"You can"t put it all over me that way, Flemister; you can"t, and, by G.o.d, you sha"n"t! You"re in the hole just as deep as I am, foot for foot!"
"Oh, no, my friend," said the cooler voice. "I haven"t been stealing in car-load lots from the company that hires me; I have merely been buying a little disused sc.r.a.p from you. You may say that I have planned a few of the adverse happenings which have been running the loss-and-damage account of the road up into the pictures during the past few weeks--possibly I have; but you are the man who has been carrying out the plans, and you are the man the courts will recognize. But we"re wasting time sitting here jawing at each other like a pair of old women.
It"s up to us to obliterate Lidgerwood; after which it will be up to you to get his job and cover up your tracks as you can. If he lives, he"ll dig; and if he digs, he"ll turn up things that neither of us can stand for. See how he hangs onto that building-and-loan ghost. He"ll tree somebody on that before he"s through, you mark my words! And it runs in my mind that the somebody will be you."
"But this trap scheme of yours," protested the other man; "it"s a frost, I tell you! You say the night pa.s.senger from Red b.u.t.te is late. I know it"s late, now; but Cranford"s running it, and it is all down-hill from Red b.u.t.te to the bridge. Cranford will make up his thirty minutes, and that will put his train right here in the thick of things. Call it off for to-night, Flemister. Meet Lidgerwood when he comes and tell him an easy lie about your not being able to hold Grofield for the right-of-way talk."
Judson heard the creak and snap of a swing-chair suddenly righted, and the floor dust jarred through the cracks upon him when the mine-owner sprang to his feet.
"Call it off and let you drop out of it? Not by a thousand miles, my cautious friend! Want to stay here and keep your feet warm while I go and do it? Not on your tintype, you yapping hound! I"m about ready to freeze you, anyway, for the second time--mark that, will you?--for the second time. No, keep your hands where I can see "em, or I"ll knife you right where you sit! You can bully and browbeat a lot of railroad buckies when you"re playing the boss act, _but I know you_! You come with me or I"ll give the whole snap away to Vice-President Ford. I"ll tell him how you built a street of houses in Red b.u.t.te out of company material and with company labor. I"ll prove to him that you"ve sc.r.a.pped first one thing and then another--condemned them so you might sell them for your own pocket. I"ll----"
"Shut up!" shouted the other man hoa.r.s.ely. And then, after a moment that Judson felt was crammed to the bursting point with murderous possibilities: "Get your tools and come on. We"ll see who"s got the yellows before we"re through with this!"
XVII
THE DIPSOMANIAC
There are moments when the primal instincts a.s.sert themselves with a sort of blind ferocity, and to Judson, jammed under the floor timbers of Flemister"s head-quarters office, came one of these moments when he heard the two men in the room above moving to depart, and found himself caught between the timbers so that he could not retreat.
What had happened he was unable, in the first fierce struggle for freedom, fully to determine. It was as if a living hand had reached down to pin him fast in the tunnel-like s.p.a.ce. Then he discovered that a huge splinter on one of the joists was thrust like a great barb into his coat. Ordinarily cool and collected in the face of emergencies, the ex-engineer lost his head for a second or so and fought like a trapped animal. Then the frenzy fit pa.s.sed and the quick wit rea.s.serted itself.
Extending his arms over his head and digging his toes into the dry earth for a purchase, he backed, crab-wise, out of the entangled coat, freed the coat, and made for the narrow exit in a sweating panic of excitement.
Notwithstanding the excitement, however, the recovered wit was taking note of the movements of the men who were leaving the room overhead.
They were not going out by the direct way--out of the door facing the moonlight and the mining hamlet. They were pa.s.sing out through the store-room in the rear. Also, there were other foot-falls--cautious treadings, these--as of some third person hastening to be first at the more distant door of egress.
Judson was out of his dodge-hole and flitting from pine to pine on the upper hill-side in time to see a man leap from the loading platform at the warehouse end of the building and run for the sheltering shadows of the timbering at the mine entrance. Following closely upon the heels of their mysterious file leader came the two whose footsteps Judson had been timing, and these, too, crossed quickly to the tunnel mouth of the mine and disappeared within it.
Judson pursued swiftly and without a moment"s hesitation. Happily for him, the tunnel was lighted at intervals by electric incandescents, their tiny filaments glowing mistily against the wet and glistening tunnel roof. Going softly, he caught a glimpse of the two men as they pa.s.sed under one of the lights in the receding tunnel depths, and a moment later he could have sworn that a third, doubtless the man who had leaped from the loading platform to run and hide in the shadows at the mine mouth, pa.s.sed the same light, going in the same direction.
