcap">The Alexa Goes East</span></a></td><td align="right">60</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII. </td><td><a href="#VII">"<span class="smcap">Heads Off, Gentlemen!</span>"</a></td><td align="right">65</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII. </td><td><a href="#VIII"><span class="smcap">With the Strings Off</span></a></td><td align="right">75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX. </td><td><a href="#IX"><span class="smcap">And Satan Came Also</span></a></td><td align="right">90</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X. </td><td><a href="#X"><span class="smcap">The Big Smash</span></a></td><td align="right">96</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI. </td><td><a href="#XI"><span class="smcap">What Every Man Knows</span></a></td><td align="right">102</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII. </td><td><a href="#XII"><span class="smcap">With the Wheels Trigged</span></a></td><td align="right">112</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII. </td><td><a href="#XIII"><span class="smcap">The Lost 1016</span></a></td><td align="right">123</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIV. </td><td><a href="#XIV"><span class="smcap">A Close Call</span></a></td><td align="right">140</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XV. </td><td><a href="#XV"><span class="smcap">The Machine</span></a></td><td align="right">155</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVI. </td><td><a href="#XVI"><span class="smcap">In the Coal Yard</span></a></td><td align="right">169</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVII. </td><td><a href="#XVII"><span class="smcap">The Man at the Window</span></a></td><td align="right">185</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVIII. </td><td><a href="#XVIII"><span class="smcap">The Name on the Register</span></a></td><td align="right">200</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIX. </td><td><a href="#XIX"><span class="smcap">The Hoodoo</span></a></td><td align="right">206</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XX. </td><td><a href="#XX"><span class="smcap">The Helpless Wires</span></a></td><td align="right">216</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXI. </td><td><a href="#XXI"><span class="smcap">Billy Morris Explains</span></a></td><td align="right">225</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXII. </td><td><a href="#XXII"><span class="smcap">What the Pilot Engine Found</span></a></td><td align="right">232</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXIII. </td><td><a href="#XXIII"><span class="smcap">The Major's Premonition</span></a></td><td align="right">247</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXIV. </td><td><a href="#XXIV"><span class="smcap">The Dead-Line</span></a></td><td align="right">262</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXV. </td><td><a href="#XXV"><span class="smcap">Flagged Down</span></a></td><td align="right">274</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXVI. </td><td><a href="#XXVI"><span class="smcap">The Dipsomaniac</span></a></td><td align="right">292</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXVII. </td><td><a href="#XXVII"><span class="smcap">The Deserter</span></a></td><td align="right">312</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXVIII. </td><td><a href="#XXVIII"><span class="smcap">The Beginning of the End</span></a></td><td align="right">319</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXIX. </td><td><a href="#XXIX"><span class="smcap">The Murder Madman</span></a></td><td align="right">334</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXX. </td><td><a href="#XXX">"<span class="smcap">Under the Wide and Starry Sky</span>"</a></td><td align="right">349</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXXI. </td><td><a href="#XXXI"><span class="smcap">P. S. L. Comes Home</span></a></td><td align="right">365</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE WRECKERS</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>At Sand Creek Siding</h3>
+
+
+<p>As a general proposition, I don't believe much in the things called
+"hunches." They are bad for the digestion, and as often as not are like
+those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it
+is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to all rules, and
+we certainly uncovered the biggest one of the lot&mdash;the boss and I&mdash;the
+night we left Portland and the good old Pacific Coast.</p>
+
+<p>It was this way. We had finished the construction work on the Oregon
+Midland; had quit, cleaned up the offices, drawn our last pay-checks,
+told everybody good-by, and were on our way to the train, when I had one
+of those queer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew
+just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to
+Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason&mdash;if you'll call
+it a reason&mdash;was that, just before we came to the railroad station, the
+boss walked calmly under a ladder standing in front of a new building;
+and besides that, it was the thirteenth day of the month, a Friday, and
+raining like the very mischief.</p>
+
+<p>Just to sort of toll us along, maybe, the fates didn't begin on us that
+night. They waited until the next day, and then proceeded to shove us in
+behind a freight-train wreck at Widner, Idaho, where we lost twelve
+hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't
+due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a
+little visit with his folks in Illinois, and beyond that he was going to
+meet a bunch of Englishmen in Montreal, and maybe let them make him
+General Manager of one of the Canadian railroads.</p>
+
+<p>So Mr. Norcross was in no special hurry, and neither was I. I wasn't
+under pay, but I expected to be when we reached Canada. I had been
+confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland
+construction, and he was taking me along partly because he knows a
+cracking good stenographer when he sees one, but mostly because I was
+dead anxious to go anywhere he was going.</p>
+
+<p>But to come back to the Widner delay: if it hadn't been for that
+twelve-hour lay-out we would have caught the Saturday night train on the
+Pioneer Short Line, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there
+would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram
+from Mr. Chadwick, because it wouldn't have found us; no hold-up at Sand
+Creek Siding; in short, nothing would have happened that did happen. But
+I mustn't get ahead of my story.</p>
+
+<p>It was on Sunday that the jolt began to get ready to land on us. Mr.
+Norcross had been a railroad man for so long that he had forgotten how
+to knock off on Sundays, and right soon after breakfast, with the help
+of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our
+section into a business office, saying that now we had a good quiet day,
+we'd clean up the million or so odds and ends of correspondence he'd
+been letting go while we were tussling for the Midland right-of-way
+through the Oregon mountains.</p>
+
+<p>By this time, you will understand, we were rocketing along over the
+Pioneer Short Line, and were supposed to be due at Portal City at
+half-past seven that evening. From where he sat dictating to me the boss
+was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his
+eyes while he was talking off his letters, and it puzzled me because it
+wasn't like him. I may as well say here as anywhere that one of his
+strong points is to be always "at himself" under all sorts of
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>So, as I say, I was sort of puzzled; and one of the times after he had
+given me a full grist of letters and had gone off to smoke while I
+typed a few thousand lines from my notes to catch up, I made a
+discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a
+young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the
+old-fashioned kind, with low seat-backs. I put it up that in those
+absent-eyed intervals Mr. Norcross had been studying the back of the
+young woman's neck. I was measurably sure it wasn't the little girl's.</p>
+
+<p>Along in the forenoon I made an excuse to go and get a drink of water
+out of the forward cooler, and on the way back I took a good square look
+at our neighbors in Number Five. At that I didn't wonder at the boss's
+temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to
+start a stopped clock&mdash;only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there
+wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. And the little girl was
+simply a peach&mdash;a nice, downy, rosy peach; chunky, round-faced,
+sunny-haired, jolly; with a neat little turned-up nose and big sort of
+boyish laughing eyes that fairly dared the world.</p>
+
+<p>I made a good half-dozen mistakes when I got in behind the old writing
+machine again and went on with the letters; but never mind about that.
+As I began to say, things rocked along until we had about worn the day
+out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up
+the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though
+I was only his stenographer, and a kid at that, he was big enough and
+Western enough not to let the buck-private-to-officer gap make any
+difference, and always when we were knocking about together he made me
+sit at his table.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, when it happened that way, he'd ditch the rank-and-file
+dignities and talk to me as if the thousand miles or so between his job
+and mine were wiped out. But this Sunday evening he was pretty quiet,
+breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a
+forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for
+a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of the Pioneer Short Line.
+Farther along, pretty well into the ice-cream and black coffee, he came
+to life again to ask me if I had noticed the young lady and the girl in
+the Pullman section next to ours.</p>
+
+<p>I told him I had, and then, because I had never known him to bother his
+head for two minutes in succession about any woman, he gave me a shock;
+said they were ticketed to Portal City&mdash;and to find that out he must
+have asked the train conductor&mdash;adding that when we reached Portal it
+would be the neighborly thing for me to do to help them off with their
+hand-bags and see that they got a cab if they wanted one.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I will," says I. "That is, if the lady's husband isn't there to
+meet them."</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he snaps out. "You know her? She is married?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't exactly <i>know</i> her," I shuffled. "But she is married, all
+right."</p>
+
+<p>"How can you tell if you don't know her?" he barked; just like that.</p>
+
+<p>I had to make good, right quick, as everybody does who goes up against
+Mr. Graham Norcross. But it so happened that I was able to.</p>
+
+<p>"Her suit case is standing in the aisle, and I saw the tag. It has her
+name, 'Mrs. Sheila Macrae,' on it."</p>
+
+<p>The boss has a way of making two up-and-down wrinkles and a little
+curved horse-shoe line come between his eyes when he is going to reach
+for you.</p>
+
+<p>"There are times, Jimmie, when you see altogether too much," he said,
+sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to the far side of his
+ice-cream pyramid before he began again.</p>
+
+<p>"'Macrae,' you say: that is Scotch. And so is 'Sheila.' Most likely the
+names, both of them, are only hand-downs. She looks straight American to
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"She is pretty enough to look anything," I threw in, just to see how he
+would take it.</p>
+
+<p>"Right you are, Jimmie," he agreed. "I've been looking at the back of
+her neck all day. I don't know whether you've ever noticed it&mdash;you are
+only a boy and probably you haven't&mdash;but there are so many women who
+don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em from behind.
+You catch a glimpse of a pretty neck, and when you get around to the
+face you find out that the neck was only a bit of bluff."</p>
+
+<p>If I had been eating anything in the world but ice-cream I believe it
+would have choked me. What he said led up to the admission that he had
+been making these face-and-neck comparisons for goodness knows how long,
+and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a
+picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a
+hard-hitter, right from the jump. And for a man of that sort women are
+usually no more than fluffy little side-issues, as Eve said when they
+told her she was made out of Adam's rib.</p>
+
+<p>That ended the dining-car part of it. The sure-enough, knock-out round
+was fought at the rear end of our Pullman, which happened to be the last
+car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a
+cigar and said we'd go out to the observation platform to smoke, because
+the smoking-room was full up with apple-raisers, and sheep-feeders and
+cattlemen, all talking at once.</p>
+
+<p>As we went down the aisle I noticed that Section Five was empty, and
+when we reached the door we found the young lady and the girl standing
+at the rear railing to watch the track unroll itself under the trucks
+and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what
+they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm
+collar, but the girl had a fur thing around her neck, and her stocky,
+chunky little arms were elbow deep in a big pillow muff to match, though
+the April night wasn't even half-way chilly.</p>
+
+<p>The boss growled out something about waiting until the ladies should go
+in; and then, for pure safety's sake, he stepped out on the platform to
+close the side trap door which, with the railing gate on that side, had
+been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific
+type" that was pulling us let out a whistle screech that would have
+waked the dead, and the air-brakes went on with a jerk that showed how
+beautifully reckless the railroading was on the Pioneer Short Line.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross was reaching for the catch on the floor trap and the jerk
+didn't throw him. But it snapped the young woman and the girl away from
+the railing so suddenly that the little one had to grab for hand-holds;
+and when she did that, of course the big muff went overboard.</p>
+
+<p>At this, a bunch of things happened, all in an eye-wink. The train
+ground and jiggled to a stop; the girl squealed, "Oh, my muff!" and
+skipped down the steps to disappear in the general direction of the
+Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie <i>Ann</i>!&mdash;come
+back here&mdash;you'll be <i>left</i>!" and then took her turn at disappearing by
+the same route; and, on top of it all, the boss jumped off and sprinted
+after both of them, leaving a string of large, man-sized comments on the
+foolishness of women as a sex trailing along behind him as he flew.</p>
+
+<p>Right then it was my golden moment to play safe and sane. With three of
+them off and lost in the gathering night, somebody with at least a grain
+of sense ought to have stood by to pull the emergency cord if the train
+should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy
+all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a
+mountain desert, and when I squinted up ahead and saw that the engine
+was taking water, it looked as if there were going to be plenty of time
+for a bit of a promenade under the stars. So I swung off and went to
+join the muff hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst them, they had found the pillow thing before I had a chance to
+horn in. They were coming up the track, and the boss had each of the two
+by an arm and was telling them that they'd be left to a dead moral
+certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts
+were too fashionably narrow, and there were still three or four
+car-lengths to go when the tank spout went up with a clang and a
+clatter of chains and the old "Pacific type" gave a couple of hisses and
+a snort.</p>
+
+<p>"They're going!" gritted the boss, sort of between his teeth, and
+without another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under
+his arms, just as if they'd been a couple of sacks of meal, and broke
+into a run.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn't a morsel of use, you know. Mr. Norcross stands six feet two in
+his socks, and I've heard that he was the best all-around athlete in his
+college bunch. But old Hercules himself couldn't have run very far or
+very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half
+a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail
+lights of the train were vanishing to pin points in the night. We were
+like the little tad that went out to the garden to eat worms. Nobody
+loved us, and we were beautifully and artistically left.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>A Tank Party</h3>
+
+
+<p>When he saw that it was no manner of use, the boss quit on the handicap
+race and put his two armfuls down while he still had breath enough left
+to talk with.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, in his best rusty-hinge rasp, "you've done it! Why, in
+the name of common sense, couldn't you have let me go back after that
+muff thing?"</p>
+
+<p>The young woman was panting as if she had been doing the running, and
+the girl was choking and making a noise that made me think that she was
+crying. If I had been as well acquainted with her as I got to be a
+little later on, I would have known that she was only trying to bottle
+up a laugh that was too beautifully big to be wasted upon just three
+people and a treeless desert.</p>
+
+<p>It was the young woman who answered the boss.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I didn't stop to think!" she fluttered, taking the blame as if she
+had been the one to head the procession. "Isn't there <i>any</i> way we can
+stop that train?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss said there wasn't, and I know the only reason why he didn't say
+a lot of other things was because he was too much of a gentleman to say
+them in the presence of a couple of women.</p>
+
+<p>"But what shall we do?" the young woman went on, gasping a little.
+"Isn't there any telegraph station, or&mdash;or anything?"</p>
+
+<p>There wasn't. So far as we could see, the surroundings consisted of a
+short side-track, a spur running off into the hills, and the water tank.
+The siding switches had no lights, which argued that there wasn't even a
+pump-man at the tank&mdash;as there was not, the tank being filled
+automatically by a gravity pipe line running back to a natural reservoir
+in the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>Before the boss had a chance to answer her question about the telegraph
+office he got his eye on me, and then I knew that he hadn't noticed me
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"You here, too?" he ripped out, and I know it did him a lot of good to
+be able to unload on somebody in trousers. "Why in blue blazes didn't
+you stay on that train and keep it from running away from us?"</p>
+
+<p>That's it: why didn't I? What made the dog stop before he caught the
+rabbit? I was trying to frame up some sort of an excuse that would sound
+just a few degrees less than plumb foolish, when the young woman took up
+for me. She'd had the clatter of my typewriter dinned into her pretty
+ears all day, and she knew who I was, even if it was dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't take it out on the poor boy!" she said, kind of crisp, and yet
+sort of motherly. "If you feel obliged to bully some one, I'm the one
+who is to blame."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, you're not!" chipped in the stocky little girl. "<i>I</i> was the
+one who jumped off first. And I don't care: I wasn't going to lose my
+perfectly good muff."</p>
+
+<p>By this time the boss was beginning to get a little better grip on
+himself and he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"We've all earned the leather medal, I guess," he chuckled. "It's done
+now, and it can't be helped. We're stuck until another train comes
+along, and perhaps we ought to be thankful that we've got Jimmie Dodds
+along to chaperon us."</p>
+
+<p>"But isn't there anything else we can do?" said the young woman. "Can't
+we walk somewhere to where there is a station or a town with people in
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>I saw Mr. Norcross look down at her skirts and then at the girl's.</p>
+
+<p>"You two couldn't walk very far or very fast in those things you are
+wearing," he grunted. "Besides, we are in one of the desert strips, and
+it is probably miles to a night wire station in either direction."</p>
+
+<p>"And how long shall we have to wait for another train?" This time it was
+the little girl who wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could tell you, but I can't," said the boss. "I'm not familiar
+with the Short Line schedules." Then to the young woman: "Shall we go
+and sit under the water tank? That seems to be about the nearest
+approach to a waiting-room that the place affords."</p>
+
+<p>We trailed off together up the track, two and two, the boss walking with
+the young woman. After we'd counted a few of the cross-ties, the girl
+said: "Is your name Jimmie Dodds?" And when I admitted it: "Mine is
+Maisie Ann. I'm Sheila's cousin on her mother's side. I think this is a
+great lark; don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell better after it's over," I said. "Maybe we'll have to stay
+here all night."</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't mind," she came back airily. "I haven't been up all night
+since I was a little kiddie and our house burned down. You're just a
+boy, aren't you? You must excuse me; it's so dark that I can't see you
+very well."</p>
+
+<p>I told her I had been shaving for three years and more, and she let out
+a little gurgling laugh, as though I had said something funny. By that
+time we had reached the big water tank, and the boss picked out one of
+the square footing timbers for a seat. It seemed as if he were finding
+it a good bit harder to get acquainted with his half of the combination
+than I was with mine, but after a little the young women thawed out a
+bit and made him talk&mdash;to help pass away the time, I took it&mdash;and the
+little girl and I sat and listened. When the young woman finally got him
+started, the boss told her all about himself, how he'd been railroading
+ever since he left college, and a lot of things that I'd never even
+dreamed of. It's curious how a pretty woman can make a man turn himself
+inside out that way, just for her amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Maisie Ann and I sat on the end of the timber; not too near to be
+butt-ins, nor so far away that we couldn't hear all that was said. I
+still had the cigar the boss had given me, and I sure wanted to smoke
+mighty bad, only I thought it wouldn't look just right&mdash;me being the
+chaperon. Along in the middle of things, Mr. Norcross broke off short
+and begged the young woman's pardon for boring her with so much shop
+talk.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're not boring me at all; I like to hear it," she protested. And
+then: "You have been telling me the story of a man who has done things,
+Mr. Norcross. It has been my misfortune to have to associate chiefly
+with men who only play at doing things."</p>
+
+<p>He switched off at that and asked her if she were warm enough, saying
+that if she were not, he and I would scrap up some sage-brush or
+something and make a fire. She replied that she didn't care for a fire,
+that the night wasn't at all cold&mdash;which it wasn't. Then she showed that
+she was human, clear down to the tips of her pretty fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"You may smoke if you want to," she told the boss. "I sha'n't mind it in
+the least."</p>
+
+<p>At that, my little girl turned on me and said, in exactly the same tone:
+"You may smoke if you want to, Mr. Dodds. I sha'n't mind it in the
+least." I heard a sort of smothered chuckle from the other end of the
+timber seat, and the boss lighted his cigar. Then there was more talk,
+in which it turned out that the young woman and her cousin were to have
+been met at Portal City by somebody she called "Cousin Basil," but there
+wouldn't be any scare, because she had written ahead to say that
+possibly they might stop over with some friends in one of the apple
+towns.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Norcross said <i>he</i> wouldn't miss anything by the drop-out but
+an appointment he had with an old friend, and he guessed that could
+wait. I listened, thinking maybe he would mention the name of the
+friend, and after a while he did. The forwarded Portal City telegram the
+boss had gotten just before we went to dinner in the dining-car was from
+"Uncle John" Chadwick, the Chicago wheat king, and that left me
+wondering what the mischief Mr. Chadwick was doing away out in the wild
+and woolly western country where they raise more apples than they do
+wheat, and more mining stock schemes than they do either.</p>
+
+<p>There was another thing that I listened for, too, but it didn't come.
+That was some little side mention of the young woman's husband. So far
+as that under-the-tank talk went, there needn't have been any "Mr.
+Macrae" at all, and I was puzzled. If she'd been wearing mourning&mdash;but
+she wasn't, so I told myself that she simply couldn't be a widow.
+Anyway, she was a lot too light-hearted for that.</p>
+
+<p>We had been marooned for nearly an hour when I struck a match and looked
+at my watch. Mr. Norcross was still doing his best to kill time for the
+young woman, and he was just in the exciting part of another railroad
+story, telling about a right-of-way fight on the Midland, where we had
+to smuggle in a few cases of Winchesters and arm the track-layers to
+keep from being shut out of the only canyon there was by the P. &amp; S. F.,
+when the little girl grabbed my arm and said: "Listen!"</p>
+
+<p>I did, and broke in promptly. "Excuse me," I called to the other two,
+"but I think there's a train coming."</p>
+
+<p>The boss cut his story short and we all listened. It seemed that I was
+wrong. The noise we heard was more like an auto running with the
+cut-out open than a train rumbling.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you make it, Jimmie?" came from the boss's end of the timber.</p>
+
+<p>"Motor car. It's out that way," I said, pointing in the darkness toward
+the east.</p>
+
+<p>My guess was right. In less than a minute we saw the lights of the car,
+which was turning in a wide circle to come up beside the main line track
+so it would head back to the east. It stopped a little way below the
+water tank and about a hundred yards north of the track, or maybe less;
+anyway, we could see it quite well even when the lamps were switched off
+and four men came tumbling out of it. If I had been alone on the job I
+should probably have called to the men as they came tramping over to the
+side-track. But Mr. Norcross had a different think coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of sight&mdash;quick, Jimmie!" he whispered, and in another second he
+had whipped the young woman over the big footing timber to a standing
+place under the tank among the braces, and I had done the same for the
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>What followed was as mysterious as a chapter out of an Anna Katherine
+Green detective story. After doing something to the switch of the unused
+spur track, the four men separated. One of them went back to the auto,
+and the other three walked down the main track to the lower switch of
+the short siding which was on the same side of the main line as the
+spur. Here the fourth man rejoined them, and the girl at my elbow told
+us what he had gone back to the car for.</p>
+
+<p>"He has lighted a red lantern," she whispered. "I saw it when he took it
+out of the auto."</p>
+
+<p>I guess it was pretty plain to all of us by this time that there was
+something decidedly crooked on the cards, but if we had known what it
+was, we couldn't very well have done anything to prevent it. There were
+only two of us men to their four; and, besides, there wasn't any time.
+The lantern-carrying man had barely reached the lower switch when we
+heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was a train coming from the
+west, and a few seconds later an electric headlight showed up on the
+long tangent beyond the siding.</p>
+
+<p>It was a bandit hold-up, all right. We saw the four men at the switch
+stop the train, which seemed to be a special, since it had only the
+engine and one passenger car. One of the men stood on the track waving
+the red lantern; we could see him plainly in the glare of the headlight.
+There wasn't much of a scrap. There were two or three pistol shots, and
+then, as near as we could make out, the hold-up men, or some of them,
+climbed into the engine.</p>
+
+<p>What they did next was as blind as a Chinese puzzle. Before you could
+count ten they had made a flying switch with the single car, kicking it
+in on the siding. Before the car had come fully to a stop, the engine
+was switched in behind it, coupled on, and the reversed train, with the
+engine pushing the car, rattled away on the old spur that led off into
+the hills; clattered away and was lost to sight and hearing in less than
+a minute.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until after the train was switched and gone that we
+discovered that two of the bandits had been left behind. These two reset
+the switches for the main track, leaving everything as they had found
+it, and then crossed over to the auto. Pretty soon we saw match flares,
+and two little red dots that appeared told us that they were smoking.</p>
+
+<p>"What are they doing, Jimmie?" asked the boss, under his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"They are waiting for the other two to come back," I ventured, taking a
+chance shot at it. Then I asked him if he knew where the old spur track
+led to. He said he didn't; that there used to be some bauxite mines back
+in the hills, somewhere in this vicinity, but he understood they had
+been worked out and abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>I was just thinking that all this mystery and kidnapping and gun play
+must be sort of hard on the young woman and the girl, but though my half
+of the allotment was shivering a little and snuggling up just a grain
+closer to me, she proved that she hadn't lost her nerve.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see the name on that car when the engine went past to get in
+behind it?" she asked, turning the whispered question loose for anybody
+to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said the boss; and I hadn't, either.</p>
+
+<p>"I did," she asserted, showing that her eyes, or her wits, were quicker
+than ours. "I had just one little glimpse of it. The name is
+'A-l-e-x-a,'" spelling it out.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross started as if he had been shot.</p>
+
+<p>"The <i>Alexa</i>? That is Mr. Chadwick's private car&mdash;they've kidnapped
+him!" Then he whirled short on me. "Jimmie, are you man enough to go
+with me and try a tackle on those fellows over there in that auto?"</p>
+
+<p>I said I was; but I didn't add what I thought&mdash;that it would probably be
+a case of double suicide for us two to go up against a pair of armed
+thugs with our bare hands. The boss would have done it in the hollow
+half of a minute; he's built just that way. But now the young woman put
+in her word.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't think of doing such a thing!" she protested; and she was
+still telling him all the different reasons why he mustn't, when we
+heard the creak and grind of the stolen engine coming back down the old
+spur.</p>
+
+<p>After that there was nothing to do but to wait and see what was going to
+happen next. What did happen was as blind as all the rest. The engine
+was stopped somewhere in the gulch back of us and out of sight from our
+hiding-place, and pretty soon the two men who had gone with her came
+hurrying across out of the hill shadows, making straight for the auto. A
+minute or two later they had climbed into the machine, the motor had
+sputtered, and the car was gone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>Mr. Chadwick's Special</h3>
+
+
+<p>Of course, as soon as the skip-out of the four hold-up men gave us a
+free hand we knew it was up to us to get busy and do something. It was a
+safe bet that the <i>Alexa</i> was carrying her owner, and in that case Mr.
+John Chadwick and his train crew were somewhere back in the hills,
+without an engine, and with a good prospect of staying "put" until
+somebody should go and hunt them up.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross had our part in the play figured out before the retreating
+auto had covered its first mile.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got to find out what they've done with Mr. Chadwick," he broke
+out. And then: "It can't be very far to where they have left the engine,
+and if they haven't crippled it&mdash;" He stopped short and slung a question
+at the two women: "Will you two stay here with Jimmie while I go and see
+what I can find in that gulch?"</p>
+
+<p>They both paid me the compliment of saying that they'd stay with me, but
+the young woman suggested that it might be just as well if we should all
+go up the gulch together. So we piked out in the dark, the boss helping
+Mrs. Sheila to hobo along over the cross-ties of the spur, and the
+little girl stumbling on behind with me. She had got over her scare, if
+she had any, and when I asked her if she didn't want an arm to grab at,
+she laughed and said, No, and that it was grand; that she wouldn't miss
+a single stumble for worlds.</p>
+
+<p>"In all my life I've never had anything half as exciting as this happen
+to me," was the way she put it, and she sure acted as if she meant to
+make the most of it.</p>
+
+<p>We had followed the spur track up the gulch for maybe a short quarter of
+a mile when we came to the engine. There was nobody on it, and the
+brigands had been good-natured enough to leave the fire-door open so
+that the steam would run down gently and let the boiler cool off by
+degrees. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert on engines, just as he
+is on everything else belonging to a railroad, and he struck matches and
+looked our find over carefully before he tried to move it. As we had
+feared it might be, the big machine was crippled. There was a key gone
+out of one of the connecting-rod crank-pin straps; one miserable little
+piece of steel, maybe eight inches long and tapering one way, and half
+an inch or so thick the other; but that was a-plenty. We couldn't make a
+move without it.</p>
+
+<p>I thought we were done for, but Mr. Norcross chased me up into the cab
+for a lantern. With the light we began to hunt around in the short
+grass, all four of us down on our hands and knees doing the
+needle-in-the-haystack stunt. I had been sensible enough to show the
+little girl the other connecting-rod key, so she knew exactly what to
+look for, and it did me a heap of good when it turned out that she was
+the one who found the lost bit of steel.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got it&mdash;I've got it!" she cried; and sure enough she had. The
+hold-up people had merely taken it out and thrown it aside on the
+extremely probable chance that nobody would be foolish enough to look
+for it so near at hand, or, looking, would be able to find it in the
+dark.</p>
+
+<p>It didn't take more than a minute or two, with a wrench from the
+engineer's box, to put the key back in place. Then, with one to boost
+and the other to pull, we got our two passengers up into the high cab,
+and Mr. Norcross made them as comfortable as he could on the fireman's
+box, showing them how to brace and hang on when the machine should begin
+to bounce over the rough track of the old spur.</p>
+
+<p>While he was doing this, I threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the
+firebox and put the blower on; and when we were all set, the boss opened
+the throttle and we went carefully nosing ahead over the old track,
+feeling our way up the gulch and keeping a sharp lookout for the <i>Alexa</i>
+as we ground and squealed around the curves.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been four or five miles back in the hills to the place
+where we found the private car, and a little way short of it we picked
+up Mr. Chadwick's conductor, walking the ties to try to get in touch
+with the civilized world once more. He looked a trifle suspicious when
+he found the engine in the hands of still another bunch of strangers,
+and two of them women; but as soon as he heard Mr. Norcross's name he
+quit being offish and got suddenly respectful. Young as he was for a
+top-rounder, the boss had a "rep," and I guess there were not very many
+railroad men west of the Rockies who didn't know him, or know of him.</p>
+
+<p>The conductor told us where we'd find the car, and we found it just as
+he said we would: pushed in on an old mine-loading track at the end of
+the spur. The other members of the crew were off and waiting for us; and
+standing out on the back platform, in the full glare of the headlight as
+we nosed up for a coupling, there was a big, gray-haired man, bareheaded
+and dressed in rough-looking old clothes like a mining prospector.</p>
+
+<p>The big man was "Uncle John" Chadwick, and if he was properly astonished
+at seeing us turn up with his lost engine, he didn't let it interfere
+with our welcome when we took our passengers around to the car and
+lifted them one at a time over the railing and climbed up after them.
+Mr. Chadwick seemed to know Mrs. Sheila; at any rate, he shook hands
+with her and called her by name. Then he grabbed for the boss and fairly
+shouted at him: "Well, well, Graham!&mdash;of all the lucky things this side
+of Mesopotamia! How the dev&mdash;how in thunder did you manage to turn up
+here?" And all that, you know.</p>
+
+<p>The explanations, such as they were, came later, after the young lady,
+confessing herself a bit excited and fussed up, had taken her cousin
+under her arm and they had both gone to lie down in one of the
+staterooms. With the women out of the way, the boss and Mr. Chadwick sat
+together in the open compartment while the train crew was trundling us
+back to the main line. Mr. Norcross had put me in right by telling the
+wheat king who I was, so they didn't pay any attention to me.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of course, the talk jumped first to the mysterious hold-up
+and kidnapping and the reason why. All either of them could say didn't
+serve to throw any light on the mystery, not a single ray. There had
+been no violence&mdash;the pistol shots had been merely meant to scare the
+trainmen&mdash;and there had been no attempt at robbery; for that matter,
+Mr. Chadwick hadn't even seen the kidnappers, and hadn't known what was
+going on until after it was all over.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross told what we had seen, and how we had come to be where we
+were able to see it, but that didn't help out much, either. From any
+point of view it seemed perfectly foolish, and the boss made mention of
+that. If we hadn't happened to be there to bring the engine back, the
+worst that could have befallen Mr. Chadwick and the crew of the special
+would have been a few hours' bother and delay. In the course of time the
+conductor would have walked out and got to a wire station somewhere,
+though it might have taken him all night, and then some, to get another
+engine.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, Mr. Chadwick was red-hot about it, on general principles. I
+guess he wasn't used to being kidnapped. But, after all, the thing that
+bothered him most was the fact that he couldn't account for it.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help thinking that it is connected with what is due to happen
+to-morrow morning, Graham," he said, at the end of things. "There are
+some certain scoundrels in Portal City at the present moment who
+wouldn't stop at anything to gain their ends, and I am wondering now if
+Dawes wasn't mixed up in it."</p>
+
+<p>The boss laughed and said:</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to begin at the beginning with me: I'm too new in this
+region to know even the names. Who is Dawes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dawes is a mining man in Portal City, and before I'd been an hour in
+town yesterday he hunted me up and wanted me to go over to Strathcona to
+look at some gold prospects he's trying to finance. I said 'No' at
+first, because I was expecting you, and thought you'd reach Portal City
+this morning. When you didn't show up, I knew I had twelve hours more on
+my hands, and as Dawes was still hanging on, I had our trainmaster give
+me a special over to Strathcona, on a promise that I'd be brought back
+early this evening, ahead of the 'Flyer' from the west&mdash;the train you
+were on."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross nodded. "And the promise wasn't kept."</p>
+
+<p>"No promise is ever kept on the Pioneer Short Line," growled the big
+magnate. And then, with a beautiful disregard for the mixed figures of
+speech: "Once in a blue moon the chapter of accidents hits the
+bull's-eye whack in the middle, Graham. When Hardshaw wired me from
+Portland, I knew you couldn't reach Portal City before this morning, at
+the very earliest. That was going to cut my time pretty short, with the
+big gun due to be fired to-morrow morning, and you cut it still shorter
+by losing twelve hours somewhere along the road&mdash;they told me in the
+despatcher's office that your train was behind a wreck somewhere up in
+Oregon. But it has turned out all right, in spite of everything. You're
+here, and we've got the night before us."</p>
+
+<p>Again Mr. Norcross said something about beginning at the beginning.
+"Just remember that I am entirely in the dark," he went on. "I didn't
+see Hardshaw at all before leaving Portland; he merely forwarded your
+wire, asking me to stop over in Portal City, to me on the train&mdash;and it
+was handed to me just before dinner this evening. Of course, that was
+enough&mdash;from anybody who has been as good a friend to me as you have."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll see presently just how far that friendship rope is going to
+reach," returned the wheat king, and though my back was turned to them,
+I could easily imagine the quizzical twinkle of the shrewd old eyes that
+went with it. Then I suppose he nodded toward me, for the boss said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Jimmie's all right; he knew what I had for dinner this evening, and
+he'll know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning."</p>
+
+<p>With the bridle off, the big man went ahead abruptly, cutting out all
+the frills.</p>
+
+<p>"You finished your building contract on the Oregon Midland, Graham, and
+after the road was opened for business you refused an offer of the
+general managership. Would you mind telling me why you did that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the least. I'm rather burnt out on trying to operate American
+railroads; at any rate, when it comes to trying to operate one of them
+for a legitimate profit. There is nothing in it. An operating head is
+now nothing more than a score-keeper for a national gambling game. The
+boss gamblers around the railroad post in the Stock Exchange tell him
+what he has to do and where he has to get off. Stock gambling, under
+whatever name it masquerades&mdash;boosting values, buying and selling
+margins, reorganizations, with their huge rake-offs for the
+underwriters&mdash;is the incubus which is crushing the life out of the
+nation's industries, especially in the railroad field. It makes me wish
+I'd never seen a railroad track."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet it is your trade, isn't it?" asked the wheat king.</p>
+
+<p>"It is; but luckily I can build railroads as well as operate them; and
+there are other countries besides the United States of America. I'm on
+my way home to Illinois for a little visit with my mother and sisters;
+and after that I think I shall close with an offer I've had from one of
+the Canadian companies."</p>
+
+<p>"Good boy!" chuckled the Chicago magnate. "In due time we might hope to
+be reading your name in the newspapers&mdash;'Sir Graham Norcross, D.S.O.,'
+or something of that sort." Then, with a sharp return to the sort of
+gritting seriousness: "You've been riding over the Pioneer Short Line
+since early this morning, Graham: what do you think of it?"</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't see the boss's smile, but I could figure it pretty well when
+he said: "There may be worse managed, worse neglected pieces of railroad
+track in some of the great transcontinental lines, but if there are I
+haven't happened to notice them. I suppose it is capitalized to death,
+like many of the others."</p>
+
+<p>"Fictitious values doubtless have something to do with it at the present
+stage of the game," Mr. Chadwick admitted. "The Pioneer Short Line is
+'under suspicion' on the books of the commissions, both State and
+Interstate, as a heavily 'watered' corporation&mdash;which it is. Do you know
+the history of the road?"</p>
+
+<p>When I got up to get a match, Mr. Norcross was shaking his head and
+saying: "Not categorically; no."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll brief it for you," said the big man in the stuffed wicker
+chair. "It has always been a good earning property, being largely, even
+yet, without much local competition. But from the day it was completed
+its securities have figured in the market only for their speculative
+values. The property itself has never been considered, save as a means
+to an end; the end being to enable one bunch of the Wall Street
+gamesters you speak of to make a 'killing' and unload on another bunch."</p>
+
+<p>"The old story," said Mr. Norcross.</p>
+
+<p>"We are bumping over the net result, right now," Mr. Chadwick went on.
+"The property is bled white; there is no money for betterments; we are
+tied hand and foot by all sorts of legal restrictions and regulations;
+and, worse than all, the people we are supposed to serve hate us until
+you can smell it and taste it in every town and hamlet on the
+right-of-way."</p>
+
+<p>"So I have heard," put in the boss, calmly.</p>
+
+<p>"That brings us down to the nib of the matter. Pioneer Short Line is
+practically in the last ditch. The stock has slumped to forty and worse;
+Shaffer, the general manager and the only able man we have had for
+years, has resigned in disgust; and if something isn't done to-morrow
+morning in Portal City, I know of at least one minority stockholder who
+is going to throw the whole mess into the courts and try for a
+receivership."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting
+himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat
+pit.</p>
+
+<p>"I am&mdash;more's the pity. I had a little lapse of sanity one fine morning
+a few years ago and bought in for an investment. I've done everything I
+could think of, Graham, to persuade Breck Dunton and his Wall Street
+accomplices to spend just one dollar in ten of their reorganization and
+recapitalization stealings on the road itself, but it's no good. All
+they want is to get one more rise out of the securities, so they can
+unload."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there to be a stockholders' meeting in Portal City to-morrow
+morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; a directors' meeting. Dunton has been making an inspection trip
+over the system with a dozen or so of his New York cronies. It's a
+junketing excursion, pure and simple, but while they're here they'll get
+together and go through the form of picking out a new general manager.
+I'm on the board and they had to send me notice, though it's an even bet
+they hoped I'd stay away. In fact, I think they scheduled the meeting
+out here on the chance that the distance from Chicago would keep me from
+attending it."</p>
+
+<p>All this talk had taken up a good bit of time, and just as Mr. Chadwick
+said that about the "even bet," our engineer was whistling for Portal
+City. From where I was sitting I could see the electric lights dotting
+the wide valley between the two gateway buttes from which the city gets
+its name. Mr. Norcross was looking at the lights, too, when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Are you really going to spring the receivership on the Dunton people
+to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to give Dunton his chance. He can appoint the man I want
+appointed as general manager, with full power to act, and ratify a
+little plan I've got up my sleeve for providing a bit of working capital
+for the road, or&mdash;he can turn me down."</p>
+
+<p>"And if he does turn you down?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then, by George, I'll see if I can't persuade the courts to put the
+property into bankruptcy and install my man as receiver!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't envy your man his job, either way around; not the least little
+morsel in the world," said the boss, quietly. And then: "Who is he,
+Uncle John?"</p>
+
+<p>The wheat king gave a great laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't tell me you haven't guessed it," he chuckled. "You're the man,
+Graham."</p>
+
+<p>But now Mr. Norcross had something to say for himself, sitting up
+straight and shaking his head sort of sorrowfully at the big man in the
+padded chair.</p>
+
+<p>"No you don't, my good old friend; not in a thousand years! You'd lose
+out in the end, and I'd lose out; and besides, I'm not quite ready to
+commit suicide." And then to me: "Jimmie, suppose you go and tap on the
+door and tell the ladies we're pulling into Portal City."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>The Tipping of the Scale</h3>
+
+
+<p>After all, it wasn't so very late in the night when our special pulled
+up to the Portal City station platform and I turned myself into a
+messenger-boy escort for the lady and the little girl whose muff had
+been responsible for so many different flip-flaps in the short space of
+a few hours.</p>
+
+<p>I hadn't hung around while the boss was telling Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann good-by. Our conductor had wired ahead from the first telegraph
+station we came to and had asked to have our dunnage&mdash;the two women's,
+the boss's, and mine&mdash;taken out of the "Flyer" Pullman and sent back to
+Portal City on a local, and I was in the baggage-room, digging up the
+put-off stuff, at the good-by minute. But I guess they didn't quarrel
+any&mdash;the boss and Mrs. Sheila. She was laughing a little to herself as I
+helped her down from the car, and when I asked her where she wanted to
+go, she said I might ask one of the porters to carry the traps, and we'd
+walk to the hotel, which was only a few blocks up the main street.</p>
+
+<p>She took Maisie Ann on the other side of her and let two of the blocks
+go by without saying anything more, and then she gave that quiet little
+laugh again and said, "Your Mr. Norcross amuses me, Jimmie. He says I
+have no business to travel without a guardian. What do you think about
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her I hadn't any thinks coming, and she seemed to take that for a
+joke and laughed some more. Then she asked me if I'd ever been in New
+York, and I felt sort of small when I had to tell her that I had never
+been east of Omaha in all my life. With that, she told me not to worry;
+that if I stayed with Mr. Norcross I'd probably get to go anywhere I
+wanted to.</p>
+
+<p>Something in the way she said it made it sound like a little slam on the
+boss, and of course I wasn't going to stand for that.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing about it: the boss will make good wherever he goes,"
+I hit back. "You can bet on that."</p>
+
+<p>"I like your loyalty," she flashed out. "It is a fine thing in a day
+that is much too careless of such qualities. And I agree with you that
+your Mr. Norcross is likely to succeed; more than likely, if he will
+only learn to combine a little gentle cleverness with the heavy hand."</p>
+
+<p>There was no doubt about it this time; she <i>was</i> slamming the boss, and
+I meant to get at the bottom of it, right there and then.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you have any cause to blacklist Mr. Norcross," I said.
+"Hasn't he been right good and brotherly to both of you this evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I didn't mean that," she said real earnestly. "But in the stateroom
+in Mr. Chadwick's car: the ventilator was open, you know, until Maisie
+Ann got up and shut it, and we couldn't very well help hearing what was
+said about the kidnapping. Neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Norcross seemed
+to be able to account for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you account for it?" I asked, bluntly enough, I guess.</p>
+
+<p>At this she smiled and said, "It would be rather presumptuous for me to
+try where Mr. Norcross and Mr. Chadwick failed, wouldn't it? But maybe I
+can give you just a wee little hint. If you are not well enough
+acquainted with Mr. Chadwick to ask him yourself, you might tell Mr.
+Norcross to ask him if there isn't some strong reason why somebody, or
+perhaps a number of somebodies, wanted to keep him out of Portal City
+over Sunday night and possibly a part of the Monday."</p>
+
+<p>We were coming to the big electric sign that was winking out the letters
+to spell "Hotel Bullard," and I was bound to have it out with her before
+my chance was gone.</p>
+
+<p>"See here," I put in; "you saw something more than I did, and more than
+Mr. Norcross did. What was it?"</p>
+
+<p>This time she took the motherly tone with me again and told me I must
+learn not to be rude and masterful, like the boss. Then she gave me what
+I was reaching for.</p>
+
+<p>"You saw the two men who went over to the auto and smoked while they
+were waiting for the other two to come back?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her that I hadn't seen them very well; couldn't, with nothing but
+the starlight to help out.</p>
+
+<p>"Neither did I," she admitted. "But if I am not mistaken, I have seen
+them many times before, and they are very well known here in Portal
+City. One of them, the smaller one with the derby hat and the short
+overcoat, was either Mr. Rufus Hatch or his double; and the other, the
+heavy-set one, might have been Mr. Gustave Henckel, Mr. Hatch's partner
+in the Red Tower Company."</p>
+
+<p>This didn't help out much, but you can bet that I made a note of the two
+names. We were just going into the hotel, so I didn't have a chance to
+ask any more questions; and after I had paid the porter for lugging the
+grips, Mrs. Sheila had made whatever arrangement she wanted to with the
+clerk, and she and Maisie Ann were ready to take the elevator.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going back to Mr. Chadwick's car?" she asked, when she was
+telling me good-by and thanking me for coming up to the hotel with them.</p>
+
+<p>I told her I was, and then she came around to the kidnapping business
+again of her own accord.</p>
+
+<p>"You may give Mr. Norcross the hint I gave you, if you wish," she said;
+"only you must be a good boy, Jimmie, and not drag me into it. I
+couldn't be positively certain, you know, that the two men were really
+Mr. Hatch and Mr. Henckel. But if there is any reason why those two
+wouldn't want Mr. Chadwick to reach the city at the time he was counting
+on&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I see," I nodded; "it just puts the weight of the inference over on
+that side. I'll tell the boss, when I get a good chance, and you can bet
+your last dollar he won't tangle you up in it&mdash;he isn't put together
+that way."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, good-night," she smiled, giving me her hand. And then: "Mr.
+Norcross says you'll be going on East to-morrow, and in that case it may
+be a long time before we meet again. After a while, after he has
+forgotten all about it, you may tell him from me&mdash;" She stopped and gave
+me that funny little laugh again that made her look so pretty, and said:
+"No, I guess you needn't, either." And with that she sort of edged the
+little girl into the elevator before we could get a chance to shake
+hands, and I heard her tell the boy to take them up to the mezzanine
+landing.</p>
+
+<p>Since I didn't have any reason to suppose that the boss was needing me,
+I took my own time about going back to hunt for Mr. Chadwick's car in
+the railroad yards, loafing for a while in the Bullard lobby to rubber
+and look on at the people coming and going. You can tell pretty well how
+a town stacks up for business if you hit it between ten and eleven
+o'clock of a Sunday night and hang around its best hotel. If the town is
+dead, there won't be anybody stirring around the hotel at that hour. But
+Portal City seemed to be good and alive. There were lots of people
+knocking about on the sidewalks and drifting in and out of the lobby.</p>
+
+<p>By and by, I went down to the station and began to hunt for the <i>Alexa</i>.
+The yard crew had side-tracked it on a spur down by the freight-house,
+and when I had stumbled over to it the negro porter remembered me well
+enough to let me in.</p>
+
+<p>The boss and Mr. Chadwick were facing each other across the table, which
+was all littered up with papers and maps and reports, and they hardly
+noticed me when I blew in and sat down a little to one side. I had known
+well enough, when Mr. Norcross had turned the new offer down, that Mr.
+Chadwick wasn't going to let it go at that. It seemed that he hadn't; he
+had got the boss sufficiently interested to go over the papers with
+him, anyhow.</p>
+
+<p>But just after I broke in, Mr. Norcross jumped up and began to pace back
+and forth before the table, with his hands in his pockets.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't see it, Uncle John," he said, still sort of stubborn and
+determined. "You are trying to make me believe that I ought to take the
+biggest job that has ever been set before the expert in any field: to
+demonstrate, on this rotten corpse of a railroad, the solution of a
+problem that has the entire country guessing at the present time;
+namely, the winning of success, and public&mdash;and industrial&mdash;approval for
+a carrier corporation which had continuously and persistently broken
+every commandment in all the decalogues&mdash;of business; of fair-dealing
+with its employees; of common honesty with everybody."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Chadwick nodded. "That is about the size of it," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't say that it can't be done," the boss went on. "Perhaps it is
+possible, for the right man. But I'm not the right man. You need
+somebody who can combine the qualities of a pretty brutal slugger with
+those of a fine-haired, all-things-to-all-men, diplomatic peacemaker. I
+can do the slugging; I've proved it a time or two in the past. But I'm
+no good at the other end of the game. When it comes to handling the
+fellow with a 'pull,' I've either got to smash him or quit."</p>
+
+<p>At that Mr. Chadwick nodded again and said: "That is one of the reasons
+why I have reached out and picked you for the job. There will be a good
+bit of the slugging needed, at first, and I guess you can acquire the
+other things as you go along, can't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at this late day, I'm afraid. People who know me best call me a
+scrapper, and I've been living up to my reputation. Yesterday, when we
+were held up behind the freight wreck at Widner, I got off to see what
+we were in for. The conductor of our train had spotted me from seeing my
+pass, and I happened to hear him docketing me for the wrecking boss. He
+said I was known on the Midland as 'Hell-and-repeat' Norcross; that it
+was a habit with me to have a man for breakfast every morning."</p>
+
+<p>"I can add a little something to that," Mr. Chadwick put in,
+quizzically. "Lepaige, your Oregon Midland president, says you need
+humanizing, and wonders why you haven't married some good woman who
+would knock the rough corners off. Why haven't you, Graham?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss gave a short laugh. "Too busy," he said. "Past that, we might
+assume that the good woman hasn't presented herself. Let it go. The
+facts still stand. I am too heavy-handed for this job of yours. I
+should probably mix up with some of these grafters you've been telling
+me about and get a knife in my back. That would be all in the day's
+work, of course, but it would leave you right where you are now. And as
+for this other thing&mdash;the industrial side of it: that's a large order; a
+whaling big order. I'm not even prepared to say, off-hand, that it's the
+right thing to do."</p>
+
+<p>"Right or wrong, it's a thing that is coming, Graham," was the sober
+reply. "If we don't meet it half-way&mdash;well, the time will come when we
+of the hiring-and-firing side won't be given any option in the matter.
+You may call it Utopian if you please, and add that I'm growing old and
+losing my grip. But that doesn't obliterate the fact that the days of
+the present master-and-man relations in the industries are numbered."</p>
+
+<p>The boss shook his head. "As I say, I can't go that far with you,
+off-hand; and if I could, I should still doubt that I am the man to head
+your procession."</p>
+
+<p>I thought that settled it, but that was because I didn't know Mr.
+Chadwick very well. The big wheat king just smiled up at the boss, sort
+of fatherly, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"We'll let it rest until morning and give you a chance to sleep on it.
+You have spoken only of the difficulties and the responsibilities,
+Graham; but there is another side to it. In a way, it's an opportunity,
+carrying with it the promise of the biggest kind of a reward."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see it," said the boss, briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you? I do. I have an idea rambling around in my head that it is
+about time some bright young fellow was demonstrating that problem you
+speak of&mdash;showing the people of the United States that a railroad
+needn't be regarded as an outlaw among the industries; needn't have the
+enmity of everybody it serves; needn't be the prey of a lot of disloyal
+and dissatisfied employees who are interested only in the figure of the
+pay-day check; needn't be shot at as a wolf with a bounty on its scalp.
+Let it rest at that for the present. Get your hat and we'll walk up-town
+to the hotel. I want to have a word with Dunton to-night, if I can shake
+him loose from his junketing bunch long enough to listen to it. Beyond
+that, I want to get hold of the sheriff and put him on the track of
+those hold-ups."</p>
+
+<p>Here was a chance for me to butt in with the hint Mrs. Sheila had given
+me, but I didn't see how I was going to do it without giving her away.
+So I said the little end of nothing, just as hard as I could; and when
+we got out of the car, Mr. Norcross told me to go by the station and
+have our luggage sent to the hotel, and that killed whatever chance I
+might have had farther along.</p>
+
+<p>It was some time after eleven o'clock when I got around to the hotel
+with the traps. The stir in the lobby had quieted down to make it seem a
+little more like Sunday night, but an automobile party had just come in,
+and some of the men were jawing at the clerk because the house wasn't
+serving a midnight theater supper in the café on the Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Chadwick had disappeared, but I saw the boss at the counter waiting
+for his chance at the clerk. The quarrelsome people melted away at last,
+all but one&mdash;a young swell who would have been handsome if he hadn't had
+the eyes of a maniac and a color that was sort of corpse-like with the
+pallor of a booze-fighter. He had his hat on the back of his head, and
+he was ripping it off at the clerk like a drunken hobo.</p>
+
+<p>His ravings were so cluttered up with cuss-words that I couldn't get any
+more than the drift of them, but it seemed that he had caught a glimpse
+of somebody he knew&mdash;a woman, I took it, because he said "she"&mdash;looking
+down from the rail of the mezzanine, and he wanted to go up to her. And
+it appeared that the clerk had told the elevator man not to take him up
+in his present condition.</p>
+
+<p>The boss was growing sort of impatient; I could tell it by the way the
+little side muscles on his jaw were working. When he got the ear of the
+clerk for a second or so between cusses, he asked what was the matter
+with the lunatic. I caught only broken bits of the clerk's half-whisper:
+"Young Collingwood ... President Dunton's nephew ... saw lady ...
+mezzanine ... wants to go up to her."</p>
+
+<p>The boss scowled at the young fellow, who was now handing himself around
+the corner of the counter to get at the clerk again, and said: "Why
+don't you ring for an officer and have him run in?"</p>
+
+<p>The night clerk was evidently scared of his job. "I wouldn't dare to do
+that," he chittered. "He's one of the New York crowd&mdash;the railroad
+people&mdash;President Dunton's nephew&mdash;guest of the house."</p>
+
+<p>The young fellow had pulled himself around to our side of the counter by
+this time and was hooking his arm to make a pass at Mr. Norcross,
+trimming things up as he came with a lot more language. The boss said,
+right short and sharp, to the clerk, "Get his room key and give it to a
+boy who can show me the way," and the next thing we knew he had bashed
+that lunatic square in the face and was cuffing him along to the nearest
+elevator.</p>
+
+<p>I guess it sort of surprised the clerk, and everybody else who happened
+to see it&mdash;but not me. It was just like the boss. He came back in a few
+minutes, looking as cool as a cucumber.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do with him?" asked the clerk, kind of awed and half
+scared.</p>
+
+<p>"Got a couple of the corridor sweepers to put him in a bath and turn the
+cold water on him. That'll take the whiskey out of him. Now, if you have
+a minute to spare, I'd like to get my assignment."</p>
+
+<p>We hadn't more than got our rooms marked off for us when I saw Mr.
+Chadwick coming across from the farther of the three elevators. He was
+smiling sort of grim, as if he'd made a killing of some sort with Mr.
+Dunton, and instead of heading back for his car he took the boss over to
+a corner of the lobby and sat down to smoke with him.</p>
+
+<p>I circled around for a while, and after a bit Mr. Norcross held up a
+finger at me to bring him a match. They didn't seem to be talking
+anything private, so I sat down just beyond them, so sleepy that I could
+hardly see straight. Mr. Chadwick was telling about his early
+experiences in Portal City, how he blew in first on top of the
+Strathcona gold boom, and how he had known mighty near everybody in the
+region in those days.</p>
+
+<p>While he was talking, a taxi drove up and one of the old residenters
+came in from the street and crossed to the elevators; a mighty handsome,
+stately old gentleman, with fierce white mustaches and a goatee, and
+"Southern Colonel" written all over him.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one of them now; Major Basil Kendrick&mdash;Kentucky born and
+raised, as you might guess," Mr. Chadwick was saying. "Old-school
+Southern 'quality,' and as fine as they make 'em. He is a lawyer, but
+not in active practice: owns a mine or two in Strathcona Gulch, and is
+neither too rich nor too poor."</p>
+
+<p>I grabbed at the name, "Basil," right away: it isn't such a very common
+name, and Mrs. Sheila had said something&mdash;under the water tank, you
+recollect&mdash;about a "Cousin Basil" who was to have met her at the train.
+I was putting two or three little private guesses of my own together,
+when one of the elevators came down and here came our two, the young
+lady and the chunky little girl, with the major chuckling and smiling
+and giving an arm to each. They had apparently stopped at the Bullard
+only to wait until he could come after them and take them home. Mrs.
+Sheila was looking just as pretty as ever, only now there wasn't a bit
+of color in her face, and her eyes seemed a good deal brighter, some
+way.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, indeed; the major is all right; as you'd find out for yourself if
+you'd make up your mind to stay in Portal City and get acquainted with
+him," Mr. Chadwick was going on; and by that time the major and the two
+pretty ones had come on to where the boss and Mr. Chadwick could see
+them.</p>
+
+<p>I saw the boss sit up in his chair and stare at them. Then he said:
+"That's Mrs. Macrae with him now. Is she a member of his family?"</p>
+
+<p>"A second cousin, or something of that sort," said Mr. Chadwick. "I met
+her once at the major's house out in the northern suburb last summer,
+and that's how I came to know her when you put her aboard of the <i>Alexa</i>
+back yonder in the gulch."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross let the three of them get out and away, and we heard their
+taxi speed up and trundle off before he said, "She is married, I'm told.
+Where is her husband?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Chadwick looked up as if he'd already forgotten the three who had
+just crossed the lobby.</p>
+
+<p>"Who&mdash;Sheila Macrae? Yes, she has been married. But there isn't any
+husband&mdash;she's a widow."</p>
+
+<p>For quite a while the boss sat staring at his cigar in a way he has when
+he is thinking right hard, and Mr. Chadwick let him alone, being busy, I
+guess, with his own little scrap that lay just ahead of him in the
+coming directors' meeting. Then, all of a sudden, the boss got up and
+shoved his hands into his coat pockets.</p>
+
+<p>"I've changed my mind, Uncle John," he said, looking sort of absent-like
+out of the window to where the major's taxi had been standing. "If you
+can pull me into that deal to-morrow morning&mdash;with an absolutely free
+hand to do as I think best, mind you&mdash;I'll take the job."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>The Directors' Meeting</h3>
+
+
+<p>I was up bright and early the next morning&mdash;that is, a good bit brighter
+and earlier than Mr. Norcross was&mdash;and after breakfast I took a little
+sashay down Nevada Avenue to have a look at <i>our</i> railroad. Of course, I
+knew, after what the boss had said to Mr. Chadwick the night before,
+just before we went to bed, that we weren't ever going to see Canada, or
+even Illinois.</p>
+
+<p>I'll have to admit that the look I got didn't make me feel as if we'd
+found a Cullinan diamond. Down in the yards everything seemed to be at
+the loosest kind of loose ends. A switching crew was making up a
+freight, and the way they slammed the boxes together, regardless of
+broken drawheads and the like, was a sin and a shame. Then I saw some
+grain cars with the ends started and the wheat running out all along the
+track, and three or four more with the air hose hanging so it knocked
+along on the ties, and a lot of things like that&mdash;and nobody caring a
+hoot.</p>
+
+<p>There was a big repair shop on the other side of the yard tracks, and
+though it was after seven o'clock, the men were still straggling over to
+go to work. Down at the round-house, a wiper was spotting a big
+freight-puller on the turn-table, and I'm blessed if he didn't actually
+run her forward pair of truck-wheels off the edge of the table, right
+while I was looking on, just as if it were all in the day's work.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of time I drifted back to the office headquarters, which
+were at the end of the passenger station and in a part of the same
+building, down-stairs and up. A few clerks were dribbling in, and none
+of them seemed to have life enough to get out of the way of an ox-team.
+One fellow recognized me for a member of the big railroad family, I
+guess, for he stopped and asked me if I was looking for a job.</p>
+
+<p>I told him I wasn't, and gave him a cigar&mdash;just on general principles.
+He took it, and right away he began to loosen up.</p>
+
+<p>"If you should change your mind about the job, you just make it a case
+of 'move on, Joey,' and don't stay here and try to hit this
+agglomeration," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a frost. I'm off of the Pennsy myself, and I'm ashamed to look in
+the looking-glass since I came out here. The P. S. L. isn't a railroad,
+at all; it's just making a bluff at being one. Besides, we're slated to
+have a new general manager, and if he's any good he'll fire the last
+living man of us."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe, if I change my mind, I might get a job with the new man," I
+said. "Who is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Search me! I don't believe they've found anybody yet. The big people
+from New York are all here now, and maybe they'll pick somebody before
+they go away. If I had the nerve of a rabbit, I'd take the next train
+back for Pittsburgh."</p>
+
+<p>"What's your job?" I quizzed.</p>
+
+<p>He grinned at me sort of good-naturedly. "You wouldn't think it to look
+at me, but I'm head stenographer in the general super's office."</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got much of a boss, if he can't command any more loyalty
+than you are giving him," I offered; and at that he spat on the platform
+and made a face like a kid that had been taking a dose of asaf[oe]tida.</p>
+
+<p>"Yah!" he snorted. "We haven't a man in the outfit, on any job where the
+pay amounts to anything, that isn't somebody's cousin or nephew or
+brother-in-law or something. They shoot 'em out here from New York in
+bunches. You may be a spotter, for all I know, but I don't care a hang.
+I'm quitting at the end of the month, anyhow&mdash;if I don't get fired this
+side of that."</p>
+
+<p>I grinned; I couldn't help it.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," I broke in, "are there many more like you in the Pioneer
+Short Line service?"</p>
+
+<p>"Scads of 'em," he retorted cheerfully. "I can round you up a couple of
+dozen fellows right here at headquarters who would go on a bat and paint
+this town a bright vermilion if the new G. M., whoever he is going to
+be, would clean out the whole rookery, cousins, nephews, and all."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll have to take your name," I told him, fishing out a pencil
+and a notebook&mdash;just to see what he would do.</p>
+
+<p>"Huh! so you <i>are</i> a spotter, after all, are you? All right, Mr.
+Spotter. My name's May, Frederic G. May. And when you want my head, you
+can find it just exactly where I told you&mdash;in the general super's
+office. You're a stranger and you took me in. So long."</p>
+
+<p>Wouldn't that jar you? A man out of the general offices talking that way
+about his road and his own boss? I couldn't help seeing how rotten the
+thing must be if it smelled that way to the men on its own pay-rolls.</p>
+
+<p>After a while, after I'd loafed through the shops and around the yard
+and got a few more whiffs of the decay, I strolled on back to the hotel.
+Seen by daylight, Portal City seemed to be a right bright little burg,
+with a cut-stone post-office and a new court house built out of pink
+lava, and three or four office buildings big enough to be called
+sky-scrapers anywhere outside of a real city like Portland or Seattle.
+The streets were paved, and on the main one, Nevada Avenue, there was
+plenty of business. Also, I tipped off a mining exchange and two pretty
+nice-looking club-houses right in sight from the Bullard entrance.</p>
+
+<p>There wasn't much of a crowd in the lobby, and as I didn't see anything
+of Mr. Norcross or Mr. Chadwick, I sat down in a corner to wear out some
+more time. Though it was now after nine o'clock, there were still a good
+many people breakfasting in the café, the entrance to which was only a
+few feet away from my corner.</p>
+
+<p>I was wondering a little what had become of the boss&mdash;who was generally
+the earliest riser on the job&mdash;when two men came bulging through the
+screen doors of the café, picking their teeth and feeling in their
+pockets for cigars. Right on the dot, and in the face of knowing that it
+couldn't reasonably be so, I had a feeling that I'd seen those men
+before. One of them was short and rather stocky, and his face had a sort
+of hard, hungry look; and the other was big and barrel-bodied. The short
+one was clean-shaven, but the other had a reddish-gray beard clipped
+close on his fat jaws and trimmed to a point at the chin.</p>
+
+<p>After they had lighted up they came along and sat down three or four
+chairs away from me. They paid no attention to me, but for fear they
+might, I tried to look as sleepy as an all-night bell-hop in a busy
+hotel.</p>
+
+<p>"The Dunton bunch got together in one of the committee rooms up-stairs a
+little after eight o'clock," said the short man, in a low, rasping voice
+that went through you like a buzz-saw, and it was evident that he was
+merely going on with a talk which had been begun over the
+breakfast-table. "Thanks to those infernal blunderers Clanahan sent us
+last night, Chadwick was with them."</p>
+
+<p>"I think that was choost so," said the big man, speaking slowly and with
+something more than a hint of a German accent. "Beckler was choost what
+you call him&mdash;a tam blunderer."</p>
+
+<p>Like a flash it came over me that I was "listening in" to a talk between
+the same two men who had sat in the auto at Sand Creek Siding and smoked
+while they were waiting for the actual kidnappers to return. You can bet
+high that I made myself mighty small and unobtrusive.</p>
+
+<p>After a while the big man spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"What has Uncle Chon Chadwick up his sleeve got, do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think&mdash;I know!" was the snappy reply. "It's one of two things:
+a receivership&mdash;which will knock us into a cocked hat because we can't
+fool with an officer of the United States court&mdash;or a new deal all
+around in the management."</p>
+
+<p>"Vich of the two will it be that will come out of that commiddee room
+up-stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>"A new management. Dunton can't stand for a receivership, and Chadwick
+knows it. Apart from the fact that a court officer would turn up a lot
+of side deals that wouldn't look well for the New York crowd if they got
+into the newspapers, the securities would be knocked out and the
+majority holders&mdash;Dunton and his bunch&mdash;couldn't unload. Chadwick has
+got him by the neck and can dictate his own terms."</p>
+
+<p>"Vich will be?"</p>
+
+<p>"That he will name the man who is to take Shaffer's place as general
+manager of the railroad outfit. We might have stood it off for a while,
+just as I said yesterday, if we could have kept Chadwick from attending
+this meeting."</p>
+
+<p>"But now we don't could stand it off&mdash;what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll have to wait and see, and size up the new man when he blows in.
+He'll be only human, Henckel. And if we get right down to it we can pull
+him over to our side&mdash;or make him wish he'd never been born."</p>
+
+<p>The big man got up ponderously and brushed the cigar ashes off of his
+bay-window. "You vait and see what comes mit the commiddee-room out. I
+go up to the ovvice."</p>
+
+<p>When I was left alone in the row of lobby chairs with the snappy one I
+was scared stiff for fear, now that he didn't have anything else to
+think of, he'd catch on to the fact that I might have overheard. But
+apart from giving me one long stare that made my blood run cold, he
+didn't seem to notice me much, and after a little he got up and went to
+sit on the other side of the big rotunda where he could watch the
+elevators going and coming.</p>
+
+<p>I guess he had lots of patience, for I had to have. It was after eleven
+o'clock, and I had been sitting in my corner for two full hours, when I
+saw the boss coming down the broad marble stair with Mr. Chadwick. I
+don't think the Hatch man saw them, or, if he did, he didn't let on.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross held up a finger for me, and when I jumped up he gave me a
+sheet of paper; a Pioneer Short Line president's letter-head with a few
+lines written on it with a pen and a sort of crazy-looking signature
+under them.</p>
+
+<p>"Take that to the <i>Mountaineer</i> job office and have five hundred of them
+printed," was the boss's order. "Tell the foreman it's a rush job and we
+want it to-day. Then make a copy and take it to Mr. Cantrell, the
+editor, and ask him to run it in to-morrow's paper as an item of news,
+if he feels like it. When you are through, come down to Mr. Chadwick's
+car."</p>
+
+<p>Since the thing was going to be published, and I was going to make a
+copy of it, I didn't scruple to read it as I hurried out to begin a hunt
+for the <i>Mountaineer</i> office. It was the printer's copy for an official
+circular, dated at Portal City and addressed to all officers and
+employees of the Pioneer Short Line. It read:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Effective at once, Mr. Graham Norcross is appointed General
+Manager of the Pioneer Short Line System, with headquarters at
+Portal City, and his orders will be respected accordingly.</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Breckenridge Dunton</span>,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+"<i>President</i>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>We had got our jolt, all right; and leaving the ladder and the Friday
+start out of the question, I grinned and told myself that the one other
+thing that counted for most was the fact that Mrs. Sheila Macrae was a
+widow.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>The <i>Alexa</i> Goes East</h3>
+
+
+<p>I chased like the dickens on the printing job, because, apart from
+wanting to absorb all the dope I could as I went along on the new job, I
+knew I would be needed every minute right at Mr. Norcross's elbow, now
+that the actual work was beginning.</p>
+
+<p>He and Mr. Chadwick were deep in reports and figures and plans of all
+sorts when I got back to the <i>Alexa</i>. Luncheon was served in the car,
+and they kept the business talk going like a house afire while they were
+eating, the hurry being that Mr. Chadwick wanted to start back for
+Chicago the minute he could find out if our connecting line east would
+run him special.</p>
+
+<p>I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was
+soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could
+go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a
+gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock
+a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the
+private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick
+were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.</p>
+
+<p>"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he
+said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand,
+not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the
+policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has
+promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."</p>
+
+<p>"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the
+first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors'
+meeting in the Bullard.</p>
+
+<p>"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick
+and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had
+to swallow you whole or take the consequences&mdash;and the consequences were
+going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled
+the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have
+some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time
+notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."</p>
+
+<p>The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when
+he has got hold of the gist of a thing.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that
+the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and
+relatives. I'll have to clean house."</p>
+
+<p>"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to
+draw from?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully.
+"There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college,
+and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store
+his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies&mdash;I'll try
+it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around
+traffic man this side of the Missouri&mdash;only his present employers don't
+seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place
+at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good
+lawyer, Uncle John."</p>
+
+<p>"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young
+fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in
+Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local
+graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it,
+but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called
+Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its
+subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries,
+the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber
+yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the
+railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."</p>
+
+<p>A road engine was backing down the spur to take the <i>Alexa</i> in tow for
+the eastward run, and what was said had to be said in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>"Dig it out," barked the wheat king. "If you find that we are in on it,
+it's your privilege to cut loose. The two men who will give you the most
+trouble are right here in Portal City: Hatch, the president of Red
+Tower, and Henckel, its vice-president. They say either of them would
+commit murder for a ten-dollar bill, and they stand in with Pete
+Clanahan, the city boss, and his gang of political thugs. That's all,
+Graham; all but one thing. Write me after you've climbed into the saddle
+and have found out just what you're in for. If you say you can make it
+go, I'll back you, if it takes half of next year's wheat crop."</p>
+
+<p>A minute or so later the boss and I stood out in the yard and watched
+the <i>Alexa</i> roll away toward the sunrise country, and perhaps we both
+felt a little bit lonesome, just for a second or two. At least, I know I
+did. But when the special had become a black smudge of coal smoke in the
+distance, Mr. Norcross turned on me with the grim little smile that
+goes with his fighting mood.</p>
+
+<p>"You are private secretary to the new general manager of the Pioneer
+Short Line, Jimmie, and your salary begins to-day," he said, briskly.
+"Now let's go up to the hotel and get our fighting clothes on."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>"Heads Off, Gentlemen!"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Gosh all Friday&mdash;say! but the next few days did see a tear-up to beat
+the band on the old Short Line! With the printing of his appointment
+circular, Mr. Norcross took the offices in the headquarters building
+lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way
+the heads went into the basket. One by one he called the Duntonites in;
+the traffic manager, the general superintendent, the roadmaster, the
+master-mechanic&mdash;clear on down to the round-house foreman and the
+division heads.</p>
+
+<p>Some few of them were allowed to take the oath of allegiance and stay,
+but the place-fillers and pay-roll parasites, the cousins and the
+nephews and the brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk
+under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van
+Burgh, great-great-grandnephew of some Revolutionary big-wig and our
+figurehead general superintendent, was the first man called in, and Mr.
+Norcross shot him dead in half a minute.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Van Burgh, what railroad experience did you have before you came to
+the P. S. L.?" was the first bullet.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired
+eyes, looked at his finger-nails.</p>
+
+<p>"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left
+Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.</p>
+
+<p>"And how long have you been here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I came out lawst October."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't
+learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the
+Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be
+accepted. Good-day."</p>
+
+<p>Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.</p>
+
+<p>"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was
+appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his
+desk. And that was all there was to it.</p>
+
+<p>Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack,
+the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery
+man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr.
+Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.</p>
+
+<p>"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the
+house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four
+of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a
+lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't
+all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which
+to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."</p>
+
+<p>"That's me," said Kirgan, who knew the boss up one side and down the
+other. "You give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And
+with that he went across the yard and took hold, before he had even
+hunted up a place to sleep in.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt was the next man to show up. He was fine; a square-built,
+stocky little gentleman who looked as if he's always had the world by
+the ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men
+went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped,
+and while his jaw looked as if he could bite a nail in two, he had a
+pair of twinkling, good-natured eyes that sort of took the edge off the
+hard jaw.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm here," he said, dropping into a chair and sitting with his
+legs wide apart. And then, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there:
+"Graham, what the devil have you got against me, that you should drag me
+out here on the edge of nowhere and make me go to work for a living?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss just grinned at him and said: "It's for the good of your soul,
+Upton. You've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the
+corridor and your chair is empty and waiting for you. Your appointment
+circular has already been mailed out."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hornack was the last of the new office staff to fall in, though he
+didn't have nearly as far to come as some of the others. He was
+red-headed and wore glasses. They used to say of him on the Overland
+Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then
+hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that
+he had a sort of meat-axe temper to go with his red hair. But they also
+used to say that he could make business grow where none ever grew
+before, and that's what a traffic man lives for.</p>
+
+<p>When the new staff was made up, Mr. Norcross gathered all the department
+heads together in his office and laid down the lines of the new policy.
+He put it in just eight words: "Clean house, and make friends for the
+company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had
+found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed.
+It was a large order, and both Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack said as
+much, but the boss said it had to go just that way. There would be a
+little money for betterments, but it must be spent as if every dollar
+were ten.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, the big turn-over brought all sorts of disturbances at the
+send-off. Some of the relieved cousins and nephews stayed in town and
+jumped in to stir up trouble for the new management. The <i>Herald</i>, which
+was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there
+wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new
+appointees. Then the employees got busy and the grievance committees
+began to pour in. Mr. Norcross never denied himself to anybody. The
+office-door stood wide open and the kickers were welcomed, as you might
+say, with open arms.</p>
+
+<p>"You men are going to get the squarest deal you have ever had, and a
+still squarer one a little farther along, if you will only stay on the
+job and keep your clothes on," was the way the boss went at the
+trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for
+service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri
+River. I want your loyalty; the loyalty of every man in the service.
+I'll go further and say that the new management will stand if you and
+the other pay-roll men stand by it in good faith, or it will fall if you
+don't."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll meet the grievance committees and talk things over with them
+when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McClure, the passenger
+conductor who was acting as spokesman.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I will&mdash;every time. More than that, I'll take a leaf out of
+Colonel Goethal's book and keep open house here in this office every
+Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thinks he has a grievance may
+come here and state it, and if he has a case, he'll get justice."</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, a few little talks like this, face to face with the men
+themselves, soon began to put new life into the rank and file. Mr.
+Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from
+Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it began to be used in the sense
+that most railroad men use the phrase, "The Old Man," in speaking of a
+big boss that they like.</p>
+
+<p>This winning of the service <i>esprit de corps</i>&mdash;if that's the
+word&mdash;commenced to show results right away. The first time Mr.
+Norcross's special went over the line anybody could see with half an eye
+that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better
+time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place we
+actually found a section foreman going along and picking up the spikes
+and bolts and fish-plates that the wasters ahead of him had strewn all
+along the right-of-way.</p>
+
+<p>There was so much crowded into these first few weeks that I've forgotten
+half of it. The work we did, pulling and hauling things into shape, was
+a fright, and my end of the job got so big that the boss had to give me
+help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd
+had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who
+had been so disgusted with his job under Van Burgh. Frederic of
+Pittsburgh was all right; a little too tonguey, perhaps, but a worker
+from away back, and that was what we were looking for.</p>
+
+<p>Out of this frantic hustle to get things started and moving right,
+anybody could have pulled a couple of conclusions that stuck up higher
+than any of the rest. The boss and Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning
+the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on
+the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were paying the
+freight a solid unit against us, hating us like blazes and entirely
+unwilling to believe that any good thing could come out of the Nazareth
+of the Pioneer Short Line.</p>
+
+<p>This hatred manifested itself in a million different ways, and all of
+them saw-toothed. On that first trip over the line I heard a Lesterburg
+banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would never
+believe that any measure of reform undertaken by the Dunton management
+would be accepted as sincere.</p>
+
+<p>"You talk like an honest man, Mr. Norcross," he said, and he was saying
+it right in the boss's own private car, too, mind you, "but this region
+has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be
+won over now by a little shoulder-patting in the way of better train
+schedules and things of that sort. You'll have to dig a good bit deeper,
+and that you won't be allowed to do."</p>
+
+<p>The boss just smiled at this, and offered the banker man a cigar&mdash;which
+he took.</p>
+
+<p>"When the time comes, Mr. Bigelow, I'm going to show you that I can dig
+as deep as the next fellow. Where shall I begin?"</p>
+
+<p>The banker laughed. "If you had a spade with a handle a mile long you
+might begin on the Red Tower people," he suggested. "But, of course, you
+can't do that: your New York people won't let you. There is the real nib
+of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will
+stick to its own proper business&mdash;the carrying of freight and
+passengers. What we have is a gigantic holding corporation which fathers
+every extortionate side-issue that can pay it a royalty!"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," said the boss, still as pleasant as a basket of chips,
+"that may be what you have had in the past; we won't try to go behind
+the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on, the
+Short Line proposes to be just what you said it should be&mdash;a carrier
+corporation, pure and simple."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to say that you are going to cut loose from Hatch and
+Henckel and their thousand-and-one robber subsidiary companies?"
+demanded the banker.</p>
+
+<p>At this the boss stood up and looked the big banker gentleman squarely
+in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Bigelow, at the present moment I represent Pioneer Short Line, in
+management and in its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you
+emphatically that the railroad management has nothing whatever to do
+with Red Tower Consolidated or any of its subsidiaries."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you've broken with Hatch?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; simply because there hasn't been anything to break, so far as I am
+concerned."</p>
+
+<p>The banker man dropped into the nearest chair.</p>
+
+<p>"But, man alive! you can't stay here if you don't pull with the Hatch
+crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipped you off
+beforehand and not let you come here to commit suicide!"</p>
+
+<p>After that they went out together; up-town to Mr. Bigelow's bank, I
+guess, and as they pushed the corridor door open I heard the banker
+say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit
+will get you, one way or another, as sure as the devil's a hog. If it
+can't break you, it will hire a gang of gunmen&mdash;I wouldn't put it an
+inch beyond Rufus Hatch; not a single inch."</p>
+
+<p>There it was again; but as he went out the boss was laughing easily and
+saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the fear of a fight
+was the least of his troubles at the present moment.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>With the Strings Off</h3>
+
+
+<p>As soon as we returned from the inspection trip, the boss pulled off his
+coat&mdash;figuratively speaking&mdash;and rolled up his sleeves. It wasn't his
+way to talk much about what he was going to do: he'd jump in and do it
+first, and then talk about it afterward&mdash;if anybody insisted on knowing
+the reason why.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt was given swift orders to fill up his engineering staff
+and get busy laying new steel, building new bridges and modernizing the
+permanent way generally. Mr. Hornack was told to put on an extra office
+force to ransack the traffic records and make reports showing the
+fairness or unfairness of existing tariffs and rates, and a widespread
+invitation was given to shippers to come in and air their
+grievances&mdash;which you bet they did!</p>
+
+<p>Sandwiched in between, there were long private conferences with Mr.
+Ripley, the bright young lawyer Mr. Chadwick had sent us from Chicago,
+and with a young fellow named Juneman, an ex-newspaper man who was on
+the pay-rolls as "Advertising Manager," but whose real business seemed
+to be to keep the Short Line public fully and accurately informed of
+everything that most railroad companies try to keep to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The next innovation that came along was another young Chicago man named
+Billoughby, and <i>his</i> title on the pay-roll was "Special Agent." What he
+did to earn his salary was the one thing that Juneman didn't publish
+broadcast in the newspapers; it was kept so dark that not a line of it
+got into the office records, and even I, who was as close to the boss as
+anybody in our outfit, never once suspected the true nature of
+Billoughby's job until the day he came in to make his final report&mdash;and
+Mr. Norcross let him make it without sending me out on an errand.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think I'm ready to talk Johnson, now," was the way Billoughby
+began. "I've been into all the deals and side deals, and I've had it out
+with Ripley on the legal points involved. Red Tower is the one outfit
+we'll have to kill off and put out of business. Under one name or
+another, it is engineering every graft in this country; it is even
+backing the fake mining boom at Saw Horse&mdash;to which, by the way, this
+railroad company is now building a branch line."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross turned to me:</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, make a note to tell Mr. Van Britt to have the work stopped at
+once on the Saw Horse branch, and all the equipment brought in." And
+then to Billoughby: "Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"The main graft, of course, is in the grain elevators, the fruit
+packeries, the coal and lumber yards and the stock yards and handling
+corrals. In these public, or <i>quasi</i>-public, utilities Red Tower has
+everybody else shut out, because the railroad has given them&mdash;in fee
+simple, it seems&mdash;all the yard room, switches, track facilities, and the
+like. Wherever local competition has tried to break in, the railroad
+company has given it the cold shoulder and it has been either forced out
+or frozen out."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly," said the boss. "Now tell me how far you have gone in the
+other field."</p>
+
+<p>"We are pretty well shaped up and are about ready to begin business.
+Juneman has done splendid work, and so has Ripley. Public sentiment is
+still incredulous, of course. It's mighty hard to make people believe
+that we are in earnest; that we have actually gone over to their side in
+the fight. They're all from Missouri, and they want to be shown."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," said Mr. Norcross.</p>
+
+<p>"We have succeeded, in a measure, though the opposition has been keeping
+up a steady bombardment. Hatch and his people haven't been idle. They
+have a strong commercial organization and a stout pull with the machine
+element, or rather the gang element, in politics. They own or control a
+dozen or more prominent newspapers in the State, and, as you know, they
+are making an open fight on you and your management through these
+papers. The net result so far has been merely to keep the people stirred
+up and doubtful. They know they can't trust Hatch and his crowd, and
+they're afraid they can't trust you. They say that the railroad has
+never played fair&mdash;and I guess it hasn't, in the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Not within a thousand miles," was the boss's curt comment. "But go on
+with your story."</p>
+
+<p>"We pulled the new deal off yesterday, simultaneously in eleven of the
+principal towns along the line. Meetings of the bankers and local
+capitalists were held, and we had a man at each one of them to explain
+our plan and to pledge the backing of the railroad. Notwithstanding all
+the doubt and dust that's been kicked up by the Hatch people, it went
+like wild-fire."</p>
+
+<p>"With money?" queried the boss.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; with real money. Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse was launched, as
+you might say, on the spot, and enough capital was subscribed to make it
+a going concern. Of course, there were some doubters, and some few
+greedy ones. The doubters wanted to know how much of the stock was going
+to be held by officials of the railroad company, and it was pretty hard
+to convince them that no Short Line official would be allowed to
+participate, directly or indirectly."</p>
+
+<p>"And the greedy ones?"</p>
+
+<p>"They kicked on that part of the plan which provides for the local
+apportionment of the stock to cover the local needs of each town only;
+they wanted more than their share. Also, they protested against the
+fixed dividend scheme; they didn't see why the new company shouldn't be
+allowed to cut a melon now and then if it should be fortunate enough to
+grow one."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross smiled. "That is precisely what the Hatch people have been
+doing, all along, and it is the chief grievance of these same people who
+now want a chance to outbid their neighbors. The lease condition was
+fully explained to them, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; Ripley saw to that, and copies of the lease were in the
+exhibits. The new company is to have railroad ground to build on, and
+ample track facilities in perpetuity, conditioned strictly upon the
+limited dividend. If the dividend is increased, the leases terminate
+automatically."</p>
+
+<p>The boss drew a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>"You've done well, and better than well, Billoughby," he said. "Now we
+are ready to fire the blast. How was the proposal to take over the Red
+Tower properties at a fair valuation received?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was some opposition. Lesterburg, and three of the other larger
+towns, want to build their own plants. They are bitter enough to want to
+smash the big monopoly, root and branch. But they agreed to abide by a
+majority vote of the stock on that point, and my wire reports this
+morning say that a lump-sum offer will be made for the Red Tower plants
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross sat back in his chair and blew a cloud of cigar smoke
+toward the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Hatch won't sell," he predicted. "He'll be up here before night with
+blood in his eye. I'm rather glad it has come down to the actual give
+and take. I don't play the waiting game very successfully, Billoughby.
+Keep in touch, and keep me in touch. And tell Ripley to keep on pushing
+on the reins. The sooner we get at it, the sooner it will be over."</p>
+
+<p>After Billoughby had gone, Mr. Norcross dictated a swift bunch of
+letters and telegrams and had me turn my shorthand notes over to Fred
+May for transcription. With the desk cleaned up he came at me on a
+little matter that had been allowed to sleep ever since the day, now
+some time back, when I had given him Mrs. Sheila's hint about the
+identity of the two men who had sat and smoked in the auto that Sunday
+night at Sand Creek Siding, and about the talk between the same two that
+I had overheard the following morning.</p>
+
+<p>"We are going to have sharp trouble with a gentleman by the name of
+Hatch before very long, Jimmie," was the way he began. "I don't want to
+hit him below the belt, if I can help it; but on the other hand, it's
+just as well to be able to give the punch if it is needed. You remember
+what you told me about that Monday morning talk between Hatch and
+Henckel in the Bullard lobby. Would you be willing to go into court as a
+witness and swear to what you heard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I would," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"All right. I may have to pull that little incident on Mr. Hatch before
+I get through with him. The train hold-up was a criminal act, and you
+are the witness who can convict the pair of them. Of course, we'll leave
+Mrs. Macrae and the little girl entirely out of it. Nobody knows that
+they were there with us, and nobody need know."</p>
+
+<p>I agreed to that, and this mention of Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann makes
+me remember that I've been leaving them out pretty severely for a good
+long while. They weren't left out in reality-not by a jugful. In spite
+of all the rush and hustle, the boss had found time to get acquainted
+with Major Basil Kendrick and had been made at home in the transplanted
+Kentucky mansion in the northern suburb. I'd been there too, sometimes
+to carry a box of flowers when the boss was suddenly called out of
+town, and some other evenings when I had to go and hunt him up to give
+him a bunch of telegrams. Of course, I didn't play the butt-in; I didn't
+have to. Maisie Ann usually looked out for me, and when she found out
+that I liked pumpkin pie, made Kentucky fashion, we used to spend most
+of those errand-running evenings together in the pantry.</p>
+
+<p>But to get back on the firing line. I wasn't around when Mr. Norcross
+had his "declaration of war" talk with Hatch. Mr. Norcross, being pretty
+sure he wasn't going to have that evening off, had sent me out to
+"Kenwood" with a note and a box of roses, and when I got back to the
+office about eight o'clock, Hatch was just going away. I met him on the
+stair.</p>
+
+<p>The boss was sitting back in his big swing chair, smoking, when I broke
+in. He looked as if he'd been mixing it up good and plenty with Mr.
+Rufus Hatch&mdash;and enjoying it.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got 'em going, Jimmie," he chuckled; and he said it without
+asking me how I had found Mrs. Sheila, or how she was looking, or
+anything.</p>
+
+<p>I told him I had met Mr. Hatch on the stair going down.</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a word."</p>
+
+<p>"I had to pull that Sand Creek business on him, and I'm rather sorry,"
+he went on. "He and his people are going to fight the new company to a
+finish, and he merely came up here to tell me so&mdash;and to add that I
+might as well resign first as last, because, in the end, he'd get my
+goat. When I laughed at him he got abusive. He's an ugly beggar,
+Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what everybody says of him."</p>
+
+<p>"It's true. He and his crowd have plenty of money&mdash;stolen money, a good
+deal of it&mdash;and they stand in with every political boss and gangster in
+the State. There is only one way to handle such a man, and that is
+without gloves. I told him we had the goods on him in the matter of Mr.
+Chadwick's kidnapping adventure. At first he said I couldn't prove it.
+Then he broke out cursing and let your name slip. I hadn't mentioned you
+at all, and so he gave himself away. He knows who you are, and he
+remembered that you had overheard his talk with Henckel in the Bullard
+lobby."</p>
+
+<p>I heard what he was saying, but I didn't really sense it because my head
+was ram jam full of a thing that was so pitiful that it had kept me
+swallowing hard all the way back from Major Kendrick's. It was this way.
+When I had jiggled the bell out at the house it was Maisie Ann who let
+me in and took the box of flowers and the boss's note. She told me that
+Aunt Mandy, the cook, hadn't made any pie that day, so we sat in the
+dimly lighted hall and talked for a few minutes.</p>
+
+<p>One thing she told me was that Mrs. Sheila had company and the name of
+it was Mr. Van Britt. That wasn't strictly news because I had known that
+Mr. Van Britt was dividing time pretty evenly with the boss in the Major
+Kendrick house visits. That wasn't anything to be scared up about. I
+knew that all Mr. Norcross asked, or would need, would be a fair field
+and no favor. But my chunky little girl didn't stop at that.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we can let Mr. Van Britt take care of himself," she said. "He
+has known Cousin Sheila for a long time, and I guess they are only just
+good friends. But there is something you ought to know, Jimmie&mdash;for Mr.
