The Wreckers

Following his hard-and-fast rule, Mr. Norcross didn't deny himself to anybody. Patiently he told each fresh batch of callers that the railroad company had nothing whatever to do with the change in ownership of C. S. & W.; that the railroad's attitude was unaltered; and that, so far as it could be done legally, the Pioneer Short Line would stand firmly between its patrons and any extortion which might grow out of the new conditions.

The C. S. & W. strike – as our wires told us – went into effect promptly on the stroke of noon, and a train from the west, arriving late in the afternoon, brought Ripley. For the first time that day, Mr. Norcross told me to snap the catch on the office door for privacy and then he told Ripley to talk. Our neat little general counsel was fresh from the actual fighting line, and his news amply confirmed the wire reports which had been trickling in.

"The conditions all along the line are almost revolutionary," was Ripley's summing-up of the situation. "Generally speaking, the public is not holding us responsible as yet, though of course there are croakers who are saying that it is entirely a railroad move, and predicting that we won't do anything to interfere with the new graft."

"Cantrell says that public sentiment is altogether on the side of the C. S. & W. strikers," the boss put in.

"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."

"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"

"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life," was the confident rejoinder.

"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it. Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the railroad management.

Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but also less hopeful.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl out of."

"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a chance to sleep on it – as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those papers – "

"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.

"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by Bullock for his vote."

"Well, what then?"

"Then I should make every mother's son of them come across with the full amount of the bribe, on pain of an exposure which the dirtiest politician in this State couldn't afford to face. That would settle it. Hatch couldn't work the same game a second time."

Ripley let it go at that and spoke of something else.

"I suppose you have seen how our stock is climbing. Has the new situation here anything to do with it?"

Mr. Norcross said he thought not, and rather lamented that we didn't have better information about what was going on at the New York end of things. Also, he told Ripley something that I hadn't known; that he had wired Mr. Chadwick asking the wheat king to give him a line on what the stock-kiting meant. Then Ripley asked for orders.

"There is nothing to be done until Hatch begins to raise his prices," he was told. "But I wanted to have you here in case anything should break loose suddenly." And at that Ripley went away.

We were closing our desks to go to dinner when Fred May came in to say that a delegation of the pay-roll men was outside and wanting to have a word with the "Big Boss." Mr. Norcross stopped with his desk curtain half drawn down.

"What is it, Fred?" he asked.

"I don't know," said the Pittsburgher. "I should call it a grievance committee, if it wasn't so big. And they don't seem to be mad about anything. Bart Hoskins is doing the talking for them."

"Send them in," was the curt command, and a minute later the inner office was about three-fourths filled up with a shuffling crowd of P. S. L. men.

The chief looked the crowd over. There was a bunch of train- and engine-men, a squad from the shops, and a bigger one from the yards. Also, the wire service had turned out a gang of linemen and half a dozen operators.

"Well, men, let's have it," said Mr. Norcross, not too sharply. "My dinner's getting cold."

"We'll not be keepin' you above the hollow half of a minute, Mister Norcross," said the big, bearded freight conductor who acted as spokesman. "About this C. S. & W. strike that went on to-day: we'd like to know, straight from you, if it's anything in the railroad company's pocket to have all these old men fired out and a lot of scabs put in on starvation wages to ball us all up when we try to work with 'em."

"It's nothing to us; or rather, I should say, we are on the other side," was the short reply. "You probably all know that C. S. & W. has changed hands, and the old Red Tower syndicate, with Mr. Rufus Hatch at its head, is now in control."

Hoskins nodded. "That's about what we allowed, and we've come up here to say that we're almighty sorry for these poor cusses that have been dumped out o' their jobs. We ain't got no kick comin' with you, n'r with the company, Mister Norcross, but it looks like it's up to us to do somethin', and we didn't want to do it without hittin' square out from the shoulder."

"I'm listening," said the chief.

"The union locals have called a meetin' f'r to-night. There ain't nobody knows yet what's goin' to be done, but whatever it is, we want you to know that it ain't done ag'inst you n'r the railroad company."

The boss had handled wage earners too long not to be able to suspect what was in the wind.

"You men don't want to let your sympathies carry you too far," he cautioned. "When you take up another fellow's quarrel you want to be pretty sure that you're not going to hit your friends in the scrap."

Hoskins grinned understandingly, and I guess the boss was a little puzzled by the nods and winks that went around among the silent members of the delegation; at least, I know I was.

"That's all right," Hoskins said. "Bein' the Big Boss, you've got to talk that way. They might reach out and grab you fr'm New York if you didn't. But what I was aimin' to say is that there'll be a train-load 'r two of strike-breakers a-careerin' along here in a day 'r so, and we ain't figurin' on lettin' 'em get past Portal City, if that far."

