Maxwell shook his head.
“A pile of cross-ties would be much simpler.”
“Doubtless. We’ll cancel that and come to the next hypothesis. Could it be the work of some crazy telegraph operator?”
“We’ve threshed out the crazy guess. It doesn’t prove up. A madman would slip up now and then—trip himself. I have a file of the fake messages. They were not sent by a lunatic.”
“Call it another cancellation,” said the guest. “You are convinced that some sane person is doing it. Very good. What is the object? You say you can’t find out; which merely means that you’ve been attacking it from the wrong angle. Or, rather, you’ve let the professional detectives give you their angle. What you need is a bit of first-class amateur work.”
The superintendent laughed mirthlessly. “If I could only find the amateur I’d hire him, Calvin,—if it took a year’s salary. I don’t know what the wire-devil’s object is, but I can catalogue the results. These periodical scares are demoralizing the entire Short Line. The service is on the ragged edge of a chaotic blow-up. Half the men in the train crews are running on their bare nerves, and the operators who have to handle train-orders are not much better.”
“Yes,” said the guest quietly. “I’ve been noticing. I saw only one man in your office who wasn’t scared stiff; and the conductor of this train we’re riding on had a pretty bad attack of the tremolos when you told him what the wrecking-train was out for.”
“Who, Garrighan? No, you’re mistaken there. He’s one of the cold-blooded ones,” said the superintendent confidently.
“Excuse me, Dick; I’m never mistaken on that side of the fence. There were signs, plenty of them. Ninety-eight men in every hundred will duck and put up one or both arms if you strike at them suddenly. Garrighan did neither, you’ll say; but if you had been watching him as closely as I was, you would have seen that he started to do both.”
Maxwell was regarding his former classmate curiously.