+Norcross's sake. He has been sending lots of flowers and things, and
+Cousin Sheila has been taking them because&mdash;well, I guess it's just
+because she doesn't know how not to take them."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," I said, but my mouth had suddenly grown dry.</p>
+
+<p>"Such things&mdash;flowers, you know&mdash;don't mean anything in New York, where
+we've been living. Men send them to their women friends just as they
+pass their cigar-cases around among their men friends. But I'm afraid
+it's different with Mr. Norcross."</p>
+
+<p>"It is different," I said.</p>
+
+<p>Then she told me the thing that made me swell up and want to burst.</p>
+
+<p>"It mustn't be different, Jimmie. Cousin Sheila's married, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"I know she has been married," I corrected; and then she gave me the
+sure-enough knock-out.</p>
+
+<p>"She is married now, and her husband is still living."</p>
+
+<p>For a little while I couldn't do anything but gape like a chicken with
+the pip. It was simply fierce! I knew, as well as I knew anything, that
+the boss was gone on Mrs. Sheila; that he had fallen in love, first with
+the back of her neck and then with her pretty face and then with all of
+her; and that the one big reason why he had let Mr. Chadwick persuade
+him to stay in Portal City was the fact that he had wanted to be near
+her and to show her how he could make a perfectly good spoon out of the
+spoiled horn of the Pioneer Short Line.</p>
+
+<p>When I began to get my grip back a little I was right warm under the
+collar.</p>
+
+<p>"She oughtn't to be going around telling people she is a widow!" I
+blurted out.</p>
+
+<p>"She doesn't," was the calm reply. "People just take it for granted, and
+it saves a lot of talk and explanations that it wouldn't be pleasant to
+have to make. They've separated, you know&mdash;years ago, and Cousin Sheila
+has taken her mother's maiden name, Macrae. If we were going to live
+here always it would be different. But we are only visiting Cousin
+Basil, or I suppose we are, though we've been here now for nearly a
+year."</p>
+
+<p>There wasn't much more to be said, and pretty soon I had staggered off
+with my load and gone back to the office. And this was why I couldn't
+get very deep into the Hatch business with Mr. Norcross when he told me
+what he had been obliged to do about the Sand Creek hold-up.</p>
+
+<p>He didn't say anything further about it, except to tell me to be careful
+and not let any of the Hatch people tangle me up so that my evidence, if
+I should have to give it, would be made to look like a faked-up story;
+and a little before nine o'clock Mr. Ripley dropped in and he and the
+boss went up-town together.</p>
+
+<p>I might have gone, too. Fred May had got through and gone home, and
+there was nothing much that I could do beyond filing a few letters and
+tidying up a bit around my own desk. But I couldn't make up my mind
+either to work or to go to bed. I wanted a chance to think over the
+horrible thing Maisie Ann had told me; time to cook up some scheme by
+which the boss could be let down easy.</p>
+
+<p>If he had been like other men it wouldn't have been so hard. But I had a
+feeling that he had gone into this love business just as he did into
+everything&mdash;neck or nothing&mdash;burning his bridges behind him, and having
+no notion of ever turning back. I had once heard our Oregon Midland
+president, Mr. Lepaige, say that it was not good for a man always to
+succeed; never to be beaten; that without a setback, now and then, a man
+never learned how to bend without breaking. The boss had never been
+beaten, and Mr. Lepaige was talking about him when he said this. What
+was it going to do to him when he learned the truth about Mrs. Sheila?</p>
+
+<p>On top of this came the still harder knock when I saw that it was up to
+me to tell him. I remembered all the stories I'd ever heard about how
+the most cold-blooded surgeon that ever lived wouldn't trust himself to
+stick a knife into a member of his own family, and I knew now just how
+the surgeon felt about it. It was up to me to whet my old Barlow and
+stick it into the boss, clear up to the handle.</p>
+
+<p>While I was still sweating under the big load Maisie Ann had dumped upon
+me, the night despatcher's boy came in with a message. It was from Mr.
+Chadwick, and I read it with my eyes bugging out. This is what it said:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To <span class="smcap">G. Norcross</span>, G. M.,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>"P. S. L. Common dropped to thirty-four to-day, and banks lending
+on short time notes for betterment fund are getting nervous. Wire
+from New York says bondholders are stirring and talking
+receivership. General opinion in financial circles leans to idea
+that new policy is foregone failure. Are you still sure you can
+make it win?</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Chadwick.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Right on the heels of this, and before I could get my breath, in came
+the boy again with another telegram. It was a hot wire from President
+Dunton, one of a series that he had been shooting in ever since Mr.
+Norcross had taken hold and begun firing the cousins and nephews.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To <span class="smcap">G. Norcross</span>, G. M.,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Portal City. RUSH.</p>
+
+<p>"See stock quotations for to-day. Your policy is a failure. Am
+advised you are now fighting Red Tower. Stop it immediately and
+assure Mr. Hatch that we are friendly, as we have always been. If
+something cannot be done to lift securities to better figure, your
+resignation will be in order.</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Dunton.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>They say that misfortunes never come singly. Here were two new griefs
+hurling themselves in over the wires all in the same quarter-hour,
+besides the one I had up my sleeve. But there was no use dallying. It
+was up to me to find the boss as quickly as I could and have the
+three-cornered surgical operation over with. I knew the telegrams
+wouldn't kill him&mdash;or I thought they wouldn't. I thought they'd probably
+make him take a fresh strangle hold on things and be fired&mdash;if he had to
+be fired&mdash;fighting it out grimly on his own line. But I wasn't so sure
+about the Mrs. Sheila business. That was a horse of another color.</p>
+
+<p>I had just reached for my hat and was getting ready to snap the
+electrics off when I heard footsteps in the outer office. At first I
+thought it was the despatcher's boy coming with another wire, but when I
+looked up, a stocky, hard-faced man in a derby hat and a short overcoat
+was standing in the doorway and scowling across at me.</p>
+
+<p>It was Mr. Rufus Hatch, and I had a notion that the hot end of his black
+cigar glared at me like a baleful red eye when he came in and sat down.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>And Satan Came Also</h3>
+
+
+<p>"I saw your office lights from the street," was the way the Red Tower
+president began on me, and his voice took me straight back to the Oregon
+woods and a lumber camp where the saw-filers were at work. "Where is Mr.
+Norcross?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him that Mr. Norcross was up-town, and that I didn't suppose he
+would come back to the office again that night, now that it was so late.
+Instead of going away and giving it up, he sat right still, boring me
+with his little gray eyes and shifting the black cigar from one corner
+of his mouth to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Hatch, of the Red Tower Company," he grated, after a minute
+or two. "You're the one they call Dodds, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>I admitted it, and he went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Norcross brought you here with him from the West, didn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded and wondered what was coming next. When it did come it nearly
+bowled me over.</p>
+
+<p>"What pay are you getting here?"</p>
+
+<p>It was on the tip of my tongue to cuss him out right there and then and
+tell him it was none of his business. But the second thought (which
+isn't always as good as it's said to be) whispered to me to lead him on
+and see how far he would go. So I told him the figures of my pay check.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm needing another shorthand man, and I can afford to pay a good bit
+more than that," he growled. "They tell me you are well up at the top in
+your trade. Are you open to an offer?"</p>
+
+<p>I let him have it straight then. "Not from you," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"And why not from me?"</p>
+
+<p>Here was where I made my first bad break. All of a sudden I got so angry
+at the thought that he was actually trying to buy me that I couldn't see
+anything but red, and I blurted out, "Because I don't hire out to work
+for any strong-arm outfit&mdash;not if I know it!"</p>
+
+<p>For a little while he sat blinking at me from under his bushy eyebrows,
+and his hard mouth was drawn into a straight line with a mean little
+wrinkle coming and going at the corners of it.</p>
+
+<p>When he got ready to speak again he said, "You're only a boy. You want
+to get on in the world, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing I do: what then?" I snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm offering you a good chance: the best you ever had. You don't owe
+Norcross anything more than your job, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe not."</p>
+
+<p>"That's better. Put on your hat and come along with me. I want to show
+you what I can do for you in a better field than railroading ever was,
+or ever will be. It'll pay you&mdash;" and he named a figure that very nearly
+made me fall dead out of my chair.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, it was all plain enough. The boss had him on the hip with
+that kidnapping business, with me for a witness. And he was trying to
+fix the witness. It's funny, but the only thing I thought of, just then,
+was the necessity of covering up the part that Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann had had in the hold-up affair that he was so anxious to bury and put
+out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we needn't beat about the bushes any longer, Mr. Hatch," I
+said, bracing up to him. "I haven't told the sheriff, or anybody but Mr.
+Norcross, what I know about a certain little train hold-up that happened
+a few weeks ago down at Sand Creek Siding; but that isn't saying that
+I'm not going to."</p>
+
+<p>At this he flung the stump of the black cigar out of the window, found
+another in his pocket, and lighted it. If I had had the sense of a field
+mouse, I might have known that I was no match for such a man; but I
+lacked the sense&mdash;lacked it good and hard.</p>
+
+<p>"You're like your boss," he said shortly. "You'd go a long distance out
+of your way to make an enemy when there is no need of it. That hold-up
+business was a joke, from start to finish. I don't know how you and
+Norcross came to get in on it; the joke was meant to be on John
+Chadwick. The night before, at a little dinner we were giving him at the
+railroad club, he said there never was a railroad hold-up that couldn't
+have been stood off. A few of us got together afterward and put up a job
+on him; sent him over to Strathcona and arranged to have him held up on
+the way back."</p>
+
+<p>Again I lost my grip on all the common, every-day sanities. My best
+play&mdash;the only reasonable play&mdash;was to let him go away thinking that he
+had made me swallow the joke story whole. But I didn't have sense enough
+to do that.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Chadwick didn't take it as a joke!" I retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"I know he didn't; and that's why we're all anxious now to dig a hole
+and bury the thing decently. Perhaps we had all been taking a drop too
+much at the club dinner that night."</p>
+
+<p>At that I swelled up man-size and kicked the whole kettle of fat into
+the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, it was a joke!" I ripped out. "And your coming here to-night
+to try to hire me away from Mr. Norcross is another. The woods are full
+of good shorthand men, Mr. Hatch, but for the present I think I shall
+stay right where I am&mdash;where a court subp[oe]na can find me when I'm
+wanted."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all nonsense, and you know it&mdash;if you're not too much of a kid
+to know anything," he snapped, shooting out his heavy jaw at me. "I
+merely wanted to give you a chance to get rid of the railroad collar, if
+you felt like it. And there'll be no court and no subp[oe]na. The
+poorest jack-leg lawyer we've got in Portal City would make a fool of
+you in five minutes on the witness-stand. Nevertheless, my offer holds
+good. I like a fighting man; and you've got nerve. Take a night and
+sleep on it. Maybe you'll think differently in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>Here was another chance for me to get off with a whole skin, but by this
+time I was completely lost to any sober weighing and measuring of the
+possible consequences. Leaning across the desk end I gave him a final
+shot, just as he was getting up to go.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Mr. Hatch," I said. "You haven't fooled me for a single minute.
+Your guess is right; I heard every word that passed between you and Mr.
+Henckel that Monday morning in the Bullard lobby. As I say, I haven't
+told anybody yet but Mr. Norcross; but if you go to making trouble for
+him and the railroad company, I'll go into court and swear to what I
+know!"</p>
+
+<p>He was half-way out of the door when I got through, and he never made
+any sign that he heard what I said. After he was gone I began to sense,
+just a little, how big a fool I had made of myself. But I was still mad
+clear through at the idea that he had taken me for the other kind of a
+fool&mdash;the kind that wouldn't know enough to be sure that the president
+of a big corporation wouldn't get down to tampering with a common clerk
+unless there was some big thing to be stood off by it.</p>
+
+<p>Stewing and sizzling over it, I puttered around with the papers on my
+desk for quite a little while before I remembered the two telegrams, and
+the fact that I'd have to go and stick the three-bladed knife into Mr.
+Norcross. When I did remember, I shoved the messages into my pocket,
+flicked off the lights and started to go up-town and hunt for the boss.</p>
+
+<p>After closing the outer door of the office I don't recall anything
+particular except that I felt my way down the headquarters stair in the
+dark and groped across the lower hall to the outside door that served
+for the stair-case entrance from the street. When I had felt around and
+found the brass knob, something happened, I didn't know just what. In
+the tiny little fraction of a second that I had left, as you might say,
+between the hearse and the grave, I had a vague notion that the door was
+falling over on me and mashing me flat; and after that, everything went
+blank.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>The Big Smash</h3>
+
+
+<p>When I came to life out of what seemed like an endless succession of bad
+dreams it was broad daylight and the sun was shining brightly through
+some filmy kind of curtain stuff in a big window that looked out toward
+the west. I was in bed, the room was strange, and my right hand was
+wrapped up in a lot of cotton and bandaged.</p>
+
+<p>I hadn't more than made the first restless move before I saw a sort of
+pie-faced woman in a nurse's cap and apron start to get up from where
+she was sitting by the window. Before she could come over to the bed,
+somebody opened a door and tip-toed in ahead of nursey. I had to blink
+hard two or three times before I could really make up my mind that the
+tip-toer was Maisie Ann. She looked as if she might be the nurse's
+understudy. She had a nifty little lace cap on her thick mop of hair,
+and I guess her apron was meant to be nursey too, only it was frilled
+and tucked to a fare-you-well.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it before, but she was always
+an awfully wholesome, jolly little girl, with a laugh so near the
+surface that it never took much of anything to make it come rippling up
+through. But now she was as sober as a deacon&mdash;and about fourteen times
+as pretty as I had ever seen her before.</p>
+
+<p>"You poor, poor boy!" she cooed, patting my pillow just like my
+grandmother used to when I was a little kid and had the mumps or the
+measles. "Are you still roaming around in the Oregon woods?"</p>
+
+<p>That brought my dream, or one of them, back; the one about wandering
+around in a forest of Douglas fir and having to jump and dodge to keep
+the big trees from falling on me and smashing me.</p>
+
+<p>"No more woods for mine," I said, sort of feebly. And then: "Where am
+I?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are in bed in the spare room at Cousin Basil's. They wanted to take
+you to the railroad hospital that night, but when they telephoned up
+here to try to find Mr. Norcross, Cousin Basil went right down and
+brought you home with him in the ambulance."</p>
+
+<p>"'That night,' you say?" I parroted. "It was last night that the door
+fell on me, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anything about a door, but the night that they found you
+all burnt and crippled, lying at the foot of your office stairs, was
+three days ago. You have been out of your head nearly all the time ever
+since."</p>
+
+<p>"Burnt and crippled? What happened to me, Maisie Ann?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody knows; not even the doctors. We've been hoping that some day
+you'd be able to tell us. Can't you tell me now, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her all there was to tell, mumbling around among the words the
+best I could. When she saw how hard it was for me to talk, I could have
+sworn that I saw tears in the big, wide-open eyes, but maybe I didn't.</p>
+
+<p>Then she told me how the headquarters watchman had found me about
+midnight; with my right hand scorched black and the rest of me
+apparently dead and ready to be buried. The ambulance surgeon had
+insisted, and was still insisting, that I had been handling a live wire;
+but there were no wires at all in the lower hall, and nothing stronger
+than an incandescent light current in the entire office building.</p>
+
+<p>"And you say I've been here hanging on by my eyelashes for three days?
+What has been going on in all that time, Maisie Ann? Hasn't anybody been
+here to see me?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little nod. "Everybody, nearly. Mr. Van Britt has been up
+every day, and sometimes twice a day. He has been awfully anxious for
+you to come alive."</p>
+
+<p>"But Mr. Norcross?" I queried. "Hasn't he been up?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head and turned her face away, and she was looking
+straight out of the window at the setting sun when she asked, "When was
+the last time you saw Mr. Norcross, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>I choked a little over a big scare that seemed to rush up out of the
+bed-clothes to smother me. But I made out to answer her question,
+telling her how Mr. Norcross had left the office maybe half an hour or
+so before I did, that night, going up-town with Mr. Ripley. Then I asked
+her why she wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"Because nobody has seen him since a little later that same night," she
+said, saying it very softly and without turning her head. And then: "Mr.
+Van Britt found a letter from Mr. Norcross on his desk the next morning.
+It was just a little typewritten note, on a Hotel Bullard letter sheet,
+saying that he had made up his mind that the Pioneer Short Line wasn't
+worth fighting for, and that he was resigning and taking the midnight
+train for the East."</p>
+
+<p>I sat straight up in bed; I should have had to do it if both arms had
+been burnt to a crisp clear to the shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Resigned?&mdash;gave up and ran away? I don't believe that for a single
+minute, Maisie Ann!" I burst out.</p>
+
+<p>She was shaking her head again, still without turning her face so that I
+could see it.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I'm afraid it's all true, Jimmie. There were two telegrams that came
+to Mr. Norcross the night he went away; one from Mr. Chadwick and the
+other from Mr. Dunton. I heard Mr. Van Britt telling Cousin Sheila what
+the messages were. He'd seen the copies of them that they keep in the
+telegraph office."</p>
+
+<p>It was on my tongue's end to say that Mr. Norcross never had seen those
+two telegrams, because I had them in my pocket and was on my way to
+deliver them when I got shot; but I didn't. Instead, I said: "And you
+think that was why Mr. Norcross threw up his hands and ran away?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I don't think anything of the sort. I know what it was, and you
+know what it was," and at that she turned around and pushed me gently
+down among the pillows.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it?" I whispered, more than half afraid that I was going to
+hear a confirmation of my own breath-taking conviction. And I heard it,
+all right.</p>
+
+<p>"It was what I was telling you about, that same evening, you
+remember&mdash;down in the hall when you brought the flowers for Cousin
+Sheila? You told him what I told you, didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I didn't have a chance&mdash;not any real chance."</p>
+
+<p>"Then somebody else told him, Jimmie; and that is the reason he has
+resigned and gone away. Mr. Van Britt thinks it was on account of the
+two messages from Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Dunton, and that is why he wants
+to talk to you about it. But you know, and I know, Jimmie, dear; and for
+Cousin Sheila's sake and Mr. Norcross's, we must never lisp it to a
+human soul. A new general manager has been appointed, and he is on his
+way out here from New York. Everything has gone to pieces on the
+railroad, and all of Mr. Norcross's friends are getting ready to resign.
+Isn't it perfectly heart-breaking?"</p>
+
+<p>It was; it was so heart-breaking that I just gasped once or twice and
+went off the hooks again, with Maisie Ann's frightened little shriek
+ringing in my ears as she tried to hold me back from slipping over the
+edge.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>What Every Man Knows</h3>
+
+
+<p>I wasn't gone very long on this second excursion into the woozy-woozies,
+though it was night-time, and the shaded electric light was turned on
+when I opened my eyes and found Mrs. Sheila sitting by the bedside. The
+pie-faced nurse was gone; or at least I didn't see her anywhere; and the
+change in Mrs. Sheila sort of made me gasp. She wasn't any less pretty
+as she sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, but she was
+different; sober, and with the laugh all gone out of the big gray eyes,
+and a look in them as if she had suddenly become so wise that nobody
+could ever fool her.</p>
+
+<p>"You are feeling better now?" she asked, when she found me staring at
+her.</p>
+
+<p>I told her I guessed I was, but that my hand hurt me some.</p>
+
+<p>"You have had a great shock of some kind&mdash;besides the burn, Jimmie," she
+rejoined, folding up the bed covers so that the bandaged hand would rest
+easier. "The doctors are all puzzled. Does your head feel quite clear
+now&mdash;so that you can think?"</p>
+
+<p>"It feels as if I had a crazy clock in it," I said. "But the thinking
+part is all right. Have you heard anything from Mr. Norcross yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a word. It is all very mysterious and perplexing. We have been
+hoping that you could tell us something when you should recover
+sufficiently to talk. Can't you, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the
+hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't
+do. So I just said:</p>
+
+<p>"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office
+some little time before I did&mdash;with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they
+were going."</p>
+
+<p>"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in
+the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his
+rooms."</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but
+if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of
+me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who
+always knew everything that was going on.</p>
+
+<p>"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening,
+wasn't there?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Hatch had some trouble&mdash;yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I
+could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the
+evening, while I was away.</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken
+idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross
+has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say
+that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he
+should do as he has done&mdash;or at least as everybody believes he has
+done."</p>
+
+<p>I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would
+clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell
+her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as
+right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let
+her down easy.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after
+Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that
+the telegrams hadn't been delivered&mdash;that they were probably in the
+pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to
+make any man throw up his hands and quit, <i>I</i> should say."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not
+telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of
+us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out
+and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing
+anything like that before?"</p>
+
+<p>I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very
+thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang
+on to my sham belief that it was the thing he <i>had</i> done: either that,
+or tell her the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr.
+Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out,
+and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"</p>
+
+<p>"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his
+friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it
+out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"</p>
+
+<p>There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said
+that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard.
+I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just
+why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out,
+but that was out of the question.</p>
+
+<p>"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said;
+not knowing what else to say.</p>
+
+<p>"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so
+that you can help me trace it out."</p>
+
+<p>"Me?" I queried.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr.
+Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr.
+Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day
+after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at
+some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him,
+and that is why they don't hear anything from him."</p>
+
+<p>"What do <i>you</i> think?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of
+frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to
+hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs
+with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as
+you were able to talk. May I send him up?"</p>
+
+<p>Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and
+only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had
+that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and
+polish a man till he shines.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again.
+Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows
+of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put
+me on the question rack. I gave him all I had&mdash;except that thing about
+the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give
+him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this
+new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie.
+I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys
+together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."</p>
+
+<p>"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me
+a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to
+stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general
+manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head
+of the new Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse organization were scared plumb
+out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the
+newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had
+expected&mdash;that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a
+good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and
+neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."</p>
+
+<p>"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of
+Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the
+telegraph."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I
+ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any
+trace of him."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an
+envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would
+say.</p>
+
+<p>"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us,
+Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a
+little more light on this damnable blow-up?"</p>
+
+<p>I hadn't&mdash;outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about&mdash;and I told him
+so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his
+own mind.</p>
+
+<p>"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm
+new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd
+is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that
+there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when
+Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"</p>
+
+<p>"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats&mdash;in a business
+way."</p>
+
+<p>"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"</p>
+
+<p>I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.</p>
+
+<p>"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well
+resign one time as another?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something like that, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you add anything more?"</p>
+
+<p>I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about
+the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't
+want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was
+beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and
+unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and
+quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband
+living. So I just said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while
+longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.</p>
+
+<p>It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them
+time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together.
+Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I
+had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the
+wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.</p>
+
+<p>After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been
+trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of
+what I knew&mdash;or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that
+there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to
+give the possibility standing-room.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a
+sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my
+lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley
+that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed.
+That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time
+and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs.
+Sheila?</p>
+
+<p>Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing
+somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it
+was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out
+early in the morning and get busy.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>With the Wheels Trigged</h3>
+
+
+<p>I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr.
+Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the
+office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after
+telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand,
+she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the
+others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away
+because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you
+know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand
+by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."</p>
+
+<p>It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be
+the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering
+after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside
+out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible;
+she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting
+ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling
+him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I
+saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled
+me over to her side again.</p>
+
+<p>So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her
+posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of
+kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's
+auto.</p>
+
+<p>Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still
+in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains
+were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was
+still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole
+business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for
+the roof to fall in&mdash;as I guess it was.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had
+moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand
+work. They wouldn't let me do anything much&mdash;I couldn't do much with my
+right arm in a sling&mdash;so I had a chance to hang around and size up the
+situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me
+that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr.
+Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to
+be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the
+public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of
+callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead
+anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive
+programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked
+as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off
+a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and
+thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these
+private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds
+of all four of them about the boss's drop-out&mdash;as to whether it was
+voluntary or not.</p>
+
+<p>Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no
+"company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man
+named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him
+and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of
+Mr. Norcross's disappearance.</p>
+
+<p>Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so
+far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were
+still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the
+night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the
+boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his
+rooms.</p>
+
+<p>Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast
+Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next
+witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr.
+Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly
+have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that,
+the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big
+and too well known by this time to the rank and file.</p>
+
+<p>Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the
+Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad
+office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had
+asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van
+Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition
+that had been made to him the day before&mdash;the offer of the new Citizens'
+Storage &amp; Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments
+and plants.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch
+had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had
+gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new
+company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said
+that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk
+straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors
+together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to
+Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.</p>
+
+<p>This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a
+new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and
+Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition;
+was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first
+been to fight everything in sight.</p>
+
+<p>By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say,
+just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and
+had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and
+Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory,
+and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were
+with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was
+quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two
+days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which
+was proof positive, you'd say, that the boss <i>had</i> resigned and had so
+notified the New York office.</p>
+
+<p>When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we
+went to the Bullard café. It was pretty rich for our blood at two
+dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt
+reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little
+threshing on our own account&mdash;and got a lot more chaff and no grain.</p>
+
+<p>Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't
+seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in
+mind all the time&mdash;the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss
+after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed
+him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.</p>
+
+<p>By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had
+at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that.
+The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the
+headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb&mdash;as I knew. It had
+burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I
+went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with
+the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had
+explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light
+current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of
+the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked
+and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss
+coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the
+afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr.
+Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It
+just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.</p>
+
+<p>Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking
+train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour
+or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of
+the <i>Mountaineer</i>, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he
+found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the
+private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good
+cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.</p>
+
+<p>I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to
+be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him
+that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of
+you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After
+the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then
+switched over to the big puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>I told him there wasn't.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie?&mdash;or do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.</p>
+
+<p>"Branderby"&mdash;he was one of the <i>Mountaineer</i> reporters&mdash;"tells me that
+you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and
+I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."</p>
+
+<p>The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and
+he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall.
+When he got good and ready, he began again.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you
+need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if
+there ever were such a miracle."</p>
+
+<p>"You think it is a case for a detective?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If
+I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help
+that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."</p>
+
+<p>Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was,
+I jumped into the hole pretty quick.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus
+Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are
+hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From
+the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been
+published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during
+the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a
+thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also
+by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you
+suspicious&mdash;very suspicious, Jimmie."</p>
+
+<p>"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to
+think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross&mdash;reason in
+fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to
+sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in
+a day."</p>
+
+<p>The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old
+saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the
+Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr.
+Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job&mdash;and I shouldn't let much
+grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at the
+<i>Mountaineer</i> office if I can help." And with that he went away.</p>
+
+<p>It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled
+across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an
+old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job
+with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything
+special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I
+loafed in on Kirgan.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up
+anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered
+into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance
+by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot
+eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers
+used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.</p>
+
+<p>Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have
+to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother.
+As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or
+other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through
+he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen
+a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the
+general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair
+and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night
+that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good
+Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur
+below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman
+went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Lost 1016</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all
+sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the
+boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left
+standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves
+together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't
+wedge them apart.</p>
+
+<p>"An engine&mdash;even a little old Atlantic-type&mdash;is a pretty big thing to
+lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!"
+he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the
+headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been
+advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That
+engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for
+four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every
+hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's
+gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't
+pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported.
+And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild
+engine over the main line without orders."</p>
+
+<p>"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst
+us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."</p>
+
+<p>I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of
+the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in
+some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to
+let go.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason
+why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had
+quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change
+his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"</p>
+
+<p>After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it
+back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But
+where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody
+findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway?
+Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was
+to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and <i>go</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the
+same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and
+the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and
+twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross
+went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find
+<i>him</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little
+space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best
+boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a
+clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go
+alone he turned on me.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its
+scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of
+things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had
+taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking
+the wheels of reform.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it
+ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods
+is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the
+bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked;
+you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to
+look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and
+turn in and help him."</p>
+
+<p>"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land,
+Mart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the
+whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces&mdash;as it's doin', right now.
+They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if
+it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all
+up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could
+bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you
+could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I
+did, Jimmie, and not think it&mdash;and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o'
+Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we
+belonged to 'em!&mdash;orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs,
+helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need,
+usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."</p>
+
+<p>"You stopped all this?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet I did&mdash;between two days! They've been makin' seventeen
+different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the
+Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."</p>
+
+<p>What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on
+their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if
+they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and
+Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Jimmie, boy&mdash;you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when
+you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about
+as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose
+end."</p>
+
+<p>"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I
+asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."</p>
+
+<p>He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy
+stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown
+and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home.
+When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study
+it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map
+was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations
+and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western
+end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get
+out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the
+shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at
+that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.</p>
+
+<p>Tracing the other way&mdash;westward&mdash;we had a clear track for ten miles to
+Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen
+engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down.
+Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west
+of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been
+seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and
+the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station
+shouldn't have been.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or
+other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be
+considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been
+running&mdash;without orders, we must remember&mdash;against the Fast Mail coming
+east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere&mdash;not officially, at least; if it
+had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's
+office."</p>
+
+<p>At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the
+"meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at
+twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making
+due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the
+missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before
+ten-forty-five.</p>
+
+<p>The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta
+was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the
+opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or
+thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time
+to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In
+other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed,
+would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.</p>
+
+<p>When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay
+in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the
+diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise.
+West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around
+among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand
+Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.</p>
+
+<p>Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing
+point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have
+been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a
+blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand
+Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was
+nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served
+for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would
+surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And
+they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the
+following morning.</p>
+
+<p>Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any
+number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail
+topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything
+about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.</p>
+
+<p>"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by
+without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>The big master-mechanic shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is
+part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the
+mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in
+for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for
+their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch
+somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut
+off."</p>
+
+<p>This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is
+one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that
+gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there
+yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of
+that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."</p>
+
+<p>You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a
+root.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just
+around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we
+can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And
+the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the
+stolen engine!"</p>
+
+<p>"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or,
+leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding,
+just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."</p>
+
+<p>Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our
+guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles
+west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van
+Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the
+map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there.
+But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you
+and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work
+on," I retorted.</p>
+
+<p>I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest
+of the way to save my life.</p>
+
+<p>"If there was the least little scrap&mdash;a reason even to imagine that Mr.
+Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be
+different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know
+doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to
+eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square
+meal inside o' your clothes."</p>
+
+<p>We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard,
+by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew
+shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait
+for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop
+track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.</p>
+
+<p>This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the
+turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing
+down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the
+step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the
+table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a
+reformed cow-punch'&mdash;with a record for getting out of more tight places
+with a heavy train than any other man on the division.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy
+Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet,
+among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost
+in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that&mdash;where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like
+the pop of a whip-lash.</p>
+
+<p>"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the
+old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the
+far end o' that gravel track, cold <i>and</i> dead."</p>
+
+<p>"When did you see her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just now&mdash;comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber
+Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin'
+more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big
+as a house."</p>
+
+<p>"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.</p>
+
+<p>"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into
+the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not
+to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't kickin' none."</p>
+
+<p>"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and
+report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go
+down along and get that runaway."</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the
+gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on
+the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had
+been opened some time after the map had been made.</p>
+
+<p>When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his
+fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for
+town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he
+patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more
+said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen
+engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr.
+Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to
+quit; and, so far as we knew&mdash;or didn't know, rather&mdash;he had done it and
+had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.</p>
+
+<p>Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive
+assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more
+infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a
+train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have
+made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story
+at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.</p>
+
+<p>I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie&mdash;which
+wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the
+major's&mdash;when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the
+grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When
+he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a
+telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it
+was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There
+were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point:
+"What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."</p>
+
+<p>I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr.
+Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody&mdash;the New York
+people, perhaps&mdash;had wired him that a new general manager had been
+appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our
+office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had
+become of him, <i>Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Gee! but that brought on more talk&mdash;a whaling lot of it. I meant to find
+out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek
+wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption
+butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head
+waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came
+over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice
+sounded that she was mightily excited.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she
+began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"</p>
+
+<p>I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back
+yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient,
+"Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from
+Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the <i>Mountaineer</i>. He called the house to
+try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain
+about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."</p>
+
+<p>That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the <i>Mountaineer</i>
+office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail,
+I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third
+floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper
+aside.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; just a minute ago."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One
+of our young men&mdash;Branderby&mdash;has a clue; a very slight one. He has
+discovered&mdash;in some way that he didn't care to explain over the
+phone&mdash;that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of
+a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared.
+From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in
+part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it
+entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's
+men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a
+locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our
+master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in
+hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly
+muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an
+attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending
+a note to somebody at the Bullard&mdash;a note that 'would do the business,'
+was the way it was put."</p>
+
+<p>"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a
+running jump at the guess.</p>
+
+<p>"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you
+more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good
+gosh!&mdash;I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able
+to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that
+engine-rescuing trip.</p>
+
+<p>"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two
+flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the
+round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher
+and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were
+filling her with water.</p>
+
+<p>It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high
+foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the
+tender.</p>
+
+<p>"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could
+say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay
+for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over
+into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.</p>
+
+<p>Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the
+fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was
+on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light
+engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight
+piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>A Close Call</h3>
+
+
+<p>Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight
+track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its
+good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at
+Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes,
+shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight
+was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.</p>
+
+<p>From Banta on, we took it a bit easier&mdash;had to. The track was pretty
+crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew
+his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.</p>
+
+<p>At the "Y" siding we stopped&mdash;without going on to the gravel track where
+Gorcher had seen the lost 1016&mdash;and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern.
+This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big
+master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in
+making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just
+the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was
+trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out
+toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as
+nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman
+when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet,
+physically.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped
+along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find
+anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail
+connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."</p>
+
+<p>He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there
+was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was
+still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch
+rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it
+hadn't been used in years.</p>
+
+<p>"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan
+said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail
+connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them
+thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came
+down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps
+there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel
+track."</p>
+
+<p>I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and
+its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we
+were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the
+two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter
+saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole;
+fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new
+splinter of the wood sticking up beside it&mdash;a splinter that had been
+broken out when the spike was pulled.</p>
+
+<p>I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there
+waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the
+saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were
+fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But
+that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the
+rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new
+holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track
+that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over
+them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan didn't say a word&mdash;not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed
+rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What
+followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a
+driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen
+were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with
+his pocket tape.</p>
+
+<p>"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in
+the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up
+and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.</p>
+
+<p>Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with
+Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing
+was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way
+cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained
+anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going,
+but we were on our way.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose we poked along into the black heart of the Timber range for as
+much as five or six miles before the engine headlight showed us the
+remains of the old saw-mill camp lying in a little pocket-like valley
+from the sides of which all the mill timber had been cut. The camp had
+been long deserted. There were perhaps a dozen shacks of all sizes and
+shapes, and with a single exception they were all dilapidated and
+dismantled, some with the roofs falling in.</p>
+
+<p>The one exception was the stout log building which had probably served
+as the mill-gang commissary and store. It stood a little back on the
+slope, and was on the opposite side of the creek from the mill site and
+sleeping-shacks. The ties at this end of the line were so rotten with
+age that our engine was grinding a good half of them to powder as she
+edged up, and a little below the switch that had formerly led in to the
+mill, Kirgan gave Gorcher the stop signal.</p>
+
+<p>After we had piled off, there wasn't any question raised as to what we
+should do. Kirgan had taken a hammer from Gorcher's tool-box, and he was
+the one who led the way straight across the little creek and up the hill
+to the commissary. I had the lantern, but it wasn't needed. From where
+the engine was standing, the headlight flooded the whole gulch basin
+with its electric beam, picking out every detail of the deserted
+saw-mill camp.</p>
+
+<p>When we reached the log commissary we found the windows all boarded up
+and the door fastened with a strong hasp and a bright new brass
+padlock&mdash;the only new thing in sight. Kirgan swung his hammer just once
+and the lock went spinning off down the slope and fell with a splash
+into the creek. Then he pushed the door open with his foot, and shoved
+in; and for just one half-second I was afraid to follow&mdash;afraid of what
+we might find in that gloomy looking log warehouse, with its blinded
+windows and locked door.</p>
+
+<p>I thank the good Lord I had my scare for nothing. While I was nerving
+myself and stumbling over the threshold behind Kirgan with the lantern,
+I heard the boss's voice, and it wasn't the voice of any dead man, not
+by a long shot! From what he said, and the way he was trimming it up
+with hot ones, it was evident that he took us for some other crowd that
+he'd been cussing out before.</p>
+
+<p>The light of the lantern showed us a long room, bare of furnishings, and
+dark and musty from having been shut up so tight. In the far end there
+were a couple of bunks built against the log wall. On what had once been
+the counter of the commissary there was a lot of canned stuff and a box
+of crackers that had been broken open, and on a bench by the door there
+was a bucket of water and a tin cup.</p>
+
+<p>The boss was sitting up in one of the bunks, and he was still tearing
+off language in strips at us when we closed in on him. He recognized
+Kirgan first, and then Gorcher. I guess he couldn't see me very well
+because I was holding the lantern. When he found out who we were, he
+stopped swearing and got up out of the bunk to put his hand on Mart
+Kirgan's shoulder. That was the only break he made to show that he was a
+man, like the rest of us. The next minute he was the Big Boss again,
+rapping out his orders as if he had just pushed his desk button to call
+us in.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got an engine here, I suppose?" he snapped, at Kirgan. "Then
+we'll get out of this quick. What day of the week is it?"</p>
+
+<p>I told him it was Friday, and by his asking that, I knew he must have
+been so roughly handled that he had lost count of time. The next order
+was shot at the two firemen.</p>
+
+<p>"You boys kick that packing-box to pieces and then pull the straw out of
+that bunk and touch a match to it. We'll make sure that they'll never
+lock anybody else up in this damned dog-hole."</p>
+
+<p>The two young huskies obeyed the order promptly. In half a minute the
+dry slab stuff that the bunks were built of was ablaze and the boss
+herded us to the door. In the open he stopped and looked around as if he
+had half a mind to burn the rest of the deserted lumber camp, but if he
+had any such notion he thought better of it, and a minute or so later we
+were all climbing into the cab of the waiting engine.</p>
+
+<p>I had one last glimpse of the commissary as Gorcher released the air and
+the backing engine slid away around the first curve. It was sweating
+smoke through the split-shingle roof, and the open door framed a square
+of lurid crimson. I guess the boss was right. "They," whoever they were,
+wouldn't ever lock anybody else up in that particular shack.</p>
+
+<p>We had to run so slowly down the old track to the "Y" that there was
+plenty of chance for the boss to talk, if he had wanted to. But
+apparently he didn't want to. He sat on the fireman's seat, with an arm
+back of me to hold me on, just as Kirgan had sat on the way up, and
+never opened his head except once to ask me what was the matter with my
+wrapped-up hand. When I told him, he made no comment, and didn't speak
+again until we had stopped on the leg of the "Y" to let Kirgan and his
+three helpers put the borrowed rails back into place. That left just the
+two of us in the cab, and I thought maybe he would tell me some of the
+particulars, but he didn't. Instead, he made me tell him.</p>
+
+<p>"You say it's Friday," he began abruptly. "What's been going on since
+Monday night, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>I boiled it down for him into just as few words as possible; about the
+letter he had left for Mr. Van Britt, how everybody thought he had
+resigned, how Mrs. Sheila and the major were two of the few who weren't
+willing to believe it, how Mr. Chadwick had been out of reach, how the
+railroad outfit was flopping around like a chicken with its head chopped
+off, how President Dunton had appointed a new general manager who was
+expected now on any train, how Gorcher had discovered the lost 1016 on
+the old disused gravel-pit track a mile below us, and, to wind up with,
+I slipped him Mr. Chadwick's telegram which had come just as I was
+finishing my supper in the Bullard grill-room, and those two others that
+had come on the knock-out night, and which had been in my pocket ever
+since.</p>
+
+<p>He heard me through without saying a word, and when I gave him the
+telegrams he read them by the light of the gauge lamp&mdash;also without
+saying anything. But when the men had the "Y" rails replaced he took
+hold of things again with a jerk.</p>
+
+<p>"Kirgan, you'll want to see to getting that dead engine out of the
+gravel pit yourself. Take one of the firemen and go to it. It's a short
+mile and you can walk it. Jimmie and I want to get back to Portal City
+in a hurry, and Gorcher will take us." And then to Gorcher: "We'll run
+to Banta ahead of Number Eighteen and get orders there. Move lively,
+Billy; time's precious."</p>
+
+<p>The orders were carried out precisely as they were given. Kirgan took
+one of the huskies and tramped off in the darkness down the main line,
+and Gorcher, turning our engine on the "Y," headed back east. This time
+he wasn't so awfully careful of the curves and sags as he had been
+coming up, and we made Banta at a record clip. While he was in the Banta
+wire office, getting orders for Portal City, Mr. Norcross took the
+time-card out of its cage in the cab and fell to studying it by the
+light of the gauge lamp. Gorcher came back pretty soon with his
+clearance, which gave him the right to run to Arroyo as first section of
+Number Eighteen.</p>
+
+<p>The boss blew up like a Roman candle when he saw that train order. It
+meant that we were to take the siding at Arroyo with the freight that
+was just behind us, and wait there for the westbound "Flyer," the
+"Flyer" being due in Portal City from the east at 9:15, and due to leave
+there, coming west, at 9:20. I didn't realize at the moment why the boss
+was so sizzling anxious to cut out the delay which would be imposed on
+us by the wait at Arroyo, but the anxiety was there, all right.</p>
+
+<p>"Billy, it's eighteen miles to Portal, and you've got twenty minutes to
+make it against the 'Flyer's' leaving time," he ripped out. "Can you do
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>Gorcher said he could, if he didn't have to lose any more time getting
+his order changed.</p>
+
+<p>"Let her go!" snapped the boss. "I'm taking all the responsibility."</p>
+
+<p>That was enough for Gorcher, and the way we hustled out of the Banta
+yard was a caution. By the time we hit the last set of switches the old
+"Pacific-type" was lurching like a ship at sea, and once out on the long
+grass-country tangents she went like a shot out of a gun. Of course,
+with nothing to pull but her own weight she had plenty of steam, and all
+Gorcher had to do was to keep her from choking herself with too much of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>He did it to the queen's taste; and in exactly eight minutes out of
+Banta we tore over the switches at Arroyo. That left us ten miles to go,
+and twelve minutes in which to make them. It looked pretty easy, and it
+would have been if the night crew hadn't been switching in the lower
+Portal City yard when we finished the race and Gorcher was whistling for
+the town stop. There was a hold-out of perhaps two minutes while the
+shifter was getting out of our way, and when we finally went clattering
+up through the yard, the "Flyer," a few minutes late, was just pulling
+in from the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p>A yardman let us in on the spur at the end of the headquarters building,
+and the boss was off in half a jiffy. "Come along with me, Jimmie," he
+commanded quickly, and I couldn't imagine why he was in such a tearing
+hurry. Pushing through the platform crowd, made up of people who were
+getting off the "Flyer" and those who were waiting to get on, he led the
+way straight up-stairs to our offices.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, there was nobody there at that time of night, and the place
+was all dark until we switched the electrics on. There was a little
+lavatory off the third room of the suite, and Mr. Norcross went in and
+washed his face and hands. In a minute or two he came out, put on his
+office coat, opened up his desk, lighted a cigar and sat down at the
+desk as though he had just come in from a late dinner at the club. And
+still he had me guessing.</p>
+
+<p>The guess didn't have to wait long. While I was making a bluff at
+uncovering my typewriter and getting ready for business there was a
+heavy step in the hall, and a red-faced, portly gentleman with fat eyes
+and little close-cropped English side-whiskers came bulging in. He had a
+light top-coat on his arm, and his tan gloves were an exact match for
+his spats.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening," he said, nodding sort of brusquely at the boss. "I'm
+looking for the general manager's office."</p>
+
+<p>"You've found it," said the boss, crisply.</p>
+
+<p>The tan-gloved gentleman looked first at me and then at Mr. Norcross.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the chief clerk, perhaps?" he suggested, pitching the query in
+the general direction of the big desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Hardly," was the curt rejoinder. "My name is Norcross. What can I do
+for you?"</p>
+
+<p>If I didn't hate slang so bad, I should say that the portly man looked
+as if he were going to throw a fit.</p>
+
+<p>"Not&mdash;not Graham Norcross?" he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes; I am 'Graham'&mdash;to my friends. Anything else?"</p>
+
+<p>The portly gentleman subsided into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>"There is some misunderstanding about this," he said, his voice
+thickening a little&mdash;with anger, I thought. "My name is Dismuke, and I
+am the general manager of this railroad."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't dispute the name, but your title is away off," said Mr.
+Norcross, as cool as a handful of dry snow. "Who appointed you, if I may
+ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"President Dunton and the board of directors, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"The same authority appointed me, something like three months ago," was
+the calm reply. "So far as I know, I am still at the head of the
+company's staff in Portal City."</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman who had named himself Dismuke puffed out his cheeks and
+looked as if he were about to explode.</p>
+
+<p>"This is a devil of a mess!" he rapped out. "I understood&mdash;we all
+understood in New York&mdash;that you had resigned!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I haven't," retorted the boss shortly. And then he stuck the
+knife in good and deep and twisted it around. "There is a commercial
+telegraph wire in the Hotel Bullard, where I suppose you will put up,
+Mr. Dismuke, and I'm sure you will find it entirely at your service. If
+you have anything further to say to me I hope it will keep until after
+this office opens in the morning. I am very busy, just now."</p>
+
+<p>I mighty nearly gasped. This Dismuke was the new general manager,
+appointed, doubtless in all good faith, by the president and sent out
+to take charge of things. And here was the boss practically ordering him
+out of the office&mdash;telling him that his room was better than his
+company!</p>
+
+<p>The portly man got out of his chair, puffing like a steam-engine.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll see about this!" he threatened. "You've been here three months
+and you haven't done anything but muddle things until the stock of the
+company isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on! If I can
+get a clear wire to New York, you'll have word from President Dunton
+to-morrow morning telling you where you get off!"</p>
+
+<p>To this Mr. Norcross made no reply whatever, and the heavy-footed
+gentleman stumped out, saying things to himself that wouldn't look very
+well in print. When the hall door below gave a big slam to let us know
+that he was still going, the boss looked across at me with a sour grin
+wrinkling around his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you know why I made Gorcher break all the rules of the service
+getting here, Jimmie," he said. "From what you told me down yonder on
+the old 'Y,' I gathered that my successor was not yet on the ground, but
+that he was likely to be at any minute. That's why I wanted to beat the
+'Flyer' in. Possession is nine points of the law, and in this case it
+was rather important that Mr. Dismuke shouldn't find the outfit without
+a head and these offices of ours unoccupied." He rose, stretched his
+arms over his head like a tired boy, and reached for the golf cap he
+kept to wear when he went out to knock around in the shops and yard.
+"Let's go up to the hotel and see if we can break into the café, Jimmie,"
+he finished up. "Later on, we'll wire Mr. Chadwick; but that can wait.
+I haven't had a square meal in four days."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>The Machine</h3>
+
+
+<p>With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess
+there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all
+along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back
+on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had
+happened.</p>
+
+<p>We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally,
+because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt
+there was plenty of it: the more since the boss&mdash;a bit grimmer than
+usual&mdash;hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members
+of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke
+over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but
+these were all in the family, too, as you might say.</p>
+
+<p>After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent
+a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President
+Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr.
+Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our
+track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all
+the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump
+themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.</p>
+
+<p>We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the
+tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him
+occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table
+with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess
+he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying
+on made it look as if there might be more to follow.</p>
+
+<p>I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that
+Branderby, the <i>Mountaineer</i> reporter, had given us and tear loose on
+the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the
+first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the
+new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business,
+and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about
+selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse people
+after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and
+the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes,
+and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. &amp; W. with all sorts of legal
+obstacles.</p>
+
+<p>Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions
+were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a
+week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around
+and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. &amp; W. folks, out of jail
+for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he
+could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side
+could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the
+local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case
+out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.</p>
+
+<p>Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days,
+as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we
+acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow
+named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in
+from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an
+"extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his
+being sent out to relieve anybody.</p>
+
+<p>I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort,
+and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped
+in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man
+who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and
+a half farther than he had bargained to.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket,"
+he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the
+boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're
+stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is
+only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens'
+Storage &amp; Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the
+Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about
+our C. S. &amp; W. friends? Are they still game?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host
+in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out
+and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere,
+now, and C. S. &amp; W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I
+venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the
+different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this
+moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original
+scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."</p>
+
+<p>The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his
+cigar, which had gone out.</p>
+
+<p>"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is
+not mine?" he said, after a little pause.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman
+who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white
+elephants."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a
+tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere
+lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt
+in his voice that fairly made me sick&mdash;knowing what I did; and knowing
+that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About
+the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had
+Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"</p>
+
+<p>"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the
+bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."</p>
+
+<p>The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the
+catch against interruptions.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's have it," he directed.</p>
+
+<p>Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the
+engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower
+Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all
+the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An
+election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be
+whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution
+was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger
+would vanish.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been
+ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political
+headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been
+turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's
+gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot
+climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept
+our messages and keep in touch.</p>
+
+<p>The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an
+anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang
+of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard
+for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail,
+which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for
+it&mdash;as he did, when the time came&mdash;and go in person to stop the raid, he
+was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to
+be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a
+fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President
+Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been
+listening soberly while the lawyer talked.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer.
+The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona
+accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands
+overnight in the same place&mdash;on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence,
+it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk
+with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of
+the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr.
+Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped
+wires."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in
+on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent
+you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place,
+and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew
+very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be
+your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they
+would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and
+would stay off until the other man could take hold."</p>
+
+<p>"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I
+haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to
+find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's
+recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley.
+Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line
+as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."</p>
+
+<p>"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; you have it all&mdash;or practically all. I fell for the anonymous
+letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily,
+ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment.
+The obvious thing to do&mdash;if any attention whatever was to be paid to the
+anonymous warning&mdash;was to telephone the police and the round-house. I
+did neither because I thought it might be too slow. The letter was
+urgent, of course; it said that Black Ike Bradley and his gang were
+already in the railroad yard, preparing to steal the engine."</p>
+
+<p>"So you made a straight shoot for the scene of action?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did; down the back streets and across the lower end of the plaza. As
+it appeared&mdash;or rather as it was made to appear&mdash;I was barely in time.
+There were men at the engine, and when I sprinted across the yard they
+were ready to move it out to the main line. I yelled at them and ran
+in."</p>
+
+<p>"You must have been beautifully rattled; to go up against a gang of
+thugs that way, alone and unarmed," was the lawyer's comment.</p>
+
+<p>"I was," the boss confessed soberly. "Of course, I didn't have a ghost
+of a show. Three of them tackled me the moment I came within reach. I
+got one of the three on the point of the jaw, and they had to leave him
+behind; but there were enough more of them. Before I fairly realized
+what was happening, they had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey,
+gagged with my own handkerchief, and loaded into the cab of the engine.
+From that on, it was all plain sailing."</p>
+
+<p>"Then they took you to the old lumber camp?"</p>
+
+<p>"As fast as the engine could be made to turn her wheels. They were
+running against the Mail, and they knew it. Arroyo has no night
+operator, and when we sneaked through the Banta yard and past the
+station, the operator there was asleep. I saw him, with his head in the
+crook of his arm, at the telegraph table in the bay window as we
+passed."</p>
+
+<p>Ripley grinned. "We've been giving that young fellow the third
+degree&mdash;Van Britt and I. He claims that he was doped; that somebody
+dropped something into his supper coffee at the station lunch counter.
+His story didn't hang together and Van Britt fired him. But go on."</p>
+
+<p>"We ran out to the Timber Mountain 'Y'," the boss resumed, "and from
+that on up the old saw-mill line. The rail connections were all in
+place, and I knew from this that preparations had been made beforehand.
+At the mill stop they untied my legs and made me walk up the hill to the
+commissary. When they took the gag out, I said a few things and asked
+them what they were going to do with me. They wouldn't tell me anything
+except that I was to be locked up for a few days."</p>
+
+<p>"You knew what that meant?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly. My drop-out would be made to look as if I had jumped the
+job, and Dunton would appoint a new man. After that, I could come back,
+if I wanted to. Whatever I might do or try to do would cut no figure,
+and no explanation I could make would be believed. I had most obligingly
+dug my own official grave, and there could be no resurrection."</p>
+
+<p>"What then?" pressed Ripley, keenly interested, as anybody could see.</p>
+
+<p>"When they took the clothes-line from my arms there was another scrap.
+It didn't do any good. They got the door shut on me and got it locked.
+After that, for four solid days, Ripley, I was made to realize how
+little it takes to hold a man. I had my pocket-knife, but I couldn't
+whittle my way out. The floor puncheons were spiked down, and I couldn't
+dig out. They had taken all my matches, and I couldn't burn the place. I
+tried the stick-rubbing, and all those things you read about: they're
+fakes; I couldn't get even the smell of smoke."</p>
+
+<p>"The chimney?"</p>
+
+<p>"There wasn't any. They had heated the place, when it was a commissary,
+with a stove, and the pipe hole through the ceiling had a piece of sheet
+iron nailed over it. And I couldn't get to the roof at all. They had
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Ripley nodded and said, snappy-like: "Well, we've got them now&mdash;any time
+you give the word. Tarbell has a pinch on one of the Clanahan men and he
+will turn State's evidence. We can railroad every one of those fellows
+who carried you off."</p>
+
+<p>"And the men higher up?" queried the boss.</p>
+
+<p>"No; not yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'll drop it right where it is. I don't want the hired tools; no
+one of them, unless you can get the devil that crippled Jimmie Dodds,
+here."</p>
+
+<p>They went on, talking about my burn-up. Listening in, I learned for the
+first time just how it had been done. Tarbell, through his hold upon the
+welshing Clanahan striker, had got the details at second-hand. Hatch's
+assassin&mdash;or Clanahan's&mdash;must have had it all doped out and made ready
+before Hatch had made the break at trying to bribe me.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, a lead had been taken from a power wire at the corner of the
+street and hooked over the outer door-knob. And inside I had been given
+a sheet of copper to stand on for a good "ground," the copper itself
+being wired to a water pipe running up through the hall. Tarbell had
+afterward proved up on all this, it seemed, finding the insulated wire
+and the copper sheet with its connections hidden in a small rubbish
+closet under the hall stair, just where a fellow in a hurry might chuck
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"Tarbell is a striking success," Mr. Norcross put in, along at the end
+of things. "We'll keep him on with us, Ripley."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better," said the level-eyed young attorney, significantly. "From
+the way things are stacking up, you'll presently need a personal
+body-guard. I suppose it's no use asking you to carry a gun?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hardly," laughed the boss. "I've never done it yet, and it's pretty
+late in the day to begin."</p>
+
+<p>Past this there was a little more talk about the C. S. &amp; W. deal, and
+about what the Hatch crowd would be likely to try next; and when it was
+finished, and Ripley was reaching for his hat, the boss said: "There is
+no change in the orders: we've got 'em going now, and we'll keep 'em
+going. Drive it, Ripley; drive it for every ounce there is in you. Never
+mind the election talk or the stock quotations. This railroad is going
+to be honest, if it never earns another net dollar. We'll win!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's beginning to look a little that way, now," the lawyer admitted,
+with his hand on the door knob. "Just the same, Norcross, there is
+safety in numbers, and our numbers are precisely one; one man"&mdash;holding
+up a single finger. "As before, the pyramid is standing on its head&mdash;and
+you are the head. The other people have shown us once what happens when
+you are removed. For God's sake, be careful!"</p>
+
+<p>I don't know whether the boss took that last bit of advice to heart or
+not. If he didn't, he was a bigger man than even I had been taking him
+for&mdash;with the crooks of a whole State reaching out for him, and with the
+knowledge which he must have had, that the next time they came gunning
+for him they'd shoot to kill.</p>
+
+<p>It was late in the afternoon when Ripley made his visit, and pretty soon
+after he went away the boss and I closed up our end of the shop and left
+May pecking away at his typewriter on a lot of routine stuff. I don't
+know what made me do it, but as I was passing Fred's desk on the way
+out, stringing along behind the boss, I stopped and jerked open one of
+the drawers. I knew beforehand what was in the drawer, and pointed to
+it&mdash;a new .38 automatic. Fred nodded, and I slipped the gun into my
+left-hand pocket, wondering as I did it, if I could make out to hit the
+broad side of a barn, shooting with that hand, if I had to.</p>
+
+<p>A half-minute later I had caught up with Mr. Norcross, and together we
+left the building and went up to the Bullard for dinner.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>In the Coal Yard</h3>
+
+
+<p>I knew, just as well as could be&mdash;without being able to prove it&mdash;that
+we were shadowed on the trip up from the railroad building to the hotel,
+and it made me nervous. There could be only one reason now for any such
+dogging of the boss. The grafters were not trying to find out what he
+was doing; they didn't need to, because he was advertising his
+doings&mdash;or Juneman was&mdash;in the newspapers. What they were trying to do
+was to catch him off his guard and do him up&mdash;this time to stay done up.</p>
+
+<p>It was safe to assume that they wouldn't fumble the ball a second time.
+Mr. Ripley had stood the thing fairly on its feet when he said that our
+campaign was purely a one-man proposition, so far as it had yet gone.
+People who had met the boss and had done business with him liked him;
+but the old-time prejudice against the railroad was so widespread and so
+bitter that it couldn't be overcome all at once. Juneman, our publicity
+man, was doing his best, but as yet we had no party following in the
+State at large which would stand by us and see that we got justice.</p>
+
+<p>I was chewing these things over while we sat at dinner in the Bullard
+café, and I guess Mr. Norcross was, too, for he didn't say much. It
+isn't altogether comfortable to be a marked man in a more or less
+unfriendly country, and I shouldn't wonder if the boss, big and
+masterful as he was, felt the pressure of it. I don't know whether he
+knew anything about the shadowing business I speak of or not, but he
+might have. We hadn't more than given our dinner order when one of
+Hatch's clerks, a cock-eyed chap named Kestler, came in and took a table
+just far enough from ours to be out of the way, and near enough to
+listen in if we said anything.</p>
+
+<p>When we finished, Kestler was just getting his service of ice-cream; but
+I noticed that he left it untouched and got up and followed us to the
+lobby. It made me hot enough to want to turn on him and knock his
+crooked eye out, but of course, that wouldn't have done any good.</p>
+
+<p>After Mr. Norcross had bought some cigars at the stand he said he
+guessed he'd run out to Major Kendrick's for a little while; and with
+that he went up to his rooms. Though the major was the one he named, I
+knew he meant that he was going to see Mrs. Sheila. I remembered what he
+had said to Ripley about a woman's giving him germ ideas and such
+things, and I guess it was really so. Every time he spent an evening at
+the major's he'd come back with a lot of new notions for popularizing
+the Short Line.</p>
+
+<p>When he said that, about going out to the major's, Kestler was near
+enough to overhear it, and so he waited, lounging in the lobby and
+pretending to read a paper. About half-past seven the boss came down and
+asked me to call a taxi for him. I did it; and Kestler loafed around
+just long enough to see him start off. Then he lit out, himself, and
+something in the way he did it made me take out after him.</p>
+
+<p>I expected to see him turn up-town to the second cross street where the
+Red Tower had its general offices on the fourth floor of the Empire
+Building. But instead, he turned the other way, and the first thing I
+knew I was trailing him through the railroad yard and on down past the
+freight house toward the big, fenced-in, Red Tower coal yards.</p>
+
+<p>At the coal yard he let himself in through a wicket in the wagon gates,
+and I noticed that he used a key and locked the wicket after he got
+inside. I put my eye to a crack in the high stockade fence and saw that
+the little shack office that was used for a scale-house was lighted up.
+My burnt hand was healing tolerably well by this time and I could use it
+a little. There was a slack pile just outside of the big gate, and by
+climbing to the top of it I got over the fence and crept up to the
+scale-house.</p>
+
+<p>A small window in one end of the shack, opened about two inches at the
+bottom, answered well enough for a peep-hole. Three men were in the
+little box of a place&mdash;three besides Kestler; Hatch, his barrel-bodied
+partner, Henckel, and one other. The third man looked like a glorified
+barkeep'. He was of the type I have heard called "black Irish," fat,
+sleek, and well-fed, with little pin-point black eyes half buried in the
+flesh of his round face, and the padded jaw and double chin shaved to
+the blue. The night was warm and he had his hat off. Through the crack
+in the window I could smell the pomatum with which his hair was
+plastered into barkeep' waves to match the tightly curled black
+mustaches.</p>
+
+<p>I knew this third man well enough, by sight; everybody in Portal City
+knew him&mdash;decent people only too well when it came to an election
+tussle. He was the redoubtable Pete Clanahan, dive-keeper, and political
+boss.</p>
+
+<p>Kestler was talking when I glued eye and ear to the window crack; was
+telling the three how he had shadowed Mr. Norcross from the railroad
+headquarters to the Bullard, and how he stayed around until he had seen
+the boss take a taxi for Major Kendrick's. This seemed to be all that
+was wanted of him, for when he was through, Hatch told him he might go
+home. After the cock-eyed clerk was gone, Hatch lighted a fresh cigar
+and put it squarely up to the Irishman.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use being mealy-mouthed over this thing, Pete," he grated in
+that saw-mill voice of his. "We've got to get rid of this man. You've
+asked us to shadow him and keep you posted, and we have&mdash;and you've done
+nothing. Every day's delay gives him that much better hold. We can choke
+him off by littles in the business game, of course; we have Dunton and
+the New Yorkers on our side, and this coöperative scheme he has launched
+can be broken down with money. Such things never hold together very
+long. But that doesn't help you political people out; and your stake in
+the game is even bigger than ours."</p>
+
+<p>Clanahan looked around the little dog-kennel of a place suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis not here that we can talk much about thim things, Misther Hatch,"
+he said cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" was the rasping question. "There's nobody in the yard, and
+the gates are locked. It's a damned sight safer than a back room in one
+of your dives&mdash;as we know now to our cost."</p>
+
+<p>Clanahan threw up his head with a gesture that said much. "Murphy's the
+man that leaked on that engine job&mdash;and he'll leak no more."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Hatch, with growing irritation, "what are you holding back
+for now? We stood to win on the first play, and we would have won if
+your people hadn't balled it by talking too much. One more day and
+Dismuke would have been in the saddle. That would have settled it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yah; and Mister Dismuke still here in Portal City remains," put in
+Henckel.</p>
+
+<p>The dive-keeper locked his pudgy fingers across a cocked knee.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis foine, brave gintlemen ye are, you two, whin ye've got somebody
+else to pull th' nuts out av th' fire for ye!" he said. "Ye'd have us
+croak this felly f'r ye, and thin ye'd stand back and wash yer hands
+while some poor divil wint to th' rope f'r it. Where do we come in, is
+what I'd like to know?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are already in," snapped Hatch. "You know what the Big Fellow at
+the capital thinks about it, and where you'll stand in the coming
+election if you don't put out this fire that Norcross is kindling.
+You're yellow, Clanahan. That's all that is the matter with you. Put
+your wits to work. There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking
+it to death with butter."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me wan thing!" insisted the dive-keeper, boring the chief grafter
+with his pin-point eyes. "Do you stand f'r it if we do this thing up
+right?"</p>
+
+<p>Hatch's eyes fell, and Henckel's big body twisted uneasily in the chair
+that was groaning under his beer-barrel weight. There was silence for a
+little space, and I could feel the cold sweat starting out all over me.
+I hadn't dreamed of stumbling upon anything like this when I started
+out to shadow Kestler. They were actually plotting to murder the boss!</p>
+
+<p>It was Hatch who broke the stillness.</p>
+
+<p>"It's up to you, Clanahan, and you know it," he declared. "You've had
+your tip from the Big Fellow. The railroad people must be made to get
+into the fight in the coming election, and get in on the right side. If
+they don't; and if Norcross stays and keeps his fire burning; you
+fellows lose out. So shall we; but what we lose will be a mere drop in
+the bucket; and, as I have said, we stand to get it back, after this
+coöperative scheme has had time to burn itself out."</p>
+
+<p>Clanahan sat back in his chair and shoved his hands into his pockets.</p>
+
+<p>"Ye'd sthring me as if I was a boy!" he scoffed. "'Tis your own game
+fr'm first to last. D'ye think I'm not knowing that? 'Tis bread and
+butther and th' big rake-off for you, and little ye care how th'
+election goes. Suppose we'd croak this man in th' hot par-rt av th'
+p'litical fight; what happens? Half th' noospaypers in th' State'd play
+him up f'r a martyr to th' cause av good governmint, and we'd all go to
+hell in a hand-basket!"</p>
+
+<p>I was cramped and sore and one of my legs had gone to sleep, but I
+couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. My heart was skipping beats
+right along while I waited for Hatch's answer. When it came, the
+drumming in my ears pretty nearly made me lose it.</p>
+
+<p>"Clanahan," he began, as cold as an icicle. "I didn't get you down here
+to argue with you. We've got your number&mdash;all your different
+numbers&mdash;and they are written down in a book. You've bungled this thing
+once, and for that reason you've got it to do over again. We haven't
+asked you to 'croak' anybody, as you put it, and we are not asking it
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis domned little you lack av asking it," retorted the dive-keeper.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," said Hatch, leaning forward with his hands on his knees.
+"Besides keeping cases on Norcross here, we've been digging back into
+his record a few lines. Every man has his sore spot, if you can only
+find it, Clanahan&mdash;just as you have yours. What if I should tell you
+that Norcross is wanted in another State&mdash;for a crime?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody would believe ut," was the prompt rejoinder. "If he's wanted he
+c'u'd be had."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," Hatch went on. "Before he came here he was chief of construction
+on the Oregon Midland. There was a right-of-way fight back in the
+mountains&mdash;fifty miles from the nearest sheriff&mdash;with the P. &amp; S. F.
+Norcross armed his track-layers, and in the bluffing there was a man
+killed."</p>
+
+<p>Though it was a warm night, as I have said, the cold chills began to
+chase themselves up and down my back. What Hatch said was perfectly
+true. In the right-of-way scrap he was talking about, there had been a
+few wild shots fired, and one of them had found a P. &amp; S. F. grade
+laborer. I don't believe anybody had ever really blamed the boss for it.
+He had given strict orders that we were only to make a show of force;
+and, besides, the other fellows were armed, too, and had armed first.
+But there <i>had</i> been a man killed.</p>
+
+<p>While I was shivering, Clanahan said: "Well, what av it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Norcross was responsible for that man's death. If he was having trouble
+over his right-of-way, his recourse was to the law, and he took the law
+into his own hands. Nothing was ever done about it, because nobody took
+the trouble to prosecute. A week ago we sent a man to Oregon to look up
+the facts. He succeeded in finding a brother of the dead man, and a
+warrant has now been sworn out for Norcross's arrest."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Clanahan again. "Ye have the sthring in yer own hand; why
+don't ye pull it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's where you come in," was the answer. "The Oregon justice issued
+the warrant because it was demanded, but he refused to incur, for his
+county, the expense of sending a deputy sheriff to another State, or to
+take the necessary steps to have Norcross extradited. If Norcross could
+be produced in court, he would try him and either discharge him or bind
+him over, as the facts might warrant. He took his stand upon the ground
+that Norcross was only technically responsible, and told the brother
+that in all probability nothing would come of an attempt to prosecute."</p>
+
+<p>"Thin ye've got nothing on him, after all," the Irishman grunted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Hatch came back; "we have the warrant, and, in addition to that,
+we have you, Pete. A word from you to the Portal City police
+headquarters, and our man finds himself arrested and locked up&mdash;to wait
+for a requisition from the Governor of Oregon."</p>
+
+<p>"But you said th' requisition wouldn't come," Clanahan put in.</p>
+
+<p>Hatch was sitting back now and stroking his ugly jaw.</p>
+
+<p>"It might come, Pete, if it had to: there's no knowing. In the meantime
+we get delay. There'll be <i>habeas corpus</i> proceedings, of course, to get
+him out of jail, but there's where you'll come in again; you've got your
+own man in for City Attorney. And, after all, the delay is all we need.
+With Norcross in trouble, and in jail on a charge of murder, the
+railroad ship'll go on the rocks in short order. The Norcross management
+is having plenty of trouble&mdash;wrecks and the like. With Norcross locked
+up, New York will be heard from, and Dismuke will step in and clean
+house. That will wind up the reform spasm."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis a small chance," growled the chief of the ward heelers. "Th'
+high-brow vote is stirrin', and there'll be some to say it's
+persecution&mdash;and say it where it'll be heard. I'll talk it over with the
+Big Fellow."</p>
+
+<p>Again Hatch leaned forward and put his hands on his knees.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll do nothing of the sort, Pete. You'll act, and act on your own
+responsibility. If you don't, somebody may wire the sheriff of Silver
+Bow County, Montana, that the man he knew in Butte as Michael Clancy
+is...."</p>
+
+<p>The dive-keeper put up both hands as if to ward off a blow.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis enough," he mumbled, speaking as if he had a bunch of dry cotton
+in his mouth. "Slip me th' warrant."</p>
+
+<p>Hatch went to a small safe and worked the combination. When the door was
+opened he passed a folded paper to Clanahan. Through all this talk,
+Henckel had said nothing, and I suspected that Hatch had him there
+solely for safety's sake, and to provide a witness. With the paper in
+his pocket, Clanahan got up to go. It was time for me to make a move.</p>
+
+<p>It's curious how an idea will sometimes lay hold of you and knock out
+reason and common sense and everything else. Clanahan had in his pocket
+a piece of paper that simply meant ruin to Mr. Norcross, and the blowing
+up of all the plans that had been made and all the work that had been
+done. If he should be allowed to get up-town with that warrant, the end
+of everything would be in sight. But how was I to prevent it?</p>
+
+<p>I saw where the Irishman had put the warrant; in the right-hand, outside
+pocket of his coat. The pocket wasn't deep enough, and about an inch of
+the folded paper showed white against the black of his coat. The three
+men were on their feet, and Hatch was reaching for the wall switch which
+controlled the single incandescent lamp hanging from the ceiling of the
+scale-house. If I could only think of some way to blow the place up and
+snatch the paper in the confusion.</p>
+
+<p>Up to that minute I had never thought once of the pistol I had taken
+from Fred May's drawer, though it was still sagging in my left hip
+pocket. When I did think of it I dragged it out with some silly notion
+of trying to hold the three men up at the door of the shack as they came
+out. Hatch's stop to light a cigar and to hand out a couple to the
+other two gave me time to chuck that notion and grab another. With the
+muzzle of the automatic resting in the crack of the opened window I took
+dead aim at the incandescent lamp in the ceiling and turned her loose
+for the whole magazineful.</p>
+
+<p>Since the first bullet got the lamp and left the place black dark, I
+couldn't see what was happening in the close little room. But whatever
+it was, there was plenty of it. I could hear them gasping and yelling
+and knocking one another down as they fought to get the door open.
+Sticking the empty pistol back into my pocket I jumped to get action,
+hurting my sore hand like the mischief in doing it.</p>
+
+<p>Hatch was the first man out, but the big German was so close a second
+that he knocked his smaller partner down and fell over him. Clanahan
+kept his feet. He had a gun in his hand that looked to me, in the
+darkness, as big as a cannon. I was flattened against the side of the
+scale shack, and when the dive-keeper tried to side-step around the two
+fallen men who were blocking the way, I snatched the folded paper from
+his pocket; snatched it and ran as if the dickens was after me.</p>
+
+<p>That was a bad move&mdash;the runaway. If I had kept still there might have
+been a chance for me to make a sneak. But when I ran, and fell over a
+pile of loose coal, and got up and ran again, they were all three after
+me, Clanahan taking blind shots in the dark with his cannon as he came.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, I made straight for the wagon gate, and forgot, until I was
+right there, that it, and the wicket through one of the leaves, were
+both locked. As I shook the wicket, a bullet from Clanahan's gun spatted
+into the woodwork and stuck a splinter into my hand, and I turned and
+sprinted again, this time for the gates where the coal cars were pushed
+in from the railroad yard. These, too, were shut and locked, and when I
+ducked under the nearest gondola I realized that I was trapped. Before I
+could climb the high fence anywhere, they'd get me.</p>
+
+<p>They came up, all three of them, puffing and blowing, while I was hiding
+under the gondola.</p>
+
+<p>"It's probably that cow-boy spotter of Norcross's, but he can't get
+away," Hatch was gritting&mdash;meaning Tarbell, probably. "The gates are
+locked and we can plug him if he tries to climb the fence. There's a gun
+in the scale-house. You two look under these cars while I go and get
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>It was up to me to move again. Henckel was striking matches and holding
+them so that Clanahan could look under the cars, and I could feel, in
+anticipation, the shock of a bullet from the big gun in the
+dive-keeper's fat fist as I crawled cautiously out on the far side.
+Creeping along behind the string of coal cars I came presently to the
+great gantry crane used for unloading the fuel. It was a huge traveling
+machine, straddling the tracks and a good part of the yard, and the
+clam-shell grab-bucket was down, resting on its two lips on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>At first I thought of climbing to the frame-work of the crane and trying
+to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the
+clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze
+in. If they were looking for a full-sized man&mdash;Tarbell, for instance,
+who was as husky as a farm-hand&mdash;they'd never think of that crack in the
+bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped
+opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the
+clam-shell.</p>
+
+<p>That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they
+combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch
+had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man
+might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the
+three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack
+between the bucket halves and touched them.</p>
+
+<p>"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel.
+And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"</p>
+
+<p>Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner
+or later.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."</p>
+
+<p>Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And
+I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out
+when he whirled upon the Irishman.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a
+thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this
+country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And
+what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a
+belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and
+wanting to know what all the shooting was about.</p>
+
+<p>It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in
+silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all
+bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and
+make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done.
+With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance
+offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of
+murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal
+tangle and had put him in peril of his life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Man at the Window</h3>
+
+
+<p>Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in
+the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy
+enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say
+much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask
+the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland
+right-of-way squabble.</p>
+
+<p>But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning
+up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it
+that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding
+Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know
+anything about that part of it&mdash;he was such a square fighter himself
+that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, things grew warmer and warmer in the tussle we were making to
+pull the old Short Line out of the mud; warmer in a number of ways,
+because, in addition to the fight for the public confidence, we began
+just then to have a perfect epidemic of wrecks.</p>
+
+<p>The boss turned the material trouble over to Mr. Van Britt and devoted
+himself pretty strictly to the public side of things. Everywhere, and on
+every occasion&mdash;at dinners at the different chambers of commerce, and
+public banquets given to this, that, or the other visiting big-wig&mdash;he
+was always ready to get on his feet and tell the people that the true
+prosperity of the country carried with it the prosperity of the
+railroads; that the two things were one and inseparable; and that, when
+it came right down to basic facts, the railroads were really a part of
+the progress machinery of the country at large and should be regarded,
+not as alien tax-collectors, but as contributors to the general
+prosperity and welfare.</p>
+
+<p>I went with him on a good many of the trips he made to be "among those
+present" at these gatherings&mdash;and so, by the way, did Tarbell&mdash;and it
+was plain to be seen that the new idea was gradually gathering a little
+headway. By this time, also, Red Tower Consolidated was beginning to
+find out what it meant to have active competition. The C. S. &amp; W. people
+were hammering their new plants into working shape, and they were
+getting the patronage, both of the producers and consumers, hand over
+fist.</p>
+
+<p>Engineered by Billoughby, the railroad was simply playing the part of
+the good big brother to these new middlemen. Track facilities and yard
+service were granted freely; and while no discrimination was permitted
+as against the Red Tower people, the friendly attitude of the road
+counted for something, as it was bound to; hence, the C. S. &amp; W. got the
+business right from the jump, enlarging its field as it went along, and
+gathering in all the little side monopolies like the ice-plants, and
+city lighting installations, and so on. This, by the way, was in line
+with the new slogan put out by the boss and his boosters: "Own your own
+Utilities."</p>
+
+<p>As to the political struggle which was now ripping the State wide open
+from end to end, the boss was steel and iron on the side of
+non-interference. He never allowed himself to say a public word on
+either side; never spoke of the campaign at all except to assert
+everywhere and at all times that the railroad was not in politics, and
+never would be again.</p>
+
+<p>This was the key-word given to the different members of the staff to be
+passed on down the line to every official in authority. We were to be
+like Cæsar's wife&mdash;above suspicion. We were neither to make nor meddle
+in the campaign, and any department head or other officer or employee
+caught trying to swing the railroad vote would be fired on the spot.</p>
+
+<p>On one of our trips over the road we had a call from Mr. Anson Burrell,
+the gubernatorial candidate who was making the race against the
+machine. He was a cattle magnate of the modern sort; a big,
+viking-looking man, with a Yale degree, and with a record as clean as a
+hound's tooth. When he came into the private car he seemed to fill it,
+not only with his presence, but with the fresh keen air of the grazing
+uplands.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad to have a chance to meet you on your own ground, Mr.
+Norcross," he said, giving the boss a hand-grip that looked mighty
+hearty and sincere. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell you
+how much we appreciate the stand you have taken. For the first time in
+its history, the railroad is keeping out of the political fight; I know
+it, and the people are beginning to find it out, too. You may not mean
+it that way, but it is the strongest card you could play. You need just
+legislation, and there is no better way to get it than by not trying to
+influence it."</p>
+
+<p>The boss met him half-way on that, of course, and said what he ought to;
+and they talked along that line for the full half-hour that our special
+stopped in the town where Mr. Burrell had caught us. In a way, it was a
+sort of temptation to take sides. Mr. Burrell made it pretty plain that
+if the railroad continued to behave itself, and if the reform party got
+in, there would be easier legislation, and perhaps some of the old
+hard-and-fast intrastate rate laws repealed. But the boss wasn't the
+man to drop his candy in the dirt, and he kept right on laying down the
+law to everybody in the service; we were to let the campaign absolutely
+alone, and every man was to vote as he thought best.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, I was a little surprised to see that Hatch and his
+gunmen side partners under Pete Clanahan made no further move; at least,
+not toward keeping cases on Mr. Norcross. Though Tarbell and I still
+went everywhere with him, we saw no more shadowers. I put it up that
+perhaps they were lying quiet because they knew that somebody had
+overheard their talk in the coal yard scale-house and they were waiting
+for the thing to blow over a little. All of us who were on the inside
+felt that the move was only postponed, and that when it did come it
+would be a center shot. But there was nothing we could do. We could only
+hang on and keep a sharp eye to windward.</p>
+
+<p>During those few pre-election weeks the New York end of us seemed to
+have petered out completely. We heard nothing more from President
+Dunton, worse than an occasional wire complaint about the number of
+wrecks we were having, though the stock was still going down, point by
+point, and, so far as a man up a tree could see, we were making no
+attempt to show net earnings&mdash;were turning all our money into
+betterments as fast as it came in. I knew that couldn't go on. Without a
+flurry of some sort, the New Yorkers would never be able to break even,
+to say nothing of a profit, and I looked every day for a howl that would
+tear things straight up the back.</p>
+
+<p>While all these threads were weaving along, I'm sorry to say that I
+hadn't yet drummed up the courage to tell the boss the truth about Mrs.
+Sheila. He kept on going to the major's every chance he had, and Maisie
+Ann was making life miserable for me because I hadn't told him&mdash;calling
+me a coward and everything under the sun. I told her to tell him
+herself, and she retorted that I knew she couldn't: that it was my job
+and nobody else's. We fussed over it a lot; and because I most always
+contrived some excuse to chase out to the Kendrick house at the boss's
+heels&mdash;merely to help Tarbell keep cases on him&mdash;there were plenty of
+chances for the fussing.</p>
+
+<p>It was on one of these chasing trips to "Kenwood" that the roof fell in.
+The major had gone out somewhere&mdash;to the theater, I guess&mdash;taking his
+wife and Maisie Ann, and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together
+in the major's den, with a little coal blaze in the basket grate because
+the nights were beginning to get a bit chilly.</p>
+
+<p>As usual when they were together, they made no attempt at privacy: the
+den doorway had no door, nothing but one of those Japanese curtains
+made out of bits of bamboo strung like beads on a lot of strings. I had
+butted in with a telegram&mdash;which might just as well have stood over
+until the next morning, if you want to know. After I had delivered it,
+Mrs. Sheila gave me that funny little laugh of hers and told me to go
+hunt in the pantry and see if I could find a piece of pie, and the boss
+added that if I'd wait, he'd go back to town with me pretty soon.</p>
+
+<p>I found the pie, and ate it in the dining-room, making noise enough
+about it so that they could know I was there if they wanted to. But they
+went right on talking, and paid no attention to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, Sheila"&mdash;they had long since got past the "Mr." and
+"Mrs."&mdash;"you've been the greatest possible help to me in this
+rough-house, all the way along," the boss was saying. "And I don't
+understand how you, or any woman, can plan so clearly and logically to a
+purely business end. I was just thinking to-night as I came out here:
+you have given me nearly every suggestion I have had that was worth
+anything; more than that, you have held me up to the rack, time and
+again, when I have been ready to throw it all up and let go. Why have
+you done it?"</p>
+
+<p>I heard the little laugh again, and she said: "It is worth something to
+have a friend. Odd as it may seem, Graham, I have been singularly
+poverty-stricken in that respect. And I have wanted to see you succeed.
+Though you are still calling it merely a 'business deal,' it is really a
+mission, you know, crammed full of good things to a struggling world. If
+you do succeed&mdash;and I am sure you are going to&mdash;you will leave this
+community, and hundreds of others, vastly the better for what you are
+doing and demonstrating."</p>
+
+<p>"But that is a man's point of view," the boss persisted. "How do you get
+it? You are all woman, you know; and your mixing and mingling&mdash;at least,
+since I have known you&mdash;has all been purely social. How do you get the
+big overlook?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I was foolish and frivolous once, like most young girls,
+I suppose. But we all grow older; and we ought to grow wiser. Besides,
+the woman has the advantage of the man in one respect; she has time to
+think and plan and reason things out as a busy man can't have. Your
+problem has seemed very simple to me, from the very beginning. It asked
+only for a strong man and an honest one. You were to take charge of a
+piece of property that had been abused and knocked about and used as a
+means of extortion and oppression, and you were to make it good."</p>
+
+<p>"Again, that is a man's point of view."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she protested quickly. "There is no sex in ethics. Women are
+the natural house-cleaners, perhaps, but that isn't saying that a man
+can't be one, too, if he wants to be."</p>
+
+<p>At this, the boss got up and began to tramp up and down the room; I
+could hear him. I knew she'd been having the biggest kind of a job to
+keep him shut up in this sort of abstract corral, when all the time he
+was loving her fit to kill, but apparently she had been doing it,
+successfully. There wasn't the faintest breath of sentiment in the air;
+not the slightest whiff. When she began again, I could somehow feel that
+she was just in time to prevent his breaking out into all sorts of
+love-making. I shouldn't wonder if that was the way it had been from the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>"The time has come, now, when you must take another leaf out of my
+book," she said, with just the proper little cooling tang in her voice.
+"Up to the present you have been hammering your way to the end like a
+strong man, and that was right. But you have been more or less
+reckless&mdash;and that isn't right or fair or just to a lot of other
+people."</p>
+
+<p>The tramping stopped and I heard him say: "I don't know what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that matters have come to such a pass now that you can't afford
+to take any risks&mdash;personal risks. The enmity that caused you to be
+kidnapped and carried away into the mountains still exists, and exists
+in even greater measure. It hasn't stopped fighting you for a single
+minute, and if the plan it is now trying doesn't work, it will try
+another and a more desperate one."</p>
+
+<p>"You've been talking to Ripley," he laughed. "Ripley wants me to become
+a gun-toter and provide myself with a body-guard. I'd look well,
+wouldn't I? But what do you mean by 'the plan it is now trying'?"</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated a little, and then said: "I shall make no charges, because
+I have no proof. But I read the newspapers, and Mr. Van Britt tells me
+something, now and then. You are having a terrible lot of wrecks."</p>
+
+<p>"That is merely bad luck," he rejoined easily, adding: "And the wrecks
+have nothing to do with my personal safety."</p>
+
+<p>"Rashness is no part of true courage," she interpolated, calmly. "As a
+private individual you might say that your life is your own, and that
+you have a perfect right to risk it as you please. But as the general
+manager of the railroad, with a lot of your friends holding office under
+you, you can't say that. Besides, you are fighting for a cause, and that
+cause will stand or fall with you."</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to be a member of this new reform legislature that some of
+our good friends think is coming up the pike," he chuckled; but she
+ignored the good-natured gibe and made him listen.</p>
+
+<p>"I was visiting a day or two at the capital last week, and there are
+influences at work that you don't know about. It has grown away past and
+beyond any mere fight with the Hatch people. If the opposition can't
+make your administration a failure, it won't hesitate to get rid of you
+in the easiest way that offers."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence in the major's den for a minute or so, and then the
+boss said:</p>
+
+<p>"As usual, you know more than you are willing to tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not," was the prompt answer. "Perhaps I am only the
+onlooker&mdash;who can usually see things rather better than the persons
+actually involved. Hitherto I have urged you to be bold, and then again
+to be bold. Now I am begging you to be prudent."</p>
+
+<p>"In what way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Careful for yourself. For example: you walked out here this evening;
+don't do that any more. Come in a taxi&mdash;and don't come alone."</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't see his frown of disagreement, but I knew well enough it was
+there.</p>
+
+<p>"There spoke the woman in you," he said. "If I should show the white
+feather that way, they'd have some excuse for potting me."</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence again, and I got up quietly and crossed the
+dining-room to the big recessed window where I stood looking out into
+the darkness of the tree-shaded lawn. It was pretty evident that Mrs.
+Sheila knew a heap more than she was telling the boss, just as he had
+said, and I couldn't help wondering how she came to know it. What she
+said about the increased number of wrecks looked like a pointer. Was she
+in touch with the enemy in some way?</p>
+
+<p>I knew that Major Kendrick heard all the gossip of the streets and the
+clubs, and that he carried a good bit of it home; but that wouldn't
+account for much inside knowledge of the real thing in Mrs. Sheila. Then
+my mind went back in a flash to what Maisie Ann had told me. Was the
+husband who ought to be dead, and wasn't, mixed up in it in any way?
+Could it be possible that he was one of those who were in the fight on
+the other side, and that she was still keeping in touch with him?</p>
+
+<p>Pretty soon I heard the murmur of their voices again, but now I was so
+far away from the bamboo-screened door that I couldn't hear what they
+were saying. I wished they would break it off so the boss could go. It
+was getting late, and there had been enough said to make me wish we were
+both safely back in the hotel. It's that way sometimes, you know, in
+spite of all you can do. You hear a talk, and you can't help reading
+between the lines. I knew, as well as I knew that I was alive, that
+Mrs. Sheila meant more than she had said: perhaps more than she had
+dared to say.</p>
+
+<p>It was while I was standing there in the big window, sweating over the
+way the talk in the other room was dragging itself out, that I saw the
+man on the lawn. At first I thought it was Tarbell, who was never very
+far out of reach when the boss was running loose. But the next minute I
+saw I was mistaken. The man under the trees looked as if he might be an
+English tourist. He had on a long traveling coat that came nearly to his
+heels, and his cap was the kind that has two visors, one in front and
+the other behind.</p>
+
+<p>Realizing that it wasn't Tarbell, I stood perfectly still. The house was
+lighted with gas, and the dining-room chandelier had been turned down,
+so there was a chance that the skulker under the trees wouldn't see me
+standing in the corner of the box window. To make it surer, I edged away
+until the curtain hid me. I was just in time. The man had crept out of
+his hiding-place and was coming up to the window on the outside. As he
+passed through the dim beam of light thrown by the turned-down
+chandelier, I saw that he had a pistol in his hand, or a weapon of some
+kind; anyway, I caught the glint of the gas-light on dull steel.</p>
+
+<p>That stirred me up good and plenty. I still had the gun I had taken out
+of Fred May's drawer; I had carried it ever since the night when it had
+mighty nearly got me killed off in the Red Tower coal yard. I fished it
+out and made ready, thinking, of course, that the skulker must certainly
+be one of Clanahan's gunmen. I still had that idea when I felt, rather
+than saw, that the man was pulling himself up to the window so that he
+could take a look into the dining-room.</p>
+
+<p>The look satisfied him, apparently, for the next second I heard him drop
+among the bushes; and when I stood up and looked out again I could just
+make him out going around toward the back of the house. Thanks to Maisie
+Ann and the pantry excursions, I knew the house like a book, and without
+making any noise about it I slipped through the butler's pantry and got
+a look out of a rear window. My man was there, and he was working his
+way sort of blindly around to the den side of the place.</p>
+
+<p>I guess maybe I ought to have given the alarm. But I knew there was only
+one window in the major's den room, and that was nearly opposite the
+screened doorway. So I ducked back into the dining-room and took a stand
+where I could see the one window through the door-curtain net-work of
+bamboo beads. I was so excited that I caught only snatches of what Mrs.
+Sheila was saying to the boss, but the bits that I heard were a good
+deal to the point.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I mean it, Graham ... it is as I told you at first ... there is no
+standing room for either of us on that ground ... and you must not come
+here again when you know that I am alone.... No, Jimmie <i>isn't</i> enough!"</p>
+
+<p>I wrenched the half-working ear-sense aside and jammed it into my eyes,
+concentrating hard on the window at which I expected every second to see
+a man's face. If the man was a murderer, I thought I could beat him to
+it. He would have to look in first before he could fire; and the boss
+and Mrs. Sheila were at the other end of the room, sitting before the
+little blaze in the grate.</p>
+
+<p>The suspense didn't last very long. A hand came up first to push the
+window vines aside. It was a white hand, long and slender, more like a
+woman's than a man's. Then against the glass I saw the face, and it gave
+me such a turn that I thought I must be going batty.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of the ugly mug of one of Clanahan's gunmen, the haggard face
+framed in the window sash was a face that I had seen once&mdash;and only
+once&mdash;before; on a certain Sunday night in the Bullard when the
+loose-lipped mouth belonging to it had been babbling drunken curses at
+the night clerk. The man at the window was the dissipated young rounder
+who had been pointed out as the nephew of President Dunton.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Name on the Register</h3>
+
+
+<p>So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one
+of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought
+I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I
+really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough
+question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the
+sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the
+other side of that window&mdash;and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw
+that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.</p>
+
+<p>What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major
+Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and
+peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the
+beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the
+sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end
+of the room where the fireplace was.</p>
+
+<p>Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he
+should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either
+the boss or Mrs. Sheila&mdash;if that was what he was aiming to do. All the
+same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the
+door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's
+nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.</p>
+
+<p>While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his
+cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the
+boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as
+usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."</p>
+
+<p>Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and
+stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick
+padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the
+rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major
+and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol
+and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt
+the boss's hand on my shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a
+minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs.
