The Wreckers

"That man," he muttered, sort of gratingly: "I had completely forgotten. He was here just a little while ago. I met him as I was coming in. Did he come to see your cousin – the major?"

"No," she said, matching his low tone; "he came to see me."

"You?"

"Yes. Finding himself in a pitfall which he has digged with his own hands, he is like other men of his kind; he would be very glad to climb out upon the shoulders of a woman."

I guess the boss saw red for a minute, but the question he asked had to come.

"By what right did he come to you, Sheila?"

"By what he doubtless thinks is the best right in the world. He is my husband."

It was out at last, and the boss's poor little house of cards that I knew he had been building all these months had got its knock-down in just those four quietly spoken words. Maisie Ann was still gripping my wrist, and I felt a hot tear go splash on my hand. "Oh, I could kill him!" she whispered, meaning Collingwood, I suppose.

As well as I knew him, I couldn't begin to guess what the boss would do or say. But he was such a splendid fighter that I might have known.

"I heard, no longer ago than this afternoon, that you were not – that your husband was still living," he said, speaking very gently. "I didn't believe it – not fully – though I saw that there might easily be room for the belief. It makes no difference, Sheila. You are my friend, and you are blameless. But before we go any farther I want you to believe that I wouldn't have been brutal enough to give you that bit of paper if I had remotely suspected that Collingwood was the man."

She didn't make any answer to that, and after a while he said:

"Having told me so much, can't you tell me a little more?"

"There isn't much to tell, and even the little is commonplace and – and disgraceful," she replied, with a touch of weariness that was fairly heart-breaking. "Don't ask me why we were married; I can't explain that, simply because I don't know, myself. It was arranged between the two families, and I suppose Howie and I always took it for granted. I can't even plead ignorance, for I have known him all my life."

"Go on," said the boss, still speaking as gently as a brother might have.

"Howie was a spoiled child, an only son, and he is a spoiled man. I stood it as long as I could – I hope you will believe that. But there are some things that a woman cannot stand, and – "

"I know," he broke in. "So you came out here to be free."

"It is four years since we have lived together," she went on, "and for a long time I hoped he would never find out where I was. There was no divorce: I couldn't endure the thought of the publicity and the – the disgrace. When I came here to Cousin Basil's there was no attempt made to hide the facts; or at least the one chief fact that I was a married woman. But on the other hand, I had taken my mother's name, and only Cousin Basil and his wife knew that I was not what perhaps every one else took me to be, – a widow with a dead husband instead of a living one."

"Did Collingwood try to find you?"

"No, I think not. But when he was here last spring with his Uncle Breckenridge he saw me and found out that I was living here with Cousin Basil."

"Did he try to persecute you?"

"No, not then. I was afraid of only one thing: that he might drink too much and – and talk. Part of the fear was realized. He saw me that Sunday night in the Bullard. That was why he was trying to fight the hotel people – because they wouldn't let him come up-stairs. I saw what you did, and I was sorry. I couldn't help feeling that in some way it would prove to be the beginning of a tragedy."

"You saw no more of him then?"

"No; I neither saw him nor heard of him until about a month ago when he came west with a man named Bullock – a New York attorney. I didn't know why he came, but I thought it was to annoy me."

"And he has annoyed you?"

"Until this night he has never missed an opportunity of doing so when he could dodge Cousin Basil. Caring nothing for me himself, he has taken violent exceptions to my friendship with you and with Upton Van Britt, though that is chiefly when he has been drinking too much. It was his taunting boast yesterday at the capital that led me to telegraph Cousin Basil and Upton Van Britt about your trip to Strathcona. He knew that you were going to the gold camp, and he declared to me that you'd never come back alive."

"But to-night," the boss persisted. "What did he want to-night?"

"He wanted to – to use me. He said that he had 'put something across' for his uncle, that he had gotten into trouble for it, and that – to use his own phrase again, you were the man who would try to 'get his goat.'"

"And his object in telling you this?"

"Was entirely worthy of the man. He asked me, or rather I should say, commanded me, to 'choke you off.' And, of course, he added the insult. He said I was the one who could do it."

The boss had gone to tramping again and when he stopped to face her I could see that he had threshed his way around to some sort of a conclusion.

"Without intending to, you have tied my hands," he said gravely. "I wasn't meaning to spare Collingwood if there were any way in which I could use him as a club to knock Hatch out of the game."

"But now you won't use him?"

