I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie—which wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the major's—when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point: "What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."
I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr. Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody—the New York people, perhaps—had wired him that a new general manager had been appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had become of him, Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago!
Gee! but that brought on more talk—a whaling lot of it. I meant to find out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.
It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice sounded that she was mightily excited.
"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"
I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient, "Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the Mountaineer. He called the house to try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."
That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the Mountaineer office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.
"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper aside.
"Yes; just a minute ago."
"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One of our young men—Branderby—has a clue; a very slight one. He has discovered—in some way that he didn't care to explain over the phone—that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared. From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"