+Kendrick, we got out.</p>
+
+<p>At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With
+the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I
+grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for
+us.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man
+stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something
+to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on
+the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and
+started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and
+put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.</p>
+
+<p>When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I
+had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it
+over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names
+written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I
+found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y."
+Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had
+come in from the West&mdash;which was a bit puzzling, since it left the
+inference that he wasn't direct from New York.</p>
+
+<p>Waiting for a good chance at the night clerk, I ventured a few
+questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwood
+<i>had</i> come in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week
+earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now,
+but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on
+the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk
+didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for
+me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the
+badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr.
+Bullock was a lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all
+conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising,
+early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same,
+after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box,
+I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my
+eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder
+should show up.</p>
+
+<p>That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep
+habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or
+whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage
+porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express
+westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with
+two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.</p>
+
+<p>When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night
+clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his
+grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto
+so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone
+for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next
+got a sight of him&mdash;from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of
+the bar-room colonnade&mdash;he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if
+it were water and he on fire inside.</p>
+
+<p>That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to
+the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train
+auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had
+found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of
+nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was
+getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and
+made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open
+register.</p>
+
+<p>A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying
+lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never
+showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash.
+When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our
+maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to
+obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master
+of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what
+the name was.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>The Hoodoo</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard
+café&mdash;the boss and I&mdash;that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck.
+The story was red-headlined in the <i>Morning Herald</i>&mdash;the Hatch-owned
+paper&mdash;and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns,
+there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.</p>
+
+<p>At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the
+track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a
+delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no
+lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal
+clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.</p>
+
+<p>The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the
+Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such
+thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the
+rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with
+this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried
+department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college
+friends&mdash;which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only
+millionaire.</p>
+
+<p>Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As
+I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With
+the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new
+"public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a
+single week without smashing something.</p>
+
+<p>Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross
+management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and
+nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors
+into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising
+storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and
+afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office,
+Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own
+copy of the <i>Herald</i>. "Did you read that editorial?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see
+in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind the newspaper talk," the boss interjected. "How bad is the
+trouble this time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty bad. I've just had Brockman on the wire from Alicante. The
+freight is practically a total loss; a good half of it is in the river.
+Kirgan says he can pick the freight engine up and rebuild it; but the
+passenger machine is a wreck."</p>
+
+<p>"How did it happen?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's like a good many of the others. Nobody seems to know. Brockman put
+the freight engine crew on the rack, and they say there was a small
+boulder on the track&mdash;that it rolled down the canyon slope just ahead of
+them as they were turning a curve. They struck it, and both men say that
+the engine knocked it off into the river apparently without hurting
+anything. But two seconds later the entire train left the track and
+piled up all over the right-of-way."</p>
+
+<p>"The engineer and fireman weren't hurt?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; they both jumped on the high side. But, of course, they were pretty
+badly shaken up. Riggs, the fireman, got out of the raffle first and
+tried to flag the passenger train, but he was too late."</p>
+
+<p>The boss was sitting back in his chair and making little rings on the
+desk blotter with the point of his letter-opener.</p>
+
+<p>"Upton, these knock-outs have got to be stopped."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord!" exclaimed the little millionaire; "you don't have to tell
+me that! If we can't stop 'em, Uncle Dunton will have plenty of good
+reasons for cleaning us all out, lock, stock, and barrel! I was talking
+with Carter, in the claim office, this morning. Our loss and damage
+account for the past month is something frightful!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said the boss gravely. And then: "Upton, we're not altogether
+as bright as we might be. Has it never occurred to you that we are
+having too much bad luck to warrant us in charging it all up to the
+chapter of accidents?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt blew his cheeks out until the stubby, cropped mustache
+bristled like porcupine quills.</p>
+
+<p>"So you've been getting your pointer, too, have you?" he threw in.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross didn't answer the question directly.</p>
+
+<p>"Put Tarbell on the job, and if he needs help, let him pick his own
+men," he directed. "We want to know why that boulder tumbled down ahead
+of Number Seventeen, and I want to see Tarbell's report on it. Keep at
+it night and day, Upton. The infection is getting into the rank and file
+and it's spreading like a sickness. You've railroaded long enough to
+know what that means. If it becomes psychological, we shall have all the
+trouble we need."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," nodded the superintendent. "I went through a siege of that
+kind on the Great Southwestern, one winter. It was horrible. Men who had
+been running trains year in and year out, and never knowing that they
+had any nerves, went to pieces if you'd snap your fingers at them."</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," said the boss. "We don't want to fall into that ditch.
+Things are quite bad enough, as they are."</p>
+
+<p>This ended it for the time. The Petrolite Canyon wreck was picked up,
+the track was cleared, and once more our trains were moving on time. But
+anybody could see that the entire Short Line had a case of "nerves."
+Kirgan, Kirgan the cold-blooded, showed it one afternoon when I went
+over to his office to return a bunch of blue-prints sent in for the
+boss's approval. The big master-mechanic had a round-house foreman "on
+the carpet" and was harrying him like the dickens for letting an engine
+go out with one of her truck safety chains hanging loose.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since we had gone together on the rescue run to Timber Mountain,
+Mart and I had been sort of chummy, and after the foreman had gone away
+with his foot in his hand, I joshed Kirgan a little about the way he had
+hammered the round-house man.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe I did, Jimmie," he said, half as if he were already sorry for the
+cussing out. "But the shape we're getting into is enough to make an
+angel bawl. Why, Great Moses! a crew can't take an engine out here in
+the yard to do a common job o' switchin' without breakin' something 'r
+hurtin' somebody!"</p>
+
+<p>"Bad medicine," I told him. "It's worrying the bosses, too. What's doing
+it, Mart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe you can tell," he growled. "It's a hoodoo&mdash;that's what <i>it</i> is.
+Seven engines in the shops in the last nine days, and three more that
+haven't been fished out-a the ditch yet. I wish Mr. Van Britt 'd fire
+the whole jumpy outfit!"</p>
+
+<p>It didn't seem as though firing was needed so much as a dose of nerve
+tonic of some sort. Tarbell was working hard on the problem, quietly,
+and without making any talk about it, and Kirgan was giving him all the
+men he asked for from the shops; quick-witted fellows who were up in all
+the mechanical details, and who made better spotters than outsiders
+would because they knew the road and the ropes. But it was no use. I saw
+some of Tarbell's reports, and they didn't show any crookedness. It
+seemed to be just bad luck&mdash;one landslide after another of it.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, New York had waked up again. President Dunton had been off
+the job somewhere, I guess, but now he was back, and the things he wired
+to the boss were enough to make your hair stand on end. I looked every
+day to see Mr. Norcross pitch the whole shooting-match into the fire
+and quit, cold.</p>
+
+<p>He'd never taken anything like Mr. Dunton's abuse from anybody before,
+and he couldn't seem to get hardened to it. But he was loyal to Mr.
+Chadwick; and, of course, he knew that Mr. Dunton's hot wires were meant
+to nag him into resigning. Then there was Mrs. Sheila. I sort of
+suspected she was holding him up to the rack, every day and every minute
+of the day. No doubt she was.</p>
+
+<p>It was one evening after he had been out to the major's for just a
+little while, and had come back to the office, that he sent for Mr. Van
+Britt, who was also working late. There was blood on the moon, and I saw
+it in the way the boss's jaw was working.</p>
+
+<p>"Upton," he began, as short as pie-crust, "have you thought of any way
+to break this wreck hoodoo yet?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt sat down and crossed his solid little legs.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had, I shouldn't be losing sleep at the rate of five or six hours
+a night," he rasped.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing that we haven't tried," the boss shot back. "We've
+been advertising it as bad luck, keeping our own suspicions to ourselves
+and letting the men believe what they pleased. We'll change all that. I
+want you to call your trainmen in as fast as you can get at them. Tell
+them&mdash;from me, if you want to&mdash;that there isn't any bad luck about it;
+that the enemies of this management are making an organized raid on the
+property itself for the purpose of putting us out of the fight. Tell
+them the whole story, if you want to: how we're trying our best to make
+a spoon out of a spoiled horn, and how there is an army of grafters and
+wreckers in this State which is doing its worst to knock us out of the
+box."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt uncrossed his legs and sat staring for a second or two.
+Then he whistled and said: "By Jove! Have you caught 'em with the goods,
+at last?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," was the curt reply. "Call it a ruse, if you like: it's
+justifiable, and it will work. If you give the force something tangible
+to lay hold of, it will work the needed miracle. It is only the
+mysterious that terrifies. Railroad employees, as a whole, are perfectly
+intelligent human beings, open to conviction. The management which
+doesn't profit by that fact is lame. If you do this and appeal to the
+loyalty of the men, you will make a private detective out of every man
+in the train service, and every one of them keen to be the first to
+catch the wreckers. You can add a bit of a reward for that, if you like,
+and I'll pay it out of my own bank account."</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute our captive millionaire didn't say a word. Then he
+grinned like a good-natured little Chinese god.</p>
+
+<p>"Who gave you this idea of taking the pay-roll into your confidence,
+Graham?" he asked softly.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in all the weeks and months I'd been knowing him, the
+boss dodged; dodged just like any of us might.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been talking to Major Kendrick," he said. "He is a wise old man,
+Upton, and he hears a good many things that don't get printed in the
+newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>I could see that this excuse didn't fool Mr. Van Britt for a single
+instant, and there was a look in his eye that I couldn't quite
+understand. Neither could I make much out of what he said.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go into that a little deeper some day, Graham&mdash;after this
+epileptic attack has been fought off. This idea&mdash;which you confess isn't
+your own&mdash;is a pretty shrewd one, and I shouldn't wonder if it would
+work, if we can get it in motion before the hoodoo breaks us wide open.
+And, as you say, the accusation is justifiable, even if we can't prove
+up against the Hatch outfit. That turned-over rail in Petrolite Canyon,
+for example, might have been helped along by&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was Kelso, Mr. Van Britt's stenographer, who smashed in with the
+interruption. He was in his shirt-sleeves, as if he'd just got up from
+his typewriter, and he rushed in with his mouth open and his eyes like
+saucers.</p>
+
+<p>"They&mdash;they want you in the despatcher's office!" he panted, jerking the
+words out at Mr. Van Britt. "Durgin has let Number Five get by for a
+head-ender with the 'Flyer,' and he's gone crazy!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<h3>The Helpless Wires</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Bobby Kelso shot his news at us we all made a quick break for the
+despatcher's office, the boss in the lead. It was a big bare room
+flanking Mr. Van Britt's quarters at the western end of the second floor
+corridor and the windows looked out upon the yard twinkling with its red
+and yellow and green switch lights.</p>
+
+<p>Durgin, the night despatcher, had been alone on the train desk, and the
+only other operators on duty were the car-record man and the young
+fellow who acted as a relief on the commercial wire. When we got there,
+we found that Tarbell had happened to be in the office when Durgin blew
+up. He was sitting in at the train key, trying to get the one
+intermediate wire station between the two trains that had failed to get
+their "meet" orders, and this was the first I knew that he really was
+the expert telegraph operator that his pay-roll description said he was.</p>
+
+<p>Durgin looked like a tortured ghost. He was a thin, dark man with a
+sort of scattering beard and limp black hair; one of the clearest-headed
+despatchers in the bunch, and the very last man, you'd say, to get
+rattled in a tangle-up. Yet here he was, hunched in a chair at the
+car-record table in the corner, a staring-eyed, pallid-faced wreck, with
+the sweat standing in big drops on his forehead and his hands shaking as
+if he had the palsy.</p>
+
+<p>Morris, the relief man, gave us the particulars, such as they were,
+speaking in a hushed voice as if he was afraid of breaking in on
+Tarbell's steady rattling of the key in the Crow Gulch station call.</p>
+
+<p>"Number Four"&mdash;Four was the eastbound "Flyer"&mdash;"is five hours off her
+time," he explained. "As near as I can get it, Durgin was going to make
+her 'meet' with Number Five at the blind siding at Sand Creek tank. She
+ought to have had her orders somewhere west of Bauxite Junction, and
+Five ought to have got hers at Banta. Durgin says he simply forgot that
+the 'Flyer' was running late: that she was still out and had a 'meet' to
+make somewhere with Five."</p>
+
+<p>Brief as Morris's explanation was, it was clear enough for anybody who
+knew the road and the schedules. The regular meeting-point for the two
+passenger trains was at a point well east of Portal City, instead of
+west, and so, of course, would not concern the Desert Division crew of
+either train, since all crews were changed at Portal City. From Banta
+to Bauxite Junction, some thirty-odd miles, there was only one telegraph
+station, namely, that at the Crow Gulch lumber camp, seven miles beyond
+the Timber Mountain "Y" and the gravel pit where the stolen 1016 had
+been abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>Unluckily, Crow Gulch was only a day station, the day wires being
+handled by a young man who was half in the pay of the railroad and half
+in that of the saw-mill company. This young man slept at the mill camp,
+which was a mile back in the gulch. There was only one chance in a
+thousand that he would be down at the railroad station at ten o'clock at
+night, and it was on that thousandth chance that Tarbell was rattling
+the Crow Gulch call. If Five were making her card time, she was now
+about half-way between Timber Mountain "Y" and Crow Gulch. And Four, the
+"Flyer," had just left Bauxite&mdash;with no orders whatever. Which meant
+that the two trains would come together somewhere near Sand Greek, one
+of them, at least, running like the mischief to make up what time she
+could.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt was as good a wire man as anybody on the line, but it was
+the boss who took things in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a long-distance telephone to the Crow Gulch saw-mill; have you
+tried that?" he barked at Tarbell.</p>
+
+<p>The big young fellow who looked like a cow-boy&mdash;and had really been one,
+they said&mdash;glanced up and nodded: "The call's in," he responded.
+"'Central' says she can't raise anybody."</p>
+
+<p>"What was Four's report from Bauxite?"</p>
+
+<p>"Four hours and fifty-two minutes off time."</p>
+
+<p>"That will bring them together somewhere in the hill curves this side of
+Sand Creek," the boss said to Mr. Van Britt; "just where there is the
+least chance of their seeing each other before they hit." Then to
+Tarbell: "Try Bauxite and find out if there is a pusher engine there
+that can be sent out to chase the 'Flyer'."</p>
+
+<p>Tarbell nodded without breaking his monotonous repetition of the Crow
+Gulch call.</p>
+
+<p>"I did that first," he put in. "There's an engine there, and they're
+getting her out. But it's a slim chance; the 'Flyer' has too good a
+start."</p>
+
+<p>For the next three or four minutes the tension was something fierce. The
+boss and Mr. Van Britt hung over the train desk, and Tarbell kept up his
+insistent clatter at the key. I had an eye on Durgin. He was still
+hunched up in the record-man's chair, and to all appearances had gone
+stone-blind crazy. Yet I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was
+listening&mdash;listening as if all of his sealed-up senses had turned in to
+intensify the one of hearing.</p>
+
+<p>Just about the time when the suspense had grown so keen that it seemed
+as if it couldn't be borne a second longer, Morris, who was sitting in
+at the office phone, called out sharply: "Long-distance says she has
+Crow Gulch lumber camp!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt jumped to take the phone, and we got one side of the
+talk&mdash;our side&mdash;in shot-like sentences:</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Bertram? All right; this is Van Britt, at Portal City. Take
+one of the mules and ride for your life down the gulch to the station!
+Get that? Stop Number Five and make her take siding quick. Report over
+your own wire what you do. <i>Hurry!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>By the time Mr. Van Britt got back to the train desk, the boss had his
+pencil out and was figuring on Bertram's time margin. It was now
+ten-twelve, and Five's time at Crow Gulch was ten-eighteen. The Crow
+Gulch operator had just six minutes in which to get his mule and cover
+the rough mile down the gulch.</p>
+
+<p>"He'll never make it," said Tarbell, who knew the gulch road. "Our only
+chance on that lay is that Five may happen to be a few minutes late&mdash;and
+she was right on the dot at Banta."</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to do but wait, and the waiting was savage. Tarbell
+had a nerve of iron, but I could see his hand shake as it lay on the
+glass-topped table. The boss was cool enough outwardly, but I knew that
+in his brain there was a heart-breaking picture of those two fast
+passenger trains rushing together in the night among the hills with no
+hint of warning to help them save themselves. Mr. Van Britt couldn't
+keep still. He had his hands jammed in the side pockets of his coat and
+was pacing back and forth in the little space between the train desk and
+the counter railing.</p>
+
+<p>At the different tables in the room the sounders were clicking away as
+if nothing were happening or due to happen, and above the spattering din
+and clatter you could hear the escapement of the big standard-time clock
+on the wall, hammering out the seconds that might mean life or death to
+two or three hundred innocent people.</p>
+
+<p>In that horrible suspense the six minutes pulled themselves out to an
+eternity for that little bunch of us in the despatcher's office who
+could do nothing but wait. On the stroke of ten-eighteen, the time when
+Five was due at Crow Gulch on her schedule, Tarbell tuned his relay to
+catch the first faint tappings from the distant day-station. Another
+sounder was silent. There was hope in the delay, and Morris voiced it.</p>
+
+<p>"He's there, and he's too busy to talk to us," he suggested, in a hushed
+voice; and Disbrow, the car-record man, added: "That's it; it'd take a
+minute or two to get them in on the siding."</p>
+
+<p>The second minute passed, and then a third, and yet there was no word
+from Bertram. "Call him," snapped the boss to Tarbell, but before the
+ex-cowboy's hand could reach the key, the sounder began to rattle out a
+string of dots and dashes; ragged Morse it was, but we could all read it
+only too plainly.</p>
+
+<p>"Too late&mdash;mule threw me and I had to crawl and drag a game leg&mdash;Five
+passed full speed at ten-nineteen&mdash;I couldn't make it."</p>
+
+<p>I saw the boss's hands shut up as though the finger nails would cut into
+the palms.</p>
+
+<p>"That ends it," he said, with a sort of swearing groan in his voice; and
+then to Tarbell: "You may as well call Kirgan and tell him to order out
+the wrecking train. Then have Perkins make up a relief train while
+you're calling the doctors. Van Britt, you go and notify the hospital
+over your own office wire. Have my private car put into the relief, and
+see to it that it has all the necessary supplies. And you'd better
+notify the undertakers, too."</p>
+
+<p>Great Joash! but it was horrible&mdash;for us to be hustling around and
+making arrangements for the funeral while the people who were to be
+gathered up and buried were still swinging along live and well, half of
+them in the crookings among the Timber Mountain foot-hills and the other
+half somewhere in the desert stretches below Sand Creek!</p>
+
+<p>Tarbell had sent Disbrow to the phone to call Kirgan, and Mr. Van Britt
+was turning away to go to his own office, when the chair in the corner
+by the car-record table fell over backwards with a crash and Durgin came
+staggering across the room. He was staring straight ahead of him as if
+he had gone blind, and the sweat was running down his face to lose
+itself in the straggling beard.</p>
+
+<p>When he spoke his voice seemed to come from away off somewhere, and he
+was still staring at the blank wall beyond the counter-railing.</p>
+
+<p>"Did I&mdash;did I hear somebody say you're sending for the undertakers?" he
+choked, with a dry rattle in his throat; and then, without waiting for
+an answer: "While you're at it, you'd better get one for me ... there's
+the money to pay him," and he tossed a thick roll of bank bills, wrapped
+around with a rubber band, over to Tarbell at the train desk.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, the little grand-stand play with the bank roll made a
+diversion, and that is why the muffled crash of a pistol shot came with
+a startling shock to everybody. When we turned to look, the mischief was
+done. Durgin had crumpled down into a misshapen heap on the floor and
+the sight we saw was enough to make your blood run cold.</p>
+
+<p>You see, he had put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth, and&mdash;but
+it's no use: I can't tell about it, and the very thought of that thing
+that had just a minute before been a man, lying there on the floor
+makes me see black and want to keel over. What he had said about sending
+for an extra undertaker was right as right. With the top of his head
+blown off, the poor devil didn't need anything more in this world except
+the burying.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>Billy Morris Explains</h3>
+
+
+<p>Somebody has said, mighty truthfully, that even a death in the family
+doesn't stop the common routine; that the things that have to be done
+will go grinding on, just the same, whether all of us live, or some of
+us die. Disbrow had jumped from the telephone at the crash of Durgin's
+shot, and for just a second or so we all stood around the dead
+despatcher, nobody making a move.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Norcross came alive with a jerk, telling Disbrow to get back on
+his job of calling out the wreck wagons and the relief train, and
+directing Bobby Kelso to go to another 'phone and call an undertaker to
+come and get Durgin's body. Tarbell turned back to the train desk to
+keep things from getting into a worse tangle than they already were in,
+and to wait for the dreadful news, and the boss stood by him.</p>
+
+<p>This second wait promised to be the worst of all. The collision was due
+to happen miles from the nearest wire station; the news, when we should
+get it, would probably be carried back to Bauxite Junction by the pusher
+engine which had gone out to try to overtake the "Flyer." But even in
+that case it might be an agonizing hour or more before we could hear
+anything.</p>
+
+<p>In a little while Disbrow had clicked in his call to Kirgan, and when
+the undertaker's wagon came to gather up what was left of the dead
+despatcher, the car-record man was hurriedly writing off his list of
+doctors, and Mr. Van Britt had gone down to superintend the making up of
+the relief train. True to his theory, which, among other things, laid
+down the broad principle that the public had a right to be given all the
+facts in a railroad disaster, Mr. Norcross was just telling me to call
+up the <i>Mountaineer</i> office, when Tarbell, calmly inking time reports
+upon the train sheet, flung down his pen and snatched at his key to
+"break" the chattering sounder.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt had come up-stairs again, and he and the boss were both
+standing over Tarbell when the "G-S" break cleared the wire. Instantly
+there came a quick call, "G-S" "G-S," followed by the signature, "B-J"
+for Bauxite Junction. Tarbell answered, and then we all heard what
+Bauxite had to say:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Pusher overtook Number Four three miles west of Sand Creek and has
+brought her back here. What orders for her?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Somebody groaned, "Oh, thank God!" and Mr. Van Britt dropped into a
+chair as if he had been hit by a cannon ball. Only the boss kept his
+head, calling out sharply to Disbrow to break off on the doctors' list
+and to hurry and stop Kirgan from getting away with the wrecking train.
+Then, as curtly as if it were all merely a matter of routine, he told
+Tarbell what to do; how he was to give the "Flyer" orders to wait at
+Bauxite for Number Five, and then to proceed under time-card regulations
+to Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>When it was all over, and Tarbell had been given charge of the
+despatching while a hurry call was sent out for the night relief man,
+Donohue, to come down and take the train desk, there was a little
+committee meeting in the general manager's office, with the boss in the
+chair, and Mr. Van Britt sitting in for the other member.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you've drawn your own conclusions, Upton," the boss began,
+when he had asked me to shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess so," was the grave rejoinder. "I'm afraid it is only too plain
+that Durgin was hired to do it. What became of the money?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have it here," said the boss, and he took the blood-money bank-roll
+from his pocket and removed the rubber band. "Count it, Jimmie," he
+ordered, passing it to me.</p>
+
+<p>I ran through the bunch. It was in twenties and fifties, and there was
+an even thousand dollars.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the price of a man's life," said Mr. Van Britt, soberly, and
+then Mr. Norcross said, "Who knows anything about Durgin? Was he a
+married man?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"He had been married, but he and his wife didn't live together. He had
+no relatives here. I knew him in the southwest two years ago. He'd had
+domestic trouble of some kind, and didn't mix or mingle much with the
+other men. But he was a good despatcher, and two months ago, when we had
+an opening here, I sent for him."</p>
+
+<p>"You think there is no doubt but that he was bribed to put those trains
+together to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"None in the least&mdash;only I wish we had a little better proof of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Where did he live?"</p>
+
+<p>"He boarded at Mrs. Chandler's, out on Cross Street. Morris boards
+there, too, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>The boss turned to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, go and get Morris."</p>
+
+<p>I carried the call and brought Morris back with me. He was a cheerful,
+red-headed fellow, and everybody liked him.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't a 'sweat-box' session, Morris," said the boss, quietly, when
+we came in and the relief operator sat down, sort of half scared, on the
+edge of a chair. "We want to know something more about Durgin. He
+roomed at your place, didn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>Morris admitted it, but said he'd never been very chummy with the
+despatcher; that Durgin wasn't chummy with anybody. Then the boss went
+straight to the point, as he usually did.</p>
+
+<p>"You were present and saw all that happened in the other room. Can you
+tell us anything about that money?" pointing to the pile of bills on my
+desk.</p>
+
+<p>Billy Morris wriggled himself into a little better chair-hold. "Nothing
+that would be worth telling, if things hadn't turned out just as they
+have," he returned. "But now I guess I know. I left Mrs. Chandler's this
+evening about seven o'clock to come on duty, and Durgin was just ahead
+of me. Some fellow&mdash;a man in a snuff-colored overcoat and with a soft
+hat pulled down so that I couldn't see his face&mdash;stopped Durgin on the
+sidewalk, and they talked together."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said Mr. Van Britt.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't hear what was said; I was up on the stoop, trying to make Mrs.
+Chandler's broken door latch work to hold the door shut. But I saw the
+overcoated man pass something to Durgin, and saw Durgin put whatever it
+was into his pocket. Then the other man dodged and went away, and did it
+so quick that I didn't see which way he went or what became of him. I
+walked on down the steps after I had got the door to stay shut and tried
+to overtake Durgin&mdash;just to walk on down here with him. But I guess he
+must have run after he left the corner, for I didn't see anything more
+of him until I got to the office."</p>
+
+<p>"He was there when you came in?" It was Mr. Norcross who wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He had his coat off and was at work on the train sheet."</p>
+
+<p>"That was a little after seven," said Mr. Van Britt. "What happened
+between that and ten o'clock?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. Disbrow was busy at his table, and I had some work to do,
+though not very much. I don't think Durgin left his chair, or said
+anything to anybody until he jumped up and began to walk the floor,
+taking on and saying that he'd put Four and Five together on the single
+track. Just then, Tarbell came in and jumped for the train key, and I
+ran out to give the alarm."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a little time, and then the boss said, "That's
+all, Morris; all but one thing. Do you think you would recognize the man
+in the snuff-colored overcoat, if you should see him again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I might; if he had on the same coat and hat."</p>
+
+<p>"That will do, then. Keep this thing to yourself, and if the newspaper
+people come after you, send them to Mr. Van Britt or to me."</p>
+
+<p>After Morris had gone, Mr. Van Britt shook his head sort of savagely.</p>
+
+<p>"It's hell, Graham!" he ripped out, bouncing to his feet and beginning
+to tramp up and down the room. "To think that these devils would take
+the chance of murdering a lot of totally innocent people to gain their
+end! What are you going to do about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know yet, Upton; but I am going to do something. This state of
+affairs can't go on. The simplest thing is for me to throw up the job
+and let the Short Line drop back into the old rut. I'm not sure that it
+wouldn't save a good many lives in the end if I should do it. And yet it
+seems such a cowardly thing to do&mdash;to resign under fire."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt had his hand on the door-knob, and what he said made me
+warm to my finger-tips.</p>
+
+<p>"We're all standing by you, Graham; all, you understand&mdash;to the last man
+and the last ditch. And you're not going to pitch it up; you're going to
+stay until you have thrown the harpoon into these high-binders, clear up
+to the hitchings. That's my prophecy. The trouble's over for to-night,
+and you'd better go up to the hotel and turn in. There is another day
+coming, or if there isn't, it won't make any difference to any of us.
+Good-night."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>What the Pilot Engine Found</h3>
+
+
+<p>For a time after the suicide of the off-trick-despatcher the wreck
+epidemic paused. Acting upon Mr. Norcross's suggestion, Mr. Van Britt
+called his trainmen in, a crew at a time, and gave them the straight
+tip; and after that the hoodoo died a natural death, and a good many
+pairs of eyes all along the Short Line were keeping a sharp lookout for
+the trouble-makers.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, Tarbell, still digging faithfully, managed to turn up a
+few facts that were worth something. In the Petrolite case he found a
+lone prospector living in a shack high up on the farther side of the
+canyon who told him that late in the evening of the day preceding the
+wreck he had seen two men climbing the slope from which the boulder had
+been dislodged, and that one of them was carrying a pick. Also, further
+investigation seemed to prove that the rail which the blow of the rock
+was supposed to have knocked loose had been previously weakened, either
+by drawing some of the spikes, or by unscrewing the nuts on the bolts at
+the joints.</p>
+
+<p>In another field, and this time under Ripley's instructions, our
+ex-cow-punch' had been able to set and bait a trap. By diligent search
+he had found the man Murphy, the Clanahan henchman, who, under pressure,
+had given away the Timber Mountain plot which had climaxed in the
+kidnapping of the boss. This man had been deliberately shot in a
+bar-room brawl and left for dead. But he had crawled away and had got
+out of town to live and recover at a distant cattle ranch in the
+Limberton Hills.</p>
+
+<p>When Tarbell discovered him he had cut out the booze, had grown a beard,
+and was thirsting for vengeance. Tarbell brought him back to Portal
+City, and presently there began to be developments. Murphy knew all the
+ropes. In a little time, Ripley, with Tarbell's help, was loaded for
+bear. One chilly October afternoon the lawyer came down to our office to
+tell Mr. Norcross that the game was cornered.</p>
+
+<p>"All you have to do now is to give the word," was the way Ripley wound
+up. "You refused to do it on a former occasion because we couldn't get
+the men higher up. This time we can nail Clanahan, and a good few of the
+political gangsters and bosses in the other towns along the line. What
+do you say?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss looked up with the little horse-shoe frown wrinkling between
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Can we get Hatch and Henckel?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; not yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well; then you may lock those papers up in your safe and we'll
+wait. When you can see your way clear to a criminal trial, with Rufus
+Hatch and Gustave Henckel in the prisoner's dock, we'll start the legal
+machinery: but not before."</p>
+
+<p>By now we were right on the eve of the State election. As far as anybody
+could see, the railroad had stayed free and clear of the political
+fight. The boss had kept his promise to maintain neutrality and was
+still keeping it.</p>
+
+<p>At the appointed time the big day dawned, and the political wind-up held
+the center of the stage. So far as we were concerned, it passed off very
+quietly. From the wire gossip that dribbled in during the day it
+appeared that the railroad vote was heavy, though there were neither
+charges nor counter-charges to indicate which way it had been thrown.</p>
+
+<p>Along in the afternoon the newspaper offices began to put out bulletins,
+and by evening the result was no longer doubtful. For the first time in
+years the power of the political machine had been smashed decisively at
+the polls, and on the following morning the <i>Mountaineer</i> announced the
+election of Governor Burrell, with a safe working majority in both
+houses of the Legislature for the Independents.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, there was all sorts of a yell from the other side of the
+fence. Charges were freely made, now, that the railroad had deliberately
+ditched its friends, and all that. Also there were the bluest kind of
+predictions for the future, most of them winding up with the assertion
+that there could be no such thing as true prosperity for the country
+while the Short Line continued under its present management.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the third day after the election, rather late in the
+afternoon, that the boss had a call from a mining promoter named Dawes,
+representing a bunch of mine owners at Strathcona who were having
+trouble with the smelter.</p>
+
+<p>I was busy at the time and didn't pay much attention to what was said,
+but I got the drift of it. The smelter, one of the few Hatch monopolies
+which hadn't been shaken loose as yet, was located in the gulch six
+miles below Strathcona, and it was served exclusively by its own
+industrial railroad, which it was using as a lever to pry an excessive
+hauling charge out of the mine owners. Wouldn't Mr. Norcross try to do
+something about it?</p>
+
+<p>The boss said he'd do anything he could, and asked what the mine owners
+wanted. Dawes said they wanted help; that they were going to hold a mass
+meeting in Strathcona the following morning at nine o'clock. Would it,
+or wouldn't it, be possible for Mr. Norcross to be present at that
+meeting?</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the boss said he'd go. It meant the better part of a night's
+run, special, in the private car, but that didn't make any difference.
+Dawes went away, and before we broke off to go to dinner at the railroad
+club, I was given a memorandum order for the special.</p>
+
+<p>At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest&mdash;Major
+Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State
+capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good
+old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a
+guest at anybody's table.</p>
+
+<p>For a while the table talk&mdash;in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any
+part whatever&mdash;circled around the late landslide election, and what
+Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by
+and by it got around to the railroad situation.</p>
+
+<p>"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't
+over yet&mdash;not by a jugful, suh"&mdash;this isn't just the way the major said
+it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the
+smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs,
+and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been
+done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable
+reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't
+lose sight of that, Graham."</p>
+
+<p>The boss looked up kind of curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more
+than any other," he commented.</p>
+
+<p>The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little
+gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin'
+at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame&mdash;she has, for a
+fact, suh."</p>
+
+<p>"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his
+plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of
+the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand
+how she can do it."</p>
+
+<p>They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good
+many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just
+then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear
+them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then
+some.</p>
+
+<p>The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought
+the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry I can't stay and smoke with you, major," he said, pushing his
+chair back. "But the business grind never lets up. I'm obliged to go to
+Strathcona to-night."</p>
+
+<p>I don't know what the major was going to say to this abrupt break-away:
+the after-dinner social cigar was a sort of religious ceremony with him.
+But whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it, for at that moment a
+telegraph boy came in and handed him a message. He put on his other
+glasses and read the telegram, with his big goatee looking more than
+ever like a dagger and the fierce white mustaches twitching. At the end
+of things he folded the message and put it into his pocket, saying, sort
+of soberly:</p>
+
+<p>"Graham, there are times when Sheila's intuhferences are mighty neah
+uncanny; they are, for a fact, suh. This wire is from her. What do you
+suppose it says?"</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the boss said he couldn't suppose anything about it, and the
+major went on.</p>
+
+<p>"She tells me, in just seven words, not to let you go to Strathcona
+to-night. Now what do you make of that? How on top of God's green earth
+did she know, away off yondeh at the capital, that you were meaning to
+go to Strathcona to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross shook his head. Then he said: "There are wires&mdash;both
+kinds&mdash;though I don't know why anybody should telegraph or telephone the
+capital that I expect to attend a mine-owners' meeting to-morrow
+morning in the big gold camp. That's why I'm going, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"But this warning," the major insisted. "There's a reason for it,
+Graham, as sure as you are bawn!"</p>
+
+<p>Again the boss shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Between you two, you and Sheila, I'm due to acquire a case of nerves. I
+don't know what she has heard, but I can't afford to dodge a business
+appointment. I have wired the Strathcona people that I shall be there
+to-morrow morning, and it is too late to make other arrangements. Sheila
+has merely overheard an echo of the threats that are constantly being
+made by the Hatch sympathizers. It's the aftermath of the election, but
+it's all talk. They're down and out, and they haven't the nerve to
+strike back, now."</p>
+
+<p>That ended matters at the club, and the boss and I walked down to the
+headquarters. The special, with Buck Chandler on the smart little
+eight-wheeler that we always had for the private-car trips, was waiting,
+and at the last minute I thought I wasn't going to get to go.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no need of your putting in a night on the road, Jimmie," said
+the boss, with the kindly thought for other people's comfort that never
+failed him. But after I had begged a little, telling him that he'd need
+somebody to take notes in the mine meeting, he said, "All right," and we
+got aboard and gave the word to Maclise, the conductor, to get his
+clearance and go.</p>
+
+<p>A few minutes later we pulled out and the night run was begun. Like
+every other car the boss had ever owned, the "05" was fitted up as a
+working office, and since he had me along, he opened up a lot of claim
+papers upon which the legal department was giving him the final say-so,
+and we went to work.</p>
+
+<p>For the next two hours I was so busy that I didn't know when we passed
+the various stations. There were no passenger trains to meet, and the
+despatcher was apparently giving us "regardless" rights over everything
+else, since we made no stops. At half-past nine, Mr. Norcross snapped a
+rubber band over the last of the claim files, lighted a pipe, and told
+me I might go to bed if I wanted to; said that he was going himself
+after he'd had a smoke. Just then, Chandler whistled for a station, and,
+looking out of a window, I saw that we were pulling into Bauxite, the
+little wind-blown junction from which the Strathcona branch led away
+into the northern mountains.</p>
+
+<p>Wanting a bite of fresh air before turning in, I got off when we made
+the stop and strolled up to the engine. Maclise was in the office,
+getting orders for the branch, and Chandler was squatting in the gangway
+of the 815 and waiting. Up ahead of us, and too far away for me to read
+the number on her tender, there was a light engine. I thought at first
+it was the pusher which was kept at Bauxite to help heavy freights up
+the branch grades, and I wondered what it was doing out on the branch
+"Y" and in our way.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the pusher out for, Buck?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>Chandler grinned down at me.</p>
+
+<p>"You ain't so much of a railroad man as you might be, Jimmie," he said.
+"That ain't the pusher."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's our first section, runnin' light to Strathcona."</p>
+
+<p>Maybe Chandler was right, that I wasn't much of a railroad man, but I
+savvied the Short Line operating rules well enough to know that it
+wasn't usual to run a light engine, deadheading over the road, as a
+section of a special. Also, I knew that Buck knew it.</p>
+
+<p>With that last little talk over the club dinner-table fresh in mind, I
+began to wonder, but instead of asking Chandler any more questions about
+the engine out ahead, I asked him if I might ride a piece with him up
+the branch; and when he said "Sure," I climbed up and humped myself on
+the fireman's box.</p>
+
+<p>Maclise got his orders in due time and we pulled out. I noticed that
+when he gave Chandler the word, he also made motions with his lantern to
+the engine up ahead and it promptly steamed away, speeding up until it
+had about a half-mile lead and then holding it. That seemed funny, too.
+Though it is a rule that is often broken on all railroads, the different
+sections of a train are supposed to keep at least five minutes apart,
+and our "first" wasn't much more than a minute away from us at any time.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing that struck me as being funny was the way Chandler was
+running. It was only sixty mountain miles up the branch to the big gold
+camp, and we ought to have been able to make it by one o'clock, taking
+it dead easy. But the way Buck was niggling along it looked as if it
+might be going to take us all night.</p>
+
+<p>Just the same, nothing happened. The first ten miles was across a desert
+stretch with only a slightly rising grade, and it was pretty much all
+tangent&mdash;straight line. Beyond the ten-mile station of Nippo we hit the
+mountain proper, climbing it through a dry canyon, with curves that
+blocked off everything fifty feet ahead of the engine, and grades that
+would have made pretty good toboggan slides. The night was fine and
+starlit, but there was no moon and the canyon shadows loomed like huge
+walls to shut us in.</p>
+
+<p>On the reverse curves I could occasionally get a glimpse of the red tail
+lights of the engine which ought, by rights, to have been five full
+minutes ahead of us. It was still holding its short lead, jogging along
+as leisurely as we were.</p>
+
+<p>With nothing to do and not much to see, I got sleepy after a while, and
+about the time when I was thinking that I might as well climb back over
+the tender and turn in, I dozed off right there on the fireman's
+box&mdash;which was safe enough, at the snail's pace we were running. When I
+awoke it was with the feeling that I hadn't been asleep more than a
+minute or two, but the facts were against me. It was nearly one o'clock
+in the morning, and we had worried through the thirty-five miles of
+canyon run and were climbing the steep talus of Slide Mountain.</p>
+
+<p>At first I didn't know what it was that woke me. On my side of the
+engine the big mountain fell away, miles it seemed, on a slope on which
+a man could hardly have kept his footing, and where a train, jumping the
+track, would roll forever before it would stop in the gorges at the
+bottom. While I was rubbing my eyes, the eight-wheeler gave another
+little jerk, and I saw that Chandler was slowing for a stop; saw this
+and got a glimpse of somebody on the track ahead, flagging us down with
+a lantern.</p>
+
+<p>A minute later the brakes had been set and Buck and I were off. As we
+swung down from the engine step, Maclise joined us, and we went to meet
+the man with the lantern. He was the fireman of the engine ahead, and
+when we got around on the track I saw that our "first section" was
+stopped just a little way farther on.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Barty?" said Maclise, when we came up to the fireman.</p>
+
+<p>"It's them hell-fired wreckers again," was the gritting reply. "Rail
+joint disconnected and sprung out so's to let us off down the mountain."</p>
+
+<p>I thought it was up to me to go back and tell the boss, but there wasn't
+any need of it. The stop or the slow running or something had roused
+him, and he was up and dressed and coming along beside the engine. When
+he came up, Maclise told him why we were stopping. He didn't say
+anything about the rail break, but he did ask, sort of sharp and quick,
+what engine that was up ahead.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know what Maclise told him. Chandler turned to go back to his
+engine, and the rest of us were moving along the other way, the boss
+setting the pace with Maclise at his elbow. Three rail-lengths ahead of
+the stopped light engine we came to the break. The head engineer and
+another man were down on their hands and knees examining it, and when
+they stood up at our coming, I saw that the other man was Mr. Van Britt.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" said the boss; "you here?"</p>
+
+<p>Our only millionaire nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I ride the line once in a while&mdash;just to see how things are going," he
+returned crisply.</p>
+
+<p>The boss didn't say anything more, but he knelt to look at the break. It
+was a trap, all right, set, beyond all question of doubt, to catch the
+private-car special. The fish-plates had been removed from a joint in
+the left-hand rail and the end of the downhill rail had been sprung out
+to make a derailing switch, which was held in position by the insertion
+of one of the fish-plates between the rail-webs. If we had hit the trap,
+going at even ordinary mountain-climbing speed, there would have been
+nothing left to tell the tale but a heap of scrap at the bottom of the
+thousand-foot dump.</p>
+
+<p>There wasn't very much talk made by anybody. Under Mr. Van Britt's
+directions the engineer and fireman of the pilot engine brought tools
+and the break was repaired. All they had to do was to spring the bent
+rail back into place and spike it, and bolt the fish-plates on again.</p>
+
+<p>While they were doing it the boss stood aside with Mr. Van Britt, and I
+heard what was said. Mr. Van Britt began it by saying, "We don't need
+any detectives this time. You are on your way to Strathcona to put a
+crimp in the smelter squeeze&mdash;the last of the Red Tower monopolies&mdash;so
+Dawes told me. He was probably foolish enough to tell others, and the
+word was pasted to scrag you before you could get to it. This trap was
+set to catch your special."</p>
+
+<p>"Evidently," barked the boss; and then: "How did you happen to be here
+on that engine, Upton?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been ahead of you all the way up from Portal City," was the calm
+reply. "I thought it might be safer if you had a pilot to show you the
+way. I guess I must have had a hunch."</p>
+
+<p>The boss turned on him like a flash.</p>
+
+<p>"You had something more than a hunch: what was it&mdash;a wire?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt gritted his teeth a little, but he told the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; a friend of ours tipped me off&mdash;not about the broken track, of
+course, but just in a general way. I knew you'd bully me if I should
+tell you that I was going to run a pilot ahead of you, so I didn't tell
+you."</p>
+
+<p>The break was repaired and the men were taking the tools back to the
+engine. As we turned to follow them, Mr. Norcross said: "Just one more
+question, Upton. Did your wire come from the capital?"</p>
+
+<p>But at this Mr. Van Britt seemed to forget that he was talking to his
+general manager.</p>
+
+<p>"It's none of your damned business where it came from," he snapped back;
+and that ended it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Major's Premonition</h3>
+
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we
+had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning;
+and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The
+boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their
+relief&mdash;and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out&mdash;by promising that our
+traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter
+on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.</p>
+
+<p>They tried to give him an ovation for that&mdash;the Strathcona men&mdash;did give
+him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted
+up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on
+account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon
+before we got away for the return to Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came
+to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the
+regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of
+us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a
+glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's
+box.</p>
+
+<p>The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to
+Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk.
+Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window,
+smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the
+branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.</p>
+
+<p>I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he
+had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole
+of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused
+public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it
+up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be
+killed if he didn't let go.</p>
+
+<p>On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down
+the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's
+tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without
+being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so
+much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact
+that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the
+Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the
+entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.</p>
+
+<p>There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be
+a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little
+farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the
+public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate
+Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man
+alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is
+trying his best to walk straight.</p>
+
+<p>Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations&mdash;the laws about headlights,
+and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making
+of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if
+enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with
+little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be
+substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had
+met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and
+I had heard him say:</p>
+
+<p>"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its
+history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without
+bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We
+are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to
+act both ways&mdash;for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers
+when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to
+your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this
+commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."</p>
+
+<p>Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the
+disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that
+no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no
+permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was
+controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a
+working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.</p>
+
+<p>That was the way Mrs. Sheila had put it to the boss, one evening along
+in the summer when they were sitting out on the Kendricks' porch, and I
+had butted in, as usual, with a bunch of telegrams that didn't matter.
+She had said that the experiment <i>couldn't</i> be a success unless the
+conditions could be changed in some way; that so long as the railroads
+were owned or controlled by men of the Mr. Dunton sort and used as
+counters in the money-making game, there would never be any real peace
+between the companies and the people at large.</p>
+
+<p>I knew that the boss had taken that saying of hers for another of the
+inspirations, and that he believed it clear through to the bottom. But I
+guess he didn't see any way as yet in which the Duntons could be shaken
+out, or just what could be made to happen if they were shaken out.</p>
+
+<p>It was at Bauxite Junction that we picked up Mr. Hornack. He had been
+down in the sugar-beet country on a business trip, and had come up as
+far as Bauxite on a freight, after the Sedgwick operator had told him
+that our special was on the way home from Strathcona, and that he could
+catch it at the Junction.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad when I saw him come in. I had just been thinking that it
+wasn't healthy for the boss to be grilling there at the car window so
+long alone, and I knew Mr. Hornack would keep him talking about
+something or other all the rest of the way in.</p>
+
+<p>For a little while they talked business, and I took my chance to stretch
+out on the leather lounge behind their chairs and kind of half doze off.
+By and by the business talk wound itself up and I heard Mr. Hornack say:
+"I saw Ripley going in on Number Six this morning, and he had company;
+Mrs. Macrae, and the major's wife, and the husky little-girl cousin.
+They've been visiting at the capital, so they told me, and I expect the
+major will be mighty glad to see them back."</p>
+
+<p>I didn't hear what Mr. Norcross said, if he said anything at all, but if
+I had been stone deaf I think I should have heard the thing that Mr.
+Hornack said when he went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard something the other day in Portal City that seems pretty hard
+to believe, Norcross. It was at one of Mrs. Stagford's 'evenings,' and I
+was sitting out a dance with a certain young woman who shall be
+nameless. We were speaking of the Kendricks, and she gave me a rather
+broad hint that Mrs. Macrae isn't a widow at all; that her husband is
+still living."</p>
+
+<p>My heavens! I had figured out a thousand ways in which the boss might
+get wised up to the dreadful truth, but never anything like this; to
+have it dropped on him that way out of a clear sky!</p>
+
+<p>For a minute or two he didn't say anything, but when he did speak, I saw
+that the truth wasn't going to take hold.</p>
+
+<p>"That is gossip, pure and simple, Hornack. The Kendricks are my friends,
+and I have been as intimate in their household as any outsider could be.
+It's merely idle gossip, I can assure you."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe so," said Mr. Hornack, sort of drawing in his horns when he saw
+how positive the boss was about it. "I'm not beyond admitting that the
+young woman who told me is a little inclined that way. But the story was
+pretty circumstantial: it went so far as to assert that 'Macrae' wasn't
+Mrs. Sheila's married name at all, and to say that her long stay with
+her Western cousins was&mdash;and still is&mdash;really a flight from conditions
+that were too humiliating to be borne."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care what was said, or who said it," the boss cut in brusquely.
+"It's ridiculous to suppose that any woman, and especially a woman like
+Sheila Macrae, would attempt to pass herself off as a widow when she
+wasn't one."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said the traffic manager, temporizing a little. "But on the
+other hand, I've never heard the major, or any one else, say outright
+that she was a widow. It seems to be just taken for granted. It stirred
+me up a bit on Van Britt's account. You don't go anywhere to mix and
+mingle socially, but it's the talk of the town that Upton is in over his
+head in that quarter."</p>
+
+<p>I shut my eyes and held my breath. Mr. Hornack hadn't the slightest idea
+what thin ice he was skating over, or how this easy mention of Mr. Van
+Britt might be just like rubbing salt into a fresh cut. By this time it
+was growing dark, and we were running into Portal City, and I was mighty
+glad that it couldn't last much longer. The boss didn't speak again
+until the yard switches were clanking under the car, and then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Upton is well able to take care of himself, Hornack, and I don't think
+we need worry about him," and then over his shoulder to me: "Jimmie,
+it's time to wake up. We're pulling in."</p>
+
+<p>As he always did on a return from a trip, Mr. Norcross ran up to his
+office to see if there was anything pressing, before he did anything
+else. May was still at his desk, and in answer to the boss's question he
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"No; nobody that couldn't wait," he said, referring to the day's
+callers. "Mr. Hatch was up with a couple of men that I didn't know, but
+he only wanted to inquire if you would be in the office this evening
+after dinner. I told him I'd find out when you came, and let him know by
+'phone."</p>
+
+<p>I thought, after all that had happened, Hatch certainly had his nerve to
+want to come and make a talk with the man his hired assassins were
+trying to murder. But if Mr. Norcross took that view of it, he didn't
+show it. On the contrary, he told Fred it would be all right to
+telephone Hatch; that he was coming down after dinner and the office
+would be open, as usual.</p>
+
+<p>When things got that far along I slipped out and went to Mr. Van Britt's
+office at the other end of the hall. Bobby Kelso was there, holding the
+office down, and I asked him where I could find Tarbell. Luckily, he was
+able to tell me that Tarbell was at that moment down in the station
+restaurant, eating his supper; so down I went and butted in with my
+story of the Hatch call, and how it was to be repeated a little later
+on.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be there," said Tarbell; and with that load off my mind, I mogged
+off up-town to the club to get my own dinner.</p>
+
+<p>When I broke into the grill-room at the railroad club, I found that Mr.
+Norcross had beaten me to it by a few minutes; that he had already
+ordered his dinner at a table with Major Kendrick. I suppose, by good
+rights, I ought to have gone off into a corner by myself, but I saw that
+the boss had tipped a chair at the end of the table where I usually sat,
+so I just went ahead and took it.</p>
+
+<p>Coming in late, that way, I didn't get the first of the talk, but I took
+it that the boss had been saying something about his rare good luck in
+having the major for a table-mate two days in succession.</p>
+
+<p>"The honoh is mine, my deah boy," the genial old Kentuckian was telling
+him as I sat down. "They told me in the despatchuh's office that youh
+special was expected in, so I telephoned Sheila and the madam not to
+wait for me."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you stayed down town purposely to see me?" asked the boss.</p>
+
+<p>"In a manneh, yes. I was by way of picking up a bit of information late
+this afte'noon that I thought ought to be passed on to you without any
+great delay."</p>
+
+<p>The boss looked up quickly. "What is it, Major?" he inquired. "Are you
+going to tell me that something new has broken loose?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I might be that he'pfully definite&mdash;I do so, Graham. But I
+can't. It's me'uhly a bit of street talk. They're telling it, oveh at
+the Commercial Club, that Hatch and John Marshall&mdash;you know him,&mdash;that
+Sedgwick stock jobbeh who has been so active in this Citizens' Storage &amp;
+Warehouse business&mdash;have finally come togetheh."</p>
+
+<p>"In a business way, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>The major gave a right and left twist to his big mustaches and shrugged
+one shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"They are most probably calling it business," he rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded. "I know what has happened. In spite of the fact that
+the local people know that their economic salvation depends upon a wide
+and even distribution of their C. S. &amp; W. stock, there has been a good
+bit of buying and selling and swapping around. I remember you prophesied
+that in a little while we'd have another trust in the hands of a few
+men. You may recollect that I didn't dispute your prediction. I merely
+said that our ground leases&mdash;the fact that all of the C. S. &amp; W. plants
+and buildings are on railroad land&mdash;would still give us the whip-hand
+over any new monopoly that might be formed."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh; I remember you said that," the major allowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Very good. Marshall and his pocket syndicate may have acquired a voting
+control in C. S. &amp; W., and they may be willing now to patch up an
+alliance with Hatch. But in that case the new monopoly will still lack
+the one vital ingredient: the power to fix prices. If there is a new
+combine, and it tries to make the producers and merchants pay more than
+the agreed percentages for storage and handling&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," the major cut in. "You-all will rise up in the majesty of youh
+wrath and put it out of business by terminating the leases. I hope you
+may: I sutt'inly do hope you may. But you'll recollect that I didn't
+advise you on that point, suh. You took Misteh Ripley's opinion. Maybe
+the cou'ts will hold with you, but, candidly, Graham, I doubt it&mdash;doubt
+it right much."</p>
+
+<p>The boss didn't seem to be much scared up over the doubt. He just smiled
+and said we'd be likely to find out what was in the wind, and that
+before very long. Then he spoke of Hatch's afternoon call at our
+offices, and mentioned the fact that the Red Tower president would
+probably try again, later in the evening.</p>
+
+<p>The major let the business matter drop, and he was working his way
+patiently through the salad course when he looked up to say:</p>
+
+<p>"Was there anything in youh trip to Strathcona to warrant Sheila's
+little telegraphic dangeh signal, Graham?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing worth mentioning," said the boss, without turning a hair; doing
+it, as I made sure, because he didn't want Mrs. Sheila to be mixed up in
+the plotting business, even by implication.</p>
+
+<p>The major didn't press the inquiry any farther, and when he spoke again
+it was of an entirely different matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Away along in the beginning, somebody&mdash;I think it was John
+Chadwick&mdash;spoke of you as a man with a sawt of raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+tempeh, Graham: what have you done with that tempeh in these heah latteh
+days?"</p>
+
+<p>This time the boss's smile was a good-natured grin.</p>
+
+<p>"Temper is not always a matter of temperament, Major. Sometimes it is
+only a means to an end. Much of my experience has been in the
+construction camps, where I have had to deal with men in the raw. Just
+the same, there have been moments within the past six months when I have
+been sorely tempted to burn the wires with a few choice words of the
+short and ugly variety and throw up my job."</p>
+
+<p>"Which, as you may say, brings us around to President Dunton," put in
+the old lawyer shrewdly. "He is still opposing youh policies?"</p>
+
+<p>"Up to a few weeks ago he was still hounding me to do something that
+would boost the stock, regardless of what the something should be, or of
+its effect upon the permanent value of the property."</p>
+
+<p>Again the major held his peace, as if he were debating some knotty point
+with himself&mdash;the table-clearing giving him his chance.</p>
+
+<p>"Did I undehstand you to say that these&mdash;ah&mdash;suggestions from Dunton had
+stopped?" he inquired, after the little coffees had been served.</p>
+
+<p>"Temporarily, at least. I haven't heard anything from New York&mdash;not
+lately."</p>
+
+<p>"Then Dunton's nephew hasn't made himself known to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Collingwood? Hardly. I'm not in Mr. Howie Collingwood's set&mdash;which is
+one of the things I have to be thankful for. But this is news: I didn't
+know he was out here."</p>
+
+<p>The news-giver bent his head gravely in confirmation of the fact.</p>
+
+<p>"He's heah, I'm sorry to say, Graham. He has been heah quite some little
+time, vibratin' round with the Grigsbys and the Gannons and a lot mo' of
+the new-rich people up at the capital."</p>
+
+<p>It was the boss's turn to go silent, and I could guess pretty well what
+he was thinking. The presence of President Dunton's nephew in the West
+might mean much or nothing. But I could imagine the boss was thinking
+that his own single experience with Collingwood was enough to make him
+wish that the nephew of Big Money would stay where he belonged&mdash;among
+the high-rollers and spenders of his own set in the effete East.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't quite get the proper slant on men of the Collingwood type," he
+remarked, after the pause. "The only time I ever saw him was on the
+night before the directors' meeting last spring. He was here with his
+uncle's party in the special train, and that night at the Bullard he had
+been drinking too much and made a braying ass of himself. I had to knock
+him silly before I could get him up to his room."</p>
+
+<p>"You did that, Graham?&mdash;for a strangeh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did it for the comfort of all concerned. As I say, he was making an
+ass of himself."</p>
+
+<p>There was another break, and then the major looked up with a little
+frown.</p>
+
+<p>"That was befo' you had met Sheila?" he asked, thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no; not exactly. It was the same night&mdash;the night we all dropped
+off the 'Flyer' and got left behind at Sand Creek. You may remember that
+we came in later on Mr. Chadwick's special."</p>
+
+<p>The major made no reply to this, and pretty soon the boss was on his
+feet and excusing himself once more on the after-dinner smoking stunt,
+saying that he was obliged to go back to the office. The major got up
+and shook hands with him as if he were bidding him good-by for a long
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going down to keep that appointment with Misteh Rufus Hatch?"
+he said. "You take an old man's advice, Graham, my boy, and keep youh
+hand&mdash;figuratively speaking, of cou'se&mdash;on youh gun. It runs in my mind,
+somehow, that you are going to be hit&mdash;and hit right hard. No, don't ask
+me why. Call it a rotten suspicion, and let it go at that. Come up to
+the house, afte'wards, if you have time, and tell me I'm a false
+prophet, suh; I hope you may."</p>
+
+<p>The boss promised plenty cheerfully as to the calling part, as you'd
+know he would since he hadn't seen Mrs. Sheila for I don't know how
+long; and a few minutes later we were on our way, walking briskly, to
+keep the Fred-May-made engagement with the chief of the grafters.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>The Dead-Line</h3>
+
+
+<p>We found the three disappointed afternoon callers already on hand when
+we reached the headquarters. Fred May was back from his dinner, and he
+had let them in as far as the ante-room. The boss said, "Good evening,
+gentlemen," as pleasant as a basket of chips; told Fred he might go, and
+invited the waiting bunch into the private office, snapping on the
+lights as he opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>In the big room he indicated the sitting possibilities, and the three
+callers planted themselves in a semicircle at the desk end. No
+introductions were needed. One of the pair Hatch had brought with him
+was a lawyer named Marrow, whose home town was Sedgwick; a sharp-nosed,
+ferret-eyed man who figured as one of the many "local counsels" for Red
+Tower. The other, Dedmon, was a political place-hunter who had once been
+sheriff of Arrowhead County.</p>
+
+<p>"You've kept us cooling our heels in your waiting-room for just about
+the last time, Mr. Norcross!" was the spiteful way in which Hatch opened
+fire. "We've come to talk straight business with you this trip, and it
+will be more to your interest than ours if you'll send your clerk away."</p>
+
+<p>While they had been dragging up their chairs and sitting down, I had
+heard Fred May lock up his typewriter and go, and had been listening
+anxiously for some noise that would tell me Tarbell was on deck. I
+thought I heard the door of the outer office open again just as Hatch
+spoke and it comforted me a whole lot.</p>
+
+<p>The boss didn't pay any attention to Hatch's suggestion about sending me
+away; acted as if he hadn't heard it. Opening his desk he took a box of
+cigars from a drawer and passed it. Dedmon, the ex-sheriff, helped
+himself, but the lawyer and Hatch both refused. With this concession to
+the small hospitalities the boss swung his chair to face the trio.</p>
+
+<p>"My time is yours, gentlemen," he said; and Hatch jumped in like a man
+fairly spoiling for a fight.</p>
+
+<p>"For six months, Norcross, you've been mowing a pretty wide swath out
+here in the tall hills. You've been posing as a little tin god before
+the people of this State, and all the while you've been knifing and
+slugging and black-jacking private capital and private business wherever
+and whenever they have happened to get in your way. Now, at the end of
+the lane, by Jupiter, we've got you dead to rights&mdash;you and your damned
+railroad!"</p>
+
+<p>"Cut out as many of the personalities as you can, and come to the
+point," suggested the boss quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"You think I haven't any point to come to?" barked the grafter, with
+rising anger. "I'll show you! You've beaten us in the courts, and your
+imported lawyers have&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, Mr. Hatch," was the curt interruption. "Abuse isn't
+argument. State your case, if you have one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I've got the case, all right. You've been keeping your finger on
+the pulse, or you think you have, but I can wise you up to a few things
+that have got away from you. You thought you were the only original
+trust-buster when you started your scheme of locally owned elevators and
+warehouses and coal- and lumber-yards and ran us out of business. But
+I'm here to tell you that your fine-haired little deal to rob us began
+to die about as soon as it was born."</p>
+
+<p>"How so?" inquired the boss, just as though Major Kendrick hadn't
+already given him his pointer about the how.</p>
+
+<p>"In the way that everything of that kind is bound to die. It wasn't a
+month before your little local stockholders began to get together and
+swap stock and sell it. In a very short time the control of the whole
+string of local plants was in the hands of a hundred men. To-day it's in
+the hands of less than twenty, with John Marshall at the head of them."</p>
+
+<p>This time the boss let out a notch. "So far, you haven't told me
+anything new. Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"If I should name Marshall's bunch, you'd know what's coming to you. But
+we needn't go into statistics. Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse is now a
+consolidated property, and John Marshall, Henckel and I control a
+majority of its stock. How does that strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It strikes me that the people most deeply interested have been
+exceedingly foolish to sell their birthright. But that is strictly their
+own business, and not mine or the railroad company's."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait!" Hatch snarled. "It's going to be both yours and the railroad
+company's business, before you are through with it. Marrow, here,
+represents Marshall, and I represent Henckel and myself. What are you
+going to do about those ground leases?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing at all, except to insist upon the condition under which they
+were granted by the railroad company."</p>
+
+<p>"Meaning that you are going to try to hold us to the fixed percentage
+charge for handling, packing, loading, and transferring?"</p>
+
+<p>"Meaning just that. If you raise the proportional market-price charge
+on the producers and merchants, the leases will terminate."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought that was about where you'd land. Now listen: we're
+It&mdash;Marshall and Henckel and I&mdash;and what we say, goes as it lies. We are
+going to use the present C. S. &amp; W. plants and equipment, charging our
+own storage and handling percentages, based on anything we see fit. If
+you pull that ground-lease business on us and try to drive us out, we'll
+fight you all the way up to the Supreme Court. If you beat us there,
+we'll merely move over to the other side of your tracks to our old Red
+Tower houses and yards and go on doing business at the old stand."</p>
+
+<p>The boss sat back in his chair, and I could tell by the set of his jaw
+that he was refusing to be panic-stricken.</p>
+
+<p>"You are taking altogether too much for granted, aren't you?" he put in
+mildly. "You are assuming that the courts will eventually nullify the
+terms of the ground-leases, or, if they do not, that the railroad
+company will do nothing to save its patrons from falling into this new
+graft trap."</p>
+
+<p>Hatch snapped his fingers. "Now you are coming to the milk in the
+cocoanut!" he rapped out. "That is exactly what we're assuming. You are
+going to let go, once for all, Norcross. You are not going to fight us
+in the courts, and neither are you going to harass us out of existence
+with short cars, over-charges, and the thousand and one petty
+persecutions that you railroad buccaneers make use of to line your own
+pockets!"</p>
+
+<p>"But if we refuse to lie down and let you walk over us and our
+patrons&mdash;what then?" the boss inquired.</p>
+
+<p>That brought the explosion. Hatch's eyes blazed and he smacked fist into
+palm.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'll knife you, and we'll do it to a velvet finish! After so long
+a time, we've got you where you can't side-step, Norcross. You thought
+you played it pretty damned fine in that election deal; but we got the
+goods on you, just the same!"</p>
+
+<p>Again the boss refused to be panic-stricken; or, anyhow, he looked that
+way.</p>
+
+<p>"We have heard that kind of talk many times in the past," he said. "The
+way to make it effective is to produce the goods."</p>
+
+<p>"That's just what we're here to do!" snapped the Red Tower president
+vindictively. "You, and the Big Fellows in New York, want a lot of the
+State railroad laws repealed or amended. If you can't get that string
+untied, you can't gamble any more with your stock. Well and good. You
+came here six months ago and set out to manufacture public sentiment in
+favor of the railroad. You ran up your 'public-be-pleased' flag and beat
+the tom-tom and blew the hewgag until you got a lot of dolts and
+chuckle-heads and easy marks to believe that you really meant it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, go on."</p>
+
+<p>"With all this humbug and hullaballoo you still couldn't be quite
+certain that you had made your point; that your measures would carry
+through the incoming Legislature. After the primaries you counted noses
+among the candidates and found it was going to be a tight squeak&mdash;a
+damned tight squeak. Then you did what you railroad people always do;
+you slipped out quietly and bought a few men&mdash;just to be on the safe
+side."</p>
+
+<p>So it was sprung at last. Hatch was accusing us of the one thing that we
+hadn't done; that the boss knew we hadn't done.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you'll have to try again, Mr. Hatch," he said, with a sour
+little smile. Then he added: "Anybody can make charges, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Hatch jumped to his feet and he was almost foaming at the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Right there is where we've got you!" he shouted. "You were too cautious
+to put one of your own men in the field, so you sent outside for your
+briber. He was fly, too; he never came near you nor any of your
+officials&mdash;to start curious talk. But he was a stranger, and he had to
+have help in finding the right men to buy. Dedmon, here, was out of a
+job&mdash;thanks to you and your meddling&mdash;and the steering stunt offered
+good pay. Do you want any more?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I don't know in the
+least what you are talking about, and you'll pardon me, I hope, if I say
+that it doesn't greatly interest me."</p>
+
+<p>"By heavens&mdash;I'll make it interest you! The easy-mark candidates were
+found and bought and paid for&mdash;and maybe they'll stay bought, and maybe
+they won't. But that isn't the point. For a little more money&mdash;my money,
+this time&mdash;each of these men has made an affidavit to the fact that
+railroad money was offered him. They don't say whether or not they
+accepted it, mind you, and that doesn't cut any figure. They have sworn
+that the money was tendered. That lets them out and lets you in. You
+don't believe it? I'll show you," and Hatch whipped a list of names from
+his pocket and slapped it upon the boss's desk. "Go to those men and ask
+them; if you want to carry it that far. They'll tell you."</p>
+
+<p>I could see that the boss barely glanced at the list. The glib story of
+the bribery was like the bite of a slipping crane-hitch&mdash;slow to take
+hold. So far as we were concerned, of course, the charge fell flat; and
+upon any other hypothesis it was blankly incredible, unbelievable,
+absurd.</p>
+
+<p>"The affidavits themselves would be much more convincing," I heard the
+boss say, "though even then I should wish to have reasonable proof that
+they were genuine."</p>
+
+<p>Hatch was sitting down again and his grin showed his teeth unpleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think for a minute that I'd bring the papers here and trust them
+in your hands?" he rapped out insultingly. "Not much! But we've got them
+all right, as you'll find out if you balk and force us to use them."</p>
+
+<p>At this point I could see that something in the persistent assurance of
+the man was getting under the boss's skin and giving him a cold chill.
+What if it were not the colossal bluff it had looked like in the
+beginning? What if.... Like a blaze of lightning out of a clear sky a
+possible explanation hit me under the fifth rib, and I guess it hit the
+boss at about the same instant. What if President Dunton and the New
+York stock-jobbers, believing as they did that nothing but legislative
+favor would give them their trading capital in the depressed stock, had
+cut in and done this thing without consulting us?</p>
+
+<p>The boss stirred uneasily in his chair and picked up the paper-knife&mdash;a
+little unconscious trick of his when he wanted time to gather himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you would be willing to give me the name of this briber, Mr.
+Hatch?" he said, after a little pause.</p>
+
+<p>"As if you didn't know it!" was the scoffing retort. "You drive us to
+the newspapers and everybody'll know it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I <i>don't</i> know it," the boss insisted patiently. Then he seemed to
+take a sort of fresh grip on himself, for he added: "And I don't believe
+you do, either, Mr. Hatch. You are a pretty good bluffer, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hatch broke in with a short laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"There were two of them; one who was hired to do the talking while the
+real wire-puller stood aside and held the coin bag. We'll skip the hired
+man." Then he turned to the ex-sheriff: "Write out the name of the
+bag-holder for him, Dedmon," he commanded, tearing a leaf from his
+pocket notebook and thrusting it, with a stubby pencil, into Dedmon's
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>The man from Arrowhead County bent over his knee and wrote a name on the
+slip of paper, laying the slip on the drawn-out slide of the boss's desk
+when he had finished the slow penciling. The effect of the thing was all
+that any plotter could have desired. I saw the boss's face go gray, saw
+him stare at the slip and heard him say, half to himself, "<i>Howard
+Collingwood!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Hatch followed up his advantage promptly. He was afoot and struggling
+into his overcoat when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"You've got what you were after, Norcross, and it has got your goat.
+We've known all along that you were only bluffing and sparring to gain
+time. We've nailed you to the cross. You let this deal with Marshall and
+his people stand as it's made, or we'll show you up for what you are.
+That's the plain English of it."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you will go to the newspapers with this?" said the boss,
+and it was no wonder that his voice was a bit husky.</p>
+
+<p>"Just that. We'll give you plenty of time to think it over. The joint
+deal with C. S. &amp; W. goes into effect to-morrow, and it's up to you to
+sit tight in the boat and let us alone. If you don't&mdash;if you butt in
+with the ground-leases, or in any other way&mdash;the story will go to the
+newspapers and every sucker on the line of the P. S. L. will know how
+you've been pulling the wool over his eyes with all this guff about
+'justice first,' and 'the public be pleased.' You're no fool, Norcross.
+You know they won't lay it to Dunton and the New Yorkers. You've taken
+pains to advertise it far and wide that you are running this railroad on
+your own responsibility, and the people are going to take you at your
+word."</p>
+
+<p>Dedmon, and the lawyer&mdash;who hadn't spoken a single word in all the
+talk&mdash;were edging toward the door. I heard just the faintest possible
+little noise in the ante-room, betokening Tarbell's withdrawal. The boss
+didn't make any answer to Hatch's wind-up except to say, "Is that all?"</p>
+
+<p>The other two were out, now, and Hatch turned to stick his ugly jaw out
+at the boss, and to say, just as if I hadn't been there to look on and
+hear him:</p>
+
+<p>"No, by Jupiter&mdash;it isn't all! In the past six months you've made Gus
+Henckel and me lose a cold half-million, Norcross. For a less
+provocation than that, many a man in this neck of woods has been sent
+back east in the baggage-car, wearing a wooden overcoat. You climb down,
+and do it while you can stay alive!"</p>
+
+<p>For some little time after the three men went away the boss sat staring
+at the slip of paper on the desk slide. At the long last he got up, sort
+of tired-like, I thought, and said to me: "Jimmie, you go down and see
+if you can find a taxi, and we'll drive out to Major Kendrick's. I
+promised him I'd go out to the house, you remember."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+<h3>Flagged Down</h3>
+
+
+<p>When our taxi stopped at the major's gate, somebody was coming out just
+as we were getting ready to go in. The light from the street arc was broken
+a good bit by the sidewalk trees, and the man had the visor of his big
+flat golf cap pulled down well over his eyes, but I knew him just the
+same. It was Collingwood!</p>
+
+<p>This looked like more trouble. What was the president's nephew doing
+here? I wondered about that, and also, if the boss had recognized
+Collingwood. If he had, he made no sign, and a moment later I had
+punched the bell-push and Maisie Ann was opening the door for us.</p>
+
+<p>"Both of you? oh, how nice!" she said, with a smile for the boss and a
+queer little grimace for me. "Come in. This is our evening for callers.
+Cousin Basil is out, but he'll be back pretty soon, and he left word for
+you to wait if you got here before he did."</p>
+
+<p>That message was for the boss, and I lagged behind in the dimly lighted
+hall while she was showing him into the back parlor. I heard her wheel
+up a chair for him before the fire, and go on chattering to him about
+nothing, and by that I knew that there wasn't anybody else in the parlor
+and that she was just filling in the time until something else should
+happen.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn't long until the something happened. I had dropped down on the
+hall settee, in the end of it next to the coat-rack, and when Mrs.
+Sheila came down-stairs and went through the hall, she didn't see me. A
+second later I heard the boss jump up and say, "At last! It seems as if
+you had been gone a year rather than a fortnight," and then Maisie Ann
+came dodging out and plunked herself down on the settee beside me.</p>
+
+<p>You needn't tell me that we had no right to sit there listening; I know
+it well enough. On the other hand, I was just shirky enough to shift the
+responsibility to Maisie Ann. She didn't make any move to duck, so I
+didn't.</p>
+
+<p>"You came out to see Cousin Basil?" Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss.
+And then: "He had a telephone call from the Bullard, and he asked me to
+tell you to wait." After that, I guess she sat down to help him wait,
+for pretty soon we heard her say: "Cousin Basil has told me a little
+about the new trouble: have you been having another bad quarter of an
+hour?"</p>
+
+<p>"The worst of the lot," the boss said gravely, and from that he went on
+to tell her about the Hatch visit and what had come of it; how the
+grafters had a new claw hold on him, now, made possible by an
+unwarranted piece of meddling on the part of the New York people in the
+political game.</p>
+
+<p>It was while he was talking about this that Maisie Ann grabbed me by the
+wrist and dragged me bodily into the darkened front parlor, the door to
+which was just on the other side of the coat rack. I thought she had
+come to her right senses, at last, and was making the shift to break off
+the eavesdropping. That being the case, I was simply horrified when I
+found that she was merely fixing it so that we could both <i>see</i> and
+hear. The sliding doors between the two parlors were cracked open about
+an inch, and before I realized what she was doing she had pulled me down
+on the floor beside her, right in front of that crack.</p>
+
+<p>"If you move or make a noise, I'll scream and they'll come in here and
+find us both!" she hissed in my ear; and because I didn't know what else
+to do with such a kiddish little termagent, I sat still. It was
+dastardly, I know; but what was I to do?</p>
+
+<p>The first thing we saw was that the two in the other room were sitting
+at opposite sides of the fire. Mrs. Sheila was awfully pretty; prettier
+than I had ever seen her, because she had a lot more color in her face,
+and her eyes had that warm glow in them that even the grayest eyes can
+get when there is a human soul behind them, and the soul has got itself
+stirred up about something.</p>
+
+<p>When the boss finished telling her about the Hatch talk, she said: "You
+mean that Mr. Dunton and his associates sent somebody out here to
+influence the election?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss looked up sort of quick.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; that is it, precisely. But how did you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"You made the inference perfectly plain," she countered. "I have a
+reasoning mind, Graham; haven't you discovered it before this?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded soberly. "I have discovered a good many things about you
+during the past six months: one of them is that there was never another
+woman like you since the world began."</p>
+
+<p>Knowing, as I did, that she had a husband alive and kicking around
+somewhere, it seemed as if I just couldn't stay there and listen to what
+a break of that kind on the boss's part was likely to lead up to. But
+Maisie Ann gripped my wrist until she hurt.</p>
+
+<p>"You <i>must</i> listen!" she whispered fiercely. "You're taking care of him,
+and you've <i>got</i> to know!"</p>
+
+<p>As on many other earlier occasions, Mrs. Sheila slid away from the
+sentimental side of things just as easy as turning your hand over.</p>
+
+<p>"You are too big a man to let an added difficulty defeat you now," she
+remarked calmly, going back to the business field. "You are really
+making a miraculous success. I have just spent two weeks in the capital,
+as you know, and everybody is talking about you. They say you are in a
+fair way to solve the big problem&mdash;the problem of bringing the railroads
+and the people together in a peaceable and profitable partnership&mdash;which
+is as it should be."</p>
+
+<p>"It can be done; and I could do it right here on the Pioneer Short Line
+if I didn't have to fight so many different kinds of devils at the same
+time," said the boss, scowling down at the fire in the grate. And then
+with a quick jerk of his head to face her: "You sent the major a wire
+from the capital last night, telling him to persuade me not to go to
+Strathcona. Why did you do it? And how did you know I was thinking of
+going?"</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in the whole six months I saw Mrs. Sheila get a
+little flustered, though she didn't show it much, only in a little more
+color in her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Some day, perhaps, I may tell you, but I can't now," she said sort of
+hurriedly. And then: "You mustn't ask me."</p>
+
+<p>"But you did send the wire?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And you also sent another to Upton Van Britt?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did."</p>
+
+<p>The boss smiled. "That second message was an after-thought. You were
+afraid I'd be stubborn and go, anyway. That was some more of your
+marvelous inner reasoning. Tell me, Sheila, did you know that there was
+going to be a broken rail-joint set to kill me on that trip?"</p>
+
+<p>That got her in spite of her heavenly calm and I could see her press her
+pretty lips together hard.</p>
+
+<p>"Was that what they did?" she asked, a bit trembly.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded. "Van Britt was on the pilot engine ahead of my car, and he
+found it. There was no harm done. It was bad enough, God knows, to set a
+trap that would have killed everybody on my train; but this other thing
+that has been pulled off to-night is even worse. Mr. Dunton and his
+unprincipled followers have set a thing on foot here which is due to
+grind us all to powder. Past that, they have contrived to handcuff me so
+that I can't make a move without pulling down consequences of a personal
+nature upon President Dunton, himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Now my 'marvelous inner reasoning' has gone quite blind," she said,
+with a queer little smile. "You'll have to explain."</p>
+
+<p>"It's simple enough," said the boss shortly. "If Mr. Dunton had sent
+only hired emissaries out here to bribe the members of the
+Legislature&mdash;but he didn't; he included a member of his own family."</p>
+
+<p>I was looking straight at Mrs. Sheila as he spoke, and I saw a sudden
+frightened shock jump into the slate-gray eyes. Just for a second.
+Before you could count one, it was gone and she was saying quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"A member of his own family? That is very singular, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is, and it isn't. The man who was sent with the bribe money has
+every qualification for the job, I should say, save one&mdash;discretion. And
+I'm not sure that he may not be discreet enough, when he isn't drunk."</p>
+
+<p>Again I saw the curious look in her eyes, and this time it was almost
+like the shrinking from a blow.</p>
+
+<p>"Was there&mdash;was this thing that was done actually criminal?" she asked,
+just breathing it at him.</p>
+
+<p>"It was, indeed. The election laws of this State have teeth. It is a
+penitentiary offense to bribe either the electorate or the law-makers."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a little time, and she was no longer looking at
+him; she was staring into the heart of the glowing coals in the grate
+basket. By and by she said: "You haven't told me this man's name&mdash;the
+one who did the bribing; may I know it?"</p>
+
+<p>I knew just what the boss was going to do, and he did it; took the slip
+of paper that Dedmon had written on from his pocket and passed it across
+to her. If there was another shock for her none of us could see it. She
+had her face turned away when she looked at the name on the paper.
+Pretty soon she said, sort of drearily:</p>
+
+<p>"Once you told me that the true test of any human being came when he was
+asked to eliminate the personal factor; to efface himself completely in
+order that his cause might prosper. Do you still believe that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. It's all in the day's work. Any cause worth while is vastly
+bigger than any man who is trying to advance it."</p>
+
+<p>"Than any man, yes; but for a woman, Graham; wouldn't you allow
+something for the woman?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought we had agreed long ago that there is no double standard,
+either in morals or ethics&mdash;one thing for the man and another for the
+woman. That is your own attitude, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>She didn't say whether it was or not. She was holding the bit of paper
+he had given her so that the light from the fire fell upon it when she
+said: "I suppose your duty is quite clear. In the slang of the street,
+you must 'beat Mr. Hatch to it.' You must be the first to denounce this
+bribery, clearing yourself and letting the axe fall where it will. You
+owe that much to yourself, to the men who have fought shoulder to
+shoulder with you, and to that wider circle of the public which is
+beginning to believe that you are honest and sincere, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss was shaking his head a bit doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't quite so simple as that," he objected. "I don't know that I'd
+have any compunctions about sending Collingwood to the dump. If the half
+of what they say of him is true, he is a spineless degenerate and hardly
+worth saving. But to do as you suggest would be open rebellion, you
+know; while Dunton remains president, I am his subordinate, and if I
+should expose him and his nephew, the situation here would become simply
+impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" she prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"Such a move would rightly and properly bring a wire demand for my
+resignation, of a nature that couldn't be ignored&mdash;only it wouldn't,
+because I should anticipate it by resigning first. That is a small
+matter, introducing the personal element which we have agreed should be
+eliminated. But the results to others; to the men of my staff and the
+rank and file, and to the public, which, as you say, is just beginning
+to realize some of the benefits of a real partnership with its principal
+railroad; these things can't be so easily ignored."</p>
+
+<p>"You have thought of some other expedient?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I haven't got that far yet. But I am determined that Hatch shall
+not be allowed to work his graft a second time upon the people who are
+trusting me. I believe in the new policy we are trying out. I'd fling my
+own fortune into the gap if I had one, and, more than that, I'd pull in
+every friend I have in the world if by so doing I could stand the
+Pioneer Short Line upon a solid foundation of honest ownership. That is
+all that is needed in the present crisis&mdash;absolutely all."</p>
+
+<p>He was on his feet now and tramping back and forth on the hearth rug. At
+one of his back-turnings I saw Mrs. Sheila reach out quickly and lay the
+bit of paper with its accusing scrawl on the glowing coals. Then she
+said, quite calm again:</p>
+
+<p>"In time to come you will accomplish even that, Graham&mdash;this change of
+ownership that we have talked of and dreamed about. It is the true
+solution of the problem; not Government ownership, but ownership by the
+people who have the most at stake&mdash;the public and the workers. You are a
+strong man, and you will bring it about. But this other man&mdash;who is not
+strong; the man whose name was written upon the bit of paper I have just
+thrown into the fire...."</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled quickly, and what he said made me feel as if a cold wind were
+blowing up the back of my neck, because I hadn't dreamed that he would
+remember Collingwood well enough to recognize him in that passing moment
+on the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>"That man," he muttered, sort of gratingly: "I had completely forgotten.
+He was here just a little while ago. I met him as I was coming in. Did
+he come to see your cousin&mdash;the major?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, matching his low tone; "he came to see me."</p>
+
+<p>"You?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Finding himself in a pitfall which he has digged with his own
+hands, he is like other men of his kind; he would be very glad to climb
+out upon the shoulders of a woman."</p>
+
+<p>I guess the boss saw red for a minute, but the question he asked had to
+come.</p>
+
+<p>"By what right did he come to you, Sheila?"</p>
+
+<p>"By what he doubtless thinks is the best right in the world. He is my
+husband."</p>
+
+<p>It was out at last, and the boss's poor little house of cards that I
+knew he had been building all these months had got its knock-down in
+just those four quietly spoken words. Maisie Ann was still gripping my
+wrist, and I felt a hot tear go splash on my hand. "Oh, I could <i>kill</i>
+him!" she whispered, meaning Collingwood, I suppose.</p>
+
+<p>As well as I knew him, I couldn't begin to guess what the boss would do
+or say. But he was such a splendid fighter that I might have known.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard, no longer ago than this afternoon, that you were not&mdash;that
+your husband was still living," he said, speaking very gently. "I didn't
+believe it&mdash;not fully&mdash;though I saw that there might easily be room for
+the belief. It makes no difference, Sheila. You are my friend, and you
+are blameless. But before we go any farther I want you to believe that I
+wouldn't have been brutal enough to give you that bit of paper if I had
+remotely suspected that Collingwood was the man."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't make any answer to that, and after a while he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Having told me so much, can't you tell me a little more?"</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't much to tell, and even the little is commonplace and&mdash;and
+disgraceful," she replied, with a touch of weariness that was fairly
+heart-breaking. "Don't ask me why we were married; I can't explain that,
+simply because I don't know, myself. It was arranged between the two
+families, and I suppose Howie and I always took it for granted. I can't
+even plead ignorance, for I have known him all my life."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said the boss, still speaking as gently as a brother might
+have.</p>
+
+<p>"Howie was a spoiled child, an only son, and he is a spoiled man. I
+stood it as long as I could&mdash;I hope you will believe that. But there are
+some things that a woman cannot stand, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he broke in. "So you came out here to be free."</p>
+
+<p>"It is four years since we have lived together," she went on, "and for a
+long time I hoped he would never find out where I was. There was no
+divorce: I couldn't endure the thought of the publicity and the&mdash;the
+disgrace. When I came here to Cousin Basil's there was no attempt made
+to hide the facts; or at least the one chief fact that I was a married
+woman. But on the other hand, I had taken my mother's name, and only
+Cousin Basil and his wife knew that I was not what perhaps every one
+else took me to be,&mdash;a widow with a dead husband instead of a living
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Collingwood try to find you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I think not. But when he was here last spring with his Uncle
+Breckenridge he saw me and found out that I was living here with Cousin
+Basil."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he try to persecute you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not then. I was afraid of only one thing: that he might drink too
+much and&mdash;and talk. Part of the fear was realized. He saw me that Sunday
+night in the Bullard. That was why he was trying to fight the hotel
+people&mdash;because they wouldn't let him come up-stairs. I saw what you
+did, and I was sorry. I couldn't help feeling that in some way it would
+prove to be the beginning of a tragedy."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw no more of him then?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I neither saw him nor heard of him until about a month ago when he
+came west with a man named Bullock&mdash;a New York attorney. I didn't know
+why he came, but I thought it was to annoy me."</p>
+
+<p>"And he has annoyed you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Until this night he has never missed an opportunity of doing so when he
+could dodge Cousin Basil. Caring nothing for me himself, he has taken
+violent exceptions to my friendship with you and with Upton Van Britt,
+though that is chiefly when he has been drinking too much. It was his
+taunting boast yesterday at the capital that led me to telegraph Cousin
+Basil and Upton Van Britt about your trip to Strathcona. He knew that
+you were going to the gold camp, and he declared to me that you'd never
+come back alive."</p>
+
+<p>"But to-night," the boss persisted. "What did he want to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wanted to&mdash;to use me. He said that he had 'put something across' for
+his uncle, that he had gotten into trouble for it, and that&mdash;to use his
+own phrase again, you were the man who would try to 'get his goat.'"</p>
+
+<p>"And his object in telling you this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Was entirely worthy of the man. He asked me, or rather I should say,
+commanded me, to 'choke you off.' And, of course, he added the insult.
+He said I was the one who could do it."</p>
+
+<p>The boss had gone to tramping again and when he stopped to face her I
+could see that he had threshed his way around to some sort of a
+conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Without intending to, you have tied my hands," he said gravely. "I
+wasn't meaning to spare Collingwood if there were any way in which I
+could use him as a club to knock Hatch out of the game."</p>
+
+<p>"But now you won't use him?"</p>
+
+<p>"You might justly write me down as a pretty poor friend of yours if I
+should&mdash;after what you have told me."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't asked you to spare him."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I know you haven't. But the fact remains that he is your husband.
+I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The interruption was the opening and closing of the front door and the
+heavy tread of the major in the hall. In a flash Mrs. Sheila was up and
+getting ready to vanish through the door that led to the dining-room.
+With her hand on the door-knob she shot a quick question at the boss.</p>
+
+<p>"How much will you tell Cousin Basil?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing of what you have told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," she whispered back; "you are as big in your friendship as
+you are in other ways." And with that she was gone.</p>
+
+<p>It was right along in the same half-minute, while the boss was standing
+with his back to the fire and the major was going in to talk to him,
+that I lost Maisie Ann. I don't know where she went, or how. She had let
+go of my wrist, and when I groped for her she was gone. Since I didn't
+see any good reason why I should stay and spy upon the boss and the
+major, I slipped out to the hall and curled up on the big settee beyond
+the coat rack; curled up, and after listening a while to the drone of
+voices in the farther room, went to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>It was away deep in the night when the boss took hold of me and shook me
+awake. The long talk was just getting itself finished, and the major had
+come to the door with his guest.</p>
+
+<p>"We must manage to pull Collingwood out of it in some way," the major
+was saying. "I don't love the damn' scoundrel any betteh than you do,
+Graham; but thah's a reason&mdash;a fam'ly reason, as you might say." Then he
+switched off quickly. "You haven't asked me yet why I ran away from home
+this evenin' when I was expecting you."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said the boss. "Sheila told me that you had a telephone call to
+the Bullard."</p>
+
+<p>The old Kentuckian chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh; and you'd neveh guess in a thousand yeahs who sent the call,
+or what was wanted. It was ouh friend Hatch, and no otheh. And he had
+the face to offeh me ten thousand dollahs a yeah to act as consulting
+counsel for him against the railroad company!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you accepted," said the boss, meaning just the opposite.</p>
+
+<p>The major chuckled again. "I talked with him long enough to find out
+about where he stood. He thinks he's got you by the neck, but, like most
+men of his breed, he's a paltry coward, suh, at heart."</p>
+
+<p>The boss laughed. "What is he afraid of?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's afraid of his life. He told me, with his eyes buggin' out, that
+thah was one man heah in Portal City who would kill him to get
+possession of certain papehs that were locked up in the cash vault of
+the Security National."</p>
+
+<p>The boss was pulling on his gloves.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't give him any reason to think that I was anxious to murder
+him," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, my deah boy; it isn't you, at all. It's Howie Collingwood.
