Maxwell fought his way stubbornly through the crowd, with the newspaper man, Sprague, Tarbell, and Connolly following in his wake. When the five were once more behind the closed door of the private office across the hall, the superintendent turned morosely upon the night despatcher, and he was so full of the thing he was about to do that he did not notice that his guest had taken Tarbell aside for a whispered conference.
“You’ve drawn the teeth of the law, this time, Connolly,” he said sharply. “After what you’ve just done I’m not going to send you to jail. But the least you can do is to tell me who hired you and sent you out here to make trouble for us. If you’ll do that——”
It was Sprague’s hand on his shoulder that stopped him, and then he noticed that Tarbell had disappeared. “Just a minute—until Tarbell gets back,” said the guest, in low tones; and while he was saying it, the door opened suddenly and the ex-cowboy returned, thrusting a sallow-faced young fellow, shirt-sleeved and livid with fear, into the office ahead of him. Then the Government man went on in the same low tone, “You can say to this young man all the things you were going to say to Mr. Connolly. There was a little miscue on Tarbell’s part, and I was just going to tell you about it when the train trouble butted in.” Then to the fat despatcher, “Mr. Connolly, sit down. You’ve jolly well earned the right to look on and listen.”
Connolly sat down heavily, and so did the superintendent. Thereupon the man from Washington slipped easily into the breach, turning briskly upon the yellow-faced car-record operator.
“Step up here, Bolton, and make a clean sweep of it to Mr. Maxwell. Tell him how a certain firm of New York brokers—you needn’t give the names now—sent you, a convicted bucket-shop wire-tapper, out here to disarrange things on this railroad for stock-jobbing purposes. Then tell him how you tapped the despatcher’s wires and put a set of concealed keys under your car-record table in the other room. Tell him how, after you’d faked that wreck message last night, you ran a bluff for sympathy, and how, when it had worked, your nerve flickered and you dropped from the wrecking-train in the yard and sent a stop-order from the yard office. Come to the front and loosen up!”
Bolton was shuffling forward and was beginning a tremulous confession when Maxwell stopped him harshly.
“You can keep all that to tell in court!” he snapped. And then to Tarbell: “Take him away, Archer. And you go back to your job, Dan, and let Davis go to bed. What I’ve got to say to you will keep.” Then to the young man from the Tribune, who had his note-book out and was scribbling down his story at breakneck speed: “Write out what you please, Scanlan, but tell Mr. Kendall that I’ll be up to the office presently, and that I’d like to see the story before it goes to the linotypes.”
When the room was cleared, the snappy little superintendent spun his chair around to face his guest.
“Calvin,” he said solemnly, “you’ll never know how near you came to making me break my heart to-night. If I’d had to send Dan Connolly to jail after what he did in the other room a little while ago——”
The chemistry expert was grinning joyously.