At the word, Sprague faced about quickly and fixed his gaze upon Stribling. The young man had turned aside in his chair and his face was ghastly. Benson and Maxwell were watching the indicator on the wall; but Starbuck was rising noiselessly from his seat on the cot, with one hand buried in the side-pocket of his coat. For ten dragging seconds the index finger of the volt-meter remained motionless. Stribling was twitching in his chair, and finally he burst out.
“Those dynamite boxes! We ought to have taken them out! What if they shouldn’t happen to be empty—all of them?”
As he spoke, the index of the volt-meter began to jump like a thing suddenly endowed with life, and Benson cried out, “There she comes!” Stribling crouched in his chair as if shrinking from a blow and covered his face with his hands. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, ticked themselves off on the little desk clock at Maxwell’s elbow, and then Sprague’s voice broke into the tense silence.
“It’s all over, Stribling. You can sit up now and take your medicine. The end of the world is still safely in the future.”
The young man whirled in his chair and his right hand shot toward a half-opened drawer of the desk. It was Starbuck who interposed.
“Nixie,” he said sharply; “it isn’t time for you to pass out yet. Keep your hands out of that drawer, or I’ll put these on,” jingling a pair of handcuffs before the culprit’s staring eyes.
Stribling leaped from his chair and took one long haggard look through the open door at the tunnel mouth where nothing was happening. Then he dropped back and became the trapped animal fighting for life.
“What have you got on me?—or what is it you think you’ve got?” he rasped.
It was the man from Washington who replied.
“Don’t make it harder for yourself than you have to,” he said gently. “We’ve got it all. We know that you had that train stopped last night so that you could unload those empty dynamite boxes—they are empty, you know—without discovery. We also know that this morning you placed a quantity of nitro-glycerine in that safety switch, and that you have the wiring rigged to fire the stuff and destroy the tunnel.”