Tarbell nodded. “I had a hand-out in one o’ the saloons.”
“Good. Then I’ll give you another job. Look around town for a man about Mr. Maxwell’s build, only about twenty pounds heavier. He is between twenty-five and thirty years old, wears a slouch hat soft gray in color, dresses in pepper-and-salt, is clean-shaven, red-faced, blue-eyed, and walks with a little hitch to his left leg which isn’t quite a limp. When you catch up with him, find out who he is and come and tell me. I’ll be over at Mr. Maxwell’s office.”
Tarbell vanished, rolling a fresh cigarette as he went, and Sprague thrust his arm in Maxwell’s.
“I’ll go over to your shop with you,” he said. “I know you’re anxious to climb back into the working saddle. I’m not going to bore you; I merely want to have a little talk with that irreproachable chief clerk of yours, Harvey Calmaine.”
A little later they climbed the stair to the office floor of the railroad building together, and Maxwell went on down the corridor to the despatcher’s room. When he came back to his own office a half-hour later and found Sprague and young Calmaine figuring together at the chief clerk’s desk in the outer room, he went on to his own inner sanctum without disturbing them.
It was perhaps another half-hour farther along when the expert, who had been patiently going over a mass of statistics with the alert, well-groomed young fellow who served as the superintendent’s right hand, sat back in his chair and relighted the fat black cigar which had been suffered to go out many times during the figuring process.
“It seems that a good many things besides wrecks have been happening in the past few weeks, Mr. Calmaine,” he suggested musingly. “In that short interval you have had many changes in the force, especially in the motive-power department. I don’t know whether you have remarked it, but fully half of the men in the shops and roundhouses are new men. And that is the department in which the sickness seems to be the worst. Your maintenance costs have increased three hundred per cent. over the same period last year.”
“I know it,” admitted the chief clerk. “It is the more marked because Dawson, our former master mechanic, made such phenomenally good records.”
“I remember Dawson,” said the big man, slipping easily from the statistics into the humanities. “He was here the first time I came over the road, early in the summer. Has he left the Short Line?”
“He has been promoted. He is superintendent of motive-power on the east end of the Southwestern.”