The young man looked up and his smile showed his teeth.
“But the current is on and the tunnel isn’t destroyed,” he interrupted.
“No; you overdid it a little in asking Benson to help you handle the nitro-glycerine and in letting him spill it on his clothes; also you skipped a stitch when you thought that by smuggling those dynamite boxes in and calling everybody’s attention to them, you’d put the blame of the explosion upon Benson and the railroad people. You forgot that all makers of dynamite nowadays stamp the date on the boxes. The tunnel was completed two years ago; and the date on one of the boxes, at least, is January of the present year. You are down and out, Mr. Stribling, and there is only one way in which you can dodge the stripes. That is by telling us who hired you to do this.”
A silence, tense like the silence of the court-room when the judge pronounces the sentence, fell upon the group gathered in the little shack-office, and it lasted for a full minute. At the end of it Stribling jerked his head up and spoke.
“I’m a man again now, Mr. Sprague, if I haven’t been for the past two months,” he said steadily. “I’ll tell you this: you can give me the third degree, if you want to—there are enough of you here to do it—and after that you can send me to the pen if you feel like it. But, so help me God, you’ll never make me welsh on the man for whom I did this: never, so long as I have the breath to say no!”
Again the tense silence supervened, and Starbuck held up the handcuffs tentatively. Sprague shook his head, and spoke again.
“You’ve considered this resolution well, have you, Stribling?”
“I have. I owe that man everything I’ve got in this world: education, the chance to hold my head up with others and, more than that, he once saved my father from going where you mean to send me—over the road. I’ll admit all you have charged. I did set the trap, and I don’t know yet why it hasn’t gone off. All I ask is that you’ll remember that I picked a time when there wouldn’t be any lives lost.”
“I discovered that last night,” said Sprague quietly; adding, with a glance for the superintendent’s brother-in-law, “I guess we’ll have to turn him over to you, Mr. Starbuck.” Then, turning once more upon the culprit: “Why did you find it necessary to cross the power wires with the telegraph lines early this afternoon, and so to destroy the instruments on a hundred miles of railroad, Stribling?”
The young engineer looked up hardily. “It was necessary. I took care to have Canby and the railroad electricians all over at the power plant, and I couldn’t take the chance of leaving them in communication with head-quarters at Brewster.”