During the short run around the hills to the small mining-town station, Sprague sat quietly in his chair, puffing steadily at his cigar, and saying nothing. When Maxwell announced their arrival he got up and followed the superintendent into the Corona office.
Galt, the express messenger, was lying on the night operator’s cot in the telegraph office. Some physician passenger on the held-up train had dressed his wounds, and he had fully recovered consciousness. His story was a mere amplification of the wire report which had gone to Brewster. He had marked, and wondered at, the unscheduled stop on the gulch curve, but before he could open his door to look out, the postal- and express-cars had been pulled on ahead, his end door had been battered in, and he had found himself trying to fight back a couple of masked men who were forcing an entrance. Then somebody hit him on the head and that was the end of it, so far as he was concerned.
Following this, the Corona night operator was put upon the question rack. He knew only what the trainmen had told him. No; there was nothing missing out of the express-car save the dead man’s body. While the train was waiting, he, the operator, and the conductor had made a careful check of the contents of the car from Galt’s waybills, and, with the single exception noted, everything was undisturbed. No, there was no panic; the scare was pretty well quieted down by the time the train reached Corona. Of course, a good many of the passengers had got out at the station stop, and everybody was curious to see the coffin.
“You took the coffin off?” Maxwell questioned.
“Yes, it’s in the freight-room.”
Sprague had taken no part in the examination of the man, and had listened only cursorily to Galt’s story. But now he became as curious as any of the morbid passengers had been. Allen, the operator, lighted a lantern and led the way to the freight-room. The coffin was lying upon a baggage-truck. It was encased in an ordinary shipping-box, half of the cover of which had been torn off. The lid of the coffin had been broken, split into three pieces; and one of the pieces was missing. It was a rather expensive affair, wooden and not metallic, of the kind known as a “casket,” silk-lined, and with a sliding glass face-plate. The glass had been broken, and the fragments were lying inside on the small silken pillow.
Sprague bent to examine the silent witness of the mysterious robbery and the operator offered his lantern. But the Government man took a small electric flash-light from his pocket and made it serve a better purpose. Only once, while he was flashing the tiny beam of the electric into the coffin’s interior, did he speak, and then it was to say to Maxwell: “I thought you said this was a metallic coffin.”
“That was the inference, when you spoke of the weight and the number of men required to handle it. Of course, I didn’t know anything definite about it.”
Once more Sprague peered into the silk-lined interior, stooping to send the light ray to the foot of the casket, which was still hidden under the undestroyed half of the outer case. Then, snapping the switch of the flash-light and carefully replacing the broken box cover, he nodded briskly to Maxwell.
“That’s all, for the present. If I were you, I’d have this coffin nailed up in its box, just as it is, without disturbing anything. You can manage that, can’t you, young man?” turning short upon the operator.