The Wreckers

The boss scowled at the young fellow, who was now handing himself around the corner of the counter to get at the clerk again, and said: "Why don't you ring for an officer and have him run in?"

The night clerk was evidently scared of his job. "I wouldn't dare to do that," he chittered. "He's one of the New York crowd – the railroad people – President Dunton's nephew – guest of the house."

The young fellow had pulled himself around to our side of the counter by this time and was hooking his arm to make a pass at Mr. Norcross, trimming things up as he came with a lot more language. The boss said, right short and sharp, to the clerk, "Get his room key and give it to a boy who can show me the way," and the next thing we knew he had bashed that lunatic square in the face and was cuffing him along to the nearest elevator.

I guess it sort of surprised the clerk, and everybody else who happened to see it – but not me. It was just like the boss. He came back in a few minutes, looking as cool as a cucumber.

"What did you do with him?" asked the clerk, kind of awed and half scared.

"Got a couple of the corridor sweepers to put him in a bath and turn the cold water on him. That'll take the whiskey out of him. Now, if you have a minute to spare, I'd like to get my assignment."

We hadn't more than got our rooms marked off for us when I saw Mr. Chadwick coming across from the farther of the three elevators. He was smiling sort of grim, as if he'd made a killing of some sort with Mr. Dunton, and instead of heading back for his car he took the boss over to a corner of the lobby and sat down to smoke with him.

I circled around for a while, and after a bit Mr. Norcross held up a finger at me to bring him a match. They didn't seem to be talking anything private, so I sat down just beyond them, so sleepy that I could hardly see straight. Mr. Chadwick was telling about his early experiences in Portal City, how he blew in first on top of the Strathcona gold boom, and how he had known mighty near everybody in the region in those days.

While he was talking, a taxi drove up and one of the old residenters came in from the street and crossed to the elevators; a mighty handsome, stately old gentleman, with fierce white mustaches and a goatee, and "Southern Colonel" written all over him.

"There's one of them now; Major Basil Kendrick – Kentucky born and raised, as you might guess," Mr. Chadwick was saying. "Old-school Southern 'quality,' and as fine as they make 'em. He is a lawyer, but not in active practice: owns a mine or two in Strathcona Gulch, and is neither too rich nor too poor."

I grabbed at the name, "Basil," right away: it isn't such a very common name, and Mrs. Sheila had said something – under the water tank, you recollect – about a "Cousin Basil" who was to have met her at the train. I was putting two or three little private guesses of my own together, when one of the elevators came down and here came our two, the young lady and the chunky little girl, with the major chuckling and smiling and giving an arm to each. They had apparently stopped at the Bullard only to wait until he could come after them and take them home. Mrs. Sheila was looking just as pretty as ever, only now there wasn't a bit of color in her face, and her eyes seemed a good deal brighter, some way.

"Yes, indeed; the major is all right; as you'd find out for yourself if you'd make up your mind to stay in Portal City and get acquainted with him," Mr. Chadwick was going on; and by that time the major and the two pretty ones had come on to where the boss and Mr. Chadwick could see them.

I saw the boss sit up in his chair and stare at them. Then he said: "That's Mrs. Macrae with him now. Is she a member of his family?"

"A second cousin, or something of that sort," said Mr. Chadwick. "I met her once at the major's house out in the northern suburb last summer, and that's how I came to know her when you put her aboard of the Alexa back yonder in the gulch."

Mr. Norcross let the three of them get out and away, and we heard their taxi speed up and trundle off before he said, "She is married, I'm told. Where is her husband?"

Mr. Chadwick looked up as if he'd already forgotten the three who had just crossed the lobby.

"Who – Sheila Macrae? Yes, she has been married. But there isn't any husband – she's a widow."

For quite a while the boss sat staring at his cigar in a way he has when he is thinking right hard, and Mr. Chadwick let him alone, being busy, I guess, with his own little scrap that lay just ahead of him in the coming directors' meeting. Then, all of a sudden, the boss got up and shoved his hands into his coat pockets.

"I've changed my mind, Uncle John," he said, looking sort of absent-like out of the window to where the major's taxi had been standing. "If you can pull me into that deal to-morrow morning – with an absolutely free hand to do as I think best, mind you – I'll take the job."

V

The Directors' Meeting

I was up bright and early the next morning – that is, a good bit brighter and earlier than Mr. Norcross was – and after breakfast I took a little sashay down Nevada Avenue to have a look at our railroad. Of course, I knew, after what the boss had said to Mr. Chadwick the night before, just before we went to bed, that we weren't ever going to see Canada, or even Illinois.

I'll have to admit that the look I got didn't make me feel as if we'd found a Cullinan diamond. Down in the yards everything seemed to be at the loosest kind of loose ends. A switching crew was making up a freight, and the way they slammed the boxes together, regardless of broken drawheads and the like, was a sin and a shame. Then I saw some grain cars with the ends started and the wheat running out all along the track, and three or four more with the air hose hanging so it knocked along on the ties, and a lot of things like that – and nobody caring a hoot.

