“Sure,” said Starbuck; and when they rose from the table he went in search of the superintendent and Benson, leaving his luncheon companion to go around to the Kinzie Building laboratory alone.
It was something less than half an hour after Sprague had stripped his coat and gone to work on the soil specimens of the morning’s gathering when Starbuck came in, bringing Maxwell and Benson. As Starbuck made it appear, the visit was merely a neighborly drop-in, with no better excuse than the expressed purpose of introducing Sprague to a possible helper.
“I thought you might be able to use Jack in some way, Mr. Sprague,” he said, after the introduction was a fact accomplished. “He sure knows a heap more about Timanyoni dirt than anybody else between the two ranges; carries right smart of it around on his clothes a good deal of the time.”
Benson took the joke in good part; and when Sprague had found and opened a box of his irreproachable cigars, the talk, touching lightly at first upon Sprague’s business in the West, came around, or was brought around, to Benson’s part in the electrification job. The big expert with the fighting jaw and the sympathetic gray eyes had a way of leading even a reticent man to tell of his troubles; and Benson, knowing the part Sprague had taken in defeating the two previous attempts to wreck the Short Line, felt free to unburden himself.
“I can’t make Maxwell, here, believe that Stribling is anything but the fine, open-handed young fellow that he seems to be; but I want to tell you three together what I have often told Maxwell: I’ve got a hunch. I don’t know a blessed thing. Stribling has always treated me fine, and he is a fellow you can hardly help cottoning to, right from the jump. But some way something inside of me keeps on telling me that he’s too smooth—too damned smooth. Last night, for instance, in that derailment muddle—there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do, didn’t do, to help us out. He packed his men into the tunnel so thick that nobody could get near that derailed car; in fact, he had the car on the rails and the train backing out before I could get any action at all.”
“What caused the derailment, Mr. Benson?” Sprague put in quietly.
“That was one of the things that made me hot. Stribling’s messing in made it impossible for anybody to tell. There was nothing the matter with the track or with the car, so far as I could see after the thing was over. Bamberg, the engineer who was pulling the train, swears that somebody flagged him down with a red light when he was about half-way through the tunnel, and he stopped. Then the red changed to white and gave him the ‘go-ahead.’ When he tried to start his train, this box-car, somewhere along in the middle of things, jumped the track and blocked the tunnel. He felt the jerk and stopped again.”
Sprague waved a hand in token of his complete satisfaction.
“Suppose we ignore this train tangle for the present and come to other things,” he interposed. “I’ve been wondering if you could describe for me, briefly, the details of this tunnel installation, Mr. Benson?”
“Why, yes; it’s simple enough—it’s merely a trolley line on a big scale: two heavy copper trolley wires strung through on catenary brackets, with double insulation. That’s all, except the safety-switches—cut-outs—one at each end and one in the middle of the tunnel.”