“More than enough,” was the quiet reply. And when Starbuck had taken the pistol from the half-opened desk drawer the two who were free went out and closed the door against any possible intrusion upon the captive’s privacy.
“I’ll stay round,” Starbuck volunteered, when they were outside. “You go over and ride the engine with Mr. Maxwell, if you want to.”
It was half an hour later when the three who had been trying out the electric locomotive side-tracked the big machine at the sound of the down passenger’s whistle signal at the western tunnel approach, and crossed the tracks to where Starbuck was standing guard at the reopened door of the office-shack.
“Still writing?” asked Sprague of the silent guard.
“No; for the last ten minutes he’s been sitting there with his head on the table, just as you see him. He asked me to open the door a while ago, so he could see better.”
Moved by a common impulse they entered the office-room, stepping softly. But the young man at the desk was far beyond all earthly disturbances. One letter, addressed to a girl in New York, lay on the desk, stamped and sealed. Hanging beside the chair, and ingeniously strung and weighted so that they could touch nothing, were the two heavily insulated power wires which he had somehow managed to disconnect from the volt-meter switch-board at his back; these and a freshly burned shrivel on the hand of the arm that was crooked for a pillow told how it had been done.
“Good God!” Maxwell exclaimed; “we might have thought of that! Poor fellow! He couldn’t face it out, after all!”
Starbuck gently released the handcuffs and slipped them into his pocket. Then he helped Benson put the body of the man who could not face it out upon the cot in the corner. The train was coming, and Benson pushed the others toward the door.
“Don’t stay here and miss your train,” he said. “I’ll do what there is to be done. I was going to stay, anyway.”