The Wreckers

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.