The Wreckers

Remembering what Maisie Ann had told me just before I went off the hooks, I thought I might tell her a lot if I dared to. But that wouldn't do. So I just said:

"I told Maisie Ann all I knew about Mr. Norcross. He left the office some little time before I did – with Mr. Ripley. I didn't know where they were going."

"They went to the hotel," she helped out. "Mr. Ripley says they sat in the lobby until after ten o'clock, and then Mr. Norcross went up to his rooms."

Of course, I knew that Mr. Ripley knew all about the Hatch ruction; but if he hadn't told her, I wasn't going to tell her. She had got ahead of me, there, though; perhaps she had been talking with the major, who always knew everything that was going on.

"There was some trouble in connection with Mr. Hatch that evening, wasn't there?" she asked.

"Hatch had some trouble – yes. But I guess the boss didn't have any," I replied.

"Tell me about it," she commanded; and I told her just as little as I could; how Hatch had had an interview with the boss earlier in the evening, while I was away.

"It wasn't a quarrel?" she suggested.

"Why should they quarrel?" I asked.

She shook her head. "You are sparring with me, Jimmie, in some mistaken idea of being loyal to Mr. Norcross. You needn't, you know. Mr. Norcross has told me all about his plans; he has even been generous enough to say that I helped him make them. That is why I can not understand why he should do as he has done – or at least as everybody believes he has done."

I saw how it was. She was trying to find some explanation that would clear the boss, and perhaps implicate the Hatch crowd. I couldn't tell her the real reason why he had run away. Maisie Ann had been right as right about that; we must keep it to our two selves. But I tried to let her down easy.

"Mr. Van Britt has told you about those two telegrams that came after Mr. Norcross left the office," I said, still covering up the fact that the telegrams hadn't been delivered – that they were probably in the pocket of my coat right now, wherever that was. "They were enough to make any man throw up his hands and quit, I should say."

"No," she insisted, looking me straight in the eyes. "You are not telling the truth now, Jimmie. You know Mr. Norcross better than any of us, and you know that it isn't the least little bit like him to walk out and leave everything to go to wreck. Have you ever known of his doing anything like that before?"

I had to admit that I hadn't; that, on the other hand, it was the very thing you'd least expect him to do. But at the same time I had to hang on to my sham belief that it was the thing he had done: either that, or tell her the truth.

"Every man reaches his limit, some time!" I protested. "What was Mr. Norcross to do, I'd like to know; with Mr. Chadwick getting scared out, and Mr. Dunton threatening to fire him?"

"The thing he wouldn't do would be to go off and leave all of his friends, Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack, and all the rest, to fight it out alone. You know that as well as I do, Jimmie Dodds!"

There was actually a flash of fire in the pretty gray eyes when she said that, and her loyal defense of the boss made me love her good and hard. I wished, clear to the bottom of my heart, that I dared tell her just why it was that Mr. Norcross had thrown up his hands and dropped out, but that was out of the question.

"If you won't take my theory, you must have one of your own," I said; not knowing what else to say.

"I have," she flashed back, "and I want you to hurry and get well so that you can help me trace it out."

"Me?" I queried.

"Yes, you. The others are all so stupid! even Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Ripley. They insist that Mr. Norcross went east to see and talk with Mr. Chadwick. They have found out that Mr. Chadwick left Chicago the day after he sent that telegram, to go up into the Canadian woods to look at some mines, or something. They say that Mr. Norcross has followed him, and that is why they don't hear anything from him."

"What do you think?" I asked.

She didn't answer right away, and in the little pause I saw a sort of frightened look come into her eyes. But all she said was, "I want you to hurry up and get well, Jimmie, so you can help."

"I'm well enough now, if they'll let me get up."

"Not to-night; to-morrow, maybe." Then: "Mr. Van Britt is down-stairs with Cousin Basil. He has been very anxious to talk with you as soon as you were able to talk. May I send him up?"