A hundred yards deeper into the mountain there was a confirming repet.i.tion of the flash-light picture for the ex-engineer. The two men, walking rapidly now, one a step in advance of the other, pa.s.sed under another of the overhead light bulbs, and this time Judson, watching for the third man, saw him quite plainly. The sight gave him a start. The third man was tall, and he wore a soft hat drawn low over his face.
"Well, I"ll be jiggered!" muttered the trailer, pulling his cap down to his ears and quickening his pace. "If I didn"t know better, I"d swear that was Hallock again--or Hallock"s shadder follerin" him at a good long range!"
The chase was growing decidedly mysterious. The two men in the lead could be no others than Flemister and the chief clerk, presumably on their way to the carrying out of whatever plot they had agreed upon, with Lidgerwood for the potential victim. But since this plot evidently turned upon the nearing approach of Lidgerwood"s special train, why were they plunging on blindly into the labyrinthine depths of the Wire-Silver mine? This was an even half of the mystery, and the other half was quite as puzzling. Who was the third man? Was he a confederate in the plot, or was he also following to spy upon the conspirators?
Judson was puzzled, but he did not let his bewilderment tangle the feet of his princ.i.p.al purpose, which was to keep Flemister and his reluctant accomplice in sight. This purpose was presently defeated in a most singular manner. At the end of one of the longer tunnel levels, a black and dripping cavern, lighted only by a single incandescent shining like a star imprisoned in the dismal depths, the ex-engineer saw what appeared to be a wooden bulkhead built across the pa.s.sage and effectively blocking it. When the two men came to this bulkhead they pa.s.sed through it and disappeared, and the shock of the confined air in the tunnel told of a door slammed behind them.
Judson broke into a stumbling run, and then stopped short in increasing bewilderment. At the slamming of the door the third man had darted forward out of the shadows to fling himself upon the wooden barrier, beating upon it with his fists and cursing like a madman. Judson saw, understood, and acted, all with the instinctive instantaneousness born of his trade of engine-driving. The two men in advance were merely taking the short cut through the mountain to the old workings on the eastern slope, and the door in the bulkhead, which was doubtless one of the airlocks in the ventilating system of the mine, had fastened itself automatically after Flemister had released it.
Judson was a hundred yards down the tunnel, racing like a trained sprinter for the western exit, before he thought to ask himself why the third man was playing the madman before the locked door. But that was a matter negligible to him; his affair was to get out of the mine with the loss of the fewest possible seconds of time--to win out, to climb the ridge, and to descend the eastern slope to the old workings before the two plotters should disappear beyond the hope of rediscovery.
He did his best, flying down the long tunnel reaches with little regard for the precarious footing, tripping over the cross-ties of the miniature tramway and colliding with the walls, now and then, between the widely separated electric bulbs. Far below, in the deeper levels, he could hear the drumming chatter of the power-drills and the purring of the compressed air, but the upper gangway was deserted, and it was not until he was stumbling through the timbered portal that a watchman rose up out of the shadows to confront and halt him. There was no time to spare for soft words or skilful evasions. With a savage upper-cut that caught the watchman on the point of the jaw and sent him crashing among the picks and shovels of the mine-mouth tool-room, Judson darted out into the moonlight. But as yet the fierce race was only fairly begun.
Without stopping to look for a path, the ex-engineer flung himself at the steep hill-side, running, falling, clambering on hands and knees, bursting by main strength through the tangled thickets of young pines, and hurling himself blindly over loose-lying bowlders and the trunks of fallen trees. When, after what seemed like an eternity of lung-bursting struggles, he came out upon the bare summit of the ridge, his tongue was like a dry stick in his mouth, refusing to shape the curses that his soul was heaping upon the alcohol which had made him a wind-broken, gasping weakling in the prime of his manhood.
For, after all the agonizing strivings, he was too late. It was a rough quarter-mile down to the shadowy group of buildings whence the humming of the dynamo and the quick exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine rose on the still night air. Judson knew that the last lap was not in his trembling muscles or in the thumping heart and the wind-broken lungs. Moreover, the path, if any there were, was either to the right or the left of the point to which he had attained; fronting him there was a steep cliff, trifling enough as to real heights and depths, but an all-sufficient barrier for a spent runner.
The ex-engineer crawled cautiously to the edge of the barrier cliff, rubbed the sweat out of his smarting eyes, and peered down into the half-lighted shadows of the stockaded enclosure. It was not very long before he made them out--two indistinct figures moving about among the disused and dilapidated ore sheds cl.u.s.tering at the track end of the old spur. Now and again a light glowed for an instant and died out, like the momentary brilliance of a gigantic fire-fly, by which the watcher on the cliff"s summit knew that the two were guiding their movements by the help of an electric flash-lamp.
