A Close Call
Billy Gorcher did some swift wheel-rolling on the stretch of straight track where our "betterment" campaign had already begun to get in its good work. We had orders against a fast freight coming eastward at Banta, and we made the eighteen miles in a little over twenty minutes, shooting in on the siding at Banta just as the headlight of the freight was showing up in the western hills beyond the town.
From Banta on, we took it a bit easier—had to. The track was pretty crooked among the hills and Gorcher hit the curves like a man who knew his trade and didn't mean to put us into the ditch.
At the "Y" siding we stopped—without going on to the gravel track where Gorcher had seen the lost 1016—and Kirgan and I got off with a lantern. This was because, on the way down, I had managed to tell the big master-mechanic about the Cantrell talk, though I hadn't succeeded in making him believe that it accounted for Mr. Norcross's drop-out. Just the same he humored me by having Billy Gorcher stop, and now he was trying to make me take it sort of slow and easy as we stumbled out toward the stem of the "Y." That was Kirgan's way. He was as hard as nails with a gang of men, but he could be as soft-hearted as any woman when a fellow was all in. And he knew I wasn't half "at myself" yet, physically.
"Don't you get too much hope up, Jimmie," he was saying, as we humped along around the crooking track of the "Y." "We ain't goin' to find anything out yonder but a rusty loggin' track and that broken rail connection. You see, I've been here before, and I know."
He was as right as could be. When we reached the end of the "Y" there was the broken connection, just as he'd said. The old saw-mill track was still there, leading off in the dark up the gulch, but the two switch rails had been taken out and the switch itself was as rusty as if it hadn't been used in years.
"What you heard from Mr. Cantrell may have been all true enough," Kirgan said, while I stood swallowing hard and staring down at the broken rail connection, "only it didn't have anything to do with the Big Boss. Them thugs was probably plannin' to wreck the Mail, all right, and they came down here to do it. The Lord only knows why they didn't do it; p'raps there wasn't time enough, after they'd got the 'Sixteen in on the gravel track."
I only just about half heard what he was saying. He had the lantern, and its light fell squarely upon a cross-tie a foot or two beyond where we were standing. It was the last tie in the empty string from which the two rails had been taken up to break the connection with the lighter saw-mill track steel, and what I was looking at was a fresh spike hole; fresh beyond all question of doubt because there was a clean new splinter of the wood sticking up beside it—a splinter that had been broken out when the spike was pulled.
I took the lantern from Kirgan in my one good hand, and he stood there waiting for me while I walked on out to the chopped-off end of the saw-mill track, examining the loose ties as I went along. There were fresh spike holes in some of the others; just one here and there. But that was enough. After I had knelt to hold the lantern close to the rails of the rusty timber track I knew my hunch was all right.
"Come here, Mart!" I called, and when he came, I showed him the new holes and new wheel-marks on the old rusty rails of the timber track that proved as clear as daylight that an engine or a train had been over them away this side of the rains and the snows that had rusted them.