“I’ll get ’em!” he gritted savagely. “I’ll get the last damned booze-fighter in the bunch!” And then: “Good God, Sprague; how could anything like this go on without my knowing it?”
“You would have found it out, sooner or later, of course. But you’re a railroad man yourself, and you ought to know railroad men well enough to take into consideration that sort of loyalty among them which keeps them from ‘peaching’ on one another. Even Tarbell had to be jarred before he would admit that he knew about it. I can imagine that there has been a sort of generous conspiracy among the men to keep you from finding out.”
“That’s all right; I know now, and I’ll sift them out; I’ll go through the whole blamed outfit with a club! I’ll——”
The man who had called out this upbubbling of righteous wrath was chuckling softly.
“You won’t do anything that you say you will,” he interrupted good-naturedly. “You stumped me to take the case, and I’ve taken it; which means that you’re under the doctor’s orders. When you have cooled down a bit, you’ll see very clearly that the worst thing you could do at this particular crisis would be to start a division-wide scrap with the rank and file.”
“But, good Lord, Sprague; I’ve got to do something, haven’t I?”
“You surely have; and that something is to help me find the germ-carrier. Somebody has been taking down the bars for your men; who is it?”
“I don’t know any more than a goat. I can’t yet believe that it is the work of any one man.”
“Possibly it isn’t; there may be a good many. But I’ll chance a guess that some one in authority is setting the pace. Leave that for a moment and we’ll take up something else. You have two daily papers here in Brewster: I’ve noticed that one of them, The Tribune, is friendly to your road. How about the other, The Times-Record?”
“It is supposed to be independent, with a slant against corporations and ‘the system,’ whatever that may be.”