What they were doing did not long remain a mystery. Judson heard a distance-diminished sound, like the grinding of rusty wheels upon iron rails, and presently a shadowy thing glided out of one of the ore sheds and took its place upon the track of the old spur. Followed a series of clankings still more familiar to the watcher--the _ting_ of metal upon metal, as of crow-bars and other tools cast carelessly, one upon the other, in the loading of the shadowy vehicle. Making a telescope of his hands to shut out the glare from the lighted windows of the power-house, Judson could dimly discern the two figures mounting to their places on the deck of the thing which he now knew to be a hand-car. A moment later, to the musical _click-click_ of wheels pa.s.sing over rail-joints, the little car shot through the gate-way in the stockade and sped away down the spur, the two indistinct figures bowing alternately to each other like a pair of grotesque automatons.
Winded and leg-weary as he was, Judson"s first impulse prompted him to seek for the path to the end that he might dash down the hill and give chase. But if he would have yielded, another pursuer was before him to show him the futility of that expedient. While the clicking of the hand-car wheels was still faintly audible, a man--the door-hammering madman, Judson thought it must be--materialized suddenly from somewhere in the under-shadows to run down the track after the disappearing conspirators. The engineer saw the racing foot-pursuer left behind so quickly that his own hope of overtaking the car died almost before it had taken shape.
"That puts it up to me again," he groaned, rising stiffly. Then he faced once more toward the western valley and the point of the great triangle, where the lights of Little b.u.t.te station and bridge twinkled uncertainly in the distance. "If I can get down yonder to Goodloe"s wire in time to catch the super"s special before it pa.s.ses Timanyoni"--he went on, only to drop his jaw and gasp when he held the face of his watch up to the moonlight. Then, brokenly, "My G.o.d! I couldn"t begin to do it unless I had wings: he said eleven o"clock, and it"s ten-ten right now!"
There was the beginning of a frenzied outburst of despairing curses upbubbling to Judson"s lips when he realized his utter helplessness and the consequences menacing the superintendent"s special. True, he did not know what the consequences were to be, but he had overheard enough to be sure that Lidgerwood"s life was threatened. Then, at the climax of despairing helplessness he remembered that there was a telephone in the mine-owner"s office--a telephone that connected with Goodloe"s station at Little b.u.t.te. Here was a last slender chance of getting a warning to Goodloe, and through him, by means of the railroad wire, to the superintendent"s special. Instantly Judson forgot his weariness, and raced away down the western slope of the mountain, prepared to fight his way to the telephone if the entire night shift of the Wire-Silver should try to stop him.
It cost ten of the precious fifty minutes to retrace his steps down the mountain-side, and five more, were lost in dodging the mine watchman, who, having recovered from the effects of Judson"s savage blow, was prowling about the mine buildings, revolver in hand, in search of his mysterious a.s.sailant. After the watchman was out of the way, five other minutes went to the cautious prying open of the window least likely to attract attention--the window upon whose drawn shade the convincing profile had been projected. Judson"s lips were dry and his hands were shaking again when he crept through the opening, and dropped into the unfamiliar interior, where the darkness was but thinly diluted by the moonlight filtering through the small, dingy squares of the opposite window. To have the courage of a house-breaker, one must be a burglar in fact; and the ex-engineer knew how swiftly and certainly he would pay the penalty if any one had seen him climbing in at the forced window, or should chance to discover him now that he was in.
But there was a stronger motive than fear, fear for himself, to set him groping for the telephone. The precious minutes were flying, and he knew that by this time the two men on the hand-car must have reached the main line at Silver Switch. Whatever helpful chain of events might be set in motion by communicating with Goodloe, must be linked up quickly.
He found the telephone without difficulty. It was an old-fashioned set, with a crank and bell for ringing up the call at the other end of the line. A single turn of the crank told him that it was cut off somewhere, doubtless by a switch in the office wiring. In a fresh fever of excitement he began a search for the switch, tracing with his fingers the wires which led from the instrument and following where they ran around the end of the room on the wainscoting. In the corner farthest from his window of ingress he found the switch and felt it out. It was a simple cut-out, designed to connect either the office instrument or the mine telephones with the main wire, as might be desired. Under the switch stood a corner cupboard, and in feeling for the wire connections on top of the cupboard, Judson found his fingers running lightly over the bounding surfaces of an object with which he was, unhappily, only too familiar--a long-necked bottle with the seal blown in the gla.s.s. The corner cupboard was evidently Flemister"s sideboard.