Of course I said yes; and pretty soon after she went away, our one and only millionaire came in. He looked as he always did; just as if he had that minute stepped out of a Turkish bath where they shave and scrub and polish a man till he shines.

"How are you, Jimmie?" he rapped out. "Glad to see you on earth again. Feeling a little more fit, to-night?"

I told him I didn't think it would take more than half a dozen fellows of my size to knock me out, but I was gaining. Then he sat down and put me on the question rack. I gave him all I had – except that thing about the undelivered telegrams and two or three others that I couldn't give him or anybody, and at the end of it he said:

"I've been hoping you could help out. I don't need to tell you that this new turn things have taken has us all fought to a standstill, Jimmie. I've known 'the boss', as you call him, ever since we were boys together, and I never knew him to do anything like this before."

"We're in pretty bad shape, aren't we?" I suggested.

"We couldn't be in worse shape," was the way he put it. Then he told me a little more than Maisie Ann had; how President Dunton had wired to stop all the betterment work on the Short Line until the new general manager could get on the ground; how the local capitalists at the head of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse organization were scared plumb out of their shoes and were afraid to make a move; and how the newspapers all over the State were saying that it was just what they had expected – that the railroad was crooked in root and branch, and that a good man couldn't stay with it long enough to get his breath.

"Then the new general manager has been appointed?" I asked.

He nodded. "Some fellow by the name of Dismuke. I don't know him, and neither does Hornack. He is on his way west now, they say."

"And there is no word from Mr. Chadwick?"

"Nothing direct. His secretary wires that he is somewhere up north of Lake Superior, in the Canadian mining country and out of reach of the telegraph."

"Mr. Norcross hasn't shown up at Mr. Chadwick's Chicago offices?" I ventured.

"No. The telegraph people have been wiring everywhere and can't get any trace of him."

"Tell them to try Galesburg. That's where his people live."

"I know," he said; and he made a note of the address on the back of an envelope. Then he came at me again, on the "direct," as a lawyer would say.

"You've been closer to Norcross in an intimate way than any of us, Jimmie: haven't you seen or heard something that would help to turn a little more light on this damnable blow-up?"

I hadn't – outside of the one thing I couldn't talk about – and I told him so, and at this he let me see a little more of what was going on in his own mind.

"You're one of us, in a way, Jimmie, and I can talk freely to you. I'm new to this neck of woods, but the major tells me that the Hatch crowd is a pretty tough proposition. Mrs. Macrae goes farther and insists that there has been foul play of some sort. You say you weren't present when Hatch called on Norcross at the office that night?"

"No; I came in just after Hatch went away."

"Did Norcross say anything to make you think there had been a fight?"

"He told me that Hatch was abusive and had made threats – in a business way."

"In a business way? What do you mean by that?"

I quoted the boss's own words, as nearly as I could recall them.

"So Hatch did make a threat, then? He said that Norcross might as well resign one time as another?"

"Something like that, yes."

"Can you add anything more?"

I could, but I didn't want to. Mr. Van Britt didn't know anything about the Sand Creek Siding hold-up, or I supposed he didn't, and I didn't want to be the first one to tell him. Besides, the whole business was beside the mark. Maisie Ann knew, and I knew, that the boss, strong and unbreakable as he was in other ways, had simply thrown up his hands and quit because somebody had told him that Mrs. Sheila had a husband living. So I just said:

"Nothing that would help out," and after he had talked a little while longer our only millionaire went down-stairs again.

It's funny how things change around for a person just by giving them time to sort of shake down into place and fit themselves together. Nobody came up any more that night; not even the pie-faced nurse; and I had a good chance to lie there looking up at the ceiling pattern of the wall paper and thinking things out to a finish.

After a while the thin edge of the wedge that Mrs. Sheila had been trying to drive into me began to take hold, just a little, in spite of what I knew – or thought I knew. Was it barely possible, after all, that there had been foul play of some sort? There were plenty of mysteries to give the possibility standing-room.