"You might justly write me down as a pretty poor friend of yours if I should – after what you have told me."

"I haven't asked you to spare him."

"No, I know you haven't. But the fact remains that he is your husband. I – "

The interruption was the opening and closing of the front door and the heavy tread of the major in the hall. In a flash Mrs. Sheila was up and getting ready to vanish through the door that led to the dining-room. With her hand on the door-knob she shot a quick question at the boss.

"How much will you tell Cousin Basil?"

"Nothing of what you have told me."

"Thank you," she whispered back; "you are as big in your friendship as you are in other ways." And with that she was gone.

It was right along in the same half-minute, while the boss was standing with his back to the fire and the major was going in to talk to him, that I lost Maisie Ann. I don't know where she went, or how. She had let go of my wrist, and when I groped for her she was gone. Since I didn't see any good reason why I should stay and spy upon the boss and the major, I slipped out to the hall and curled up on the big settee beyond the coat rack; curled up, and after listening a while to the drone of voices in the farther room, went to sleep.

It was away deep in the night when the boss took hold of me and shook me awake. The long talk was just getting itself finished, and the major had come to the door with his guest.

"We must manage to pull Collingwood out of it in some way," the major was saying. "I don't love the damn' scoundrel any betteh than you do, Graham; but thah's a reason – a fam'ly reason, as you might say." Then he switched off quickly. "You haven't asked me yet why I ran away from home this evenin' when I was expecting you."

"No," said the boss. "Sheila told me that you had a telephone call to the Bullard."

The old Kentuckian chuckled.

"Yes, suh; and you'd neveh guess in a thousand yeahs who sent the call, or what was wanted. It was ouh friend Hatch, and no otheh. And he had the face to offeh me ten thousand dollahs a yeah to act as consulting counsel for him against the railroad company!"

"Of course you accepted," said the boss, meaning just the opposite.

The major chuckled again. "I talked with him long enough to find out about where he stood. He thinks he's got you by the neck, but, like most men of his breed, he's a paltry coward, suh, at heart."

The boss laughed. "What is he afraid of?"

"He's afraid of his life. He told me, with his eyes buggin' out, that thah was one man heah in Portal City who would kill him to get possession of certain papehs that were locked up in the cash vault of the Security National."

The boss was pulling on his gloves.

"I didn't give him any reason to think that I was anxious to murder him," he said.

"Oh, no, my deah boy; it isn't you, at all. It's Howie Collingwood. Thah's where we land afteh all is said and done. Youh hands are tied, and we've got this heah young maniac to deal with. If Collingwood gets about three fingehs of red likkeh under his belt, why, thah's one murder in prospect. And if Hatch has any reason to think that you can still get the underholt on him, why, thah's another. I'm glad you've seen fit to take Ripley's advice at last, and got you a body-guard."

"What's that?" queried the boss. But the query was answered a minute later when we hit the sidewalk for the tramp back to town and Tarbell fell in to walk three steps behind us all the way to the door of the railroad club.

It sure did look as if things were just about as bad as they could ever be, now. Hatch once more on top, the whole bottom knocked out of the railroad experiment, our good name for political honesty gone glimmering, and, worst of all, perhaps, the boss's big heart broken right in two over those four little words that nothing could ever rub out – "he is my husband." I didn't wonder that the boss said never a word in all that long walk down-town, or that he forgot to tell me good-night when he locked himself up in his room at the club.

XXVI

The Dipsomaniac

In a day when bunched money, however arrogant it may be, has been taught to go sort of softly, the Hatch people were careful not to make any public announcement of the things they were doing or going to do. But bad news has wings of its own. Mr. Norcross was still in the midst of his mail dictation to me the morning after the bottom – all the different bottoms – fell out, when Mr. Hornack came bulging in.

"What's all this fire-alarm that's been sprung about a new elevator trust?" he demanded, chewing on his cigar as if it were something he were trying to eat. "It's all over town that C. S. & W. has been secretly reorganized, with the Hatch crowd in control. I'm having a perfect cyclone of telephone calls asking what, and how, and why."

The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps, and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical consolidation."

"Is that the fact? – or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the traffic manager.

"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also, to tell me where we were to get off."

Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.

"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.

"He does – just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."

"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"

"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.

Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply can't!"

"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of its securities among the people it actually serves."

Hornack's teeth met in the middle of the chewed cigar.

