“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he demurred. “You can’t say that all big money is lawless. Of course, there are buccaneers in every chapter of the world’s history, and we have ours, neatly labelled with the dollar-mark instead of the skull and cross-bones. Good big money is an undoubted blessing; it is only bad big money that is a curse.”
Maxwell’s smile was mirthless.
“When a man puts a gun in your face and holds you up, it isn’t very consoling to remember that there are a good many other men in the world who wouldn’t treat you that way,” he commented. And then: “I hope we’ve seen the last of this fight in the dark with that stock-jobbing gang in New York.”
“You haven’t,” Sprague declared definitely. “They’ll come back at you, and keep on coming back, until you get a fair grand-jury underhold on the men at the top. I counted confidently upon being able to give you that underhold to-day. I thought we had Stribling where he would be obliged to turn state’s evidence. It was our misfortune that he happened to be too good a man; that he was only the tool of a villain and not a villain himself. They’ll hit you again, Maxwell, and go on hitting you until you can strike back hard enough to put some of the men higher up in the prisoner’s dock.”
This might have stood for the final word; but the true finality was reached a couple of hours later when the superintendent and the Government expert were smoking their bedtime pipes in the Topaz lobby.
“We haven’t fully grasped the real pity of this thing yet, Dick,” said Sprague, at the end of the ends. “It is this: that greed, the infernal lust of money that has laid hold upon our day and generation, can take so fine a thing as that poor boy’s gratitude, transform it into criminality, and make him pay the price with his life. Isn’t that enough to make your blood run cold? Let’s turn in and forget it if we can. Good-night. I’m going to bed.”
IV
The Mystery of the Black Blight
THE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in the advertising folders as “The Fast Mail,” had collided in the early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time, had run past Angels without heeding the “stop for orders” signal plainly displayed.
Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had shot around the hill curve to hurl itself, a six-thousand-ton, steel-pointed projectile, into the rear end of the first section, and the disaster was complete. Somewhere under the smoking mountain of wreckage marking the spot where the Mail and first-section locomotives had locked themselves together, reared, and fallen over into the ditch, two firemen and an engineer were buried. Out of one of the crushed mail-cars two postal clerks were taken; one of them to die a few minutes after his rescue, and the other bruised and broken, with an arm and a leg dangling, as he was carried out to safety.
At the other point of impact there had been no loss of life, though the material damage was almost as great. The engine of the second section had split its way sheer through the first-section caboose—which, in the nature of things, had no one in it to be killed—and through two of the three merchandise-cars next in its plunging path. With a mixed chaos of groceries, farming implements, and splintered timbers for its monument, the big mogul had burrowed into the soft side bank of the cutting as if in some blind attempt to bury itself out of sight of the havoc it had wrought.