+Thah's where we land afteh all is said and done. Youh hands are tied,
+and we've got this heah young maniac to deal with. If Collingwood gets
+about three fingehs of red likkeh under his belt, why, thah's one murder
+in prospect. And if Hatch has any reason to think that you can still get
+the underholt on him, why, thah's another. I'm glad you've seen fit to
+take Ripley's advice at last, and got you a body-guard."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" queried the boss. But the query was answered a minute
+later when we hit the sidewalk for the tramp back to town and Tarbell
+fell in to walk three steps behind us all the way to the door of the
+railroad club.</p>
+
+<p>It sure did look as if things were just about as bad as they could ever
+be, now. Hatch once more on top, the whole bottom knocked out of the
+railroad experiment, our good name for political honesty gone
+glimmering, and, worst of all, perhaps, the boss's big heart broken
+right in two over those four little words that nothing could ever rub
+out&mdash;"he is my husband." I didn't wonder that the boss said never a word
+in all that long walk down-town, or that he forgot to tell me good-night
+when he locked himself up in his room at the club.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>The Dipsomaniac</h3>
+
+
+<p>In a day when bunched money, however arrogant it may be, has been taught
+to go sort of softly, the Hatch people were careful not to make any
+public announcement of the things they were doing or going to do. But
+bad news has wings of its own. Mr. Norcross was still in the midst of
+his mail dictation to me the morning after the bottom&mdash;all the different
+bottoms&mdash;fell out, when Mr. Hornack came bulging in.</p>
+
+<p>"What's all this fire-alarm that's been sprung about a new elevator
+trust?" he demanded, chewing on his cigar as if it were something he
+were trying to eat. "It's all over town that C. S. &amp; W. has been
+secretly reorganized, with the Hatch crowd in control. I'm having a
+perfect cyclone of telephone calls asking what, and how, and why."</p>
+
+<p>The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he
+announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing
+when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps,
+and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical
+consolidation."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that the fact?&mdash;or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the
+traffic manager.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also,
+to tell me where we were to get off."</p>
+
+<p>Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.</p>
+
+<p>"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down
+quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.</p>
+
+<p>"He does&mdash;just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up
+to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."</p>
+
+<p>"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"</p>
+
+<p>"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who
+ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went
+on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for
+publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he
+got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between
+cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply
+<i>can't</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can
+do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street
+owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only
+hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of
+its securities among the people it actually serves."</p>
+
+<p>Hornack's teeth met in the middle of the chewed cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"That's excellent logic&mdash;bully good logic, if anybody should ask you!
+But we're fighting a condition, not a theory. Nobody wants P. S. L.
+Common even at thirty-two. You wouldn't advise your worst enemy to buy
+it at that figure."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said the boss, kind of musingly. "You're forgetting the
+water that's been put into it from time to time by the speculators and
+reorganizers; there has been a good deal of that, first and last.
+Nevertheless, value for value, you know, and I know, that the property
+is worth more than thirty-two, including the bonds. What I mean is that
+if anybody would buy the control at that figure,&mdash;the control, mind you,
+and not merely a minority&mdash;and handle the road purely as a
+dividend-earning business proposition, he wouldn't lose money; he'd make
+money&mdash;a lot of it."</p>
+
+<p>"All of which doesn't get us anywhere in the present pinch," returned
+the traffic manager. "I suppose we'll have to wait until Hatch makes his
+first move, and I've still got fight enough left in me to hope that
+he'll make it suddenly. Punch the button for me if anything new
+develops. I'm going back to swing on to my telephone."</p>
+
+<p>Following this talk with Hornack there was a try-out with Billoughby and
+Juneman, but as this three-cornered conference was held in the private
+room of the suite, I don't know what was said. A little farther along,
+when the boss was once more whittling at the dictation, Mr. Van Britt
+strolled in. Mr. Norcross told me to take my bunch of notes to May and
+then he gave Mr. Van Britt his inning, starting off with: "Well, how is
+the general superintendent this fine morning?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt wrinkled his nose.</p>
+
+<p>"The general superintendent is wondering, one more time, why under the
+starry heavens he is out here in this country that God has forgotten,
+scrapping for a living on this one-horse railroad of yours when he might
+be in good little old New York, living easy and clipping coupons in the
+safety-deposit room of a Broad Street bank."</p>
+
+<p>The boss laughed at that, and I'm telling you right now that I was glad
+to know that he was still able to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"You've never seen the day when you wanted to renege, Upton, and you
+know it," he hit back. "Think of the perfectly good technical education
+you were wasting when I took hold of you and jerked you out here."</p>
+
+<p>"Huh!" said our millionaire; "I've got other things to think of. I've
+just had two enginemen on the carpet for running over an old ranchman's
+pet cow. They said they couldn't help it; but I told them that under the
+'public-be-pleased' policy, they'd got to help it."</p>
+
+<p>Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral,
+Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage &amp; Warehouse is
+due to have a strike on its hands. The management&mdash;which seems to have
+got itself consolidated in some way&mdash;shot out a lot of new bosses all
+along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the
+entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and
+everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty
+per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the
+wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C.
+S. &amp; W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that
+the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. &amp; W.?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."</p>
+
+<p>"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one
+stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. &amp; W., who have
+been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later
+on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local
+sympathizers."</p>
+
+<p>"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon,"
+Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that
+once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers
+will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will
+be asking us what <i>we</i> are going to do about it; whether we are going to
+fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft,
+as our predecessors did."</p>
+
+<p>"We needn't go over that ground again&mdash;you and I, Upton," said Mr.
+Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We
+have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little
+operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the
+Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his
+hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in
+wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand
+the gaff&mdash;this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the
+people as the accuser of your president&mdash;and hope to hold your job. The
+one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."</p>
+
+<p>"Upton, if I thought you meant that&mdash;but I never know when to take you
+seriously."</p>
+
+<p>"The two enginemen who ran over the ranchman's pet cow had no such
+difficulty, I assure you. And isn't it good advice? You know, as well as
+I do, that Chadwick is holding you here by main strength; that you can
+never accomplish anything permanent while Dunton and his cronies are at
+the steering-wheel. It might be different if you had the local backing
+of your constituency&mdash;the people served by the Short Line. But you
+haven't that; up to date, the people are merely interested spectators."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said the boss, frowning again.</p>
+
+<p>"They have a stake in the game&mdash;the biggest of the stakes, as a matter
+of fact&mdash;but it isn't sufficiently apparent to make them climb in and
+fight for you. They are saying, with a good bit of reason, that, after
+all is said and done, Big Money&mdash;Wall Street&mdash;still has the call, and
+any twenty-four hours may see the whole thing slump back into graft and
+crooked politics."</p>
+
+<p>"It is so true that you might be reading it out of a book," was the
+boss's comment. And then: "What's the answer?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt shook his head. "I don't know. If you had money enough to
+buy the voting control in P. S. L. you might get somewhere; but as it
+is, you're like a cat in Hades without claws."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," said Mr. Norcross, after a little pause: "You're a native New
+Yorker: do you know this man Collingwood?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only by hearsay. He is what our English friends call a 'blooming
+bounder'; fast yachts, fast motor-cars, the fast set generally. It's a
+pretty bad case of money-spoil, I fancy. They say he wasn't always a
+total loss."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever hear that he was married?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; he married a Kentucky girl some years ago: I don't remember
+her name. They say she stood him for about six months and then dropped
+out. I suppose he needs killing for that."</p>
+
+<p>At this the boss went a step farther, saying: "He does, indeed, Upton. I
+happen to know the young woman."</p>
+
+<p>That was when Mr. Van Britt fired his own little bomb-shell. "So do I,"
+he answered quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"But you said you had forgotten her name!"</p>
+
+<p>"So I have&mdash;her married name. And what's more, I mean to keep on
+forgetting it."</p>
+
+<p>There was no mistake about the boss's frown this time.</p>
+
+<p>"That won't do, Upton," he said, kind of warningly.</p>
+
+<p>"It will do well enough for the present. I'd marry her to-morrow,
+Graham, if she were free, and there were no other obstacles. Unhappily,
+there are two&mdash;besides the small legal difficulty; she doesn't care for
+my money&mdash;having a little of her own; and she happens to be in love with
+the other fellow."</p>
+
+<p>I guess the boss was remembering what Mrs. Sheila had told him in that
+confidence before the back-parlor fire, about its being all off between
+her and Collingwood, for he said: "I think you are mistaken as to that
+last."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm not mistaken. But that's neither here nor there. Neither you
+nor I can send Collingwood to the penitentiary&mdash;that's a cinch.
+Wherefore, I'm advising you to quit, walk out, jump the job."</p>
+
+<p>At that the boss took a fresh brace, righting his swing chair with a
+snap.</p>
+
+<p>"You know very little about me, Upton, if you think I'm going to throw
+up my hands now, when the real pinch has come. A while back I might have
+done it, but now I'll fight until I'm permanently killed. I have a
+scheme&mdash;if it could only be worked. But it can't be worked on a rising
+market. I suppose you have seen the morning's quotations. By some trick
+or other, the Dunton people are boosting the stock again. It went up
+three points yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt grinned. "They're discounting the effect of this little
+political deal&mdash;which will at least rope your reform scheme down, if it
+doesn't do anything else. What you need is a good, old-fashioned
+cataclysm of some sort; something that would fairly knock the tar out of
+P. S. L. securities and send them skittering down the toboggan slide in
+spite of anything Uncle Breckenridge could do to stop them; down to
+where they could be safely and profitably picked up by the dear public.
+Unfortunately, those things don't happen outside of the story books. If
+they did, if the earthquake should happen along our way just now, I
+don't know but I'd be disloyal enough to get out and help it shake
+things up a bit."</p>
+
+<p>After Mr. Van Britt had gone, the boss put in the remainder of the day
+like a workingman, skipping the noon luncheon as he sometimes did when
+the work drive was extra heavy. Meanwhile, as you'd suppose, rumor was
+plentifully busy, on the railroad, and also in town.</p>
+
+<p>By noon it was well understood that there had been a radical change in
+the management of C. S. &amp; W., and that there was going to be a general
+strike in answer to the slashing cut in wages. I slipped up-town to get
+a bite while Fred May was spelling me at the dictation desk, and I heard
+some of the talk. It was pretty straight, most of it&mdash;which shows how
+useless it is to try to keep any business secrets, nowadays.</p>
+
+<p>For example: the three men at my table in the Bullard grill-room&mdash;they
+didn't know me or who I was&mdash;knew that a council of war had been called
+in the railroad headquarters, and that Ripley had been pulled in by wire
+from Lesterburg, and that we were rushing around hurriedly to provide
+storage room for the wheat shippers in case of a tie-up, and that we
+were arranging to distribute railroad company coal in case the tie-up
+should bring on a fuel famine&mdash;knew all these things and talked about
+them.</p>
+
+<p>They were facts, as far as they went&mdash;these things. The boss hadn't been
+idle during the forenoon, and he kept up the drive straight through to
+quitting time. Word was brought in during the afternoon by Tarbell that
+the Hatch people were wiring the Kansas City and Omaha employment
+agencies and placing hurry orders for strike-breakers. The boss's answer
+to this was a peremptory wire to our passenger agents at both points to
+make no rate concessions whatever, of any kind, for the transportation
+of laborers under contract. It was a shrewd little knock. Labor of that
+kind is mighty hard to move unless it can get free transportation or a
+low rate of fare, and I could see that Mr. Norcross was hoping to keep
+the strike-breakers away.</p>
+
+<p>When six o'clock came, the boss asked May to stay and keep the office
+open while I could go down-stairs and get my dinner in the station
+restaurant, and he went off up-town&mdash;to the club, I suppose. After I'd
+had my bite, I let May go. Everything was moving along all right, so far
+as anybody could see. We had five extra fuel trains loading at the
+company's chutes at Coalville, and the despatcher was instructed to work
+them out on the line during the night, distributing them to the towns
+that had reported shortages. They were not to be turned over to the
+regular coal yards; they were to be side-tracked and held for
+emergencies.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross came back about eight o'clock, and I gave him my report of
+how things were going on the line. A little later Mr. Cantrell dropped
+in, and there was a quiet talk about the situation, and what it was
+likely to develop. The <i>Mountaineer</i> editor was given all the facts,
+except the one big one about Hatch's death-grip on us, and in turn Mr.
+Cantrell promised the help of his paper to the last ditch&mdash;though, of
+course, he had no idea of how deep that last ditch was going to be. I
+had a lot of filing and indexing to do, and I kept at work while they
+were talking, wondering all the time if the boss would venture to tell
+the editor about the depth of that "last ditch." He didn't. I guess he
+thought he wouldn't until he had to.</p>
+
+<p>It was pretty nearly nine o'clock when the editor went away, and Mr.
+Norcross was just saying to me that he guessed we'd better knock off for
+the night, when we both heard a step in May's room. A second later the
+door was pushed open and a man came in, making for the nearest chair and
+flinging himself into it as if he'd reached the limit. It was
+Collingwood. He was chewing on a dead cigar and his face was like the
+face of a corpse. But he was sober.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, I supposed he had come to make trouble with the boss on Mrs.
+Sheila's account, and I quietly edged open the drawer of my desk where I
+kept Fred May's automatic, so as to be ready. He didn't waste much time.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw you as I was coming away from Kendrick's last night," he began,
+with a bickering rasp in his voice. "Did you go up against the gun I had
+loaded for you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross cut straight through to the bottom of that little
+complication at a single stroke.</p>
+
+<p>"What Mrs. Collingwood said to me, or what I said to her, can have no
+possible bearing upon anything that you may have to say to me, or that I
+can consent to listen to, Mr. Collingwood."</p>
+
+<p>The derelict sat up in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"But you've got to keep hands off, just the same; at Kendrick's, and in
+this other business, too. If you don't, there is going to be blood on
+the moon! Get me?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss never batted an eye. "I'm taking it for granted that you are
+sober, Mr. Collingwood," he said. "If you are, you must surely know that
+threats are about the poorest possible weapons you can use just now."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a plant, from start to finish!" gritted the man in the chair. "I
+haven't done a damned thing more than to cash a few checks for&mdash;for
+expenses, and turn the money over to Bullock. Now Hatch tells me that I
+was working with a spotter&mdash;his spotter&mdash;and that he can send me up for
+bribery. It's a lie. I don't know what Bullock did with the money, and I
+don't want to know."</p>
+
+<p>"But you had orders to give it to him when he required it, didn't you?"
+Mr. Norcross cut in.</p>
+
+<p>"That's none of your business. I want you to choke this man Hatch off of
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>The boss had picked up his paper-knife. "I don't know why you should
+come to me for help," he said. "You have been hand-in-glove with these
+conspirators ever since you came out here. You have known what they were
+doing to destroy the railroad property and wreck our trains, and two
+days ago you knew that they had set a trap for my special train on the
+Strathcona branch&mdash;a trap that was meant to kill me."</p>
+
+<p>It was a random shot, and I knew that Mr. Norcross was just guessing at
+where it might land when he fired it. But it went home; oh, you bet it
+went home!</p>
+
+<p>"Damn you!" gurgled the bounder, half starting to his feet. "Why
+shouldn't I want to see you killed? And what do I care what becomes of
+your cursed railroad? Haven't you done enough to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No!" the word was slammed at him like a bullet. And then: "As I told
+you in the beginning, we won't go into any phase of it that involves
+Mrs. Collingwood. Get back into your own boat. Are you trying to tell me
+now that Hatch is threatening you?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's played me for a come-on. He says he's got the whole business down
+in black and white, with affidavits, and all that. He had the nerve to
+tell me less than an hour ago that he'd burn me alive if I didn't toe
+the mark."</p>
+
+<p>"What does he want you to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wants me to stick around here so that he can use me against you. He
+knows how you're mixed up with Sheila and that you can't turn a wheel
+without making it look as if you were going after me on your own
+personal account."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a little time, and the crackle of the match with
+which Mr. Norcross relighted his cigar smashed into the stillness like a
+tiny pistol shot. It was an awful muddle, with bloody murder sticking
+out of it on every side.</p>
+
+<p>"If you have come here with the idea that I can force Hatch's hand, you
+are very much misled," said the boss, at the close of the electric
+pause. And then: "Has he made it appear to you that he was merely trying
+to help you avenge your own fancied wrongs?"</p>
+
+<p>"He said I ought to get you; that any man who would make love to a
+married woman ought to be got."</p>
+
+<p>My chief was looking past the derelict and out through the darkened
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know me, Mr. Collingwood, but you do know your wife; and you
+know that she is as far above suspicion as the angels in heaven. Let
+that part of it go. Hatch was merely using you for his own ends. If he
+could persuade you to kill me off out of the way, it would be merely
+that much gained in the business fight. You haven't done it thus far,
+and now he is using your check-cashing excursion as a club with which he
+proposes to brain the entire railroad management, your uncle included,
+if we interfere with his plans."</p>
+
+<p>Collingwood scowled up at the ceiling, shifting the dead cigar from one
+corner of his mouth to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"So that's the way of it, is it?" he commented. "He was working for his
+own pocket all the time, and Uncle Breck stands pat and slips him the
+ace he was needing to make his hand a winner. Between you and me,
+Norcross, I believe this damned piker needs killing a few times,
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>The boss sat back in his swing chair and I could just imagine that he
+was trying to get some sort of proper angle on this young fellow who, in
+addition to his other scoundrelisms, big and little, had wrecked the
+life of Sheila Macrae. I knew what he was thinking. He had a theory that
+no man that was ever born was either all angel or all devil, and he was
+hunting for the redeeming streak in this one.</p>
+
+<p>When you looked right hard at the haggard face you could see something
+sort of half-appealing in it; something to make you think that perhaps,
+away back yonder before the spoiling began, there used to be a man;
+never a strong man, I guess, but one that might have been generous and
+free-hearted, maybe. I got a fleeting little glimpse of that back-number
+man when he turned suddenly and said:</p>
+
+<p>"One night a few weeks ago when I was full up, Hatch got hold of me and
+told me you were out at the Kendrick place with Sheila. He made me
+believe that I ought to go out there and kill you, and I started to do
+it. Do you know why I didn't do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said the chief, mighty quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll tell you. One night last spring up at the Bullard you
+slammed me one in the face and dragged me off to my room to keep me from
+making a bigger ass of myself than I'd already made. I haven't forgotten
+that. In all these crooked years, nobody else has ever taken the trouble
+to chuck me decently out of sight and give me a chance to brace. Drunk
+as I was, I remembered it that night when I was climbing up to a window
+in the major's house and trying to get a shot at you."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross shook his head, more than half sympathetically, I thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Let that part of it go and tell me about this other trouble," he said.
+"How badly are you tangled up in this political business?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've given it to you straight on the bribing proposition. Uncle Breck
+used me as a money carrier because&mdash;well, maybe it was because he
+couldn't trust Bullock. I didn't know definitely what Bullock was doing
+with the checks I cashed for him, though I supposed, of course, it was
+something that wouldn't stand daylight. It was only a side issue with
+me. I was coming out here anyway. I knew Sheila had made up her
+mind&mdash;God knows she's had cause enough; but I had a crazy notion that
+I'd like to be on the same side of the earth with her again for just a
+little while. Then this&mdash;" he trailed off in a babble of maledictions
+poured out upon the man who had trapped him and used him.</p>
+
+<p>The boss straightened himself in his chair, but he still was speaking
+gently when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"You are not asking my advice, and I don't owe you anything, personally,
+Mr. Collingwood. But I'll say to you what I might say to a better man in
+like circumstances. You have done all the harm you can, but, as I see
+it, there doesn't seem to be any need of your staying here to suffer the
+consequences. Why don't you go back to New York, taking your wife with
+you, if she will go?"</p>
+
+<p>Collingwood's smile was a mere teeth-baring grimace.</p>
+
+<p>"Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was just
+eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my funeral. Oh,
+I've earned it, and I'm not kicking. And about this other thing: I can't
+duck. You know what Hatch is holding me for. He told me just a little
+while ago that if I stepped aboard of a train, I'd be arrested before
+the train could pull out."</p>
+
+<p>It was a handsome little precaution on the part of the chief of the
+grafters. If a fight should be precipitated&mdash;if the boss should try to
+checkmate the C. S. &amp; W. gobble&mdash;the arrest and indictment of President
+Dunton's nephew would serve bully good and well as a dramatic bit of
+side play to keep the newspapers from printing too much about the other
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>"If you really want to go, I think it can be arranged in some way, in
+spite of Hatch and his bluffing," Mr. Norcross put in quietly. "So far
+as our railroad troubles are concerned it will neither help nor hinder
+for you to stay on here, now."</p>
+
+<p>As if the helpful suggestion had been a lighted match to fire a hidden
+mine of rage, Collingwood sprang to his feet with his dull eyes ablaze.</p>
+
+<p>"No, by God!" he swore. "I'm going to make him come across with those
+affidavit papers first! You wait right here, Norcross. You think I'm all
+cur, but I'll show you. There isn't much left of me but hound dog, but
+even a hound dog will bite if you kick him hard enough. Lend me a gun,
+if you've got one and I'll&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on&mdash;none of that!" the boss broke in sternly, jumping out of his
+chair to enforce the command. But before he could make the grabbing move
+the corridor door slammed noisily and the madman was gone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Deserter</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross chased out and tried to overtake Collingwood, going as far
+as the foot of the stairs. I went, too, but got only far enough to meet
+the boss coming up again. There was nothing doing. The station policeman
+had seen the crazy rounder jump into a taxi and go spinning off up-town.</p>
+
+<p>That settled the Collingwood business for the time being, but there was
+another jolt waiting for us when we got back to the office. While we
+were both out, Mr. Van Britt had blown in from his room at the foot of
+the hall and we found him lounging comfortably in the chair that
+Collingwood had just vacated.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought maybe you'd turn up again pretty soon, since you'd left the
+doors all open," was the way he started out. Then: "Sit down, Graham; I
+want to talk a few lines."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross took his own chair and twirled it to face the general
+superintendent. "Say it," he commanded briefly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt hooked his thumbs in his armholes.</p>
+
+<p>"I've just been figuring a bit on the general outlook: you have a
+decently efficient operating outfit here, what with Perkins and Brant
+and Conway handling the three divisions as self-contained units. You
+don't need a general superintendent any more than a monkey needs two
+tails."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you driving at?" was the curt demand.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suppose we say retrenchment, for one thing. As I size it up, you
+might just as well be saving my salary. It would buy a good many new
+cross-ties in the course of a year."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all bunk, and you know it," snapped the boss. "The organization
+as it stands hasn't a single stick of dead wood in it. You know very
+well that a railroad the size of the Short Line can't run without an
+individual head of the operating department."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt laughed a little at that.</p>
+
+<p>"If you should get some one of these new efficiency experts out here he
+would probably tell you that you could cut your staff right in two in
+the middle."</p>
+
+<p>I could see that the boss was getting mighty nearly impatient.</p>
+
+<p>"You are merely turning handsprings around the edges of the thing you
+have come to say, Upton," he barked out. "Come to the point, can't you?
+What have you got up your sleeve?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing that I could make you understand in a month of Sundays. I'm
+sore on my job and I want to quit."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense! You don't mean that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do. I'm tired of wearing the brass collar of a soulless
+corporation. What's the use, anyway? I found a bunch of dividend checks
+from my bank at home in the mail to-day, and what good does the money do
+me? I can't spend it out here; can't even tip the servants at the hotel
+without everlastingly demoralizing them. I'm like the little boy who
+wanted to go out in the garden and eat worms."</p>
+
+<p>The boss was frowning thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not giving me a show, Upton," he protested. "Can't you blow the
+froth off and let me see what's in the bottom of the stein?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pledge you my word, it's all froth, Graham. I want to climb up on the
+mesa behind the shops and take a good deep breath of free air and shake
+my fist at your blamed old cow-track of a railroad and tell it to go to
+the devil. You shouldn't deny me a little pleasure like that."</p>
+
+<p>It was getting under the boss's skin at last. "I can't believe that you
+really want to resign," he broke out, sort of hopelessly. "It's simply
+preposterous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pull it down out of the future and put it in the present, and you've
+got it," said Mr. Van Britt. "I <i>have</i> resigned. I wrote it out on a
+piece of paper and dropped it into your mail box as I came through the
+outer office. It's signed, sealed, and delivered. You'll give me a
+testimonial, or something of that sort, 'To Whom It May Concern,' won't
+you? I've been obedient and faithful and honest and efficient, and all
+that, haven't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to know first where you got your liquor, Upton. That is the
+most charitable construction I can put upon all this. Why, man alive!
+you're quitting me in the thick of the toughest fight the grafters have
+put up!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know; but a man's got only one life to live, and I've always had
+a sneaking sympathy for the high private in the front rank who didn't
+want to stand up and get himself shot full of holes. I'm running, and if
+you should ask me why, I'd tell you what the retreating soldier told
+Stonewall Jackson; he said he was running only because he couldn't fly."</p>
+
+<p>Once more the boss grew silently thoughtful. Out of the digging mental
+inquiry he brought this:</p>
+
+<p>"Has this sudden notion of yours anything to do with Sheila Macrae,
+Upton?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pledge you my word again. I met Sheila on the street to-day and
+promised her that I wouldn't so much as tip my hat to her while
+Collingwood is on this side of the Missouri River."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you quit, you'll go East yourself, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe, after a while. For the time being, I'd like to loaf on you for a
+week or so and watch the wheels go around without my having to prod
+them. It's running in my mind that this newest phase of the C. S. &amp; W.
+business is going to stir up a mighty pretty shindy, and I had a foolish
+notion that I'd like to stick around and look on&mdash;as an innocent
+bystander."</p>
+
+<p>"The innocent bystander usually gets shot in the leg," the boss ripped
+out, with the brittlest kind of humor. And then: "I suppose I shall have
+to let you do what you want to&mdash;and let you pick your own time for
+giving me the real reason. But you're crippling me most savagely,
+Upton&mdash;and at a time when I am least able to stand it."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt got up and edged his way toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a good reason, Graham; and sometime&mdash;say when we are walking
+through the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem together&mdash;maybe I'll tell
+you about it. If I were really a good scrapper, I'd stay and help you
+fight it out with Hatch; but you know the old saying&mdash;capital is always
+cowardly; and my present credit at the Portal City National is pretty
+well up to a quarter of a million, thanks to the dividends I deposited
+to-day. Good-night. I'll see you in the morning&mdash;if by that time you
+haven't decided to cut me cold."</p>
+
+<p>I kept right busy over the indexes after Mr. Van Britt went away, just
+to give the boss a little chance to catch up with himself. He sure was
+catching it hot and heavy on all sides. The way things had turned out,
+he couldn't go to the major's any more, and now his railroad
+organization was beginning to go to pieces on him. It certainly was
+tough. All we needed now was for President Dunton to come smashing in
+with one more good jolt and it would be all over but the obsequies, the
+monument and the epitaph. At least, that is the way it looked to me.</p>
+
+<p>It was along about ten o'clock when the boss closed his desk with a bang
+and said we'd better saw it off for the night. I walked up-town with him
+and as we were passing the Bullard he turned in to ask the night clerk
+if Collingwood was in his room. The answer was nix; that the young New
+Yorker hadn't been seen since dinner.</p>
+
+<p>On the way out we saw Mr. Van Britt at the telegraph alcove. He had
+apparently been making good use of his first half-hour or so of freedom.
+He was handing in a thick bunch of telegrams for transmission, and he
+rather pointedly turned the sheaf face down upon the marble slab when we
+came along, as much as to say "it's none of your business what I'm
+doing."</p>
+
+<p>It struck me as sort of curious that he should have so much wire
+correspondence when he claimed to be taking a rest, and why he was so
+careful not to let us get a glimpse of what it was all about. But the
+whole thing was now so horribly muddled that a little mystery more or
+less on anybody's part couldn't make much difference; and that was the
+thought I took to bed with me a little later after we reached our rooms
+in the railroad club.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>The Beginning of the End</h3>
+
+
+<p>However much the Hatch people may have wanted to avoid publicity
+regarding the change of ownership and policies in the Storage &amp;
+Warehouse reorganization, the prompt announcement of a general strike of
+the employees was enough to make every newspaper in the State sit up and
+take notice.</p>
+
+<p>We had the <i>Mountaineer</i> at the breakfast-table in the club grill-room
+on the morning of the day when the strike was advertised to go into
+effect. There was a news story, with big headlines in red ink, and also
+an editorial. Cantrell didn't say anything against the railroad company.
+His comments were those of an observer who wished to be straight-forward
+and fair to all concerned, but his editorial did not spare the silly
+local stockholders whose swapping and selling had made the <i>coup</i>
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>Cantrell himself, mild-eyed and looking as if he'd got out of bed about
+three hours too early, drifted into the grill-room and took a seat at
+our table before we were through.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to be decent about it, Norcross," he said, forestalling
+anything that the boss might be going to say about the editorial in the
+<i>Mountaineer</i>. "I'm trying to believe that the men higher up in your
+railroad councils haven't fathered this Hatch scheme of
+consolidation&mdash;which is more than some of the other pencil-pushers will
+do for you, I'm afraid. Thanks to your publicity measures, everybody
+believes that you still hold the whip-hand over the combination with
+your ground leases. I'm not asking what you propose to do; I am merely
+taking it for granted that you are going to stick to your policy, and
+hoping that you will come and tell me about it when you are ready to
+talk."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall do just that," the boss promised; and I guess he would have
+been glad to let the matter drop at this, only Cantrell wouldn't.</p>
+
+<p>"I lost three good hours' sleep this morning on the chance of catching
+you here at table," the editor went on. "A little whisper leaked in over
+the wires last night, or, rather, early this morning, that set me to
+thinking. You haven't been having any trouble with your own employees
+lately, have you, Norcross?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit in the world. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is some little excitement, with the public taking a hand in it.
+There were indignation meetings held last night in a number of the
+towns along your lines, and resolutions were passed protesting against
+the action of the new combination in cutting wages, and asserting that
+public sentiment would be with the C. S. &amp; W. employees if they are
+forced to carry out their threat of striking at noon to-day. The whisper
+that I spoke of intimated that the protest might extend to the railroad
+employees."</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing in it," said the boss decisively. "I suppose you mean
+in the way of a sympathetic strike, and that is entirely improbable. I
+imagine very few of the C. S. &amp; W. employees belong to any of the labor
+unions."</p>
+
+<p>"A strike on the railroad would hit you pretty hard just now, wouldn't
+it?" Cantrell asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross dodged the question. "We're not going to have a strike," he
+averred; and since we had finished our breakfast, he made a business
+excuse and we slid out.</p>
+
+<p>When we reached the office we found Fred May already there and at work,
+and in the middle room Mr. Van Britt was on hand, reading the morning
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't get around as early as you might," was the little
+millionaire's comment when the boss walked in and opened up his desk.
+"I've been waiting nearly a half-hour for you to show up. Seen the
+paper?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean the strike business; I mean the market quotations."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I didn't look at them."</p>
+
+<p>"They are interesting. P. S. L. Common went up another three points
+yesterday. It closed at 38 and a fraction. Do you know what that means,
+Graham?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"It means that Uncle Breckenridge and his crowd are already joyfully
+discounting your coming resignation. Somebody has given them a wire tip
+that you are as good as down and out, and unless a miracle of some sort
+can be pulled off, I guess the tip is a straight one. Strong as he is,
+Chadwick can't carry you alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Drop it," snapped the boss irritably. And then: "Have you come to tell
+me that you have reconsidered that fool letter you wrote me last night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in a million years," returned the escaped captive airily. "I am
+here this morning as a paying patron of the Pioneer Short Line. I want
+to hire a special train to go&mdash;well, anywhere I please on your jerkwater
+railroad."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, I do. I want a car and a good, smart engine. The Eight-Fifteen
+will do, with Buck Chandler to run it."</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw! take your own car and any crew you please. We are not selling
+transportation to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes you are; I'm going to pay for that train, and what's more, I want
+your written receipt for the money. I need it in my business. Then, if
+Chandler should happen to get gay and dump me into the ditch somewhere,
+I can sue you for damages."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; if you will persist in joking with me it's going to cost you
+something. How far do you want your train to run?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know; anywhere the notion prods me&mdash;say to the west end and
+back, with as many stops as I see fit to make, and perhaps a run over
+the branches."</p>
+
+<p>I saw the boss make a few figures on a pad under his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It would cost anybody else, roughly, something like five hundred
+dollars. On account of your little joke it's going to cost you a cold
+thousand."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt took out his check-book and a fountain pen and solemnly
+made out the check.</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are," he said, flipping the check over to the boss's desk.
+"Now shell out that receipt, so that I'll have it to show if anybody
+wants to know how much you've gouged me. Since you're making the
+accommodation cost me a dollar a minute, how long have I got to wait?"</p>
+
+<p>The chief's answer was a push at Fred May's call button, and when
+Frederic of Pittsburgh came in:</p>
+
+<p>"Have Mr. Perkins order out my private car for Mr. Van Britt, with the
+Eight-Fifteen and Chandler, engineer. Tell Mr. Perkins to give Chandler
+and his conductor orders to run as Mr. Van Britt may direct, giving the
+special right-of-way over everything except first-class trains in the
+opposite direction." Then to Van Britt: "Will that do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Admirably; only I'm waiting for that receipt."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross said something that sounded like "damn," scribbled a
+memorandum of the thousand-dollar payment on a sheet of the scratch-pad
+and handed it over, saying: "The order for the car includes my cook and
+porter, and something to eat; we'll throw these in with the
+transportation, and if the car is ditched and you sue for damages, we'll
+file a cross-bill for hotel accommodations. Now go away and work off
+your little attack of lunacy. I'm busy."</p>
+
+<p>We had an easier day in the office than I had dared hope for, whatever
+the boss thought about it, though it was an exceedingly busy one. With
+the strike news in the papers, it seemed as if everybody in town wanted
+to interview the general manager of the railroad, and to ask him what he
+was going to do about it.</p>
+
+<p>Following his hard-and-fast rule, Mr. Norcross didn't deny himself to
+anybody. Patiently he told each fresh batch of callers that the railroad
+company had nothing whatever to do with the change in ownership of C. S.
+&amp; W.; that the railroad's attitude was unaltered; and that, so far as it
+could be done legally, the Pioneer Short Line would stand firmly between
+its patrons and any extortion which might grow out of the new
+conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The C. S. &amp; W. strike&mdash;as our wires told us&mdash;went into effect promptly
+on the stroke of noon, and a train from the west, arriving late in the
+afternoon, brought Ripley. For the first time that day, Mr. Norcross
+told me to snap the catch on the office door for privacy and then he
+told Ripley to talk. Our neat little general counsel was fresh from the
+actual fighting line, and his news amply confirmed the wire reports
+which had been trickling in.</p>
+
+<p>"The conditions all along the line are almost revolutionary," was
+Ripley's summing-up of the situation. "Generally speaking, the public is
+not holding us responsible as yet, though of course there are croakers
+who are saying that it is entirely a railroad move, and predicting that
+we won't do anything to interfere with the new graft."</p>
+
+<p>"Cantrell says that public sentiment is altogether on the side of the C.
+S. &amp; W. strikers," the boss put in.</p>
+
+<p>"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to
+everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be
+any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of
+affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can
+starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a
+bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."</p>
+
+<p>"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those
+ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"</p>
+
+<p>"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life,"
+was the confident rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond
+and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is
+a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply
+your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it.
+Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third
+member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap
+into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the
+railroad management.</p>
+
+<p>Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but
+also less hopeful.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his
+sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is
+all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately
+trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any
+surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl
+out of."</p>
+
+<p>"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a
+chance to sleep on it&mdash;as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in
+some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men
+who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the
+affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make
+them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those
+papers&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.</p>
+
+<p>"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these
+men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by
+Bullock for his vote."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I should make every mother's son of them come across with the full
+amount of the bribe, on pain of an exposure which the dirtiest
+politician in this State couldn't afford to face. That would settle it.
+Hatch couldn't work the same game a second time."</p>
+
+<p>Ripley let it go at that and spoke of something else.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you have seen how our stock is climbing. Has the new
+situation here anything to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross said he thought not, and rather lamented that we didn't
+have better information about what was going on at the New York end of
+things. Also, he told Ripley something that I hadn't known; that he had
+wired Mr. Chadwick asking the wheat king to give him a line on what the
+stock-kiting meant. Then Ripley asked for orders.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing to be done until Hatch begins to raise his prices," he
+was told. "But I wanted to have you here in case anything should break
+loose suddenly." And at that Ripley went away.</p>
+
+<p>We were closing our desks to go to dinner when Fred May came in to say
+that a delegation of the pay-roll men was outside and wanting to have a
+word with the "Big Boss." Mr. Norcross stopped with his desk curtain
+half drawn down.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Fred?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said the Pittsburgher. "I should call it a grievance
+committee, if it wasn't so big. And they don't seem to be mad about
+anything. Bart Hoskins is doing the talking for them."</p>
+
+<p>"Send them in," was the curt command, and a minute later the inner
+office was about three-fourths filled up with a shuffling crowd of P. S.
+L. men.</p>
+
+<p>The chief looked the crowd over. There was a bunch of train- and
+engine-men, a squad from the shops, and a bigger one from the yards.
+Also, the wire service had turned out a gang of linemen and half a dozen
+operators.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, men, let's have it," said Mr. Norcross, not too sharply. "My
+dinner's getting cold."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll not be keepin' you above the hollow half of a minute, Mister
+Norcross," said the big, bearded freight conductor who acted as
+spokesman. "About this C. S. &amp; W. strike that went on to-day: we'd like
+to know, straight from you, if it's anything in the railroad company's
+pocket to have all these old men fired out and a lot of scabs put in on
+starvation wages to ball us all up when we try to work with 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"It's nothing to us; or rather, I should say, we are on the other side,"
+was the short reply. "You probably all know that C. S. &amp; W. has changed
+hands, and the old Red Tower syndicate, with Mr. Rufus Hatch at its
+head, is now in control."</p>
+
+<p>Hoskins nodded. "That's about what we allowed, and we've come up here to
+say that we're almighty sorry for these poor cusses that have been
+dumped out o' their jobs. We ain't got no kick comin' with you, n'r with
+the company, Mister Norcross, but it looks like it's up to us to do
+somethin', and we didn't want to do it without hittin' square out from
+the shoulder."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm listening," said the chief.</p>
+
+<p>"The union locals have called a meetin' f'r to-night. There ain't nobody
+knows yet what's goin' to be done, but whatever it is, we want you to
+know that it ain't done ag'inst you n'r the railroad company."</p>
+
+<p>The boss had handled wage earners too long not to be able to suspect
+what was in the wind.</p>
+
+<p>"You men don't want to let your sympathies carry you too far," he
+cautioned. "When you take up another fellow's quarrel you want to be
+pretty sure that you're not going to hit your friends in the scrap."</p>
+
+<p>Hoskins grinned understandingly, and I guess the boss was a little
+puzzled by the nods and winks that went around among the silent members
+of the delegation; at least, I know I was.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," Hoskins said. "Bein' the Big Boss, you've got to
+talk that way. They might reach out and grab you fr'm New York if you
+didn't. But what I was aimin' to say is that there'll be a train-load 'r
+two of strike-breakers a-careerin' along here in a day 'r so, and we
+ain't figurin' on lettin' 'em get past Portal City, if that far."</p>
+
+<p>"That's up to you," said Mr. Norcross brusquely. "If you start anything
+in the way of a riot&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse <i>me</i>. There ain't goin' to be no riotin', and no company
+property mashed up. Mr. Van Britt, he&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was right here that an odd thing happened. Con Corrigan, a big
+two-fisted freight engineer standing directly behind Hoskins, reached an
+arm around the speaker's neck and choked him so suddenly that Hoskins's
+sentence ended in a gasping chuckle. When the garroting arm was
+withdrawn the conductor looked around sort of foolishly and said: "I'm
+thinking that's about all we wanted to say, ain't it, boys?" and the
+deputation filed out as solemnly as it had come in.</p>
+
+<p>I guess Mr. Norcross wasn't left wholly in the dark when the tramping
+footfalls of the committee died away in the corridor. That unintentional
+mention of Mr. Van Britt's name looked as if it might open up some more
+possibilities, though what they were I couldn't imagine, and I don't
+believe the general manager could, either.</p>
+
+<p>After that, things rocked along pretty easy until after dinner. Instead
+of going right back to the office from the club, Mr. Norcross drifted
+into the smoking-room and filled a pipe. In the course of a few minutes,
+Major Kendrick dropped in and pulled up a chair. I don't know what they
+talked about, but after a little while, when the boss got up to go, I
+heard him say something that gave the key to the most of what had gone
+before, I guess.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen or heard anything of Collingwood since yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>The good old major shook his head. "I haven't seen, but I have heard,"
+he said, sort of soberly. "They're tellin' me that he's oveh in his
+rooms at the Bullard, drinkin' himself to death. If he wasn't altogetheh
+past redemption, suh, he would have had the decency to get out of town
+befo' he turned loose all holts that way; he would, for a fact, Graham."</p>
+
+<p>At that, Mr. Norcross explained in just a few words why Collingwood
+hadn't gone&mdash;why he couldn't go. Whereupon the old Kentuckian looked
+graver than ever.</p>
+
+<p>"That thah spells trouble, Graham. Hatch is simply invitin' the
+unde'takeh. Howie isn't what you'd call a dangerous man, but he is
+totally irresponsible, even when he's sobeh."</p>
+
+<p>"We ought to get him away from here," was the boss's decision. "He is an
+added menace while he stays."</p>
+
+<p>I didn't hear what the major said to that, because little Rags, Mr.
+Perkins's office boy, had just come in with a note which he was asking
+me to give to Mr. Norcross. I did it; and after the note had been
+glanced at, the chief said, kind of bitterly, to the major:</p>
+
+<p>"You can never fall so far that you can't fall a little farther; have
+you ever remarked that, major?" And then he want on to explain: "I have
+a note here from Perkins, our Desert Division superintendent. He says
+that the 'locals' of the various railroad labor unions have just
+notified him of the unanimous passage of a strike vote&mdash;the strike to go
+into effect at midnight."</p>
+
+<p>"A strike?&mdash;on the <i>railroad</i>? Why, Graham, son, you don't mean it!"</p>
+
+<p>"The men seem to mean it&mdash;which is much more to the purpose. They are
+striking in sympathy with the C. S. &amp; W. employees. I fancy that settles
+our little experiment in good railroading definitely, major. We'll go
+out of business as a common carrier at midnight, and it's the final
+straw that will break the camel's back. Dunton doesn't want a
+receivership, but he'll have to take one now."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my deah fellow!" protested the major. "Let's hope it isn't going to
+be so bad as that!"</p>
+
+<p>"It will. The bottom will drop out of the stock and break the market
+when this strike news gets on the wire, and that will end it. I wish to
+God there were some way in which I could save Mr. Chadwick: he has
+trusted me, major, and I&mdash;I've failed him!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>The Murder Madman</h3>
+
+
+<p>I knew what we were up against when we headed down to the railroad
+lay-out, the chief and I, leaving the good old major thoughtfully
+puffing his cigar in the club smoking-room. With a strike due to be
+pulled off in a little more than three hours there were about a million
+things that would have to be jerked around into shape and propped up so
+that they could stand by themselves while the Short Line was taking a
+vacation. And there was only a little handful of us in the headquarters
+to do the jerking and propping.</p>
+
+<p>But it was precisely in a crisis like this that the boss could shine.
+From the minute we hit the tremendous job he was all there, carrying the
+whole map of the Short Line in his head, thinking straight from the
+shoulder, and never missing a lick; and I don't believe anybody would
+ever have suspected that he was a beaten man, pushed to the ropes in the
+final round with the grafters, his reputation as a successful railroad
+manager as good as gone, and his warm little love-dream knocked
+sky-winding forever and a day.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, we found Fred May still at his desk, and he was promptly
+clamped to the telephone and told to get busy spreading the hurry call.
+In half an hour every relief operator we had in Portal City was in the
+wire-room, and the back-breaking job of preparing a thousand miles of
+railroad for a sudden tie-up was in full swing. Mr. Perkins, as division
+superintendent, was in touch with the local labor unions, and a
+conference was held with the strike leaders. Persuading and insisting by
+turns, Mr. Norcross fought out the necessary compromises with the
+unions. All ordinary traffic would be suspended at midnight, but
+passenger trains <i>en route</i> were to be run through to our connecting
+line terminals east and west, live-stock trains were to be laid out only
+where there were feeding corrals, and perishable freight was to be taken
+to its destination, wherever that might be.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to these concessions, the strikers agreed to allow the mail
+trains to run without interruption, with our promise that they would not
+carry passengers. Hoskins and his committee bucked a little at this, but
+got down when they were shown that they could not afford to risk a clash
+with the Government. This exception admitted, another followed, as a
+matter of course. If the mail trains were to be run, some of the
+telegraph operators would have to remain on duty, at least to the extent
+of handling train orders.</p>
+
+<p>With these generalities out of the way, we got down to details.
+"Fire-alarm" wires were sent to the various cities and towns on the
+lines asking for immediate information regarding food and fuel supplies,
+and the strike leaders were notified that, for sheer humanity's sake,
+they would have to permit the handling of provision trains in cases
+where they were absolutely needed.</p>
+
+<p>By eleven o'clock the tangle was getting itself pretty well straightened
+out. Some of the trains had already been abandoned, and the others were
+moving along to the agreed-upon destinations. Kirgan had taken hold in
+the Portal City yard, and by putting on extra crews was getting the
+needful shifting and car sorting into shape; and the Portal City
+employees, acting upon their own initiative, were picketing the yard and
+company buildings to protect them from looters or fire-setters. Mr. Van
+Britt's special, so the wires told us, was at Lesterburg, and it was
+likely to stay there; and Mr. Van Britt, himself, couldn't be reached.</p>
+
+<p>It was at half-past eleven that we got the first real yelp from somebody
+who was getting pinched. It came in the shape of a wire from the
+Strathcona night operator. A party of men&mdash;"mine owners" the operator
+called them&mdash;had just heard of the impending railroad tie-up. They had
+been meaning to come in on the regular night train, but that had been
+abandoned. So now they were offering all kinds of money for a special to
+bring them to Portal City. It was represented that there were millions
+at stake. Couldn't we do something?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross had kept Hoskins and a few of the other local strike
+leaders where he could get hold of them, and he put the request up to
+them as a matter that was now out of his hands. Would they allow him to
+run a one-car special from the gold camp to Portal City after midnight?
+It was for them to say.</p>
+
+<p>Hoskins and his accomplices went off to talk it over with some of the
+other men. When the big freight conductor came back he was alone and was
+grinning good-naturedly.</p>
+
+<p>"We ain't aimin' to make the company lose any good money that comes
+a-rolling down the hill at it, Mister Norcross," he said. "Cinch these
+here Strathcona hurry-boys f'r all you can get out o' them, and if
+you'll lend us the loan of the wires, we'll pass the word to let the
+special come on through."</p>
+
+<p>It was sure the funniest strike I ever saw or heard of, and I guess the
+boss thought so, too&mdash;with all this good-natured bargaining back and
+forth; but there was nothing more said, and I carried the word to Mr.
+Perkins directing him to have arrangements made for the running of a
+one-car special from Strathcona for the hurry folks.</p>
+
+<p>Past that, things rocked along until the hands of the big standard-time
+clock in the despatcher's room pointed to midnight. Mr. Norcross and I
+were both at Donohue's elbow when the men at the wires, east and west,
+clicked in their "Good-night," which was the signal that the Pioneer
+Short Line had laid down on the job and gone out of business. I couldn't
+compare it to anything but a funeral bell, and that's about what it was.
+No matter how short the strike might be, it was going to smash us good
+and plenty. And whatever else might come of it, it was a cinch that it
+would squeeze the last little breath of life out of the Norcross
+management for good and all.</p>
+
+<p>As if to confirm that sort of doleful foreboding of mine, Norris, who
+was holding down the commercial wire, came over to the counter railing
+just then with a New York message. I saw the boss's eyes flash and the
+little bunchy muscle-swellings of anger come and go on the edge of his
+jaw as he read it, and then he handed it to me.</p>
+
+<p>"You may endorse that 'No Answer' and file it when you go back to the
+office," he said shortly, and then he went on talking to Donohue,
+telling him how to handle the trains which were still out and moving to
+their tie-up destinations.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I read the message; I knew there was nothing private about it
+so far as I was concerned, since it had been given me to put away in the
+files. It was dated from the Waldorf-Astoria at midnight, which,
+allowing for the difference in time between New York and Portal City,
+meant that it had been sent at nine o'clock by our time. Somebody in our
+neck of woods was evidently keeping in close wire touch with Mr. Dunton,
+for though the strike vote was only a little more than an hour old when
+he sent the telegram, he evidently knew all about it. This is what I
+read:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To <span class="smcap">G. Norcross</span>, G. M.,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>"Your administration has been a conspicuous failure from the
+beginning. Compromise with employees on any terms offered and
+prevent strike at all costs. That done, you are hereby directed to
+wire your resignation to take effect one week from to-day.</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">B. Dunton</span>, <i>President</i>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>It had hit us at last; not a decent request, mind you, but a blunt,
+brutal demand. The boss was fired. No word had come from Mr. Chadwick,
+and there could be but one reason for his silence. In some way, perhaps
+through the late boosting of the stock, the New Yorkers had squeezed
+him out. We were shot dead in the trenches.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't understand how the chief could take it so quietly, unless it
+was because he had been hammered so long and so hard that nothing
+mattered any more. Anyhow, he was just standing there, talking soberly
+to Donohue, when once more the Strathcona branch sounder began to click
+furiously, snipping out the headquarters call.</p>
+
+<p>Donohue cut in and we all heard the Strathcona man's new bleat. The way
+he told it, it seemed that one member of the party that had chartered
+the special to come to Portal City had got left, and this man was now in
+the Strathcona wire office, bidding high for an engine to chase the
+train and put him aboard.</p>
+
+<p>At first the boss said, "No," short off, just like that; adding that it
+wouldn't be keeping faith with the strike committee. But at that moment
+Hoskins blew in again, and when he was told what was on the cards, he
+took a little responsibility of his own.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to it, Mister Norcross, if there's any more money in it f'r the
+railroad," he told the boss. "I'll stand f'r it with the boys." And then
+to Donohue: "Who'll be runnin' this chaser engine?"</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be John Hogan and the Four-Sixteen," said Donohue. "There's
+nobody else at that end of the branch."</p>
+
+<p>The arrangement, such as it was, was fixed up quickly. The man who was
+putting up the money seemed to have plenty of it. He was offering five
+hundred dollars for the engine, and a thousand if it should overtake the
+special that side of Bauxite Junction.</p>
+
+<p>I guess the bleat unravelled itself pretty clearly for all of us; or at
+least, it seemed plain enough. A mining deal of some kind was on, and
+this man who was left behind was going to be left in another sense of
+the word if he couldn't butt in soon enough to break whatever
+combination the others were stacking up against him.</p>
+
+<p>In just a few minutes we got the word from the Strathcona operator that
+the money was paid and the chaser engine was out and gone. The special
+train had fully a half-hour's start, and with the hazardous grades of
+Slide Mountain and Dry Canyon to negotiate, it didn't seem probable that
+the light engine could overtake it anywhere north of Bauxite. That
+wasn't up to us, however. Kirgan had come in to say that our
+good-natured strikers had thrown a guard into the shops and were
+patroling the yard, when Fred May showed up, making signals to me. I
+heard him when he edged up to the boss and said: "There's a lady in the
+office, wanting to see you, Mr. Norcross."</p>
+
+<p>"Holy Smoke!" said I to myself. I knew it couldn't be anybody but Mrs.
+Sheila, at that time of night, and I saw seventeen different kinds of
+bloody murder looming up again when I tagged along after the boss on the
+trip down the hall to our offices.</p>
+
+<p>The guess was right, both ways around. It was Mrs. Sheila, and she had
+the major with her. And the air of the private office was so thick with
+tragedy that it made the very electrics look dim and ghostly. Mrs.
+Sheila didn't have a bit of color in her face, and her eyes had a big
+horror in them that was enough to make your flesh creep.</p>
+
+<p>I won't attempt to tell all that was said, partly by the good old major
+and partly by Mrs. Sheila. But the gist of it was this: Collingwood had
+continued his booze fight in his rooms at the Bullard until he had
+worked himself up to the crazy murder pitch. Then he had gone on the
+warpath, hunting for Hatch. Just how he had contrived to dodge Hatch's
+spotters, who were doubtless keeping cases on him, did not appear. But
+that was a detail. He had dodged them, had learned that Hatch and a
+bunch of his Red Tower backers had gone to Strathcona on a mining deal,
+and had started to drive to the gold camp in an auto to get his man.</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving Portal City he had written a letter to Mrs. Sheila,
+telling her what he was going to do, and that when he got through with
+it, she would be free. The letter, which had been left at the hotel,
+had been delayed in delivery&mdash;had, in fact, just been sent out to the
+major's house by the night clerk who had found it.</p>
+
+<p>Long before the story could get itself fully told, the different gaps in
+it were filling themselves up for me&mdash;and for Mr. Norcross, as well, I
+guess. When Mrs. Sheila came to the auto-drive part of it, the boss
+whirled and shot an order at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, chase into the despatcher's office and find out the name of the
+man who chartered that following engine!" he snapped; and I went on the
+run, remembering that in the strike excitement and hustle it hadn't
+occurred to anybody to ask the man's name or that of the particular
+"mine owner" who had chartered the special train.</p>
+
+<p>Donohue got the Strathcona operator in less than half a minute after I
+fired my order at him, and the answer came almost without a break:</p>
+
+<p>"Charter of special train was to R. Hatch, of Portal City, and of engine
+416 to man named Collingwood."</p>
+
+<p>Gosh! but this did settle it! I didn't run back to the office with the
+news&mdash;I flew. It was like firing a gun in amongst the three who were
+waiting, but it had to be done. The major groaned and said, "Oh, good
+God!" and Mrs. Sheila sat down and put her face in her hands. The boss
+was the only one who knew what to do and he did it: vanished like a
+shot in the direction of the despatcher's office.</p>
+
+<p>In about fifteen of the longest minutes I ever lived he came back,
+shaking his head. I knew what he had been doing, or trying to do. There
+was one night telegraph station on the branch&mdash;at a mining-camp half-way
+down the grade on Slide Mountain&mdash;and he had been trying to get word
+there to stop the wild engine.</p>
+
+<p>"He has either bribed or bullied his engine crew," he told the major. "I
+wired and had a stop signal set for them at the Antonio Mine, but they
+overran it, going at full speed down the hill."</p>
+
+<p>It was plain enough now what Collingwood was trying to do. The murder
+mania had got a firm hold of its weapon. Collingwood knew that Hatch was
+on the special, and he was going to chase that one-car train until it
+made a stop somewhere and then smash into it for blood. After Mr.
+Norcross had talked hurriedly for a minute or two with the major he went
+back to the despatcher's room and I went with him. There was a word for
+Donohue, telling him to call all night stations ahead of the special.
+The operators were to give the special the "go-ahead," and after it had
+passed, to set their signals against the following engine.</p>
+
+<p>As Donohue cut in on the branch wire, Nippo, at the canyon mouth, broke
+in to say that the special had gone by fifteen minutes earlier, and
+that the following engine was now coming down the canyon. Donohue
+grabbed his key.</p>
+
+<p>"Throw signal against engine 416," he clicked; and a few seconds later
+we got the reply:</p>
+
+<p>"No good. Engine 416 overran signal."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," said the boss to Donohue; "keep it up at the other
+stations. That engine has got to be stopped. It's carrying a madman."
+This is what he said, but I knew well enough what he was thinking. He
+was remembering that the special now had a lead of only fifteen minutes,
+and that it would be obliged to stop at Bauxite for its orders over the
+main line.</p>
+
+<p>He did what he could to cut out the Bauxite stop for the special,
+ordering Donohue to tell the junction man to set his signals at "clear"
+for the train, and at "stop" for the 416. It was only a make-shift. In
+the natural order of things the engineer of the special would make the
+Bauxite stop anyway, signal or no signal, since it is a nation-wide
+railroad rule that no train shall pass a junction without stopping.</p>
+
+<p>Past that the boss grabbed up an official time-card and began to study
+it hurriedly and to jot down figures. I wondered if he wasn't
+tempted&mdash;just the least little bit in the world, you know.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a thing shaping itself up&mdash;a thing for which he wasn't in the
+least responsible&mdash;and if it should work out to the catastrophe that
+nobody seemed to be able to prevent, the chief of the grafters, and
+probably a number of his nearest backers, would be wiped off the books;
+and Collingwood's death, which, in all human probability, was equally
+certain, would set Mrs. Sheila free.</p>
+
+<p>He must be thinking of it, I argued; he couldn't be a human man and not
+be thinking of it. But he never stopped his hasty figuring for a single
+instant until he broke off to bark out at Kirgan, who was standing by:</p>
+
+<p>"Quick, Mart! I want a light engine, and somebody to run it! Jump for
+it, man!"</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan, big and slow-motioned at most times, was off like a shot. Then
+the boss hurried back down the hall to his own offices, and again I
+tagged him. The old major was standing at a window with his hands behind
+him, and Mrs. Sheila was sitting just as we had left her, with the big
+terror still in her eyes and her face as white as a sheet.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't stop him without throwing a switch in front of him, and that
+would mean death to him and his two enginemen," said the boss, talking
+straight at the major, and as if he were trying to ignore Mrs. Sheila.
+"I'm going to take a long chance and run down the line to meet them.
+There's a bare possibility that I can contrive to get between the train
+and the engine, and if I can&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sheila was on her feet and she had her hands clasped as if she were
+going to make a prayer to the boss. And it was pretty nearly that.</p>
+
+<p>"Take me!" she begged; "oh, <i>please</i> take me. It's my <i>right</i> to go!"</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan had found an engine somewhere in the yard and was backing it up
+to the station platform. We could hear it. I saw that the chief was
+going to turn Mrs. Sheila down&mdash;which was, of course, exactly the right
+thing to do. But just then the major shoved in.</p>
+
+<p>"Sheila knows what she's talking about, Graham," he said quietly. "When
+you-all find Howie, you'll have a madman on your hands&mdash;and she's the
+only one who can control him at such times&mdash;God pity her! Take us both,
+suh."</p>
+
+<p>I suppose Mr. Norcross thought there wasn't any time to stand there
+arguing about it.</p>
+
+<p>"As you will," he snapped at the major; and then to me: "Break for it,
+Jimmie, and tell Kirgan to get a car&mdash;any car&mdash;the first one he can
+find!"</p>
+
+<p>I broke, and came pretty near breaking my blessed neck tumbling down the
+stairs. Kirgan had found his engine and had picked up a yard man to fire
+it. I told him what was wanted, and in less than no time he had pulled
+out an empty day-coach from the washing track. While he was backing in
+with it, Mr. Norcross came down the platform with the major and Mrs.
+Sheila. He let the major help Mrs. Sheila up the steps of the coach and
+ran forward to call out to Kirgan:</p>
+
+<p>"Donohue is clearing for you, and there'll be nothing in the way. Run
+regardless to Timber Mountain 'Y.' You have six minutes on the special's
+time to that point, if you run like the devil!" And then, as he was
+climbing to the cab, he ripped out at me: "Jimmie, you go back and stay
+with them in the car. Hurry or you'll be left!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+<h3>Under the Wide and Starry Sky</h3>
+
+
+<p>I sure had to be quick about obeying that "get-aboard" order of Mr.
+Norcross's. Kirgan had jerked the throttle open the minute the word was
+given. I missed the forward end of the car, and when the other end came
+along my grab at the hand-rod slammed me head over heels up the steps.
+Kirgan was holding his whistle valve open, and the guarding strikers in
+the yard gave us room and a clear track. By the time we had passed the
+"limit" switches we were going like a blue streak, and I could hardly
+keep my balance on the back platform of the day-coach.</p>
+
+<p>You can guess that I didn't stay out there very long. The night was
+clear as a bell and pretty coolish, with the stars burning like white
+diamonds in the black inverted bowl of the sky. It was mighty pretty
+scenery, but just the same, after Kirgan had fairly struck his gait on
+the long western tangent, I clawed my way inside. It was a lot too
+blustery and unsafe on that back platform.</p>
+
+<p>The major and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together, near the middle of the
+car. I staggered up and took the seat just ahead of them, and the major
+asked me if Mr. Norcross was on the engine. I told him he was, and that
+ended it. What with the rattle and bang of the coach, the howling of the
+speed-made wind in the ventilators, and the shrill scream of the
+spinning wheels, there wasn't any room for talk during the whole of that
+breath-taking race to the old "Y" in the hills beyond Banta.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing, from what Mr. Norcross had said, the point at which we were
+going to side-track and wait for the special and the wild engine, I grew
+sort of nervous and worked-up after we had crashed through the Banta
+yard and the day-coach began to sway and lurch around the hill curves.
+What if the special had been making better time than the boss had
+counted upon? In that case, we'd probably hit her in a head-ender
+somewhere on one of those very curves. And with the time we were making,
+and the time she'd be making, there wouldn't be enough left of either
+train to be worth picking up.</p>
+
+<p>A mile or so short of the "Y" siding I went up ahead and handed myself
+out to the forward platform to see if I couldn't get a squint past the
+storming engine. I got it now and then, on the swing of the curves, but
+there was nothing in sight. Just the same, it was mighty scary, and I
+took a relief breath so deep that it nearly made me sick at my stomach
+when I finally realized that Kirgan had shut off and was slowing for the
+stop at the farther switch of the old "Y."</p>
+
+<p>What was done at the switch was done swiftly, as men work when they have
+the fear of death gripping at them. If the special should come up while
+we were making the back-in, the result would be just about the same as
+it would have been if we had met it on the curves.</p>
+
+<p>The jerking tug of the self-preservation instinct is pretty strong,
+sometimes, and I tumbled off the steps of the car as it was backing in
+around the western curve of the "Y." Our picked-up fireman was at the
+switch, setting it again for the main line. With our own engine silent,
+I could hear a faint sound like the far-away fluttering of a
+safety-valve. We were not ten seconds too soon. The special was coming.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norcross, who was still in the engine cab, shot an order at Kirgan.</p>
+
+<p>"Fling your coat over the headlight, and then be ready to snatch it and
+get off!" he shouted. "If they see it as they come up, it may stop
+them!" Then, catching a glimpse of me on the ground: "Break the coupling
+on the coach, Jimmie&mdash;quick!"</p>
+
+<p>As I jumped to obey I understood what was to be done. The fireman at
+the switch was to let the special go by, and then the boss&mdash;just the
+boss alone on the engine&mdash;was to be let out on the main track to put
+himself between the chaser and the chased. It was a hair-raising
+proposition, but perhaps&mdash;just perhaps&mdash;not quite so suicidal as it
+looked. With skilful handling the interposed engine might possibly be
+kept out of the way by backing, and its warning headlight shining full
+into the eyes of the men in the 416's cab would surely be enough to stop
+them&mdash;if anything would.</p>
+
+<p>I got the coupling broken on the car to set our engine free before the
+distant flutter noise had grown to anything more than a humming like
+that of an overhead swarm of angry bees. Kirgan was standing on the
+front end, with his coat thrown over the headlight, ready to jerk it off
+and jump when he got the word. Out at the switch, our fireman was
+keeping out of sight so that the engineer of the special shouldn't see
+him, and maybe get rattled and stop. As usual, the boss had covered
+every little detail in his instructions, and had remembered that the
+sight of a man standing at a switch in a lonesome place like this might
+give an engineer a fit of "nerves" and make him shut off steam.</p>
+
+<p>I had just finished uncoupling the day-coach and the boss was easing our
+engine ahead a bit to make sure that she was loose, when the car-door
+opened behind me and the major and Mrs. Sheila came out in the front
+vestibule. It was Mrs. Sheila who spoke to me, and her voice had
+borrowed some of the big terror that I had seen in her eyes while she
+was sitting in the office at Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>"Where&mdash;whereabouts are we, Jimmie?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't get a chance to tell her. Before I could open my mouth the
+black shadows of the crooked valley beyond the switch were shot through
+with the white, shimmering glow of a headlight beam, and a second later
+the special flicked into view on the curve of approach.</p>
+
+<p>When we first saw it, the engine was working steam, and she was running
+like a streak of lightning. But as we looked, there was a short, sharp
+whistle yelp, the brakes gripped the wheels, the one-car train, with
+fire grinding from every brake-shoe, came to a jerking stop a short
+car-length on our side of the switch, and a man dropped from the engine
+step to go sprinting to the rear. And it was plain that neither the
+engineer nor the man who was running back saw our outfit waiting on the
+leg of the old "Y."</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan was the first one to understand. With a shout of warning, he
+jumped and ran toward the stopped train, yelling at the engineer for
+God's sake to pull out and go on. Back in the hills beyond the curve of
+approach another hoarse murmur was jarring upon the air, and the
+special's fireman, who was the man we had seen jump off and go running
+back, and who, of course, didn't know that we had our man there, was
+apparently trying to reach the switch behind his train to throw it
+against the following engine to shoot it off on the "Y."</p>
+
+<p>By this time the boss was off of our engine and racing across the angle
+of the "Y" only a little way behind Kirgan. He realized that his plan
+was smashed by the stopping of the special, and that the very
+catastrophe we had come out to try to prevent was due to happen right
+there and then. Whatever our man waiting at the switch might do, there
+was bound to be a collision. If he left the points set for the main
+line, the wild engine would crash into the rear end of the stopped
+special; and if he did the other thing, our engine and coach standing on
+the "Y" would get it.</p>
+
+<p>"Get the people out of that car!" I heard the boss bellow, but even as
+he said it the pop-valve of the stopped engine went off with a roar,
+filling the shut-in valley with clamorings that nothing could drown.</p>
+
+<p>Two minutes, two little minutes more, and the sleep-sodden bunch of men
+in the special's car might have been roused and turned out and saved.
+But the minutes were not given us. While the racing fireman was still a
+few feet short of the switch the throwing of which would have saved the
+one-car train only to let the madman's engine in on our engine and
+coach, and our man&mdash;already at the switch&mdash;was too scared to know which
+horn of the dilemma to choose, the end came. There was the flash of
+another headlight on the curve, another whistle shriek, and I turned to
+help the Major take Mrs. Sheila off our car and run with her, against
+the horrible chance that we might get it instead of the special.</p>
+
+<p>But we didn't get it. Ten seconds later the chasing engine had crashed
+headlong into the standing train, burying itself clear up to the tender
+in the heart of the old wooden sleeper, rolling the whole business over
+on its side in the ditch, and setting the wreckage afire as suddenly as
+if the old Pullman had been a fagot of pitch-pine kindlings and only
+waiting for the match.</p>
+
+<p>If I could write down any real description of the way things stacked up
+there in that lonesome valley for the little bunch of us who stood
+aghast at the awful horror, I guess I wouldn't need to be hammering the
+keys of a typewriter in a railroad office. But never mind; no soldier
+sees any more of a battle than the part he is in. There were seven of us
+men, including the engineer and fireman of the special, who were able to
+jump in and try to do something, and, looking back at it now, it seems
+as if we all did what we could.</p>
+
+<p>That wasn't much. About half of the people in the sleeping-car&mdash;six by
+actual count, as we learned afterward&mdash;were killed outright in the crash
+or so badly hurt that they died pretty soon afterward; and the fire was
+so quick and so hot that after we had got the wounded ones out we
+couldn't get all of the bodies of the others.</p>
+
+<p>As you'd imagine, the boss was the head and front of that fierce rescue
+fight. He had stripped off his coat, and he kept on diving into the
+burning wreck after another and yet another of the victims until it
+seemed as if he couldn't possibly do it one more time and come out
+alive. He didn't seem to remember that these very men were the ones who
+had been trying to ruin him&mdash;that at least once they had set a trap for
+him and tried to kill him. He was too big for that.</p>
+
+<p>After we had got out all the victims we could reach, there was still one
+more left who wasn't dead; we could hear him above the hissing of the
+steam and the crackling of the flames, screaming and begging us to break
+in the side of the car and kill him before the fire got to him. Kirgan
+had found an axe in the emergency box of our day-coach, and was chopping
+away like a madman.</p>
+
+<p>The minute he got a hole big enough, the big master-mechanic dropped
+his axe and climbed down into the choking hell where the screams were
+coming from. Our fireman picked up the axe and ran around to the other
+side of the wreck where Jones, the engineer of the special, and his
+fireman were trying to break into the crushed cab of the 416.</p>
+
+<p>The old major, the boss, and I stood by to help Kirgan, and the minute
+his head came up through the chopped hole we saw that he needed help. He
+had pried the screaming man loose, somehow, and was trying to drag him
+up out of the smoking furnace. It was done, amongst us, some way or
+other. Kirgan had wrapped the man up in a Pullman blanket to keep the
+fire from getting at him any worse than it already had, and as we were
+taking him out the blanket slipped aside from his face and I saw who it
+was that the master-mechanic had risked his life for. It was Hatch,
+himself, and he died in our arms, the major's and mine, while we were
+carrying him out to where Mrs. Sheila was tearing one of the Pullman
+sheets that I had got hold of into strips to make bandages for the
+wounded.</p>
+
+<p>With the chance of saving maybe another one or two, we couldn't stay to
+help the brave little woman who was trying to be doctor and nurse to
+half a dozen poor wretches at once. But she took time to ask me one
+single breathless question:</p>
+
+<p>"Have they found him yet?&mdash;you know the one I mean, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said. "They're digging away at that side now," and then I ran
+back to jump in again.</p>
+
+<p>Though the fire was now licking at everything in sight, Kirgan, who had
+taken the axe from our fireman, had managed to cut some of the car
+timbers out of the way so that we could see down into the tangle of
+things where the cab of the 416 ought to have been. There wasn't much
+left of the cab. The water-gauge was broken, along with everything else,
+but in spite of the reek of smoke and steam we could see that Hogan and
+his fireman were not there. But down under the coal that had shifted
+forward at the impact of the collision we could make out the other
+man&mdash;the murder-maniac&mdash;lying on his back, black in the face and
+gasping.</p>
+
+<p>That was enough for the boss. It looked like certain death for anybody
+to crawl down into that hissing steam-bath, but he did it, wriggling
+through the hole that Kirgan had chopped, while two or three of us ran
+to the little creek that trickled down on the far side of the "Y" and
+brought back soaking Pullman blankets to try to delay the encroaching
+fire and smother the steam-jets.</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't see very well what the boss was doing; the smoke and steam
+were so blinding. But when I did get a glimpse I saw that he was digging
+frantically with his bare hands at the shifted coal, and that he had
+succeeded in freeing the head and shoulders of the buried man, who was
+still alive enough to choke and gasp in the furnace-like heat.</p>
+
+<p>Kirgan stood it as long as he could&mdash;until the licking flames were about
+to drive us all away.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be burnt alive&mdash;come up out of that!" he yelled to the boss; but
+I knew it wouldn't do any good. With Collingwood still buried down there
+and still with the breath of life in him, the boss was going to stay and
+keep on trying to dig him out, even if he, himself, got burned to a
+crisp doing it. Loving Mrs. Sheila the way he did, he couldn't do any
+less.</p>
+
+<p>It was awful, those next two or three minutes. We were all running
+frantically back and forth, now, between the wreck and the creek,
+soaking the blankets and doing our level best to beat the fire back and
+keep it from cutting off the only way there was for the boss to climb
+out. But we could only fight gaspingly on the surface of things, as you
+might say. Down underneath, the fire was working around in front and
+behind in spite of all we could do. Some of it had got to the coal, and
+the heavy sulphurous smoke was oozing up to make us all choke and
+strangle.</p>
+
+<p>Honestly, you couldn't have told that the boss was a white man when he
+crawled up out of that pit of death, tugging and lifting the crushed
+and broken body of the madman, and making us take it out before he would
+come out himself. We got them both away from the fire as quickly as we
+could and around to the other side of things, Kirgan and Jones carrying
+Collingwood.</p>
+
+<p>The poor little lady we had left alone with the rescued ones had done
+all she could, and she was waiting for us. When we put Collingwood down,
+she sat down on the ground and took his head in her lap and cried over
+him just like his mother might have, and when the boss knelt down beside
+her I heard what he said: "That's right, little woman; that's just as it
+should be. Death wipes out all scores. I did my best&mdash;you must always
+believe that I did my best."</p>
+
+<p>She choked again at that, and said: "There is no hope?" and he said:
+"I'm afraid not. He was dying when I got to him."</p>
+
+<p>I tried to swallow the big lump in my throat and turned away, and so did
+everybody else but the major, who went around and knelt down on the
+other side of Mrs. Sheila. The wreck was blazing now like a mighty
+bonfire, lighting up the pine-clad hills all around and snapping and
+growling like some savage monster gloating over its prey. In the red
+glow we saw a man limping up the track from the west, and Kirgan and I
+went to meet him. It was Hogan, the missing engineer of the 416.</p>
+
+<p>He told us what there was to tell, which wasn't very different from the
+way we'd been putting it up. They&mdash;Hogan and his fireman&mdash;hadn't
+suspected that they were carrying a maniac until after they had passed
+Bauxite and Collingwood had told them both that what he wanted to do was
+to overtake the special and smash it. Then there had been a fight on the
+engine, but Collingwood had a gun and he had threatened to kill them
+both if they didn't keep on.</p>
+
+<p>"I kep' her goin'," said the Irishman, "thinkin' maybe Jonesy'd keep out
+of my way, or that at the lasht I'd get a chanst to shut the 'Sixteen
+off an' give her the brake. He kep' me fr'm doin' it, and whin I saw the
+tail-lights, I pushed Johnnie Shovel off an' wint afther him because
+there was nawthin' else to do. Johnnie's back yondher a piece, wid a
+broken leg."</p>
+
+<p>Just then Jones, the special's engineer, came up, and he pieced out
+Hogan's story. The wire to Bauxite had warned him that a crazy man was
+chasing him and overrunning stop-signals. He had thought to side-track
+the chaser at the old "Y" and that was what he had stopped for.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon the three of us went after the crippled fireman, and when we
+got back to the "Y" with him it was all over. Collingwood had died with
+his head in Mrs. Sheila's lap, and the boss, fagged out and half dead as
+he must have been, was up and at work, getting the wreck victims into
+our day-coach, which had been backed up and taken around to the other
+leg of the "Y" to head for Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>When it came time for us to move Collingwood, Mrs. Sheila pulled her
+veil down and walked behind the body, with the good old major locking
+his arm in hers, and that choking lump came again in my throat when I
+remembered what Collingwood had said to the boss the night he came to
+our office: "Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was
+just eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my
+funeral."</p>
+
+<p>I guess there's no use stretching the agony out by telling about that
+mournful ride back to Portal City with the dead and wounded. We left the
+wreck blazing and roaring in the shut-in valley at the gulch mouth
+because there wasn't anything else to do; Kirgan and Jones and one of
+the firemen handled the engine and pulled out, while the rest of us rode
+in the day-coach and did what we could for the suffering.</p>
+
+<p>At Banta we made a stop long enough to let the boss send a wire to
+Portal City, turning out the doctors and the ambulances&mdash;and the
+undertakers; and though it was after three o'clock in the morning when
+we pulled in, it seemed as if the whole town had got the word and was
+down at the station to meet us.</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't see Mrs. Sheila's face when the major helped her off at the
+platform; her veil was still down. But I did hear her low-spoken word to
+the boss, whispered while they were carrying Collingwood and Hatch, and
+two of the others who were past help, out to the waiting string of
+dead-wagons.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go East with the body to-morrow&mdash;to-day, I mean&mdash;if the
+strikers will let you run a train, and Cousin Basil will go with me. We
+may never meet again, Graham, and for that reason I must say what I have
+to say now. Your opportunity has come. The man who could do the most to
+defeat you is dead, and the strike will do the rest. If I were you, I
+should neither eat nor sleep until I had thought of some way to take the
+railroad out of the hands of those who have proved that they are not
+worthy to own it."</p>
+
+<p>I didn't know, just then, how much or little attention Mr. Norcross was
+paying to this mighty good, clear-headed bit of business advice. What he
+said went back to that saying of hers that they might never meet again.</p>
+
+<p>"We must meet again&mdash;sometime and somewhere," he said. And then: "I did
+my best: God knows I did my best, Sheila. I would have given my own
+life gladly if the giving would have saved Collingwood's. Don't you
+believe that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall always believe that you are one of God's own gentlemen,
+Graham," she said, soft and low; and then the major came to take her
+away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3>P. S. L. Comes Home</h3>
+
+
+<p>I didn't get more than five hours' sleep after the excitement was all
+over, and we had ourselves driven, Mr. Norcross and I, up to the club.
+But by nine o'clock the next morning, as soon as I'd swallowed a hurried
+bite of breakfast in the grill-room I swiped a camp-stool and a magazine
+out of the lounge and trotted up-stairs to plant myself before the
+boss's door, determined that nobody should disturb him until he was good
+and ready to get up.</p>
+
+<p>He turned out a little before twelve, looking sort of haggard and drawn,
+of course, and having some pretty bad burns on the side of his neck and
+on the backs of both hands. But he was all there, as usual, and he laid
+a good, brotherly hand on my shoulder when he saw what I was doing.</p>
+
+<p>"They don't make many of them like you, Jimmie," he said. And then:
+"Have you any news?"</p>
+
+<p>I had, a little, and I gave it to him. Fred May had come tip-toeing up
+into my sentry corridor about ten o'clock to tell me that Mr. Perkins
+had arranged with the strikers to have a special go east with the major
+and Mrs. Sheila and Collingwood's body to catch the Overland at
+Sedgwick; and I told the boss this, and that the train had been gone for
+an hour or more.</p>
+
+<p>Also, I gave him a sealed package that a strange boy had brought up just
+a little while after May went away. We took the elevator to the
+grill-room for something to eat, and at table Mr. Norcross opened the
+package. It contained a bunch of affidavits, eleven of them in all, and
+there was no letter or anything to tell where they had come from.</p>
+
+<p>He handed the papers over to me, after he had seen what they were, and
+told me to take care of them, and, when the waiter was bringing our
+bite&mdash;or rather after he had brought it and was gone&mdash;he sort of frowned
+across the table at me and said: "Do you know what it means&mdash;this
+surrender of those bribe affidavits, Jimmie?"</p>
+
+<p>I said I guessed I did; that Hatch being dead, and Collingwood, too,
+there wasn't nerve enough left in the Red Tower outfit to keep up the
+fight; that the surrender of the affidavits was kind of a plea for a
+let-up on our part.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll begin to show them, in just about fifteen minutes, Jimmie," was
+the short comment. "Reach over and get that telephone and tell Mr.
+Ripley and Mr. Billoughby that I want them to meet me at my office at
+half-past twelve. Any news from the strike?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," I told him, while "Central" was getting me Mr. Ripley's
+number. "Fred May said it was going on just the same; everything quiet
+and nothing doing, except that the wrecking train had gone out to pick
+up the scraps at Timber Mountain 'Y'. Kirgan is bossing it, and the
+strikers manned it for him."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing more was said until after I had sent the two phone messages, and
+then the boss broke out in a new spot.</p>
+
+<p>"Has anything been heard from Mr. Van Britt?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I know of."</p>
+
+<p>Again he gave me that queer little scowl across the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Jimmie, have you found out yet why Mr. Van Britt insisted on quitting
+the service?"</p>
+
+<p>I guess I grinned a little, though I tried not to.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Van Britt is one of the best friends you've got," I said. "He
+thought you needed this strike, and he wanted to go out among the
+pay-roll men and sort of help it along. He couldn't do a thing like that
+while he was an officer of the company and drawing his pay like the rest
+of us."</p>
+
+<p>"I might have known&mdash;he as good as told me," was the reply, made kind of
+half-absently; and then, short and quick: "How's the stock market? Have
+you seen a paper?"</p>
+
+<p>I had seen both papers, at breakfast-time, but of course they had
+nothing startling in them except a last-minute account of the wreck at
+Timber Mountain "Y," grabbed off just before they went to press. They
+couldn't have anything later from New York than the day before. But Fred
+May had tipped me off when he came up to tell me about the Major
+Kendrick special. The newspaper offices were putting out bulletins by
+that time.</p>
+
+<p>I told Mr. Norcross about the bulletins and was brash enough to add:
+"We're headed for the receivership all right, I guess; our stock has
+tumbled to twenty-nine, and there's a regular dog-fight going on over it
+at the railroad post in the Exchange. Wall Street's afire and burning
+up, so they say."</p>
+
+<p>The chief hadn't eaten enough to keep a cat alive, but at that he pushed
+his chair back and reached for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Jimmie," he snapped. "We've got to get busy. And there isn't
+going to be any receivership."</p>
+
+<p>We reached the railroad headquarters&mdash;which were as dead and quiet as a
+graveyard&mdash;a little before Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got down. But Mr.
+Editor Cantrell was there, waiting to shoot an anxious question at the
+boss.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Norcross, are you ready to talk now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not just yet; to-morrow, maybe," was the good-natured rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"All right; then perhaps you will tell me this: Do you, yourself,
+believe that four or five thousand railroad men have gone on strike out
+of sheer sympathy for a few hundred C. S. &amp; W. employees, most of whom
+are merely common laborers?"</p>
+
+<p>The boss spread his hands. "You have all the facts that anybody has,
+Cantrell."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you haven't fomented this
+eruption on the quiet to get the better of the Red Tower crowd in some
+way?" demanded the editor.</p>
+
+<p>"I can, indeed," was the smiling answer.</p>
+
+<p>Cantrell looked as if he didn't more than half believe it.</p>
+
+<p>"Being a newspaper man, I'm naturally suspicious," he put in. "There are
+big doings down underneath all this that I can smell, but can't dig up.
+Everything about this strike is too blamed good-natured. I've talked
+with half a dozen of the leaders, and with any number of the rank and
+file. They all grin and give me the wink, as if it were the best joke
+that was ever pulled off."</p>
+
+<p>Again Mr. Norcross smiled handsomely. "If you push me to it, Cantrell, I
+may say that this is exactly their attitude toward me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the editor, getting up to go; "it's doing one thing to you,
+good and proper. Your railroad stock is tumbling down-stairs so fast
+that it can't keep up with itself."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope it will tumble still more," said the boss, pleasantly, with
+another sort of enigmatic smile; and with that Mr. Cantrell had to be
+content.</p>
+
+<p>As the editor went out, Fred May brought in the bunch of forenoon
+telegrams and laid them on the desk. They were quickly glanced at and
+tossed over to me as fast as they were read. Most of them were plaintive
+little yips from a strike-stricken lot of people along the Short Line
+who seemed to think that the world had come to an end, but there were
+three bearing the New York date line and signed "Dunton." The earliest
+had been sent shortly after the opening of the Stock Exchange, and it
+ran thus:</p>
+
+<p>"Morning papers announce strike and complete tie-up on P. S. L. Why no
+report from you of labor troubles threatening? Compromise at any cost
+and wire emphatic denial of strike. Answer quick."</p>
+
+<p>The second of the series had been filed for transmission an hour later
+and it was still more saw-toothed.</p>
+
+<p>"Later reports confirm newspaper story. Your failure to compromise
+instantly with employees will break stock market and subject you to
+investigation for criminal incompetency. Answer."</p>
+
+<p>The third message had been sent still later.</p>
+
+<p>"Your continued silence inexcusable. If no favorable report from you by
+six o'clock you may consider yourself discharged from the company's
+service and criminal proceedings on charge of conspiracy will be
+instituted at once."</p>
+
+<p>There was no mention of Collingwood, and I could only imagine that Major
+Kendrick's telegram had not yet reached the president. I thought things
+were beginning to look pretty serious for us if Mr. Dunton was going to
+try to drag us into the courts, but Mr. Norcross was still smiling when
+he handed me the last and latest telegram in the bunch that May had
+brought in. It was from Mr. Chadwick, and was good-naturedly laconic.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To <span class="smcap">G. Norcross</span>, G. M.,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Portal City.</p>
+
+<p>"Just returned from trip to Seattle. What's doing on the Short
+Line?</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Chadwick.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"A couple of telegrams, Jimmie," said the chief, as he passed this last
+wire over, and I got my notebook ready.</p>
+
+<p>"To B. Dunton, New York. Strike is sympathetic and not subject to
+compromise. Mails moving regularly, but all other traffic suspended
+indefinitely. My office closes to-day, and my resignation, effective at
+once, goes to you on Fast Mail to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Now one to Mr. Chadwick, and you may send it in code," he directed
+crisply. Then he dictated:</p>
+
+<p>"See newspapers for account of strike. Hatch and eight of his associates
+were killed last night in railroad wreck. Dunton has demanded my
+resignation and I have given it. Have plan for complete reorganization
+along lines discussed in beginning, and need your help. At market
+opening to-morrow sell P. S. L. large blocks and repurchase in driblets
+as price goes down. Repeat until I tell you to stop. Wire quick if you
+are with us."</p>
+
+<p>Just as I was taking the last sentence, Mr. Ripley and Billoughby came
+in, and Mr. Norcross took them both into the third room of the suite and
+shut the door. An hour later when the door opened and they came out, the
+boss was summing up the new orders to Billoughby: "There's a lot to do,
+and you have my authority to hire all the help you need. See the bankers
+yourself, personally, and get them to interest other local buyers along
+the line, the more of them, and the smaller they are, the better. I'll
+take care of Portal City, myself. I've had Van Britt on the wire and he
+is taking care of the employees&mdash;yes, that goes as it lies, and is a
+part of the original plan; every man who works for P. S. L. is going to
+own a bit of stock, if we have to carry him for it and let him pay a
+dollar a week. More than that, they shall have representation on the
+board if they want it. And while you're knocking about, take time to
+show these C. S. &amp; W. folks how they can climb back into the saddle. Red
+Tower is down and out, now, and they can keep it out if they want to."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I suppose I might rattle this old type-machine of mine indefinitely and
+tell the story of the financial fight that filled the next few days; of
+how the boss and Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got the bankers and
+practically everybody together all along the Short Line and sprung the
+big plan upon them, which was nothing less than the snapping up, on a
+tumbling stock market, of the opportunity now presented to them of
+owning&mdash;actually <i>owning</i> in fee simple&mdash;their own railroad, the buying
+to be done quietly through Mr. Chadwick's brokers in Chicago and New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>There was some opposition and jangling and see-sawing back and forth, of
+course, but the newspapers, led by the <i>Mountaineer</i>, took hold, and
+then, pretty soon, everybody took hold; after which the only trouble was
+to keep people&mdash;our own rank and file among them&mdash;from buying P. S. L.
+Common so fast that the New Yorkers would catch on and run the price
+up.</p>
+
+<p>They didn't catch on&mdash;not until after it was too late; and the minute
+Mr. Chadwick wired us from Chicago that we were safe, the strike went
+off, as you might say, between two minutes, and Mr. Norcross called a
+meeting of stockholders, the same to be held&mdash;bless your heart!&mdash;in
+Portal City, the thriving metropolis of the region in which, counting
+Mr. Chadwick in as one of us, a good, solid voting majority of the stock
+was now held. The <i>Mountaineer</i> printed the call, and it spoke of the
+railroad as "<i>our</i> railroad company"!</p>
+
+<p>The meeting was held in due time, and Mr. Chadwick was there to preside.
