Kitabı oku: «The Wreckers», sayfa 8
XV
The Machine
With everybody supposing he had resigned and left the country, I guess there were all kinds of a nine-minutes' wonder in Portal City, and all along the Short Line, when the word went out that Mr. Norcross was back on the job and running it pretty much the same as if nothing had happened.
We, of the general offices, didn't hear much of the comment, naturally, because we were all too busy to sit in on the gossip game, but no doubt there was plenty of it: the more since the boss – a bit grimmer than usual – hadn't much to say about his drop-out; little even to the members of his staff, and nothing at all for publication. I suppose he broke over to the major, to Cantrell, and, of course, to Mrs. Sheila; but these were all in the family, too, as you might say.
After supper, on the night of his return from the hide-out, he had sent a long code message to Mr. Chadwick, and a short one to President Dunton; and though I didn't see the reply to either, I guess Mr. Chadwick's answer, as least, was the right kind, because our track-renewing campaign went into commission again with a slam, and all the reform policies took a sure-enough fresh start and began to hump themselves, with Juneman working the newspapers to a finish.
We heard nothing further from Mr. Dismuke, the portly gentleman in the tan spats, though he still stayed on at the Bullard. We saw him occasionally at meal times, and twice he was eating at the same table with Hatch and Henckel. That placed him all right for us, though I guess he didn't need much placing. I kind of wished he'd go away. His staying on made it look as if there might be more to follow.
I wondered a little at first that Mr. Norcross didn't take the clue that Branderby, the Mountaineer reporter, had given us and tear loose on the gang that had trapped him. He didn't; or didn't seem to. From the first hour of the first day he was up to his neck pushing things for the new company formed for the purpose of putting Red Tower out of business, and he wouldn't take a minute's time for anything else.
Of course, it says itself that Hatch never made any more proposals about selling the Red Tower plants to the Citizens' Storage & Warehouse people after the boss got back. That move went into the discard in a hurry, and the Consolidation outfit was busy getting into its fighting clothes, and trying to chock the wheels of the C. S. & W. with all sorts of legal obstacles.
Franchise contracts with the railroad were flashed up, and injunctions were prayed for. Ripley waded in, and what little sleep he got for a week or two was in Pullman cars, snatched while he was rushing around and trying to keep his new clients, the C. S. & W. folks, out of jail for contempt of court. He did it. Little and quiet and smooth-spoken, he could put the legal leather into the biggest bullies the other side could hire. Luckily, we were an inter-state corporation, and when the local courts proved crooked, Ripley would find some way to jerk the case out of them and put it up to some Federal judge.
Around home in Portal City things were just simmering. Between two days, as you might say, and right soon after Mr. Norcross got back, we acquired a new chum on the headquarters force. He was a young fellow named Tarbell, who looked and talked and acted like a cow-punch just in from riding line. He was carried on Mr. Van Britt's pay-roll as an "extra" or "relief" telegraph operator; though we never heard of his being sent out to relieve anybody.
I sized this new young man up, right away, for a "special" of some sort, and the proof that I was right came one afternoon when Ripley dropped in and fell into a chair to fan himself with his straw hat like a man who had just put down a load that he had been carrying about a mile and a half farther than he had bargained to.
"Thank the Lord, the last of those injunction suits is off the docket," he said, drawing a long breath and wagging his neat little head at the boss. "I'll say one thing for the Hatch people, Norcross; they're stubborn fighters. It makes me sweat when I remember that all this is only the preliminary; that the real fight will come when Citizens' Storage & Warehouse enters the field as a business competitor of the Consolidated. That is when the fur will fly."
"We'll beat 'em," predicted the boss. "They've got to let go. How about our C. S. & W. friends? Are they still game?"
"Fine!" asserted the lawyer. "That man Bigelow, at Lesterburg, is a host in himself. After he had pulled his own 'local' into shape, he went out and helped the others organize. The stock is over-subscribed everywhere, now, and C. S. & W. is a going concern. The building boom is on. I venture to say there are over two thousand mechanics at work at the different centers, rushing up the buildings for the new plants, at this moment. You ought to have a monument, Norcross. It's the most original scheme for breaking a monopoly that was ever devised."