In the first place, something had been done to me by somebody: it was a sure thing that I hadn't crippled and half-killed myself all by my lonesome. Then they had said that the boss stayed up with Mr. Ripley that night until after ten o'clock, and had then gone up to go to bed. That being the case, how could anybody have got to him between that time and the leaving time of the midnight Fast Mail to tell him about Mrs. Sheila?

Anyway it was stacked up, it made a three-cornered puzzle, needing somebody to tackle it right away; and when I finally went to sleep it was with the notion that, sick or no sick, I was going to turn out early in the morning and get busy.

XII

With the Wheels Trigged

I was well enough to get up the next morning, and when I phoned to Mr. Van Britt he sent his car out to the major's to take me down to the office. Just before I left the house, Mrs. Sheila waylaid me, and after telling me that I must be careful and not take cold in the burnt hand, she put in another word about the boss's disappearance.

"I want you to remember what I said last night, Jimmie, and not let the others talk you over into the belief that Mr. Norcross has gone away because he was either discouraged or afraid. He wouldn't do that: you know it, and I know it. We are his friends, you and I, and we must stand by him and defend him when he isn't here to defend himself."

It did me good to hear her talk that way, and I wondered if she could be the same young woman who had jumped off the train to run skittering after Maisie Ann, and had afterward made the boss turn himself inside out under the water tank just for her pastime. It didn't seem possible; she seemed so many worlds older and wiser. I had been sort of getting ready to dislike her for letting the boss get in so deep and not telling him straight out that she was a married woman and he mustn't; but when I saw that she was trying to be just as loyal to him as I was, it pulled me over to her side again.

So I promised to do all the things she told me to do, and to keep her posted as to what was going on; and then she made me feel kind of kiddish and feckless by coming out and helping me into Mr. Van Britt's auto.

Though the boss's disappearance was now four days old, things were still in a sort of daze down at the railroad offices. Of course, the trains were running yet, and, so far as anybody could see, the Short Line was still a going proposition. But the heart was gone out of the whole business, and the entire push was acting as if it were just waiting for the roof to fall in – as I guess it was.

Mr. Van Britt, being the general superintendent and next in command, had moved over into the boss's office, and Fred May was doing his shorthand work. They wouldn't let me do anything much – I couldn't do much with my right arm in a sling – so I had a chance to hang around and size up the situation. If you want to know how it sized up, you can take it from me that it was pretty bad. People all along the line were bombarding Mr. Van Britt with letters and telegrams wanting to know what was going to be done, and what the change in management was going to mean for the public, and all that. On top of this, the office ante-room was full of callers, some of them just merely curious, but most of them dead anxious. You see, Mr. Norcross had laid out a mighty attractive programme in the little time he had been at the wheel, and now it looked as if it was all going to be dumped into the ditch.

Mr. Van Britt saw and talked with everybody, and when he could wedge off a minute or two of privacy, he'd go into the third room of the suite and thresh it out with Juneman, or Billoughby, or Mr. Ripley. From these private talks I found out that there was still some doubt in the minds of all four of them about the boss's drop-out – as to whether it was voluntary or not.

Also, I found out what had been done during the four days. We had no "company detective" at that time, and Mr. Hornack had borrowed a man named Grimmer from his old company, the Overland Central, wiring for him and getting him on the ground within twenty-four hours of the time of Mr. Norcross's disappearance.

Grimmer had gone to work at once, but everything he had turned up, so far, favored the voluntary runaway theory. Mr. Norcross's trunks were still in his rooms at the Bullard; but his two grips were gone. And the night clerk at the hotel, when he was pushed to it, remembered that the boss had paid his bill up to date, that night before going up to his rooms.

Past that, the trace was completely lost. The conductor on the Fast Mail, eastbound, on the night in question, ought to have been the next witness. But he wasn't. He swore by all that was good and great that Mr. Norcross hadn't been a passenger on his train. And he would certainly have known it if he had been carrying his general manager. Besides that, the boss wasn't the kind of man to be lost in a crowd; he was too big and too well known by this time to the rank and file.

