“Cipher?—holy smoke!” exclaimed the young man at the lobby wire desk; but a liberal tip made it look easier, and he added: “All right, I’m good for it, I guess, and I’ll get it through as quick as I can. Answer to your room?”
“If you please,” said the guest; and, as it was by this time well on toward midnight, he went to bed.
By noon of the day following the false alarm run of the wrecking-train to Timanyoni Canyon, all Brewster, or at least the railroad part of it, knew that Superintendent Maxwell was entertaining an old college classmate at the Hotel Topaz. For the town portion of the gossip there was some little disagreement as to Mr. Calvin Sprague’s state and standing. Some had it that the big, handsome athlete was a foot-ball coach taking his vacation between seasons. Others said that he was a capitalist in disguise, looking for a ground-floor investment in Timanyoni mines.
These were Mr. Sprague’s placings for the man in the street. But to the rank and file in the railroad head-quarters building Sprague figured in his proper character as a Government drug-mixer on a holiday; a royal good fellow who fraternized instantly with everybody, whose naïve ignorance about railroading was a joke, and whose vast unknowledge was nicely balanced by a keen and comradely curiosity to learn all that anybody could tell him about the complex workings of a railroad head-quarters in action.
Naturally, and possibly because Davis, the chief despatcher, was willing to be hospitable, he spent an hour of the forenoon in the wire office, ingenuously absorbing detail and evincing an interest in the day’s work that made Davis, ordinarily a rather reticent man, transform himself into a lecturer on the theory and practice of railway telegraphy.
It was in Davis’s office that he met Tarbell; and the keen-eyed, sober-faced young fellow who was carried on the division pay-rolls as a relief operator became his guide on a walking tour of the shops and the yards. Tarbell saw in Mr. Maxwell’s guest nothing more than an exceedingly affable gentleman with an immense capacity for interesting himself in the workaday details of a railroad outfit; but at one o’clock, when Maxwell joined Sprague at a quiet corner table for two in the hotel café, there were several surprises awaiting the superintendent.
“Getting it shaken down a little so that you’ll know where to begin?” was Maxwell’s opening question; and the ex-fullback laughed.
“You must take me for a sleuth of the common or garden variety,” he retorted. “Did you suppose I had thrown away an entire forenoon scoring for a start? Not so, Richard; not even remotely so. I’ve been finding out a lot of things. I am even able to suggest an improvement or two in your telegraph installation.”
“For example?” said Maxwell.
“Both of your yard offices are cut in on the working wire. If this were my railroad I’d put them on a pony circuit and cut them out of the main line.”