"That's excellent logic – bully good logic, if anybody should ask you! But we're fighting a condition, not a theory. Nobody wants P. S. L. Common even at thirty-two. You wouldn't advise your worst enemy to buy it at that figure."

"I don't know," said the boss, kind of musingly. "You're forgetting the water that's been put into it from time to time by the speculators and reorganizers; there has been a good deal of that, first and last. Nevertheless, value for value, you know, and I know, that the property is worth more than thirty-two, including the bonds. What I mean is that if anybody would buy the control at that figure, – the control, mind you, and not merely a minority – and handle the road purely as a dividend-earning business proposition, he wouldn't lose money; he'd make money – a lot of it."

"All of which doesn't get us anywhere in the present pinch," returned the traffic manager. "I suppose we'll have to wait until Hatch makes his first move, and I've still got fight enough left in me to hope that he'll make it suddenly. Punch the button for me if anything new develops. I'm going back to swing on to my telephone."

Following this talk with Hornack there was a try-out with Billoughby and Juneman, but as this three-cornered conference was held in the private room of the suite, I don't know what was said. A little farther along, when the boss was once more whittling at the dictation, Mr. Van Britt strolled in. Mr. Norcross told me to take my bunch of notes to May and then he gave Mr. Van Britt his inning, starting off with: "Well, how is the general superintendent this fine morning?"

Mr. Van Britt wrinkled his nose.

"The general superintendent is wondering, one more time, why under the starry heavens he is out here in this country that God has forgotten, scrapping for a living on this one-horse railroad of yours when he might be in good little old New York, living easy and clipping coupons in the safety-deposit room of a Broad Street bank."

The boss laughed at that, and I'm telling you right now that I was glad to know that he was still able to laugh.

"You've never seen the day when you wanted to renege, Upton, and you know it," he hit back. "Think of the perfectly good technical education you were wasting when I took hold of you and jerked you out here."

"Huh!" said our millionaire; "I've got other things to think of. I've just had two enginemen on the carpet for running over an old ranchman's pet cow. They said they couldn't help it; but I told them that under the 'public-be-pleased' policy, they'd got to help it."

Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral, Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."

"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is due to have a strike on its hands. The management – which seems to have got itself consolidated in some way – shot out a lot of new bosses all along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C. S. & W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."

"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. & W.?"

"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."

"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. & W., who have been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local sympathizers."

"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon," Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will be asking us what we are going to do about it; whether we are going to fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft, as our predecessors did."

"We needn't go over that ground again – you and I, Upton," said Mr. Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.

Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:

"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand the gaff – this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the people as the accuser of your president – and hope to hold your job. The one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."

"Upton, if I thought you meant that – but I never know when to take you seriously."

"The two enginemen who ran over the ranchman's pet cow had no such difficulty, I assure you. And isn't it good advice? You know, as well as I do, that Chadwick is holding you here by main strength; that you can never accomplish anything permanent while Dunton and his cronies are at the steering-wheel. It might be different if you had the local backing of your constituency – the people served by the Short Line. But you haven't that; up to date, the people are merely interested spectators."

"Go on," said the boss, frowning again.

"They have a stake in the game – the biggest of the stakes, as a matter of fact – but it isn't sufficiently apparent to make them climb in and fight for you. They are saying, with a good bit of reason, that, after all is said and done, Big Money – Wall Street – still has the call, and any twenty-four hours may see the whole thing slump back into graft and crooked politics."

"It is so true that you might be reading it out of a book," was the boss's comment. And then: "What's the answer?"

Mr. Van Britt shook his head. "I don't know. If you had money enough to buy the voting control in P. S. L. you might get somewhere; but as it is, you're like a cat in Hades without claws."

"Tell me," said Mr. Norcross, after a little pause: "You're a native New Yorker: do you know this man Collingwood?"

"Only by hearsay. He is what our English friends call a 'blooming bounder'; fast yachts, fast motor-cars, the fast set generally. It's a pretty bad case of money-spoil, I fancy. They say he wasn't always a total loss."

"Did you ever hear that he was married?"

"Oh, yes; he married a Kentucky girl some years ago: I don't remember her name. They say she stood him for about six months and then dropped out. I suppose he needs killing for that."

At this the boss went a step farther, saying: "He does, indeed, Upton. I happen to know the young woman."

That was when Mr. Van Britt fired his own little bomb-shell. "So do I," he answered quietly.

"But you said you had forgotten her name!"

