"You have light-fingered gentry here?" I queried.
"Oh, if anything were left lying around loose it might disappear. I don't take any chances because I leave that window open so that the conductors can throw their reports inside. There's one coming now," he said, looking up the line as we picked our way over the main track and two switches, toward the quarry under the bluff, about two hundred yards distant.
"Hiram, have you any theory at all about the disappearance of this case of dynamite?" I insisted.
"I don't believe it ever came here—I know the waybill called for ten cases, and the conductor of the local checks up everything as it comes out of the car on the platform, and they're careful and good fellows, but that day he had a lot of freight; he must have checked in another case to make up his ten—you know there's a lot of goods packed in cases about that size. I'm not worried; that case of dynamite never came here, and will show up somewhere else," he said definitely, and with complete candor, as we approached the three flat cars loaded with granite on the short quarry switch.
While he was taking the numbers I stopped and looked back at the disreputable-looking station house and D. R. Morgan's store and residence beyond, the pepper trees along the highway, and the dwindling sized houses behind them. Two or three mule teams with cotton bales could be seen creeping toward the station.
"Do you want to come over to the office and see the boss here? I must go in and give him a copy of these bills," he explained, looking over at a board shanty they called an office some distance away.
"No—I think not. Where do they store their explosives, Hiram?" I asked, not noticing the usual isolated brick or stone receptacle.
"They tunneled into the granite bluff about four hundred feet down the track. This road leads to it," he replied, pointing to a cart-track which led in that direction.
"You go and deliver your bills—I will stay and make a little diagram or map of the place." He glanced up the track at a heavily loaded locomotive laboring down toward the station, but when the engineer gave no signs of stopping he went over to the quarry office, while I took out my pencil and pad to make my map and notes.
As I drew with my pencil the full length of the pad to represent the railroad running midway between the river and the bluff, a most extraordinary thing occurred. I could not believe my senses. The point of my pencil sputtered like a parlor match, but before it reached the end of the pad it exploded like a firecracker and blackened the paper. In an instant I recalled having used my pencil to gouge some of the sticky stuff off the box Hiram, Jr., was using as a seat. I then knew positively it was the lost case of dynamite.