Maxwell laughed. “That was what the New Yorkers seemed to think. They secured a court order allowing them to put an expert of their own on the job. And nobody seems to enjoy the watch-dog stunt. They’ve had to send in a new man every few weeks.”
“Do the Cripple Creekers kill them off?”
“No; they buy ’em off, I guess. Anyway, they don’t stay. Murtrie was the last.”
“And apparently he hasn’t stayed,” said Sprague reflectively; and just then a long-drawn wail of the locomotive whistle announced the approach of the train to Brewster. At the signal the guest rose and tossed the remains of the bad cigar out of the window. “Here’s where I have to quit you, Dick,” he was beginning; but Maxwell would not have it that way.
“Not much, you don’t, Calvin, old man,” he protested. “You’re going to stop over one day with me, at least. No; I won’t listen to any excuses. Give me your berth check and I’ll send my boy up ahead to get your traps out of the sleeper. Sit down right where you are and take it easy. You’ll find a box of cigars—real cigars—in this lower drawer. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve seen Calmaine.”
Apparently, the man from Washington did not require much urging. He sat down in Maxwell’s chair as the train was slowing into the division station, and was rummaging in the desk drawer for the box of cigars when an alert, carefully groomed young man came in through the forward corridor and met the superintendent as he was going out. There was a hurried conference, a passing of papers, and the two, Maxwell and his chief clerk, went out together, leaving the big man to go on with his rummaging alone.
Shortly afterward came the bump of a coupling touch, and the office-car, in the grip of a switching-engine, raced backward through the yards; backward and forward again, and when it came to rest it was standing on the short station spur at the end of the railroad head-quarters building. From the open windows Sprague could see the long through train, with its two big mountain-pulling locomotives coupled on, drawn up for its farther flight. It was after it had steamed away into the night that Maxwell returned to his side-tracked car to find his guest, half-asleep, as it seemed, in the depths of the big wicker easy-chair.
“I hope you didn’t think I’d deserted you,” he said, drawing up another of the wicker chairs. “I took time to telephone home. Mrs. Maxwell’s dining out at her sister’s, and, if you don’t mind, we’ll sit here a while and go out to the house later.”
There was enough to talk about. The two, who had been college classmates, had seen little of each other for a number of years. Maxwell told how he had gone into railroading under Ford, and how in his first summer in the Timanyoni he had acquired a gold mine and a wife. Sprague’s recounting was less romantic. After leaving college he had coached the ’varsity foot-ball team for two years and had afterward gone in for original research in chemistry, which had been his “major” in college. Later he had drifted into the Washington bureau as an expert, taking the job, as he explained, because it gave him time and frequent leisurely intervals for the pursuit of his principal hobby, which was the lifting of detective work to the plane of pure theory, treating each case as a mathematical problem to be demonstrated by logical reasoning.
“You ought to drop everything else and take up the man-hunting business as a profession,” laughed Maxwell, when the hour-long talk had come around to the big man’s pet among the hobbies.