
Полная версия
The Wreckers
"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.