Scientific Sprague

CONNOLLY, off-trick division despatcher, doubling on the early night trick for Jenner, whose baby was sick, snapped his key-switch at the close of a rapid fire of orders sent to straighten out a freight-train tangle on the Magdalene district, sat back in his chair, and reached for his corn-cob pipe with a fat man’s sigh of relief.

Over in the corner of the bare, dingy office, Bolton, night man on the car-record wire, was rattling away at his type-writer; and on the wall opposite the despatcher’s table the electrically timed standard clock was ticking off the minutes between eight-fifty-five and nine. While Connolly was striking a match to light his pipe, Bolton tore the type-written sheet out of his machine and twisted himself in his chair to ask a question.

“What’s the good word from the Apache Limited?” he inquired, his evil little eyes blinking indecently. And then, before Connolly could reply: “It’s up to me to ‘buy’ for the boys to-night. My little girl-doll is comin’ on the Apache. Whadda you know about that: chasin’ me all the way from little old New York.”

The fat despatcher knew precisely where the Limited was, but he glanced at his train-sheet from sheer force of habit.

“On time at Angels, double-heading with the Nine-thirteen, and the Six-five,” he said. Then he shifted over to the car-record man’s cause for jubilation. “I didn’t know you were a married man, Bolton. If I ever get out of the woods and make good on the job, I’m going to do it myself.”

Bolton’s mouth widened like a split in a parchment mask, and his laugh was a dry cackle.

“Married--that’s a bully good joke. I’ll have to tell it to the little doll-girl, when she comes.”

Connolly was Irish chiefly by virtue of his name. He entirely missed the pointing of the car-record man’s remark, but the apparent gibe touched his vanity and his round and naturally ruddy face grew a shade darker.

“Meaning that no girl with half a chance at other fellows would look twice at a fat slouch like me? That’s where you’re off your trolley. There is one, Barry, and she’s pretty enough to make a wooden-Indian cigar-sign get down from his block and chase her up the street for another look-in. But I’ve got to make good and pull down a wad, first.”

The car-record man’s laugh this time was an unchaste sneer.

“Aw, chuck it!” he derided. “Whadda you want to tie yourself up for when there’s plenty of----”

“Say, that’ll do,” Connolly broke in, with a frown of cleanly disgust, taking Bolton’s meaning at last. Then he changed the subject abruptly. “Mr. Maxwell’s got him a new chum: seen him?”

Bolton nodded.

“Sure, I have; couldn’t help seein’ him if you happened to look his way. What is he?--champion All-America heavy-weight?”

The despatcher shook his head. “College professor, somebody said; one of Mr. Maxwell’s classmates. Specializes in something or other; I didn’t hear what.”

Again the tag-wire operator’s laugh crackled like a snapping of dry twigs. He had risen from his chair and was half-sitting, half-leaning, upon his table-desk, his hands resting palms down, with the fingers curled under the table edge--his characteristic loafing attitude.

“He might specialize in any old thing,” he jeered, with a small man’s bickering hostility for a big one in his tone. “All he’s got to do is to reach out and take it; nobody but a fellow in the Joe Gans class’d have the nerve to tell him not to. I saw him sittin’ on the Topaz porch with the super as I came over. He’s so big it made me sick at my stomach to look at him.”

Connolly’s pipe had gone out, burned out, and he was feeling in his pockets for the tobacco sack. While he was doing it the corridor door opened and Calmaine, the superintendent’s chief clerk, came in, let himself briskly through the gate in the counter railing, and leaned over Connolly’s shoulder to glance at the train-sheet.

“Everything moving along all right, Dan?” he asked.

“Is now,” said the despatcher, still feeling absently for the missing tobacco sack. “Twenty-one and Twenty-eight got balled up on their orders over on the other side of the range, but I guess I’ve got ’em straightened out, after so long a time.... Now what the dickens did I do with that tobacco of mine, I wonder?”

“Have a cigar,” said the chief clerk, laying one on the glass-topped wire-table. Calmaine, eastern trunk-line bred, had been inclined to cockiness when he came West, but a year with Maxwell, whose standing was that of the Short Line’s best-beloved tyrant, had taken a good deal of it out of him.

