“And you have let the roundabout track lapse?”
“Oh, yes; the cloud-bursts of the first summer wiped it out for us completely.”
“So this tunnel is really the neck of your five-hundred-mile-long man, is it?”
“It is. If Burnt Mountain should happen to fall in on us one of these fine nights—which it won’t—we’d be definitely out of the game as a through line. It would bottle us up for weeks, if not for months.”
A slow smile spread itself over Sprague’s smooth-shaven, good-natured face.
“If I had as tender a neck as that, Dick, I’d have night sweats thinking about it; I should, for a fact,” he averred. And then, after a pause: “Ah; I’ve been waiting for that. The lights have just gone out in your office over there in the railroad building. Who is so industrious as to stay on the job until nearly midnight?”
“It is Harvey Calmaine, my paragon of a chief clerk. He’s a mighty hard-working young fellow—a treasure, as you may remember. He has been getting up some statistics for me, and he won’t take the time out of the working day.”
“H’m, yes; he is a fine young fellow, Dick, and no mistake.” Then, after he had refilled his pipe: “He still limps a little from that foot-scorching episode in Bart Holladay’s back room—when they were torturing him to make him tell what he had done with the proxies—doesn’t he?”
Maxwell turned upon his companion with a frown of mystification wrinkling between his eyes.
“How did you know that, Calvin?” he demanded.