The boss was looking out of the window sort of absently, chewing on his cigar, which had gone out.
"Ripley, I wonder what you'd say if I should tell you that the idea is not mine?" he said, after a little pause.
"Not yours?"
"No; it, or at least the germ of it, was given to me by a woman; a woman who knows no more about business details than you do about driving white elephants."
"I'd like to be made acquainted with the lady," said Ripley, with a tired little smile. "Such germs are too valuable to be wasted on mere lumber yards and fruit packeries and grain elevators and the like."
"You'll meet her some day," laughed the boss, with a sort of happy lilt in his voice that fairly made me sick – knowing what I did; and knowing that he didn't know it. Then he switched the subject abruptly: "About the other matter, Ripley: I know you've been pretty busy, but you've had Tarbell nearly a week. What have you found out?"
"We've gone into it pretty thoroughly, and I think we've got at the bottom of it, finally. I can tell you the whole story now."
The boss got up, closed the door leading to May's room, and snapped the catch against interruptions.
"Let's have it," he directed.
Ripley briefed the general situation as it stood on the night of the engine theft in a few terse sentences. Aside from the fight on Red Tower Consolidated, the new railroad policies were threatening to upset all the time-honored political traditions of the machine-governed State. An election was approaching, and the railroad vote and influence must be whipped into line. As the grafters viewed it, the threatened revolution was a one-man government, and if that man could be removed the danger would vanish.
Beyond that, he gave the story of the facts, so far as they had been ferreted out by Tarbell. The orders had apparently come from political headquarters in the State capital, but the execution details had been turned over to Clanahan, the political boss of Portal City. Clanahan's gangsters and crooks had been at work for some time before the plot climaxed. They had tapped our wires and were thus enabled to intercept our messages and keep in touch.
The plot itself was simple. At a certain hour of a given night an anonymous letter was to be sent to Mr. Norcross, telling him that a gang of noted train robbers was stealing an engine from the Portal City yard for the purpose of running down the line and wrecking the Fast Mail, which often carried a bullion express-car. If the boss should fall for it – as he did, when the time came – and go in person to stop the raid, he was to be overpowered and spirited away, a forged letter purporting to be a notice of his resignation was to be left for Mr. Van Britt, and a fake telegram, making the same announcement, was to be sent to President Dunton in New York. Nothing was left indefinite but the choosing of the night.
"I suppose Hatch was to give the word," said the boss, who had been listening soberly while the lawyer talked.
"That is the inference. Any night when you were in town would answer. The engine to be stolen was the one which brings the Strathcona accommodation in at eight-thirty each evening, and which always stands overnight in the same place – on the spur below the coal chutes. Hence, it was always available. Hatch probably gave the word after his talk with you, but the time was made even more propitious by the arrival of the two telegrams; the one from Mr. Chadwick, and the one from Mr. Dunton, both of which they doubtless intercepted by means of the tapped wires."
Mr. Norcross looked up quickly.
"Ripley, did Dunton know what was going to be done to me?"
"Oh, I think not. It wasn't at all necessary that he should be taken in on it. He has been opposing your policies all along, and had just sent you a pretty savage call-down. He didn't want you in the first place, and he has been anxious to get rid of you ever since. The plotters knew very well what he would do if he should get a wire which purported to be your resignation. He would appoint another man, quick, and all they would have to do would be to make sure that you were well off stage, and would stay off until the other man could take hold."
"It worked out like a charm," admitted the boss, with a wry smile. "I haven't been talking much about the details, partly because I wanted to find out if this young fellow, Tarbell, was as good as the major's recommendation of him, and partly because I'm honestly ashamed, Ripley. Any man of my age and experience who would swallow bait, hook, and line as I did that night deserves to get all that is coming to him."
"You can tell me now, can't you?" queried the attorney.
"Oh, yes; you have it all – or practically all. I fell for the anonymous letter about the Mail hold-up, and while I don't 'rattle' very easily, ordinarily, that was one time when I lost my head, just for the moment. The obvious thing to do – if any attention whatever was to be paid to the anonymous warning – was to telephone the police and the round-house. I did neither because I thought it might be too slow. The letter was urgent, of course; it said that Black Ike Bradley and his gang were already in the railroad yard, preparing to steal the engine."