+He made a cracking good chairman, and the way he dilated on the fact
+that now the country&mdash;and the employees&mdash;had a railroad of their own,
+and that the whole nation would be looking to see how we would
+demonstrate the problem we had taken over, actually brought
+cheers&mdash;think of it; cheers in a railroad stockholders' meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Following Mr. Chadwick's talk there was the usual routine business;
+reports were read and it was shown that the Short Line, notwithstanding
+all the stealings and mismanagements was still a good going proposition
+at the price at which it had been bought in. A new board of directors
+was chosen, and as soon as the new board got together, Mr. Norcross
+went back to his office in the headquarters, not as general manager,
+this time&mdash;not on your life!&mdash;but as the newly elected president of
+Pioneer Short Line. And by the same token, the first official circular
+that came out&mdash;a copy of which I sent, tied up with a blue ribbon, to
+Maisie Ann&mdash;read like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"To all Employees:</p>
+
+<p>"Effective this day, Mr. James F. Dodds is appointed Assistant to
+the President with headquarters in Portal City.</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">G. Norcross</span>, <i>President</i>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>That's all; all but a little talk between the boss and Mr. Upton Van
+Britt that took place in our office on the day after Mr. Van Britt,
+still kicking about the hard work that the boss was always piling upon
+him, had been appointed general manager.</p>
+
+<p>"You've made the riffle, Graham&mdash;just as I said you would," said our own
+and only millionaire, after he had got through abusing the fates that
+wouldn't let him go back East and play with his coupon shears and his
+yachts and polo ponies. "You're going to be the biggest man this side of
+the mountains, some day; and the day isn't so very far off, either."</p>
+
+<p>It was just here that the boss got out of his chair and walked to the
+other end of the room. When he came back it was to say:</p>
+
+<p>"You think I have won out, Upton, and so does everybody else. I suppose
+it looks that way to the man in the street. But I haven't, you know. I
+have lost the one thing for which I would gladly give all the business
+success I have ever made or hope to make."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Britt's smile was more than half a grin.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't lost, Graham: it's only gone before. Can't you wait a decent
+little while?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I should wait all my life it wouldn't be long enough, Upton," was
+the reply. "What you said to me&mdash;that time when we first spoke of
+Collingwood&mdash;was true. You said she loved the other man&mdash;and so she
+did."</p>
+
+<p>This time Mr. Van Britt's smile was a whole grin.</p>
+
+<p>"I said it, and I'll say it again. She didn't realize it or admit it,
+even to herself you know; she's too good and clean-hearted for anything
+like that. But I could see it plainly enough, and so could everybody
+else except the two people most nearly concerned. I didn't mean Howie
+Collingwood: you were the 'other man,' Graham."</p>
+
+<p>At this the boss whirled short around and tramped to the other end of
+the room again, standing for quite a little while with one foot on the
+low window-sill and making out like he was looking down at the traffic
+clattering along in Nevada Avenue. But I'll bet a quarter he never saw a
+single wheel of it. When he came back our way his eyes were shining and
+he put his hand on Mr. Van Britt's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"It ought to have been you, Uppy," he said, dropping back to the old
+college nickname. "You're by long odds the better man. When&mdash;when do you
+think I might venture to take a little run across to New York?"</p>
+
+<p>At that, Mr. Van Britt laughed out loud.</p>
+
+<p>"Ho! ho!" he said. "I suppose I ought to say a year. You can wait one
+little year, can't you, Graham?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not on your life!" rasped the boss. And then: "I'll tell you what I'll
+do; I'll compromise with the proprieties, or whatever it is that you're
+insisting on, and make it six months. But that's the limit&mdash;the absolute
+limit!"</p>
+
+<p>And so it was.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+<h3><i>BY FRANCIS LYNDE</i></h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">THE WRECKERS<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">DAVID VALLORY<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">BRANDED<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">STRANDED IN ARCADY<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">THE REAL MAN<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUÉ<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">THE PRICE<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKERS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38846-h.htm or 38846-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/8/4/38846/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
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+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
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+
+
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wreckers
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Illustrator: Arthur E. Becher
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2012 [EBook #38846]
+Last updated: April 22, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRECKERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE WRECKERS
+
+                          BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+    WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
+    ARTHUR E. BECHER
+
+
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+    NEW YORK           1920
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+    Published March, 1920
+
+
+
+
+To a certain grave and reverend official of the Union Pacific System
+who, in his younger days, might well have played the part of _Jimmie
+Dodds_, this book is affectionately inscribed by
+
+THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "You have spoken only of the difficulties and
+responsibilities, Graham, but there is another side to it."]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+    I. AT SAND CREEK SIDING                            1
+
+    II. A TANK PARTY                                  11
+
+    III. MR. CHADWICK'S SPECIAL                       23
+
+    IV. THE TIPPING OF THE SCALE                      36
+
+    V. THE DIRECTORS' MEETING                         51
+
+    VI. THE ALEXA GOES EAST                           60
+
+    VII. "HEADS OFF, GENTLEMEN!"                      65
+
+    VIII. WITH THE STRINGS OFF                        75
+
+    IX. AND SATAN CAME ALSO                           90
+
+    X. THE BIG SMASH                                  96
+
+    XI. WHAT EVERY MAN KNOWS                         102
+
+    XII. WITH THE WHEELS TRIGGED                     112
+
+    XIII. THE LOST 1016                              123
+
+    XIV. A CLOSE CALL                                140
+
+    XV. THE MACHINE                                  155
+
+    XVI. IN THE COAL YARD                            169
+
+    XVII. THE MAN AT THE WINDOW                      185
+
+    XVIII. THE NAME ON THE REGISTER                  200
+
+    XIX. THE HOODOO                                  206
+
+    XX. THE HELPLESS WIRES                           216
+
+    XXI. BILLY MORRIS EXPLAINS                       225
+
+    XXII. WHAT THE PILOT ENGINE FOUND                232
+
+    XXIII. THE MAJOR'S PREMONITION                   247
+
+    XXIV. THE DEAD-LINE                              262
+
+    XXV. FLAGGED DOWN                                274
+
+    XXVI. THE DIPSOMANIAC                            292
+
+    XXVII. THE DESERTER                              312
+
+    XXVIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE END                 319
+
+    XXIX. THE MURDER MADMAN                          334
+
+    XXX. "UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY"             349
+
+    XXXI. P. S. L. COMES HOME                        365
+
+
+
+
+THE WRECKERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+At Sand Creek Siding
+
+
+As a general proposition, I don't believe much in the things called
+"hunches." They are bad for the digestion, and as often as not are like
+those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it
+is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to all rules, and
+we certainly uncovered the biggest one of the lot--the boss and I--the
+night we left Portland and the good old Pacific Coast.
+
+It was this way. We had finished the construction work on the Oregon
+Midland; had quit, cleaned up the offices, drawn our last pay-checks,
+told everybody good-by, and were on our way to the train, when I had one
+of those queer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew
+just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to
+Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason--if you'll call
+it a reason--was that, just before we came to the railroad station, the
+boss walked calmly under a ladder standing in front of a new building;
+and besides that, it was the thirteenth day of the month, a Friday, and
+raining like the very mischief.
+
+Just to sort of toll us along, maybe, the fates didn't begin on us that
+night. They waited until the next day, and then proceeded to shove us in
+behind a freight-train wreck at Widner, Idaho, where we lost twelve
+hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't
+due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a
+little visit with his folks in Illinois, and beyond that he was going to
+meet a bunch of Englishmen in Montreal, and maybe let them make him
+General Manager of one of the Canadian railroads.
+
+So Mr. Norcross was in no special hurry, and neither was I. I wasn't
+under pay, but I expected to be when we reached Canada. I had been
+confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland
+construction, and he was taking me along partly because he knows a
+cracking good stenographer when he sees one, but mostly because I was
+dead anxious to go anywhere he was going.
+
+But to come back to the Widner delay: if it hadn't been for that
+twelve-hour lay-out we would have caught the Saturday night train on the
+Pioneer Short Line, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there
+would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram
+from Mr. Chadwick, because it wouldn't have found us; no hold-up at Sand
+Creek Siding; in short, nothing would have happened that did happen. But
+I mustn't get ahead of my story.
+
+It was on Sunday that the jolt began to get ready to land on us. Mr.
+Norcross had been a railroad man for so long that he had forgotten how
+to knock off on Sundays, and right soon after breakfast, with the help
+of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our
+section into a business office, saying that now we had a good quiet day,
+we'd clean up the million or so odds and ends of correspondence he'd
+been letting go while we were tussling for the Midland right-of-way
+through the Oregon mountains.
+
+By this time, you will understand, we were rocketing along over the
+Pioneer Short Line, and were supposed to be due at Portal City at
+half-past seven that evening. From where he sat dictating to me the boss
+was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his
+eyes while he was talking off his letters, and it puzzled me because it
+wasn't like him. I may as well say here as anywhere that one of his
+strong points is to be always "at himself" under all sorts of
+conditions.
+
+So, as I say, I was sort of puzzled; and one of the times after he had
+given me a full grist of letters and had gone off to smoke while I
+typed a few thousand lines from my notes to catch up, I made a
+discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a
+young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the
+old-fashioned kind, with low seat-backs. I put it up that in those
+absent-eyed intervals Mr. Norcross had been studying the back of the
+young woman's neck. I was measurably sure it wasn't the little girl's.
+
+Along in the forenoon I made an excuse to go and get a drink of water
+out of the forward cooler, and on the way back I took a good square look
+at our neighbors in Number Five. At that I didn't wonder at the boss's
+temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to
+start a stopped clock--only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there
+wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. And the little girl was
+simply a peach--a nice, downy, rosy peach; chunky, round-faced,
+sunny-haired, jolly; with a neat little turned-up nose and big sort of
+boyish laughing eyes that fairly dared the world.
+
+I made a good half-dozen mistakes when I got in behind the old writing
+machine again and went on with the letters; but never mind about that.
+As I began to say, things rocked along until we had about worn the day
+out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up
+the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though
+I was only his stenographer, and a kid at that, he was big enough and
+Western enough not to let the buck-private-to-officer gap make any
+difference, and always when we were knocking about together he made me
+sit at his table.
+
+Sometimes, when it happened that way, he'd ditch the rank-and-file
+dignities and talk to me as if the thousand miles or so between his job
+and mine were wiped out. But this Sunday evening he was pretty quiet,
+breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a
+forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for
+a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of the Pioneer Short Line.
+Farther along, pretty well into the ice-cream and black coffee, he came
+to life again to ask me if I had noticed the young lady and the girl in
+the Pullman section next to ours.
+
+I told him I had, and then, because I had never known him to bother his
+head for two minutes in succession about any woman, he gave me a shock;
+said they were ticketed to Portal City--and to find that out he must
+have asked the train conductor--adding that when we reached Portal it
+would be the neighborly thing for me to do to help them off with their
+hand-bags and see that they got a cab if they wanted one.
+
+"Sure I will," says I. "That is, if the lady's husband isn't there to
+meet them."
+
+"What?" he snaps out. "You know her? She is married?"
+
+"No, I don't exactly _know_ her," I shuffled. "But she is married, all
+right."
+
+"How can you tell if you don't know her?" he barked; just like that.
+
+I had to make good, right quick, as everybody does who goes up against
+Mr. Graham Norcross. But it so happened that I was able to.
+
+"Her suit case is standing in the aisle, and I saw the tag. It has her
+name, 'Mrs. Sheila Macrae,' on it."
+
+The boss has a way of making two up-and-down wrinkles and a little
+curved horse-shoe line come between his eyes when he is going to reach
+for you.
+
+"There are times, Jimmie, when you see altogether too much," he said,
+sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to the far side of his
+ice-cream pyramid before he began again.
+
+"'Macrae,' you say: that is Scotch. And so is 'Sheila.' Most likely the
+names, both of them, are only hand-downs. She looks straight American to
+me."
+
+"She is pretty enough to look anything," I threw in, just to see how he
+would take it.
+
+"Right you are, Jimmie," he agreed. "I've been looking at the back of
+her neck all day. I don't know whether you've ever noticed it--you are
+only a boy and probably you haven't--but there are so many women who
+don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em from behind.
+You catch a glimpse of a pretty neck, and when you get around to the
+face you find out that the neck was only a bit of bluff."
+
+If I had been eating anything in the world but ice-cream I believe it
+would have choked me. What he said led up to the admission that he had
+been making these face-and-neck comparisons for goodness knows how long,
+and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a
+picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a
+hard-hitter, right from the jump. And for a man of that sort women are
+usually no more than fluffy little side-issues, as Eve said when they
+told her she was made out of Adam's rib.
+
+That ended the dining-car part of it. The sure-enough, knock-out round
+was fought at the rear end of our Pullman, which happened to be the last
+car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a
+cigar and said we'd go out to the observation platform to smoke, because
+the smoking-room was full up with apple-raisers, and sheep-feeders and
+cattlemen, all talking at once.
+
+As we went down the aisle I noticed that Section Five was empty, and
+when we reached the door we found the young lady and the girl standing
+at the rear railing to watch the track unroll itself under the trucks
+and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what
+they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm
+collar, but the girl had a fur thing around her neck, and her stocky,
+chunky little arms were elbow deep in a big pillow muff to match, though
+the April night wasn't even half-way chilly.
+
+The boss growled out something about waiting until the ladies should go
+in; and then, for pure safety's sake, he stepped out on the platform to
+close the side trap door which, with the railing gate on that side, had
+been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific
+type" that was pulling us let out a whistle screech that would have
+waked the dead, and the air-brakes went on with a jerk that showed how
+beautifully reckless the railroading was on the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+Mr. Norcross was reaching for the catch on the floor trap and the jerk
+didn't throw him. But it snapped the young woman and the girl away from
+the railing so suddenly that the little one had to grab for hand-holds;
+and when she did that, of course the big muff went overboard.
+
+At this, a bunch of things happened, all in an eye-wink. The train
+ground and jiggled to a stop; the girl squealed, "Oh, my muff!" and
+skipped down the steps to disappear in the general direction of the
+Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie _Ann_!--come
+back here--you'll be _left_!" and then took her turn at disappearing by
+the same route; and, on top of it all, the boss jumped off and sprinted
+after both of them, leaving a string of large, man-sized comments on the
+foolishness of women as a sex trailing along behind him as he flew.
+
+Right then it was my golden moment to play safe and sane. With three of
+them off and lost in the gathering night, somebody with at least a grain
+of sense ought to have stood by to pull the emergency cord if the train
+should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy
+all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a
+mountain desert, and when I squinted up ahead and saw that the engine
+was taking water, it looked as if there were going to be plenty of time
+for a bit of a promenade under the stars. So I swung off and went to
+join the muff hunt.
+
+Amongst them, they had found the pillow thing before I had a chance to
+horn in. They were coming up the track, and the boss had each of the two
+by an arm and was telling them that they'd be left to a dead moral
+certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts
+were too fashionably narrow, and there were still three or four
+car-lengths to go when the tank spout went up with a clang and a
+clatter of chains and the old "Pacific type" gave a couple of hisses and
+a snort.
+
+"They're going!" gritted the boss, sort of between his teeth, and
+without another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under
+his arms, just as if they'd been a couple of sacks of meal, and broke
+into a run.
+
+It wasn't a morsel of use, you know. Mr. Norcross stands six feet two in
+his socks, and I've heard that he was the best all-around athlete in his
+college bunch. But old Hercules himself couldn't have run very far or
+very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half
+a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail
+lights of the train were vanishing to pin points in the night. We were
+like the little tad that went out to the garden to eat worms. Nobody
+loved us, and we were beautifully and artistically left.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A Tank Party
+
+
+When he saw that it was no manner of use, the boss quit on the handicap
+race and put his two armfuls down while he still had breath enough left
+to talk with.
+
+"Well," he said, in his best rusty-hinge rasp, "you've done it! Why, in
+the name of common sense, couldn't you have let me go back after that
+muff thing?"
+
+The young woman was panting as if she had been doing the running, and
+the girl was choking and making a noise that made me think that she was
+crying. If I had been as well acquainted with her as I got to be a
+little later on, I would have known that she was only trying to bottle
+up a laugh that was too beautifully big to be wasted upon just three
+people and a treeless desert.
+
+It was the young woman who answered the boss.
+
+"I--I didn't stop to think!" she fluttered, taking the blame as if she
+had been the one to head the procession. "Isn't there _any_ way we can
+stop that train?"
+
+The boss said there wasn't, and I know the only reason why he didn't say
+a lot of other things was because he was too much of a gentleman to say
+them in the presence of a couple of women.
+
+"But what shall we do?" the young woman went on, gasping a little.
+"Isn't there any telegraph station, or--or anything?"
+
+There wasn't. So far as we could see, the surroundings consisted of a
+short side-track, a spur running off into the hills, and the water tank.
+The siding switches had no lights, which argued that there wasn't even a
+pump-man at the tank--as there was not, the tank being filled
+automatically by a gravity pipe line running back to a natural reservoir
+in the mountains.
+
+Before the boss had a chance to answer her question about the telegraph
+office he got his eye on me, and then I knew that he hadn't noticed me
+before.
+
+"You here, too?" he ripped out, and I know it did him a lot of good to
+be able to unload on somebody in trousers. "Why in blue blazes didn't
+you stay on that train and keep it from running away from us?"
+
+That's it: why didn't I? What made the dog stop before he caught the
+rabbit? I was trying to frame up some sort of an excuse that would sound
+just a few degrees less than plumb foolish, when the young woman took up
+for me. She'd had the clatter of my typewriter dinned into her pretty
+ears all day, and she knew who I was, even if it was dark.
+
+"Don't take it out on the poor boy!" she said, kind of crisp, and yet
+sort of motherly. "If you feel obliged to bully some one, I'm the one
+who is to blame."
+
+"Indeed, you're not!" chipped in the stocky little girl. "_I_ was the
+one who jumped off first. And I don't care: I wasn't going to lose my
+perfectly good muff."
+
+By this time the boss was beginning to get a little better grip on
+himself and he laughed.
+
+"We've all earned the leather medal, I guess," he chuckled. "It's done
+now, and it can't be helped. We're stuck until another train comes
+along, and perhaps we ought to be thankful that we've got Jimmie Dodds
+along to chaperon us."
+
+"But isn't there anything else we can do?" said the young woman. "Can't
+we walk somewhere to where there is a station or a town with people in
+it?"
+
+I saw Mr. Norcross look down at her skirts and then at the girl's.
+
+"You two couldn't walk very far or very fast in those things you are
+wearing," he grunted. "Besides, we are in one of the desert strips, and
+it is probably miles to a night wire station in either direction."
+
+"And how long shall we have to wait for another train?" This time it was
+the little girl who wanted to know.
+
+"I wish I could tell you, but I can't," said the boss. "I'm not familiar
+with the Short Line schedules." Then to the young woman: "Shall we go
+and sit under the water tank? That seems to be about the nearest
+approach to a waiting-room that the place affords."
+
+We trailed off together up the track, two and two, the boss walking with
+the young woman. After we'd counted a few of the cross-ties, the girl
+said: "Is your name Jimmie Dodds?" And when I admitted it: "Mine is
+Maisie Ann. I'm Sheila's cousin on her mother's side. I think this is a
+great lark; don't you?"
+
+"I can tell better after it's over," I said. "Maybe we'll have to stay
+here all night."
+
+"I shouldn't mind," she came back airily. "I haven't been up all night
+since I was a little kiddie and our house burned down. You're just a
+boy, aren't you? You must excuse me; it's so dark that I can't see you
+very well."
+
+I told her I had been shaving for three years and more, and she let out
+a little gurgling laugh, as though I had said something funny. By that
+time we had reached the big water tank, and the boss picked out one of
+the square footing timbers for a seat. It seemed as if he were finding
+it a good bit harder to get acquainted with his half of the combination
+than I was with mine, but after a little the young women thawed out a
+bit and made him talk--to help pass away the time, I took it--and the
+little girl and I sat and listened. When the young woman finally got him
+started, the boss told her all about himself, how he'd been railroading
+ever since he left college, and a lot of things that I'd never even
+dreamed of. It's curious how a pretty woman can make a man turn himself
+inside out that way, just for her amusement.
+
+Maisie Ann and I sat on the end of the timber; not too near to be
+butt-ins, nor so far away that we couldn't hear all that was said. I
+still had the cigar the boss had given me, and I sure wanted to smoke
+mighty bad, only I thought it wouldn't look just right--me being the
+chaperon. Along in the middle of things, Mr. Norcross broke off short
+and begged the young woman's pardon for boring her with so much shop
+talk.
+
+"Oh, you're not boring me at all; I like to hear it," she protested. And
+then: "You have been telling me the story of a man who has done things,
+Mr. Norcross. It has been my misfortune to have to associate chiefly
+with men who only play at doing things."
+
+He switched off at that and asked her if she were warm enough, saying
+that if she were not, he and I would scrap up some sage-brush or
+something and make a fire. She replied that she didn't care for a fire,
+that the night wasn't at all cold--which it wasn't. Then she showed that
+she was human, clear down to the tips of her pretty fingers.
+
+"You may smoke if you want to," she told the boss. "I sha'n't mind it in
+the least."
+
+At that, my little girl turned on me and said, in exactly the same tone:
+"You may smoke if you want to, Mr. Dodds. I sha'n't mind it in the
+least." I heard a sort of smothered chuckle from the other end of the
+timber seat, and the boss lighted his cigar. Then there was more talk,
+in which it turned out that the young woman and her cousin were to have
+been met at Portal City by somebody she called "Cousin Basil," but there
+wouldn't be any scare, because she had written ahead to say that
+possibly they might stop over with some friends in one of the apple
+towns.
+
+Then Mr. Norcross said _he_ wouldn't miss anything by the drop-out but
+an appointment he had with an old friend, and he guessed that could
+wait. I listened, thinking maybe he would mention the name of the
+friend, and after a while he did. The forwarded Portal City telegram the
+boss had gotten just before we went to dinner in the dining-car was from
+"Uncle John" Chadwick, the Chicago wheat king, and that left me
+wondering what the mischief Mr. Chadwick was doing away out in the wild
+and woolly western country where they raise more apples than they do
+wheat, and more mining stock schemes than they do either.
+
+There was another thing that I listened for, too, but it didn't come.
+That was some little side mention of the young woman's husband. So far
+as that under-the-tank talk went, there needn't have been any "Mr.
+Macrae" at all, and I was puzzled. If she'd been wearing mourning--but
+she wasn't, so I told myself that she simply couldn't be a widow.
+Anyway, she was a lot too light-hearted for that.
+
+We had been marooned for nearly an hour when I struck a match and looked
+at my watch. Mr. Norcross was still doing his best to kill time for the
+young woman, and he was just in the exciting part of another railroad
+story, telling about a right-of-way fight on the Midland, where we had
+to smuggle in a few cases of Winchesters and arm the track-layers to
+keep from being shut out of the only canyon there was by the P. & S. F.,
+when the little girl grabbed my arm and said: "Listen!"
+
+I did, and broke in promptly. "Excuse me," I called to the other two,
+"but I think there's a train coming."
+
+The boss cut his story short and we all listened. It seemed that I was
+wrong. The noise we heard was more like an auto running with the
+cut-out open than a train rumbling.
+
+"What do you make it, Jimmie?" came from the boss's end of the timber.
+
+"Motor car. It's out that way," I said, pointing in the darkness toward
+the east.
+
+My guess was right. In less than a minute we saw the lights of the car,
+which was turning in a wide circle to come up beside the main line track
+so it would head back to the east. It stopped a little way below the
+water tank and about a hundred yards north of the track, or maybe less;
+anyway, we could see it quite well even when the lamps were switched off
+and four men came tumbling out of it. If I had been alone on the job I
+should probably have called to the men as they came tramping over to the
+side-track. But Mr. Norcross had a different think coming.
+
+"Out of sight--quick, Jimmie!" he whispered, and in another second he
+had whipped the young woman over the big footing timber to a standing
+place under the tank among the braces, and I had done the same for the
+girl.
+
+What followed was as mysterious as a chapter out of an Anna Katherine
+Green detective story. After doing something to the switch of the unused
+spur track, the four men separated. One of them went back to the auto,
+and the other three walked down the main track to the lower switch of
+the short siding which was on the same side of the main line as the
+spur. Here the fourth man rejoined them, and the girl at my elbow told
+us what he had gone back to the car for.
+
+"He has lighted a red lantern," she whispered. "I saw it when he took it
+out of the auto."
+
+I guess it was pretty plain to all of us by this time that there was
+something decidedly crooked on the cards, but if we had known what it
+was, we couldn't very well have done anything to prevent it. There were
+only two of us men to their four; and, besides, there wasn't any time.
+The lantern-carrying man had barely reached the lower switch when we
+heard the whistle of a locomotive. There was a train coming from the
+west, and a few seconds later an electric headlight showed up on the
+long tangent beyond the siding.
+
+It was a bandit hold-up, all right. We saw the four men at the switch
+stop the train, which seemed to be a special, since it had only the
+engine and one passenger car. One of the men stood on the track waving
+the red lantern; we could see him plainly in the glare of the headlight.
+There wasn't much of a scrap. There were two or three pistol shots, and
+then, as near as we could make out, the hold-up men, or some of them,
+climbed into the engine.
+
+What they did next was as blind as a Chinese puzzle. Before you could
+count ten they had made a flying switch with the single car, kicking it
+in on the siding. Before the car had come fully to a stop, the engine
+was switched in behind it, coupled on, and the reversed train, with the
+engine pushing the car, rattled away on the old spur that led off into
+the hills; clattered away and was lost to sight and hearing in less than
+a minute.
+
+It was not until after the train was switched and gone that we
+discovered that two of the bandits had been left behind. These two reset
+the switches for the main track, leaving everything as they had found
+it, and then crossed over to the auto. Pretty soon we saw match flares,
+and two little red dots that appeared told us that they were smoking.
+
+"What are they doing, Jimmie?" asked the boss, under his breath.
+
+"They are waiting for the other two to come back," I ventured, taking a
+chance shot at it. Then I asked him if he knew where the old spur track
+led to. He said he didn't; that there used to be some bauxite mines back
+in the hills, somewhere in this vicinity, but he understood they had
+been worked out and abandoned.
+
+I was just thinking that all this mystery and kidnapping and gun play
+must be sort of hard on the young woman and the girl, but though my half
+of the allotment was shivering a little and snuggling up just a grain
+closer to me, she proved that she hadn't lost her nerve.
+
+"Did you see the name on that car when the engine went past to get in
+behind it?" she asked, turning the whispered question loose for anybody
+to answer.
+
+"No," said the boss; and I hadn't, either.
+
+"I did," she asserted, showing that her eyes, or her wits, were quicker
+than ours. "I had just one little glimpse of it. The name is
+'A-l-e-x-a,'" spelling it out.
+
+Mr. Norcross started as if he had been shot.
+
+"The _Alexa_? That is Mr. Chadwick's private car--they've kidnapped
+him!" Then he whirled short on me. "Jimmie, are you man enough to go
+with me and try a tackle on those fellows over there in that auto?"
+
+I said I was; but I didn't add what I thought--that it would probably be
+a case of double suicide for us two to go up against a pair of armed
+thugs with our bare hands. The boss would have done it in the hollow
+half of a minute; he's built just that way. But now the young woman put
+in her word.
+
+"You mustn't think of doing such a thing!" she protested; and she was
+still telling him all the different reasons why he mustn't, when we
+heard the creak and grind of the stolen engine coming back down the old
+spur.
+
+After that there was nothing to do but to wait and see what was going to
+happen next. What did happen was as blind as all the rest. The engine
+was stopped somewhere in the gulch back of us and out of sight from our
+hiding-place, and pretty soon the two men who had gone with her came
+hurrying across out of the hill shadows, making straight for the auto. A
+minute or two later they had climbed into the machine, the motor had
+sputtered, and the car was gone.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Mr. Chadwick's Special
+
+
+Of course, as soon as the skip-out of the four hold-up men gave us a
+free hand we knew it was up to us to get busy and do something. It was a
+safe bet that the _Alexa_ was carrying her owner, and in that case Mr.
+John Chadwick and his train crew were somewhere back in the hills,
+without an engine, and with a good prospect of staying "put" until
+somebody should go and hunt them up.
+
+Mr. Norcross had our part in the play figured out before the retreating
+auto had covered its first mile.
+
+"We've got to find out what they've done with Mr. Chadwick," he broke
+out. And then: "It can't be very far to where they have left the engine,
+and if they haven't crippled it--" He stopped short and slung a question
+at the two women: "Will you two stay here with Jimmie while I go and see
+what I can find in that gulch?"
+
+They both paid me the compliment of saying that they'd stay with me, but
+the young woman suggested that it might be just as well if we should all
+go up the gulch together. So we piked out in the dark, the boss helping
+Mrs. Sheila to hobo along over the cross-ties of the spur, and the
+little girl stumbling on behind with me. She had got over her scare, if
+she had any, and when I asked her if she didn't want an arm to grab at,
+she laughed and said, No, and that it was grand; that she wouldn't miss
+a single stumble for worlds.
+
+"In all my life I've never had anything half as exciting as this happen
+to me," was the way she put it, and she sure acted as if she meant to
+make the most of it.
+
+We had followed the spur track up the gulch for maybe a short quarter of
+a mile when we came to the engine. There was nobody on it, and the
+brigands had been good-natured enough to leave the fire-door open so
+that the steam would run down gently and let the boiler cool off by
+degrees. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert on engines, just as he
+is on everything else belonging to a railroad, and he struck matches and
+looked our find over carefully before he tried to move it. As we had
+feared it might be, the big machine was crippled. There was a key gone
+out of one of the connecting-rod crank-pin straps; one miserable little
+piece of steel, maybe eight inches long and tapering one way, and half
+an inch or so thick the other; but that was a-plenty. We couldn't make a
+move without it.
+
+I thought we were done for, but Mr. Norcross chased me up into the cab
+for a lantern. With the light we began to hunt around in the short
+grass, all four of us down on our hands and knees doing the
+needle-in-the-haystack stunt. I had been sensible enough to show the
+little girl the other connecting-rod key, so she knew exactly what to
+look for, and it did me a heap of good when it turned out that she was
+the one who found the lost bit of steel.
+
+"I've got it--I've got it!" she cried; and sure enough she had. The
+hold-up people had merely taken it out and thrown it aside on the
+extremely probable chance that nobody would be foolish enough to look
+for it so near at hand, or, looking, would be able to find it in the
+dark.
+
+It didn't take more than a minute or two, with a wrench from the
+engineer's box, to put the key back in place. Then, with one to boost
+and the other to pull, we got our two passengers up into the high cab,
+and Mr. Norcross made them as comfortable as he could on the fireman's
+box, showing them how to brace and hang on when the machine should begin
+to bounce over the rough track of the old spur.
+
+While he was doing this, I threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the
+firebox and put the blower on; and when we were all set, the boss opened
+the throttle and we went carefully nosing ahead over the old track,
+feeling our way up the gulch and keeping a sharp lookout for the _Alexa_
+as we ground and squealed around the curves.
+
+It must have been four or five miles back in the hills to the place
+where we found the private car, and a little way short of it we picked
+up Mr. Chadwick's conductor, walking the ties to try to get in touch
+with the civilized world once more. He looked a trifle suspicious when
+he found the engine in the hands of still another bunch of strangers,
+and two of them women; but as soon as he heard Mr. Norcross's name he
+quit being offish and got suddenly respectful. Young as he was for a
+top-rounder, the boss had a "rep," and I guess there were not very many
+railroad men west of the Rockies who didn't know him, or know of him.
+
+The conductor told us where we'd find the car, and we found it just as
+he said we would: pushed in on an old mine-loading track at the end of
+the spur. The other members of the crew were off and waiting for us; and
+standing out on the back platform, in the full glare of the headlight as
+we nosed up for a coupling, there was a big, gray-haired man, bareheaded
+and dressed in rough-looking old clothes like a mining prospector.
+
+The big man was "Uncle John" Chadwick, and if he was properly astonished
+at seeing us turn up with his lost engine, he didn't let it interfere
+with our welcome when we took our passengers around to the car and
+lifted them one at a time over the railing and climbed up after them.
+Mr. Chadwick seemed to know Mrs. Sheila; at any rate, he shook hands
+with her and called her by name. Then he grabbed for the boss and fairly
+shouted at him: "Well, well, Graham!--of all the lucky things this side
+of Mesopotamia! How the dev--how in thunder did you manage to turn up
+here?" And all that, you know.
+
+The explanations, such as they were, came later, after the young lady,
+confessing herself a bit excited and fussed up, had taken her cousin
+under her arm and they had both gone to lie down in one of the
+staterooms. With the women out of the way, the boss and Mr. Chadwick sat
+together in the open compartment while the train crew was trundling us
+back to the main line. Mr. Norcross had put me in right by telling the
+wheat king who I was, so they didn't pay any attention to me.
+
+As a matter of course, the talk jumped first to the mysterious hold-up
+and kidnapping and the reason why. All either of them could say didn't
+serve to throw any light on the mystery, not a single ray. There had
+been no violence--the pistol shots had been merely meant to scare the
+trainmen--and there had been no attempt at robbery; for that matter,
+Mr. Chadwick hadn't even seen the kidnappers, and hadn't known what was
+going on until after it was all over.
+
+Mr. Norcross told what we had seen, and how we had come to be where we
+were able to see it, but that didn't help out much, either. From any
+point of view it seemed perfectly foolish, and the boss made mention of
+that. If we hadn't happened to be there to bring the engine back, the
+worst that could have befallen Mr. Chadwick and the crew of the special
+would have been a few hours' bother and delay. In the course of time the
+conductor would have walked out and got to a wire station somewhere,
+though it might have taken him all night, and then some, to get another
+engine.
+
+Naturally, Mr. Chadwick was red-hot about it, on general principles. I
+guess he wasn't used to being kidnapped. But, after all, the thing that
+bothered him most was the fact that he couldn't account for it.
+
+"I can't help thinking that it is connected with what is due to happen
+to-morrow morning, Graham," he said, at the end of things. "There are
+some certain scoundrels in Portal City at the present moment who
+wouldn't stop at anything to gain their ends, and I am wondering now if
+Dawes wasn't mixed up in it."
+
+The boss laughed and said:
+
+"You'll have to begin at the beginning with me: I'm too new in this
+region to know even the names. Who is Dawes?"
+
+"Dawes is a mining man in Portal City, and before I'd been an hour in
+town yesterday he hunted me up and wanted me to go over to Strathcona to
+look at some gold prospects he's trying to finance. I said 'No' at
+first, because I was expecting you, and thought you'd reach Portal City
+this morning. When you didn't show up, I knew I had twelve hours more on
+my hands, and as Dawes was still hanging on, I had our trainmaster give
+me a special over to Strathcona, on a promise that I'd be brought back
+early this evening, ahead of the 'Flyer' from the west--the train you
+were on."
+
+Mr. Norcross nodded. "And the promise wasn't kept."
+
+"No promise is ever kept on the Pioneer Short Line," growled the big
+magnate. And then, with a beautiful disregard for the mixed figures of
+speech: "Once in a blue moon the chapter of accidents hits the
+bull's-eye whack in the middle, Graham. When Hardshaw wired me from
+Portland, I knew you couldn't reach Portal City before this morning, at
+the very earliest. That was going to cut my time pretty short, with the
+big gun due to be fired to-morrow morning, and you cut it still shorter
+by losing twelve hours somewhere along the road--they told me in the
+despatcher's office that your train was behind a wreck somewhere up in
+Oregon. But it has turned out all right, in spite of everything. You're
+here, and we've got the night before us."
+
+Again Mr. Norcross said something about beginning at the beginning.
+"Just remember that I am entirely in the dark," he went on. "I didn't
+see Hardshaw at all before leaving Portland; he merely forwarded your
+wire, asking me to stop over in Portal City, to me on the train--and it
+was handed to me just before dinner this evening. Of course, that was
+enough--from anybody who has been as good a friend to me as you have."
+
+"We'll see presently just how far that friendship rope is going to
+reach," returned the wheat king, and though my back was turned to them,
+I could easily imagine the quizzical twinkle of the shrewd old eyes that
+went with it. Then I suppose he nodded toward me, for the boss said:
+
+"Oh, Jimmie's all right; he knew what I had for dinner this evening, and
+he'll know what I'm going to have for breakfast to-morrow morning."
+
+With the bridle off, the big man went ahead abruptly, cutting out all
+the frills.
+
+"You finished your building contract on the Oregon Midland, Graham, and
+after the road was opened for business you refused an offer of the
+general managership. Would you mind telling me why you did that?"
+
+"Not in the least. I'm rather burnt out on trying to operate American
+railroads; at any rate, when it comes to trying to operate one of them
+for a legitimate profit. There is nothing in it. An operating head is
+now nothing more than a score-keeper for a national gambling game. The
+boss gamblers around the railroad post in the Stock Exchange tell him
+what he has to do and where he has to get off. Stock gambling, under
+whatever name it masquerades--boosting values, buying and selling
+margins, reorganizations, with their huge rake-offs for the
+underwriters--is the incubus which is crushing the life out of the
+nation's industries, especially in the railroad field. It makes me wish
+I'd never seen a railroad track."
+
+"Yet it is your trade, isn't it?" asked the wheat king.
+
+"It is; but luckily I can build railroads as well as operate them; and
+there are other countries besides the United States of America. I'm on
+my way home to Illinois for a little visit with my mother and sisters;
+and after that I think I shall close with an offer I've had from one of
+the Canadian companies."
+
+"Good boy!" chuckled the Chicago magnate. "In due time we might hope to
+be reading your name in the newspapers--'Sir Graham Norcross, D.S.O.,'
+or something of that sort." Then, with a sharp return to the sort of
+gritting seriousness: "You've been riding over the Pioneer Short Line
+since early this morning, Graham: what do you think of it?"
+
+I couldn't see the boss's smile, but I could figure it pretty well when
+he said: "There may be worse managed, worse neglected pieces of railroad
+track in some of the great transcontinental lines, but if there are I
+haven't happened to notice them. I suppose it is capitalized to death,
+like many of the others."
+
+"Fictitious values doubtless have something to do with it at the present
+stage of the game," Mr. Chadwick admitted. "The Pioneer Short Line is
+'under suspicion' on the books of the commissions, both State and
+Interstate, as a heavily 'watered' corporation--which it is. Do you know
+the history of the road?"
+
+When I got up to get a match, Mr. Norcross was shaking his head and
+saying: "Not categorically; no."
+
+"Then I'll brief it for you," said the big man in the stuffed wicker
+chair. "It has always been a good earning property, being largely, even
+yet, without much local competition. But from the day it was completed
+its securities have figured in the market only for their speculative
+values. The property itself has never been considered, save as a means
+to an end; the end being to enable one bunch of the Wall Street
+gamesters you speak of to make a 'killing' and unload on another bunch."
+
+"The old story," said Mr. Norcross.
+
+"We are bumping over the net result, right now," Mr. Chadwick went on.
+"The property is bled white; there is no money for betterments; we are
+tied hand and foot by all sorts of legal restrictions and regulations;
+and, worse than all, the people we are supposed to serve hate us until
+you can smell it and taste it in every town and hamlet on the
+right-of-way."
+
+"So I have heard," put in the boss, calmly.
+
+"That brings us down to the nib of the matter. Pioneer Short Line is
+practically in the last ditch. The stock has slumped to forty and worse;
+Shaffer, the general manager and the only able man we have had for
+years, has resigned in disgust; and if something isn't done to-morrow
+morning in Portal City, I know of at least one minority stockholder who
+is going to throw the whole mess into the courts and try for a
+receivership."
+
+Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
+
+"Are you the minority stockholder, Uncle John?" he asked, letting
+himself use the name by which Mr. Chadwick was best known in the wheat
+pit.
+
+"I am--more's the pity. I had a little lapse of sanity one fine morning
+a few years ago and bought in for an investment. I've done everything I
+could think of, Graham, to persuade Breck Dunton and his Wall Street
+accomplices to spend just one dollar in ten of their reorganization and
+recapitalization stealings on the road itself, but it's no good. All
+they want is to get one more rise out of the securities, so they can
+unload."
+
+"Is there to be a stockholders' meeting in Portal City to-morrow
+morning?"
+
+"No; a directors' meeting. Dunton has been making an inspection trip
+over the system with a dozen or so of his New York cronies. It's a
+junketing excursion, pure and simple, but while they're here they'll get
+together and go through the form of picking out a new general manager.
+I'm on the board and they had to send me notice, though it's an even bet
+they hoped I'd stay away. In fact, I think they scheduled the meeting
+out here on the chance that the distance from Chicago would keep me from
+attending it."
+
+All this talk had taken up a good bit of time, and just as Mr. Chadwick
+said that about the "even bet," our engineer was whistling for Portal
+City. From where I was sitting I could see the electric lights dotting
+the wide valley between the two gateway buttes from which the city gets
+its name. Mr. Norcross was looking at the lights, too, when he said:
+
+"Are you really going to spring the receivership on the Dunton people
+to-morrow?"
+
+"I'm going to give Dunton his chance. He can appoint the man I want
+appointed as general manager, with full power to act, and ratify a
+little plan I've got up my sleeve for providing a bit of working capital
+for the road, or--he can turn me down."
+
+"And if he does turn you down?"
+
+"Then, by George, I'll see if I can't persuade the courts to put the
+property into bankruptcy and install my man as receiver!"
+
+"I don't envy your man his job, either way around; not the least little
+morsel in the world," said the boss, quietly. And then: "Who is he,
+Uncle John?"
+
+The wheat king gave a great laugh.
+
+"Don't tell me you haven't guessed it," he chuckled. "You're the man,
+Graham."
+
+But now Mr. Norcross had something to say for himself, sitting up
+straight and shaking his head sort of sorrowfully at the big man in the
+padded chair.
+
+"No you don't, my good old friend; not in a thousand years! You'd lose
+out in the end, and I'd lose out; and besides, I'm not quite ready to
+commit suicide." And then to me: "Jimmie, suppose you go and tap on the
+door and tell the ladies we're pulling into Portal City."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Tipping of the Scale
+
+
+After all, it wasn't so very late in the night when our special pulled
+up to the Portal City station platform and I turned myself into a
+messenger-boy escort for the lady and the little girl whose muff had
+been responsible for so many different flip-flaps in the short space of
+a few hours.
+
+I hadn't hung around while the boss was telling Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann good-by. Our conductor had wired ahead from the first telegraph
+station we came to and had asked to have our dunnage--the two women's,
+the boss's, and mine--taken out of the "Flyer" Pullman and sent back to
+Portal City on a local, and I was in the baggage-room, digging up the
+put-off stuff, at the good-by minute. But I guess they didn't quarrel
+any--the boss and Mrs. Sheila. She was laughing a little to herself as I
+helped her down from the car, and when I asked her where she wanted to
+go, she said I might ask one of the porters to carry the traps, and we'd
+walk to the hotel, which was only a few blocks up the main street.
+
+She took Maisie Ann on the other side of her and let two of the blocks
+go by without saying anything more, and then she gave that quiet little
+laugh again and said, "Your Mr. Norcross amuses me, Jimmie. He says I
+have no business to travel without a guardian. What do you think about
+it?"
+
+I told her I hadn't any thinks coming, and she seemed to take that for a
+joke and laughed some more. Then she asked me if I'd ever been in New
+York, and I felt sort of small when I had to tell her that I had never
+been east of Omaha in all my life. With that, she told me not to worry;
+that if I stayed with Mr. Norcross I'd probably get to go anywhere I
+wanted to.
+
+Something in the way she said it made it sound like a little slam on the
+boss, and of course I wasn't going to stand for that.
+
+"There is one thing about it: the boss will make good wherever he goes,"
+I hit back. "You can bet on that."
+
+"I like your loyalty," she flashed out. "It is a fine thing in a day
+that is much too careless of such qualities. And I agree with you that
+your Mr. Norcross is likely to succeed; more than likely, if he will
+only learn to combine a little gentle cleverness with the heavy hand."
+
+There was no doubt about it this time; she _was_ slamming the boss, and
+I meant to get at the bottom of it, right there and then.
+
+"I don't think you have any cause to blacklist Mr. Norcross," I said.
+"Hasn't he been right good and brotherly to both of you this evening?"
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean that," she said real earnestly. "But in the stateroom
+in Mr. Chadwick's car: the ventilator was open, you know, until Maisie
+Ann got up and shut it, and we couldn't very well help hearing what was
+said about the kidnapping. Neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Norcross seemed
+to be able to account for it."
+
+"Can you account for it?" I asked, bluntly enough, I guess.
+
+At this she smiled and said, "It would be rather presumptuous for me to
+try where Mr. Norcross and Mr. Chadwick failed, wouldn't it? But maybe I
+can give you just a wee little hint. If you are not well enough
+acquainted with Mr. Chadwick to ask him yourself, you might tell Mr.
+Norcross to ask him if there isn't some strong reason why somebody, or
+perhaps a number of somebodies, wanted to keep him out of Portal City
+over Sunday night and possibly a part of the Monday."
+
+We were coming to the big electric sign that was winking out the letters
+to spell "Hotel Bullard," and I was bound to have it out with her before
+my chance was gone.
+
+"See here," I put in; "you saw something more than I did, and more than
+Mr. Norcross did. What was it?"
+
+This time she took the motherly tone with me again and told me I must
+learn not to be rude and masterful, like the boss. Then she gave me what
+I was reaching for.
+
+"You saw the two men who went over to the auto and smoked while they
+were waiting for the other two to come back?"
+
+I told her that I hadn't seen them very well; couldn't, with nothing but
+the starlight to help out.
+
+"Neither did I," she admitted. "But if I am not mistaken, I have seen
+them many times before, and they are very well known here in Portal
+City. One of them, the smaller one with the derby hat and the short
+overcoat, was either Mr. Rufus Hatch or his double; and the other, the
+heavy-set one, might have been Mr. Gustave Henckel, Mr. Hatch's partner
+in the Red Tower Company."
+
+This didn't help out much, but you can bet that I made a note of the two
+names. We were just going into the hotel, so I didn't have a chance to
+ask any more questions; and after I had paid the porter for lugging the
+grips, Mrs. Sheila had made whatever arrangement she wanted to with the
+clerk, and she and Maisie Ann were ready to take the elevator.
+
+"You are going back to Mr. Chadwick's car?" she asked, when she was
+telling me good-by and thanking me for coming up to the hotel with them.
+
+I told her I was, and then she came around to the kidnapping business
+again of her own accord.
+
+"You may give Mr. Norcross the hint I gave you, if you wish," she said;
+"only you must be a good boy, Jimmie, and not drag me into it. I
+couldn't be positively certain, you know, that the two men were really
+Mr. Hatch and Mr. Henckel. But if there is any reason why those two
+wouldn't want Mr. Chadwick to reach the city at the time he was counting
+on----"
+
+"I see," I nodded; "it just puts the weight of the inference over on
+that side. I'll tell the boss, when I get a good chance, and you can bet
+your last dollar he won't tangle you up in it--he isn't put together
+that way."
+
+"Well, then, good-night," she smiled, giving me her hand. And then: "Mr.
+Norcross says you'll be going on East to-morrow, and in that case it may
+be a long time before we meet again. After a while, after he has
+forgotten all about it, you may tell him from me--" She stopped and gave
+me that funny little laugh again that made her look so pretty, and said:
+"No, I guess you needn't, either." And with that she sort of edged the
+little girl into the elevator before we could get a chance to shake
+hands, and I heard her tell the boy to take them up to the mezzanine
+landing.
+
+Since I didn't have any reason to suppose that the boss was needing me,
+I took my own time about going back to hunt for Mr. Chadwick's car in
+the railroad yards, loafing for a while in the Bullard lobby to rubber
+and look on at the people coming and going. You can tell pretty well how
+a town stacks up for business if you hit it between ten and eleven
+o'clock of a Sunday night and hang around its best hotel. If the town is
+dead, there won't be anybody stirring around the hotel at that hour. But
+Portal City seemed to be good and alive. There were lots of people
+knocking about on the sidewalks and drifting in and out of the lobby.
+
+By and by, I went down to the station and began to hunt for the _Alexa_.
+The yard crew had side-tracked it on a spur down by the freight-house,
+and when I had stumbled over to it the negro porter remembered me well
+enough to let me in.
+
+The boss and Mr. Chadwick were facing each other across the table, which
+was all littered up with papers and maps and reports, and they hardly
+noticed me when I blew in and sat down a little to one side. I had known
+well enough, when Mr. Norcross had turned the new offer down, that Mr.
+Chadwick wasn't going to let it go at that. It seemed that he hadn't; he
+had got the boss sufficiently interested to go over the papers with
+him, anyhow.
+
+But just after I broke in, Mr. Norcross jumped up and began to pace back
+and forth before the table, with his hands in his pockets.
+
+"No, I can't see it, Uncle John," he said, still sort of stubborn and
+determined. "You are trying to make me believe that I ought to take the
+biggest job that has ever been set before the expert in any field: to
+demonstrate, on this rotten corpse of a railroad, the solution of a
+problem that has the entire country guessing at the present time;
+namely, the winning of success, and public--and industrial--approval for
+a carrier corporation which had continuously and persistently broken
+every commandment in all the decalogues--of business; of fair-dealing
+with its employees; of common honesty with everybody."
+
+Mr. Chadwick nodded. "That is about the size of it," he said.
+
+"I wouldn't say that it can't be done," the boss went on. "Perhaps it is
+possible, for the right man. But I'm not the right man. You need
+somebody who can combine the qualities of a pretty brutal slugger with
+those of a fine-haired, all-things-to-all-men, diplomatic peacemaker. I
+can do the slugging; I've proved it a time or two in the past. But I'm
+no good at the other end of the game. When it comes to handling the
+fellow with a 'pull,' I've either got to smash him or quit."
+
+At that Mr. Chadwick nodded again and said: "That is one of the reasons
+why I have reached out and picked you for the job. There will be a good
+bit of the slugging needed, at first, and I guess you can acquire the
+other things as you go along, can't you?"
+
+"Not at this late day, I'm afraid. People who know me best call me a
+scrapper, and I've been living up to my reputation. Yesterday, when we
+were held up behind the freight wreck at Widner, I got off to see what
+we were in for. The conductor of our train had spotted me from seeing my
+pass, and I happened to hear him docketing me for the wrecking boss. He
+said I was known on the Midland as 'Hell-and-repeat' Norcross; that it
+was a habit with me to have a man for breakfast every morning."
+
+"I can add a little something to that," Mr. Chadwick put in,
+quizzically. "Lepaige, your Oregon Midland president, says you need
+humanizing, and wonders why you haven't married some good woman who
+would knock the rough corners off. Why haven't you, Graham?"
+
+The boss gave a short laugh. "Too busy," he said. "Past that, we might
+assume that the good woman hasn't presented herself. Let it go. The
+facts still stand. I am too heavy-handed for this job of yours. I
+should probably mix up with some of these grafters you've been telling
+me about and get a knife in my back. That would be all in the day's
+work, of course, but it would leave you right where you are now. And as
+for this other thing--the industrial side of it: that's a large order; a
+whaling big order. I'm not even prepared to say, off-hand, that it's the
+right thing to do."
+
+"Right or wrong, it's a thing that is coming, Graham," was the sober
+reply. "If we don't meet it half-way--well, the time will come when we
+of the hiring-and-firing side won't be given any option in the matter.
+You may call it Utopian if you please, and add that I'm growing old and
+losing my grip. But that doesn't obliterate the fact that the days of
+the present master-and-man relations in the industries are numbered."
+
+The boss shook his head. "As I say, I can't go that far with you,
+off-hand; and if I could, I should still doubt that I am the man to head
+your procession."
+
+I thought that settled it, but that was because I didn't know Mr.
+Chadwick very well. The big wheat king just smiled up at the boss, sort
+of fatherly, and said:
+
+"We'll let it rest until morning and give you a chance to sleep on it.
+You have spoken only of the difficulties and the responsibilities,
+Graham; but there is another side to it. In a way, it's an opportunity,
+carrying with it the promise of the biggest kind of a reward."
+
+"I don't see it," said the boss, briefly.
+
+"Don't you? I do. I have an idea rambling around in my head that it is
+about time some bright young fellow was demonstrating that problem you
+speak of--showing the people of the United States that a railroad
+needn't be regarded as an outlaw among the industries; needn't have the
+enmity of everybody it serves; needn't be the prey of a lot of disloyal
+and dissatisfied employees who are interested only in the figure of the
+pay-day check; needn't be shot at as a wolf with a bounty on its scalp.
+Let it rest at that for the present. Get your hat and we'll walk up-town
+to the hotel. I want to have a word with Dunton to-night, if I can shake
+him loose from his junketing bunch long enough to listen to it. Beyond
+that, I want to get hold of the sheriff and put him on the track of
+those hold-ups."
+
+Here was a chance for me to butt in with the hint Mrs. Sheila had given
+me, but I didn't see how I was going to do it without giving her away.
+So I said the little end of nothing, just as hard as I could; and when
+we got out of the car, Mr. Norcross told me to go by the station and
+have our luggage sent to the hotel, and that killed whatever chance I
+might have had farther along.
+
+It was some time after eleven o'clock when I got around to the hotel
+with the traps. The stir in the lobby had quieted down to make it seem a
+little more like Sunday night, but an automobile party had just come in,
+and some of the men were jawing at the clerk because the house wasn't
+serving a midnight theater supper in the cafe on the Sunday.
+
+Mr. Chadwick had disappeared, but I saw the boss at the counter waiting
+for his chance at the clerk. The quarrelsome people melted away at last,
+all but one--a young swell who would have been handsome if he hadn't had
+the eyes of a maniac and a color that was sort of corpse-like with the
+pallor of a booze-fighter. He had his hat on the back of his head, and
+he was ripping it off at the clerk like a drunken hobo.
+
+His ravings were so cluttered up with cuss-words that I couldn't get any
+more than the drift of them, but it seemed that he had caught a glimpse
+of somebody he knew--a woman, I took it, because he said "she"--looking
+down from the rail of the mezzanine, and he wanted to go up to her. And
+it appeared that the clerk had told the elevator man not to take him up
+in his present condition.
+
+The boss was growing sort of impatient; I could tell it by the way the
+little side muscles on his jaw were working. When he got the ear of the
+clerk for a second or so between cusses, he asked what was the matter
+with the lunatic. I caught only broken bits of the clerk's half-whisper:
+"Young Collingwood ... President Dunton's nephew ... saw lady ...
+mezzanine ... wants to go up to her."
+
+The boss scowled at the young fellow, who was now handing himself around
+the corner of the counter to get at the clerk again, and said: "Why
+don't you ring for an officer and have him run in?"
+
+The night clerk was evidently scared of his job. "I wouldn't dare to do
+that," he chittered. "He's one of the New York crowd--the railroad
+people--President Dunton's nephew--guest of the house."
+
+The young fellow had pulled himself around to our side of the counter by
+this time and was hooking his arm to make a pass at Mr. Norcross,
+trimming things up as he came with a lot more language. The boss said,
+right short and sharp, to the clerk, "Get his room key and give it to a
+boy who can show me the way," and the next thing we knew he had bashed
+that lunatic square in the face and was cuffing him along to the nearest
+elevator.
+
+I guess it sort of surprised the clerk, and everybody else who happened
+to see it--but not me. It was just like the boss. He came back in a few
+minutes, looking as cool as a cucumber.
+
+"What did you do with him?" asked the clerk, kind of awed and half
+scared.
+
+"Got a couple of the corridor sweepers to put him in a bath and turn the
+cold water on him. That'll take the whiskey out of him. Now, if you have
+a minute to spare, I'd like to get my assignment."
+
+We hadn't more than got our rooms marked off for us when I saw Mr.
+Chadwick coming across from the farther of the three elevators. He was
+smiling sort of grim, as if he'd made a killing of some sort with Mr.
+Dunton, and instead of heading back for his car he took the boss over to
+a corner of the lobby and sat down to smoke with him.
+
+I circled around for a while, and after a bit Mr. Norcross held up a
+finger at me to bring him a match. They didn't seem to be talking
+anything private, so I sat down just beyond them, so sleepy that I could
+hardly see straight. Mr. Chadwick was telling about his early
+experiences in Portal City, how he blew in first on top of the
+Strathcona gold boom, and how he had known mighty near everybody in the
+region in those days.
+
+While he was talking, a taxi drove up and one of the old residenters
+came in from the street and crossed to the elevators; a mighty handsome,
+stately old gentleman, with fierce white mustaches and a goatee, and
+"Southern Colonel" written all over him.
+
+"There's one of them now; Major Basil Kendrick--Kentucky born and
+raised, as you might guess," Mr. Chadwick was saying. "Old-school
+Southern 'quality,' and as fine as they make 'em. He is a lawyer, but
+not in active practice: owns a mine or two in Strathcona Gulch, and is
+neither too rich nor too poor."
+
+I grabbed at the name, "Basil," right away: it isn't such a very common
+name, and Mrs. Sheila had said something--under the water tank, you
+recollect--about a "Cousin Basil" who was to have met her at the train.
+I was putting two or three little private guesses of my own together,
+when one of the elevators came down and here came our two, the young
+lady and the chunky little girl, with the major chuckling and smiling
+and giving an arm to each. They had apparently stopped at the Bullard
+only to wait until he could come after them and take them home. Mrs.
+Sheila was looking just as pretty as ever, only now there wasn't a bit
+of color in her face, and her eyes seemed a good deal brighter, some
+way.
+
+"Yes, indeed; the major is all right; as you'd find out for yourself if
+you'd make up your mind to stay in Portal City and get acquainted with
+him," Mr. Chadwick was going on; and by that time the major and the two
+pretty ones had come on to where the boss and Mr. Chadwick could see
+them.
+
+I saw the boss sit up in his chair and stare at them. Then he said:
+"That's Mrs. Macrae with him now. Is she a member of his family?"
+
+"A second cousin, or something of that sort," said Mr. Chadwick. "I met
+her once at the major's house out in the northern suburb last summer,
+and that's how I came to know her when you put her aboard of the _Alexa_
+back yonder in the gulch."
+
+Mr. Norcross let the three of them get out and away, and we heard their
+taxi speed up and trundle off before he said, "She is married, I'm told.
+Where is her husband?"
+
+Mr. Chadwick looked up as if he'd already forgotten the three who had
+just crossed the lobby.
+
+"Who--Sheila Macrae? Yes, she has been married. But there isn't any
+husband--she's a widow."
+
+For quite a while the boss sat staring at his cigar in a way he has when
+he is thinking right hard, and Mr. Chadwick let him alone, being busy, I
+guess, with his own little scrap that lay just ahead of him in the
+coming directors' meeting. Then, all of a sudden, the boss got up and
+shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
+
+"I've changed my mind, Uncle John," he said, looking sort of absent-like
+out of the window to where the major's taxi had been standing. "If you
+can pull me into that deal to-morrow morning--with an absolutely free
+hand to do as I think best, mind you--I'll take the job."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Directors' Meeting
+
+
+I was up bright and early the next morning--that is, a good bit brighter
+and earlier than Mr. Norcross was--and after breakfast I took a little
+sashay down Nevada Avenue to have a look at _our_ railroad. Of course, I
+knew, after what the boss had said to Mr. Chadwick the night before,
+just before we went to bed, that we weren't ever going to see Canada, or
+even Illinois.
+
+I'll have to admit that the look I got didn't make me feel as if we'd
+found a Cullinan diamond. Down in the yards everything seemed to be at
+the loosest kind of loose ends. A switching crew was making up a
+freight, and the way they slammed the boxes together, regardless of
+broken drawheads and the like, was a sin and a shame. Then I saw some
+grain cars with the ends started and the wheat running out all along the
+track, and three or four more with the air hose hanging so it knocked
+along on the ties, and a lot of things like that--and nobody caring a
+hoot.
+
+There was a big repair shop on the other side of the yard tracks, and
+though it was after seven o'clock, the men were still straggling over to
+go to work. Down at the round-house, a wiper was spotting a big
+freight-puller on the turn-table, and I'm blessed if he didn't actually
+run her forward pair of truck-wheels off the edge of the table, right
+while I was looking on, just as if it were all in the day's work.
+
+In the course of time I drifted back to the office headquarters, which
+were at the end of the passenger station and in a part of the same
+building, down-stairs and up. A few clerks were dribbling in, and none
+of them seemed to have life enough to get out of the way of an ox-team.
+One fellow recognized me for a member of the big railroad family, I
+guess, for he stopped and asked me if I was looking for a job.
+
+I told him I wasn't, and gave him a cigar--just on general principles.
+He took it, and right away he began to loosen up.
+
+"If you should change your mind about the job, you just make it a case
+of 'move on, Joey,' and don't stay here and try to hit this
+agglomeration," he said.
+
+"Why not?" I asked.
+
+"It's a frost. I'm off of the Pennsy myself, and I'm ashamed to look in
+the looking-glass since I came out here. The P. S. L. isn't a railroad,
+at all; it's just making a bluff at being one. Besides, we're slated to
+have a new general manager, and if he's any good he'll fire the last
+living man of us."
+
+"Maybe, if I change my mind, I might get a job with the new man," I
+said. "Who is he?"
+
+"Search me! I don't believe they've found anybody yet. The big people
+from New York are all here now, and maybe they'll pick somebody before
+they go away. If I had the nerve of a rabbit, I'd take the next train
+back for Pittsburgh."
+
+"What's your job?" I quizzed.
+
+He grinned at me sort of good-naturedly. "You wouldn't think it to look
+at me, but I'm head stenographer in the general super's office."
+
+"You haven't got much of a boss, if he can't command any more loyalty
+than you are giving him," I offered; and at that he spat on the platform
+and made a face like a kid that had been taking a dose of asafoetida.
+
+"Yah!" he snorted. "We haven't a man in the outfit, on any job where the
+pay amounts to anything, that isn't somebody's cousin or nephew or
+brother-in-law or something. They shoot 'em out here from New York in
+bunches. You may be a spotter, for all I know, but I don't care a hang.
+I'm quitting at the end of the month, anyhow--if I don't get fired this
+side of that."
+
+I grinned; I couldn't help it.
+
+"Tell me," I broke in, "are there many more like you in the Pioneer
+Short Line service?"
+
+"Scads of 'em," he retorted cheerfully. "I can round you up a couple of
+dozen fellows right here at headquarters who would go on a bat and paint
+this town a bright vermilion if the new G. M., whoever he is going to
+be, would clean out the whole rookery, cousins, nephews, and all."
+
+"I think I'll have to take your name," I told him, fishing out a pencil
+and a notebook--just to see what he would do.
+
+"Huh! so you _are_ a spotter, after all, are you? All right, Mr.
+Spotter. My name's May, Frederic G. May. And when you want my head, you
+can find it just exactly where I told you--in the general super's
+office. You're a stranger and you took me in. So long."
+
+Wouldn't that jar you? A man out of the general offices talking that way
+about his road and his own boss? I couldn't help seeing how rotten the
+thing must be if it smelled that way to the men on its own pay-rolls.
+
+After a while, after I'd loafed through the shops and around the yard
+and got a few more whiffs of the decay, I strolled on back to the hotel.
+Seen by daylight, Portal City seemed to be a right bright little burg,
+with a cut-stone post-office and a new court house built out of pink
+lava, and three or four office buildings big enough to be called
+sky-scrapers anywhere outside of a real city like Portland or Seattle.
+The streets were paved, and on the main one, Nevada Avenue, there was
+plenty of business. Also, I tipped off a mining exchange and two pretty
+nice-looking club-houses right in sight from the Bullard entrance.
+
+There wasn't much of a crowd in the lobby, and as I didn't see anything
+of Mr. Norcross or Mr. Chadwick, I sat down in a corner to wear out some
+more time. Though it was now after nine o'clock, there were still a good
+many people breakfasting in the cafe, the entrance to which was only a
+few feet away from my corner.
+
+I was wondering a little what had become of the boss--who was generally
+the earliest riser on the job--when two men came bulging through the
+screen doors of the cafe, picking their teeth and feeling in their
+pockets for cigars. Right on the dot, and in the face of knowing that it
+couldn't reasonably be so, I had a feeling that I'd seen those men
+before. One of them was short and rather stocky, and his face had a sort
+of hard, hungry look; and the other was big and barrel-bodied. The short
+one was clean-shaven, but the other had a reddish-gray beard clipped
+close on his fat jaws and trimmed to a point at the chin.
+
+After they had lighted up they came along and sat down three or four
+chairs away from me. They paid no attention to me, but for fear they
+might, I tried to look as sleepy as an all-night bell-hop in a busy
+hotel.
+
+"The Dunton bunch got together in one of the committee rooms up-stairs a
+little after eight o'clock," said the short man, in a low, rasping voice
+that went through you like a buzz-saw, and it was evident that he was
+merely going on with a talk which had been begun over the
+breakfast-table. "Thanks to those infernal blunderers Clanahan sent us
+last night, Chadwick was with them."
+
+"I think that was choost so," said the big man, speaking slowly and with
+something more than a hint of a German accent. "Beckler was choost what
+you call him--a tam blunderer."
+
+Like a flash it came over me that I was "listening in" to a talk between
+the same two men who had sat in the auto at Sand Creek Siding and smoked
+while they were waiting for the actual kidnappers to return. You can bet
+high that I made myself mighty small and unobtrusive.
+
+After a while the big man spoke again.
+
+"What has Uncle Chon Chadwick up his sleeve got, do you think?"
+
+"I don't think--I know!" was the snappy reply. "It's one of two things:
+a receivership--which will knock us into a cocked hat because we can't
+fool with an officer of the United States court--or a new deal all
+around in the management."
+
+"Vich of the two will it be that will come out of that commiddee room
+up-stairs?"
+
+"A new management. Dunton can't stand for a receivership, and Chadwick
+knows it. Apart from the fact that a court officer would turn up a lot
+of side deals that wouldn't look well for the New York crowd if they got
+into the newspapers, the securities would be knocked out and the
+majority holders--Dunton and his bunch--couldn't unload. Chadwick has
+got him by the neck and can dictate his own terms."
+
+"Vich will be?"
+
+"That he will name the man who is to take Shaffer's place as general
+manager of the railroad outfit. We might have stood it off for a while,
+just as I said yesterday, if we could have kept Chadwick from attending
+this meeting."
+
+"But now we don't could stand it off--what then?"
+
+"We'll have to wait and see, and size up the new man when he blows in.
+He'll be only human, Henckel. And if we get right down to it we can pull
+him over to our side--or make him wish he'd never been born."
+
+The big man got up ponderously and brushed the cigar ashes off of his
+bay-window. "You vait and see what comes mit the commiddee-room out. I
+go up to the ovvice."
+
+When I was left alone in the row of lobby chairs with the snappy one I
+was scared stiff for fear, now that he didn't have anything else to
+think of, he'd catch on to the fact that I might have overheard. But
+apart from giving me one long stare that made my blood run cold, he
+didn't seem to notice me much, and after a little he got up and went to
+sit on the other side of the big rotunda where he could watch the
+elevators going and coming.
+
+I guess he had lots of patience, for I had to have. It was after eleven
+o'clock, and I had been sitting in my corner for two full hours, when I
+saw the boss coming down the broad marble stair with Mr. Chadwick. I
+don't think the Hatch man saw them, or, if he did, he didn't let on.
+
+Mr. Norcross held up a finger for me, and when I jumped up he gave me a
+sheet of paper; a Pioneer Short Line president's letter-head with a few
+lines written on it with a pen and a sort of crazy-looking signature
+under them.
+
+"Take that to the _Mountaineer_ job office and have five hundred of them
+printed," was the boss's order. "Tell the foreman it's a rush job and we
+want it to-day. Then make a copy and take it to Mr. Cantrell, the
+editor, and ask him to run it in to-morrow's paper as an item of news,
+if he feels like it. When you are through, come down to Mr. Chadwick's
+car."
+
+Since the thing was going to be published, and I was going to make a
+copy of it, I didn't scruple to read it as I hurried out to begin a hunt
+for the _Mountaineer_ office. It was the printer's copy for an official
+circular, dated at Portal City and addressed to all officers and
+employees of the Pioneer Short Line. It read:
+
+     "Effective at once, Mr. Graham Norcross is appointed General
+     Manager of the Pioneer Short Line System, with headquarters at
+     Portal City, and his orders will be respected accordingly.
+
+     "BRECKENRIDGE DUNTON,
+
+     "_President_."
+
+We had got our jolt, all right; and leaving the ladder and the Friday
+start out of the question, I grinned and told myself that the one other
+thing that counted for most was the fact that Mrs. Sheila Macrae was a
+widow.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The _Alexa_ Goes East
+
+
+I chased like the dickens on the printing job, because, apart from
+wanting to absorb all the dope I could as I went along on the new job, I
+knew I would be needed every minute right at Mr. Norcross's elbow, now
+that the actual work was beginning.
+
+He and Mr. Chadwick were deep in reports and figures and plans of all
+sorts when I got back to the _Alexa_. Luncheon was served in the car,
+and they kept the business talk going like a house afire while they were
+eating, the hurry being that Mr. Chadwick wanted to start back for
+Chicago the minute he could find out if our connecting line east would
+run him special.
+
+I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was
+soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could
+go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a
+gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock
+a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the
+private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick
+were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.
+
+"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he
+said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand,
+not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the
+policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has
+promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."
+
+"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the
+first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors'
+meeting in the Bullard.
+
+"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick
+and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had
+to swallow you whole or take the consequences--and the consequences were
+going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled
+the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have
+some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time
+notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."
+
+The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when
+he has got hold of the gist of a thing.
+
+"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that
+the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and
+relatives. I'll have to clean house."
+
+"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to
+draw from?"
+
+"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully.
+"There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college,
+and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store
+his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies--I'll try
+it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around
+traffic man this side of the Missouri--only his present employers don't
+seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place
+at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good
+lawyer, Uncle John."
+
+"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young
+fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in
+Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local
+graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it,
+but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called
+Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its
+subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries,
+the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber
+yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."
+
+The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the
+railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."
+
+A road engine was backing down the spur to take the _Alexa_ in tow for
+the eastward run, and what was said had to be said in a hurry.
+
+"Dig it out," barked the wheat king. "If you find that we are in on it,
+it's your privilege to cut loose. The two men who will give you the most
+trouble are right here in Portal City: Hatch, the president of Red
+Tower, and Henckel, its vice-president. They say either of them would
+commit murder for a ten-dollar bill, and they stand in with Pete
+Clanahan, the city boss, and his gang of political thugs. That's all,
+Graham; all but one thing. Write me after you've climbed into the saddle
+and have found out just what you're in for. If you say you can make it
+go, I'll back you, if it takes half of next year's wheat crop."
+
+A minute or so later the boss and I stood out in the yard and watched
+the _Alexa_ roll away toward the sunrise country, and perhaps we both
+felt a little bit lonesome, just for a second or two. At least, I know I
+did. But when the special had become a black smudge of coal smoke in the
+distance, Mr. Norcross turned on me with the grim little smile that
+goes with his fighting mood.
+
+"You are private secretary to the new general manager of the Pioneer
+Short Line, Jimmie, and your salary begins to-day," he said, briskly.
+"Now let's go up to the hotel and get our fighting clothes on."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+"Heads Off, Gentlemen!"
+
+
+Gosh all Friday--say! but the next few days did see a tear-up to beat
+the band on the old Short Line! With the printing of his appointment
+circular, Mr. Norcross took the offices in the headquarters building
+lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way
+the heads went into the basket. One by one he called the Duntonites in;
+the traffic manager, the general superintendent, the roadmaster, the
+master-mechanic--clear on down to the round-house foreman and the
+division heads.
+
+Some few of them were allowed to take the oath of allegiance and stay,
+but the place-fillers and pay-roll parasites, the cousins and the
+nephews and the brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk
+under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van
+Burgh, great-great-grandnephew of some Revolutionary big-wig and our
+figurehead general superintendent, was the first man called in, and Mr.
+Norcross shot him dead in half a minute.
+
+"Mr. Van Burgh, what railroad experience did you have before you came to
+the P. S. L.?" was the first bullet.
+
+Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired
+eyes, looked at his finger-nails.
+
+"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left
+Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.
+
+"And how long have you been here?"
+
+"I came out lawst October."
+
+"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't
+learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the
+Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be
+accepted. Good-day."
+
+Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.
+
+"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was
+appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."
+
+"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his
+desk. And that was all there was to it.
+
+Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack,
+the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery
+man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr.
+Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.
+
+"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the
+house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four
+of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a
+lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't
+all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which
+to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."
+
+"That's me," said Kirgan, who knew the boss up one side and down the
+other. "You give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And
+with that he went across the yard and took hold, before he had even
+hunted up a place to sleep in.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was the next man to show up. He was fine; a square-built,
+stocky little gentleman who looked as if he's always had the world by
+the ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men
+went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped,
+and while his jaw looked as if he could bite a nail in two, he had a
+pair of twinkling, good-natured eyes that sort of took the edge off the
+hard jaw.
+
+"Well, I'm here," he said, dropping into a chair and sitting with his
+legs wide apart. And then, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there:
+"Graham, what the devil have you got against me, that you should drag me
+out here on the edge of nowhere and make me go to work for a living?"
+
+The boss just grinned at him and said: "It's for the good of your soul,
+Upton. You've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the
+corridor and your chair is empty and waiting for you. Your appointment
+circular has already been mailed out."
+
+Mr. Hornack was the last of the new office staff to fall in, though he
+didn't have nearly as far to come as some of the others. He was
+red-headed and wore glasses. They used to say of him on the Overland
+Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then
+hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that
+he had a sort of meat-axe temper to go with his red hair. But they also
+used to say that he could make business grow where none ever grew
+before, and that's what a traffic man lives for.
+
+When the new staff was made up, Mr. Norcross gathered all the department
+heads together in his office and laid down the lines of the new policy.
+He put it in just eight words: "Clean house, and make friends for the
+company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had
+found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed.
+It was a large order, and both Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack said as
+much, but the boss said it had to go just that way. There would be a
+little money for betterments, but it must be spent as if every dollar
+were ten.
+
+Naturally, the big turn-over brought all sorts of disturbances at the
+send-off. Some of the relieved cousins and nephews stayed in town and
+jumped in to stir up trouble for the new management. The _Herald_, which
+was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there
+wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new
+appointees. Then the employees got busy and the grievance committees
+began to pour in. Mr. Norcross never denied himself to anybody. The
+office-door stood wide open and the kickers were welcomed, as you might
+say, with open arms.
+
+"You men are going to get the squarest deal you have ever had, and a
+still squarer one a little farther along, if you will only stay on the
+job and keep your clothes on," was the way the boss went at the
+trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for
+service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri
+River. I want your loyalty; the loyalty of every man in the service.
+I'll go further and say that the new management will stand if you and
+the other pay-roll men stand by it in good faith, or it will fall if you
+don't."
+
+"You'll meet the grievance committees and talk things over with them
+when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McClure, the passenger
+conductor who was acting as spokesman.
+
+"Sure I will--every time. More than that, I'll take a leaf out of
+Colonel Goethal's book and keep open house here in this office every
+Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thinks he has a grievance may
+come here and state it, and if he has a case, he'll get justice."
+
+Naturally, a few little talks like this, face to face with the men
+themselves, soon began to put new life into the rank and file. Mr.
+Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from
+Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it began to be used in the sense
+that most railroad men use the phrase, "The Old Man," in speaking of a
+big boss that they like.
+
+This winning of the service _esprit de corps_--if that's the
+word--commenced to show results right away. The first time Mr.
+Norcross's special went over the line anybody could see with half an eye
+that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better
+time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place we
+actually found a section foreman going along and picking up the spikes
+and bolts and fish-plates that the wasters ahead of him had strewn all
+along the right-of-way.
+
+There was so much crowded into these first few weeks that I've forgotten
+half of it. The work we did, pulling and hauling things into shape, was
+a fright, and my end of the job got so big that the boss had to give me
+help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd
+had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who
+had been so disgusted with his job under Van Burgh. Frederic of
+Pittsburgh was all right; a little too tonguey, perhaps, but a worker
+from away back, and that was what we were looking for.
+
+Out of this frantic hustle to get things started and moving right,
+anybody could have pulled a couple of conclusions that stuck up higher
+than any of the rest. The boss and Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning
+the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on
+the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were paying the
+freight a solid unit against us, hating us like blazes and entirely
+unwilling to believe that any good thing could come out of the Nazareth
+of the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+This hatred manifested itself in a million different ways, and all of
+them saw-toothed. On that first trip over the line I heard a Lesterburg
+banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would never
+believe that any measure of reform undertaken by the Dunton management
+would be accepted as sincere.
+
+"You talk like an honest man, Mr. Norcross," he said, and he was saying
+it right in the boss's own private car, too, mind you, "but this region
+has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be
+won over now by a little shoulder-patting in the way of better train
+schedules and things of that sort. You'll have to dig a good bit deeper,
+and that you won't be allowed to do."
+
+The boss just smiled at this, and offered the banker man a cigar--which
+he took.
+
+"When the time comes, Mr. Bigelow, I'm going to show you that I can dig
+as deep as the next fellow. Where shall I begin?"
+
+The banker laughed. "If you had a spade with a handle a mile long you
+might begin on the Red Tower people," he suggested. "But, of course, you
+can't do that: your New York people won't let you. There is the real nib
+of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will
+stick to its own proper business--the carrying of freight and
+passengers. What we have is a gigantic holding corporation which fathers
+every extortionate side-issue that can pay it a royalty!"
+
+"Excuse me," said the boss, still as pleasant as a basket of chips,
+"that may be what you have had in the past; we won't try to go behind
+the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on, the
+Short Line proposes to be just what you said it should be--a carrier
+corporation, pure and simple."
+
+"Do you mean to say that you are going to cut loose from Hatch and
+Henckel and their thousand-and-one robber subsidiary companies?"
+demanded the banker.
+
+At this the boss stood up and looked the big banker gentleman squarely
+in the eye.
+
+"Mr. Bigelow, at the present moment I represent Pioneer Short Line, in
+management and in its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you
+emphatically that the railroad management has nothing whatever to do
+with Red Tower Consolidated or any of its subsidiaries."
+
+"Then you've broken with Hatch?"
+
+"No; simply because there hasn't been anything to break, so far as I am
+concerned."
+
+The banker man dropped into the nearest chair.
+
+"But, man alive! you can't stay here if you don't pull with the Hatch
+crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipped you off
+beforehand and not let you come here to commit suicide!"
+
+After that they went out together; up-town to Mr. Bigelow's bank, I
+guess, and as they pushed the corridor door open I heard the banker
+say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit
+will get you, one way or another, as sure as the devil's a hog. If it
+can't break you, it will hire a gang of gunmen--I wouldn't put it an
+inch beyond Rufus Hatch; not a single inch."
+
+There it was again; but as he went out the boss was laughing easily and
+saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the fear of a fight
+was the least of his troubles at the present moment.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+With the Strings Off
+
+
+As soon as we returned from the inspection trip, the boss pulled off his
+coat--figuratively speaking--and rolled up his sleeves. It wasn't his
+way to talk much about what he was going to do: he'd jump in and do it
+first, and then talk about it afterward--if anybody insisted on knowing
+the reason why.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was given swift orders to fill up his engineering staff
+and get busy laying new steel, building new bridges and modernizing the
+permanent way generally. Mr. Hornack was told to put on an extra office
+force to ransack the traffic records and make reports showing the
+fairness or unfairness of existing tariffs and rates, and a widespread
+invitation was given to shippers to come in and air their
+grievances--which you bet they did!
+
+Sandwiched in between, there were long private conferences with Mr.
+Ripley, the bright young lawyer Mr. Chadwick had sent us from Chicago,
+and with a young fellow named Juneman, an ex-newspaper man who was on
+the pay-rolls as "Advertising Manager," but whose real business seemed
+to be to keep the Short Line public fully and accurately informed of
+everything that most railroad companies try to keep to themselves.
+
+The next innovation that came along was another young Chicago man named
+Billoughby, and _his_ title on the pay-roll was "Special Agent." What he
+did to earn his salary was the one thing that Juneman didn't publish
+broadcast in the newspapers; it was kept so dark that not a line of it
+got into the office records, and even I, who was as close to the boss as
+anybody in our outfit, never once suspected the true nature of
+Billoughby's job until the day he came in to make his final report--and
+Mr. Norcross let him make it without sending me out on an errand.
+
+"Well, I think I'm ready to talk Johnson, now," was the way Billoughby
+began. "I've been into all the deals and side deals, and I've had it out
+with Ripley on the legal points involved. Red Tower is the one outfit
+we'll have to kill off and put out of business. Under one name or
+another, it is engineering every graft in this country; it is even
+backing the fake mining boom at Saw Horse--to which, by the way, this
+railroad company is now building a branch line."
+
+Mr. Norcross turned to me:
+
+"Jimmie, make a note to tell Mr. Van Britt to have the work stopped at
+once on the Saw Horse branch, and all the equipment brought in." And
+then to Billoughby: "Go on."
+
+"The main graft, of course, is in the grain elevators, the fruit
+packeries, the coal and lumber yards and the stock yards and handling
+corrals. In these public, or _quasi_-public, utilities Red Tower has
+everybody else shut out, because the railroad has given them--in fee
+simple, it seems--all the yard room, switches, track facilities, and the
+like. Wherever local competition has tried to break in, the railroad
+company has given it the cold shoulder and it has been either forced out
+or frozen out."
+
+"Exactly," said the boss. "Now tell me how far you have gone in the
+other field."
+
+"We are pretty well shaped up and are about ready to begin business.
+Juneman has done splendid work, and so has Ripley. Public sentiment is
+still incredulous, of course. It's mighty hard to make people believe
+that we are in earnest; that we have actually gone over to their side in
+the fight. They're all from Missouri, and they want to be shown."
+
+"Naturally," said Mr. Norcross.
+
+"We have succeeded, in a measure, though the opposition has been keeping
+up a steady bombardment. Hatch and his people haven't been idle. They
+have a strong commercial organization and a stout pull with the machine
+element, or rather the gang element, in politics. They own or control a
+dozen or more prominent newspapers in the State, and, as you know, they
+are making an open fight on you and your management through these
+papers. The net result so far has been merely to keep the people stirred
+up and doubtful. They know they can't trust Hatch and his crowd, and
+they're afraid they can't trust you. They say that the railroad has
+never played fair--and I guess it hasn't, in the past."
+
+"Not within a thousand miles," was the boss's curt comment. "But go on
+with your story."
+
+"We pulled the new deal off yesterday, simultaneously in eleven of the
+principal towns along the line. Meetings of the bankers and local
+capitalists were held, and we had a man at each one of them to explain
+our plan and to pledge the backing of the railroad. Notwithstanding all
+the doubt and dust that's been kicked up by the Hatch people, it went
+like wild-fire."
+
+"With money?" queried the boss.
+
+"Yes; with real money. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse was launched, as
+you might say, on the spot, and enough capital was subscribed to make it
+a going concern. Of course, there were some doubters, and some few
+greedy ones. The doubters wanted to know how much of the stock was going
+to be held by officials of the railroad company, and it was pretty hard
+to convince them that no Short Line official would be allowed to
+participate, directly or indirectly."
+
+"And the greedy ones?"
+
+"They kicked on that part of the plan which provides for the local
+apportionment of the stock to cover the local needs of each town only;
+they wanted more than their share. Also, they protested against the
+fixed dividend scheme; they didn't see why the new company shouldn't be
+allowed to cut a melon now and then if it should be fortunate enough to
+grow one."
+
+Mr. Norcross smiled. "That is precisely what the Hatch people have been
+doing, all along, and it is the chief grievance of these same people who
+now want a chance to outbid their neighbors. The lease condition was
+fully explained to them, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes; Ripley saw to that, and copies of the lease were in the
+exhibits. The new company is to have railroad ground to build on, and
+ample track facilities in perpetuity, conditioned strictly upon the
+limited dividend. If the dividend is increased, the leases terminate
+automatically."
+
+The boss drew a long breath.
+
+"You've done well, and better than well, Billoughby," he said. "Now we
+are ready to fire the blast. How was the proposal to take over the Red
+Tower properties at a fair valuation received?"
+
+"There was some opposition. Lesterburg, and three of the other larger
+towns, want to build their own plants. They are bitter enough to want to
+smash the big monopoly, root and branch. But they agreed to abide by a
+majority vote of the stock on that point, and my wire reports this
+morning say that a lump-sum offer will be made for the Red Tower plants
+to-day."
+
+Mr. Norcross sat back in his chair and blew a cloud of cigar smoke
+toward the ceiling.
+
+"Hatch won't sell," he predicted. "He'll be up here before night with
+blood in his eye. I'm rather glad it has come down to the actual give
+and take. I don't play the waiting game very successfully, Billoughby.
+Keep in touch, and keep me in touch. And tell Ripley to keep on pushing
+on the reins. The sooner we get at it, the sooner it will be over."
+
+After Billoughby had gone, Mr. Norcross dictated a swift bunch of
+letters and telegrams and had me turn my shorthand notes over to Fred
+May for transcription. With the desk cleaned up he came at me on a
+little matter that had been allowed to sleep ever since the day, now
+some time back, when I had given him Mrs. Sheila's hint about the
+identity of the two men who had sat and smoked in the auto that Sunday
+night at Sand Creek Siding, and about the talk between the same two that
+I had overheard the following morning.
+
+"We are going to have sharp trouble with a gentleman by the name of
+Hatch before very long, Jimmie," was the way he began. "I don't want to
+hit him below the belt, if I can help it; but on the other hand, it's
+just as well to be able to give the punch if it is needed. You remember
+what you told me about that Monday morning talk between Hatch and
+Henckel in the Bullard lobby. Would you be willing to go into court as a
+witness and swear to what you heard?"
+
+"Sure I would," I said.
+
+"All right. I may have to pull that little incident on Mr. Hatch before
+I get through with him. The train hold-up was a criminal act, and you
+are the witness who can convict the pair of them. Of course, we'll leave
+Mrs. Macrae and the little girl entirely out of it. Nobody knows that
+they were there with us, and nobody need know."
+
+I agreed to that, and this mention of Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann makes
+me remember that I've been leaving them out pretty severely for a good
+long while. They weren't left out in reality-not by a jugful. In spite
+of all the rush and hustle, the boss had found time to get acquainted
+with Major Basil Kendrick and had been made at home in the transplanted
+Kentucky mansion in the northern suburb. I'd been there too, sometimes
+to carry a box of flowers when the boss was suddenly called out of
+town, and some other evenings when I had to go and hunt him up to give
+him a bunch of telegrams. Of course, I didn't play the butt-in; I didn't
+have to. Maisie Ann usually looked out for me, and when she found out
+that I liked pumpkin pie, made Kentucky fashion, we used to spend most
+of those errand-running evenings together in the pantry.
+
+But to get back on the firing line. I wasn't around when Mr. Norcross
+had his "declaration of war" talk with Hatch. Mr. Norcross, being pretty
+sure he wasn't going to have that evening off, had sent me out to
+"Kenwood" with a note and a box of roses, and when I got back to the
+office about eight o'clock, Hatch was just going away. I met him on the
+stair.
+
+The boss was sitting back in his big swing chair, smoking, when I broke
+in. He looked as if he'd been mixing it up good and plenty with Mr.
+Rufus Hatch--and enjoying it.
+
+"We've got 'em going, Jimmie," he chuckled; and he said it without
+asking me how I had found Mrs. Sheila, or how she was looking, or
+anything.
+
+I told him I had met Mr. Hatch on the stair going down.
+
+"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" he asked.
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"I had to pull that Sand Creek business on him, and I'm rather sorry,"
+he went on. "He and his people are going to fight the new company to a
+finish, and he merely came up here to tell me so--and to add that I
+might as well resign first as last, because, in the end, he'd get my
+goat. When I laughed at him he got abusive. He's an ugly beggar,
+Jimmie."
+
+"That's what everybody says of him."
+
+"It's true. He and his crowd have plenty of money--stolen money, a good
+deal of it--and they stand in with every political boss and gangster in
+the State. There is only one way to handle such a man, and that is
+without gloves. I told him we had the goods on him in the matter of Mr.
+Chadwick's kidnapping adventure. At first he said I couldn't prove it.
+Then he broke out cursing and let your name slip. I hadn't mentioned you
+at all, and so he gave himself away. He knows who you are, and he
+remembered that you had overheard his talk with Henckel in the Bullard
+lobby."
+
+I heard what he was saying, but I didn't really sense it because my head
+was ram jam full of a thing that was so pitiful that it had kept me
+swallowing hard all the way back from Major Kendrick's. It was this way.
+When I had jiggled the bell out at the house it was Maisie Ann who let
+me in and took the box of flowers and the boss's note. She told me that
+Aunt Mandy, the cook, hadn't made any pie that day, so we sat in the
+dimly lighted hall and talked for a few minutes.
+
+One thing she told me was that Mrs. Sheila had company and the name of
+it was Mr. Van Britt. That wasn't strictly news because I had known that
+Mr. Van Britt was dividing time pretty evenly with the boss in the Major
+Kendrick house visits. That wasn't anything to be scared up about. I
+knew that all Mr. Norcross asked, or would need, would be a fair field
+and no favor. But my chunky little girl didn't stop at that.
+
+"I think we can let Mr. Van Britt take care of himself," she said. "He
+has known Cousin Sheila for a long time, and I guess they are only just
+good friends. But there is something you ought to know, Jimmie--for Mr.
+Norcross's sake. He has been sending lots of flowers and things, and
+Cousin Sheila has been taking them because--well, I guess it's just
+because she doesn't know how not to take them."
+
+"Go on," I said, but my mouth had suddenly grown dry.