"That's up to you," said Mr. Norcross brusquely. "If you start anything in the way of a riot – "

"Excuse me. There ain't goin' to be no riotin', and no company property mashed up. Mr. Van Britt, he – "

It was right here that an odd thing happened. Con Corrigan, a big two-fisted freight engineer standing directly behind Hoskins, reached an arm around the speaker's neck and choked him so suddenly that Hoskins's sentence ended in a gasping chuckle. When the garroting arm was withdrawn the conductor looked around sort of foolishly and said: "I'm thinking that's about all we wanted to say, ain't it, boys?" and the deputation filed out as solemnly as it had come in.

I guess Mr. Norcross wasn't left wholly in the dark when the tramping footfalls of the committee died away in the corridor. That unintentional mention of Mr. Van Britt's name looked as if it might open up some more possibilities, though what they were I couldn't imagine, and I don't believe the general manager could, either.

After that, things rocked along pretty easy until after dinner. Instead of going right back to the office from the club, Mr. Norcross drifted into the smoking-room and filled a pipe. In the course of a few minutes, Major Kendrick dropped in and pulled up a chair. I don't know what they talked about, but after a little while, when the boss got up to go, I heard him say something that gave the key to the most of what had gone before, I guess.

"Have you seen or heard anything of Collingwood since yesterday?"

The good old major shook his head. "I haven't seen, but I have heard," he said, sort of soberly. "They're tellin' me that he's oveh in his rooms at the Bullard, drinkin' himself to death. If he wasn't altogetheh past redemption, suh, he would have had the decency to get out of town befo' he turned loose all holts that way; he would, for a fact, Graham."

At that, Mr. Norcross explained in just a few words why Collingwood hadn't gone – why he couldn't go. Whereupon the old Kentuckian looked graver than ever.

"That thah spells trouble, Graham. Hatch is simply invitin' the unde'takeh. Howie isn't what you'd call a dangerous man, but he is totally irresponsible, even when he's sobeh."

"We ought to get him away from here," was the boss's decision. "He is an added menace while he stays."

I didn't hear what the major said to that, because little Rags, Mr. Perkins's office boy, had just come in with a note which he was asking me to give to Mr. Norcross. I did it; and after the note had been glanced at, the chief said, kind of bitterly, to the major:

"You can never fall so far that you can't fall a little farther; have you ever remarked that, major?" And then he want on to explain: "I have a note here from Perkins, our Desert Division superintendent. He says that the 'locals' of the various railroad labor unions have just notified him of the unanimous passage of a strike vote – the strike to go into effect at midnight."

"A strike? – on the railroad? Why, Graham, son, you don't mean it!"

"The men seem to mean it – which is much more to the purpose. They are striking in sympathy with the C. S. & W. employees. I fancy that settles our little experiment in good railroading definitely, major. We'll go out of business as a common carrier at midnight, and it's the final straw that will break the camel's back. Dunton doesn't want a receivership, but he'll have to take one now."

"Oh, my deah fellow!" protested the major. "Let's hope it isn't going to be so bad as that!"

"It will. The bottom will drop out of the stock and break the market when this strike news gets on the wire, and that will end it. I wish to God there were some way in which I could save Mr. Chadwick: he has trusted me, major, and I – I've failed him!"

XXIX

The Murder Madman

I knew what we were up against when we headed down to the railroad lay-out, the chief and I, leaving the good old major thoughtfully puffing his cigar in the club smoking-room. With a strike due to be pulled off in a little more than three hours there were about a million things that would have to be jerked around into shape and propped up so that they could stand by themselves while the Short Line was taking a vacation. And there was only a little handful of us in the headquarters to do the jerking and propping.

But it was precisely in a crisis like this that the boss could shine. From the minute we hit the tremendous job he was all there, carrying the whole map of the Short Line in his head, thinking straight from the shoulder, and never missing a lick; and I don't believe anybody would ever have suspected that he was a beaten man, pushed to the ropes in the final round with the grafters, his reputation as a successful railroad manager as good as gone, and his warm little love-dream knocked sky-winding forever and a day.

Luckily, we found Fred May still at his desk, and he was promptly clamped to the telephone and told to get busy spreading the hurry call. In half an hour every relief operator we had in Portal City was in the wire-room, and the back-breaking job of preparing a thousand miles of railroad for a sudden tie-up was in full swing. Mr. Perkins, as division superintendent, was in touch with the local labor unions, and a conference was held with the strike leaders. Persuading and insisting by turns, Mr. Norcross fought out the necessary compromises with the unions. All ordinary traffic would be suspended at midnight, but passenger trains en route were to be run through to our connecting line terminals east and west, live-stock trains were to be laid out only where there were feeding corrals, and perishable freight was to be taken to its destination, wherever that might be.