“Thanks,” returned Connolly, with a fat man’s grin, “not for me when I’m despatching trains. The corn-cob goes with the job. Sit in here on the wire for a minute while I go up to the bunk-room and look in my other coat.”

Calmaine took the vacated chair and ran his eye along the latest additions to the many columns of figures on the train-sheet. Bolton in his far corner was still loafing, though his night’s work of taking and typing the wire car reports from the various stations on the double division was scarcely begun. “You think you’re a little tin god on wheels, don’t you?” he muttered under his breath, blinking and scowling across at the well-groomed young man sitting in Connolly’s chair. “You can let down with Dan Connolly all right, but when it comes to throwin’ a bone to the other new dog, you ain’t it. One o’ these times I’m goin’ to jump up and bite you.”

The object of this splenetic outburst was still bending over the train-sheet, abstractedly unconscious of Bolton’s presence. From the conductors’ room beyond the wire office three or four trainmen drifted in to look over the bulletin-board notices; and still Connolly did not return.

Suddenly the sounder in front of the substitute set up a furious chatter, clicking out a monotonous repetition of the “G.S.” call, breaking at intervals with the signature “Ag,” the code letters for Angels, the desert-edge town from which the Apache Limited had been last reported. Calmaine flicked his key-switch and cut in quickly with the answering signal. Then, reaching for pad and pen, he wrote out the message that came boiling over the wire.

“G.S.

“Apache Limited in ditch at Lobo Cut four miles west. Both engines crumpled up. Two enginemen, one route agent, under wreck. Everything off but rear Pullman. Train on fire and lot of passengers pinned down. Hurry help quick.

“AG.”

Calmaine was an alert young man, well abreast of his job and altogether capable. But before he could yelp twice Connolly had come in, and it was the fat despatcher who gave the alarm.

“My Lord, Bolton--see here!” he shouted, pushing Calmaine aside as an incumbrance. And then, when the car-record man came over to stare vacantly at the fateful message: “Get a move! Send somebody after Mr. Maxwell, quick! Then get busy on that yard wire and turn out the wrecking crew. Get Dawson on the ’phone and tell him I’ll have a clear track for him by the time his wreck-wagons are ready! Jump at it, man! Your wife isn’t the only one that’s needing help! _Wake up!_”

Over on the sidewalk loggia porch of the Hotel Topaz fronting the electric-lighted railroad plaza, Maxwell, the division superintendent, was sitting out the evening with a broad-shouldered, solidly built young man whose big frame, clear gray eyes, and fighting jaw were the outward presentments of a foot-ball “back” rather than those of the traditional college professor.

“I don’t mind piping myself off to you, Dick, though the full size of my job isn’t generally known,” the athletic-looking stop-over guest was saying. “You got the first part of it right; I’m down on the Department of Agriculture pay-rolls as a chemistry sharp. But outside of that I’ve half a dozen little hobbies which they let me ride now and then. You’ll guess what one of them is when I tell you that I was the man who fried out the evidence in the post-office cases last winter.”

“What!” exclaimed Maxwell. “But your name didn’t appear.”

The big man with the smooth-shaven, boyish face smiled contentedly.

“My name never appears. That is the high card in the game. So far as that goes, I never mess or meddle in the police details. My part of the job is always and only the theoretical stunt. They come to me and I tell ’em what to do. And just about half the time they haven’t the least idea why they are doing it.”

“Say, Calvin; that interests me a lot more than you know,” was the young superintendent’s eager comment. “I wish you didn’t have to go on to the coast to-morrow morning. We’ve developed an original little Chinese puzzle of our own here in the Timanyoni that is pretty nearly driving the last one of us wild-eyed. If you could stop over----”

The interruption came in the shape of a one-armed man with a lantern, sprinting like a base-runner across from the railroad building to the hotel. It was the night watchman summoned by the despatcher, and ten seconds later he had delivered his message.

“The Lord have mercy!” gasped the superintendent, bounding out of his chair, “the Limited?--in the ditch and on fire, you say? For Heaven’s sake, where?”

“’Tis at Lobo Cut; ’tis Angels reporting it, sorr, so Misther Connolly did be saying. He’s clearing f’r the wreck-train now, and he axed would you be coming over.”

“Tell him I’ll be over in a minute or two: as soon as I’ve called up the hospital and turned out the doctors.”