There was a big repair shop on the other side of the yard tracks, and though it was after seven o'clock, the men were still straggling over to go to work. Down at the round-house, a wiper was spotting a big freight-puller on the turn-table, and I'm blessed if he didn't actually run her forward pair of truck-wheels off the edge of the table, right while I was looking on, just as if it were all in the day's work.

In the course of time I drifted back to the office headquarters, which were at the end of the passenger station and in a part of the same building, down-stairs and up. A few clerks were dribbling in, and none of them seemed to have life enough to get out of the way of an ox-team. One fellow recognized me for a member of the big railroad family, I guess, for he stopped and asked me if I was looking for a job.

I told him I wasn't, and gave him a cigar – just on general principles. He took it, and right away he began to loosen up.

"If you should change your mind about the job, you just make it a case of 'move on, Joey,' and don't stay here and try to hit this agglomeration," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"It's a frost. I'm off of the Pennsy myself, and I'm ashamed to look in the looking-glass since I came out here. The P. S. L. isn't a railroad, at all; it's just making a bluff at being one. Besides, we're slated to have a new general manager, and if he's any good he'll fire the last living man of us."

"Maybe, if I change my mind, I might get a job with the new man," I said. "Who is he?"

"Search me! I don't believe they've found anybody yet. The big people from New York are all here now, and maybe they'll pick somebody before they go away. If I had the nerve of a rabbit, I'd take the next train back for Pittsburgh."

"What's your job?" I quizzed.

He grinned at me sort of good-naturedly. "You wouldn't think it to look at me, but I'm head stenographer in the general super's office."

"You haven't got much of a boss, if he can't command any more loyalty than you are giving him," I offered; and at that he spat on the platform and made a face like a kid that had been taking a dose of asaf[oe]tida.

"Yah!" he snorted. "We haven't a man in the outfit, on any job where the pay amounts to anything, that isn't somebody's cousin or nephew or brother-in-law or something. They shoot 'em out here from New York in bunches. You may be a spotter, for all I know, but I don't care a hang. I'm quitting at the end of the month, anyhow – if I don't get fired this side of that."

I grinned; I couldn't help it.

"Tell me," I broke in, "are there many more like you in the Pioneer Short Line service?"

"Scads of 'em," he retorted cheerfully. "I can round you up a couple of dozen fellows right here at headquarters who would go on a bat and paint this town a bright vermilion if the new G. M., whoever he is going to be, would clean out the whole rookery, cousins, nephews, and all."

"I think I'll have to take your name," I told him, fishing out a pencil and a notebook – just to see what he would do.

"Huh! so you are a spotter, after all, are you? All right, Mr. Spotter. My name's May, Frederic G. May. And when you want my head, you can find it just exactly where I told you – in the general super's office. You're a stranger and you took me in. So long."

Wouldn't that jar you? A man out of the general offices talking that way about his road and his own boss? I couldn't help seeing how rotten the thing must be if it smelled that way to the men on its own pay-rolls.

After a while, after I'd loafed through the shops and around the yard and got a few more whiffs of the decay, I strolled on back to the hotel. Seen by daylight, Portal City seemed to be a right bright little burg, with a cut-stone post-office and a new court house built out of pink lava, and three or four office buildings big enough to be called sky-scrapers anywhere outside of a real city like Portland or Seattle. The streets were paved, and on the main one, Nevada Avenue, there was plenty of business. Also, I tipped off a mining exchange and two pretty nice-looking club-houses right in sight from the Bullard entrance.

There wasn't much of a crowd in the lobby, and as I didn't see anything of Mr. Norcross or Mr. Chadwick, I sat down in a corner to wear out some more time. Though it was now after nine o'clock, there were still a good many people breakfasting in the café, the entrance to which was only a few feet away from my corner.

I was wondering a little what had become of the boss – who was generally the earliest riser on the job – when two men came bulging through the screen doors of the café, picking their teeth and feeling in their pockets for cigars. Right on the dot, and in the face of knowing that it couldn't reasonably be so, I had a feeling that I'd seen those men before. One of them was short and rather stocky, and his face had a sort of hard, hungry look; and the other was big and barrel-bodied. The short one was clean-shaven, but the other had a reddish-gray beard clipped close on his fat jaws and trimmed to a point at the chin.

After they had lighted up they came along and sat down three or four chairs away from me. They paid no attention to me, but for fear they might, I tried to look as sleepy as an all-night bell-hop in a busy hotel.

"The Dunton bunch got together in one of the committee rooms up-stairs a little after eight o'clock," said the short man, in a low, rasping voice that went through you like a buzz-saw, and it was evident that he was merely going on with a talk which had been begun over the breakfast-table. "Thanks to those infernal blunderers Clanahan sent us last night, Chadwick was with them."

"I think that was choost so," said the big man, speaking slowly and with something more than a hint of a German accent. "Beckler was choost what you call him – a tam blunderer."

Like a flash it came over me that I was "listening in" to a talk between the same two men who had sat in the auto at Sand Creek Siding and smoked while they were waiting for the actual kidnappers to return. You can bet high that I made myself mighty small and unobtrusive.

After a while the big man spoke again.

"What has Uncle Chon Chadwick up his sleeve got, do you think?"