"So you made a straight shoot for the scene of action?"
"I did; down the back streets and across the lower end of the plaza. As it appeared – or rather as it was made to appear – I was barely in time. There were men at the engine, and when I sprinted across the yard they were ready to move it out to the main line. I yelled at them and ran in."
"You must have been beautifully rattled; to go up against a gang of thugs that way, alone and unarmed," was the lawyer's comment.
"I was," the boss confessed soberly. "Of course, I didn't have a ghost of a show. Three of them tackled me the moment I came within reach. I got one of the three on the point of the jaw, and they had to leave him behind; but there were enough more of them. Before I fairly realized what was happening, they had me trussed up like a Christmas turkey, gagged with my own handkerchief, and loaded into the cab of the engine. From that on, it was all plain sailing."
"Then they took you to the old lumber camp?"
"As fast as the engine could be made to turn her wheels. They were running against the Mail, and they knew it. Arroyo has no night operator, and when we sneaked through the Banta yard and past the station, the operator there was asleep. I saw him, with his head in the crook of his arm, at the telegraph table in the bay window as we passed."
Ripley grinned. "We've been giving that young fellow the third degree – Van Britt and I. He claims that he was doped; that somebody dropped something into his supper coffee at the station lunch counter. His story didn't hang together and Van Britt fired him. But go on."
"We ran out to the Timber Mountain 'Y'," the boss resumed, "and from that on up the old saw-mill line. The rail connections were all in place, and I knew from this that preparations had been made beforehand. At the mill stop they untied my legs and made me walk up the hill to the commissary. When they took the gag out, I said a few things and asked them what they were going to do with me. They wouldn't tell me anything except that I was to be locked up for a few days."
"You knew what that meant?"
"Perfectly. My drop-out would be made to look as if I had jumped the job, and Dunton would appoint a new man. After that, I could come back, if I wanted to. Whatever I might do or try to do would cut no figure, and no explanation I could make would be believed. I had most obligingly dug my own official grave, and there could be no resurrection."
"What then?" pressed Ripley, keenly interested, as anybody could see.
"When they took the clothes-line from my arms there was another scrap. It didn't do any good. They got the door shut on me and got it locked. After that, for four solid days, Ripley, I was made to realize how little it takes to hold a man. I had my pocket-knife, but I couldn't whittle my way out. The floor puncheons were spiked down, and I couldn't dig out. They had taken all my matches, and I couldn't burn the place. I tried the stick-rubbing, and all those things you read about: they're fakes; I couldn't get even the smell of smoke."
"The chimney?"
"There wasn't any. They had heated the place, when it was a commissary, with a stove, and the pipe hole through the ceiling had a piece of sheet iron nailed over it. And I couldn't get to the roof at all. They had me."
Ripley nodded and said, snappy-like: "Well, we've got them now – any time you give the word. Tarbell has a pinch on one of the Clanahan men and he will turn State's evidence. We can railroad every one of those fellows who carried you off."
"And the men higher up?" queried the boss.
"No; not yet."
"Then we'll drop it right where it is. I don't want the hired tools; no one of them, unless you can get the devil that crippled Jimmie Dodds, here."
They went on, talking about my burn-up. Listening in, I learned for the first time just how it had been done. Tarbell, through his hold upon the welshing Clanahan striker, had got the details at second-hand. Hatch's assassin – or Clanahan's – must have had it all doped out and made ready before Hatch had made the break at trying to bribe me.
Anyway, a lead had been taken from a power wire at the corner of the street and hooked over the outer door-knob. And inside I had been given a sheet of copper to stand on for a good "ground," the copper itself being wired to a water pipe running up through the hall. Tarbell had afterward proved up on all this, it seemed, finding the insulated wire and the copper sheet with its connections hidden in a small rubbish closet under the hall stair, just where a fellow in a hurry might chuck them.
"Tarbell is a striking success," Mr. Norcross put in, along at the end of things. "We'll keep him on with us, Ripley."
"You'd better," said the level-eyed young attorney, significantly. "From the way things are stacking up, you'll presently need a personal body-guard. I suppose it's no use asking you to carry a gun?"
