“Why, grandfather was once a telegrapher, a famous----” He checked himself. “This is his hobby, and I fixed up things to please him.”
“How about yourself?” asked Ralph, with a keen glance at his companion, recalling what Dan Lacey had told him back at the switch shanty.
Glen eyed him steadily for a moment. Then his eyes faltered.
“My grandfather has taught me a lot about telegraphy,” he admitted.
Ralph walked over to the chart on the wall. The young engineer had learned his Morse alphabet early in his railroad career, and knew something of the system in vogue along the line.
As his eye studied the rude scrawl made with a red pencil, Ralph at once discerned that its dotted lines denoted three divisions of a railway system. From separate dots he traced a line of towns. Above each was a designation, an initial, a double initial, sometimes an additional numeral.
“The mischief!” muttered the young railroad engineer under his breath, “this doesn’t look much like a plaything outfit. Why, that is a perfect transcript of the routing chart in the train dispatcher’s office at Stanley Junction.”
[CHAPTER X—THE TRAIN DISPATCHER]
A great flood of dark suspicion crossed Ralph’s mind at the discovery of the road chart. A dozen quick questions arose to his lips. Before he could speak, however, there was a hail from the outside.
“Hey, there, young fellow!”