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."