"Hardly," laughed the boss. "I've never done it yet, and it's pretty late in the day to begin."
Past this there was a little more talk about the C. S. & W. deal, and about what the Hatch crowd would be likely to try next; and when it was finished, and Ripley was reaching for his hat, the boss said: "There is no change in the orders: we've got 'em going now, and we'll keep 'em going. Drive it, Ripley; drive it for every ounce there is in you. Never mind the election talk or the stock quotations. This railroad is going to be honest, if it never earns another net dollar. We'll win!"
"It's beginning to look a little that way, now," the lawyer admitted, with his hand on the door knob. "Just the same, Norcross, there is safety in numbers, and our numbers are precisely one; one man" – holding up a single finger. "As before, the pyramid is standing on its head – and you are the head. The other people have shown us once what happens when you are removed. For God's sake, be careful!"
I don't know whether the boss took that last bit of advice to heart or not. If he didn't, he was a bigger man than even I had been taking him for – with the crooks of a whole State reaching out for him, and with the knowledge which he must have had, that the next time they came gunning for him they'd shoot to kill.
It was late in the afternoon when Ripley made his visit, and pretty soon after he went away the boss and I closed up our end of the shop and left May pecking away at his typewriter on a lot of routine stuff. I don't know what made me do it, but as I was passing Fred's desk on the way out, stringing along behind the boss, I stopped and jerked open one of the drawers. I knew beforehand what was in the drawer, and pointed to it – a new .38 automatic. Fred nodded, and I slipped the gun into my left-hand pocket, wondering as I did it, if I could make out to hit the broad side of a barn, shooting with that hand, if I had to.
A half-minute later I had caught up with Mr. Norcross, and together we left the building and went up to the Bullard for dinner.
XVI
In the Coal Yard
I knew, just as well as could be – without being able to prove it – that we were shadowed on the trip up from the railroad building to the hotel, and it made me nervous. There could be only one reason now for any such dogging of the boss. The grafters were not trying to find out what he was doing; they didn't need to, because he was advertising his doings – or Juneman was – in the newspapers. What they were trying to do was to catch him off his guard and do him up – this time to stay done up.
It was safe to assume that they wouldn't fumble the ball a second time. Mr. Ripley had stood the thing fairly on its feet when he said that our campaign was purely a one-man proposition, so far as it had yet gone. People who had met the boss and had done business with him liked him; but the old-time prejudice against the railroad was so widespread and so bitter that it couldn't be overcome all at once. Juneman, our publicity man, was doing his best, but as yet we had no party following in the State at large which would stand by us and see that we got justice.
I was chewing these things over while we sat at dinner in the Bullard café, and I guess Mr. Norcross was, too, for he didn't say much. It isn't altogether comfortable to be a marked man in a more or less unfriendly country, and I shouldn't wonder if the boss, big and masterful as he was, felt the pressure of it. I don't know whether he knew anything about the shadowing business I speak of or not, but he might have. We hadn't more than given our dinner order when one of Hatch's clerks, a cock-eyed chap named Kestler, came in and took a table just far enough from ours to be out of the way, and near enough to listen in if we said anything.
When we finished, Kestler was just getting his service of ice-cream; but I noticed that he left it untouched and got up and followed us to the lobby. It made me hot enough to want to turn on him and knock his crooked eye out, but of course, that wouldn't have done any good.
After Mr. Norcross had bought some cigars at the stand he said he guessed he'd run out to Major Kendrick's for a little while; and with that he went up to his rooms. Though the major was the one he named, I knew he meant that he was going to see Mrs. Sheila. I remembered what he had said to Ripley about a woman's giving him germ ideas and such things, and I guess it was really so. Every time he spent an evening at the major's he'd come back with a lot of new notions for popularizing the Short Line.
When he said that, about going out to the major's, Kestler was near enough to overhear it, and so he waited, lounging in the lobby and pretending to read a paper. About half-past seven the boss came down and asked me to call a taxi for him. I did it; and Kestler loafed around just long enough to see him start off. Then he lit out, himself, and something in the way he did it made me take out after him.
