“No; as to that, I’ll admit I set a harmless trap for him. I fancied once, and then again, that I saw the prison look in his eye; the quick side-glance that a long-term prisoner learns to give without turning his head—notice it the next time you happen to be in a penitentiary, if you are ever so unfortunate as to visit one.”
“I have noticed it,” said Maxwell, and the expert went on.
“When I saw that, the scientific mentality said instantly, ‘That look wasn’t acquired in a jail term—it took longer.’ The next suggestion followed as a matter of course. Every long-term man answers to a number instead of to his name. At the moment I was numbering the bottles of chemicals which Tarbell had been buying for me, and I turned the talk upon my peculiar system of labelling—by numbers. Starbuck himself did the rest. He said, ‘I reckon I wouldn’t rent even a post-office box if it had to have a number on it.’ That was all, but it was enough.”
Maxwell was toying with his dessert.
“As I have said several times before, Calvin, you are almost uncanny now and then. You know too much. Some fine day it will strike in on you—sour on you and make you sick.”
Sprague’s mellow laugh sounded again.
“I haven’t begun to tell you all I know. For example, I might say that all through this spell of gossip about your brother-in-law you’ve been giving the subject no more than a scant half of your mind. The other half has been tussling with your railroad involvement, and you’ve been wondering where the Big Nine is going to land on you next. What do you hear from Tunnel Number Three?”
“Nothing much; or at least nothing out of the ordinary. They got the tangle straightened out last night after a time. Benson wires that Stribling put the entire electrifying force under his orders, and was all kinds of nice about it.”
“‘Electrifying,’” repeated Sprague musingly. “A slight change in the spelling would make it ‘electrocuting,’ wouldn’t it? How long will it be before the installation is completed?”
“They are starting the turbines in Lopez Canyon to-day, for a try-out. The wires are all strung, and Stribling is installing some sort of a safety contrivance in the tunnel as a finishing touch; a switch of some kind that will shunt the current in case any accident should happen to a train in transit. It’s all Greek to me—and to Benson, for that matter. Neither of us knows enough about electric installations to keep us from spoiling.”