“You have no imagination, Dick. Murtrie came here to do you up in the proxy business—as the Wall Street crowd’s last resort. He got in with Calthrop and Higgins and showed them how to beat their game, meaning to put the double-cross on them—as he did—when the time came. He was merely killing two birds with one stone; but your bird was the big one. I don’t know what sort of a dodge he put up with Calthrop and Higgins, but I can suppose that there is a trusty confederate at the Kentucky end of the string who is doubtless waiting now for a corpse that will never come.”
“Of course!” said the unimaginative one disgustedly. “Just the same, it’s all mighty miraculous to me, Calvin—how you can reason out these things hot off the bat, as you do. Why, Great Jonah! I had all the opportunities you had, and then some; and I didn’t see an inch ahead of my nose at any stage of the game!”
The big man rose and yawned good-naturedly.
“It’s my hobby—not yours,” he laughed; and then, as the telephone buzzer went off with a purring noise under Maxwell’s desk: “That will be Mrs. Maxwell, calling up to ask why in the world you don’t come home. Tell her all right, and let’s go. It will be the biggest miracle of all if you succeed in getting me up in time for breakfast to-morrow—or rather, I should say, to-day, since it’s three o’clock, and worse, right now.”
Maxwell put the receiver to his ear and exchanged a few words with some one at the other end of the wire. When he closed his desk and made ready to go, a little frown of reflective puzzlement was gathering between his eyes.
“You know too much—too thundering much, Calvin. As I said a while back, it’s uncanny. It was Alice; and she said the very words you said she would: ‘Why in the world don’t you come home, Dick?’ If you weren’t so blooming big and beefy and good-natured—but, pshaw! who ever heard of a fat wizard? Come on; let’s go and hunt a taxi. It’s too far to walk.”
III
The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three
AT ten o’clock on the second Tuesday after the return of the lately promoted chief night despatcher, Dan Connolly, from his wedding trip, the business of the Brewster wire office had settled down, momentarily at least, into the comfortable rut of routine. Everything was moving smoothly on the double division, and between the leisurely inscribing of the figured entries on the train-sheet, the fat, jolly-looking night chief had a chance to fill his corn-cob pipe and to swap a word of gossip now and then with Johnson, the car-record operator who, as “Wire-Devil” Bolton’s successor, was clattering at his type-writer in the far corner of the bare room.
It was after he had finished typing the long “record” report from Red Butte that Johnson twisted himself in his chair to say: “Who is that fellow ‘Scientific Sprague’ that I’ve been hearing so much about since I came on the job, Dan?”
The fat despatcher chuckled reminiscently and sat back in his tilting chair.