In addition to these concessions, the strikers agreed to allow the mail trains to run without interruption, with our promise that they would not carry passengers. Hoskins and his committee bucked a little at this, but got down when they were shown that they could not afford to risk a clash with the Government. This exception admitted, another followed, as a matter of course. If the mail trains were to be run, some of the telegraph operators would have to remain on duty, at least to the extent of handling train orders.

With these generalities out of the way, we got down to details. "Fire-alarm" wires were sent to the various cities and towns on the lines asking for immediate information regarding food and fuel supplies, and the strike leaders were notified that, for sheer humanity's sake, they would have to permit the handling of provision trains in cases where they were absolutely needed.

By eleven o'clock the tangle was getting itself pretty well straightened out. Some of the trains had already been abandoned, and the others were moving along to the agreed-upon destinations. Kirgan had taken hold in the Portal City yard, and by putting on extra crews was getting the needful shifting and car sorting into shape; and the Portal City employees, acting upon their own initiative, were picketing the yard and company buildings to protect them from looters or fire-setters. Mr. Van Britt's special, so the wires told us, was at Lesterburg, and it was likely to stay there; and Mr. Van Britt, himself, couldn't be reached.

It was at half-past eleven that we got the first real yelp from somebody who was getting pinched. It came in the shape of a wire from the Strathcona night operator. A party of men – "mine owners" the operator called them – had just heard of the impending railroad tie-up. They had been meaning to come in on the regular night train, but that had been abandoned. So now they were offering all kinds of money for a special to bring them to Portal City. It was represented that there were millions at stake. Couldn't we do something?

Mr. Norcross had kept Hoskins and a few of the other local strike leaders where he could get hold of them, and he put the request up to them as a matter that was now out of his hands. Would they allow him to run a one-car special from the gold camp to Portal City after midnight? It was for them to say.

Hoskins and his accomplices went off to talk it over with some of the other men. When the big freight conductor came back he was alone and was grinning good-naturedly.

"We ain't aimin' to make the company lose any good money that comes a-rolling down the hill at it, Mister Norcross," he said. "Cinch these here Strathcona hurry-boys f'r all you can get out o' them, and if you'll lend us the loan of the wires, we'll pass the word to let the special come on through."

It was sure the funniest strike I ever saw or heard of, and I guess the boss thought so, too – with all this good-natured bargaining back and forth; but there was nothing more said, and I carried the word to Mr. Perkins directing him to have arrangements made for the running of a one-car special from Strathcona for the hurry folks.

Past that, things rocked along until the hands of the big standard-time clock in the despatcher's room pointed to midnight. Mr. Norcross and I were both at Donohue's elbow when the men at the wires, east and west, clicked in their "Good-night," which was the signal that the Pioneer Short Line had laid down on the job and gone out of business. I couldn't compare it to anything but a funeral bell, and that's about what it was. No matter how short the strike might be, it was going to smash us good and plenty. And whatever else might come of it, it was a cinch that it would squeeze the last little breath of life out of the Norcross management for good and all.

As if to confirm that sort of doleful foreboding of mine, Norris, who was holding down the commercial wire, came over to the counter railing just then with a New York message. I saw the boss's eyes flash and the little bunchy muscle-swellings of anger come and go on the edge of his jaw as he read it, and then he handed it to me.

"You may endorse that 'No Answer' and file it when you go back to the office," he said shortly, and then he went on talking to Donohue, telling him how to handle the trains which were still out and moving to their tie-up destinations.

Of course, I read the message; I knew there was nothing private about it so far as I was concerned, since it had been given me to put away in the files. It was dated from the Waldorf-Astoria at midnight, which, allowing for the difference in time between New York and Portal City, meant that it had been sent at nine o'clock by our time. Somebody in our neck of woods was evidently keeping in close wire touch with Mr. Dunton, for though the strike vote was only a little more than an hour old when he sent the telegram, he evidently knew all about it. This is what I read:

"To G. Norcross, G. M.,

"Portal City.

"Your administration has been a conspicuous failure from the beginning. Compromise with employees on any terms offered and prevent strike at all costs. That done, you are hereby directed to wire your resignation to take effect one week from to-day.

"B. Dunton, President."

It had hit us at last; not a decent request, mind you, but a blunt, brutal demand. The boss was fired. No word had come from Mr. Chadwick, and there could be but one reason for his silence. In some way, perhaps through the late boosting of the stock, the New Yorkers had squeezed him out. We were shot dead in the trenches.