+
+"Such things--flowers, you know--don't mean anything in New York, where
+we've been living. Men send them to their women friends just as they
+pass their cigar-cases around among their men friends. But I'm afraid
+it's different with Mr. Norcross."
+
+"It is different," I said.
+
+Then she told me the thing that made me swell up and want to burst.
+
+"It mustn't be different, Jimmie. Cousin Sheila's married, you know."
+
+"I know she has been married," I corrected; and then she gave me the
+sure-enough knock-out.
+
+"She is married now, and her husband is still living."
+
+For a little while I couldn't do anything but gape like a chicken with
+the pip. It was simply fierce! I knew, as well as I knew anything, that
+the boss was gone on Mrs. Sheila; that he had fallen in love, first with
+the back of her neck and then with her pretty face and then with all of
+her; and that the one big reason why he had let Mr. Chadwick persuade
+him to stay in Portal City was the fact that he had wanted to be near
+her and to show her how he could make a perfectly good spoon out of the
+spoiled horn of the Pioneer Short Line.
+
+When I began to get my grip back a little I was right warm under the
+collar.
+
+"She oughtn't to be going around telling people she is a widow!" I
+blurted out.
+
+"She doesn't," was the calm reply. "People just take it for granted, and
+it saves a lot of talk and explanations that it wouldn't be pleasant to
+have to make. They've separated, you know--years ago, and Cousin Sheila
+has taken her mother's maiden name, Macrae. If we were going to live
+here always it would be different. But we are only visiting Cousin
+Basil, or I suppose we are, though we've been here now for nearly a
+year."
+
+There wasn't much more to be said, and pretty soon I had staggered off
+with my load and gone back to the office. And this was why I couldn't
+get very deep into the Hatch business with Mr. Norcross when he told me
+what he had been obliged to do about the Sand Creek hold-up.
+
+He didn't say anything further about it, except to tell me to be careful
+and not let any of the Hatch people tangle me up so that my evidence, if
+I should have to give it, would be made to look like a faked-up story;
+and a little before nine o'clock Mr. Ripley dropped in and he and the
+boss went up-town together.
+
+I might have gone, too. Fred May had got through and gone home, and
+there was nothing much that I could do beyond filing a few letters and
+tidying up a bit around my own desk. But I couldn't make up my mind
+either to work or to go to bed. I wanted a chance to think over the
+horrible thing Maisie Ann had told me; time to cook up some scheme by
+which the boss could be let down easy.
+
+If he had been like other men it wouldn't have been so hard. But I had a
+feeling that he had gone into this love business just as he did into
+everything--neck or nothing--burning his bridges behind him, and having
+no notion of ever turning back. I had once heard our Oregon Midland
+president, Mr. Lepaige, say that it was not good for a man always to
+succeed; never to be beaten; that without a setback, now and then, a man
+never learned how to bend without breaking. The boss had never been
+beaten, and Mr. Lepaige was talking about him when he said this. What
+was it going to do to him when he learned the truth about Mrs. Sheila?
+
+On top of this came the still harder knock when I saw that it was up to
+me to tell him. I remembered all the stories I'd ever heard about how
+the most cold-blooded surgeon that ever lived wouldn't trust himself to
+stick a knife into a member of his own family, and I knew now just how
+the surgeon felt about it. It was up to me to whet my old Barlow and
+stick it into the boss, clear up to the handle.
+
+While I was still sweating under the big load Maisie Ann had dumped upon
+me, the night despatcher's boy came in with a message. It was from Mr.
+Chadwick, and I read it with my eyes bugging out. This is what it said:
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "P. S. L. Common dropped to thirty-four to-day, and banks lending
+     on short time notes for betterment fund are getting nervous. Wire
+     from New York says bondholders are stirring and talking
+     receivership. General opinion in financial circles leans to idea
+     that new policy is foregone failure. Are you still sure you can
+     make it win?
+
+     "CHADWICK."
+
+Right on the heels of this, and before I could get my breath, in came
+the boy again with another telegram. It was a hot wire from President
+Dunton, one of a series that he had been shooting in ever since Mr.
+Norcross had taken hold and begun firing the cousins and nephews.
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City. RUSH.
+
+     "See stock quotations for to-day. Your policy is a failure. Am
+     advised you are now fighting Red Tower. Stop it immediately and
+     assure Mr. Hatch that we are friendly, as we have always been. If
+     something cannot be done to lift securities to better figure, your
+     resignation will be in order.
+
+     "DUNTON."
+
+They say that misfortunes never come singly. Here were two new griefs
+hurling themselves in over the wires all in the same quarter-hour,
+besides the one I had up my sleeve. But there was no use dallying. It
+was up to me to find the boss as quickly as I could and have the
+three-cornered surgical operation over with. I knew the telegrams
+wouldn't kill him--or I thought they wouldn't. I thought they'd probably
+make him take a fresh strangle hold on things and be fired--if he had to
+be fired--fighting it out grimly on his own line. But I wasn't so sure
+about the Mrs. Sheila business. That was a horse of another color.
+
+I had just reached for my hat and was getting ready to snap the
+electrics off when I heard footsteps in the outer office. At first I
+thought it was the despatcher's boy coming with another wire, but when I
+looked up, a stocky, hard-faced man in a derby hat and a short overcoat
+was standing in the doorway and scowling across at me.
+
+It was Mr. Rufus Hatch, and I had a notion that the hot end of his black
+cigar glared at me like a baleful red eye when he came in and sat down.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+And Satan Came Also
+
+
+"I saw your office lights from the street," was the way the Red Tower
+president began on me, and his voice took me straight back to the Oregon
+woods and a lumber camp where the saw-filers were at work. "Where is Mr.
+Norcross?"
+
+I told him that Mr. Norcross was up-town, and that I didn't suppose he
+would come back to the office again that night, now that it was so late.
+Instead of going away and giving it up, he sat right still, boring me
+with his little gray eyes and shifting the black cigar from one corner
+of his mouth to the other.
+
+"My name is Hatch, of the Red Tower Company," he grated, after a minute
+or two. "You're the one they call Dodds, aren't you?"
+
+I admitted it, and he went on.
+
+"Norcross brought you here with him from the West, didn't he?"
+
+I nodded and wondered what was coming next. When it did come it nearly
+bowled me over.
+
+"What pay are you getting here?"
+
+It was on the tip of my tongue to cuss him out right there and then and
+tell him it was none of his business. But the second thought (which
+isn't always as good as it's said to be) whispered to me to lead him on
+and see how far he would go. So I told him the figures of my pay check.
+
+"I'm needing another shorthand man, and I can afford to pay a good bit
+more than that," he growled. "They tell me you are well up at the top in
+your trade. Are you open to an offer?"
+
+I let him have it straight then. "Not from you," I said.
+
+"And why not from me?"
+
+Here was where I made my first bad break. All of a sudden I got so angry
+at the thought that he was actually trying to buy me that I couldn't see
+anything but red, and I blurted out, "Because I don't hire out to work
+for any strong-arm outfit--not if I know it!"
+
+For a little while he sat blinking at me from under his bushy eyebrows,
+and his hard mouth was drawn into a straight line with a mean little
+wrinkle coming and going at the corners of it.
+
+When he got ready to speak again he said, "You're only a boy. You want
+to get on in the world, don't you?"
+
+"Supposing I do: what then?" I snapped.
+
+"I'm offering you a good chance: the best you ever had. You don't owe
+Norcross anything more than your job, do you?"
+
+"Maybe not."
+
+"That's better. Put on your hat and come along with me. I want to show
+you what I can do for you in a better field than railroading ever was,
+or ever will be. It'll pay you--" and he named a figure that very nearly
+made me fall dead out of my chair.
+
+Of course, it was all plain enough. The boss had him on the hip with
+that kidnapping business, with me for a witness. And he was trying to
+fix the witness. It's funny, but the only thing I thought of, just then,
+was the necessity of covering up the part that Mrs. Sheila and Maisie
+Ann had had in the hold-up affair that he was so anxious to bury and put
+out of sight.
+
+"I guess we needn't beat about the bushes any longer, Mr. Hatch," I
+said, bracing up to him. "I haven't told the sheriff, or anybody but Mr.
+Norcross, what I know about a certain little train hold-up that happened
+a few weeks ago down at Sand Creek Siding; but that isn't saying that
+I'm not going to."
+
+At this he flung the stump of the black cigar out of the window, found
+another in his pocket, and lighted it. If I had had the sense of a field
+mouse, I might have known that I was no match for such a man; but I
+lacked the sense--lacked it good and hard.
+
+"You're like your boss," he said shortly. "You'd go a long distance out
+of your way to make an enemy when there is no need of it. That hold-up
+business was a joke, from start to finish. I don't know how you and
+Norcross came to get in on it; the joke was meant to be on John
+Chadwick. The night before, at a little dinner we were giving him at the
+railroad club, he said there never was a railroad hold-up that couldn't
+have been stood off. A few of us got together afterward and put up a job
+on him; sent him over to Strathcona and arranged to have him held up on
+the way back."
+
+Again I lost my grip on all the common, every-day sanities. My best
+play--the only reasonable play--was to let him go away thinking that he
+had made me swallow the joke story whole. But I didn't have sense enough
+to do that.
+
+"Mr. Chadwick didn't take it as a joke!" I retorted.
+
+"I know he didn't; and that's why we're all anxious now to dig a hole
+and bury the thing decently. Perhaps we had all been taking a drop too
+much at the club dinner that night."
+
+At that I swelled up man-size and kicked the whole kettle of fat into
+the fire.
+
+"Of course, it was a joke!" I ripped out. "And your coming here to-night
+to try to hire me away from Mr. Norcross is another. The woods are full
+of good shorthand men, Mr. Hatch, but for the present I think I shall
+stay right where I am--where a court subpoena can find me when I'm
+wanted."
+
+"That's all nonsense, and you know it--if you're not too much of a kid
+to know anything," he snapped, shooting out his heavy jaw at me. "I
+merely wanted to give you a chance to get rid of the railroad collar, if
+you felt like it. And there'll be no court and no subpoena. The
+poorest jack-leg lawyer we've got in Portal City would make a fool of
+you in five minutes on the witness-stand. Nevertheless, my offer holds
+good. I like a fighting man; and you've got nerve. Take a night and
+sleep on it. Maybe you'll think differently in the morning."
+
+Here was another chance for me to get off with a whole skin, but by this
+time I was completely lost to any sober weighing and measuring of the
+possible consequences. Leaning across the desk end I gave him a final
+shot, just as he was getting up to go.
+
+"Listen, Mr. Hatch," I said. "You haven't fooled me for a single minute.
+Your guess is right; I heard every word that passed between you and Mr.
+Henckel that Monday morning in the Bullard lobby. As I say, I haven't
+told anybody yet but Mr. Norcross; but if you go to making trouble for
+him and the railroad company, I'll go into court and swear to what I
+know!"
+
+He was half-way out of the door when I got through, and he never made
+any sign that he heard what I said. After he was gone I began to sense,
+just a little, how big a fool I had made of myself. But I was still mad
+clear through at the idea that he had taken me for the other kind of a
+fool--the kind that wouldn't know enough to be sure that the president
+of a big corporation wouldn't get down to tampering with a common clerk
+unless there was some big thing to be stood off by it.
+
+Stewing and sizzling over it, I puttered around with the papers on my
+desk for quite a little while before I remembered the two telegrams, and
+the fact that I'd have to go and stick the three-bladed knife into Mr.
+Norcross. When I did remember, I shoved the messages into my pocket,
+flicked off the lights and started to go up-town and hunt for the boss.
+
+After closing the outer door of the office I don't recall anything
+particular except that I felt my way down the headquarters stair in the
+dark and groped across the lower hall to the outside door that served
+for the stair-case entrance from the street. When I had felt around and
+found the brass knob, something happened, I didn't know just what. In
+the tiny little fraction of a second that I had left, as you might say,
+between the hearse and the grave, I had a vague notion that the door was
+falling over on me and mashing me flat; and after that, everything went
+blank.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+The Big Smash
+
+
+When I came to life out of what seemed like an endless succession of bad
+dreams it was broad daylight and the sun was shining brightly through
+some filmy kind of curtain stuff in a big window that looked out toward
+the west. I was in bed, the room was strange, and my right hand was
+wrapped up in a lot of cotton and bandaged.
+
+I hadn't more than made the first restless move before I saw a sort of
+pie-faced woman in a nurse's cap and apron start to get up from where
+she was sitting by the window. Before she could come over to the bed,
+somebody opened a door and tip-toed in ahead of nursey. I had to blink
+hard two or three times before I could really make up my mind that the
+tip-toer was Maisie Ann. She looked as if she might be the nurse's
+understudy. She had a nifty little lace cap on her thick mop of hair,
+and I guess her apron was meant to be nursey too, only it was frilled
+and tucked to a fare-you-well.
+
+I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it before, but she was always
+an awfully wholesome, jolly little girl, with a laugh so near the
+surface that it never took much of anything to make it come rippling up
+through. But now she was as sober as a deacon--and about fourteen times
+as pretty as I had ever seen her before.
+
+"You poor, poor boy!" she cooed, patting my pillow just like my
+grandmother used to when I was a little kid and had the mumps or the
+measles. "Are you still roaming around in the Oregon woods?"
+
+That brought my dream, or one of them, back; the one about wandering
+around in a forest of Douglas fir and having to jump and dodge to keep
+the big trees from falling on me and smashing me.
+
+"No more woods for mine," I said, sort of feebly. And then: "Where am
+I?"
+
+"You are in bed in the spare room at Cousin Basil's. They wanted to take
+you to the railroad hospital that night, but when they telephoned up
+here to try to find Mr. Norcross, Cousin Basil went right down and
+brought you home with him in the ambulance."
+
+"'That night,' you say?" I parroted. "It was last night that the door
+fell on me, wasn't it?"
+
+"I don't know anything about a door, but the night that they found you
+all burnt and crippled, lying at the foot of your office stairs, was
+three days ago. You have been out of your head nearly all the time ever
+since."
+
+"Burnt and crippled? What happened to me, Maisie Ann?"
+
+"Nobody knows; not even the doctors. We've been hoping that some day
+you'd be able to tell us. Can't you tell me now, Jimmie?"
+
+I told her all there was to tell, mumbling around among the words the
+best I could. When she saw how hard it was for me to talk, I could have
+sworn that I saw tears in the big, wide-open eyes, but maybe I didn't.
+
+Then she told me how the headquarters watchman had found me about
+midnight; with my right hand scorched black and the rest of me
+apparently dead and ready to be buried. The ambulance surgeon had
+insisted, and was still insisting, that I had been handling a live wire;
+but there were no wires at all in the lower hall, and nothing stronger
+than an incandescent light current in the entire office building.
+
+"And you say I've been here hanging on by my eyelashes for three days?
+What has been going on in all that time, Maisie Ann? Hasn't anybody been
+here to see me?"
+
+She gave a little nod. "Everybody, nearly. Mr. Van Britt has been up
+every day, and sometimes twice a day. He has been awfully anxious for
+you to come alive."
+
+"But Mr. Norcross?" I queried. "Hasn't he been up?"
+
+She shook her head and turned her face away, and she was looking
+straight out of the window at the setting sun when she asked, "When was
+the last time you saw Mr. Norcross, Jimmie?"
+
+I choked a little over a big scare that seemed to rush up out of the
+bed-clothes to smother me. But I made out to answer her question,
+telling her how Mr. Norcross had left the office maybe half an hour or
+so before I did, that night, going up-town with Mr. Ripley. Then I asked
+her why she wanted to know.
+
+"Because nobody has seen him since a little later that same night," she
+said, saying it very softly and without turning her head. And then: "Mr.
+Van Britt found a letter from Mr. Norcross on his desk the next morning.
+It was just a little typewritten note, on a Hotel Bullard letter sheet,
+saying that he had made up his mind that the Pioneer Short Line wasn't
+worth fighting for, and that he was resigning and taking the midnight
+train for the East."
+
+I sat straight up in bed; I should have had to do it if both arms had
+been burnt to a crisp clear to the shoulders.
+
+"Resigned?--gave up and ran away? I don't believe that for a single
+minute, Maisie Ann!" I burst out.
+
+She was shaking her head again, still without turning her face so that I
+could see it.
+
+"I--I'm afraid it's all true, Jimmie. There were two telegrams that came
+to Mr. Norcross the night he went away; one from Mr. Chadwick and the
+other from Mr. Dunton. I heard Mr. Van Britt telling Cousin Sheila what
+the messages were. He'd seen the copies of them that they keep in the
+telegraph office."
+
+It was on my tongue's end to say that Mr. Norcross never had seen those
+two telegrams, because I had them in my pocket and was on my way to
+deliver them when I got shot; but I didn't. Instead, I said: "And you
+think that was why Mr. Norcross threw up his hands and ran away?"
+
+"No; I don't think anything of the sort. I know what it was, and you
+know what it was," and at that she turned around and pushed me gently
+down among the pillows.
+
+"What was it?" I whispered, more than half afraid that I was going to
+hear a confirmation of my own breath-taking conviction. And I heard it,
+all right.
+
+"It was what I was telling you about, that same evening, you
+remember--down in the hall when you brought the flowers for Cousin
+Sheila? You told him what I told you, didn't you?"
+
+"No; I didn't have a chance--not any real chance."
+
+"Then somebody else told him, Jimmie; and that is the reason he has
+resigned and gone away. Mr. Van Britt thinks it was on account of the
+two messages from Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Dunton, and that is why he wants
+to talk to you about it. But you know, and I know, Jimmie, dear; and for
+Cousin Sheila's sake and Mr. Norcross's, we must never lisp it to a
+human soul. A new general manager has been appointed, and he is on his
+way out here from New York. Everything has gone to pieces on the
+railroad, and all of Mr. Norcross's friends are getting ready to resign.
+Isn't it perfectly heart-breaking?"
+
+It was; it was so heart-breaking that I just gasped once or twice and
+went off the hooks again, with Maisie Ann's frightened little shriek
+ringing in my ears as she tried to hold me back from slipping over the
+edge.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+What Every Man Knows
+
+
+I wasn't gone very long on this second excursion into the woozy-woozies,
+though it was night-time, and the shaded electric light was turned on
+when I opened my eyes and found Mrs. Sheila sitting by the bedside. The
+pie-faced nurse was gone; or at least I didn't see her anywhere; and the
+change in Mrs. Sheila sort of made me gasp. She wasn't any less pretty
+as she sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, but she was
+different; sober, and with the laugh all gone out of the big gray eyes,
+and a look in them as if she had suddenly become so wise that nobody
+could ever fool her.
+
+"You are feeling better now?" she asked, when she found me staring at
+her.
+
+I told her I guessed I was, but that my hand hurt me some.
+
+"You have had a great shock of some kind--besides the burn, Jimmie," she
+rejoined, folding up the bed covers so that the bandaged hand would rest
+easier. "The doctors are all puzzled. Does your head feel quite clear
+now--so that you can think?"
+
+"It feels as if I had a crazy clock in it," I said. "But the thinking
+part is all right. Have you heard anything from Mr. Norcross yet?"
+
+"Not a word. It is all very mysterious and perplexing. We have been
+hoping that you could tell us something when you should recover
+sufficiently to talk. Can't you, Jimmie?"
+
+Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the
+hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't
+do. So I just said:
+
+"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office
+some little time before I did--with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they
+were going."
+
+"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in
+the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his
+rooms."
+
+Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but
+if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of
+me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who
+always knew everything that was going on.
+
+"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening,
+wasn't there?" she asked.
+
+"Hatch had some trouble--yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I
+replied.
+
+"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I
+could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the
+evening, while I was away.
+
+"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.
+
+"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.
+
+She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken
+idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross
+has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say
+that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he
+should do as he has done--or at least as everybody believes he has
+done."
+
+I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would
+clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell
+her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as
+right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let
+her down easy.
+
+"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after
+Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that
+the telegrams hadn't been delivered--that they were probably in the
+pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to
+make any man throw up his hands and quit, _I_ should say."
+
+"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not
+telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of
+us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out
+and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing
+anything like that before?"
+
+I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very
+thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang
+on to my sham belief that it was the thing he _had_ done: either that,
+or tell her the truth.
+
+"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr.
+Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out,
+and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"
+
+"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his
+friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it
+out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"
+
+There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said
+that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard.
+I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just
+why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out,
+but that was out of the question.
+
+"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said;
+not knowing what else to say.
+
+"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so
+that you can help me trace it out."
+
+"Me?" I queried.
+
+"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr.
+Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr.
+Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day
+after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at
+some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him,
+and that is why they don't hear anything from him."
+
+"What do _you_ think?" I asked.
+
+She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of
+frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to
+hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."
+
+"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."
+
+"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs
+with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as
+you were able to talk. May I send him up?"
+
+Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and
+only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had
+that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and
+polish a man till he shines.
+
+"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again.
+Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"
+
+I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows
+of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put
+me on the question rack. I gave him all I had--except that thing about
+the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give
+him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:
+
+"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this
+new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie.
+I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys
+together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."
+
+"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.
+
+"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me
+a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to
+stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general
+manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head
+of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse organization were scared plumb
+out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the
+newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had
+expected--that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a
+good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.
+
+"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.
+
+He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and
+neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."
+
+"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"
+
+"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of
+Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the
+telegraph."
+
+"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I
+ventured.
+
+"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any
+trace of him."
+
+"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."
+
+"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an
+envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would
+say.
+
+"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us,
+Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a
+little more light on this damnable blow-up?"
+
+I hadn't--outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about--and I told him
+so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his
+own mind.
+
+"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm
+new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd
+is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that
+there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when
+Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"
+
+"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."
+
+"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"
+
+"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats--in a business
+way."
+
+"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"
+
+I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.
+
+"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well
+resign one time as another?"
+
+"Something like that, yes."
+
+"Can you add anything more?"
+
+I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about
+the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't
+want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was
+beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and
+unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and
+quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband
+living. So I just said:
+
+"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while
+longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.
+
+It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them
+time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together.
+Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I
+had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the
+wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.
+
+After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been
+trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of
+what I knew--or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that
+there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to
+give the possibility standing-room.
+
+In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a
+sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my
+lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley
+that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed.
+That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time
+and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs.
+Sheila?
+
+Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing
+somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it
+was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out
+early in the morning and get busy.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+With the Wheels Trigged
+
+
+I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr.
+Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the
+office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after
+telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand,
+she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.
+
+"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the
+others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away
+because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you
+know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand
+by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."
+
+It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be
+the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering
+after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside
+out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible;
+she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting
+ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling
+him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I
+saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled
+me over to her side again.
+
+So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her
+posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of
+kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's
+auto.
+
+Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still
+in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains
+were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was
+still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole
+business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for
+the roof to fall in--as I guess it was.
+
+Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had
+moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand
+work. They wouldn't let me do anything much--I couldn't do much with my
+right arm in a sling--so I had a chance to hang around and size up the
+situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me
+that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr.
+Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to
+be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the
+public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of
+callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead
+anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive
+programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked
+as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.
+
+Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off
+a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and
+thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these
+private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds
+of all four of them about the boss's drop-out--as to whether it was
+voluntary or not.
+
+Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no
+"company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man
+named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him
+and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of
+Mr. Norcross's disappearance.
+
+Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so
+far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were
+still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the
+night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the
+boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his
+rooms.
+
+Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast
+Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next
+witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr.
+Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly
+have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that,
+the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big
+and too well known by this time to the rank and file.
+
+Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the
+Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad
+office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had
+asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van
+Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition
+that had been made to him the day before--the offer of the new Citizens'
+Storage & Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments
+and plants.
+
+Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch
+had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had
+gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new
+company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said
+that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk
+straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors
+together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to
+Citizens' Storage & Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.
+
+This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a
+new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and
+Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition;
+was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first
+been to fight everything in sight.
+
+By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say,
+just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and
+had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and
+Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory,
+and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were
+with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was
+quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two
+days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which
+was proof positive, you'd say, that the boss _had_ resigned and had so
+notified the New York office.
+
+When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we
+went to the Bullard cafe. It was pretty rich for our blood at two
+dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt
+reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little
+threshing on our own account--and got a lot more chaff and no grain.
+
+Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't
+seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in
+mind all the time--the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss
+after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed
+him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.
+
+By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had
+at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that.
+The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the
+headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb--as I knew. It had
+burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I
+went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with
+the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had
+explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light
+current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.
+
+The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of
+the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked
+and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss
+coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the
+afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr.
+Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It
+just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.
+
+Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking
+train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour
+or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of
+the _Mountaineer_, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he
+found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the
+private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good
+cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.
+
+I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to
+be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him
+that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of
+you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After
+the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then
+switched over to the big puzzle.
+
+"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.
+
+I told him there wasn't.
+
+"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie?--or do you?"
+
+"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.
+
+"Branderby"--he was one of the _Mountaineer_ reporters--"tells me that
+you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"
+
+"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and
+I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."
+
+The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and
+he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall.
+When he got good and ready, he began again.
+
+"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you
+need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if
+there ever were such a miracle."
+
+"You think it is a case for a detective?"
+
+"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If
+I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help
+that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."
+
+Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was,
+I jumped into the hole pretty quick.
+
+"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.
+
+"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus
+Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are
+hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From
+the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been
+published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during
+the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a
+thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also
+by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you
+suspicious--very suspicious, Jimmie."
+
+"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to
+think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross--reason in
+fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to
+sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in
+a day."
+
+The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old
+saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the
+Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr.
+Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job--and I shouldn't let much
+grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at the
+_Mountaineer_ office if I can help." And with that he went away.
+
+It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled
+across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an
+old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job
+with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything
+special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I
+loafed in on Kirgan.
+
+I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up
+anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered
+into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance
+by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot
+eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers
+used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.
+
+Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have
+to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother.
+As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or
+other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through
+he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen
+a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.
+
+"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the
+general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair
+and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night
+that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good
+Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur
+below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman
+went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The Lost 1016
+
+
+When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all
+sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the
+boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left
+standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves
+together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't
+wedge them apart.
+
+"An engine--even a little old Atlantic-type--is a pretty big thing to
+lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.
+
+Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.
+
+"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!"
+he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the
+headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been
+advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That
+engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for
+four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every
+hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's
+gone!"
+
+"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't
+pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported.
+And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild
+engine over the main line without orders."
+
+"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst
+us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."
+
+I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of
+the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in
+some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to
+let go.
+
+"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason
+why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had
+quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change
+his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"
+
+After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it
+back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.
+
+"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But
+where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody
+findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway?
+Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was
+to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and _go_."
+
+"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the
+same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and
+the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and
+twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross
+went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find
+_him_!"
+
+Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little
+space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best
+boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a
+clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go
+alone he turned on me.
+
+"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its
+scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he
+demanded.
+
+I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of
+things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had
+taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking
+the wheels of reform.
+
+"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it
+ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods
+is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the
+bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked;
+you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to
+look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and
+turn in and help him."
+
+"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land,
+Mart?"
+
+"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the
+whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces--as it's doin', right now.
+They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if
+it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all
+up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could
+bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you
+could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a
+that."
+
+"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"
+
+"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I
+did, Jimmie, and not think it--and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o'
+Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we
+belonged to 'em!--orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs,
+helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need,
+usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."
+
+"You stopped all this?"
+
+"You bet I did--between two days! They've been makin' seventeen
+different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the
+Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."
+
+What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on
+their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if
+they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and
+Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.
+
+"Say, Jimmie, boy--you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when
+you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about
+as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose
+end."
+
+"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I
+asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."
+
+He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy
+stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown
+and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home.
+When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study
+it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.
+
+At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map
+was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations
+and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western
+end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get
+out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the
+shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at
+that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.
+
+Tracing the other way--westward--we had a clear track for ten miles to
+Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen
+engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down.
+Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west
+of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been
+seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and
+the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station
+shouldn't have been.
+
+"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or
+other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be
+considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been
+running--without orders, we must remember--against the Fast Mail coming
+east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere--not officially, at least; if it
+had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's
+office."
+
+At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the
+"meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at
+twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making
+due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the
+missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before
+ten-forty-five.
+
+The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta
+was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the
+opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or
+thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time
+to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In
+other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed,
+would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.
+
+When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay
+in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the
+diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise.
+West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around
+among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand
+Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.
+
+Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing
+point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have
+been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a
+blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand
+Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was
+nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served
+for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would
+surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And
+they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the
+following morning.
+
+Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any
+number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail
+topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything
+about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.
+
+"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by
+without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"
+
+The big master-mechanic shook his head.
+
+"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is
+part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the
+mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in
+for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for
+their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch
+somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut
+off."
+
+This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.
+
+"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is
+one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that
+gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"
+
+"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there
+yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of
+that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."
+
+You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a
+root.
+
+"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just
+around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we
+can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And
+the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the
+stolen engine!"
+
+"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or,
+leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding,
+just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."
+
+Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our
+guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles
+west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van
+Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.
+
+"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the
+map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there.
+But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."
+
+"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you
+and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work
+on," I retorted.
+
+I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest
+of the way to save my life.
+
+"If there was the least little scrap--a reason even to imagine that Mr.
+Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be
+different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know
+doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to
+eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square
+meal inside o' your clothes."
+
+We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard,
+by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew
+shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait
+for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop
+track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.
+
+This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the
+turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing
+down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the
+step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the
+table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a
+reformed cow-punch'--with a record for getting out of more tight places
+with a heavy train than any other man on the division.
+
+"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy
+Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet,
+among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost
+in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."
+
+"What's that--where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like
+the pop of a whip-lash.
+
+"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the
+old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the
+far end o' that gravel track, cold _and_ dead."
+
+"When did you see her?"
+
+"Just now--comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber
+Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin'
+more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big
+as a house."
+
+"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.
+
+"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into
+the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."
+
+Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"
+
+"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."
+
+"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not
+to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"
+
+"I ain't kickin' none."
+
+"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and
+report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go
+down along and get that runaway."
+
+This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the
+gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on
+the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had
+been opened some time after the map had been made.
+
+When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his
+fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for
+town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he
+patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more
+said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen
+engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr.
+Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to
+quit; and, so far as we knew--or didn't know, rather--he had done it and
+had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.
+
+Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive
+assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more
+infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a
+train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have
+made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story
+at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.
+
+I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie--which
+wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the
+major's--when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the
+grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When
+he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a
+telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it
+was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There
+were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point:
+"What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
+
+I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr.
+Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody--the New York
+people, perhaps--had wired him that a new general manager had been
+appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our
+office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had
+become of him, _Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago_!
+
+Gee! but that brought on more talk--a whaling lot of it. I meant to find
+out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek
+wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption
+butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head
+waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came
+over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
+
+It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice
+sounded that she was mightily excited.
+
+"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she
+began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
+
+I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back
+yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient,
+"Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from
+Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the _Mountaineer_. He called the house to
+try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain
+about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
+
+That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the _Mountaineer_
+office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail,
+I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third
+floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
+
+"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper
+aside.
+
+"Yes; just a minute ago."
+
+"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One
+of our young men--Branderby--has a clue; a very slight one. He has
+discovered--in some way that he didn't care to explain over the
+phone--that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of
+a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared.
+From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in
+part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it
+entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's
+men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a
+locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"
+
+"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our
+master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in
+hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir
+about it."
+
+"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly
+muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an
+attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending
+a note to somebody at the Bullard--a note that 'would do the business,'
+was the way it was put."
+
+"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a
+running jump at the guess.
+
+"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you
+more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good
+gosh!--I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able
+to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that
+engine-rescuing trip.
+
+"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two
+flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the
+round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher
+and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were
+filling her with water.
+
+It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high
+foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the
+tender.
+
+"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could
+say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay
+for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over
+into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.
+
+Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the
+fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was
+on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light
+engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight
+piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+A Close Call
+
+
+Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight
+track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its
+good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at
+Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes,
+shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight
+was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
+
+From Banta on, we took it a bit easier--had to. The track was pretty
+crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew
+his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
+
+At the "Y" siding we stopped--without going on to the gravel track where
+Gorcher had seen the lost 1016--and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern.
+This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big
+master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in
+making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just
+the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was
+trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out
+toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as
+nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman
+when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet,
+physically.
+
+"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped
+along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find
+anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail
+connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
+
+He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there
+was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was
+still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch
+rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it
+hadn't been used in years.
+
+"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan
+said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail
+connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them
+thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came
+down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps
+there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel
+track."
+
+I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and
+its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we
+were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the
+two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter
+saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole;
+fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new
+splinter of the wood sticking up beside it--a splinter that had been
+broken out when the spike was pulled.
+
+I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there
+waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the
+saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were
+fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But
+that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the
+rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
+
+"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new
+holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track
+that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over
+them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.
+
+Kirgan didn't say a word--not to me. He just took one look at the rubbed
+rails and then yelled back to Gorcher to run out on the "Y." What
+followed went like clockwork. There were tools, a spike-puller and a
+driving-maul, on the light engine's tender, and while the two firemen
+were throwing them off, Kirgan made a couple of swift measurements with
+his pocket tape.
+
+"These two, right here, boys," he ordered, indicating a pair of rails in
+the other leg of the "Y," and in less than no time the two rails were up
+and relaid to bridge the gap of the broken connection.
+
+Gorcher moved the engine carefully over the temporary connection, with
+Kirgan watching to see that she didn't ditch herself. When the crossing
+was safely made we all climbed on, and Gorcher began to feel his way
+cautiously out over the saw-mill track. Kirgan hadn't explained
+anything, but that didn't matter. We didn't know where we were going,
+but we were on our way.
+
+I suppose we poked along into the black heart of the Timber range for as
+much as five or six miles before the engine headlight showed us the
+remains of the old saw-mill camp lying in a little pocket-like valley
+from the sides of which all the mill timber had been cut. The camp had
+been long deserted. There were perhaps a dozen shacks of all sizes and
+shapes, and with a single exception they were all dilapidated and
+dismantled, some with the roofs falling in.
+
+The one exception was the stout log building which had probably served
+as the mill-gang commissary and store. It stood a little back on the
+slope, and was on the opposite side of the creek from the mill site and
+sleeping-shacks. The ties at this end of the line were so rotten with
+age that our engine was grinding a good half of them to powder as she
+edged up, and a little below the switch that had formerly led in to the
+mill, Kirgan gave Gorcher the stop signal.
+
+After we had piled off, there wasn't any question raised as to what we
+should do. Kirgan had taken a hammer from Gorcher's tool-box, and he was
+the one who led the way straight across the little creek and up the hill
+to the commissary. I had the lantern, but it wasn't needed. From where
+the engine was standing, the headlight flooded the whole gulch basin
+with its electric beam, picking out every detail of the deserted
+saw-mill camp.
+
+When we reached the log commissary we found the windows all boarded up
+and the door fastened with a strong hasp and a bright new brass
+padlock--the only new thing in sight. Kirgan swung his hammer just once
+and the lock went spinning off down the slope and fell with a splash
+into the creek. Then he pushed the door open with his foot, and shoved
+in; and for just one half-second I was afraid to follow--afraid of what
+we might find in that gloomy looking log warehouse, with its blinded
+windows and locked door.
+
+I thank the good Lord I had my scare for nothing. While I was nerving
+myself and stumbling over the threshold behind Kirgan with the lantern,
+I heard the boss's voice, and it wasn't the voice of any dead man, not
+by a long shot! From what he said, and the way he was trimming it up
+with hot ones, it was evident that he took us for some other crowd that
+he'd been cussing out before.
+
+The light of the lantern showed us a long room, bare of furnishings, and
+dark and musty from having been shut up so tight. In the far end there
+were a couple of bunks built against the log wall. On what had once been
+the counter of the commissary there was a lot of canned stuff and a box
+of crackers that had been broken open, and on a bench by the door there
+was a bucket of water and a tin cup.
+
+The boss was sitting up in one of the bunks, and he was still tearing
+off language in strips at us when we closed in on him. He recognized
+Kirgan first, and then Gorcher. I guess he couldn't see me very well
+because I was holding the lantern. When he found out who we were, he
+stopped swearing and got up out of the bunk to put his hand on Mart
+Kirgan's shoulder. That was the only break he made to show that he was a
+man, like the rest of us. The next minute he was the Big Boss again,
+rapping out his orders as if he had just pushed his desk button to call
+us in.
+
+"You've got an engine here, I suppose?" he snapped, at Kirgan. "Then
+we'll get out of this quick. What day of the week is it?"
+
+I told him it was Friday, and by his asking that, I knew he must have
+been so roughly handled that he had lost count of time. The next order
+was shot at the two firemen.
+
+"You boys kick that packing-box to pieces and then pull the straw out of
+that bunk and touch a match to it. We'll make sure that they'll never
+lock anybody else up in this damned dog-hole."
+
+The two young huskies obeyed the order promptly. In half a minute the
+dry slab stuff that the bunks were built of was ablaze and the boss
+herded us to the door. In the open he stopped and looked around as if he
+had half a mind to burn the rest of the deserted lumber camp, but if he
+had any such notion he thought better of it, and a minute or so later we
+were all climbing into the cab of the waiting engine.
+
+I had one last glimpse of the commissary as Gorcher released the air and
+the backing engine slid away around the first curve. It was sweating
+smoke through the split-shingle roof, and the open door framed a square
+of lurid crimson. I guess the boss was right. "They," whoever they were,
+wouldn't ever lock anybody else up in that particular shack.
+
+We had to run so slowly down the old track to the "Y" that there was
+plenty of chance for the boss to talk, if he had wanted to. But
+apparently he didn't want to. He sat on the fireman's seat, with an arm
+back of me to hold me on, just as Kirgan had sat on the way up, and
+never opened his head except once to ask me what was the matter with my
+wrapped-up hand. When I told him, he made no comment, and didn't speak
+again until we had stopped on the leg of the "Y" to let Kirgan and his
+three helpers put the borrowed rails back into place. That left just the
+two of us in the cab, and I thought maybe he would tell me some of the
+particulars, but he didn't. Instead, he made me tell him.
+
+"You say it's Friday," he began abruptly. "What's been going on since
+Monday night, Jimmie?"
+
+I boiled it down for him into just as few words as possible; about the
+letter he had left for Mr. Van Britt, how everybody thought he had
+resigned, how Mrs. Sheila and the major were two of the few who weren't
+willing to believe it, how Mr. Chadwick had been out of reach, how the
+railroad outfit was flopping around like a chicken with its head chopped
+off, how President Dunton had appointed a new general manager who was
+expected now on any train, how Gorcher had discovered the lost 1016 on
+the old disused gravel-pit track a mile below us, and, to wind up with,
+I slipped him Mr. Chadwick's telegram which had come just as I was
+finishing my supper in the Bullard grill-room, and those two others that
+had come on the knock-out night, and which had been in my pocket ever
+since.
+
+He heard me through without saying a word, and when I gave him the
+telegrams he read them by the light of the gauge lamp--also without
+saying anything. But when the men had the "Y" rails replaced he took
+hold of things again with a jerk.
+
+"Kirgan, you'll want to see to getting that dead engine out of the
+gravel pit yourself. Take one of the firemen and go to it. It's a short
+mile and you can walk it. Jimmie and I want to get back to Portal City
+in a hurry, and Gorcher will take us." And then to Gorcher: "We'll run
+to Banta ahead of Number Eighteen and get orders there. Move lively,
+Billy; time's precious."
+
+The orders were carried out precisely as they were given. Kirgan took
+one of the huskies and tramped off in the darkness down the main line,
+and Gorcher, turning our engine on the "Y," headed back east. This time
+he wasn't so awfully careful of the curves and sags as he had been
+coming up, and we made Banta at a record clip. While he was in the Banta
+wire office, getting orders for Portal City, Mr. Norcross took the
+time-card out of its cage in the cab and fell to studying it by the
+light of the gauge lamp. Gorcher came back pretty soon with his
+clearance, which gave him the right to run to Arroyo as first section of
+Number Eighteen.
+
+The boss blew up like a Roman candle when he saw that train order. It
+meant that we were to take the siding at Arroyo with the freight that
+was just behind us, and wait there for the westbound "Flyer," the
+"Flyer" being due in Portal City from the east at 9:15, and due to leave
+there, coming west, at 9:20. I didn't realize at the moment why the boss
+was so sizzling anxious to cut out the delay which would be imposed on
+us by the wait at Arroyo, but the anxiety was there, all right.
+
+"Billy, it's eighteen miles to Portal, and you've got twenty minutes to
+make it against the 'Flyer's' leaving time," he ripped out. "Can you do
+it?"
+
+Gorcher said he could, if he didn't have to lose any more time getting
+his order changed.
+
+"Let her go!" snapped the boss. "I'm taking all the responsibility."
+
+That was enough for Gorcher, and the way we hustled out of the Banta
+yard was a caution. By the time we hit the last set of switches the old
+"Pacific-type" was lurching like a ship at sea, and once out on the long
+grass-country tangents she went like a shot out of a gun. Of course,
+with nothing to pull but her own weight she had plenty of steam, and all
+Gorcher had to do was to keep her from choking herself with too much of
+it.
+
+He did it to the queen's taste; and in exactly eight minutes out of
+Banta we tore over the switches at Arroyo. That left us ten miles to go,
+and twelve minutes in which to make them. It looked pretty easy, and it
+would have been if the night crew hadn't been switching in the lower
+Portal City yard when we finished the race and Gorcher was whistling for
+the town stop. There was a hold-out of perhaps two minutes while the
+shifter was getting out of our way, and when we finally went clattering
+up through the yard, the "Flyer," a few minutes late, was just pulling
+in from the opposite direction.
+
+A yardman let us in on the spur at the end of the headquarters building,
+and the boss was off in half a jiffy. "Come along with me, Jimmie," he
+commanded quickly, and I couldn't imagine why he was in such a tearing
+hurry. Pushing through the platform crowd, made up of people who were
+getting off the "Flyer" and those who were waiting to get on, he led the
+way straight up-stairs to our offices.
+
+Of course, there was nobody there at that time of night, and the place
+was all dark until we switched the electrics on. There was a little
+lavatory off the third room of the suite, and Mr. Norcross went in and
+washed his face and hands. In a minute or two he came out, put on his
+office coat, opened up his desk, lighted a cigar and sat down at the
+desk as though he had just come in from a late dinner at the club. And
+still he had me guessing.
+
+The guess didn't have to wait long. While I was making a bluff at
+uncovering my typewriter and getting ready for business there was a
+heavy step in the hall, and a red-faced, portly gentleman with fat eyes
+and little close-cropped English side-whiskers came bulging in. He had a
+light top-coat on his arm, and his tan gloves were an exact match for
+his spats.
+
+"Good evening," he said, nodding sort of brusquely at the boss. "I'm
+looking for the general manager's office."
+
+"You've found it," said the boss, crisply.
+
+The tan-gloved gentleman looked first at me and then at Mr. Norcross.
+
+"You are the chief clerk, perhaps?" he suggested, pitching the query in
+the general direction of the big desk.
+
+"Hardly," was the curt rejoinder. "My name is Norcross. What can I do
+for you?"
+
+If I didn't hate slang so bad, I should say that the portly man looked
+as if he were going to throw a fit.
+
+"Not--not Graham Norcross?" he stammered.
+
+"Well, yes; I am 'Graham'--to my friends. Anything else?"
+
+The portly gentleman subsided into a chair.
+
+"There is some misunderstanding about this," he said, his voice
+thickening a little--with anger, I thought. "My name is Dismuke, and I
+am the general manager of this railroad."
+
+"I wouldn't dispute the name, but your title is away off," said Mr.
+Norcross, as cool as a handful of dry snow. "Who appointed you, if I may
+ask?"
+
+"President Dunton and the board of directors, of course."
+
+"The same authority appointed me, something like three months ago," was
+the calm reply. "So far as I know, I am still at the head of the
+company's staff in Portal City."
+
+The gentleman who had named himself Dismuke puffed out his cheeks and
+looked as if he were about to explode.
+
+"This is a devil of a mess!" he rapped out. "I understood--we all
+understood in New York--that you had resigned!"
+
+"Well, I haven't," retorted the boss shortly. And then he stuck the
+knife in good and deep and twisted it around. "There is a commercial
+telegraph wire in the Hotel Bullard, where I suppose you will put up,
+Mr. Dismuke, and I'm sure you will find it entirely at your service. If
+you have anything further to say to me I hope it will keep until after
+this office opens in the morning. I am very busy, just now."
+
+I mighty nearly gasped. This Dismuke was the new general manager,
+appointed, doubtless in all good faith, by the president and sent out
+to take charge of things. And here was the boss practically ordering him
+out of the office--telling him that his room was better than his
+company!
+
+The portly man got out of his chair, puffing like a steam-engine.
+
+"We'll see about this!" he threatened. "You've been here three months
+and you haven't done anything but muddle things until the stock of the
+company isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on! If I can
+get a clear wire to New York, you'll have word from President Dunton
+to-morrow morning telling you where you get off!"
+
+To this Mr. Norcross made no reply whatever, and the heavy-footed
+gentleman stumped out, saying things to himself that wouldn't look very
+well in print. When the hall door below gave a big slam to let us know
+that he was still going, the boss looked across at me with a sour grin
+wrinkling around his eyes.
+
+"Now you know why I made Gorcher break all the rules of the service
+getting here, Jimmie," he said. "From what you told me down yonder on
+the old 'Y,' I gathered that my successor was not yet on the ground, but
+that he was likely to be at any minute. That's why I wanted to beat the
+'Flyer' in. Possession is nine points of the law, and in this case it
+was rather important that Mr. Dismuke shouldn't find the outfit without
+a head and these offices of ours unoccupied." He rose, stretched his
+arms over his head like a tired boy, and reached for the golf cap he
+kept to wear when he went out to knock around in the shops and yard.
+"Let's go up to the hotel and see if we can break into the cafe, Jimmie,"
+he finished up. "Later on, we'll wire Mr. Chadwick; but that can wait.
+I haven't had a square meal in four days."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+The Machine
+
+
+With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess
+there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all
+along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back
+on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally,
+because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt
+there was plenty of it: the more since the boss--a bit grimmer than
+usual--hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members
+of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke
+over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but
+these were all in the family, too, as you might say.
+
+After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent
+a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President
+Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr.
+Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our
+track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all
+the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump
+themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.
+
+We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the
+tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him
+occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table
+with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess
+he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying
+on made it look as if there might be more to follow.
+
+I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that
+Branderby, the _Mountaineer_ reporter, had given us and tear loose on
+the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the
+first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the
+new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business,
+and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.
+
+Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about
+selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage & Warehouse people
+after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and
+the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes,
+and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. & W. with all sorts of legal
+obstacles.
+
+Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions
+were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a
+week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around
+and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. & W. folks, out of jail
+for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he
+could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side
+could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the
+local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case
+out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.
+
+Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days,
+as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we
+acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow
+named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in
+from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an
+"extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his
+being sent out to relieve anybody.
+
+I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort,
+and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped
+in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man
+who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and
+a half farther than he had bargained to.
+
+"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket,"
+he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the
+boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're
+stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is
+only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens'
+Storage & Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the
+Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."
+
+"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about
+our C. S. & W. friends? Are they still game?"
+
+"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host
+in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out
+and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere,
+now, and C. S. & W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I
+venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the
+different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this
+moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original
+scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."
+
+The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his
+cigar, which had gone out.
+
+"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is
+not mine?" he said, after a little pause.
+
+"Not yours?"
+
+"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman
+who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white
+elephants."
+
+"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a
+tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere
+lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."
+
+"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt
+in his voice that fairly made me sick--knowing what I did; and knowing
+that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About
+the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had
+Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"
+
+"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the
+bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."
+
+The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the
+catch against interruptions.
+
+"Let's have it," he directed.
+
+Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the
+engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower
+Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all
+the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An
+election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be
+whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution
+was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger
+would vanish.
+
+Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been
+ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political
+headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been
+turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's
+gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot
+climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept
+our messages and keep in touch.
+
+The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an
+anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang
+of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard
+for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail,
+which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for
+it--as he did, when the time came--and go in person to stop the raid, he
+was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to
+be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a
+fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President
+Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the
+night.
+
+"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been
+listening soberly while the lawyer talked.
+
+"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer.
+The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona
+accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands
+overnight in the same place--on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence,
+it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk
+with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of
+the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr.
+Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped
+wires."
+
+Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
+
+"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"
+
+"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in
+on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent
+you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place,
+and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew
+very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be
+your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they
+would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and
+would stay off until the other man could take hold."
+
+"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I
+haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to
+find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's
+recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley.
+Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line
+as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."
+
+"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.
+
+"Oh, yes; you have it all--or practically all. I fell for the anonymous
+letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily,
+ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment.
+The obvious thing to do--if any attention whatever was to be paid to the
+anonymous warning--was to telephone the police and the round-house. I
+did neither because I thought it might be too slow. The letter was
+urgent, of course; it said that Black Ike Bradley and his gang were
+already in the railroad yard, preparing to steal the engine."
+
+"So you made a straight shoot for the scene of action?"
+
+"I did; down the back streets and across the lower end of the plaza. As
+it appeared--or rather as it was made to appear--I was barely in time.
+There were men at the engine, and when I sprinted across the yard they
+were ready to move it out to the main line. I yelled at them and ran
+in."
+
+"You must have been beautifully rattled; to go up against a gang of
+thugs that way, alone and unarmed," was the lawyer's comment.
+
+"I was," the boss confessed soberly. "Of course, I didn't have a ghost
+of a show. Three of them tackled me the moment I came within reach. I
+got one of the three on the point of the jaw, and they had to leave him
+behind; but there were enough more of them. Before I fairly realized
+what was happening, they had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey,
+gagged with my own handkerchief, and loaded into the cab of the engine.
+From that on, it was all plain sailing."
+
+"Then they took you to the old lumber camp?"
+
+"As fast as the engine could be made to turn her wheels. They were
+running against the Mail, and they knew it. Arroyo has no night
+operator, and when we sneaked through the Banta yard and past the
+station, the operator there was asleep. I saw him, with his head in the
+crook of his arm, at the telegraph table in the bay window as we
+passed."
+
+Ripley grinned. "We've been giving that young fellow the third
+degree--Van Britt and I. He claims that he was doped; that somebody
+dropped something into his supper coffee at the station lunch counter.
+His story didn't hang together and Van Britt fired him. But go on."
+
+"We ran out to the Timber Mountain 'Y'," the boss resumed, "and from
+that on up the old saw-mill line. The rail connections were all in
+place, and I knew from this that preparations had been made beforehand.
+At the mill stop they untied my legs and made me walk up the hill to the
+commissary. When they took the gag out, I said a few things and asked
+them what they were going to do with me. They wouldn't tell me anything
+except that I was to be locked up for a few days."
+
+"You knew what that meant?"
+
+"Perfectly. My drop-out would be made to look as if I had jumped the
+job, and Dunton would appoint a new man. After that, I could come back,
+if I wanted to. Whatever I might do or try to do would cut no figure,
+and no explanation I could make would be believed. I had most obligingly
+dug my own official grave, and there could be no resurrection."
+
+"What then?" pressed Ripley, keenly interested, as anybody could see.
+
+"When they took the clothes-line from my arms there was another scrap.
+It didn't do any good. They got the door shut on me and got it locked.
+After that, for four solid days, Ripley, I was made to realize how
+little it takes to hold a man. I had my pocket-knife, but I couldn't
+whittle my way out. The floor puncheons were spiked down, and I couldn't
+dig out. They had taken all my matches, and I couldn't burn the place. I
+tried the stick-rubbing, and all those things you read about: they're
+fakes; I couldn't get even the smell of smoke."
+
+"The chimney?"
+
+"There wasn't any. They had heated the place, when it was a commissary,
+with a stove, and the pipe hole through the ceiling had a piece of sheet
+iron nailed over it. And I couldn't get to the roof at all. They had
+me."
+
+Ripley nodded and said, snappy-like: "Well, we've got them now--any time
+you give the word. Tarbell has a pinch on one of the Clanahan men and he
+will turn State's evidence. We can railroad every one of those fellows
+who carried you off."
+
+"And the men higher up?" queried the boss.
+
+"No; not yet."
+
+"Then we'll drop it right where it is. I don't want the hired tools; no
+one of them, unless you can get the devil that crippled Jimmie Dodds,
+here."
+
+They went on, talking about my burn-up. Listening in, I learned for the
+first time just how it had been done. Tarbell, through his hold upon the
+welshing Clanahan striker, had got the details at second-hand. Hatch's
+assassin--or Clanahan's--must have had it all doped out and made ready
+before Hatch had made the break at trying to bribe me.
+
+Anyway, a lead had been taken from a power wire at the corner of the
+street and hooked over the outer door-knob. And inside I had been given
+a sheet of copper to stand on for a good "ground," the copper itself
+being wired to a water pipe running up through the hall. Tarbell had
+afterward proved up on all this, it seemed, finding the insulated wire
+and the copper sheet with its connections hidden in a small rubbish
+closet under the hall stair, just where a fellow in a hurry might chuck
+them.
+
+"Tarbell is a striking success," Mr. Norcross put in, along at the end
+of things. "We'll keep him on with us, Ripley."
+
+"You'd better," said the level-eyed young attorney, significantly. "From
+the way things are stacking up, you'll presently need a personal
+body-guard. I suppose it's no use asking you to carry a gun?"
+
+"Hardly," laughed the boss. "I've never done it yet, and it's pretty
+late in the day to begin."
+
+Past this there was a little more talk about the C. S. & W. deal, and
+about what the Hatch crowd would be likely to try next; and when it was
+finished, and Ripley was reaching for his hat, the boss said: "There is
+no change in the orders: we've got 'em going now, and we'll keep 'em
+going. Drive it, Ripley; drive it for every ounce there is in you. Never
+mind the election talk or the stock quotations. This railroad is going
+to be honest, if it never earns another net dollar. We'll win!"
+
+"It's beginning to look a little that way, now," the lawyer admitted,
+with his hand on the door knob. "Just the same, Norcross, there is
+safety in numbers, and our numbers are precisely one; one man"--holding
+up a single finger. "As before, the pyramid is standing on its head--and
+you are the head. The other people have shown us once what happens when
+you are removed. For God's sake, be careful!"
+
+I don't know whether the boss took that last bit of advice to heart or
+not. If he didn't, he was a bigger man than even I had been taking him
+for--with the crooks of a whole State reaching out for him, and with the
+knowledge which he must have had, that the next time they came gunning
+for him they'd shoot to kill.
+
+It was late in the afternoon when Ripley made his visit, and pretty soon
+after he went away the boss and I closed up our end of the shop and left
+May pecking away at his typewriter on a lot of routine stuff. I don't
+know what made me do it, but as I was passing Fred's desk on the way
+out, stringing along behind the boss, I stopped and jerked open one of
+the drawers. I knew beforehand what was in the drawer, and pointed to
+it--a new .38 automatic. Fred nodded, and I slipped the gun into my
+left-hand pocket, wondering as I did it, if I could make out to hit the
+broad side of a barn, shooting with that hand, if I had to.
+
+A half-minute later I had caught up with Mr. Norcross, and together we
+left the building and went up to the Bullard for dinner.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+In the Coal Yard
+
+
+I knew, just as well as could be--without being able to prove it--that
+we were shadowed on the trip up from the railroad building to the hotel,
+and it made me nervous. There could be only one reason now for any such
+dogging of the boss. The grafters were not trying to find out what he
+was doing; they didn't need to, because he was advertising his
+doings--or Juneman was--in the newspapers. What they were trying to do
+was to catch him off his guard and do him up--this time to stay done up.
+
+It was safe to assume that they wouldn't fumble the ball a second time.
+Mr. Ripley had stood the thing fairly on its feet when he said that our
+campaign was purely a one-man proposition, so far as it had yet gone.
+People who had met the boss and had done business with him liked him;
+but the old-time prejudice against the railroad was so widespread and so
+bitter that it couldn't be overcome all at once. Juneman, our publicity
+man, was doing his best, but as yet we had no party following in the
+State at large which would stand by us and see that we got justice.
+
+I was chewing these things over while we sat at dinner in the Bullard
+cafe, and I guess Mr. Norcross was, too, for he didn't say much. It
+isn't altogether comfortable to be a marked man in a more or less
+unfriendly country, and I shouldn't wonder if the boss, big and
+masterful as he was, felt the pressure of it. I don't know whether he
+knew anything about the shadowing business I speak of or not, but he
+might have. We hadn't more than given our dinner order when one of
+Hatch's clerks, a cock-eyed chap named Kestler, came in and took a table
+just far enough from ours to be out of the way, and near enough to
+listen in if we said anything.
+
+When we finished, Kestler was just getting his service of ice-cream; but
+I noticed that he left it untouched and got up and followed us to the
+lobby. It made me hot enough to want to turn on him and knock his
+crooked eye out, but of course, that wouldn't have done any good.
+
+After Mr. Norcross had bought some cigars at the stand he said he
+guessed he'd run out to Major Kendrick's for a little while; and with
+that he went up to his rooms. Though the major was the one he named, I
+knew he meant that he was going to see Mrs. Sheila. I remembered what he
+had said to Ripley about a woman's giving him germ ideas and such
+things, and I guess it was really so. Every time he spent an evening at
+the major's he'd come back with a lot of new notions for popularizing
+the Short Line.
+
+When he said that, about going out to the major's, Kestler was near
+enough to overhear it, and so he waited, lounging in the lobby and
+pretending to read a paper. About half-past seven the boss came down and
+asked me to call a taxi for him. I did it; and Kestler loafed around
+just long enough to see him start off. Then he lit out, himself, and
+something in the way he did it made me take out after him.
+
+I expected to see him turn up-town to the second cross street where the
+Red Tower had its general offices on the fourth floor of the Empire
+Building. But instead, he turned the other way, and the first thing I
+knew I was trailing him through the railroad yard and on down past the
+freight house toward the big, fenced-in, Red Tower coal yards.
+
+At the coal yard he let himself in through a wicket in the wagon gates,
+and I noticed that he used a key and locked the wicket after he got
+inside. I put my eye to a crack in the high stockade fence and saw that
+the little shack office that was used for a scale-house was lighted up.
+My burnt hand was healing tolerably well by this time and I could use it
+a little. There was a slack pile just outside of the big gate, and by
+climbing to the top of it I got over the fence and crept up to the
+scale-house.
+
+A small window in one end of the shack, opened about two inches at the
+bottom, answered well enough for a peep-hole. Three men were in the
+little box of a place--three besides Kestler; Hatch, his barrel-bodied
+partner, Henckel, and one other. The third man looked like a glorified
+barkeep'. He was of the type I have heard called "black Irish," fat,
+sleek, and well-fed, with little pin-point black eyes half buried in the
+flesh of his round face, and the padded jaw and double chin shaved to
+the blue. The night was warm and he had his hat off. Through the crack
+in the window I could smell the pomatum with which his hair was
+plastered into barkeep' waves to match the tightly curled black
+mustaches.
+
+I knew this third man well enough, by sight; everybody in Portal City
+knew him--decent people only too well when it came to an election
+tussle. He was the redoubtable Pete Clanahan, dive-keeper, and political
+boss.
+
+Kestler was talking when I glued eye and ear to the window crack; was
+telling the three how he had shadowed Mr. Norcross from the railroad
+headquarters to the Bullard, and how he stayed around until he had seen
+the boss take a taxi for Major Kendrick's. This seemed to be all that
+was wanted of him, for when he was through, Hatch told him he might go
+home. After the cock-eyed clerk was gone, Hatch lighted a fresh cigar
+and put it squarely up to the Irishman.
+
+"It's no use being mealy-mouthed over this thing, Pete," he grated in
+that saw-mill voice of his. "We've got to get rid of this man. You've
+asked us to shadow him and keep you posted, and we have--and you've done
+nothing. Every day's delay gives him that much better hold. We can choke
+him off by littles in the business game, of course; we have Dunton and
+the New Yorkers on our side, and this cooeperative scheme he has launched
+can be broken down with money. Such things never hold together very
+long. But that doesn't help you political people out; and your stake in
+the game is even bigger than ours."
+
+Clanahan looked around the little dog-kennel of a place suspiciously.
+
+"'Tis not here that we can talk much about thim things, Misther Hatch,"
+he said cautiously.
+
+"Why not?" was the rasping question. "There's nobody in the yard, and
+the gates are locked. It's a damned sight safer than a back room in one
+of your dives--as we know now to our cost."
+
+Clanahan threw up his head with a gesture that said much. "Murphy's the
+man that leaked on that engine job--and he'll leak no more."
+
+"Well," said Hatch, with growing irritation, "what are you holding back
+for now? We stood to win on the first play, and we would have won if
+your people hadn't balled it by talking too much. One more day and
+Dismuke would have been in the saddle. That would have settled it."
+
+"Yah; and Mister Dismuke still here in Portal City remains," put in
+Henckel.
+
+The dive-keeper locked his pudgy fingers across a cocked knee.
+
+"'Tis foine, brave gintlemen ye are, you two, whin ye've got somebody
+else to pull th' nuts out av th' fire for ye!" he said. "Ye'd have us
+croak this felly f'r ye, and thin ye'd stand back and wash yer hands
+while some poor divil wint to th' rope f'r it. Where do we come in, is
+what I'd like to know?"
+
+"You are already in," snapped Hatch. "You know what the Big Fellow at
+the capital thinks about it, and where you'll stand in the coming
+election if you don't put out this fire that Norcross is kindling.
+You're yellow, Clanahan. That's all that is the matter with you. Put
+your wits to work. There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking
+it to death with butter."
+
+"Tell me wan thing!" insisted the dive-keeper, boring the chief grafter
+with his pin-point eyes. "Do you stand f'r it if we do this thing up
+right?"
+
+Hatch's eyes fell, and Henckel's big body twisted uneasily in the chair
+that was groaning under his beer-barrel weight. There was silence for a
+little space, and I could feel the cold sweat starting out all over me.
+I hadn't dreamed of stumbling upon anything like this when I started
+out to shadow Kestler. They were actually plotting to murder the boss!
+
+It was Hatch who broke the stillness.
+
+"It's up to you, Clanahan, and you know it," he declared. "You've had
+your tip from the Big Fellow. The railroad people must be made to get
+into the fight in the coming election, and get in on the right side. If
+they don't; and if Norcross stays and keeps his fire burning; you
+fellows lose out. So shall we; but what we lose will be a mere drop in
+the bucket; and, as I have said, we stand to get it back, after this
+cooeperative scheme has had time to burn itself out."
+
+Clanahan sat back in his chair and shoved his hands into his pockets.
+
+"Ye'd sthring me as if I was a boy!" he scoffed. "'Tis your own game
+fr'm first to last. D'ye think I'm not knowing that? 'Tis bread and
+butther and th' big rake-off for you, and little ye care how th'
+election goes. Suppose we'd croak this man in th' hot par-rt av th'
+p'litical fight; what happens? Half th' noospaypers in th' State'd play
+him up f'r a martyr to th' cause av good governmint, and we'd all go to
+hell in a hand-basket!"
+
+I was cramped and sore and one of my legs had gone to sleep, but I
+couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. My heart was skipping beats
+right along while I waited for Hatch's answer. When it came, the
+drumming in my ears pretty nearly made me lose it.
+
+"Clanahan," he began, as cold as an icicle. "I didn't get you down here
+to argue with you. We've got your number--all your different
+numbers--and they are written down in a book. You've bungled this thing
+once, and for that reason you've got it to do over again. We haven't
+asked you to 'croak' anybody, as you put it, and we are not asking it
+now."
+
+"'Tis domned little you lack av asking it," retorted the dive-keeper.
+
+"Listen," said Hatch, leaning forward with his hands on his knees.
+"Besides keeping cases on Norcross here, we've been digging back into
+his record a few lines. Every man has his sore spot, if you can only
+find it, Clanahan--just as you have yours. What if I should tell you
+that Norcross is wanted in another State--for a crime?"
+
+"Nobody would believe ut," was the prompt rejoinder. "If he's wanted he
+c'u'd be had."
+
+"Wait," Hatch went on. "Before he came here he was chief of construction
+on the Oregon Midland. There was a right-of-way fight back in the
+mountains--fifty miles from the nearest sheriff--with the P. & S. F.
+Norcross armed his track-layers, and in the bluffing there was a man
+killed."
+
+Though it was a warm night, as I have said, the cold chills began to
+chase themselves up and down my back. What Hatch said was perfectly
+true. In the right-of-way scrap he was talking about, there had been a
+few wild shots fired, and one of them had found a P. & S. F. grade
+laborer. I don't believe anybody had ever really blamed the boss for it.
+He had given strict orders that we were only to make a show of force;
+and, besides, the other fellows were armed, too, and had armed first.
+But there _had_ been a man killed.
+
+While I was shivering, Clanahan said: "Well, what av it?"
+
+"Norcross was responsible for that man's death. If he was having trouble
+over his right-of-way, his recourse was to the law, and he took the law
+into his own hands. Nothing was ever done about it, because nobody took
+the trouble to prosecute. A week ago we sent a man to Oregon to look up
+the facts. He succeeded in finding a brother of the dead man, and a
+warrant has now been sworn out for Norcross's arrest."
+
+"Well?" said Clanahan again. "Ye have the sthring in yer own hand; why
+don't ye pull it?"
+
+"That's where you come in," was the answer. "The Oregon justice issued
+the warrant because it was demanded, but he refused to incur, for his
+county, the expense of sending a deputy sheriff to another State, or to
+take the necessary steps to have Norcross extradited. If Norcross could
+be produced in court, he would try him and either discharge him or bind
+him over, as the facts might warrant. He took his stand upon the ground
+that Norcross was only technically responsible, and told the brother
+that in all probability nothing would come of an attempt to prosecute."
+
+"Thin ye've got nothing on him, after all," the Irishman grunted.
+
+"Yes," Hatch came back; "we have the warrant, and, in addition to that,
+we have you, Pete. A word from you to the Portal City police
+headquarters, and our man finds himself arrested and locked up--to wait
+for a requisition from the Governor of Oregon."
+
+"But you said th' requisition wouldn't come," Clanahan put in.
+
+Hatch was sitting back now and stroking his ugly jaw.
+
+"It might come, Pete, if it had to: there's no knowing. In the meantime
+we get delay. There'll be _habeas corpus_ proceedings, of course, to get
+him out of jail, but there's where you'll come in again; you've got your
+own man in for City Attorney. And, after all, the delay is all we need.
+With Norcross in trouble, and in jail on a charge of murder, the
+railroad ship'll go on the rocks in short order. The Norcross management
+is having plenty of trouble--wrecks and the like. With Norcross locked
+up, New York will be heard from, and Dismuke will step in and clean
+house. That will wind up the reform spasm."
+
+"'Tis a small chance," growled the chief of the ward heelers. "Th'
+high-brow vote is stirrin', and there'll be some to say it's
+persecution--and say it where it'll be heard. I'll talk it over with the
+Big Fellow."
+
+Again Hatch leaned forward and put his hands on his knees.
+
+"You'll do nothing of the sort, Pete. You'll act, and act on your own
+responsibility. If you don't, somebody may wire the sheriff of Silver
+Bow County, Montana, that the man he knew in Butte as Michael Clancy
+is...."
+
+The dive-keeper put up both hands as if to ward off a blow.
+
+"'Tis enough," he mumbled, speaking as if he had a bunch of dry cotton
+in his mouth. "Slip me th' warrant."
+
+Hatch went to a small safe and worked the combination. When the door was
+opened he passed a folded paper to Clanahan. Through all this talk,
+Henckel had said nothing, and I suspected that Hatch had him there
+solely for safety's sake, and to provide a witness. With the paper in
+his pocket, Clanahan got up to go. It was time for me to make a move.
+
+It's curious how an idea will sometimes lay hold of you and knock out
+reason and common sense and everything else. Clanahan had in his pocket
+a piece of paper that simply meant ruin to Mr. Norcross, and the blowing
+up of all the plans that had been made and all the work that had been
+done. If he should be allowed to get up-town with that warrant, the end
+of everything would be in sight. But how was I to prevent it?
+
+I saw where the Irishman had put the warrant; in the right-hand, outside
+pocket of his coat. The pocket wasn't deep enough, and about an inch of
+the folded paper showed white against the black of his coat. The three
+men were on their feet, and Hatch was reaching for the wall switch which
+controlled the single incandescent lamp hanging from the ceiling of the
+scale-house. If I could only think of some way to blow the place up and
+snatch the paper in the confusion.
+
+Up to that minute I had never thought once of the pistol I had taken
+from Fred May's drawer, though it was still sagging in my left hip
+pocket. When I did think of it I dragged it out with some silly notion
+of trying to hold the three men up at the door of the shack as they came
+out. Hatch's stop to light a cigar and to hand out a couple to the
+other two gave me time to chuck that notion and grab another. With the
+muzzle of the automatic resting in the crack of the opened window I took
+dead aim at the incandescent lamp in the ceiling and turned her loose
+for the whole magazineful.
+
+Since the first bullet got the lamp and left the place black dark, I
+couldn't see what was happening in the close little room. But whatever
+it was, there was plenty of it. I could hear them gasping and yelling
+and knocking one another down as they fought to get the door open.
+Sticking the empty pistol back into my pocket I jumped to get action,
+hurting my sore hand like the mischief in doing it.
+
+Hatch was the first man out, but the big German was so close a second
+that he knocked his smaller partner down and fell over him. Clanahan
+kept his feet. He had a gun in his hand that looked to me, in the
+darkness, as big as a cannon. I was flattened against the side of the
+scale shack, and when the dive-keeper tried to side-step around the two
+fallen men who were blocking the way, I snatched the folded paper from
+his pocket; snatched it and ran as if the dickens was after me.
+
+That was a bad move--the runaway. If I had kept still there might have
+been a chance for me to make a sneak. But when I ran, and fell over a
+pile of loose coal, and got up and ran again, they were all three after
+me, Clanahan taking blind shots in the dark with his cannon as he came.
+
+Naturally, I made straight for the wagon gate, and forgot, until I was
+right there, that it, and the wicket through one of the leaves, were
+both locked. As I shook the wicket, a bullet from Clanahan's gun spatted
+into the woodwork and stuck a splinter into my hand, and I turned and
+sprinted again, this time for the gates where the coal cars were pushed
+in from the railroad yard. These, too, were shut and locked, and when I
+ducked under the nearest gondola I realized that I was trapped. Before I
+could climb the high fence anywhere, they'd get me.
+
+They came up, all three of them, puffing and blowing, while I was hiding
+under the gondola.
+
+"It's probably that cow-boy spotter of Norcross's, but he can't get
+away," Hatch was gritting--meaning Tarbell, probably. "The gates are
+locked and we can plug him if he tries to climb the fence. There's a gun
+in the scale-house. You two look under these cars while I go and get
+it!"
+
+It was up to me to move again. Henckel was striking matches and holding
+them so that Clanahan could look under the cars, and I could feel, in
+anticipation, the shock of a bullet from the big gun in the
+dive-keeper's fat fist as I crawled cautiously out on the far side.
+Creeping along behind the string of coal cars I came presently to the
+great gantry crane used for unloading the fuel. It was a huge traveling
+machine, straddling the tracks and a good part of the yard, and the
+clam-shell grab-bucket was down, resting on its two lips on the ground.
+
+At first I thought of climbing to the frame-work of the crane and trying
+to hide on the big bridge beam. Then I saw that the two halves of the
+clam-shell bucket were slightly open, just wide enough to let me squeeze
+in. If they were looking for a full-sized man--Tarbell, for instance,
+who was as husky as a farm-hand--they'd never think of that crack in the
+bucket; and in another second I had wriggled through the V-shaped
+opening and was sitting humped up in one of the halves of the
+clam-shell.
+
+That was a mighty good guess. When Hatch came back with his gun, they
+combed that coal yard with a fine-tooth comb, using a lantern that Hatch
+had gotten from somewhere and missing no hole or corner where a man
+might hide, save and excepting only the one I had preempted.
+
+As it happened, the search wound up finally under the crane, with the
+three standing so near that I could have reached out of the crack
+between the bucket halves and touched them.
+
+"Der tuyfel has gone mit himself ofer der fence, yes?" puffed Henckel.
+And then: "Vot for iss he shoot off dem pistols, ennahow?"
+
+Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner
+or later.
+
+"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."
+
+Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And
+I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out
+when he whirled upon the Irishman.
+
+"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a
+thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this
+country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And
+what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a
+belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and
+wanting to know what all the shooting was about.
+
+It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in
+silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all
+bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and
+make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done.
+With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance
+offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of
+murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal
+tangle and had put him in peril of his life.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+The Man at the Window
+
+
+Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in
+the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy
+enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say
+much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask
+the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland
+right-of-way squabble.
+
+But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning
+up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it
+that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding
+Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know
+anything about that part of it--he was such a square fighter himself
+that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.
+
+Meanwhile, things grew warmer and warmer in the tussle we were making to
+pull the old Short Line out of the mud; warmer in a number of ways,
+because, in addition to the fight for the public confidence, we began
+just then to have a perfect epidemic of wrecks.
+
+The boss turned the material trouble over to Mr. Van Britt and devoted
+himself pretty strictly to the public side of things. Everywhere, and on
+every occasion--at dinners at the different chambers of commerce, and
+public banquets given to this, that, or the other visiting big-wig--he
+was always ready to get on his feet and tell the people that the true
+prosperity of the country carried with it the prosperity of the
+railroads; that the two things were one and inseparable; and that, when
+it came right down to basic facts, the railroads were really a part of
+the progress machinery of the country at large and should be regarded,
+not as alien tax-collectors, but as contributors to the general
+prosperity and welfare.
+
+I went with him on a good many of the trips he made to be "among those
+present" at these gatherings--and so, by the way, did Tarbell--and it
+was plain to be seen that the new idea was gradually gathering a little
+headway. By this time, also, Red Tower Consolidated was beginning to
+find out what it meant to have active competition. The C. S. & W. people
+were hammering their new plants into working shape, and they were
+getting the patronage, both of the producers and consumers, hand over
+fist.
+
+Engineered by Billoughby, the railroad was simply playing the part of
+the good big brother to these new middlemen. Track facilities and yard
+service were granted freely; and while no discrimination was permitted
+as against the Red Tower people, the friendly attitude of the road
+counted for something, as it was bound to; hence, the C. S. & W. got the
+business right from the jump, enlarging its field as it went along, and
+gathering in all the little side monopolies like the ice-plants, and
+city lighting installations, and so on. This, by the way, was in line
+with the new slogan put out by the boss and his boosters: "Own your own
+Utilities."
+
+As to the political struggle which was now ripping the State wide open
+from end to end, the boss was steel and iron on the side of
+non-interference. He never allowed himself to say a public word on
+either side; never spoke of the campaign at all except to assert
+everywhere and at all times that the railroad was not in politics, and
+never would be again.
+
+This was the key-word given to the different members of the staff to be
+passed on down the line to every official in authority. We were to be
+like Caesar's wife--above suspicion. We were neither to make nor meddle
+in the campaign, and any department head or other officer or employee
+caught trying to swing the railroad vote would be fired on the spot.
+
+On one of our trips over the road we had a call from Mr. Anson Burrell,
+the gubernatorial candidate who was making the race against the
+machine. He was a cattle magnate of the modern sort; a big,
+viking-looking man, with a Yale degree, and with a record as clean as a
+hound's tooth. When he came into the private car he seemed to fill it,
+not only with his presence, but with the fresh keen air of the grazing
+uplands.
+
+"I'm glad to have a chance to meet you on your own ground, Mr.
+Norcross," he said, giving the boss a hand-grip that looked mighty
+hearty and sincere. "I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell you
+how much we appreciate the stand you have taken. For the first time in
+its history, the railroad is keeping out of the political fight; I know
+it, and the people are beginning to find it out, too. You may not mean
+it that way, but it is the strongest card you could play. You need just
+legislation, and there is no better way to get it than by not trying to
+influence it."
+
+The boss met him half-way on that, of course, and said what he ought to;
+and they talked along that line for the full half-hour that our special
+stopped in the town where Mr. Burrell had caught us. In a way, it was a
+sort of temptation to take sides. Mr. Burrell made it pretty plain that
+if the railroad continued to behave itself, and if the reform party got
+in, there would be easier legislation, and perhaps some of the old
+hard-and-fast intrastate rate laws repealed. But the boss wasn't the
+man to drop his candy in the dirt, and he kept right on laying down the
+law to everybody in the service; we were to let the campaign absolutely
+alone, and every man was to vote as he thought best.
+
+As time went on, I was a little surprised to see that Hatch and his
+gunmen side partners under Pete Clanahan made no further move; at least,
+not toward keeping cases on Mr. Norcross. Though Tarbell and I still
+went everywhere with him, we saw no more shadowers. I put it up that
+perhaps they were lying quiet because they knew that somebody had
+overheard their talk in the coal yard scale-house and they were waiting
+for the thing to blow over a little. All of us who were on the inside
+felt that the move was only postponed, and that when it did come it
+would be a center shot. But there was nothing we could do. We could only
+hang on and keep a sharp eye to windward.
+
+During those few pre-election weeks the New York end of us seemed to
+have petered out completely. We heard nothing more from President
+Dunton, worse than an occasional wire complaint about the number of
+wrecks we were having, though the stock was still going down, point by
+point, and, so far as a man up a tree could see, we were making no
+attempt to show net earnings--were turning all our money into
+betterments as fast as it came in. I knew that couldn't go on. Without a
+flurry of some sort, the New Yorkers would never be able to break even,
+to say nothing of a profit, and I looked every day for a howl that would
+tear things straight up the back.
+
+While all these threads were weaving along, I'm sorry to say that I
+hadn't yet drummed up the courage to tell the boss the truth about Mrs.
+Sheila. He kept on going to the major's every chance he had, and Maisie
+Ann was making life miserable for me because I hadn't told him--calling
+me a coward and everything under the sun. I told her to tell him
+herself, and she retorted that I knew she couldn't: that it was my job
+and nobody else's. We fussed over it a lot; and because I most always
+contrived some excuse to chase out to the Kendrick house at the boss's
+heels--merely to help Tarbell keep cases on him--there were plenty of
+chances for the fussing.
+
+It was on one of these chasing trips to "Kenwood" that the roof fell in.
+The major had gone out somewhere--to the theater, I guess--taking his
+wife and Maisie Ann, and the boss and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together
+in the major's den, with a little coal blaze in the basket grate because
+the nights were beginning to get a bit chilly.
+
+As usual when they were together, they made no attempt at privacy: the
+den doorway had no door, nothing but one of those Japanese curtains
+made out of bits of bamboo strung like beads on a lot of strings. I had
+butted in with a telegram--which might just as well have stood over
+until the next morning, if you want to know. After I had delivered it,
+Mrs. Sheila gave me that funny little laugh of hers and told me to go
+hunt in the pantry and see if I could find a piece of pie, and the boss
+added that if I'd wait, he'd go back to town with me pretty soon.
+
+I found the pie, and ate it in the dining-room, making noise enough
+about it so that they could know I was there if they wanted to. But they
+went right on talking, and paid no attention to me.
+
+"Do you know, Sheila"--they had long since got past the "Mr." and
+"Mrs."--"you've been the greatest possible help to me in this
+rough-house, all the way along," the boss was saying. "And I don't
+understand how you, or any woman, can plan so clearly and logically to a
+purely business end. I was just thinking to-night as I came out here:
+you have given me nearly every suggestion I have had that was worth
+anything; more than that, you have held me up to the rack, time and
+again, when I have been ready to throw it all up and let go. Why have
+you done it?"
+
+I heard the little laugh again, and she said: "It is worth something to
+have a friend. Odd as it may seem, Graham, I have been singularly
+poverty-stricken in that respect. And I have wanted to see you succeed.
+Though you are still calling it merely a 'business deal,' it is really a
+mission, you know, crammed full of good things to a struggling world. If
+you do succeed--and I am sure you are going to--you will leave this
+community, and hundreds of others, vastly the better for what you are
+doing and demonstrating."
+
+"But that is a man's point of view," the boss persisted. "How do you get
+it? You are all woman, you know; and your mixing and mingling--at least,
+since I have known you--has all been purely social. How do you get the
+big overlook?"
+
+"I don't know. I was foolish and frivolous once, like most young girls,
+I suppose. But we all grow older; and we ought to grow wiser. Besides,
+the woman has the advantage of the man in one respect; she has time to
+think and plan and reason things out as a busy man can't have. Your
+problem has seemed very simple to me, from the very beginning. It asked
+only for a strong man and an honest one. You were to take charge of a
+piece of property that had been abused and knocked about and used as a
+means of extortion and oppression, and you were to make it good."
+
+"Again, that is a man's point of view."
+
+"Oh, no," she protested quickly. "There is no sex in ethics. Women are
+the natural house-cleaners, perhaps, but that isn't saying that a man
+can't be one, too, if he wants to be."
+
+At this, the boss got up and began to tramp up and down the room; I
+could hear him. I knew she'd been having the biggest kind of a job to
+keep him shut up in this sort of abstract corral, when all the time he
+was loving her fit to kill, but apparently she had been doing it,
+successfully. There wasn't the faintest breath of sentiment in the air;
+not the slightest whiff. When she began again, I could somehow feel that
+she was just in time to prevent his breaking out into all sorts of
+love-making. I shouldn't wonder if that was the way it had been from the
+beginning.
+
+"The time has come, now, when you must take another leaf out of my
+book," she said, with just the proper little cooling tang in her voice.
+"Up to the present you have been hammering your way to the end like a
+strong man, and that was right. But you have been more or less
+reckless--and that isn't right or fair or just to a lot of other
+people."
+
+The tramping stopped and I heard him say: "I don't know what you mean."
+
+"I mean that matters have come to such a pass now that you can't afford
+to take any risks--personal risks. The enmity that caused you to be
+kidnapped and carried away into the mountains still exists, and exists
+in even greater measure. It hasn't stopped fighting you for a single
+minute, and if the plan it is now trying doesn't work, it will try
+another and a more desperate one."
+
+"You've been talking to Ripley," he laughed. "Ripley wants me to become
+a gun-toter and provide myself with a body-guard. I'd look well,
+wouldn't I? But what do you mean by 'the plan it is now trying'?"
+
+She hesitated a little, and then said: "I shall make no charges, because
+I have no proof. But I read the newspapers, and Mr. Van Britt tells me
+something, now and then. You are having a terrible lot of wrecks."
+
+"That is merely bad luck," he rejoined easily, adding: "And the wrecks
+have nothing to do with my personal safety."
+
+"Rashness is no part of true courage," she interpolated, calmly. "As a
+private individual you might say that your life is your own, and that
+you have a perfect right to risk it as you please. But as the general
+manager of the railroad, with a lot of your friends holding office under
+you, you can't say that. Besides, you are fighting for a cause, and that
+cause will stand or fall with you."
+
+"You ought to be a member of this new reform legislature that some of
+our good friends think is coming up the pike," he chuckled; but she
+ignored the good-natured gibe and made him listen.
+
+"I was visiting a day or two at the capital last week, and there are
+influences at work that you don't know about. It has grown away past and
+beyond any mere fight with the Hatch people. If the opposition can't
+make your administration a failure, it won't hesitate to get rid of you
+in the easiest way that offers."
+
+There was silence in the major's den for a minute or so, and then the
+boss said:
+
+"As usual, you know more than you are willing to tell me."
+
+"Perhaps not," was the prompt answer. "Perhaps I am only the
+onlooker--who can usually see things rather better than the persons
+actually involved. Hitherto I have urged you to be bold, and then again
+to be bold. Now I am begging you to be prudent."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"Careful for yourself. For example: you walked out here this evening;
+don't do that any more. Come in a taxi--and don't come alone."
+
+I couldn't see his frown of disagreement, but I knew well enough it was
+there.
+
+"There spoke the woman in you," he said. "If I should show the white
+feather that way, they'd have some excuse for potting me."
+
+There was a silence again, and I got up quietly and crossed the
+dining-room to the big recessed window where I stood looking out into
+the darkness of the tree-shaded lawn. It was pretty evident that Mrs.
+Sheila knew a heap more than she was telling the boss, just as he had
+said, and I couldn't help wondering how she came to know it. What she
+said about the increased number of wrecks looked like a pointer. Was she
+in touch with the enemy in some way?
+
+I knew that Major Kendrick heard all the gossip of the streets and the
+clubs, and that he carried a good bit of it home; but that wouldn't
+account for much inside knowledge of the real thing in Mrs. Sheila. Then
+my mind went back in a flash to what Maisie Ann had told me. Was the
+husband who ought to be dead, and wasn't, mixed up in it in any way?
+Could it be possible that he was one of those who were in the fight on
+the other side, and that she was still keeping in touch with him?
+
+Pretty soon I heard the murmur of their voices again, but now I was so
+far away from the bamboo-screened door that I couldn't hear what they
+were saying. I wished they would break it off so the boss could go. It
+was getting late, and there had been enough said to make me wish we were
+both safely back in the hotel. It's that way sometimes, you know, in
+spite of all you can do. You hear a talk, and you can't help reading
+between the lines. I knew, as well as I knew that I was alive, that
+Mrs. Sheila meant more than she had said: perhaps more than she had
+dared to say.
+
+It was while I was standing there in the big window, sweating over the
+way the talk in the other room was dragging itself out, that I saw the
+man on the lawn. At first I thought it was Tarbell, who was never very
+far out of reach when the boss was running loose. But the next minute I
+saw I was mistaken. The man under the trees looked as if he might be an
+English tourist. He had on a long traveling coat that came nearly to his
+heels, and his cap was the kind that has two visors, one in front and
+the other behind.
+
+Realizing that it wasn't Tarbell, I stood perfectly still. The house was
+lighted with gas, and the dining-room chandelier had been turned down,
+so there was a chance that the skulker under the trees wouldn't see me
+standing in the corner of the box window. To make it surer, I edged away
+until the curtain hid me. I was just in time. The man had crept out of
+his hiding-place and was coming up to the window on the outside. As he
+passed through the dim beam of light thrown by the turned-down
+chandelier, I saw that he had a pistol in his hand, or a weapon of some
+kind; anyway, I caught the glint of the gas-light on dull steel.
+
+That stirred me up good and plenty. I still had the gun I had taken out
+of Fred May's drawer; I had carried it ever since the night when it had
+mighty nearly got me killed off in the Red Tower coal yard. I fished it
+out and made ready, thinking, of course, that the skulker must certainly
+be one of Clanahan's gunmen. I still had that idea when I felt, rather
+than saw, that the man was pulling himself up to the window so that he
+could take a look into the dining-room.
+
+The look satisfied him, apparently, for the next second I heard him drop
+among the bushes; and when I stood up and looked out again I could just
+make him out going around toward the back of the house. Thanks to Maisie
+Ann and the pantry excursions, I knew the house like a book, and without
+making any noise about it I slipped through the butler's pantry and got
+a look out of a rear window. My man was there, and he was working his
+way sort of blindly around to the den side of the place.
+
+I guess maybe I ought to have given the alarm. But I knew there was only
+one window in the major's den room, and that was nearly opposite the
+screened doorway. So I ducked back into the dining-room and took a stand
+where I could see the one window through the door-curtain net-work of
+bamboo beads. I was so excited that I caught only snatches of what Mrs.
+Sheila was saying to the boss, but the bits that I heard were a good
+deal to the point.
+
+"No, I mean it, Graham ... it is as I told you at first ... there is no
+standing room for either of us on that ground ... and you must not come
+here again when you know that I am alone.... No, Jimmie _isn't_ enough!"
+
+I wrenched the half-working ear-sense aside and jammed it into my eyes,
+concentrating hard on the window at which I expected every second to see
+a man's face. If the man was a murderer, I thought I could beat him to
+it. He would have to look in first before he could fire; and the boss
+and Mrs. Sheila were at the other end of the room, sitting before the
+little blaze in the grate.
+
+The suspense didn't last very long. A hand came up first to push the
+window vines aside. It was a white hand, long and slender, more like a
+woman's than a man's. Then against the glass I saw the face, and it gave
+me such a turn that I thought I must be going batty.
+
+Instead of the ugly mug of one of Clanahan's gunmen, the haggard face
+framed in the window sash was a face that I had seen once--and only
+once--before; on a certain Sunday night in the Bullard when the
+loose-lipped mouth belonging to it had been babbling drunken curses at
+the night clerk. The man at the window was the dissipated young rounder
+who had been pointed out as the nephew of President Dunton.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+The Name on the Register
+
+
+So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one
+of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought
+I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I
+really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough
+question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the
+sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the
+other side of that window--and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw
+that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.
+
+What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major
+Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and
+peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the
+beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the
+sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end
+of the room where the fireplace was.
+
+Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he
+should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either
+the boss or Mrs. Sheila--if that was what he was aiming to do. All the
+same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the
+door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's
+nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.