Over in the other field there was absolutely nothing to incriminate the Hatch people. So far from it, Hatch had turned up at the railroad office, bright and early the morning after Mr. Norcross had gone. He had asked for the boss, and failing to find him, he had hunted up Mr. Van Britt. What he wanted, it seemed, was a chance to reopen the proposition that had been made to him the day before – the offer of the new Citizens' Storage & Warehouse Company to purchase the various Red Tower equipments and plants.

Mr. Van Britt had referred him to Mr. Ripley, and to our lawyer Hatch had made what purported to be an open confession, admitting that he had gone to Mr. Norcross the night before, determined to fight the new company to a finish, and that there had been a good many things said that would better be forgotten. Now, however, he was willing to talk straight business and a compromise. He had called his board of directors together, and they had voted to sell their track-bordering plants to Citizens' Storage & Warehouse if a price could be amicably agreed upon.

This was the way the matter still stood. With Mr. Norcross gone and a new general manager coming, Mr. Ripley was afraid to make a move, and Hatch was pressing him to get busy on the bargain and sale proposition; was apparently as anxious now to sell and withdraw as he had at first been to fight everything in sight.

By the morning I came on the scene the man Grimmer had, as they say, just about done his do. He was only a sort of journeyman detective, and had run out of clues. When he came in and talked to Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Ripley, I could see that he fully believed in the drop-out theory, and even the lawyer and Mr. Van Britt had to admit that the facts were with him. The boss had written a letter saying definitely that he was quitting; he had paid his hotel bill, and his grips were gone; and two days later President Dunton had appointed a new general manager, which was proof positive, you'd say, that the boss had resigned and had so notified the New York office.

When the noon hour came along, Fred May took me out to luncheon, and we went to the Bullard café. It was pretty rich for our blood at two dollars per, but I guess Fred thought his job was gone, anyway, and felt reckless. Over the good things at our corner table we did a little threshing on our own account – and got a lot more chaff and no grain.

Fred didn't want to agree with Grimmer and the facts, but there didn't seem to be any help for it. And as for me, I had that other thing in mind all the time – the big scary fear that somebody had got to the boss after he had left Ripley on the night of shockings, and had just bashed him in the face with the story of Mrs. Sheila's sham widowhood.

By and by we got around to my burned hand, and Fred told me Grimmer had at least succeeded in clearing up whatever mystery there was about that. The wall switch for the electric light in the lower hall at the headquarters was right beside the outer door jamb – as I knew. It had burned out in some way, and that was why there was no light on when I went down-stairs. And in burning out it had short-circuited itself with the brass lock of the door; Fred didn't know just how, but Grimmer had explained it. I asked him if Grimmer had explained how a 110-volt light current could cook me like a fried potato, and he said he hadn't.

The afternoon at the office was a sort of cut-and-come-again repeat of the morning, with lots of people milling around and things going crooked and cross-ways, as they were bound to with the boss gone and a new boss coming. Nobody had any heart for anything, and along late in the afternoon when word came of a freight wreck at Cross Creek Gulch, Mr. Van Britt threw up both hands and yipped and swore like a pirate. It just showed what a raw edge the headquarters' nerves were taking on.

Though it wasn't his business, Mr. Van Britt went out with the wrecking train, and Fred May and I had it all to ourselves for the remaining hour or so up to closing time. Just before five, Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the Mountaineer, dropped in. He looked a bit disappointed when he found only us two. Fred turned him over to me, and he came on in to the private office when I asked him to, and smoked one of the boss's good cigars out of a box that I found in the big desk.

I liked Cantrell. He was just the sort of man you expect an editor to be; tall and thin and kind of mild-eyed, with an absent way with him that made you feel as if he were thinking along about a mile ahead of you when you were striking the best think-gait you ever knew of. After the cigar was going he talked a little about my sore hand and then switched over to the big puzzle.

