In the present case there should have been no trouble. With a clear thirty minutes in which to make less than eight miles, the time freight should be safely in on the siding at the west end of Tunnel Number Three some minutes before the Fast Mail could possibly cover its own intervening distance.
But on this particular Tuesday night the fates were inauspicious. Fifteen minutes farther along, after Johnson had gone back to his table in the corner, Connolly’s west-wire sounder began to chatter furiously. The fat despatcher broke in promptly, and again the trembling fit seized upon the unbusied half of him.
“Oh, good Lord!” he groaned; and again: “Oh, good Lord!” Then the corridor door opened and Maxwell, the superintendent, came in, looking as he always did, the square-shouldered, square-jawed fighter of transportation battles, with a few streaks of youthful gray beginning to show in his tightly curled mustaches—a militant figure of a man giving a truthful impression of the fit and purposeful railroad field officer.
“What’s the matter, Dan?” he demanded, making a quick push through the gate in the counter railing.
Connolly explained hastily.
“Seventeen tried to steal a siding on Six. Gallagher, the work-line operator at the electric gang’s camp, has just called up to say that the freight’s stuck in the tunnel—something off the track. A flagman has come back to the camp with the news, and he says the tunnel is blocked so they can’t get through with a flag for Six.”
“Good God, Dan—they’ve got to get through!” Maxwell exploded; and pushing the despatcher aside he cut in on the wire himself. There was a brief and brittle colloquy in which the emphatic word was made to do duty for entire sentences, a wait, and when the clicking began again the superintendent translated audibly, quite as if Connolly, listening with all of his five senses concentrated in the single one of hearing, were not taking the hopeful information as it came from the sounder.
“Stribling’s there, and every sprinter in the camp is turning out to do a Marathon over the hill to the west end. Just the same, it will be touch and go if they make it in time to warn the Mail. How much late is Six?”
Connolly gave the time, making the proper deduction for the few minutes made up west of Junico. Maxwell glanced up at the time-standard clock on the wall.
“There is an even chance,” he asserted hopefully. “There ought to be somebody in that mob of wire-stringers who can run the two miles in time to head off the Mail. How did you come to let things get into such a snarl as this, Dan?”