Almost before he knew what he was doing, Judson had grasped the bottle and had removed the cork. Here was renewed strength and courage, and a swift clearing of the brain, to be had for the taking. At the drawing of the cork the fine bouquet of the liquor seemed instantly to fill the room with its subtle and intoxicating essence. With the smell of the whiskey in his nostrils he had the bottle half-way to his lips before he realized that the demon of appet.i.te had sprung upon him out of the darkness, taking him naked and unawares. Twice he put the bottle down, only to take it up again. His lips were parched; his tongue rattled in his mouth, and within there were cravings like the fires of h.e.l.l, threatening torments unutterable if they should not be a.s.suaged.
"G.o.d have mercy!" he mumbled, and then, in a voice which the rising fires had scorched to a hoa.r.s.e whisper: "If I drink, I"m d.a.m.ned to all eternity; and if I don"t take just one swallow, I"ll never be able to talk so as to make Goodloe understand me!"
It was the supreme test of the man. Somewhere, deep down in the soul-abyss of the tempted one, a thing stirred, took shape, and arose to help him to fight the devil of appet.i.te. Slowly the fierce thirst burned itself out. The invisible hand at his throat relaxed its cruel grip, and a fine dew of perspiration broke out thickly on his forehead. At the sweating instant the newly arisen soul-captain within him whispered, "Now, John Judson--once for all!" and staggering to the open window he flung the tempting bottle afar among the scattered bowlders, waiting until he had heard the tinkling crash of broken gla.s.s before he turned back to his appointed task.
His hands were no longer trembling when he once more wound the crank of the telephone and held the receiver to his ear. There was an answering skirl of the bell, and then a voice said: "h.e.l.lo! This is Goodloe: what"s wanted?"
Judson wasted no time in explanations. "This is Judson--John Judson. Get Timanyoni on your wire, quick, and catch Mr. Lidgerwood"s special. Tell Bradford and Williams to run slow, looking for trouble. Do you get that?"
A confused medley of rumblings and clankings crashed in over the wire, and in the midst of the interruption Judson heard Goodloe put down the receiver. In a flash he knew what was happening at Little b.u.t.te station. The delayed pa.s.senger-train from the west had arrived, and the agent was obliged to break off and attend to his duties.
Anxiously Judson twirled the crank, again and yet again. Since Goodloe had not cut off the connection, the mingled clamor of the station came to the listening ear; the incessant clicking of the telegraph instruments on Goodloe"s table, the trundling roar of a baggage-truck on the station platform, the cacophonous screech of the pa.s.senger-engine"s pop-valve. With the _phut_ of the closing safety-valve came the conductor"s cry of "All aboard!" and then the long-drawn sobs of the big engine as Cranford started the train. Judson knew that in all human probability the superintendent"s special had already pa.s.sed Timanyoni, the last chance for a telegraphic warning; and here was the pa.s.senger slipping away, also without warning.
Goodloe came back to the telephone when the train clatter had died away, and took up the broken conversation.
"Are you there yet, John?" he called. And when Judson"s yelp answered him: "All right; now, what was it you were trying to tell me about the special?"
Judson did not swear; the seconds were too vitally precious. He merely repeated his warning, with a hoa.r.s.e prayer for haste.
There was another pause, a break in the clicking of Goodloe"s telegraph instruments, and then the agent"s voice came back over the wire: "Can"t reach the special. It pa.s.sed Timanyoni ten minutes ago."
Judson"s heart was in his mouth, and he had to swallow twice before he could go on.
"Where does it meet the pa.s.senger?" he demanded.
"You can search me," replied the Little b.u.t.te agent, who was not of those who go out of their way to borrow trouble. Then, suddenly: "Hold the "phone a minute; the despatcher"s calling me, right now."
There was a third trying interval of waiting for the man in the darkened room at the Wire-Silver head-quarters; an interval shot through with p.r.i.c.klings of feverish impatience, mingled with a lively sense of the risk he was running; and then Goodloe called again.
"Trouble," he said shortly. "Angels didn"t know that Cranford had made up so much time. Now he tries to give me an order to hold the pa.s.senger--after it"s gone by. So long. I"m going to take a lantern and mog along up the track to see where they come together."
Judson hung up the receiver, reset the wire switch to leave it as he had found it, climbed out through the open window and replaced the sash; all this methodically, as one who sets the death chamber in order after the sheet has been drawn over the face of the corpse. Then he stumbled down the hill to the gulch bottom and started out to walk along the new spur toward Little b.u.t.te station, limping painfully and feeling mechanically in his pocket for his pipe, which had apparently been lost in some one of the many swift and strenuous scene-shiftings.