In the office-car the porter-cook had laid the table for the mid-day meal; and the superintendent and his guest ate it in transit, the office-car special being the first of the halted trains to pass westward over the newly cleared line.
“Well?” said Maxwell interrogatively, when the meal had progressed to the meat and vegetables without comment on the part of the one who had lifted the challenge.
“You’ve got the disease, all right; it’s with you, and in the epidemic form, too. Its expression came out emphatically every now and then in that track-clearing hustle. One little snappy, snarly fellow lying under a box-car to make the hoisting-hitch voiced it precisely when his mate yelled at him to come out, that the hitch might slip. He yapped back, ‘Who the hell and blinkety-blank blankation cares!’ That’s one form your disease is taking, and you’d say it would account for a good many of the smashes.”
“Well?” queried the superintendent again. “You didn’t stop at that?”
“No; I made a few other preliminary observations which may or may not prove up. Give me a little time; and when we get back to Brewster, detail that ex-cowboy ‘relief operator’ of yours, Tarbell, to run errands for me. If I can’t show you good, tangible results within the next forty-eight hours or so, you may discharge me and hire a Pinkerton.”
“You’ll fail,” said Maxwell gloomily. “I’ve been through a sickness of this kind before. There’s no cure for it. It has simply got to run its course and wear itself out.”
“That’s what they used to say about cholera and the plague and yellow-fever, and all those things,” laughed the man from Washington; but he did not go any farther into the matter of theories.
The run of the special train to Brewster was made without incident, and from the station Sprague went directly across to his hotel.
“I’m going over to clean up,” he announced. “By and by, when you get around to it, send Tarbell over and tell him to wait in the lobby for me.”
It was possibly an hour later when the young man who resembled William Starbuck sufficiently to pass for the mine owner’s younger brother, got out of his chair in the quietest corner of the Hotel Topaz lobby and crossed to the elevators to meet the Government chemist.