"I can tell you that right now. He is hooked to Number Seven, and is due here to-morrow at 11:15, unless his old special car makes her late."
CHAPTER XIX
So far I had regarded Miss Bascom as one of the hundreds of others that just chanced to take the place of the men who had been drafted from the railroad employees. They came from everywhere, cities, villages and rural districts, and substitutes for man-power were in such demand that "no questions" was the rule; no disposition to "look a gift horse in the mouth" or even to see if they had a spavin, ringbone, or inflicted with "string halt."
Very likely she may have written the anonymous suggestion to Hiram. I did know that she entered the back room of a hotel with Becker and had received his embraces and proposals, which would surely shock a maiden's ears, but admittedly she did not drink, and she had acted with singular astuteness.
I knew she was flirting with Burrell, the chief clerk, and that Becker and Burrell frequented low places together. Altogether it looked as though she was playing a double rôle and I was not at all sure just where I fitted into the planning going on in her head, although I'll admit the latter was very attractive.
At once I decided to put her to a test that would make each blonde hair stand without support, and the opportunity came sooner than I expected.
As the warehouse to which Superintendent Kitchell referred was not far away, I went there before keeping my noon appointment with Hiram. It was, as he said, a veritable graveyard of disappointed hopes and plans gone wrong—bleached, grinning skeletons of blue-sky finance and religio-political scheming reduced to the irreducible. They couldn't even pay the freight to New Orleans, not to mention their Gulf and Caribbean destinations.
Shippers always receive money in advance for antiquated or experimental devices from their "bone-yard" and therefore they had no further interest. Cannon, more deadly at the breech, airships that would do everything but fly, rifles rejected by shop inspectors, cartridges that wouldn't explode, and so on. Threshing machines and engines, sawmills and agricultural implements, cases of rifles and cartridges and other war-like material in astonishing abundance—but nothing apparently for our purpose. I did observe a big case made of two-inch lumber, heavily iron-bound, that might contain an engine or motor, but I needed help to reach it.