"So I have – her married name. And what's more, I mean to keep on forgetting it."

There was no mistake about the boss's frown this time.

"That won't do, Upton," he said, kind of warningly.

"It will do well enough for the present. I'd marry her to-morrow, Graham, if she were free, and there were no other obstacles. Unhappily, there are two – besides the small legal difficulty; she doesn't care for my money – having a little of her own; and she happens to be in love with the other fellow."

I guess the boss was remembering what Mrs. Sheila had told him in that confidence before the back-parlor fire, about its being all off between her and Collingwood, for he said: "I think you are mistaken as to that last."

"No, I'm not mistaken. But that's neither here nor there. Neither you nor I can send Collingwood to the penitentiary – that's a cinch. Wherefore, I'm advising you to quit, walk out, jump the job."

At that the boss took a fresh brace, righting his swing chair with a snap.

"You know very little about me, Upton, if you think I'm going to throw up my hands now, when the real pinch has come. A while back I might have done it, but now I'll fight until I'm permanently killed. I have a scheme – if it could only be worked. But it can't be worked on a rising market. I suppose you have seen the morning's quotations. By some trick or other, the Dunton people are boosting the stock again. It went up three points yesterday."

Mr. Van Britt grinned. "They're discounting the effect of this little political deal – which will at least rope your reform scheme down, if it doesn't do anything else. What you need is a good, old-fashioned cataclysm of some sort; something that would fairly knock the tar out of P. S. L. securities and send them skittering down the toboggan slide in spite of anything Uncle Breckenridge could do to stop them; down to where they could be safely and profitably picked up by the dear public. Unfortunately, those things don't happen outside of the story books. If they did, if the earthquake should happen along our way just now, I don't know but I'd be disloyal enough to get out and help it shake things up a bit."

After Mr. Van Britt had gone, the boss put in the remainder of the day like a workingman, skipping the noon luncheon as he sometimes did when the work drive was extra heavy. Meanwhile, as you'd suppose, rumor was plentifully busy, on the railroad, and also in town.

By noon it was well understood that there had been a radical change in the management of C. S. & W., and that there was going to be a general strike in answer to the slashing cut in wages. I slipped up-town to get a bite while Fred May was spelling me at the dictation desk, and I heard some of the talk. It was pretty straight, most of it – which shows how useless it is to try to keep any business secrets, nowadays.

For example: the three men at my table in the Bullard grill-room – they didn't know me or who I was – knew that a council of war had been called in the railroad headquarters, and that Ripley had been pulled in by wire from Lesterburg, and that we were rushing around hurriedly to provide storage room for the wheat shippers in case of a tie-up, and that we were arranging to distribute railroad company coal in case the tie-up should bring on a fuel famine – knew all these things and talked about them.

They were facts, as far as they went – these things. The boss hadn't been idle during the forenoon, and he kept up the drive straight through to quitting time. Word was brought in during the afternoon by Tarbell that the Hatch people were wiring the Kansas City and Omaha employment agencies and placing hurry orders for strike-breakers. The boss's answer to this was a peremptory wire to our passenger agents at both points to make no rate concessions whatever, of any kind, for the transportation of laborers under contract. It was a shrewd little knock. Labor of that kind is mighty hard to move unless it can get free transportation or a low rate of fare, and I could see that Mr. Norcross was hoping to keep the strike-breakers away.

When six o'clock came, the boss asked May to stay and keep the office open while I could go down-stairs and get my dinner in the station restaurant, and he went off up-town – to the club, I suppose. After I'd had my bite, I let May go. Everything was moving along all right, so far as anybody could see. We had five extra fuel trains loading at the company's chutes at Coalville, and the despatcher was instructed to work them out on the line during the night, distributing them to the towns that had reported shortages. They were not to be turned over to the regular coal yards; they were to be side-tracked and held for emergencies.

Mr. Norcross came back about eight o'clock, and I gave him my report of how things were going on the line. A little later Mr. Cantrell dropped in, and there was a quiet talk about the situation, and what it was likely to develop. The Mountaineer editor was given all the facts, except the one big one about Hatch's death-grip on us, and in turn Mr. Cantrell promised the help of his paper to the last ditch – though, of course, he had no idea of how deep that last ditch was going to be. I had a lot of filing and indexing to do, and I kept at work while they were talking, wondering all the time if the boss would venture to tell the editor about the depth of that "last ditch." He didn't. I guess he thought he wouldn't until he had to.