I expected to see him turn up-town to the second cross street where the Red Tower had its general offices on the fourth floor of the Empire Building. But instead, he turned the other way, and the first thing I knew I was trailing him through the railroad yard and on down past the freight house toward the big, fenced-in, Red Tower coal yards.
At the coal yard he let himself in through a wicket in the wagon gates, and I noticed that he used a key and locked the wicket after he got inside. I put my eye to a crack in the high stockade fence and saw that the little shack office that was used for a scale-house was lighted up. My burnt hand was healing tolerably well by this time and I could use it a little. There was a slack pile just outside of the big gate, and by climbing to the top of it I got over the fence and crept up to the scale-house.
A small window in one end of the shack, opened about two inches at the bottom, answered well enough for a peep-hole. Three men were in the little box of a place – three besides Kestler; Hatch, his barrel-bodied partner, Henckel, and one other. The third man looked like a glorified barkeep'. He was of the type I have heard called "black Irish," fat, sleek, and well-fed, with little pin-point black eyes half buried in the flesh of his round face, and the padded jaw and double chin shaved to the blue. The night was warm and he had his hat off. Through the crack in the window I could smell the pomatum with which his hair was plastered into barkeep' waves to match the tightly curled black mustaches.
I knew this third man well enough, by sight; everybody in Portal City knew him – decent people only too well when it came to an election tussle. He was the redoubtable Pete Clanahan, dive-keeper, and political boss.
Kestler was talking when I glued eye and ear to the window crack; was telling the three how he had shadowed Mr. Norcross from the railroad headquarters to the Bullard, and how he stayed around until he had seen the boss take a taxi for Major Kendrick's. This seemed to be all that was wanted of him, for when he was through, Hatch told him he might go home. After the cock-eyed clerk was gone, Hatch lighted a fresh cigar and put it squarely up to the Irishman.
"It's no use being mealy-mouthed over this thing, Pete," he grated in that saw-mill voice of his. "We've got to get rid of this man. You've asked us to shadow him and keep you posted, and we have – and you've done nothing. Every day's delay gives him that much better hold. We can choke him off by littles in the business game, of course; we have Dunton and the New Yorkers on our side, and this coöperative scheme he has launched can be broken down with money. Such things never hold together very long. But that doesn't help you political people out; and your stake in the game is even bigger than ours."
Clanahan looked around the little dog-kennel of a place suspiciously.
"'Tis not here that we can talk much about thim things, Misther Hatch," he said cautiously.
"Why not?" was the rasping question. "There's nobody in the yard, and the gates are locked. It's a damned sight safer than a back room in one of your dives – as we know now to our cost."
Clanahan threw up his head with a gesture that said much. "Murphy's the man that leaked on that engine job – and he'll leak no more."
"Well," said Hatch, with growing irritation, "what are you holding back for now? We stood to win on the first play, and we would have won if your people hadn't balled it by talking too much. One more day and Dismuke would have been in the saddle. That would have settled it."
"Yah; and Mister Dismuke still here in Portal City remains," put in Henckel.
The dive-keeper locked his pudgy fingers across a cocked knee.
"'Tis foine, brave gintlemen ye are, you two, whin ye've got somebody else to pull th' nuts out av th' fire for ye!" he said. "Ye'd have us croak this felly f'r ye, and thin ye'd stand back and wash yer hands while some poor divil wint to th' rope f'r it. Where do we come in, is what I'd like to know?"
"You are already in," snapped Hatch. "You know what the Big Fellow at the capital thinks about it, and where you'll stand in the coming election if you don't put out this fire that Norcross is kindling. You're yellow, Clanahan. That's all that is the matter with you. Put your wits to work. There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with butter."
"Tell me wan thing!" insisted the dive-keeper, boring the chief grafter with his pin-point eyes. "Do you stand f'r it if we do this thing up right?"
Hatch's eyes fell, and Henckel's big body twisted uneasily in the chair that was groaning under his beer-barrel weight. There was silence for a little space, and I could feel the cold sweat starting out all over me. I hadn't dreamed of stumbling upon anything like this when I started out to shadow Kestler. They were actually plotting to murder the boss!
It was Hatch who broke the stillness.