"No word yet from Mr. Norcross, I suppose?" he said.

I told him there wasn't.

"It's very singular, don't you think, Jimmie? – or do you?"

"It's as singular to me, and to all of us, as it is to you," I threw in.

"Branderby" – he was one of the Mountaineer reporters – "tells me that you people have had a detective on the job. Did he find out anything?"

"Nothing worth speaking of. He is the Overland Central's 'special,' and I guess his best hold is train robberies and things of that sort."

The editor smoked on for a full minute without saying anything more, and he seemed to be staring absently at a steamship picture on the wall. When he got good and ready, he began again.

"You don't need any common plain-clothes man on this job, Jimmie; you need the best there is: a real, dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes, if there ever were such a miracle."

"You think it is a case for a detective?"

"I do," he replied, looking straight at me with his mild blue eyes. "If I were one of Mr. Norcross's close friends I should get the best help that could be found and not lose a single minute about it."

Since there was nobody around who was any closer to the boss than I was, I jumped into the hole pretty quick.

"Can you tell us anything that will help, Mr. Cantrell?" I asked.

"Not specifically; I wish I could. But I can say this: I know Mr. Rufus Hatch and his associates up one side and down the other. They are hand-in-glove with the political pirates who control this State. From the little that has leaked out, and the great deal that has been published in the Hatch-controlled newspapers all over the State during the past few weeks, it is apparent that Mr. Norcross's removal was a thing greatly to be desired, not only by the Red Tower people, but also by the political bosses. That ought to be enough to make all of you suspicious – very suspicious, Jimmie."

"It did, and does," I admitted. "But there isn't the slightest reason to think that the Hatch crowd has made away with Mr. Norcross – reason in fact, I mean. Hatch, himself, says that his directors are willing to sell out, and that if Mr. Norcross were here the deal could be closed in a day."

The tall editor got up and made ready to go. "You remember the old saying, current in Europe in Napoleon's time, Jimmie: 'Beware of the Russians when they retreat.' If I were in your place, or rather in Mr. Van Britt's, I'd get an expert on this job – and I shouldn't let much grass grow under my feet while I was about it. Call me up at the Mountaineer office if I can help." And with that he went away.

It was just a little while after this that I put on my hat and strolled across the yard tracks to Kirgan's office in the shops. Kirgan was an old friend, as you might say: he had been on the Oregon building job with us and knew the boss through and through. I didn't have anything special to say, but I kind of wanted to talk to somebody who knew. So I loafed in on Kirgan.

I wish I could show you Mart Kirgan just as he was. You'd pick him up anywhere for the toughest Bad Man from Bitter Creek that ever swaggered into a saloon to throw down on some poor tenderfoot and make him dance by shooting at his heels: big-jowled, black, with a hard jaw, sultry hot eyes, and a pair of drooping mustaches like the penny picture-makers used to put on One-Eyed Ike, the Terror of the Uintahs.

Really, however, Mart wasn't half as savage as he looked; he didn't have to be, you know, looking that way. And he loved the boss like a brother. As soon as I came in, he fired his kid stenographer on some errand or other, and made me sit down and tell him all I knew. When I got through he was pulling at his long mustache and wrinkling his nose as I've seen a bulldog do when he was getting ready to bite something.

"You haven't got all the drop-out business cornered over yonder in the general office, Jimmie," he said slowly, tilting back in his swing-chair and glowering at me with those sultry eyes of his. "On that same night that you're talkin' about, I stand to lose one perfectly good Atlantic-type locomotive. At ten o'clock she was set in on the spur below the coal chutes. At twelve o'clock, when the round-house watchman went down there to see if her fire was banked all right, she was gone."

XIII

The Lost 1016

When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't wedge them apart.

"An engine – even a little old Atlantic-type – is a pretty big thing to lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.

Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.

"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!" he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's gone!"

"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported. And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild engine over the main line without orders."