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.