"It's up to you, Clanahan, and you know it," he declared. "You've had your tip from the Big Fellow. The railroad people must be made to get into the fight in the coming election, and get in on the right side. If they don't; and if Norcross stays and keeps his fire burning; you fellows lose out. So shall we; but what we lose will be a mere drop in the bucket; and, as I have said, we stand to get it back, after this coöperative scheme has had time to burn itself out."
Clanahan sat back in his chair and shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Ye'd sthring me as if I was a boy!" he scoffed. "'Tis your own game fr'm first to last. D'ye think I'm not knowing that? 'Tis bread and butther and th' big rake-off for you, and little ye care how th' election goes. Suppose we'd croak this man in th' hot par-rt av th' p'litical fight; what happens? Half th' noospaypers in th' State'd play him up f'r a martyr to th' cause av good governmint, and we'd all go to hell in a hand-basket!"
I was cramped and sore and one of my legs had gone to sleep, but I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. My heart was skipping beats right along while I waited for Hatch's answer. When it came, the drumming in my ears pretty nearly made me lose it.
"Clanahan," he began, as cold as an icicle. "I didn't get you down here to argue with you. We've got your number – all your different numbers – and they are written down in a book. You've bungled this thing once, and for that reason you've got it to do over again. We haven't asked you to 'croak' anybody, as you put it, and we are not asking it now."
"'Tis domned little you lack av asking it," retorted the dive-keeper.
"Listen," said Hatch, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. "Besides keeping cases on Norcross here, we've been digging back into his record a few lines. Every man has his sore spot, if you can only find it, Clanahan – just as you have yours. What if I should tell you that Norcross is wanted in another State – for a crime?"
"Nobody would believe ut," was the prompt rejoinder. "If he's wanted he c'u'd be had."
"Wait," Hatch went on. "Before he came here he was chief of construction on the Oregon Midland. There was a right-of-way fight back in the mountains – fifty miles from the nearest sheriff – with the P. & S. F. Norcross armed his track-layers, and in the bluffing there was a man killed."
Though it was a warm night, as I have said, the cold chills began to chase themselves up and down my back. What Hatch said was perfectly true. In the right-of-way scrap he was talking about, there had been a few wild shots fired, and one of them had found a P. & S. F. grade laborer. I don't believe anybody had ever really blamed the boss for it. He had given strict orders that we were only to make a show of force; and, besides, the other fellows were armed, too, and had armed first. But there had been a man killed.
While I was shivering, Clanahan said: "Well, what av it?"
"Norcross was responsible for that man's death. If he was having trouble over his right-of-way, his recourse was to the law, and he took the law into his own hands. Nothing was ever done about it, because nobody took the trouble to prosecute. A week ago we sent a man to Oregon to look up the facts. He succeeded in finding a brother of the dead man, and a warrant has now been sworn out for Norcross's arrest."
"Well?" said Clanahan again. "Ye have the sthring in yer own hand; why don't ye pull it?"
"That's where you come in," was the answer. "The Oregon justice issued the warrant because it was demanded, but he refused to incur, for his county, the expense of sending a deputy sheriff to another State, or to take the necessary steps to have Norcross extradited. If Norcross could be produced in court, he would try him and either discharge him or bind him over, as the facts might warrant. He took his stand upon the ground that Norcross was only technically responsible, and told the brother that in all probability nothing would come of an attempt to prosecute."
"Thin ye've got nothing on him, after all," the Irishman grunted.
"Yes," Hatch came back; "we have the warrant, and, in addition to that, we have you, Pete. A word from you to the Portal City police headquarters, and our man finds himself arrested and locked up – to wait for a requisition from the Governor of Oregon."
"But you said th' requisition wouldn't come," Clanahan put in.
Hatch was sitting back now and stroking his ugly jaw.
"It might come, Pete, if it had to: there's no knowing. In the meantime we get delay. There'll be habeas corpus proceedings, of course, to get him out of jail, but there's where you'll come in again; you've got your own man in for City Attorney. And, after all, the delay is all we need. With Norcross in trouble, and in jail on a charge of murder, the railroad ship'll go on the rocks in short order. The Norcross management is having plenty of trouble – wrecks and the like. With Norcross locked up, New York will be heard from, and Dismuke will step in and clean house. That will wind up the reform spasm."