I didn't understand how the chief could take it so quietly, unless it was because he had been hammered so long and so hard that nothing mattered any more. Anyhow, he was just standing there, talking soberly to Donohue, when once more the Strathcona branch sounder began to click furiously, snipping out the headquarters call.

Donohue cut in and we all heard the Strathcona man's new bleat. The way he told it, it seemed that one member of the party that had chartered the special to come to Portal City had got left, and this man was now in the Strathcona wire office, bidding high for an engine to chase the train and put him aboard.

At first the boss said, "No," short off, just like that; adding that it wouldn't be keeping faith with the strike committee. But at that moment Hoskins blew in again, and when he was told what was on the cards, he took a little responsibility of his own.

"Go to it, Mister Norcross, if there's any more money in it f'r the railroad," he told the boss. "I'll stand f'r it with the boys." And then to Donohue: "Who'll be runnin' this chaser engine?"

"It'll be John Hogan and the Four-Sixteen," said Donohue. "There's nobody else at that end of the branch."

The arrangement, such as it was, was fixed up quickly. The man who was putting up the money seemed to have plenty of it. He was offering five hundred dollars for the engine, and a thousand if it should overtake the special that side of Bauxite Junction.

I guess the bleat unravelled itself pretty clearly for all of us; or at least, it seemed plain enough. A mining deal of some kind was on, and this man who was left behind was going to be left in another sense of the word if he couldn't butt in soon enough to break whatever combination the others were stacking up against him.

In just a few minutes we got the word from the Strathcona operator that the money was paid and the chaser engine was out and gone. The special train had fully a half-hour's start, and with the hazardous grades of Slide Mountain and Dry Canyon to negotiate, it didn't seem probable that the light engine could overtake it anywhere north of Bauxite. That wasn't up to us, however. Kirgan had come in to say that our good-natured strikers had thrown a guard into the shops and were patroling the yard, when Fred May showed up, making signals to me. I heard him when he edged up to the boss and said: "There's a lady in the office, wanting to see you, Mr. Norcross."

"Holy Smoke!" said I to myself. I knew it couldn't be anybody but Mrs. Sheila, at that time of night, and I saw seventeen different kinds of bloody murder looming up again when I tagged along after the boss on the trip down the hall to our offices.

The guess was right, both ways around. It was Mrs. Sheila, and she had the major with her. And the air of the private office was so thick with tragedy that it made the very electrics look dim and ghostly. Mrs. Sheila didn't have a bit of color in her face, and her eyes had a big horror in them that was enough to make your flesh creep.

I won't attempt to tell all that was said, partly by the good old major and partly by Mrs. Sheila. But the gist of it was this: Collingwood had continued his booze fight in his rooms at the Bullard until he had worked himself up to the crazy murder pitch. Then he had gone on the warpath, hunting for Hatch. Just how he had contrived to dodge Hatch's spotters, who were doubtless keeping cases on him, did not appear. But that was a detail. He had dodged them, had learned that Hatch and a bunch of his Red Tower backers had gone to Strathcona on a mining deal, and had started to drive to the gold camp in an auto to get his man.

Before leaving Portal City he had written a letter to Mrs. Sheila, telling her what he was going to do, and that when he got through with it, she would be free. The letter, which had been left at the hotel, had been delayed in delivery – had, in fact, just been sent out to the major's house by the night clerk who had found it.

Long before the story could get itself fully told, the different gaps in it were filling themselves up for me – and for Mr. Norcross, as well, I guess. When Mrs. Sheila came to the auto-drive part of it, the boss whirled and shot an order at me.

"Jimmie, chase into the despatcher's office and find out the name of the man who chartered that following engine!" he snapped; and I went on the run, remembering that in the strike excitement and hustle it hadn't occurred to anybody to ask the man's name or that of the particular "mine owner" who had chartered the special train.

Donohue got the Strathcona operator in less than half a minute after I fired my order at him, and the answer came almost without a break:

"Charter of special train was to R. Hatch, of Portal City, and of engine 416 to man named Collingwood."

Gosh! but this did settle it! I didn't run back to the office with the news – I flew. It was like firing a gun in amongst the three who were waiting, but it had to be done. The major groaned and said, "Oh, good God!" and Mrs. Sheila sat down and put her face in her hands. The boss was the only one who knew what to do and he did it: vanished like a shot in the direction of the despatcher's office.

In about fifteen of the longest minutes I ever lived he came back, shaking his head. I knew what he had been doing, or trying to do. There was one night telegraph station on the branch – at a mining-camp half-way down the grade on Slide Mountain – and he had been trying to get word there to stop the wild engine.

"He has either bribed or bullied his engine crew," he told the major. "I wired and had a stop signal set for them at the Antonio Mine, but they overran it, going at full speed down the hill."