“If we don’t do something, and do it quick, there is a bunch of us so-called railroad bosses on this high line who may as well pack our duffle-bags and fade away into the landscape. Three wrecks within a week; and this last one will cost a hundred thousand cold iron dollars before we’re through with the lawyers; I’ll be hanged if I wouldn’t call in the doctor—some doctor—any doctor, Maxwell. That’s my ante. So long; see you a little later about this Mesquite business, if you’re still here.” And he put a leg over the platform railing and went away.
Three minutes later, when the superintendent had crossed the station platform and was on his way around to the door opening into the operator’s office, two men mounted upon wiry range horses rode down the single remaining street of the dead-alive former railroad town, pointing for the station.
One of them, a good-looking youngish man with a preternaturally grave face and the shrewd thoughtful eyes that tell of days and nights spent afield and alone with the desert immensities, was the superintendent’s brother-in-law by courtesy. The other, a gigantic athlete of a man, whose weight fairly bowed the back of the stout horse he rode, was Mr. Calvin Sprague.
Maxwell paused when he saw and recognized the two horsemen. But when they came up, the weight of the recent disaster made his greeting a rather dismal attempt at friendly jocularity.
“Well, well!” he said, gripping hands with the athlete; “Billy certainly had it in for you this time! Rode you over the range, did he? I’ll bet you’ll never have the nerve to look a horse in the face again, after this. Where on top of earth have you two been keeping yourselves for the last fortnight?”
“Oh, just sashayin’ round on the edges,” drawled Starbuck, replying for both; “gettin’ acquainted with the luminous landscape, and chewin’ off chunks of the scenery, and layin’ awake nights to soak up some of the good old ozone.”
“Ozone!” chuckled the big man; “I’m jammed gullet-full of it, Dick, and I have a hunch that it’s going to settle somewhere below the waist line and make me bow-legged for life. King David said that a horse is a vain thing for safety, but I can go him one better and say that it’s the vainest possible thing for just plain, ordinary, every-day comfort. I’m a living parenthesis-mark—or a pair of ’em, if you like that better.” Then without warning and almost without a break: “Where is the wreck, this time?”
Maxwell’s frown was a little brow-wrinkling of curious perplexity.
“You’ve just ridden down from the hills, haven’t you? How do you know there is a wreck?”
“That’s too easy,” laughed the expert, waving a Samsonic arm toward the five side-tracked trains held up in the Angels yard. “If you didn’t have your track cluttered up somewhere, those trains wouldn’t be hanging up here, I’m sure. Is it a bad one?—but you needn’t answer that; I can see at least one dead man in your eyes.”