“That is what we’ve all thought. But to tap a wire, you have to cut in on it somewhere. Of course, it could be done in any one of a thousand isolated places, but hardly without leaving some trace. Wickert, our wire-chief, has been over the lines east and west with a magnifying-glass, you might say.”
For the measuring of a few other miles of the westward flight of the train the big man in the opposite seat said nothing. Then he began again.
“Have you tried to figure out a motive, Dick?”
“That is precisely what is driving every one of us stark, staring mad, Calvin,” was the sober confession. “There isn’t any motive—there can’t be!”
“No trouble with the labor unions?”
“Not a bit in the world. More than that, the men have spent good money of their own trying to help us find out—as a measure of self-protection. You can see what they’re afraid of; what we are all afraid of. Everybody is losing nerve, and if the scare keeps up, we’ll have real trouble—plenty of it.”
“And you say the source of the thing can’t be localized?”
“No. We have a double division, with Brewster as the common head-quarters. Sometimes the yelp comes from the east, and sometimes from the west.”
Again the big-bodied chemistry expert sank back in his seat and fell into the thoughtful trance. When he came out of it, it was to say:
“You’ve probably settled it for yourself that it isn’t a plant for a train robbery—the kind of robbery which would be made easier by a wreck.”