+
+While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his
+cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the
+boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as
+usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."
+
+Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and
+stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick
+padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the
+rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major
+and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol
+and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt
+the boss's hand on my shoulder.
+
+"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a
+minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs.
+Kendrick, we got out.
+
+At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With
+the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I
+grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for
+us.
+
+"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man
+stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something
+to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on
+the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and
+started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and
+put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.
+
+When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I
+had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it
+over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names
+written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I
+found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y."
+Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had
+come in from the West--which was a bit puzzling, since it left the
+inference that he wasn't direct from New York.
+
+Waiting for a good chance at the night clerk, I ventured a few
+questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwood
+_had_ come in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week
+earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now,
+but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on
+the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk
+didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for
+me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the
+badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr.
+Bullock was a lawyer.
+
+I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all
+conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising,
+early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same,
+after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box,
+I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my
+eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder
+should show up.
+
+That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep
+habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or
+whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage
+porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express
+westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with
+two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.
+
+When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night
+clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his
+grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto
+so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone
+for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next
+got a sight of him--from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of
+the bar-room colonnade--he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if
+it were water and he on fire inside.
+
+That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to
+the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train
+auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had
+found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of
+nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was
+getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and
+made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open
+register.
+
+A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying
+lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never
+showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash.
+When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our
+maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to
+obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master
+of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what
+the name was.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The Hoodoo
+
+
+It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard
+cafe--the boss and I--that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck.
+The story was red-headlined in the _Morning Herald_--the Hatch-owned
+paper--and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns,
+there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the
+track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a
+delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no
+lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal
+clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.
+
+The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the
+Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such
+thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the
+rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with
+this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried
+department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college
+friends--which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only
+millionaire.
+
+Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As
+I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With
+the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new
+"public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a
+single week without smashing something.
+
+Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross
+management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and
+nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors
+into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising
+storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.
+
+Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and
+afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office,
+Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.
+
+"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own
+copy of the _Herald_. "Did you read that editorial?"
+
+The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see
+in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."
+
+"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.
+
+"Never mind the newspaper talk," the boss interjected. "How bad is the
+trouble this time?"
+
+"Pretty bad. I've just had Brockman on the wire from Alicante. The
+freight is practically a total loss; a good half of it is in the river.
+Kirgan says he can pick the freight engine up and rebuild it; but the
+passenger machine is a wreck."
+
+"How did it happen?"
+
+"It's like a good many of the others. Nobody seems to know. Brockman put
+the freight engine crew on the rack, and they say there was a small
+boulder on the track--that it rolled down the canyon slope just ahead of
+them as they were turning a curve. They struck it, and both men say that
+the engine knocked it off into the river apparently without hurting
+anything. But two seconds later the entire train left the track and
+piled up all over the right-of-way."
+
+"The engineer and fireman weren't hurt?"
+
+"No; they both jumped on the high side. But, of course, they were pretty
+badly shaken up. Riggs, the fireman, got out of the raffle first and
+tried to flag the passenger train, but he was too late."
+
+The boss was sitting back in his chair and making little rings on the
+desk blotter with the point of his letter-opener.
+
+"Upton, these knock-outs have got to be stopped."
+
+"Good Lord!" exclaimed the little millionaire; "you don't have to tell
+me that! If we can't stop 'em, Uncle Dunton will have plenty of good
+reasons for cleaning us all out, lock, stock, and barrel! I was talking
+with Carter, in the claim office, this morning. Our loss and damage
+account for the past month is something frightful!"
+
+"It is," said the boss gravely. And then: "Upton, we're not altogether
+as bright as we might be. Has it never occurred to you that we are
+having too much bad luck to warrant us in charging it all up to the
+chapter of accidents?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt blew his cheeks out until the stubby, cropped mustache
+bristled like porcupine quills.
+
+"So you've been getting your pointer, too, have you?" he threw in.
+
+Mr. Norcross didn't answer the question directly.
+
+"Put Tarbell on the job, and if he needs help, let him pick his own
+men," he directed. "We want to know why that boulder tumbled down ahead
+of Number Seventeen, and I want to see Tarbell's report on it. Keep at
+it night and day, Upton. The infection is getting into the rank and file
+and it's spreading like a sickness. You've railroaded long enough to
+know what that means. If it becomes psychological, we shall have all the
+trouble we need."
+
+"I know," nodded the superintendent. "I went through a siege of that
+kind on the Great Southwestern, one winter. It was horrible. Men who had
+been running trains year in and year out, and never knowing that they
+had any nerves, went to pieces if you'd snap your fingers at them."
+
+"That's it," said the boss. "We don't want to fall into that ditch.
+Things are quite bad enough, as they are."
+
+This ended it for the time. The Petrolite Canyon wreck was picked up,
+the track was cleared, and once more our trains were moving on time. But
+anybody could see that the entire Short Line had a case of "nerves."
+Kirgan, Kirgan the cold-blooded, showed it one afternoon when I went
+over to his office to return a bunch of blue-prints sent in for the
+boss's approval. The big master-mechanic had a round-house foreman "on
+the carpet" and was harrying him like the dickens for letting an engine
+go out with one of her truck safety chains hanging loose.
+
+Ever since we had gone together on the rescue run to Timber Mountain,
+Mart and I had been sort of chummy, and after the foreman had gone away
+with his foot in his hand, I joshed Kirgan a little about the way he had
+hammered the round-house man.
+
+"Maybe I did, Jimmie," he said, half as if he were already sorry for the
+cussing out. "But the shape we're getting into is enough to make an
+angel bawl. Why, Great Moses! a crew can't take an engine out here in
+the yard to do a common job o' switchin' without breakin' something 'r
+hurtin' somebody!"
+
+"Bad medicine," I told him. "It's worrying the bosses, too. What's doing
+it, Mart?"
+
+"Maybe you can tell," he growled. "It's a hoodoo--that's what _it_ is.
+Seven engines in the shops in the last nine days, and three more that
+haven't been fished out-a the ditch yet. I wish Mr. Van Britt 'd fire
+the whole jumpy outfit!"
+
+It didn't seem as though firing was needed so much as a dose of nerve
+tonic of some sort. Tarbell was working hard on the problem, quietly,
+and without making any talk about it, and Kirgan was giving him all the
+men he asked for from the shops; quick-witted fellows who were up in all
+the mechanical details, and who made better spotters than outsiders
+would because they knew the road and the ropes. But it was no use. I saw
+some of Tarbell's reports, and they didn't show any crookedness. It
+seemed to be just bad luck--one landslide after another of it.
+
+Meanwhile, New York had waked up again. President Dunton had been off
+the job somewhere, I guess, but now he was back, and the things he wired
+to the boss were enough to make your hair stand on end. I looked every
+day to see Mr. Norcross pitch the whole shooting-match into the fire
+and quit, cold.
+
+He'd never taken anything like Mr. Dunton's abuse from anybody before,
+and he couldn't seem to get hardened to it. But he was loyal to Mr.
+Chadwick; and, of course, he knew that Mr. Dunton's hot wires were meant
+to nag him into resigning. Then there was Mrs. Sheila. I sort of
+suspected she was holding him up to the rack, every day and every minute
+of the day. No doubt she was.
+
+It was one evening after he had been out to the major's for just a
+little while, and had come back to the office, that he sent for Mr. Van
+Britt, who was also working late. There was blood on the moon, and I saw
+it in the way the boss's jaw was working.
+
+"Upton," he began, as short as pie-crust, "have you thought of any way
+to break this wreck hoodoo yet?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt sat down and crossed his solid little legs.
+
+"If I had, I shouldn't be losing sleep at the rate of five or six hours
+a night," he rasped.
+
+"There's one thing that we haven't tried," the boss shot back. "We've
+been advertising it as bad luck, keeping our own suspicions to ourselves
+and letting the men believe what they pleased. We'll change all that. I
+want you to call your trainmen in as fast as you can get at them. Tell
+them--from me, if you want to--that there isn't any bad luck about it;
+that the enemies of this management are making an organized raid on the
+property itself for the purpose of putting us out of the fight. Tell
+them the whole story, if you want to: how we're trying our best to make
+a spoon out of a spoiled horn, and how there is an army of grafters and
+wreckers in this State which is doing its worst to knock us out of the
+box."
+
+Mr. Van Britt uncrossed his legs and sat staring for a second or two.
+Then he whistled and said: "By Jove! Have you caught 'em with the goods,
+at last?"
+
+"No," was the curt reply. "Call it a ruse, if you like: it's
+justifiable, and it will work. If you give the force something tangible
+to lay hold of, it will work the needed miracle. It is only the
+mysterious that terrifies. Railroad employees, as a whole, are perfectly
+intelligent human beings, open to conviction. The management which
+doesn't profit by that fact is lame. If you do this and appeal to the
+loyalty of the men, you will make a private detective out of every man
+in the train service, and every one of them keen to be the first to
+catch the wreckers. You can add a bit of a reward for that, if you like,
+and I'll pay it out of my own bank account."
+
+For a full minute our captive millionaire didn't say a word. Then he
+grinned like a good-natured little Chinese god.
+
+"Who gave you this idea of taking the pay-roll into your confidence,
+Graham?" he asked softly.
+
+For the first time in all the weeks and months I'd been knowing him, the
+boss dodged; dodged just like any of us might.
+
+"I've been talking to Major Kendrick," he said. "He is a wise old man,
+Upton, and he hears a good many things that don't get printed in the
+newspapers."
+
+I could see that this excuse didn't fool Mr. Van Britt for a single
+instant, and there was a look in his eye that I couldn't quite
+understand. Neither could I make much out of what he said.
+
+"We'll go into that a little deeper some day, Graham--after this
+epileptic attack has been fought off. This idea--which you confess isn't
+your own--is a pretty shrewd one, and I shouldn't wonder if it would
+work, if we can get it in motion before the hoodoo breaks us wide open.
+And, as you say, the accusation is justifiable, even if we can't prove
+up against the Hatch outfit. That turned-over rail in Petrolite Canyon,
+for example, might have been helped along by----"
+
+It was Kelso, Mr. Van Britt's stenographer, who smashed in with the
+interruption. He was in his shirt-sleeves, as if he'd just got up from
+his typewriter, and he rushed in with his mouth open and his eyes like
+saucers.
+
+"They--they want you in the despatcher's office!" he panted, jerking the
+words out at Mr. Van Britt. "Durgin has let Number Five get by for a
+head-ender with the 'Flyer,' and he's gone crazy!"
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+The Helpless Wires
+
+
+When Bobby Kelso shot his news at us we all made a quick break for the
+despatcher's office, the boss in the lead. It was a big bare room
+flanking Mr. Van Britt's quarters at the western end of the second floor
+corridor and the windows looked out upon the yard twinkling with its red
+and yellow and green switch lights.
+
+Durgin, the night despatcher, had been alone on the train desk, and the
+only other operators on duty were the car-record man and the young
+fellow who acted as a relief on the commercial wire. When we got there,
+we found that Tarbell had happened to be in the office when Durgin blew
+up. He was sitting in at the train key, trying to get the one
+intermediate wire station between the two trains that had failed to get
+their "meet" orders, and this was the first I knew that he really was
+the expert telegraph operator that his pay-roll description said he was.
+
+Durgin looked like a tortured ghost. He was a thin, dark man with a
+sort of scattering beard and limp black hair; one of the clearest-headed
+despatchers in the bunch, and the very last man, you'd say, to get
+rattled in a tangle-up. Yet here he was, hunched in a chair at the
+car-record table in the corner, a staring-eyed, pallid-faced wreck, with
+the sweat standing in big drops on his forehead and his hands shaking as
+if he had the palsy.
+
+Morris, the relief man, gave us the particulars, such as they were,
+speaking in a hushed voice as if he was afraid of breaking in on
+Tarbell's steady rattling of the key in the Crow Gulch station call.
+
+"Number Four"--Four was the eastbound "Flyer"--"is five hours off her
+time," he explained. "As near as I can get it, Durgin was going to make
+her 'meet' with Number Five at the blind siding at Sand Creek tank. She
+ought to have had her orders somewhere west of Bauxite Junction, and
+Five ought to have got hers at Banta. Durgin says he simply forgot that
+the 'Flyer' was running late: that she was still out and had a 'meet' to
+make somewhere with Five."
+
+Brief as Morris's explanation was, it was clear enough for anybody who
+knew the road and the schedules. The regular meeting-point for the two
+passenger trains was at a point well east of Portal City, instead of
+west, and so, of course, would not concern the Desert Division crew of
+either train, since all crews were changed at Portal City. From Banta
+to Bauxite Junction, some thirty-odd miles, there was only one telegraph
+station, namely, that at the Crow Gulch lumber camp, seven miles beyond
+the Timber Mountain "Y" and the gravel pit where the stolen 1016 had
+been abandoned.
+
+Unluckily, Crow Gulch was only a day station, the day wires being
+handled by a young man who was half in the pay of the railroad and half
+in that of the saw-mill company. This young man slept at the mill camp,
+which was a mile back in the gulch. There was only one chance in a
+thousand that he would be down at the railroad station at ten o'clock at
+night, and it was on that thousandth chance that Tarbell was rattling
+the Crow Gulch call. If Five were making her card time, she was now
+about half-way between Timber Mountain "Y" and Crow Gulch. And Four, the
+"Flyer," had just left Bauxite--with no orders whatever. Which meant
+that the two trains would come together somewhere near Sand Greek, one
+of them, at least, running like the mischief to make up what time she
+could.
+
+Mr. Van Britt was as good a wire man as anybody on the line, but it was
+the boss who took things in hand.
+
+"There is a long-distance telephone to the Crow Gulch saw-mill; have you
+tried that?" he barked at Tarbell.
+
+The big young fellow who looked like a cow-boy--and had really been one,
+they said--glanced up and nodded: "The call's in," he responded.
+"'Central' says she can't raise anybody."
+
+"What was Four's report from Bauxite?"
+
+"Four hours and fifty-two minutes off time."
+
+"That will bring them together somewhere in the hill curves this side of
+Sand Creek," the boss said to Mr. Van Britt; "just where there is the
+least chance of their seeing each other before they hit." Then to
+Tarbell: "Try Bauxite and find out if there is a pusher engine there
+that can be sent out to chase the 'Flyer'."
+
+Tarbell nodded without breaking his monotonous repetition of the Crow
+Gulch call.
+
+"I did that first," he put in. "There's an engine there, and they're
+getting her out. But it's a slim chance; the 'Flyer' has too good a
+start."
+
+For the next three or four minutes the tension was something fierce. The
+boss and Mr. Van Britt hung over the train desk, and Tarbell kept up his
+insistent clatter at the key. I had an eye on Durgin. He was still
+hunched up in the record-man's chair, and to all appearances had gone
+stone-blind crazy. Yet I couldn't get rid of the idea that he was
+listening--listening as if all of his sealed-up senses had turned in to
+intensify the one of hearing.
+
+Just about the time when the suspense had grown so keen that it seemed
+as if it couldn't be borne a second longer, Morris, who was sitting in
+at the office phone, called out sharply: "Long-distance says she has
+Crow Gulch lumber camp!"
+
+Mr. Van Britt jumped to take the phone, and we got one side of the
+talk--our side--in shot-like sentences:
+
+"That you, Bertram? All right; this is Van Britt, at Portal City. Take
+one of the mules and ride for your life down the gulch to the station!
+Get that? Stop Number Five and make her take siding quick. Report over
+your own wire what you do. _Hurry!_"
+
+By the time Mr. Van Britt got back to the train desk, the boss had his
+pencil out and was figuring on Bertram's time margin. It was now
+ten-twelve, and Five's time at Crow Gulch was ten-eighteen. The Crow
+Gulch operator had just six minutes in which to get his mule and cover
+the rough mile down the gulch.
+
+"He'll never make it," said Tarbell, who knew the gulch road. "Our only
+chance on that lay is that Five may happen to be a few minutes late--and
+she was right on the dot at Banta."
+
+There was nothing to do but wait, and the waiting was savage. Tarbell
+had a nerve of iron, but I could see his hand shake as it lay on the
+glass-topped table. The boss was cool enough outwardly, but I knew that
+in his brain there was a heart-breaking picture of those two fast
+passenger trains rushing together in the night among the hills with no
+hint of warning to help them save themselves. Mr. Van Britt couldn't
+keep still. He had his hands jammed in the side pockets of his coat and
+was pacing back and forth in the little space between the train desk and
+the counter railing.
+
+At the different tables in the room the sounders were clicking away as
+if nothing were happening or due to happen, and above the spattering din
+and clatter you could hear the escapement of the big standard-time clock
+on the wall, hammering out the seconds that might mean life or death to
+two or three hundred innocent people.
+
+In that horrible suspense the six minutes pulled themselves out to an
+eternity for that little bunch of us in the despatcher's office who
+could do nothing but wait. On the stroke of ten-eighteen, the time when
+Five was due at Crow Gulch on her schedule, Tarbell tuned his relay to
+catch the first faint tappings from the distant day-station. Another
+sounder was silent. There was hope in the delay, and Morris voiced it.
+
+"He's there, and he's too busy to talk to us," he suggested, in a hushed
+voice; and Disbrow, the car-record man, added: "That's it; it'd take a
+minute or two to get them in on the siding."
+
+The second minute passed, and then a third, and yet there was no word
+from Bertram. "Call him," snapped the boss to Tarbell, but before the
+ex-cowboy's hand could reach the key, the sounder began to rattle out a
+string of dots and dashes; ragged Morse it was, but we could all read it
+only too plainly.
+
+"Too late--mule threw me and I had to crawl and drag a game leg--Five
+passed full speed at ten-nineteen--I couldn't make it."
+
+I saw the boss's hands shut up as though the finger nails would cut into
+the palms.
+
+"That ends it," he said, with a sort of swearing groan in his voice; and
+then to Tarbell: "You may as well call Kirgan and tell him to order out
+the wrecking train. Then have Perkins make up a relief train while
+you're calling the doctors. Van Britt, you go and notify the hospital
+over your own office wire. Have my private car put into the relief, and
+see to it that it has all the necessary supplies. And you'd better
+notify the undertakers, too."
+
+Great Joash! but it was horrible--for us to be hustling around and
+making arrangements for the funeral while the people who were to be
+gathered up and buried were still swinging along live and well, half of
+them in the crookings among the Timber Mountain foot-hills and the other
+half somewhere in the desert stretches below Sand Creek!
+
+Tarbell had sent Disbrow to the phone to call Kirgan, and Mr. Van Britt
+was turning away to go to his own office, when the chair in the corner
+by the car-record table fell over backwards with a crash and Durgin came
+staggering across the room. He was staring straight ahead of him as if
+he had gone blind, and the sweat was running down his face to lose
+itself in the straggling beard.
+
+When he spoke his voice seemed to come from away off somewhere, and he
+was still staring at the blank wall beyond the counter-railing.
+
+"Did I--did I hear somebody say you're sending for the undertakers?" he
+choked, with a dry rattle in his throat; and then, without waiting for
+an answer: "While you're at it, you'd better get one for me ... there's
+the money to pay him," and he tossed a thick roll of bank bills, wrapped
+around with a rubber band, over to Tarbell at the train desk.
+
+Naturally, the little grand-stand play with the bank roll made a
+diversion, and that is why the muffled crash of a pistol shot came with
+a startling shock to everybody. When we turned to look, the mischief was
+done. Durgin had crumpled down into a misshapen heap on the floor and
+the sight we saw was enough to make your blood run cold.
+
+You see, he had put the muzzle of the pistol into his mouth, and--but
+it's no use: I can't tell about it, and the very thought of that thing
+that had just a minute before been a man, lying there on the floor
+makes me see black and want to keel over. What he had said about sending
+for an extra undertaker was right as right. With the top of his head
+blown off, the poor devil didn't need anything more in this world except
+the burying.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+Billy Morris Explains
+
+
+Somebody has said, mighty truthfully, that even a death in the family
+doesn't stop the common routine; that the things that have to be done
+will go grinding on, just the same, whether all of us live, or some of
+us die. Disbrow had jumped from the telephone at the crash of Durgin's
+shot, and for just a second or so we all stood around the dead
+despatcher, nobody making a move.
+
+Then Mr. Norcross came alive with a jerk, telling Disbrow to get back on
+his job of calling out the wreck wagons and the relief train, and
+directing Bobby Kelso to go to another 'phone and call an undertaker to
+come and get Durgin's body. Tarbell turned back to the train desk to
+keep things from getting into a worse tangle than they already were in,
+and to wait for the dreadful news, and the boss stood by him.
+
+This second wait promised to be the worst of all. The collision was due
+to happen miles from the nearest wire station; the news, when we should
+get it, would probably be carried back to Bauxite Junction by the pusher
+engine which had gone out to try to overtake the "Flyer." But even in
+that case it might be an agonizing hour or more before we could hear
+anything.
+
+In a little while Disbrow had clicked in his call to Kirgan, and when
+the undertaker's wagon came to gather up what was left of the dead
+despatcher, the car-record man was hurriedly writing off his list of
+doctors, and Mr. Van Britt had gone down to superintend the making up of
+the relief train. True to his theory, which, among other things, laid
+down the broad principle that the public had a right to be given all the
+facts in a railroad disaster, Mr. Norcross was just telling me to call
+up the _Mountaineer_ office, when Tarbell, calmly inking time reports
+upon the train sheet, flung down his pen and snatched at his key to
+"break" the chattering sounder.
+
+Mr. Van Britt had come up-stairs again, and he and the boss were both
+standing over Tarbell when the "G-S" break cleared the wire. Instantly
+there came a quick call, "G-S" "G-S," followed by the signature, "B-J"
+for Bauxite Junction. Tarbell answered, and then we all heard what
+Bauxite had to say:
+
+"_Pusher overtook Number Four three miles west of Sand Creek and has
+brought her back here. What orders for her?_"
+
+Somebody groaned, "Oh, thank God!" and Mr. Van Britt dropped into a
+chair as if he had been hit by a cannon ball. Only the boss kept his
+head, calling out sharply to Disbrow to break off on the doctors' list
+and to hurry and stop Kirgan from getting away with the wrecking train.
+Then, as curtly as if it were all merely a matter of routine, he told
+Tarbell what to do; how he was to give the "Flyer" orders to wait at
+Bauxite for Number Five, and then to proceed under time-card regulations
+to Portal City.
+
+When it was all over, and Tarbell had been given charge of the
+despatching while a hurry call was sent out for the night relief man,
+Donohue, to come down and take the train desk, there was a little
+committee meeting in the general manager's office, with the boss in the
+chair, and Mr. Van Britt sitting in for the other member.
+
+"Of course, you've drawn your own conclusions, Upton," the boss began,
+when he had asked me to shut the door.
+
+"I guess so," was the grave rejoinder. "I'm afraid it is only too plain
+that Durgin was hired to do it. What became of the money?"
+
+"I have it here," said the boss, and he took the blood-money bank-roll
+from his pocket and removed the rubber band. "Count it, Jimmie," he
+ordered, passing it to me.
+
+I ran through the bunch. It was in twenties and fifties, and there was
+an even thousand dollars.
+
+"That is the price of a man's life," said Mr. Van Britt, soberly, and
+then Mr. Norcross said, "Who knows anything about Durgin? Was he a
+married man?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt shook his head.
+
+"He had been married, but he and his wife didn't live together. He had
+no relatives here. I knew him in the southwest two years ago. He'd had
+domestic trouble of some kind, and didn't mix or mingle much with the
+other men. But he was a good despatcher, and two months ago, when we had
+an opening here, I sent for him."
+
+"You think there is no doubt but that he was bribed to put those trains
+together to-night?"
+
+"None in the least--only I wish we had a little better proof of it."
+
+"Where did he live?"
+
+"He boarded at Mrs. Chandler's, out on Cross Street. Morris boards
+there, too, I believe."
+
+The boss turned to me.
+
+"Jimmie, go and get Morris."
+
+I carried the call and brought Morris back with me. He was a cheerful,
+red-headed fellow, and everybody liked him.
+
+"It isn't a 'sweat-box' session, Morris," said the boss, quietly, when
+we came in and the relief operator sat down, sort of half scared, on the
+edge of a chair. "We want to know something more about Durgin. He
+roomed at your place, didn't he?"
+
+Morris admitted it, but said he'd never been very chummy with the
+despatcher; that Durgin wasn't chummy with anybody. Then the boss went
+straight to the point, as he usually did.
+
+"You were present and saw all that happened in the other room. Can you
+tell us anything about that money?" pointing to the pile of bills on my
+desk.
+
+Billy Morris wriggled himself into a little better chair-hold. "Nothing
+that would be worth telling, if things hadn't turned out just as they
+have," he returned. "But now I guess I know. I left Mrs. Chandler's this
+evening about seven o'clock to come on duty, and Durgin was just ahead
+of me. Some fellow--a man in a snuff-colored overcoat and with a soft
+hat pulled down so that I couldn't see his face--stopped Durgin on the
+sidewalk, and they talked together."
+
+"Go on," said Mr. Van Britt.
+
+"I didn't hear what was said; I was up on the stoop, trying to make Mrs.
+Chandler's broken door latch work to hold the door shut. But I saw the
+overcoated man pass something to Durgin, and saw Durgin put whatever it
+was into his pocket. Then the other man dodged and went away, and did it
+so quick that I didn't see which way he went or what became of him. I
+walked on down the steps after I had got the door to stay shut and tried
+to overtake Durgin--just to walk on down here with him. But I guess he
+must have run after he left the corner, for I didn't see anything more
+of him until I got to the office."
+
+"He was there when you came in?" It was Mr. Norcross who wanted to know.
+
+"Yes. He had his coat off and was at work on the train sheet."
+
+"That was a little after seven," said Mr. Van Britt. "What happened
+between that and ten o'clock?"
+
+"Nothing. Disbrow was busy at his table, and I had some work to do,
+though not very much. I don't think Durgin left his chair, or said
+anything to anybody until he jumped up and began to walk the floor,
+taking on and saying that he'd put Four and Five together on the single
+track. Just then, Tarbell came in and jumped for the train key, and I
+ran out to give the alarm."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and then the boss said, "That's
+all, Morris; all but one thing. Do you think you would recognize the man
+in the snuff-colored overcoat, if you should see him again?"
+
+"Yes, I might; if he had on the same coat and hat."
+
+"That will do, then. Keep this thing to yourself, and if the newspaper
+people come after you, send them to Mr. Van Britt or to me."
+
+After Morris had gone, Mr. Van Britt shook his head sort of savagely.
+
+"It's hell, Graham!" he ripped out, bouncing to his feet and beginning
+to tramp up and down the room. "To think that these devils would take
+the chance of murdering a lot of totally innocent people to gain their
+end! What are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I don't know yet, Upton; but I am going to do something. This state of
+affairs can't go on. The simplest thing is for me to throw up the job
+and let the Short Line drop back into the old rut. I'm not sure that it
+wouldn't save a good many lives in the end if I should do it. And yet it
+seems such a cowardly thing to do--to resign under fire."
+
+Mr. Van Britt had his hand on the door-knob, and what he said made me
+warm to my finger-tips.
+
+"We're all standing by you, Graham; all, you understand--to the last man
+and the last ditch. And you're not going to pitch it up; you're going to
+stay until you have thrown the harpoon into these high-binders, clear up
+to the hitchings. That's my prophecy. The trouble's over for to-night,
+and you'd better go up to the hotel and turn in. There is another day
+coming, or if there isn't, it won't make any difference to any of us.
+Good-night."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+What the Pilot Engine Found
+
+
+For a time after the suicide of the off-trick-despatcher the wreck
+epidemic paused. Acting upon Mr. Norcross's suggestion, Mr. Van Britt
+called his trainmen in, a crew at a time, and gave them the straight
+tip; and after that the hoodoo died a natural death, and a good many
+pairs of eyes all along the Short Line were keeping a sharp lookout for
+the trouble-makers.
+
+In the meantime, Tarbell, still digging faithfully, managed to turn up a
+few facts that were worth something. In the Petrolite case he found a
+lone prospector living in a shack high up on the farther side of the
+canyon who told him that late in the evening of the day preceding the
+wreck he had seen two men climbing the slope from which the boulder had
+been dislodged, and that one of them was carrying a pick. Also, further
+investigation seemed to prove that the rail which the blow of the rock
+was supposed to have knocked loose had been previously weakened, either
+by drawing some of the spikes, or by unscrewing the nuts on the bolts at
+the joints.
+
+In another field, and this time under Ripley's instructions, our
+ex-cow-punch' had been able to set and bait a trap. By diligent search
+he had found the man Murphy, the Clanahan henchman, who, under pressure,
+had given away the Timber Mountain plot which had climaxed in the
+kidnapping of the boss. This man had been deliberately shot in a
+bar-room brawl and left for dead. But he had crawled away and had got
+out of town to live and recover at a distant cattle ranch in the
+Limberton Hills.
+
+When Tarbell discovered him he had cut out the booze, had grown a beard,
+and was thirsting for vengeance. Tarbell brought him back to Portal
+City, and presently there began to be developments. Murphy knew all the
+ropes. In a little time, Ripley, with Tarbell's help, was loaded for
+bear. One chilly October afternoon the lawyer came down to our office to
+tell Mr. Norcross that the game was cornered.
+
+"All you have to do now is to give the word," was the way Ripley wound
+up. "You refused to do it on a former occasion because we couldn't get
+the men higher up. This time we can nail Clanahan, and a good few of the
+political gangsters and bosses in the other towns along the line. What
+do you say?"
+
+The boss looked up with the little horse-shoe frown wrinkling between
+his eyes.
+
+"Can we get Hatch and Henckel?"
+
+"No; not yet."
+
+"Very well; then you may lock those papers up in your safe and we'll
+wait. When you can see your way clear to a criminal trial, with Rufus
+Hatch and Gustave Henckel in the prisoner's dock, we'll start the legal
+machinery: but not before."
+
+By now we were right on the eve of the State election. As far as anybody
+could see, the railroad had stayed free and clear of the political
+fight. The boss had kept his promise to maintain neutrality and was
+still keeping it.
+
+At the appointed time the big day dawned, and the political wind-up held
+the center of the stage. So far as we were concerned, it passed off very
+quietly. From the wire gossip that dribbled in during the day it
+appeared that the railroad vote was heavy, though there were neither
+charges nor counter-charges to indicate which way it had been thrown.
+
+Along in the afternoon the newspaper offices began to put out bulletins,
+and by evening the result was no longer doubtful. For the first time in
+years the power of the political machine had been smashed decisively at
+the polls, and on the following morning the _Mountaineer_ announced the
+election of Governor Burrell, with a safe working majority in both
+houses of the Legislature for the Independents.
+
+Naturally, there was all sorts of a yell from the other side of the
+fence. Charges were freely made, now, that the railroad had deliberately
+ditched its friends, and all that. Also there were the bluest kind of
+predictions for the future, most of them winding up with the assertion
+that there could be no such thing as true prosperity for the country
+while the Short Line continued under its present management.
+
+It was on the third day after the election, rather late in the
+afternoon, that the boss had a call from a mining promoter named Dawes,
+representing a bunch of mine owners at Strathcona who were having
+trouble with the smelter.
+
+I was busy at the time and didn't pay much attention to what was said,
+but I got the drift of it. The smelter, one of the few Hatch monopolies
+which hadn't been shaken loose as yet, was located in the gulch six
+miles below Strathcona, and it was served exclusively by its own
+industrial railroad, which it was using as a lever to pry an excessive
+hauling charge out of the mine owners. Wouldn't Mr. Norcross try to do
+something about it?
+
+The boss said he'd do anything he could, and asked what the mine owners
+wanted. Dawes said they wanted help; that they were going to hold a mass
+meeting in Strathcona the following morning at nine o'clock. Would it,
+or wouldn't it, be possible for Mr. Norcross to be present at that
+meeting?
+
+Of course, the boss said he'd go. It meant the better part of a night's
+run, special, in the private car, but that didn't make any difference.
+Dawes went away, and before we broke off to go to dinner at the railroad
+club, I was given a memorandum order for the special.
+
+At the club I found that Mr. Norcross had an invited guest--Major
+Kendrick. For a week or two Mrs. Sheila had been visiting at the State
+capital, and the major's wife and Maisie Ann were with her. So the good
+old major was sort of unattached, and glad enough, I took it, to be a
+guest at anybody's table.
+
+For a while the table talk--in which, of course, Jimmie Dodds hadn't any
+part whatever--circled around the late landslide election, and what
+Governor Burrell's party would do, now that it had the say-so. But by
+and by it got around to the railroad situation.
+
+"You're putting up a mighty good fight, Graham, my son, but it isn't
+over yet--not by a jugful, suh"--this isn't just the way the major said
+it, but it's as near as I can come to his soft Southern drawl with the
+smothered "r's." "I've known Misteh Rufus Hatch for a good many yeahs,
+and he has the perseve'ance of the ve'y devil. With all that has been
+done, you must neveh forget, for a single hou'uh, that youh admirable
+reform structchuh stands, as yet, upon the life of a single man. Don't
+lose sight of that, Graham."
+
+The boss looked up kind of curiously.
+
+"You and Sheila seem to think that that point needs emphasizing more
+than any other," he commented.
+
+The major's fine old eyes twinkled gravely.
+
+"You are mighty safe in payin' strict attention to whatever the little
+gyerl tells you, Graham, my boy," he asserted. "She has a way of gettin'
+at the heart of things that puts us meah men to shame--she has, for a
+fact, suh."
+
+"She has been very helpful to me," the boss put in, with his eyes in his
+plate. "In fact, I may say that she has herself suggested a good many of
+the moves in the railroad game. It's marvelous, and I can't understand
+how she can do it."
+
+They went on for a while, singing Mrs. Sheila's praises over in a good
+many different ways, and I thought, wherever she might happen to be just
+then, her pretty little ears ought to be burning good and hard. To hear
+them talk you would have thought she was another Portia-person, and then
+some.
+
+The dinner wore itself out after a while, and when the waiter brought
+the cigars, the boss was looking at his watch.
+
+"I'm sorry I can't stay and smoke with you, major," he said, pushing his
+chair back. "But the business grind never lets up. I'm obliged to go to
+Strathcona to-night."
+
+I don't know what the major was going to say to this abrupt break-away:
+the after-dinner social cigar was a sort of religious ceremony with him.
+But whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it, for at that moment a
+telegraph boy came in and handed him a message. He put on his other
+glasses and read the telegram, with his big goatee looking more than
+ever like a dagger and the fierce white mustaches twitching. At the end
+of things he folded the message and put it into his pocket, saying, sort
+of soberly:
+
+"Graham, there are times when Sheila's intuhferences are mighty neah
+uncanny; they are, for a fact, suh. This wire is from her. What do you
+suppose it says?"
+
+Of course, the boss said he couldn't suppose anything about it, and the
+major went on.
+
+"She tells me, in just seven words, not to let you go to Strathcona
+to-night. Now what do you make of that? How on top of God's green earth
+did she know, away off yondeh at the capital, that you were meaning to
+go to Strathcona to-night?"
+
+Mr. Norcross shook his head. Then he said: "There are wires--both
+kinds--though I don't know why anybody should telegraph or telephone the
+capital that I expect to attend a mine-owners' meeting to-morrow
+morning in the big gold camp. That's why I'm going, you know."
+
+"But this warning," the major insisted. "There's a reason for it,
+Graham, as sure as you are bawn!"
+
+Again the boss shook his head.
+
+"Between you two, you and Sheila, I'm due to acquire a case of nerves. I
+don't know what she has heard, but I can't afford to dodge a business
+appointment. I have wired the Strathcona people that I shall be there
+to-morrow morning, and it is too late to make other arrangements. Sheila
+has merely overheard an echo of the threats that are constantly being
+made by the Hatch sympathizers. It's the aftermath of the election, but
+it's all talk. They're down and out, and they haven't the nerve to
+strike back, now."
+
+That ended matters at the club, and the boss and I walked down to the
+headquarters. The special, with Buck Chandler on the smart little
+eight-wheeler that we always had for the private-car trips, was waiting,
+and at the last minute I thought I wasn't going to get to go.
+
+"There's no need of your putting in a night on the road, Jimmie," said
+the boss, with the kindly thought for other people's comfort that never
+failed him. But after I had begged a little, telling him that he'd need
+somebody to take notes in the mine meeting, he said, "All right," and we
+got aboard and gave the word to Maclise, the conductor, to get his
+clearance and go.
+
+A few minutes later we pulled out and the night run was begun. Like
+every other car the boss had ever owned, the "05" was fitted up as a
+working office, and since he had me along, he opened up a lot of claim
+papers upon which the legal department was giving him the final say-so,
+and we went to work.
+
+For the next two hours I was so busy that I didn't know when we passed
+the various stations. There were no passenger trains to meet, and the
+despatcher was apparently giving us "regardless" rights over everything
+else, since we made no stops. At half-past nine, Mr. Norcross snapped a
+rubber band over the last of the claim files, lighted a pipe, and told
+me I might go to bed if I wanted to; said that he was going himself
+after he'd had a smoke. Just then, Chandler whistled for a station, and,
+looking out of a window, I saw that we were pulling into Bauxite, the
+little wind-blown junction from which the Strathcona branch led away
+into the northern mountains.
+
+Wanting a bite of fresh air before turning in, I got off when we made
+the stop and strolled up to the engine. Maclise was in the office,
+getting orders for the branch, and Chandler was squatting in the gangway
+of the 815 and waiting. Up ahead of us, and too far away for me to read
+the number on her tender, there was a light engine. I thought at first
+it was the pusher which was kept at Bauxite to help heavy freights up
+the branch grades, and I wondered what it was doing out on the branch
+"Y" and in our way.
+
+"What's the pusher out for, Buck?" I asked.
+
+Chandler grinned down at me.
+
+"You ain't so much of a railroad man as you might be, Jimmie," he said.
+"That ain't the pusher."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"It's our first section, runnin' light to Strathcona."
+
+Maybe Chandler was right, that I wasn't much of a railroad man, but I
+savvied the Short Line operating rules well enough to know that it
+wasn't usual to run a light engine, deadheading over the road, as a
+section of a special. Also, I knew that Buck knew it.
+
+With that last little talk over the club dinner-table fresh in mind, I
+began to wonder, but instead of asking Chandler any more questions about
+the engine out ahead, I asked him if I might ride a piece with him up
+the branch; and when he said "Sure," I climbed up and humped myself on
+the fireman's box.
+
+Maclise got his orders in due time and we pulled out. I noticed that
+when he gave Chandler the word, he also made motions with his lantern to
+the engine up ahead and it promptly steamed away, speeding up until it
+had about a half-mile lead and then holding it. That seemed funny, too.
+Though it is a rule that is often broken on all railroads, the different
+sections of a train are supposed to keep at least five minutes apart,
+and our "first" wasn't much more than a minute away from us at any time.
+
+Another thing that struck me as being funny was the way Chandler was
+running. It was only sixty mountain miles up the branch to the big gold
+camp, and we ought to have been able to make it by one o'clock, taking
+it dead easy. But the way Buck was niggling along it looked as if it
+might be going to take us all night.
+
+Just the same, nothing happened. The first ten miles was across a desert
+stretch with only a slightly rising grade, and it was pretty much all
+tangent--straight line. Beyond the ten-mile station of Nippo we hit the
+mountain proper, climbing it through a dry canyon, with curves that
+blocked off everything fifty feet ahead of the engine, and grades that
+would have made pretty good toboggan slides. The night was fine and
+starlit, but there was no moon and the canyon shadows loomed like huge
+walls to shut us in.
+
+On the reverse curves I could occasionally get a glimpse of the red tail
+lights of the engine which ought, by rights, to have been five full
+minutes ahead of us. It was still holding its short lead, jogging along
+as leisurely as we were.
+
+With nothing to do and not much to see, I got sleepy after a while, and
+about the time when I was thinking that I might as well climb back over
+the tender and turn in, I dozed off right there on the fireman's
+box--which was safe enough, at the snail's pace we were running. When I
+awoke it was with the feeling that I hadn't been asleep more than a
+minute or two, but the facts were against me. It was nearly one o'clock
+in the morning, and we had worried through the thirty-five miles of
+canyon run and were climbing the steep talus of Slide Mountain.
+
+At first I didn't know what it was that woke me. On my side of the
+engine the big mountain fell away, miles it seemed, on a slope on which
+a man could hardly have kept his footing, and where a train, jumping the
+track, would roll forever before it would stop in the gorges at the
+bottom. While I was rubbing my eyes, the eight-wheeler gave another
+little jerk, and I saw that Chandler was slowing for a stop; saw this
+and got a glimpse of somebody on the track ahead, flagging us down with
+a lantern.
+
+A minute later the brakes had been set and Buck and I were off. As we
+swung down from the engine step, Maclise joined us, and we went to meet
+the man with the lantern. He was the fireman of the engine ahead, and
+when we got around on the track I saw that our "first section" was
+stopped just a little way farther on.
+
+"What is it, Barty?" said Maclise, when we came up to the fireman.
+
+"It's them hell-fired wreckers again," was the gritting reply. "Rail
+joint disconnected and sprung out so's to let us off down the mountain."
+
+I thought it was up to me to go back and tell the boss, but there wasn't
+any need of it. The stop or the slow running or something had roused
+him, and he was up and dressed and coming along beside the engine. When
+he came up, Maclise told him why we were stopping. He didn't say
+anything about the rail break, but he did ask, sort of sharp and quick,
+what engine that was up ahead.
+
+I don't know what Maclise told him. Chandler turned to go back to his
+engine, and the rest of us were moving along the other way, the boss
+setting the pace with Maclise at his elbow. Three rail-lengths ahead of
+the stopped light engine we came to the break. The head engineer and
+another man were down on their hands and knees examining it, and when
+they stood up at our coming, I saw that the other man was Mr. Van Britt.
+
+"What?" said the boss; "you here?"
+
+Our only millionaire nodded.
+
+"I ride the line once in a while--just to see how things are going," he
+returned crisply.
+
+The boss didn't say anything more, but he knelt to look at the break. It
+was a trap, all right, set, beyond all question of doubt, to catch the
+private-car special. The fish-plates had been removed from a joint in
+the left-hand rail and the end of the downhill rail had been sprung out
+to make a derailing switch, which was held in position by the insertion
+of one of the fish-plates between the rail-webs. If we had hit the trap,
+going at even ordinary mountain-climbing speed, there would have been
+nothing left to tell the tale but a heap of scrap at the bottom of the
+thousand-foot dump.
+
+There wasn't very much talk made by anybody. Under Mr. Van Britt's
+directions the engineer and fireman of the pilot engine brought tools
+and the break was repaired. All they had to do was to spring the bent
+rail back into place and spike it, and bolt the fish-plates on again.
+
+While they were doing it the boss stood aside with Mr. Van Britt, and I
+heard what was said. Mr. Van Britt began it by saying, "We don't need
+any detectives this time. You are on your way to Strathcona to put a
+crimp in the smelter squeeze--the last of the Red Tower monopolies--so
+Dawes told me. He was probably foolish enough to tell others, and the
+word was pasted to scrag you before you could get to it. This trap was
+set to catch your special."
+
+"Evidently," barked the boss; and then: "How did you happen to be here
+on that engine, Upton?"
+
+"I've been ahead of you all the way up from Portal City," was the calm
+reply. "I thought it might be safer if you had a pilot to show you the
+way. I guess I must have had a hunch."
+
+The boss turned on him like a flash.
+
+"You had something more than a hunch: what was it--a wire?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt gritted his teeth a little, but he told the truth.
+
+"Yes; a friend of ours tipped me off--not about the broken track, of
+course, but just in a general way. I knew you'd bully me if I should
+tell you that I was going to run a pilot ahead of you, so I didn't tell
+you."
+
+The break was repaired and the men were taking the tools back to the
+engine. As we turned to follow them, Mr. Norcross said: "Just one more
+question, Upton. Did your wire come from the capital?"
+
+But at this Mr. Van Britt seemed to forget that he was talking to his
+general manager.
+
+"It's none of your damned business where it came from," he snapped back;
+and that ended it.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Major's Premonition
+
+
+Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we
+had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning;
+and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The
+boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their
+relief--and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out--by promising that our
+traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter
+on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.
+
+They tried to give him an ovation for that--the Strathcona men--did give
+him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted
+up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on
+account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon
+before we got away for the return to Portal City.
+
+We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came
+to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the
+regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of
+us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a
+glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's
+box.
+
+The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to
+Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk.
+Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window,
+smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the
+branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.
+
+I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he
+had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole
+of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused
+public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it
+up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be
+killed if he didn't let go.
+
+On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down
+the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's
+tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without
+being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so
+much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact
+that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the
+Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the
+entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.
+
+There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be
+a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little
+farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the
+public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate
+Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man
+alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is
+trying his best to walk straight.
+
+Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations--the laws about headlights,
+and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making
+of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if
+enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with
+little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be
+substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had
+met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and
+I had heard him say:
+
+"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its
+history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without
+bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We
+are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to
+act both ways--for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers
+when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to
+your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this
+commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."
+
+Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the
+disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that
+no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no
+permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was
+controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a
+working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.
+
+That was the way Mrs. Sheila had put it to the boss, one evening along
+in the summer when they were sitting out on the Kendricks' porch, and I
+had butted in, as usual, with a bunch of telegrams that didn't matter.
+She had said that the experiment _couldn't_ be a success unless the
+conditions could be changed in some way; that so long as the railroads
+were owned or controlled by men of the Mr. Dunton sort and used as
+counters in the money-making game, there would never be any real peace
+between the companies and the people at large.
+
+I knew that the boss had taken that saying of hers for another of the
+inspirations, and that he believed it clear through to the bottom. But I
+guess he didn't see any way as yet in which the Duntons could be shaken
+out, or just what could be made to happen if they were shaken out.
+
+It was at Bauxite Junction that we picked up Mr. Hornack. He had been
+down in the sugar-beet country on a business trip, and had come up as
+far as Bauxite on a freight, after the Sedgwick operator had told him
+that our special was on the way home from Strathcona, and that he could
+catch it at the Junction.
+
+I was glad when I saw him come in. I had just been thinking that it
+wasn't healthy for the boss to be grilling there at the car window so
+long alone, and I knew Mr. Hornack would keep him talking about
+something or other all the rest of the way in.
+
+For a little while they talked business, and I took my chance to stretch
+out on the leather lounge behind their chairs and kind of half doze off.
+By and by the business talk wound itself up and I heard Mr. Hornack say:
+"I saw Ripley going in on Number Six this morning, and he had company;
+Mrs. Macrae, and the major's wife, and the husky little-girl cousin.
+They've been visiting at the capital, so they told me, and I expect the
+major will be mighty glad to see them back."
+
+I didn't hear what Mr. Norcross said, if he said anything at all, but if
+I had been stone deaf I think I should have heard the thing that Mr.
+Hornack said when he went on.
+
+"I heard something the other day in Portal City that seems pretty hard
+to believe, Norcross. It was at one of Mrs. Stagford's 'evenings,' and I
+was sitting out a dance with a certain young woman who shall be
+nameless. We were speaking of the Kendricks, and she gave me a rather
+broad hint that Mrs. Macrae isn't a widow at all; that her husband is
+still living."
+
+My heavens! I had figured out a thousand ways in which the boss might
+get wised up to the dreadful truth, but never anything like this; to
+have it dropped on him that way out of a clear sky!
+
+For a minute or two he didn't say anything, but when he did speak, I saw
+that the truth wasn't going to take hold.
+
+"That is gossip, pure and simple, Hornack. The Kendricks are my friends,
+and I have been as intimate in their household as any outsider could be.
+It's merely idle gossip, I can assure you."
+
+"Maybe so," said Mr. Hornack, sort of drawing in his horns when he saw
+how positive the boss was about it. "I'm not beyond admitting that the
+young woman who told me is a little inclined that way. But the story was
+pretty circumstantial: it went so far as to assert that 'Macrae' wasn't
+Mrs. Sheila's married name at all, and to say that her long stay with
+her Western cousins was--and still is--really a flight from conditions
+that were too humiliating to be borne."
+
+"I don't care what was said, or who said it," the boss cut in brusquely.
+"It's ridiculous to suppose that any woman, and especially a woman like
+Sheila Macrae, would attempt to pass herself off as a widow when she
+wasn't one."
+
+"I know," said the traffic manager, temporizing a little. "But on the
+other hand, I've never heard the major, or any one else, say outright
+that she was a widow. It seems to be just taken for granted. It stirred
+me up a bit on Van Britt's account. You don't go anywhere to mix and
+mingle socially, but it's the talk of the town that Upton is in over his
+head in that quarter."
+
+I shut my eyes and held my breath. Mr. Hornack hadn't the slightest idea
+what thin ice he was skating over, or how this easy mention of Mr. Van
+Britt might be just like rubbing salt into a fresh cut. By this time it
+was growing dark, and we were running into Portal City, and I was mighty
+glad that it couldn't last much longer. The boss didn't speak again
+until the yard switches were clanking under the car, and then he said:
+
+"Upton is well able to take care of himself, Hornack, and I don't think
+we need worry about him," and then over his shoulder to me: "Jimmie,
+it's time to wake up. We're pulling in."
+
+As he always did on a return from a trip, Mr. Norcross ran up to his
+office to see if there was anything pressing, before he did anything
+else. May was still at his desk, and in answer to the boss's question he
+shook his head.
+
+"No; nobody that couldn't wait," he said, referring to the day's
+callers. "Mr. Hatch was up with a couple of men that I didn't know, but
+he only wanted to inquire if you would be in the office this evening
+after dinner. I told him I'd find out when you came, and let him know by
+'phone."
+
+I thought, after all that had happened, Hatch certainly had his nerve to
+want to come and make a talk with the man his hired assassins were
+trying to murder. But if Mr. Norcross took that view of it, he didn't
+show it. On the contrary, he told Fred it would be all right to
+telephone Hatch; that he was coming down after dinner and the office
+would be open, as usual.
+
+When things got that far along I slipped out and went to Mr. Van Britt's
+office at the other end of the hall. Bobby Kelso was there, holding the
+office down, and I asked him where I could find Tarbell. Luckily, he was
+able to tell me that Tarbell was at that moment down in the station
+restaurant, eating his supper; so down I went and butted in with my
+story of the Hatch call, and how it was to be repeated a little later
+on.
+
+"I'll be there," said Tarbell; and with that load off my mind, I mogged
+off up-town to the club to get my own dinner.
+
+When I broke into the grill-room at the railroad club, I found that Mr.
+Norcross had beaten me to it by a few minutes; that he had already
+ordered his dinner at a table with Major Kendrick. I suppose, by good
+rights, I ought to have gone off into a corner by myself, but I saw that
+the boss had tipped a chair at the end of the table where I usually sat,
+so I just went ahead and took it.
+
+Coming in late, that way, I didn't get the first of the talk, but I took
+it that the boss had been saying something about his rare good luck in
+having the major for a table-mate two days in succession.
+
+"The honoh is mine, my deah boy," the genial old Kentuckian was telling
+him as I sat down. "They told me in the despatchuh's office that youh
+special was expected in, so I telephoned Sheila and the madam not to
+wait for me."
+
+"Then you stayed down town purposely to see me?" asked the boss.
+
+"In a manneh, yes. I was by way of picking up a bit of information late
+this afte'noon that I thought ought to be passed on to you without any
+great delay."
+
+The boss looked up quickly. "What is it, Major?" he inquired. "Are you
+going to tell me that something new has broken loose?"
+
+"I wish I might be that he'pfully definite--I do so, Graham. But I
+can't. It's me'uhly a bit of street talk. They're telling it, oveh at
+the Commercial Club, that Hatch and John Marshall--you know him,--that
+Sedgwick stock jobbeh who has been so active in this Citizens' Storage &
+Warehouse business--have finally come togetheh."
+
+"In a business way, you mean?"
+
+The major gave a right and left twist to his big mustaches and shrugged
+one shoulder.
+
+"They are most probably calling it business," he rejoined.
+
+The boss nodded. "I know what has happened. In spite of the fact that
+the local people know that their economic salvation depends upon a wide
+and even distribution of their C. S. & W. stock, there has been a good
+bit of buying and selling and swapping around. I remember you prophesied
+that in a little while we'd have another trust in the hands of a few
+men. You may recollect that I didn't dispute your prediction. I merely
+said that our ground leases--the fact that all of the C. S. & W. plants
+and buildings are on railroad land--would still give us the whip-hand
+over any new monopoly that might be formed."
+
+"Yes, suh; I remember you said that," the major allowed.
+
+"Very good. Marshall and his pocket syndicate may have acquired a voting
+control in C. S. & W., and they may be willing now to patch up an
+alliance with Hatch. But in that case the new monopoly will still lack
+the one vital ingredient: the power to fix prices. If there is a new
+combine, and it tries to make the producers and merchants pay more than
+the agreed percentages for storage and handling----"
+
+"I know," the major cut in. "You-all will rise up in the majesty of youh
+wrath and put it out of business by terminating the leases. I hope you
+may: I sutt'inly do hope you may. But you'll recollect that I didn't
+advise you on that point, suh. You took Misteh Ripley's opinion. Maybe
+the cou'ts will hold with you, but, candidly, Graham, I doubt it--doubt
+it right much."
+
+The boss didn't seem to be much scared up over the doubt. He just smiled
+and said we'd be likely to find out what was in the wind, and that
+before very long. Then he spoke of Hatch's afternoon call at our
+offices, and mentioned the fact that the Red Tower president would
+probably try again, later in the evening.
+
+The major let the business matter drop, and he was working his way
+patiently through the salad course when he looked up to say:
+
+"Was there anything in youh trip to Strathcona to warrant Sheila's
+little telegraphic dangeh signal, Graham?"
+
+"Nothing worth mentioning," said the boss, without turning a hair; doing
+it, as I made sure, because he didn't want Mrs. Sheila to be mixed up in
+the plotting business, even by implication.
+
+The major didn't press the inquiry any farther, and when he spoke again
+it was of an entirely different matter.
+
+"Away along in the beginning, somebody--I think it was John
+Chadwick--spoke of you as a man with a sawt of raw-head-and-bloody-bones
+tempeh, Graham: what have you done with that tempeh in these heah latteh
+days?"
+
+This time the boss's smile was a good-natured grin.
+
+"Temper is not always a matter of temperament, Major. Sometimes it is
+only a means to an end. Much of my experience has been in the
+construction camps, where I have had to deal with men in the raw. Just
+the same, there have been moments within the past six months when I have
+been sorely tempted to burn the wires with a few choice words of the
+short and ugly variety and throw up my job."
+
+"Which, as you may say, brings us around to President Dunton," put in
+the old lawyer shrewdly. "He is still opposing youh policies?"
+
+"Up to a few weeks ago he was still hounding me to do something that
+would boost the stock, regardless of what the something should be, or of
+its effect upon the permanent value of the property."
+
+Again the major held his peace, as if he were debating some knotty point
+with himself--the table-clearing giving him his chance.
+
+"Did I undehstand you to say that these--ah--suggestions from Dunton had
+stopped?" he inquired, after the little coffees had been served.
+
+"Temporarily, at least. I haven't heard anything from New York--not
+lately."
+
+"Then Dunton's nephew hasn't made himself known to you?"
+
+"Collingwood? Hardly. I'm not in Mr. Howie Collingwood's set--which is
+one of the things I have to be thankful for. But this is news: I didn't
+know he was out here."
+
+The news-giver bent his head gravely in confirmation of the fact.
+
+"He's heah, I'm sorry to say, Graham. He has been heah quite some little
+time, vibratin' round with the Grigsbys and the Gannons and a lot mo' of
+the new-rich people up at the capital."
+
+It was the boss's turn to go silent, and I could guess pretty well what
+he was thinking. The presence of President Dunton's nephew in the West
+might mean much or nothing. But I could imagine the boss was thinking
+that his own single experience with Collingwood was enough to make him
+wish that the nephew of Big Money would stay where he belonged--among
+the high-rollers and spenders of his own set in the effete East.
+
+"I can't quite get the proper slant on men of the Collingwood type," he
+remarked, after the pause. "The only time I ever saw him was on the
+night before the directors' meeting last spring. He was here with his
+uncle's party in the special train, and that night at the Bullard he had
+been drinking too much and made a braying ass of himself. I had to knock
+him silly before I could get him up to his room."
+
+"You did that, Graham?--for a strangeh?"
+
+"I did it for the comfort of all concerned. As I say, he was making an
+ass of himself."
+
+There was another break, and then the major looked up with a little
+frown.
+
+"That was befo' you had met Sheila?" he asked, thoughtfully.
+
+"Why, no; not exactly. It was the same night--the night we all dropped
+off the 'Flyer' and got left behind at Sand Creek. You may remember that
+we came in later on Mr. Chadwick's special."
+
+The major made no reply to this, and pretty soon the boss was on his
+feet and excusing himself once more on the after-dinner smoking stunt,
+saying that he was obliged to go back to the office. The major got up
+and shook hands with him as if he were bidding him good-by for a long
+journey.
+
+"You are going down to keep that appointment with Misteh Rufus Hatch?"
+he said. "You take an old man's advice, Graham, my boy, and keep youh
+hand--figuratively speaking, of cou'se--on youh gun. It runs in my mind,
+somehow, that you are going to be hit--and hit right hard. No, don't ask
+me why. Call it a rotten suspicion, and let it go at that. Come up to
+the house, afte'wards, if you have time, and tell me I'm a false
+prophet, suh; I hope you may."
+
+The boss promised plenty cheerfully as to the calling part, as you'd
+know he would since he hadn't seen Mrs. Sheila for I don't know how
+long; and a few minutes later we were on our way, walking briskly, to
+keep the Fred-May-made engagement with the chief of the grafters.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The Dead-Line
+
+
+We found the three disappointed afternoon callers already on hand when
+we reached the headquarters. Fred May was back from his dinner, and he
+had let them in as far as the ante-room. The boss said, "Good evening,
+gentlemen," as pleasant as a basket of chips; told Fred he might go, and
+invited the waiting bunch into the private office, snapping on the
+lights as he opened the door.
+
+In the big room he indicated the sitting possibilities, and the three
+callers planted themselves in a semicircle at the desk end. No
+introductions were needed. One of the pair Hatch had brought with him
+was a lawyer named Marrow, whose home town was Sedgwick; a sharp-nosed,
+ferret-eyed man who figured as one of the many "local counsels" for Red
+Tower. The other, Dedmon, was a political place-hunter who had once been
+sheriff of Arrowhead County.
+
+"You've kept us cooling our heels in your waiting-room for just about
+the last time, Mr. Norcross!" was the spiteful way in which Hatch opened
+fire. "We've come to talk straight business with you this trip, and it
+will be more to your interest than ours if you'll send your clerk away."
+
+While they had been dragging up their chairs and sitting down, I had
+heard Fred May lock up his typewriter and go, and had been listening
+anxiously for some noise that would tell me Tarbell was on deck. I
+thought I heard the door of the outer office open again just as Hatch
+spoke and it comforted me a whole lot.
+
+The boss didn't pay any attention to Hatch's suggestion about sending me
+away; acted as if he hadn't heard it. Opening his desk he took a box of
+cigars from a drawer and passed it. Dedmon, the ex-sheriff, helped
+himself, but the lawyer and Hatch both refused. With this concession to
+the small hospitalities the boss swung his chair to face the trio.
+
+"My time is yours, gentlemen," he said; and Hatch jumped in like a man
+fairly spoiling for a fight.
+
+"For six months, Norcross, you've been mowing a pretty wide swath out
+here in the tall hills. You've been posing as a little tin god before
+the people of this State, and all the while you've been knifing and
+slugging and black-jacking private capital and private business wherever
+and whenever they have happened to get in your way. Now, at the end of
+the lane, by Jupiter, we've got you dead to rights--you and your damned
+railroad!"
+
+"Cut out as many of the personalities as you can, and come to the
+point," suggested the boss quietly.
+
+"You think I haven't any point to come to?" barked the grafter, with
+rising anger. "I'll show you! You've beaten us in the courts, and your
+imported lawyers have----"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Hatch," was the curt interruption. "Abuse isn't
+argument. State your case, if you have one."
+
+"Oh, I've got the case, all right. You've been keeping your finger on
+the pulse, or you think you have, but I can wise you up to a few things
+that have got away from you. You thought you were the only original
+trust-buster when you started your scheme of locally owned elevators and
+warehouses and coal- and lumber-yards and ran us out of business. But
+I'm here to tell you that your fine-haired little deal to rob us began
+to die about as soon as it was born."
+
+"How so?" inquired the boss, just as though Major Kendrick hadn't
+already given him his pointer about the how.
+
+"In the way that everything of that kind is bound to die. It wasn't a
+month before your little local stockholders began to get together and
+swap stock and sell it. In a very short time the control of the whole
+string of local plants was in the hands of a hundred men. To-day it's in
+the hands of less than twenty, with John Marshall at the head of them."
+
+This time the boss let out a notch. "So far, you haven't told me
+anything new. Go on."
+
+"If I should name Marshall's bunch, you'd know what's coming to you. But
+we needn't go into statistics. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is now a
+consolidated property, and John Marshall, Henckel and I control a
+majority of its stock. How does that strike you?"
+
+"It strikes me that the people most deeply interested have been
+exceedingly foolish to sell their birthright. But that is strictly their
+own business, and not mine or the railroad company's."
+
+"Wait!" Hatch snarled. "It's going to be both yours and the railroad
+company's business, before you are through with it. Marrow, here,
+represents Marshall, and I represent Henckel and myself. What are you
+going to do about those ground leases?"
+
+"Nothing at all, except to insist upon the condition under which they
+were granted by the railroad company."
+
+"Meaning that you are going to try to hold us to the fixed percentage
+charge for handling, packing, loading, and transferring?"
+
+"Meaning just that. If you raise the proportional market-price charge
+on the producers and merchants, the leases will terminate."
+
+"I thought that was about where you'd land. Now listen: we're
+It--Marshall and Henckel and I--and what we say, goes as it lies. We are
+going to use the present C. S. & W. plants and equipment, charging our
+own storage and handling percentages, based on anything we see fit. If
+you pull that ground-lease business on us and try to drive us out, we'll
+fight you all the way up to the Supreme Court. If you beat us there,
+we'll merely move over to the other side of your tracks to our old Red
+Tower houses and yards and go on doing business at the old stand."
+
+The boss sat back in his chair, and I could tell by the set of his jaw
+that he was refusing to be panic-stricken.
+
+"You are taking altogether too much for granted, aren't you?" he put in
+mildly. "You are assuming that the courts will eventually nullify the
+terms of the ground-leases, or, if they do not, that the railroad
+company will do nothing to save its patrons from falling into this new
+graft trap."
+
+Hatch snapped his fingers. "Now you are coming to the milk in the
+cocoanut!" he rapped out. "That is exactly what we're assuming. You are
+going to let go, once for all, Norcross. You are not going to fight us
+in the courts, and neither are you going to harass us out of existence
+with short cars, over-charges, and the thousand and one petty
+persecutions that you railroad buccaneers make use of to line your own
+pockets!"
+
+"But if we refuse to lie down and let you walk over us and our
+patrons--what then?" the boss inquired.
+
+That brought the explosion. Hatch's eyes blazed and he smacked fist into
+palm.
+
+"Then we'll knife you, and we'll do it to a velvet finish! After so long
+a time, we've got you where you can't side-step, Norcross. You thought
+you played it pretty damned fine in that election deal; but we got the
+goods on you, just the same!"
+
+Again the boss refused to be panic-stricken; or, anyhow, he looked that
+way.
+
+"We have heard that kind of talk many times in the past," he said. "The
+way to make it effective is to produce the goods."
+
+"That's just what we're here to do!" snapped the Red Tower president
+vindictively. "You, and the Big Fellows in New York, want a lot of the
+State railroad laws repealed or amended. If you can't get that string
+untied, you can't gamble any more with your stock. Well and good. You
+came here six months ago and set out to manufacture public sentiment in
+favor of the railroad. You ran up your 'public-be-pleased' flag and beat
+the tom-tom and blew the hewgag until you got a lot of dolts and
+chuckle-heads and easy marks to believe that you really meant it."
+
+"Well, go on."
+
+"With all this humbug and hullaballoo you still couldn't be quite
+certain that you had made your point; that your measures would carry
+through the incoming Legislature. After the primaries you counted noses
+among the candidates and found it was going to be a tight squeak--a
+damned tight squeak. Then you did what you railroad people always do;
+you slipped out quietly and bought a few men--just to be on the safe
+side."
+
+So it was sprung at last. Hatch was accusing us of the one thing that we
+hadn't done; that the boss knew we hadn't done.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have to try again, Mr. Hatch," he said, with a sour
+little smile. Then he added: "Anybody can make charges, you know."
+
+Hatch jumped to his feet and he was almost foaming at the mouth.
+
+"Right there is where we've got you!" he shouted. "You were too cautious
+to put one of your own men in the field, so you sent outside for your
+briber. He was fly, too; he never came near you nor any of your
+officials--to start curious talk. But he was a stranger, and he had to
+have help in finding the right men to buy. Dedmon, here, was out of a
+job--thanks to you and your meddling--and the steering stunt offered
+good pay. Do you want any more?"
+
+The boss shook his head.
+
+"It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I don't know in the
+least what you are talking about, and you'll pardon me, I hope, if I say
+that it doesn't greatly interest me."
+
+"By heavens--I'll make it interest you! The easy-mark candidates were
+found and bought and paid for--and maybe they'll stay bought, and maybe
+they won't. But that isn't the point. For a little more money--my money,
+this time--each of these men has made an affidavit to the fact that
+railroad money was offered him. They don't say whether or not they
+accepted it, mind you, and that doesn't cut any figure. They have sworn
+that the money was tendered. That lets them out and lets you in. You
+don't believe it? I'll show you," and Hatch whipped a list of names from
+his pocket and slapped it upon the boss's desk. "Go to those men and ask
+them; if you want to carry it that far. They'll tell you."
+
+I could see that the boss barely glanced at the list. The glib story of
+the bribery was like the bite of a slipping crane-hitch--slow to take
+hold. So far as we were concerned, of course, the charge fell flat; and
+upon any other hypothesis it was blankly incredible, unbelievable,
+absurd.
+
+"The affidavits themselves would be much more convincing," I heard the
+boss say, "though even then I should wish to have reasonable proof that
+they were genuine."
+
+Hatch was sitting down again and his grin showed his teeth unpleasantly.
+
+"Do you think for a minute that I'd bring the papers here and trust them
+in your hands?" he rapped out insultingly. "Not much! But we've got them
+all right, as you'll find out if you balk and force us to use them."
+
+At this point I could see that something in the persistent assurance of
+the man was getting under the boss's skin and giving him a cold chill.
+What if it were not the colossal bluff it had looked like in the
+beginning? What if.... Like a blaze of lightning out of a clear sky a
+possible explanation hit me under the fifth rib, and I guess it hit the
+boss at about the same instant. What if President Dunton and the New
+York stock-jobbers, believing as they did that nothing but legislative
+favor would give them their trading capital in the depressed stock, had
+cut in and done this thing without consulting us?
+
+The boss stirred uneasily in his chair and picked up the paper-knife--a
+little unconscious trick of his when he wanted time to gather himself.
+
+"Perhaps you would be willing to give me the name of this briber, Mr.
+Hatch?" he said, after a little pause.
+
+"As if you didn't know it!" was the scoffing retort. "You drive us to
+the newspapers and everybody'll know it."
+
+"But I _don't_ know it," the boss insisted patiently. Then he seemed to
+take a sort of fresh grip on himself, for he added: "And I don't believe
+you do, either, Mr. Hatch. You are a pretty good bluffer, but----"
+
+Hatch broke in with a short laugh.
+
+"There were two of them; one who was hired to do the talking while the
+real wire-puller stood aside and held the coin bag. We'll skip the hired
+man." Then he turned to the ex-sheriff: "Write out the name of the
+bag-holder for him, Dedmon," he commanded, tearing a leaf from his
+pocket notebook and thrusting it, with a stubby pencil, into Dedmon's
+hands.
+
+The man from Arrowhead County bent over his knee and wrote a name on the
+slip of paper, laying the slip on the drawn-out slide of the boss's desk
+when he had finished the slow penciling. The effect of the thing was all
+that any plotter could have desired. I saw the boss's face go gray, saw
+him stare at the slip and heard him say, half to himself, "_Howard
+Collingwood!_"
+
+Hatch followed up his advantage promptly. He was afoot and struggling
+into his overcoat when he said:
+
+"You've got what you were after, Norcross, and it has got your goat.
+We've known all along that you were only bluffing and sparring to gain
+time. We've nailed you to the cross. You let this deal with Marshall and
+his people stand as it's made, or we'll show you up for what you are.
+That's the plain English of it."
+
+"You mean that you will go to the newspapers with this?" said the boss,
+and it was no wonder that his voice was a bit husky.
+
+"Just that. We'll give you plenty of time to think it over. The joint
+deal with C. S. & W. goes into effect to-morrow, and it's up to you to
+sit tight in the boat and let us alone. If you don't--if you butt in
+with the ground-leases, or in any other way--the story will go to the
+newspapers and every sucker on the line of the P. S. L. will know how
+you've been pulling the wool over his eyes with all this guff about
+'justice first,' and 'the public be pleased.' You're no fool, Norcross.
+You know they won't lay it to Dunton and the New Yorkers. You've taken
+pains to advertise it far and wide that you are running this railroad on
+your own responsibility, and the people are going to take you at your
+word."
+
+Dedmon, and the lawyer--who hadn't spoken a single word in all the
+talk--were edging toward the door. I heard just the faintest possible
+little noise in the ante-room, betokening Tarbell's withdrawal. The boss
+didn't make any answer to Hatch's wind-up except to say, "Is that all?"
+
+The other two were out, now, and Hatch turned to stick his ugly jaw out
+at the boss, and to say, just as if I hadn't been there to look on and
+hear him:
+
+"No, by Jupiter--it isn't all! In the past six months you've made Gus
+Henckel and me lose a cold half-million, Norcross. For a less
+provocation than that, many a man in this neck of woods has been sent
+back east in the baggage-car, wearing a wooden overcoat. You climb down,
+and do it while you can stay alive!"
+
+For some little time after the three men went away the boss sat staring
+at the slip of paper on the desk slide. At the long last he got up, sort
+of tired-like, I thought, and said to me: "Jimmie, you go down and see
+if you can find a taxi, and we'll drive out to Major Kendrick's. I
+promised him I'd go out to the house, you remember."
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Flagged Down
+
+
+When our taxi stopped at the major's gate, somebody was coming out just
+as we were getting ready to go in. The light from the street arc was broken
+a good bit by the sidewalk trees, and the man had the visor of his big
+flat golf cap pulled down well over his eyes, but I knew him just the
+same. It was Collingwood!
+
+This looked like more trouble. What was the president's nephew doing
+here? I wondered about that, and also, if the boss had recognized
+Collingwood. If he had, he made no sign, and a moment later I had
+punched the bell-push and Maisie Ann was opening the door for us.
+
+"Both of you? oh, how nice!" she said, with a smile for the boss and a
+queer little grimace for me. "Come in. This is our evening for callers.
+Cousin Basil is out, but he'll be back pretty soon, and he left word for
+you to wait if you got here before he did."
+
+That message was for the boss, and I lagged behind in the dimly lighted
+hall while she was showing him into the back parlor. I heard her wheel
+up a chair for him before the fire, and go on chattering to him about
+nothing, and by that I knew that there wasn't anybody else in the parlor
+and that she was just filling in the time until something else should
+happen.
+
+It wasn't long until the something happened. I had dropped down on the
+hall settee, in the end of it next to the coat-rack, and when Mrs.
+Sheila came down-stairs and went through the hall, she didn't see me. A
+second later I heard the boss jump up and say, "At last! It seems as if
+you had been gone a year rather than a fortnight," and then Maisie Ann
+came dodging out and plunked herself down on the settee beside me.
+
+You needn't tell me that we had no right to sit there listening; I know
+it well enough. On the other hand, I was just shirky enough to shift the
+responsibility to Maisie Ann. She didn't make any move to duck, so I
+didn't.
+
+"You came out to see Cousin Basil?" Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss.
+And then: "He had a telephone call from the Bullard, and he asked me to
+tell you to wait." After that, I guess she sat down to help him wait,
+for pretty soon we heard her say: "Cousin Basil has told me a little
+about the new trouble: have you been having another bad quarter of an
+hour?"
+
+"The worst of the lot," the boss said gravely, and from that he went on
+to tell her about the Hatch visit and what had come of it; how the
+grafters had a new claw hold on him, now, made possible by an
+unwarranted piece of meddling on the part of the New York people in the
+political game.
+
+It was while he was talking about this that Maisie Ann grabbed me by the
+wrist and dragged me bodily into the darkened front parlor, the door to
+which was just on the other side of the coat rack. I thought she had
+come to her right senses, at last, and was making the shift to break off
+the eavesdropping. That being the case, I was simply horrified when I
+found that she was merely fixing it so that we could both _see_ and
+hear. The sliding doors between the two parlors were cracked open about
+an inch, and before I realized what she was doing she had pulled me down
+on the floor beside her, right in front of that crack.
+
+"If you move or make a noise, I'll scream and they'll come in here and
+find us both!" she hissed in my ear; and because I didn't know what else
+to do with such a kiddish little termagent, I sat still. It was
+dastardly, I know; but what was I to do?
+
+The first thing we saw was that the two in the other room were sitting
+at opposite sides of the fire. Mrs. Sheila was awfully pretty; prettier
+than I had ever seen her, because she had a lot more color in her face,
+and her eyes had that warm glow in them that even the grayest eyes can
+get when there is a human soul behind them, and the soul has got itself
+stirred up about something.
+
+When the boss finished telling her about the Hatch talk, she said: "You
+mean that Mr. Dunton and his associates sent somebody out here to
+influence the election?"
+
+The boss looked up sort of quick.
+
+"Yes; that is it, precisely. But how did you know?"
+
+"You made the inference perfectly plain," she countered. "I have a
+reasoning mind, Graham; haven't you discovered it before this?"
+
+The boss nodded soberly. "I have discovered a good many things about you
+during the past six months: one of them is that there was never another
+woman like you since the world began."
+
+Knowing, as I did, that she had a husband alive and kicking around
+somewhere, it seemed as if I just couldn't stay there and listen to what
+a break of that kind on the boss's part was likely to lead up to. But
+Maisie Ann gripped my wrist until she hurt.
+
+"You _must_ listen!" she whispered fiercely. "You're taking care of him,
+and you've _got_ to know!"
+
+As on many other earlier occasions, Mrs. Sheila slid away from the
+sentimental side of things just as easy as turning your hand over.
+
+"You are too big a man to let an added difficulty defeat you now," she
+remarked calmly, going back to the business field. "You are really
+making a miraculous success. I have just spent two weeks in the capital,
+as you know, and everybody is talking about you. They say you are in a
+fair way to solve the big problem--the problem of bringing the railroads
+and the people together in a peaceable and profitable partnership--which
+is as it should be."
+
+"It can be done; and I could do it right here on the Pioneer Short Line
+if I didn't have to fight so many different kinds of devils at the same
+time," said the boss, scowling down at the fire in the grate. And then
+with a quick jerk of his head to face her: "You sent the major a wire
+from the capital last night, telling him to persuade me not to go to
+Strathcona. Why did you do it? And how did you know I was thinking of
+going?"
+
+For the first time in the whole six months I saw Mrs. Sheila get a
+little flustered, though she didn't show it much, only in a little more
+color in her cheeks.
+
+"Some day, perhaps, I may tell you, but I can't now," she said sort of
+hurriedly. And then: "You mustn't ask me."
+
+"But you did send the wire?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you also sent another to Upton Van Britt?"
+
+"I did."
+
+The boss smiled. "That second message was an after-thought. You were
+afraid I'd be stubborn and go, anyway. That was some more of your
+marvelous inner reasoning. Tell me, Sheila, did you know that there was
+going to be a broken rail-joint set to kill me on that trip?"
+
+That got her in spite of her heavenly calm and I could see her press her
+pretty lips together hard.
+
+"Was that what they did?" she asked, a bit trembly.
+
+He nodded. "Van Britt was on the pilot engine ahead of my car, and he
+found it. There was no harm done. It was bad enough, God knows, to set a
+trap that would have killed everybody on my train; but this other thing
+that has been pulled off to-night is even worse. Mr. Dunton and his
+unprincipled followers have set a thing on foot here which is due to
+grind us all to powder. Past that, they have contrived to handcuff me so
+that I can't make a move without pulling down consequences of a personal
+nature upon President Dunton, himself."
+
+"Now my 'marvelous inner reasoning' has gone quite blind," she said,
+with a queer little smile. "You'll have to explain."
+
+"It's simple enough," said the boss shortly. "If Mr. Dunton had sent
+only hired emissaries out here to bribe the members of the
+Legislature--but he didn't; he included a member of his own family."
+
+I was looking straight at Mrs. Sheila as he spoke, and I saw a sudden
+frightened shock jump into the slate-gray eyes. Just for a second.
+Before you could count one, it was gone and she was saying quietly:
+
+"A member of his own family? That is very singular, isn't it?"
+
+"It is, and it isn't. The man who was sent with the bribe money has
+every qualification for the job, I should say, save one--discretion. And
+I'm not sure that he may not be discreet enough, when he isn't drunk."
+
+Again I saw the curious look in her eyes, and this time it was almost
+like the shrinking from a blow.
+
+"Was there--was this thing that was done actually criminal?" she asked,
+just breathing it at him.
+
+"It was, indeed. The election laws of this State have teeth. It is a
+penitentiary offense to bribe either the electorate or the law-makers."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and she was no longer looking at
+him; she was staring into the heart of the glowing coals in the grate
+basket. By and by she said: "You haven't told me this man's name--the
+one who did the bribing; may I know it?"
+
+I knew just what the boss was going to do, and he did it; took the slip
+of paper that Dedmon had written on from his pocket and passed it across
+to her. If there was another shock for her none of us could see it. She
+had her face turned away when she looked at the name on the paper.
+Pretty soon she said, sort of drearily:
+
+"Once you told me that the true test of any human being came when he was
+asked to eliminate the personal factor; to efface himself completely in
+order that his cause might prosper. Do you still believe that?"
+
+"Of course. It's all in the day's work. Any cause worth while is vastly
+bigger than any man who is trying to advance it."
+
+"Than any man, yes; but for a woman, Graham; wouldn't you allow
+something for the woman?"
+
+"I thought we had agreed long ago that there is no double standard,
+either in morals or ethics--one thing for the man and another for the
+woman. That is your own attitude, isn't it?"
+
+She didn't say whether it was or not. She was holding the bit of paper
+he had given her so that the light from the fire fell upon it when she
+said: "I suppose your duty is quite clear. In the slang of the street,
+you must 'beat Mr. Hatch to it.' You must be the first to denounce this
+bribery, clearing yourself and letting the axe fall where it will. You
+owe that much to yourself, to the men who have fought shoulder to
+shoulder with you, and to that wider circle of the public which is
+beginning to believe that you are honest and sincere, don't you?"
+
+The boss was shaking his head a bit doubtfully.
+
+"It isn't quite so simple as that," he objected. "I don't know that I'd
+have any compunctions about sending Collingwood to the dump. If the half
+of what they say of him is true, he is a spineless degenerate and hardly
+worth saving. But to do as you suggest would be open rebellion, you
+know; while Dunton remains president, I am his subordinate, and if I
+should expose him and his nephew, the situation here would become simply
+impossible."
+
+"Well?" she prompted.
+
+"Such a move would rightly and properly bring a wire demand for my
+resignation, of a nature that couldn't be ignored--only it wouldn't,
+because I should anticipate it by resigning first. That is a small
+matter, introducing the personal element which we have agreed should be
+eliminated. But the results to others; to the men of my staff and the
+rank and file, and to the public, which, as you say, is just beginning
+to realize some of the benefits of a real partnership with its principal
+railroad; these things can't be so easily ignored."
+
+"You have thought of some other expedient?"
+
+"No; I haven't got that far yet. But I am determined that Hatch shall
+not be allowed to work his graft a second time upon the people who are
+trusting me. I believe in the new policy we are trying out. I'd fling my
+own fortune into the gap if I had one, and, more than that, I'd pull in
+every friend I have in the world if by so doing I could stand the
+Pioneer Short Line upon a solid foundation of honest ownership. That is
+all that is needed in the present crisis--absolutely all."
+
+He was on his feet now and tramping back and forth on the hearth rug. At
+one of his back-turnings I saw Mrs. Sheila reach out quickly and lay the
+bit of paper with its accusing scrawl on the glowing coals. Then she
+said, quite calm again:
+
+"In time to come you will accomplish even that, Graham--this change of
+ownership that we have talked of and dreamed about. It is the true
+solution of the problem; not Government ownership, but ownership by the
+people who have the most at stake--the public and the workers. You are a
+strong man, and you will bring it about. But this other man--who is not
+strong; the man whose name was written upon the bit of paper I have just
+thrown into the fire...."
+
+He wheeled quickly, and what he said made me feel as if a cold wind were
+blowing up the back of my neck, because I hadn't dreamed that he would
+remember Collingwood well enough to recognize him in that passing moment
+on the sidewalk.
+
+"That man," he muttered, sort of gratingly: "I had completely forgotten.
+He was here just a little while ago. I met him as I was coming in. Did
+he come to see your cousin--the major?"
+
+"No," she said, matching his low tone; "he came to see me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes. Finding himself in a pitfall which he has digged with his own
+hands, he is like other men of his kind; he would be very glad to climb
+out upon the shoulders of a woman."
+
+I guess the boss saw red for a minute, but the question he asked had to
+come.
+
+"By what right did he come to you, Sheila?"
+
+"By what he doubtless thinks is the best right in the world. He is my
+husband."
+
+It was out at last, and the boss's poor little house of cards that I
+knew he had been building all these months had got its knock-down in
+just those four quietly spoken words. Maisie Ann was still gripping my
+wrist, and I felt a hot tear go splash on my hand. "Oh, I could _kill_
+him!" she whispered, meaning Collingwood, I suppose.
+
+As well as I knew him, I couldn't begin to guess what the boss would do
+or say. But he was such a splendid fighter that I might have known.
+
+"I heard, no longer ago than this afternoon, that you were not--that
+your husband was still living," he said, speaking very gently. "I didn't
+believe it--not fully--though I saw that there might easily be room for
+the belief. It makes no difference, Sheila. You are my friend, and you
+are blameless. But before we go any farther I want you to believe that I
+wouldn't have been brutal enough to give you that bit of paper if I had
+remotely suspected that Collingwood was the man."
+
+She didn't make any answer to that, and after a while he said:
+
+"Having told me so much, can't you tell me a little more?"
+
+"There isn't much to tell, and even the little is commonplace and--and
+disgraceful," she replied, with a touch of weariness that was fairly
+heart-breaking. "Don't ask me why we were married; I can't explain that,
+simply because I don't know, myself. It was arranged between the two
+families, and I suppose Howie and I always took it for granted. I can't
+even plead ignorance, for I have known him all my life."
+
+"Go on," said the boss, still speaking as gently as a brother might
+have.
+
+"Howie was a spoiled child, an only son, and he is a spoiled man. I
+stood it as long as I could--I hope you will believe that. But there are
+some things that a woman cannot stand, and----"
+
+"I know," he broke in. "So you came out here to be free."
+
+"It is four years since we have lived together," she went on, "and for a
+long time I hoped he would never find out where I was. There was no
+divorce: I couldn't endure the thought of the publicity and the--the
+disgrace. When I came here to Cousin Basil's there was no attempt made
+to hide the facts; or at least the one chief fact that I was a married
+woman. But on the other hand, I had taken my mother's name, and only
+Cousin Basil and his wife knew that I was not what perhaps every one
+else took me to be,--a widow with a dead husband instead of a living
+one."
+
+"Did Collingwood try to find you?"
+
+"No, I think not. But when he was here last spring with his Uncle
+Breckenridge he saw me and found out that I was living here with Cousin
+Basil."
+
+"Did he try to persecute you?"
+
+"No, not then. I was afraid of only one thing: that he might drink too
+much and--and talk. Part of the fear was realized. He saw me that Sunday
+night in the Bullard. That was why he was trying to fight the hotel
+people--because they wouldn't let him come up-stairs. I saw what you
+did, and I was sorry. I couldn't help feeling that in some way it would
+prove to be the beginning of a tragedy."
+
+"You saw no more of him then?"
+
+"No; I neither saw him nor heard of him until about a month ago when he
+came west with a man named Bullock--a New York attorney. I didn't know
+why he came, but I thought it was to annoy me."
+
+"And he has annoyed you?"
+
+"Until this night he has never missed an opportunity of doing so when he
+could dodge Cousin Basil. Caring nothing for me himself, he has taken
+violent exceptions to my friendship with you and with Upton Van Britt,
+though that is chiefly when he has been drinking too much. It was his
+taunting boast yesterday at the capital that led me to telegraph Cousin
+Basil and Upton Van Britt about your trip to Strathcona. He knew that
+you were going to the gold camp, and he declared to me that you'd never
+come back alive."
+
+"But to-night," the boss persisted. "What did he want to-night?"
+
+"He wanted to--to use me. He said that he had 'put something across' for
+his uncle, that he had gotten into trouble for it, and that--to use his
+own phrase again, you were the man who would try to 'get his goat.'"
+
+"And his object in telling you this?"
+
+"Was entirely worthy of the man. He asked me, or rather I should say,
+commanded me, to 'choke you off.' And, of course, he added the insult.
+He said I was the one who could do it."
+
+The boss had gone to tramping again and when he stopped to face her I
+could see that he had threshed his way around to some sort of a
+conclusion.
+
+"Without intending to, you have tied my hands," he said gravely. "I
+wasn't meaning to spare Collingwood if there were any way in which I
+could use him as a club to knock Hatch out of the game."
+
+"But now you won't use him?"
+
+"You might justly write me down as a pretty poor friend of yours if I
+should--after what you have told me."
+
+"I haven't asked you to spare him."
+
+"No, I know you haven't. But the fact remains that he is your husband.
+I----"
+
+The interruption was the opening and closing of the front door and the
+heavy tread of the major in the hall. In a flash Mrs. Sheila was up and
+getting ready to vanish through the door that led to the dining-room.
+With her hand on the door-knob she shot a quick question at the boss.
+
+"How much will you tell Cousin Basil?"
+
+"Nothing of what you have told me."
+
+"Thank you," she whispered back; "you are as big in your friendship as
+you are in other ways." And with that she was gone.
+
+It was right along in the same half-minute, while the boss was standing
+with his back to the fire and the major was going in to talk to him,
+that I lost Maisie Ann. I don't know where she went, or how. She had let
+go of my wrist, and when I groped for her she was gone. Since I didn't
+see any good reason why I should stay and spy upon the boss and the
+major, I slipped out to the hall and curled up on the big settee beyond
+the coat rack; curled up, and after listening a while to the drone of
+voices in the farther room, went to sleep.
+
+It was away deep in the night when the boss took hold of me and shook me
+awake. The long talk was just getting itself finished, and the major had
+come to the door with his guest.
+
+"We must manage to pull Collingwood out of it in some way," the major
+was saying. "I don't love the damn' scoundrel any betteh than you do,
+Graham; but thah's a reason--a fam'ly reason, as you might say." Then he
+switched off quickly. "You haven't asked me yet why I ran away from home
+this evenin' when I was expecting you."
+
+"No," said the boss. "Sheila told me that you had a telephone call to
+the Bullard."
+
+The old Kentuckian chuckled.
+
+"Yes, suh; and you'd neveh guess in a thousand yeahs who sent the call,
+or what was wanted. It was ouh friend Hatch, and no otheh. And he had
+the face to offeh me ten thousand dollahs a yeah to act as consulting
+counsel for him against the railroad company!"
+
+"Of course you accepted," said the boss, meaning just the opposite.
+
+The major chuckled again. "I talked with him long enough to find out
+about where he stood. He thinks he's got you by the neck, but, like most
+men of his breed, he's a paltry coward, suh, at heart."
+
+The boss laughed. "What is he afraid of?"
+
+"He's afraid of his life. He told me, with his eyes buggin' out, that
+thah was one man heah in Portal City who would kill him to get
+possession of certain papehs that were locked up in the cash vault of
+the Security National."
+
+The boss was pulling on his gloves.
+
+"I didn't give him any reason to think that I was anxious to murder
+him," he said.
+
+"Oh, no, my deah boy; it isn't you, at all. It's Howie Collingwood.
+Thah's where we land afteh all is said and done. Youh hands are tied,
+and we've got this heah young maniac to deal with. If Collingwood gets
+about three fingehs of red likkeh under his belt, why, thah's one murder
+in prospect. And if Hatch has any reason to think that you can still get
+the underholt on him, why, thah's another. I'm glad you've seen fit to
+take Ripley's advice at last, and got you a body-guard."
