"Yes; how do you know?" demanded Bromley.
"By a mere fluke, and not by any process of deduction, in this instance, as it happens. One of the survivors was crafty enough to steal the coil of substituted fuse, having some vague notion of suing the company for damages for supplying poor material. Like other men of his class, he gave up the notion when he got well of his injuries; but it was revived again the other day when one of his comrades told him I was a lawyer. He made a date with me, told me his tale, and showed me the carefully preserved coil of bad fuse. I cut off a bit of it and did a little experimenting. Look at this." He took a piece of fuse from his pocket, uncoiled it upon the table, and applied a match. It went off like a flash of dry gunpowder, burning through from end to end in a fraction of a second.
"Go on," said Ballard, speaking for the first time since the playwright had begun his unravelling of the tangled threads of disaster.
"We dismiss the quarry catastrophe and come to the fall of a great boulder from the hill-crags on the farther side of the river some two weeks later. This heaven-sent projectile smashed into the dam structure, broke out a chunk of the completed masonry, killed two men outright and injured half a dozen others—correct me if I distort the details, Mr. Bromley. This time there was no investigation worthy of the name, if I have gathered my information carefully enough. Other rocks had fallen from the same slope; and after Fitzpatrick had assured himself that there were no more likely to fall, the matter was charged off to the accident account. If you and Michael Fitzpatrick had been the typical coroner's jury, Mr. Bromley, you couldn't have been more easily satisfied with purely inferential evidence. I wasn't satisfied until I had climbed painfully to the almost inaccessible ledge from which the boulder had fallen. Once there, however, the 'act of God' became very plainly the act of man. The 'heel' used as a fulcrum in levering the rock from the ledge was still in place; and the man in the case, in his haste or in his indifference to discovery, had left the iron crowbar with which he had pried the stone from its bed. The crowbar is still there."
"Is that all?" asked Bromley, wetting his lips again.
"By no manner of means," was the equable rejoinder. "I could go on indefinitely. The falling derrick may or may not have been aimed specially at Macpherson; but it committed premeditated murder, just the same—the broken guy cable was rotted in two with acid. Again you will demand to know how I know. I satisfied myself by making a few simple tests on the broken ends with chemicals filched out of Colonel Craigmiles's laboratory up yonder in the second story of his electric plant. No; I'm no chemist. But you will find, when you come to write stories and plays, that a smattering knowledge of every man's trade comes in handy. Otherwise you'll be writing yourself down as a blundering ass in every second paragraph."
Wingfield paused, but it was only to relight his pipe. When the tobacco was burning again he went on, in the same even tone.
"The falling derrick brings us down to your régime, Mr. Ballard. I pass by the incident of the hurled stone that made that awkward patch necessary in your ceiling: you yourself have admitted that the stone could not have come from the blasting in the quarry. But there was another railroad accident which deserves mention. No doubt Hoskins has told you what he saw almost on the very spot where Braithwaite's snuffing-out occurred. He thought it was Braithwaite's ghost—he still thinks so. But we are less credulous; or, at least, I was. Like Sanderson, I have been making friends—or enemies—at the Craigmiles cattle ranch. In fact, I was down there the day following Hoskins's misfortune. Curiously enough, there was another man who saw the Braithwaite ghost—one 'Scotty,' a cow-boy. He was night-herding on the ranch bunch of beef cattle on the night of the accident, and he saw the ghost, leather leggings, Norfolk shooting-jacket, and double-visored British cap all complete, riding a horse down to the river a little while before the train came around the curve. And after the hullabaloo, he saw it again, riding quietly back to the ranch."
Bromley was gripping the edge of the table and exchanging glances with Ballard. It was the Kentuckian who broke the silence which fell upon the group around the table when the playwright made an end.
"Summing it all up, what is your conclusion, Wingfield? You have reached one long before this, I take it."