+
+"What's that?" queried the boss. But the query was answered a minute
+later when we hit the sidewalk for the tramp back to town and Tarbell
+fell in to walk three steps behind us all the way to the door of the
+railroad club.
+
+It sure did look as if things were just about as bad as they could ever
+be, now. Hatch once more on top, the whole bottom knocked out of the
+railroad experiment, our good name for political honesty gone
+glimmering, and, worst of all, perhaps, the boss's big heart broken
+right in two over those four little words that nothing could ever rub
+out--"he is my husband." I didn't wonder that the boss said never a word
+in all that long walk down-town, or that he forgot to tell me good-night
+when he locked himself up in his room at the club.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+The Dipsomaniac
+
+
+In a day when bunched money, however arrogant it may be, has been taught
+to go sort of softly, the Hatch people were careful not to make any
+public announcement of the things they were doing or going to do. But
+bad news has wings of its own. Mr. Norcross was still in the midst of
+his mail dictation to me the morning after the bottom--all the different
+bottoms--fell out, when Mr. Hornack came bulging in.
+
+"What's all this fire-alarm that's been sprung about a new elevator
+trust?" he demanded, chewing on his cigar as if it were something he
+were trying to eat. "It's all over town that C. S. & W. has been
+secretly reorganized, with the Hatch crowd in control. I'm having a
+perfect cyclone of telephone calls asking what, and how, and why."
+
+The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he
+announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing
+when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps,
+and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical
+consolidation."
+
+"Is that the fact?--or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the
+traffic manager.
+
+"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also,
+to tell me where we were to get off."
+
+Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.
+
+"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down
+quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.
+
+"He does--just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up
+to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."
+
+"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"
+
+"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who
+ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went
+on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.
+
+Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for
+publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he
+got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between
+cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply
+_can't_!"
+
+"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can
+do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street
+owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only
+hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of
+its securities among the people it actually serves."
+
+Hornack's teeth met in the middle of the chewed cigar.
+
+"That's excellent logic--bully good logic, if anybody should ask you!
+But we're fighting a condition, not a theory. Nobody wants P. S. L.
+Common even at thirty-two. You wouldn't advise your worst enemy to buy
+it at that figure."
+
+"I don't know," said the boss, kind of musingly. "You're forgetting the
+water that's been put into it from time to time by the speculators and
+reorganizers; there has been a good deal of that, first and last.
+Nevertheless, value for value, you know, and I know, that the property
+is worth more than thirty-two, including the bonds. What I mean is that
+if anybody would buy the control at that figure,--the control, mind you,
+and not merely a minority--and handle the road purely as a
+dividend-earning business proposition, he wouldn't lose money; he'd make
+money--a lot of it."
+
+"All of which doesn't get us anywhere in the present pinch," returned
+the traffic manager. "I suppose we'll have to wait until Hatch makes his
+first move, and I've still got fight enough left in me to hope that
+he'll make it suddenly. Punch the button for me if anything new
+develops. I'm going back to swing on to my telephone."
+
+Following this talk with Hornack there was a try-out with Billoughby and
+Juneman, but as this three-cornered conference was held in the private
+room of the suite, I don't know what was said. A little farther along,
+when the boss was once more whittling at the dictation, Mr. Van Britt
+strolled in. Mr. Norcross told me to take my bunch of notes to May and
+then he gave Mr. Van Britt his inning, starting off with: "Well, how is
+the general superintendent this fine morning?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt wrinkled his nose.
+
+"The general superintendent is wondering, one more time, why under the
+starry heavens he is out here in this country that God has forgotten,
+scrapping for a living on this one-horse railroad of yours when he might
+be in good little old New York, living easy and clipping coupons in the
+safety-deposit room of a Broad Street bank."
+
+The boss laughed at that, and I'm telling you right now that I was glad
+to know that he was still able to laugh.
+
+"You've never seen the day when you wanted to renege, Upton, and you
+know it," he hit back. "Think of the perfectly good technical education
+you were wasting when I took hold of you and jerked you out here."
+
+"Huh!" said our millionaire; "I've got other things to think of. I've
+just had two enginemen on the carpet for running over an old ranchman's
+pet cow. They said they couldn't help it; but I told them that under the
+'public-be-pleased' policy, they'd got to help it."
+
+Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral,
+Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."
+
+"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is
+due to have a strike on its hands. The management--which seems to have
+got itself consolidated in some way--shot out a lot of new bosses all
+along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the
+entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and
+everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty
+per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the
+wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C.
+S. & W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."
+
+"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that
+the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. & W.?"
+
+"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."
+
+"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one
+stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. & W., who have
+been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later
+on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local
+sympathizers."
+
+"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon,"
+Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that
+once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers
+will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will
+be asking us what _we_ are going to do about it; whether we are going to
+fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft,
+as our predecessors did."
+
+"We needn't go over that ground again--you and I, Upton," said Mr.
+Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We
+have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little
+operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the
+Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.
+
+Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his
+hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in
+wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:
+
+"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand
+the gaff--this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the
+people as the accuser of your president--and hope to hold your job. The
+one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."
+
+"Upton, if I thought you meant that--but I never know when to take you
+seriously."
+
+"The two enginemen who ran over the ranchman's pet cow had no such
+difficulty, I assure you. And isn't it good advice? You know, as well as
+I do, that Chadwick is holding you here by main strength; that you can
+never accomplish anything permanent while Dunton and his cronies are at
+the steering-wheel. It might be different if you had the local backing
+of your constituency--the people served by the Short Line. But you
+haven't that; up to date, the people are merely interested spectators."
+
+"Go on," said the boss, frowning again.
+
+"They have a stake in the game--the biggest of the stakes, as a matter
+of fact--but it isn't sufficiently apparent to make them climb in and
+fight for you. They are saying, with a good bit of reason, that, after
+all is said and done, Big Money--Wall Street--still has the call, and
+any twenty-four hours may see the whole thing slump back into graft and
+crooked politics."
+
+"It is so true that you might be reading it out of a book," was the
+boss's comment. And then: "What's the answer?"
+
+Mr. Van Britt shook his head. "I don't know. If you had money enough to
+buy the voting control in P. S. L. you might get somewhere; but as it
+is, you're like a cat in Hades without claws."
+
+"Tell me," said Mr. Norcross, after a little pause: "You're a native New
+Yorker: do you know this man Collingwood?"
+
+"Only by hearsay. He is what our English friends call a 'blooming
+bounder'; fast yachts, fast motor-cars, the fast set generally. It's a
+pretty bad case of money-spoil, I fancy. They say he wasn't always a
+total loss."
+
+"Did you ever hear that he was married?"
+
+"Oh, yes; he married a Kentucky girl some years ago: I don't remember
+her name. They say she stood him for about six months and then dropped
+out. I suppose he needs killing for that."
+
+At this the boss went a step farther, saying: "He does, indeed, Upton. I
+happen to know the young woman."
+
+That was when Mr. Van Britt fired his own little bomb-shell. "So do I,"
+he answered quietly.
+
+"But you said you had forgotten her name!"
+
+"So I have--her married name. And what's more, I mean to keep on
+forgetting it."
+
+There was no mistake about the boss's frown this time.
+
+"That won't do, Upton," he said, kind of warningly.
+
+"It will do well enough for the present. I'd marry her to-morrow,
+Graham, if she were free, and there were no other obstacles. Unhappily,
+there are two--besides the small legal difficulty; she doesn't care for
+my money--having a little of her own; and she happens to be in love with
+the other fellow."
+
+I guess the boss was remembering what Mrs. Sheila had told him in that
+confidence before the back-parlor fire, about its being all off between
+her and Collingwood, for he said: "I think you are mistaken as to that
+last."
+
+"No, I'm not mistaken. But that's neither here nor there. Neither you
+nor I can send Collingwood to the penitentiary--that's a cinch.
+Wherefore, I'm advising you to quit, walk out, jump the job."
+
+At that the boss took a fresh brace, righting his swing chair with a
+snap.
+
+"You know very little about me, Upton, if you think I'm going to throw
+up my hands now, when the real pinch has come. A while back I might have
+done it, but now I'll fight until I'm permanently killed. I have a
+scheme--if it could only be worked. But it can't be worked on a rising
+market. I suppose you have seen the morning's quotations. By some trick
+or other, the Dunton people are boosting the stock again. It went up
+three points yesterday."
+
+Mr. Van Britt grinned. "They're discounting the effect of this little
+political deal--which will at least rope your reform scheme down, if it
+doesn't do anything else. What you need is a good, old-fashioned
+cataclysm of some sort; something that would fairly knock the tar out of
+P. S. L. securities and send them skittering down the toboggan slide in
+spite of anything Uncle Breckenridge could do to stop them; down to
+where they could be safely and profitably picked up by the dear public.
+Unfortunately, those things don't happen outside of the story books. If
+they did, if the earthquake should happen along our way just now, I
+don't know but I'd be disloyal enough to get out and help it shake
+things up a bit."
+
+After Mr. Van Britt had gone, the boss put in the remainder of the day
+like a workingman, skipping the noon luncheon as he sometimes did when
+the work drive was extra heavy. Meanwhile, as you'd suppose, rumor was
+plentifully busy, on the railroad, and also in town.
+
+By noon it was well understood that there had been a radical change in
+the management of C. S. & W., and that there was going to be a general
+strike in answer to the slashing cut in wages. I slipped up-town to get
+a bite while Fred May was spelling me at the dictation desk, and I heard
+some of the talk. It was pretty straight, most of it--which shows how
+useless it is to try to keep any business secrets, nowadays.
+
+For example: the three men at my table in the Bullard grill-room--they
+didn't know me or who I was--knew that a council of war had been called
+in the railroad headquarters, and that Ripley had been pulled in by wire
+from Lesterburg, and that we were rushing around hurriedly to provide
+storage room for the wheat shippers in case of a tie-up, and that we
+were arranging to distribute railroad company coal in case the tie-up
+should bring on a fuel famine--knew all these things and talked about
+them.
+
+They were facts, as far as they went--these things. The boss hadn't been
+idle during the forenoon, and he kept up the drive straight through to
+quitting time. Word was brought in during the afternoon by Tarbell that
+the Hatch people were wiring the Kansas City and Omaha employment
+agencies and placing hurry orders for strike-breakers. The boss's answer
+to this was a peremptory wire to our passenger agents at both points to
+make no rate concessions whatever, of any kind, for the transportation
+of laborers under contract. It was a shrewd little knock. Labor of that
+kind is mighty hard to move unless it can get free transportation or a
+low rate of fare, and I could see that Mr. Norcross was hoping to keep
+the strike-breakers away.
+
+When six o'clock came, the boss asked May to stay and keep the office
+open while I could go down-stairs and get my dinner in the station
+restaurant, and he went off up-town--to the club, I suppose. After I'd
+had my bite, I let May go. Everything was moving along all right, so far
+as anybody could see. We had five extra fuel trains loading at the
+company's chutes at Coalville, and the despatcher was instructed to work
+them out on the line during the night, distributing them to the towns
+that had reported shortages. They were not to be turned over to the
+regular coal yards; they were to be side-tracked and held for
+emergencies.
+
+Mr. Norcross came back about eight o'clock, and I gave him my report of
+how things were going on the line. A little later Mr. Cantrell dropped
+in, and there was a quiet talk about the situation, and what it was
+likely to develop. The _Mountaineer_ editor was given all the facts,
+except the one big one about Hatch's death-grip on us, and in turn Mr.
+Cantrell promised the help of his paper to the last ditch--though, of
+course, he had no idea of how deep that last ditch was going to be. I
+had a lot of filing and indexing to do, and I kept at work while they
+were talking, wondering all the time if the boss would venture to tell
+the editor about the depth of that "last ditch." He didn't. I guess he
+thought he wouldn't until he had to.
+
+It was pretty nearly nine o'clock when the editor went away, and Mr.
+Norcross was just saying to me that he guessed we'd better knock off for
+the night, when we both heard a step in May's room. A second later the
+door was pushed open and a man came in, making for the nearest chair and
+flinging himself into it as if he'd reached the limit. It was
+Collingwood. He was chewing on a dead cigar and his face was like the
+face of a corpse. But he was sober.
+
+Naturally, I supposed he had come to make trouble with the boss on Mrs.
+Sheila's account, and I quietly edged open the drawer of my desk where I
+kept Fred May's automatic, so as to be ready. He didn't waste much time.
+
+"I saw you as I was coming away from Kendrick's last night," he began,
+with a bickering rasp in his voice. "Did you go up against the gun I had
+loaded for you?"
+
+Mr. Norcross cut straight through to the bottom of that little
+complication at a single stroke.
+
+"What Mrs. Collingwood said to me, or what I said to her, can have no
+possible bearing upon anything that you may have to say to me, or that I
+can consent to listen to, Mr. Collingwood."
+
+The derelict sat up in his chair.
+
+"But you've got to keep hands off, just the same; at Kendrick's, and in
+this other business, too. If you don't, there is going to be blood on
+the moon! Get me?"
+
+The boss never batted an eye. "I'm taking it for granted that you are
+sober, Mr. Collingwood," he said. "If you are, you must surely know that
+threats are about the poorest possible weapons you can use just now."
+
+"It's a plant, from start to finish!" gritted the man in the chair. "I
+haven't done a damned thing more than to cash a few checks for--for
+expenses, and turn the money over to Bullock. Now Hatch tells me that I
+was working with a spotter--his spotter--and that he can send me up for
+bribery. It's a lie. I don't know what Bullock did with the money, and I
+don't want to know."
+
+"But you had orders to give it to him when he required it, didn't you?"
+Mr. Norcross cut in.
+
+"That's none of your business. I want you to choke this man Hatch off of
+me!"
+
+The boss had picked up his paper-knife. "I don't know why you should
+come to me for help," he said. "You have been hand-in-glove with these
+conspirators ever since you came out here. You have known what they were
+doing to destroy the railroad property and wreck our trains, and two
+days ago you knew that they had set a trap for my special train on the
+Strathcona branch--a trap that was meant to kill me."
+
+It was a random shot, and I knew that Mr. Norcross was just guessing at
+where it might land when he fired it. But it went home; oh, you bet it
+went home!
+
+"Damn you!" gurgled the bounder, half starting to his feet. "Why
+shouldn't I want to see you killed? And what do I care what becomes of
+your cursed railroad? Haven't you done enough to me?"
+
+"No!" the word was slammed at him like a bullet. And then: "As I told
+you in the beginning, we won't go into any phase of it that involves
+Mrs. Collingwood. Get back into your own boat. Are you trying to tell me
+now that Hatch is threatening you?"
+
+"He's played me for a come-on. He says he's got the whole business down
+in black and white, with affidavits, and all that. He had the nerve to
+tell me less than an hour ago that he'd burn me alive if I didn't toe
+the mark."
+
+"What does he want you to do?"
+
+"He wants me to stick around here so that he can use me against you. He
+knows how you're mixed up with Sheila and that you can't turn a wheel
+without making it look as if you were going after me on your own
+personal account."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and the crackle of the match with
+which Mr. Norcross relighted his cigar smashed into the stillness like a
+tiny pistol shot. It was an awful muddle, with bloody murder sticking
+out of it on every side.
+
+"If you have come here with the idea that I can force Hatch's hand, you
+are very much misled," said the boss, at the close of the electric
+pause. And then: "Has he made it appear to you that he was merely trying
+to help you avenge your own fancied wrongs?"
+
+"He said I ought to get you; that any man who would make love to a
+married woman ought to be got."
+
+My chief was looking past the derelict and out through the darkened
+window.
+
+"You don't know me, Mr. Collingwood, but you do know your wife; and you
+know that she is as far above suspicion as the angels in heaven. Let
+that part of it go. Hatch was merely using you for his own ends. If he
+could persuade you to kill me off out of the way, it would be merely
+that much gained in the business fight. You haven't done it thus far,
+and now he is using your check-cashing excursion as a club with which he
+proposes to brain the entire railroad management, your uncle included,
+if we interfere with his plans."
+
+Collingwood scowled up at the ceiling, shifting the dead cigar from one
+corner of his mouth to the other.
+
+"So that's the way of it, is it?" he commented. "He was working for his
+own pocket all the time, and Uncle Breck stands pat and slips him the
+ace he was needing to make his hand a winner. Between you and me,
+Norcross, I believe this damned piker needs killing a few times,
+himself."
+
+The boss sat back in his swing chair and I could just imagine that he
+was trying to get some sort of proper angle on this young fellow who, in
+addition to his other scoundrelisms, big and little, had wrecked the
+life of Sheila Macrae. I knew what he was thinking. He had a theory that
+no man that was ever born was either all angel or all devil, and he was
+hunting for the redeeming streak in this one.
+
+When you looked right hard at the haggard face you could see something
+sort of half-appealing in it; something to make you think that perhaps,
+away back yonder before the spoiling began, there used to be a man;
+never a strong man, I guess, but one that might have been generous and
+free-hearted, maybe. I got a fleeting little glimpse of that back-number
+man when he turned suddenly and said:
+
+"One night a few weeks ago when I was full up, Hatch got hold of me and
+told me you were out at the Kendrick place with Sheila. He made me
+believe that I ought to go out there and kill you, and I started to do
+it. Do you know why I didn't do it?"
+
+"No," said the chief, mighty quietly.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. One night last spring up at the Bullard you
+slammed me one in the face and dragged me off to my room to keep me from
+making a bigger ass of myself than I'd already made. I haven't forgotten
+that. In all these crooked years, nobody else has ever taken the trouble
+to chuck me decently out of sight and give me a chance to brace. Drunk
+as I was, I remembered it that night when I was climbing up to a window
+in the major's house and trying to get a shot at you."
+
+Mr. Norcross shook his head, more than half sympathetically, I thought.
+
+"Let that part of it go and tell me about this other trouble," he said.
+"How badly are you tangled up in this political business?"
+
+"I've given it to you straight on the bribing proposition. Uncle Breck
+used me as a money carrier because--well, maybe it was because he
+couldn't trust Bullock. I didn't know definitely what Bullock was doing
+with the checks I cashed for him, though I supposed, of course, it was
+something that wouldn't stand daylight. It was only a side issue with
+me. I was coming out here anyway. I knew Sheila had made up her
+mind--God knows she's had cause enough; but I had a crazy notion that
+I'd like to be on the same side of the earth with her again for just a
+little while. Then this--" he trailed off in a babble of maledictions
+poured out upon the man who had trapped him and used him.
+
+The boss straightened himself in his chair, but he still was speaking
+gently when he said:
+
+"You are not asking my advice, and I don't owe you anything, personally,
+Mr. Collingwood. But I'll say to you what I might say to a better man in
+like circumstances. You have done all the harm you can, but, as I see
+it, there doesn't seem to be any need of your staying here to suffer the
+consequences. Why don't you go back to New York, taking your wife with
+you, if she will go?"
+
+Collingwood's smile was a mere teeth-baring grimace.
+
+"Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was just
+eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my funeral. Oh,
+I've earned it, and I'm not kicking. And about this other thing: I can't
+duck. You know what Hatch is holding me for. He told me just a little
+while ago that if I stepped aboard of a train, I'd be arrested before
+the train could pull out."
+
+It was a handsome little precaution on the part of the chief of the
+grafters. If a fight should be precipitated--if the boss should try to
+checkmate the C. S. & W. gobble--the arrest and indictment of President
+Dunton's nephew would serve bully good and well as a dramatic bit of
+side play to keep the newspapers from printing too much about the other
+thing.
+
+"If you really want to go, I think it can be arranged in some way, in
+spite of Hatch and his bluffing," Mr. Norcross put in quietly. "So far
+as our railroad troubles are concerned it will neither help nor hinder
+for you to stay on here, now."
+
+As if the helpful suggestion had been a lighted match to fire a hidden
+mine of rage, Collingwood sprang to his feet with his dull eyes ablaze.
+
+"No, by God!" he swore. "I'm going to make him come across with those
+affidavit papers first! You wait right here, Norcross. You think I'm all
+cur, but I'll show you. There isn't much left of me but hound dog, but
+even a hound dog will bite if you kick him hard enough. Lend me a gun,
+if you've got one and I'll----"
+
+"Hold on--none of that!" the boss broke in sternly, jumping out of his
+chair to enforce the command. But before he could make the grabbing move
+the corridor door slammed noisily and the madman was gone.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The Deserter
+
+
+Mr. Norcross chased out and tried to overtake Collingwood, going as far
+as the foot of the stairs. I went, too, but got only far enough to meet
+the boss coming up again. There was nothing doing. The station policeman
+had seen the crazy rounder jump into a taxi and go spinning off up-town.
+
+That settled the Collingwood business for the time being, but there was
+another jolt waiting for us when we got back to the office. While we
+were both out, Mr. Van Britt had blown in from his room at the foot of
+the hall and we found him lounging comfortably in the chair that
+Collingwood had just vacated.
+
+"I thought maybe you'd turn up again pretty soon, since you'd left the
+doors all open," was the way he started out. Then: "Sit down, Graham; I
+want to talk a few lines."
+
+Mr. Norcross took his own chair and twirled it to face the general
+superintendent. "Say it," he commanded briefly.
+
+Mr. Van Britt hooked his thumbs in his armholes.
+
+"I've just been figuring a bit on the general outlook: you have a
+decently efficient operating outfit here, what with Perkins and Brant
+and Conway handling the three divisions as self-contained units. You
+don't need a general superintendent any more than a monkey needs two
+tails."
+
+"What are you driving at?" was the curt demand.
+
+"Well, suppose we say retrenchment, for one thing. As I size it up, you
+might just as well be saving my salary. It would buy a good many new
+cross-ties in the course of a year."
+
+"That's all bunk, and you know it," snapped the boss. "The organization
+as it stands hasn't a single stick of dead wood in it. You know very
+well that a railroad the size of the Short Line can't run without an
+individual head of the operating department."
+
+Mr. Van Britt laughed a little at that.
+
+"If you should get some one of these new efficiency experts out here he
+would probably tell you that you could cut your staff right in two in
+the middle."
+
+I could see that the boss was getting mighty nearly impatient.
+
+"You are merely turning handsprings around the edges of the thing you
+have come to say, Upton," he barked out. "Come to the point, can't you?
+What have you got up your sleeve?"
+
+"Nothing that I could make you understand in a month of Sundays. I'm
+sore on my job and I want to quit."
+
+"Nonsense! You don't mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I do. I'm tired of wearing the brass collar of a soulless
+corporation. What's the use, anyway? I found a bunch of dividend checks
+from my bank at home in the mail to-day, and what good does the money do
+me? I can't spend it out here; can't even tip the servants at the hotel
+without everlastingly demoralizing them. I'm like the little boy who
+wanted to go out in the garden and eat worms."
+
+The boss was frowning thoughtfully.
+
+"You're not giving me a show, Upton," he protested. "Can't you blow the
+froth off and let me see what's in the bottom of the stein?"
+
+"Pledge you my word, it's all froth, Graham. I want to climb up on the
+mesa behind the shops and take a good deep breath of free air and shake
+my fist at your blamed old cow-track of a railroad and tell it to go to
+the devil. You shouldn't deny me a little pleasure like that."
+
+It was getting under the boss's skin at last. "I can't believe that you
+really want to resign," he broke out, sort of hopelessly. "It's simply
+preposterous!"
+
+"Pull it down out of the future and put it in the present, and you've
+got it," said Mr. Van Britt. "I _have_ resigned. I wrote it out on a
+piece of paper and dropped it into your mail box as I came through the
+outer office. It's signed, sealed, and delivered. You'll give me a
+testimonial, or something of that sort, 'To Whom It May Concern,' won't
+you? I've been obedient and faithful and honest and efficient, and all
+that, haven't I?"
+
+"I'd like to know first where you got your liquor, Upton. That is the
+most charitable construction I can put upon all this. Why, man alive!
+you're quitting me in the thick of the toughest fight the grafters have
+put up!"
+
+"Yes, I know; but a man's got only one life to live, and I've always had
+a sneaking sympathy for the high private in the front rank who didn't
+want to stand up and get himself shot full of holes. I'm running, and if
+you should ask me why, I'd tell you what the retreating soldier told
+Stonewall Jackson; he said he was running only because he couldn't fly."
+
+Once more the boss grew silently thoughtful. Out of the digging mental
+inquiry he brought this:
+
+"Has this sudden notion of yours anything to do with Sheila Macrae,
+Upton?"
+
+"Pledge you my word again. I met Sheila on the street to-day and
+promised her that I wouldn't so much as tip my hat to her while
+Collingwood is on this side of the Missouri River."
+
+"But if you quit, you'll go East yourself, won't you?"
+
+"Maybe, after a while. For the time being, I'd like to loaf on you for a
+week or so and watch the wheels go around without my having to prod
+them. It's running in my mind that this newest phase of the C. S. & W.
+business is going to stir up a mighty pretty shindy, and I had a foolish
+notion that I'd like to stick around and look on--as an innocent
+bystander."
+
+"The innocent bystander usually gets shot in the leg," the boss ripped
+out, with the brittlest kind of humor. And then: "I suppose I shall have
+to let you do what you want to--and let you pick your own time for
+giving me the real reason. But you're crippling me most savagely,
+Upton--and at a time when I am least able to stand it."
+
+Mr. Van Britt got up and edged his way toward the door.
+
+"It's a good reason, Graham; and sometime--say when we are walking
+through the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem together--maybe I'll tell
+you about it. If I were really a good scrapper, I'd stay and help you
+fight it out with Hatch; but you know the old saying--capital is always
+cowardly; and my present credit at the Portal City National is pretty
+well up to a quarter of a million, thanks to the dividends I deposited
+to-day. Good-night. I'll see you in the morning--if by that time you
+haven't decided to cut me cold."
+
+I kept right busy over the indexes after Mr. Van Britt went away, just
+to give the boss a little chance to catch up with himself. He sure was
+catching it hot and heavy on all sides. The way things had turned out,
+he couldn't go to the major's any more, and now his railroad
+organization was beginning to go to pieces on him. It certainly was
+tough. All we needed now was for President Dunton to come smashing in
+with one more good jolt and it would be all over but the obsequies, the
+monument and the epitaph. At least, that is the way it looked to me.
+
+It was along about ten o'clock when the boss closed his desk with a bang
+and said we'd better saw it off for the night. I walked up-town with him
+and as we were passing the Bullard he turned in to ask the night clerk
+if Collingwood was in his room. The answer was nix; that the young New
+Yorker hadn't been seen since dinner.
+
+On the way out we saw Mr. Van Britt at the telegraph alcove. He had
+apparently been making good use of his first half-hour or so of freedom.
+He was handing in a thick bunch of telegrams for transmission, and he
+rather pointedly turned the sheaf face down upon the marble slab when we
+came along, as much as to say "it's none of your business what I'm
+doing."
+
+It struck me as sort of curious that he should have so much wire
+correspondence when he claimed to be taking a rest, and why he was so
+careful not to let us get a glimpse of what it was all about. But the
+whole thing was now so horribly muddled that a little mystery more or
+less on anybody's part couldn't make much difference; and that was the
+thought I took to bed with me a little later after we reached our rooms
+in the railroad club.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+The Beginning of the End
+
+
+However much the Hatch people may have wanted to avoid publicity
+regarding the change of ownership and policies in the Storage &
+Warehouse reorganization, the prompt announcement of a general strike of
+the employees was enough to make every newspaper in the State sit up and
+take notice.
+
+We had the _Mountaineer_ at the breakfast-table in the club grill-room
+on the morning of the day when the strike was advertised to go into
+effect. There was a news story, with big headlines in red ink, and also
+an editorial. Cantrell didn't say anything against the railroad company.
+His comments were those of an observer who wished to be straight-forward
+and fair to all concerned, but his editorial did not spare the silly
+local stockholders whose swapping and selling had made the _coup_
+possible.
+
+Cantrell himself, mild-eyed and looking as if he'd got out of bed about
+three hours too early, drifted into the grill-room and took a seat at
+our table before we were through.
+
+"I wanted to be decent about it, Norcross," he said, forestalling
+anything that the boss might be going to say about the editorial in the
+_Mountaineer_. "I'm trying to believe that the men higher up in your
+railroad councils haven't fathered this Hatch scheme of
+consolidation--which is more than some of the other pencil-pushers will
+do for you, I'm afraid. Thanks to your publicity measures, everybody
+believes that you still hold the whip-hand over the combination with
+your ground leases. I'm not asking what you propose to do; I am merely
+taking it for granted that you are going to stick to your policy, and
+hoping that you will come and tell me about it when you are ready to
+talk."
+
+"I shall do just that," the boss promised; and I guess he would have
+been glad to let the matter drop at this, only Cantrell wouldn't.
+
+"I lost three good hours' sleep this morning on the chance of catching
+you here at table," the editor went on. "A little whisper leaked in over
+the wires last night, or, rather, early this morning, that set me to
+thinking. You haven't been having any trouble with your own employees
+lately, have you, Norcross?"
+
+"Not a bit in the world. Why?"
+
+"There is some little excitement, with the public taking a hand in it.
+There were indignation meetings held last night in a number of the
+towns along your lines, and resolutions were passed protesting against
+the action of the new combination in cutting wages, and asserting that
+public sentiment would be with the C. S. & W. employees if they are
+forced to carry out their threat of striking at noon to-day. The whisper
+that I spoke of intimated that the protest might extend to the railroad
+employees."
+
+"There's nothing in it," said the boss decisively. "I suppose you mean
+in the way of a sympathetic strike, and that is entirely improbable. I
+imagine very few of the C. S. & W. employees belong to any of the labor
+unions."
+
+"A strike on the railroad would hit you pretty hard just now, wouldn't
+it?" Cantrell asked.
+
+Mr. Norcross dodged the question. "We're not going to have a strike," he
+averred; and since we had finished our breakfast, he made a business
+excuse and we slid out.
+
+When we reached the office we found Fred May already there and at work,
+and in the middle room Mr. Van Britt was on hand, reading the morning
+paper.
+
+"You don't get around as early as you might," was the little
+millionaire's comment when the boss walked in and opened up his desk.
+"I've been waiting nearly a half-hour for you to show up. Seen the
+paper?"
+
+The boss nodded.
+
+"I don't mean the strike business; I mean the market quotations."
+
+"No; I didn't look at them."
+
+"They are interesting. P. S. L. Common went up another three points
+yesterday. It closed at 38 and a fraction. Do you know what that means,
+Graham?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It means that Uncle Breckenridge and his crowd are already joyfully
+discounting your coming resignation. Somebody has given them a wire tip
+that you are as good as down and out, and unless a miracle of some sort
+can be pulled off, I guess the tip is a straight one. Strong as he is,
+Chadwick can't carry you alone."
+
+"Drop it," snapped the boss irritably. And then: "Have you come to tell
+me that you have reconsidered that fool letter you wrote me last night?"
+
+"Not in a million years," returned the escaped captive airily. "I am
+here this morning as a paying patron of the Pioneer Short Line. I want
+to hire a special train to go--well, anywhere I please on your jerkwater
+railroad."
+
+"You don't mean it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do. I want a car and a good, smart engine. The Eight-Fifteen
+will do, with Buck Chandler to run it."
+
+"Pshaw! take your own car and any crew you please. We are not selling
+transportation to you."
+
+"Yes you are; I'm going to pay for that train, and what's more, I want
+your written receipt for the money. I need it in my business. Then, if
+Chandler should happen to get gay and dump me into the ditch somewhere,
+I can sue you for damages."
+
+"All right; if you will persist in joking with me it's going to cost you
+something. How far do you want your train to run?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; anywhere the notion prods me--say to the west end and
+back, with as many stops as I see fit to make, and perhaps a run over
+the branches."
+
+I saw the boss make a few figures on a pad under his hand.
+
+"It would cost anybody else, roughly, something like five hundred
+dollars. On account of your little joke it's going to cost you a cold
+thousand."
+
+Mr. Van Britt took out his check-book and a fountain pen and solemnly
+made out the check.
+
+"Here you are," he said, flipping the check over to the boss's desk.
+"Now shell out that receipt, so that I'll have it to show if anybody
+wants to know how much you've gouged me. Since you're making the
+accommodation cost me a dollar a minute, how long have I got to wait?"
+
+The chief's answer was a push at Fred May's call button, and when
+Frederic of Pittsburgh came in:
+
+"Have Mr. Perkins order out my private car for Mr. Van Britt, with the
+Eight-Fifteen and Chandler, engineer. Tell Mr. Perkins to give Chandler
+and his conductor orders to run as Mr. Van Britt may direct, giving the
+special right-of-way over everything except first-class trains in the
+opposite direction." Then to Van Britt: "Will that do?"
+
+"Admirably; only I'm waiting for that receipt."
+
+Mr. Norcross said something that sounded like "damn," scribbled a
+memorandum of the thousand-dollar payment on a sheet of the scratch-pad
+and handed it over, saying: "The order for the car includes my cook and
+porter, and something to eat; we'll throw these in with the
+transportation, and if the car is ditched and you sue for damages, we'll
+file a cross-bill for hotel accommodations. Now go away and work off
+your little attack of lunacy. I'm busy."
+
+We had an easier day in the office than I had dared hope for, whatever
+the boss thought about it, though it was an exceedingly busy one. With
+the strike news in the papers, it seemed as if everybody in town wanted
+to interview the general manager of the railroad, and to ask him what he
+was going to do about it.
+
+Following his hard-and-fast rule, Mr. Norcross didn't deny himself to
+anybody. Patiently he told each fresh batch of callers that the railroad
+company had nothing whatever to do with the change in ownership of C. S.
+& W.; that the railroad's attitude was unaltered; and that, so far as it
+could be done legally, the Pioneer Short Line would stand firmly between
+its patrons and any extortion which might grow out of the new
+conditions.
+
+The C. S. & W. strike--as our wires told us--went into effect promptly
+on the stroke of noon, and a train from the west, arriving late in the
+afternoon, brought Ripley. For the first time that day, Mr. Norcross
+told me to snap the catch on the office door for privacy and then he
+told Ripley to talk. Our neat little general counsel was fresh from the
+actual fighting line, and his news amply confirmed the wire reports
+which had been trickling in.
+
+"The conditions all along the line are almost revolutionary," was
+Ripley's summing-up of the situation. "Generally speaking, the public is
+not holding us responsible as yet, though of course there are croakers
+who are saying that it is entirely a railroad move, and predicting that
+we won't do anything to interfere with the new graft."
+
+"Cantrell says that public sentiment is altogether on the side of the C.
+S. & W. strikers," the boss put in.
+
+"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to
+everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be
+any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of
+affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can
+starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a
+bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."
+
+"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those
+ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"
+
+"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life,"
+was the confident rejoinder.
+
+"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond
+and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is
+a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply
+your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it.
+Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third
+member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap
+into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the
+railroad management.
+
+Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but
+also less hopeful.
+
+"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his
+sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is
+all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately
+trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any
+surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl
+out of."
+
+"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a
+chance to sleep on it--as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in
+some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men
+who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the
+affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make
+them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those
+papers----"
+
+"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.
+
+"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these
+men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by
+Bullock for his vote."
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"Then I should make every mother's son of them come across with the full
+amount of the bribe, on pain of an exposure which the dirtiest
+politician in this State couldn't afford to face. That would settle it.
+Hatch couldn't work the same game a second time."
+
+Ripley let it go at that and spoke of something else.
+
+"I suppose you have seen how our stock is climbing. Has the new
+situation here anything to do with it?"
+
+Mr. Norcross said he thought not, and rather lamented that we didn't
+have better information about what was going on at the New York end of
+things. Also, he told Ripley something that I hadn't known; that he had
+wired Mr. Chadwick asking the wheat king to give him a line on what the
+stock-kiting meant. Then Ripley asked for orders.
+
+"There is nothing to be done until Hatch begins to raise his prices," he
+was told. "But I wanted to have you here in case anything should break
+loose suddenly." And at that Ripley went away.
+
+We were closing our desks to go to dinner when Fred May came in to say
+that a delegation of the pay-roll men was outside and wanting to have a
+word with the "Big Boss." Mr. Norcross stopped with his desk curtain
+half drawn down.
+
+"What is it, Fred?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," said the Pittsburgher. "I should call it a grievance
+committee, if it wasn't so big. And they don't seem to be mad about
+anything. Bart Hoskins is doing the talking for them."
+
+"Send them in," was the curt command, and a minute later the inner
+office was about three-fourths filled up with a shuffling crowd of P. S.
+L. men.
+
+The chief looked the crowd over. There was a bunch of train- and
+engine-men, a squad from the shops, and a bigger one from the yards.
+Also, the wire service had turned out a gang of linemen and half a dozen
+operators.
+
+"Well, men, let's have it," said Mr. Norcross, not too sharply. "My
+dinner's getting cold."
+
+"We'll not be keepin' you above the hollow half of a minute, Mister
+Norcross," said the big, bearded freight conductor who acted as
+spokesman. "About this C. S. & W. strike that went on to-day: we'd like
+to know, straight from you, if it's anything in the railroad company's
+pocket to have all these old men fired out and a lot of scabs put in on
+starvation wages to ball us all up when we try to work with 'em."
+
+"It's nothing to us; or rather, I should say, we are on the other side,"
+was the short reply. "You probably all know that C. S. & W. has changed
+hands, and the old Red Tower syndicate, with Mr. Rufus Hatch at its
+head, is now in control."
+
+Hoskins nodded. "That's about what we allowed, and we've come up here to
+say that we're almighty sorry for these poor cusses that have been
+dumped out o' their jobs. We ain't got no kick comin' with you, n'r with
+the company, Mister Norcross, but it looks like it's up to us to do
+somethin', and we didn't want to do it without hittin' square out from
+the shoulder."
+
+"I'm listening," said the chief.
+
+"The union locals have called a meetin' f'r to-night. There ain't nobody
+knows yet what's goin' to be done, but whatever it is, we want you to
+know that it ain't done ag'inst you n'r the railroad company."
+
+The boss had handled wage earners too long not to be able to suspect
+what was in the wind.
+
+"You men don't want to let your sympathies carry you too far," he
+cautioned. "When you take up another fellow's quarrel you want to be
+pretty sure that you're not going to hit your friends in the scrap."
+
+Hoskins grinned understandingly, and I guess the boss was a little
+puzzled by the nods and winks that went around among the silent members
+of the delegation; at least, I know I was.
+
+"That's all right," Hoskins said. "Bein' the Big Boss, you've got to
+talk that way. They might reach out and grab you fr'm New York if you
+didn't. But what I was aimin' to say is that there'll be a train-load 'r
+two of strike-breakers a-careerin' along here in a day 'r so, and we
+ain't figurin' on lettin' 'em get past Portal City, if that far."
+
+"That's up to you," said Mr. Norcross brusquely. "If you start anything
+in the way of a riot----"
+
+"Excuse _me_. There ain't goin' to be no riotin', and no company
+property mashed up. Mr. Van Britt, he----"
+
+It was right here that an odd thing happened. Con Corrigan, a big
+two-fisted freight engineer standing directly behind Hoskins, reached an
+arm around the speaker's neck and choked him so suddenly that Hoskins's
+sentence ended in a gasping chuckle. When the garroting arm was
+withdrawn the conductor looked around sort of foolishly and said: "I'm
+thinking that's about all we wanted to say, ain't it, boys?" and the
+deputation filed out as solemnly as it had come in.
+
+I guess Mr. Norcross wasn't left wholly in the dark when the tramping
+footfalls of the committee died away in the corridor. That unintentional
+mention of Mr. Van Britt's name looked as if it might open up some more
+possibilities, though what they were I couldn't imagine, and I don't
+believe the general manager could, either.
+
+After that, things rocked along pretty easy until after dinner. Instead
+of going right back to the office from the club, Mr. Norcross drifted
+into the smoking-room and filled a pipe. In the course of a few minutes,
+Major Kendrick dropped in and pulled up a chair. I don't know what they
+talked about, but after a little while, when the boss got up to go, I
+heard him say something that gave the key to the most of what had gone
+before, I guess.
+
+"Have you seen or heard anything of Collingwood since yesterday?"
+
+The good old major shook his head. "I haven't seen, but I have heard,"
+he said, sort of soberly. "They're tellin' me that he's oveh in his
+rooms at the Bullard, drinkin' himself to death. If he wasn't altogetheh
+past redemption, suh, he would have had the decency to get out of town
+befo' he turned loose all holts that way; he would, for a fact, Graham."
+
+At that, Mr. Norcross explained in just a few words why Collingwood
+hadn't gone--why he couldn't go. Whereupon the old Kentuckian looked
+graver than ever.
+
+"That thah spells trouble, Graham. Hatch is simply invitin' the
+unde'takeh. Howie isn't what you'd call a dangerous man, but he is
+totally irresponsible, even when he's sobeh."
+
+"We ought to get him away from here," was the boss's decision. "He is an
+added menace while he stays."
+
+I didn't hear what the major said to that, because little Rags, Mr.
+Perkins's office boy, had just come in with a note which he was asking
+me to give to Mr. Norcross. I did it; and after the note had been
+glanced at, the chief said, kind of bitterly, to the major:
+
+"You can never fall so far that you can't fall a little farther; have
+you ever remarked that, major?" And then he want on to explain: "I have
+a note here from Perkins, our Desert Division superintendent. He says
+that the 'locals' of the various railroad labor unions have just
+notified him of the unanimous passage of a strike vote--the strike to go
+into effect at midnight."
+
+"A strike?--on the _railroad_? Why, Graham, son, you don't mean it!"
+
+"The men seem to mean it--which is much more to the purpose. They are
+striking in sympathy with the C. S. & W. employees. I fancy that settles
+our little experiment in good railroading definitely, major. We'll go
+out of business as a common carrier at midnight, and it's the final
+straw that will break the camel's back. Dunton doesn't want a
+receivership, but he'll have to take one now."
+
+"Oh, my deah fellow!" protested the major. "Let's hope it isn't going to
+be so bad as that!"
+
+"It will. The bottom will drop out of the stock and break the market
+when this strike news gets on the wire, and that will end it. I wish to
+God there were some way in which I could save Mr. Chadwick: he has
+trusted me, major, and I--I've failed him!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+The Murder Madman
+
+
+I knew what we were up against when we headed down to the railroad
+lay-out, the chief and I, leaving the good old major thoughtfully
+puffing his cigar in the club smoking-room. With a strike due to be
+pulled off in a little more than three hours there were about a million
+things that would have to be jerked around into shape and propped up so
+that they could stand by themselves while the Short Line was taking a
+vacation. And there was only a little handful of us in the headquarters
+to do the jerking and propping.
+
+But it was precisely in a crisis like this that the boss could shine.
+From the minute we hit the tremendous job he was all there, carrying the
+whole map of the Short Line in his head, thinking straight from the
+shoulder, and never missing a lick; and I don't believe anybody would
+ever have suspected that he was a beaten man, pushed to the ropes in the
+final round with the grafters, his reputation as a successful railroad
+manager as good as gone, and his warm little love-dream knocked
+sky-winding forever and a day.
+
+Luckily, we found Fred May still at his desk, and he was promptly
+clamped to the telephone and told to get busy spreading the hurry call.
+In half an hour every relief operator we had in Portal City was in the
+wire-room, and the back-breaking job of preparing a thousand miles of
+railroad for a sudden tie-up was in full swing. Mr. Perkins, as division
+superintendent, was in touch with the local labor unions, and a
+conference was held with the strike leaders. Persuading and insisting by
+turns, Mr. Norcross fought out the necessary compromises with the
+unions. All ordinary traffic would be suspended at midnight, but
+passenger trains _en route_ were to be run through to our connecting
+line terminals east and west, live-stock trains were to be laid out only
+where there were feeding corrals, and perishable freight was to be taken
+to its destination, wherever that might be.
+
+In addition to these concessions, the strikers agreed to allow the mail
+trains to run without interruption, with our promise that they would not
+carry passengers. Hoskins and his committee bucked a little at this, but
+got down when they were shown that they could not afford to risk a clash
+with the Government. This exception admitted, another followed, as a
+matter of course. If the mail trains were to be run, some of the
+telegraph operators would have to remain on duty, at least to the extent
+of handling train orders.
+
+With these generalities out of the way, we got down to details.
+"Fire-alarm" wires were sent to the various cities and towns on the
+lines asking for immediate information regarding food and fuel supplies,
+and the strike leaders were notified that, for sheer humanity's sake,
+they would have to permit the handling of provision trains in cases
+where they were absolutely needed.
+
+By eleven o'clock the tangle was getting itself pretty well straightened
+out. Some of the trains had already been abandoned, and the others were
+moving along to the agreed-upon destinations. Kirgan had taken hold in
+the Portal City yard, and by putting on extra crews was getting the
+needful shifting and car sorting into shape; and the Portal City
+employees, acting upon their own initiative, were picketing the yard and
+company buildings to protect them from looters or fire-setters. Mr. Van
+Britt's special, so the wires told us, was at Lesterburg, and it was
+likely to stay there; and Mr. Van Britt, himself, couldn't be reached.
+
+It was at half-past eleven that we got the first real yelp from somebody
+who was getting pinched. It came in the shape of a wire from the
+Strathcona night operator. A party of men--"mine owners" the operator
+called them--had just heard of the impending railroad tie-up. They had
+been meaning to come in on the regular night train, but that had been
+abandoned. So now they were offering all kinds of money for a special to
+bring them to Portal City. It was represented that there were millions
+at stake. Couldn't we do something?
+
+Mr. Norcross had kept Hoskins and a few of the other local strike
+leaders where he could get hold of them, and he put the request up to
+them as a matter that was now out of his hands. Would they allow him to
+run a one-car special from the gold camp to Portal City after midnight?
+It was for them to say.
+
+Hoskins and his accomplices went off to talk it over with some of the
+other men. When the big freight conductor came back he was alone and was
+grinning good-naturedly.
+
+"We ain't aimin' to make the company lose any good money that comes
+a-rolling down the hill at it, Mister Norcross," he said. "Cinch these
+here Strathcona hurry-boys f'r all you can get out o' them, and if
+you'll lend us the loan of the wires, we'll pass the word to let the
+special come on through."
+
+It was sure the funniest strike I ever saw or heard of, and I guess the
+boss thought so, too--with all this good-natured bargaining back and
+forth; but there was nothing more said, and I carried the word to Mr.
+Perkins directing him to have arrangements made for the running of a
+one-car special from Strathcona for the hurry folks.
+
+Past that, things rocked along until the hands of the big standard-time
+clock in the despatcher's room pointed to midnight. Mr. Norcross and I
+were both at Donohue's elbow when the men at the wires, east and west,
+clicked in their "Good-night," which was the signal that the Pioneer
+Short Line had laid down on the job and gone out of business. I couldn't
+compare it to anything but a funeral bell, and that's about what it was.
+No matter how short the strike might be, it was going to smash us good
+and plenty. And whatever else might come of it, it was a cinch that it
+would squeeze the last little breath of life out of the Norcross
+management for good and all.
+
+As if to confirm that sort of doleful foreboding of mine, Norris, who
+was holding down the commercial wire, came over to the counter railing
+just then with a New York message. I saw the boss's eyes flash and the
+little bunchy muscle-swellings of anger come and go on the edge of his
+jaw as he read it, and then he handed it to me.
+
+"You may endorse that 'No Answer' and file it when you go back to the
+office," he said shortly, and then he went on talking to Donohue,
+telling him how to handle the trains which were still out and moving to
+their tie-up destinations.
+
+Of course, I read the message; I knew there was nothing private about it
+so far as I was concerned, since it had been given me to put away in the
+files. It was dated from the Waldorf-Astoria at midnight, which,
+allowing for the difference in time between New York and Portal City,
+meant that it had been sent at nine o'clock by our time. Somebody in our
+neck of woods was evidently keeping in close wire touch with Mr. Dunton,
+for though the strike vote was only a little more than an hour old when
+he sent the telegram, he evidently knew all about it. This is what I
+read:
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "Your administration has been a conspicuous failure from the
+     beginning. Compromise with employees on any terms offered and
+     prevent strike at all costs. That done, you are hereby directed to
+     wire your resignation to take effect one week from to-day.
+
+     "B. DUNTON, _President_."
+
+It had hit us at last; not a decent request, mind you, but a blunt,
+brutal demand. The boss was fired. No word had come from Mr. Chadwick,
+and there could be but one reason for his silence. In some way, perhaps
+through the late boosting of the stock, the New Yorkers had squeezed
+him out. We were shot dead in the trenches.
+
+I didn't understand how the chief could take it so quietly, unless it
+was because he had been hammered so long and so hard that nothing
+mattered any more. Anyhow, he was just standing there, talking soberly
+to Donohue, when once more the Strathcona branch sounder began to click
+furiously, snipping out the headquarters call.
+
+Donohue cut in and we all heard the Strathcona man's new bleat. The way
+he told it, it seemed that one member of the party that had chartered
+the special to come to Portal City had got left, and this man was now in
+the Strathcona wire office, bidding high for an engine to chase the
+train and put him aboard.
+
+At first the boss said, "No," short off, just like that; adding that it
+wouldn't be keeping faith with the strike committee. But at that moment
+Hoskins blew in again, and when he was told what was on the cards, he
+took a little responsibility of his own.
+
+"Go to it, Mister Norcross, if there's any more money in it f'r the
+railroad," he told the boss. "I'll stand f'r it with the boys." And then
+to Donohue: "Who'll be runnin' this chaser engine?"
+
+"It'll be John Hogan and the Four-Sixteen," said Donohue. "There's
+nobody else at that end of the branch."
+
+The arrangement, such as it was, was fixed up quickly. The man who was
+putting up the money seemed to have plenty of it. He was offering five
+hundred dollars for the engine, and a thousand if it should overtake the
+special that side of Bauxite Junction.
+
+I guess the bleat unravelled itself pretty clearly for all of us; or at
+least, it seemed plain enough. A mining deal of some kind was on, and
+this man who was left behind was going to be left in another sense of
+the word if he couldn't butt in soon enough to break whatever
+combination the others were stacking up against him.
+
+In just a few minutes we got the word from the Strathcona operator that
+the money was paid and the chaser engine was out and gone. The special
+train had fully a half-hour's start, and with the hazardous grades of
+Slide Mountain and Dry Canyon to negotiate, it didn't seem probable that
+the light engine could overtake it anywhere north of Bauxite. That
+wasn't up to us, however. Kirgan had come in to say that our
+good-natured strikers had thrown a guard into the shops and were
+patroling the yard, when Fred May showed up, making signals to me. I
+heard him when he edged up to the boss and said: "There's a lady in the
+office, wanting to see you, Mr. Norcross."
+
+"Holy Smoke!" said I to myself. I knew it couldn't be anybody but Mrs.
+Sheila, at that time of night, and I saw seventeen different kinds of
+bloody murder looming up again when I tagged along after the boss on the
+trip down the hall to our offices.
+
+The guess was right, both ways around. It was Mrs. Sheila, and she had
+the major with her. And the air of the private office was so thick with
+tragedy that it made the very electrics look dim and ghostly. Mrs.
+Sheila didn't have a bit of color in her face, and her eyes had a big
+horror in them that was enough to make your flesh creep.
+
+I won't attempt to tell all that was said, partly by the good old major
+and partly by Mrs. Sheila. But the gist of it was this: Collingwood had
+continued his booze fight in his rooms at the Bullard until he had
+worked himself up to the crazy murder pitch. Then he had gone on the
+warpath, hunting for Hatch. Just how he had contrived to dodge Hatch's
+spotters, who were doubtless keeping cases on him, did not appear. But
+that was a detail. He had dodged them, had learned that Hatch and a
+bunch of his Red Tower backers had gone to Strathcona on a mining deal,
+and had started to drive to the gold camp in an auto to get his man.
+
+Before leaving Portal City he had written a letter to Mrs. Sheila,
+telling her what he was going to do, and that when he got through with
+it, she would be free. The letter, which had been left at the hotel,
+had been delayed in delivery--had, in fact, just been sent out to the
+major's house by the night clerk who had found it.
+
+Long before the story could get itself fully told, the different gaps in
+it were filling themselves up for me--and for Mr. Norcross, as well, I
+guess. When Mrs. Sheila came to the auto-drive part of it, the boss
+whirled and shot an order at me.
+
+"Jimmie, chase into the despatcher's office and find out the name of the
+man who chartered that following engine!" he snapped; and I went on the
+run, remembering that in the strike excitement and hustle it hadn't
+occurred to anybody to ask the man's name or that of the particular
+"mine owner" who had chartered the special train.
+
+Donohue got the Strathcona operator in less than half a minute after I
+fired my order at him, and the answer came almost without a break:
+
+"Charter of special train was to R. Hatch, of Portal City, and of engine
+416 to man named Collingwood."
+
+Gosh! but this did settle it! I didn't run back to the office with the
+news--I flew. It was like firing a gun in amongst the three who were
+waiting, but it had to be done. The major groaned and said, "Oh, good
+God!" and Mrs. Sheila sat down and put her face in her hands. The boss
+was the only one who knew what to do and he did it: vanished like a
+shot in the direction of the despatcher's office.
+
+In about fifteen of the longest minutes I ever lived he came back,
+shaking his head. I knew what he had been doing, or trying to do. There
+was one night telegraph station on the branch--at a mining-camp half-way
+down the grade on Slide Mountain--and he had been trying to get word
+there to stop the wild engine.
+
+"He has either bribed or bullied his engine crew," he told the major. "I
+wired and had a stop signal set for them at the Antonio Mine, but they
+overran it, going at full speed down the hill."
+
+It was plain enough now what Collingwood was trying to do. The murder
+mania had got a firm hold of its weapon. Collingwood knew that Hatch was
+on the special, and he was going to chase that one-car train until it
+made a stop somewhere and then smash into it for blood. After Mr.
+Norcross had talked hurriedly for a minute or two with the major he went
+back to the despatcher's room and I went with him. There was a word for
+Donohue, telling him to call all night stations ahead of the special.
+The operators were to give the special the "go-ahead," and after it had
+passed, to set their signals against the following engine.
+
+As Donohue cut in on the branch wire, Nippo, at the canyon mouth, broke
+in to say that the special had gone by fifteen minutes earlier, and
+that the following engine was now coming down the canyon. Donohue
+grabbed his key.
+
+"Throw signal against engine 416," he clicked; and a few seconds later
+we got the reply:
+
+"No good. Engine 416 overran signal."
+
+"Never mind," said the boss to Donohue; "keep it up at the other
+stations. That engine has got to be stopped. It's carrying a madman."
+This is what he said, but I knew well enough what he was thinking. He
+was remembering that the special now had a lead of only fifteen minutes,
+and that it would be obliged to stop at Bauxite for its orders over the
+main line.
+
+He did what he could to cut out the Bauxite stop for the special,
+ordering Donohue to tell the junction man to set his signals at "clear"
+for the train, and at "stop" for the 416. It was only a make-shift. In
+the natural order of things the engineer of the special would make the
+Bauxite stop anyway, signal or no signal, since it is a nation-wide
+railroad rule that no train shall pass a junction without stopping.
+
+Past that the boss grabbed up an official time-card and began to study
+it hurriedly and to jot down figures. I wondered if he wasn't
+tempted--just the least little bit in the world, you know.
+
+Here was a thing shaping itself up--a thing for which he wasn't in the
+least responsible--and if it should work out to the catastrophe that
+nobody seemed to be able to prevent, the chief of the grafters, and
+probably a number of his nearest backers, would be wiped off the books;
+and Collingwood's death, which, in all human probability, was equally
+certain, would set Mrs. Sheila free.
+
+He must be thinking of it, I argued; he couldn't be a human man and not
+be thinking of it. But he never stopped his hasty figuring for a single
+instant until he broke off to bark out at Kirgan, who was standing by:
+
+"Quick, Mart! I want a light engine, and somebody to run it! Jump for
+it, man!"
+
+Kirgan, big and slow-motioned at most times, was off like a shot. Then
+the boss hurried back down the hall to his own offices, and again I
+tagged him. The old major was standing at a window with his hands behind
+him, and Mrs. Sheila was sitting just as we had left her, with the big
+terror still in her eyes and her face as white as a sheet.
+
+"We can't stop him without throwing a switch in front of him, and that
+would mean death to him and his two enginemen," said the boss, talking
+straight at the major, and as if he were trying to ignore Mrs. Sheila.
+"I'm going to take a long chance and run down the line to meet them.
+There's a bare possibility that I can contrive to get between the train
+and the engine, and if I can----"
+
+Mrs. Sheila was on her feet and she had her hands clasped as if she were
+going to make a prayer to the boss. And it was pretty nearly that.
+
+"Take me!" she begged; "oh, _please_ take me. It's my _right_ to go!"
+
+Kirgan had found an engine somewhere in the yard and was backing it up
+to the station platform. We could hear it. I saw that the chief was
+going to turn Mrs. Sheila down--which was, of course, exactly the right
+thing to do. But just then the major shoved in.
+
+"Sheila knows what she's talking about, Graham," he said quietly. "When
+you-all find Howie, you'll have a madman on your hands--and she's the
+only one who can control him at such times--God pity her! Take us both,
+suh."
+
+I suppose Mr. Norcross thought there wasn't any time to stand there
+arguing about it.
+
+"As you will," he snapped at the major; and then to me: "Break for it,
+Jimmie, and tell Kirgan to get a car--any car--the first one he can
+find!"
+
+I broke, and came pretty near breaking my blessed neck tumbling down the
+stairs. Kirgan had found his engine and had picked up a yard man to fire
+it. I told him what was wanted, and in less than no time he had pulled
+out an empty day-coach from the washing track. While he was backing in
+with it, Mr. Norcross came down the platform with the major and Mrs.
+Sheila. He let the major help Mrs. Sheila up the steps of the coach and
+ran forward to call out to Kirgan:
+
+"Donohue is clearing for you, and there'll be nothing in the way. Run
+regardless to Timber Mountain 'Y.' You have six minutes on the special's
+time to that point, if you run like the devil!" And then, as he was
+climbing to the cab, he ripped out at me: "Jimmie, you go back and stay
+with them in the car. Hurry or you'll be left!"
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+Under the Wide and Starry Sky
+
+
+I sure had to be quick about obeying that "get-aboard" order of Mr.
+Norcross's. Kirgan had jerked the throttle open the minute the word was
+given. I missed the forward end of the car, and when the other end came
+along my grab at the hand-rod slammed me head over heels up the steps.
+Kirgan was holding his whistle valve open, and the guarding strikers in
+the yard gave us room and a clear track. By the time we had passed the
+"limit" switches we were going like a blue streak, and I could hardly
+keep my balance on the back platform of the day-coach.
+
+You can guess that I didn't stay out there very long. The night was
+clear as a bell and pretty coolish, with the stars burning like white
+diamonds in the black inverted bowl of the sky. It was mighty pretty
+scenery, but just the same, after Kirgan had fairly struck his gait on
+the long western tangent, I clawed my way inside. It was a lot too
+blustery and unsafe on that back platform.
+
+The major and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together, near the middle of the
+car. I staggered up and took the seat just ahead of them, and the major
+asked me if Mr. Norcross was on the engine. I told him he was, and that
+ended it. What with the rattle and bang of the coach, the howling of the
+speed-made wind in the ventilators, and the shrill scream of the
+spinning wheels, there wasn't any room for talk during the whole of that
+breath-taking race to the old "Y" in the hills beyond Banta.
+
+Knowing, from what Mr. Norcross had said, the point at which we were
+going to side-track and wait for the special and the wild engine, I grew
+sort of nervous and worked-up after we had crashed through the Banta
+yard and the day-coach began to sway and lurch around the hill curves.
+What if the special had been making better time than the boss had
+counted upon? In that case, we'd probably hit her in a head-ender
+somewhere on one of those very curves. And with the time we were making,
+and the time she'd be making, there wouldn't be enough left of either
+train to be worth picking up.
+
+A mile or so short of the "Y" siding I went up ahead and handed myself
+out to the forward platform to see if I couldn't get a squint past the
+storming engine. I got it now and then, on the swing of the curves, but
+there was nothing in sight. Just the same, it was mighty scary, and I
+took a relief breath so deep that it nearly made me sick at my stomach
+when I finally realized that Kirgan had shut off and was slowing for the
+stop at the farther switch of the old "Y."
+
+What was done at the switch was done swiftly, as men work when they have
+the fear of death gripping at them. If the special should come up while
+we were making the back-in, the result would be just about the same as
+it would have been if we had met it on the curves.
+
+The jerking tug of the self-preservation instinct is pretty strong,
+sometimes, and I tumbled off the steps of the car as it was backing in
+around the western curve of the "Y." Our picked-up fireman was at the
+switch, setting it again for the main line. With our own engine silent,
+I could hear a faint sound like the far-away fluttering of a
+safety-valve. We were not ten seconds too soon. The special was coming.
+
+Mr. Norcross, who was still in the engine cab, shot an order at Kirgan.
+
+"Fling your coat over the headlight, and then be ready to snatch it and
+get off!" he shouted. "If they see it as they come up, it may stop
+them!" Then, catching a glimpse of me on the ground: "Break the coupling
+on the coach, Jimmie--quick!"
+
+As I jumped to obey I understood what was to be done. The fireman at
+the switch was to let the special go by, and then the boss--just the
+boss alone on the engine--was to be let out on the main track to put
+himself between the chaser and the chased. It was a hair-raising
+proposition, but perhaps--just perhaps--not quite so suicidal as it
+looked. With skilful handling the interposed engine might possibly be
+kept out of the way by backing, and its warning headlight shining full
+into the eyes of the men in the 416's cab would surely be enough to stop
+them--if anything would.
+
+I got the coupling broken on the car to set our engine free before the
+distant flutter noise had grown to anything more than a humming like
+that of an overhead swarm of angry bees. Kirgan was standing on the
+front end, with his coat thrown over the headlight, ready to jerk it off
+and jump when he got the word. Out at the switch, our fireman was
+keeping out of sight so that the engineer of the special shouldn't see
+him, and maybe get rattled and stop. As usual, the boss had covered
+every little detail in his instructions, and had remembered that the
+sight of a man standing at a switch in a lonesome place like this might
+give an engineer a fit of "nerves" and make him shut off steam.
+
+I had just finished uncoupling the day-coach and the boss was easing our
+engine ahead a bit to make sure that she was loose, when the car-door
+opened behind me and the major and Mrs. Sheila came out in the front
+vestibule. It was Mrs. Sheila who spoke to me, and her voice had
+borrowed some of the big terror that I had seen in her eyes while she
+was sitting in the office at Portal City.
+
+"Where--whereabouts are we, Jimmie?" she asked.
+
+I didn't get a chance to tell her. Before I could open my mouth the
+black shadows of the crooked valley beyond the switch were shot through
+with the white, shimmering glow of a headlight beam, and a second later
+the special flicked into view on the curve of approach.
+
+When we first saw it, the engine was working steam, and she was running
+like a streak of lightning. But as we looked, there was a short, sharp
+whistle yelp, the brakes gripped the wheels, the one-car train, with
+fire grinding from every brake-shoe, came to a jerking stop a short
+car-length on our side of the switch, and a man dropped from the engine
+step to go sprinting to the rear. And it was plain that neither the
+engineer nor the man who was running back saw our outfit waiting on the
+leg of the old "Y."
+
+Kirgan was the first one to understand. With a shout of warning, he
+jumped and ran toward the stopped train, yelling at the engineer for
+God's sake to pull out and go on. Back in the hills beyond the curve of
+approach another hoarse murmur was jarring upon the air, and the
+special's fireman, who was the man we had seen jump off and go running
+back, and who, of course, didn't know that we had our man there, was
+apparently trying to reach the switch behind his train to throw it
+against the following engine to shoot it off on the "Y."
+
+By this time the boss was off of our engine and racing across the angle
+of the "Y" only a little way behind Kirgan. He realized that his plan
+was smashed by the stopping of the special, and that the very
+catastrophe we had come out to try to prevent was due to happen right
+there and then. Whatever our man waiting at the switch might do, there
+was bound to be a collision. If he left the points set for the main
+line, the wild engine would crash into the rear end of the stopped
+special; and if he did the other thing, our engine and coach standing on
+the "Y" would get it.
+
+"Get the people out of that car!" I heard the boss bellow, but even as
+he said it the pop-valve of the stopped engine went off with a roar,
+filling the shut-in valley with clamorings that nothing could drown.
+
+Two minutes, two little minutes more, and the sleep-sodden bunch of men
+in the special's car might have been roused and turned out and saved.
+But the minutes were not given us. While the racing fireman was still a
+few feet short of the switch the throwing of which would have saved the
+one-car train only to let the madman's engine in on our engine and
+coach, and our man--already at the switch--was too scared to know which
+horn of the dilemma to choose, the end came. There was the flash of
+another headlight on the curve, another whistle shriek, and I turned to
+help the Major take Mrs. Sheila off our car and run with her, against
+the horrible chance that we might get it instead of the special.
+
+But we didn't get it. Ten seconds later the chasing engine had crashed
+headlong into the standing train, burying itself clear up to the tender
+in the heart of the old wooden sleeper, rolling the whole business over
+on its side in the ditch, and setting the wreckage afire as suddenly as
+if the old Pullman had been a fagot of pitch-pine kindlings and only
+waiting for the match.
+
+If I could write down any real description of the way things stacked up
+there in that lonesome valley for the little bunch of us who stood
+aghast at the awful horror, I guess I wouldn't need to be hammering the
+keys of a typewriter in a railroad office. But never mind; no soldier
+sees any more of a battle than the part he is in. There were seven of us
+men, including the engineer and fireman of the special, who were able to
+jump in and try to do something, and, looking back at it now, it seems
+as if we all did what we could.
+
+That wasn't much. About half of the people in the sleeping-car--six by
+actual count, as we learned afterward--were killed outright in the crash
+or so badly hurt that they died pretty soon afterward; and the fire was
+so quick and so hot that after we had got the wounded ones out we
+couldn't get all of the bodies of the others.
+
+As you'd imagine, the boss was the head and front of that fierce rescue
+fight. He had stripped off his coat, and he kept on diving into the
+burning wreck after another and yet another of the victims until it
+seemed as if he couldn't possibly do it one more time and come out
+alive. He didn't seem to remember that these very men were the ones who
+had been trying to ruin him--that at least once they had set a trap for
+him and tried to kill him. He was too big for that.
+
+After we had got out all the victims we could reach, there was still one
+more left who wasn't dead; we could hear him above the hissing of the
+steam and the crackling of the flames, screaming and begging us to break
+in the side of the car and kill him before the fire got to him. Kirgan
+had found an axe in the emergency box of our day-coach, and was chopping
+away like a madman.
+
+The minute he got a hole big enough, the big master-mechanic dropped
+his axe and climbed down into the choking hell where the screams were
+coming from. Our fireman picked up the axe and ran around to the other
+side of the wreck where Jones, the engineer of the special, and his
+fireman were trying to break into the crushed cab of the 416.
+
+The old major, the boss, and I stood by to help Kirgan, and the minute
+his head came up through the chopped hole we saw that he needed help. He
+had pried the screaming man loose, somehow, and was trying to drag him
+up out of the smoking furnace. It was done, amongst us, some way or
+other. Kirgan had wrapped the man up in a Pullman blanket to keep the
+fire from getting at him any worse than it already had, and as we were
+taking him out the blanket slipped aside from his face and I saw who it
+was that the master-mechanic had risked his life for. It was Hatch,
+himself, and he died in our arms, the major's and mine, while we were
+carrying him out to where Mrs. Sheila was tearing one of the Pullman
+sheets that I had got hold of into strips to make bandages for the
+wounded.
+
+With the chance of saving maybe another one or two, we couldn't stay to
+help the brave little woman who was trying to be doctor and nurse to
+half a dozen poor wretches at once. But she took time to ask me one
+single breathless question:
+
+"Have they found him yet?--you know the one I mean, Jimmie?"
+
+"No," I said. "They're digging away at that side now," and then I ran
+back to jump in again.
+
+Though the fire was now licking at everything in sight, Kirgan, who had
+taken the axe from our fireman, had managed to cut some of the car
+timbers out of the way so that we could see down into the tangle of
+things where the cab of the 416 ought to have been. There wasn't much
+left of the cab. The water-gauge was broken, along with everything else,
+but in spite of the reek of smoke and steam we could see that Hogan and
+his fireman were not there. But down under the coal that had shifted
+forward at the impact of the collision we could make out the other
+man--the murder-maniac--lying on his back, black in the face and
+gasping.
+
+That was enough for the boss. It looked like certain death for anybody
+to crawl down into that hissing steam-bath, but he did it, wriggling
+through the hole that Kirgan had chopped, while two or three of us ran
+to the little creek that trickled down on the far side of the "Y" and
+brought back soaking Pullman blankets to try to delay the encroaching
+fire and smother the steam-jets.
+
+I couldn't see very well what the boss was doing; the smoke and steam
+were so blinding. But when I did get a glimpse I saw that he was digging
+frantically with his bare hands at the shifted coal, and that he had
+succeeded in freeing the head and shoulders of the buried man, who was
+still alive enough to choke and gasp in the furnace-like heat.
+
+Kirgan stood it as long as he could--until the licking flames were about
+to drive us all away.
+
+"You'll be burnt alive--come up out of that!" he yelled to the boss; but
+I knew it wouldn't do any good. With Collingwood still buried down there
+and still with the breath of life in him, the boss was going to stay and
+keep on trying to dig him out, even if he, himself, got burned to a
+crisp doing it. Loving Mrs. Sheila the way he did, he couldn't do any
+less.
+
+It was awful, those next two or three minutes. We were all running
+frantically back and forth, now, between the wreck and the creek,
+soaking the blankets and doing our level best to beat the fire back and
+keep it from cutting off the only way there was for the boss to climb
+out. But we could only fight gaspingly on the surface of things, as you
+might say. Down underneath, the fire was working around in front and
+behind in spite of all we could do. Some of it had got to the coal, and
+the heavy sulphurous smoke was oozing up to make us all choke and
+strangle.
+
+Honestly, you couldn't have told that the boss was a white man when he
+crawled up out of that pit of death, tugging and lifting the crushed
+and broken body of the madman, and making us take it out before he would
+come out himself. We got them both away from the fire as quickly as we
+could and around to the other side of things, Kirgan and Jones carrying
+Collingwood.
+
+The poor little lady we had left alone with the rescued ones had done
+all she could, and she was waiting for us. When we put Collingwood down,
+she sat down on the ground and took his head in her lap and cried over
+him just like his mother might have, and when the boss knelt down beside
+her I heard what he said: "That's right, little woman; that's just as it
+should be. Death wipes out all scores. I did my best--you must always
+believe that I did my best."
+
+She choked again at that, and said: "There is no hope?" and he said:
+"I'm afraid not. He was dying when I got to him."
+
+I tried to swallow the big lump in my throat and turned away, and so did
+everybody else but the major, who went around and knelt down on the
+other side of Mrs. Sheila. The wreck was blazing now like a mighty
+bonfire, lighting up the pine-clad hills all around and snapping and
+growling like some savage monster gloating over its prey. In the red
+glow we saw a man limping up the track from the west, and Kirgan and I
+went to meet him. It was Hogan, the missing engineer of the 416.
+
+He told us what there was to tell, which wasn't very different from the
+way we'd been putting it up. They--Hogan and his fireman--hadn't
+suspected that they were carrying a maniac until after they had passed
+Bauxite and Collingwood had told them both that what he wanted to do was
+to overtake the special and smash it. Then there had been a fight on the
+engine, but Collingwood had a gun and he had threatened to kill them
+both if they didn't keep on.
+
+"I kep' her goin'," said the Irishman, "thinkin' maybe Jonesy'd keep out
+of my way, or that at the lasht I'd get a chanst to shut the 'Sixteen
+off an' give her the brake. He kep' me fr'm doin' it, and whin I saw the
+tail-lights, I pushed Johnnie Shovel off an' wint afther him because
+there was nawthin' else to do. Johnnie's back yondher a piece, wid a
+broken leg."
+
+Just then Jones, the special's engineer, came up, and he pieced out
+Hogan's story. The wire to Bauxite had warned him that a crazy man was
+chasing him and overrunning stop-signals. He had thought to side-track
+the chaser at the old "Y" and that was what he had stopped for.
+
+Thereupon the three of us went after the crippled fireman, and when we
+got back to the "Y" with him it was all over. Collingwood had died with
+his head in Mrs. Sheila's lap, and the boss, fagged out and half dead as
+he must have been, was up and at work, getting the wreck victims into
+our day-coach, which had been backed up and taken around to the other
+leg of the "Y" to head for Portal City.
+
+When it came time for us to move Collingwood, Mrs. Sheila pulled her
+veil down and walked behind the body, with the good old major locking
+his arm in hers, and that choking lump came again in my throat when I
+remembered what Collingwood had said to the boss the night he came to
+our office: "Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was
+just eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my
+funeral."
+
+I guess there's no use stretching the agony out by telling about that
+mournful ride back to Portal City with the dead and wounded. We left the
+wreck blazing and roaring in the shut-in valley at the gulch mouth
+because there wasn't anything else to do; Kirgan and Jones and one of
+the firemen handled the engine and pulled out, while the rest of us rode
+in the day-coach and did what we could for the suffering.
+
+At Banta we made a stop long enough to let the boss send a wire to
+Portal City, turning out the doctors and the ambulances--and the
+undertakers; and though it was after three o'clock in the morning when
+we pulled in, it seemed as if the whole town had got the word and was
+down at the station to meet us.
+
+I couldn't see Mrs. Sheila's face when the major helped her off at the
+platform; her veil was still down. But I did hear her low-spoken word to
+the boss, whispered while they were carrying Collingwood and Hatch, and
+two of the others who were past help, out to the waiting string of
+dead-wagons.
+
+"I shall go East with the body to-morrow--to-day, I mean--if the
+strikers will let you run a train, and Cousin Basil will go with me. We
+may never meet again, Graham, and for that reason I must say what I have
+to say now. Your opportunity has come. The man who could do the most to
+defeat you is dead, and the strike will do the rest. If I were you, I
+should neither eat nor sleep until I had thought of some way to take the
+railroad out of the hands of those who have proved that they are not
+worthy to own it."
+
+I didn't know, just then, how much or little attention Mr. Norcross was
+paying to this mighty good, clear-headed bit of business advice. What he
+said went back to that saying of hers that they might never meet again.
+
+"We must meet again--sometime and somewhere," he said. And then: "I did
+my best: God knows I did my best, Sheila. I would have given my own
+life gladly if the giving would have saved Collingwood's. Don't you
+believe that?"
+
+"I shall always believe that you are one of God's own gentlemen,
+Graham," she said, soft and low; and then the major came to take her
+away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+P. S. L. Comes Home
+
+
+I didn't get more than five hours' sleep after the excitement was all
+over, and we had ourselves driven, Mr. Norcross and I, up to the club.
+But by nine o'clock the next morning, as soon as I'd swallowed a hurried
+bite of breakfast in the grill-room I swiped a camp-stool and a magazine
+out of the lounge and trotted up-stairs to plant myself before the
+boss's door, determined that nobody should disturb him until he was good
+and ready to get up.
+
+He turned out a little before twelve, looking sort of haggard and drawn,
+of course, and having some pretty bad burns on the side of his neck and
+on the backs of both hands. But he was all there, as usual, and he laid
+a good, brotherly hand on my shoulder when he saw what I was doing.
+
+"They don't make many of them like you, Jimmie," he said. And then:
+"Have you any news?"
+
+I had, a little, and I gave it to him. Fred May had come tip-toeing up
+into my sentry corridor about ten o'clock to tell me that Mr. Perkins
+had arranged with the strikers to have a special go east with the major
+and Mrs. Sheila and Collingwood's body to catch the Overland at
+Sedgwick; and I told the boss this, and that the train had been gone for
+an hour or more.
+
+Also, I gave him a sealed package that a strange boy had brought up just
+a little while after May went away. We took the elevator to the
+grill-room for something to eat, and at table Mr. Norcross opened the
+package. It contained a bunch of affidavits, eleven of them in all, and
+there was no letter or anything to tell where they had come from.
+
+He handed the papers over to me, after he had seen what they were, and
+told me to take care of them, and, when the waiter was bringing our
+bite--or rather after he had brought it and was gone--he sort of frowned
+across the table at me and said: "Do you know what it means--this
+surrender of those bribe affidavits, Jimmie?"
+
+I said I guessed I did; that Hatch being dead, and Collingwood, too,
+there wasn't nerve enough left in the Red Tower outfit to keep up the
+fight; that the surrender of the affidavits was kind of a plea for a
+let-up on our part.
+
+"We'll begin to show them, in just about fifteen minutes, Jimmie," was
+the short comment. "Reach over and get that telephone and tell Mr.
+Ripley and Mr. Billoughby that I want them to meet me at my office at
+half-past twelve. Any news from the strike?"
+
+"Nothing," I told him, while "Central" was getting me Mr. Ripley's
+number. "Fred May said it was going on just the same; everything quiet
+and nothing doing, except that the wrecking train had gone out to pick
+up the scraps at Timber Mountain 'Y'. Kirgan is bossing it, and the
+strikers manned it for him."
+
+Nothing more was said until after I had sent the two phone messages, and
+then the boss broke out in a new spot.
+
+"Has anything been heard from Mr. Van Britt?" he asked.
+
+"Not that I know of."
+
+Again he gave me that queer little scowl across the table.
+
+"Jimmie, have you found out yet why Mr. Van Britt insisted on quitting
+the service?"
+
+I guess I grinned a little, though I tried not to.
+
+"Mr. Van Britt is one of the best friends you've got," I said. "He
+thought you needed this strike, and he wanted to go out among the
+pay-roll men and sort of help it along. He couldn't do a thing like that
+while he was an officer of the company and drawing his pay like the rest
+of us."
+
+"I might have known--he as good as told me," was the reply, made kind of
+half-absently; and then, short and quick: "How's the stock market? Have
+you seen a paper?"
+
+I had seen both papers, at breakfast-time, but of course they had
+nothing startling in them except a last-minute account of the wreck at
+Timber Mountain "Y," grabbed off just before they went to press. They
+couldn't have anything later from New York than the day before. But Fred
+May had tipped me off when he came up to tell me about the Major
+Kendrick special. The newspaper offices were putting out bulletins by
+that time.
+
+I told Mr. Norcross about the bulletins and was brash enough to add:
+"We're headed for the receivership all right, I guess; our stock has
+tumbled to twenty-nine, and there's a regular dog-fight going on over it
+at the railroad post in the Exchange. Wall Street's afire and burning
+up, so they say."
+
+The chief hadn't eaten enough to keep a cat alive, but at that he pushed
+his chair back and reached for his hat.
+
+"Come on, Jimmie," he snapped. "We've got to get busy. And there isn't
+going to be any receivership."
+
+We reached the railroad headquarters--which were as dead and quiet as a
+graveyard--a little before Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got down. But Mr.
+Editor Cantrell was there, waiting to shoot an anxious question at the
+boss.
+
+"Well, Norcross, are you ready to talk now?"
+
+"Not just yet; to-morrow, maybe," was the good-natured rejoinder.
+
+"All right; then perhaps you will tell me this: Do you, yourself,
+believe that four or five thousand railroad men have gone on strike out
+of sheer sympathy for a few hundred C. S. & W. employees, most of whom
+are merely common laborers?"
+
+The boss spread his hands. "You have all the facts that anybody has,
+Cantrell."
+
+"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you haven't fomented this
+eruption on the quiet to get the better of the Red Tower crowd in some
+way?" demanded the editor.
+
+"I can, indeed," was the smiling answer.
+
+Cantrell looked as if he didn't more than half believe it.
+
+"Being a newspaper man, I'm naturally suspicious," he put in. "There are
+big doings down underneath all this that I can smell, but can't dig up.
+Everything about this strike is too blamed good-natured. I've talked
+with half a dozen of the leaders, and with any number of the rank and
+file. They all grin and give me the wink, as if it were the best joke
+that was ever pulled off."
+
+Again Mr. Norcross smiled handsomely. "If you push me to it, Cantrell, I
+may say that this is exactly their attitude toward me!"
+
+"Well," said the editor, getting up to go; "it's doing one thing to you,
+good and proper. Your railroad stock is tumbling down-stairs so fast
+that it can't keep up with itself."
+
+"I hope it will tumble still more," said the boss, pleasantly, with
+another sort of enigmatic smile; and with that Mr. Cantrell had to be
+content.
+
+As the editor went out, Fred May brought in the bunch of forenoon
+telegrams and laid them on the desk. They were quickly glanced at and
+tossed over to me as fast as they were read. Most of them were plaintive
+little yips from a strike-stricken lot of people along the Short Line
+who seemed to think that the world had come to an end, but there were
+three bearing the New York date line and signed "Dunton." The earliest
+had been sent shortly after the opening of the Stock Exchange, and it
+ran thus:
+
+"Morning papers announce strike and complete tie-up on P. S. L. Why no
+report from you of labor troubles threatening? Compromise at any cost
+and wire emphatic denial of strike. Answer quick."
+
+The second of the series had been filed for transmission an hour later
+and it was still more saw-toothed.
+
+"Later reports confirm newspaper story. Your failure to compromise
+instantly with employees will break stock market and subject you to
+investigation for criminal incompetency. Answer."
+
+The third message had been sent still later.
+
+"Your continued silence inexcusable. If no favorable report from you by
+six o'clock you may consider yourself discharged from the company's
+service and criminal proceedings on charge of conspiracy will be
+instituted at once."
+
+There was no mention of Collingwood, and I could only imagine that Major
+Kendrick's telegram had not yet reached the president. I thought things
+were beginning to look pretty serious for us if Mr. Dunton was going to
+try to drag us into the courts, but Mr. Norcross was still smiling when
+he handed me the last and latest telegram in the bunch that May had
+brought in. It was from Mr. Chadwick, and was good-naturedly laconic.
+
+     "To G. NORCROSS, G. M.,
+
+     "Portal City.
+
+     "Just returned from trip to Seattle. What's doing on the Short
+     Line?
+
+     "CHADWICK."
+
+"A couple of telegrams, Jimmie," said the chief, as he passed this last
+wire over, and I got my notebook ready.
+
+"To B. Dunton, New York. Strike is sympathetic and not subject to
+compromise. Mails moving regularly, but all other traffic suspended
+indefinitely. My office closes to-day, and my resignation, effective at
+once, goes to you on Fast Mail to-night."
+
+"Now one to Mr. Chadwick, and you may send it in code," he directed
+crisply. Then he dictated:
+
+"See newspapers for account of strike. Hatch and eight of his associates
+were killed last night in railroad wreck. Dunton has demanded my
+resignation and I have given it. Have plan for complete reorganization
+along lines discussed in beginning, and need your help. At market
+opening to-morrow sell P. S. L. large blocks and repurchase in driblets
+as price goes down. Repeat until I tell you to stop. Wire quick if you
+are with us."
+
+Just as I was taking the last sentence, Mr. Ripley and Billoughby came
+in, and Mr. Norcross took them both into the third room of the suite and
+shut the door. An hour later when the door opened and they came out, the
+boss was summing up the new orders to Billoughby: "There's a lot to do,
+and you have my authority to hire all the help you need. See the bankers
+yourself, personally, and get them to interest other local buyers along
+the line, the more of them, and the smaller they are, the better. I'll
+take care of Portal City, myself. I've had Van Britt on the wire and he
+is taking care of the employees--yes, that goes as it lies, and is a
+part of the original plan; every man who works for P. S. L. is going to
+own a bit of stock, if we have to carry him for it and let him pay a
+dollar a week. More than that, they shall have representation on the
+board if they want it. And while you're knocking about, take time to
+show these C. S. & W. folks how they can climb back into the saddle. Red
+Tower is down and out, now, and they can keep it out if they want to."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I suppose I might rattle this old type-machine of mine indefinitely and
+tell the story of the financial fight that filled the next few days; of
+how the boss and Mr. Ripley and Billoughby got the bankers and
+practically everybody together all along the Short Line and sprung the
+big plan upon them, which was nothing less than the snapping up, on a
+tumbling stock market, of the opportunity now presented to them of
+owning--actually _owning_ in fee simple--their own railroad, the buying
+to be done quietly through Mr. Chadwick's brokers in Chicago and New
+York.
+
+There was some opposition and jangling and see-sawing back and forth, of
+course, but the newspapers, led by the _Mountaineer_, took hold, and
+then, pretty soon, everybody took hold; after which the only trouble was
+to keep people--our own rank and file among them--from buying P. S. L.
+Common so fast that the New Yorkers would catch on and run the price
+up.
+
+They didn't catch on--not until after it was too late; and the minute
+Mr. Chadwick wired us from Chicago that we were safe, the strike went
+off, as you might say, between two minutes, and Mr. Norcross called a
+meeting of stockholders, the same to be held--bless your heart!--in
+Portal City, the thriving metropolis of the region in which, counting
+Mr. Chadwick in as one of us, a good, solid voting majority of the stock
+was now held. The _Mountaineer_ printed the call, and it spoke of the
+railroad as "_our_ railroad company"!
+
+The meeting was held in due time, and Mr. Chadwick was there to preside.
+He made a cracking good chairman, and the way he dilated on the fact
+that now the country--and the employees--had a railroad of their own,
+and that the whole nation would be looking to see how we would
+demonstrate the problem we had taken over, actually brought
+cheers--think of it; cheers in a railroad stockholders' meeting.
+
+Following Mr. Chadwick's talk there was the usual routine business;
+reports were read and it was shown that the Short Line, notwithstanding
+all the stealings and mismanagements was still a good going proposition
+at the price at which it had been bought in. A new board of directors
+was chosen, and as soon as the new board got together, Mr. Norcross
+went back to his office in the headquarters, not as general manager,
+this time--not on your life!--but as the newly elected president of
+Pioneer Short Line. And by the same token, the first official circular
+that came out--a copy of which I sent, tied up with a blue ribbon, to
+Maisie Ann--read like this:
+
+     "To all Employees:
+
+     "Effective this day, Mr. James F. Dodds is appointed Assistant to
+     the President with headquarters in Portal City.
+
+     "G. NORCROSS, _President_."
+
+That's all; all but a little talk between the boss and Mr. Upton Van
+Britt that took place in our office on the day after Mr. Van Britt,
+still kicking about the hard work that the boss was always piling upon
+him, had been appointed general manager.
+
+"You've made the riffle, Graham--just as I said you would," said our own
+and only millionaire, after he had got through abusing the fates that
+wouldn't let him go back East and play with his coupon shears and his
+yachts and polo ponies. "You're going to be the biggest man this side of
+the mountains, some day; and the day isn't so very far off, either."
+
+It was just here that the boss got out of his chair and walked to the
+other end of the room. When he came back it was to say:
+
+"You think I have won out, Upton, and so does everybody else. I suppose
+it looks that way to the man in the street. But I haven't, you know. I
+have lost the one thing for which I would gladly give all the business
+success I have ever made or hope to make."
+
+Mr. Van Britt's smile was more than half a grin.
+
+"It isn't lost, Graham: it's only gone before. Can't you wait a decent
+little while?"
+
+"If I should wait all my life it wouldn't be long enough, Upton," was
+the reply. "What you said to me--that time when we first spoke of
+Collingwood--was true. You said she loved the other man--and so she
+did."
+
+This time Mr. Van Britt's smile was a whole grin.
+
+"I said it, and I'll say it again. She didn't realize it or admit it,
+even to herself you know; she's too good and clean-hearted for anything
+like that. But I could see it plainly enough, and so could everybody
+else except the two people most nearly concerned. I didn't mean Howie
+Collingwood: you were the 'other man,' Graham."
+
+At this the boss whirled short around and tramped to the other end of
+the room again, standing for quite a little while with one foot on the
+low window-sill and making out like he was looking down at the traffic
+clattering along in Nevada Avenue. But I'll bet a quarter he never saw a
+single wheel of it. When he came back our way his eyes were shining and
+he put his hand on Mr. Van Britt's shoulder.
+
+"It ought to have been you, Uppy," he said, dropping back to the old
+college nickname. "You're by long odds the better man. When--when do you
+think I might venture to take a little run across to New York?"
+
+At that, Mr. Van Britt laughed out loud.
+
+"Ho! ho!" he said. "I suppose I ought to say a year. You can wait one
+little year, can't you, Graham?"
+
+"Not on your life!" rasped the boss. And then: "I'll tell you what I'll
+do; I'll compromise with the proprieties, or whatever it is that you're
+insisting on, and make it six months. But that's the limit--the absolute
+limit!"
+
+And so it was.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+_BY FRANCIS LYNDE_
+
+    THE WRECKERS
+    DAVID VALLORY
+    BRANDED
+    STRANDED IN ARCADY
+    AFTER THE MANNER OF MEN
+    THE REAL MAN
+    THE CITY OF NUMBERED DAYS
+    THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+    SCIENTIFIC SPRAGUE
+    THE PRICE
+    THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN
+    A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wreckers, by Francis Lynde
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