Ralph, the Train Dispatcher: or, The Mystery of the Pay Car
TekstCHAPTER XXV – A WILD NIGHT
“Tic-tac!”-“annul train 22-blockade at Fox Center”-“25-25-25-45 stalled at Morey Gap.” “Fast freight derailed-switch 19 outside of Abingdon.”
“Whew!” exploded the first trick man at dispatcher’s headquarters. “Did you get all that, Fairbanks?”
Ralph nodded, but did not speak. He was too busy for that. His hand was constantly on the key of his instrument, and his ear was bent with almost painful tension to catch every faint vibration of the wires. His eyes jumped with magic swiftness from chart to note sheet and train schedule. Ralph just now was a typical dispatcher in the midst of muddles, calls, cross-calls and piling up business enough to distract the average man. The young railroader confessed to himself that this was the busiest hour of his life.
It was a wild, stormy night outside, cozy enough in the warm, well-lighted dispatcher’s room. The wind without went howling by shrilly. Great sweeps of snow deluged the window panes. Whistles from the yards sounded hoarse and muffled. Inside that room skilled intelligence and vigilance controlled the midnight workings of the important Great Northern. In a picture view Ralph could see some belated locomotive breasting the drifts of lonely gully and curve. He could imagine a cumbersome freight feeling its way slowly past snow-clouded signals, marooned station men with their instruments knocked dead through fallen wires, and the venturesome repair crew wading through deep drifts to locate the break.
And a finger on the key controlled all this mix-up, and intent eye and brain tried to keep the various trains moving. As early as eight o’clock messages had begun to come in fast and thick telling of the great storm of wind and snow, the third of the season, that was sweeping over the Mountain Division of the Great Northern road.
At ten o’clock the commercial wires went out from Rockton, and a special operator now sat over in a corner of the dispatcher’s room at an extra instrument taking press news over a roundabout circuit. Everything went by jerks and starts. The insulation was bad and sometimes the sounders moved without giving out any intelligible vibration.
Towards eleven o’clock the rush was over on regular business, but the delayed train list began to pile up alarmingly. Everything was late. Within the next half hour two blockades, four stalled freights and two telegraph lines down were reported. It was now that Ralph was put distinctly on his mettle. Glidden watched him anxiously but admiringly from under his deep set eyebrows, and so far did not have to check up an error in orders or a mistake in judgment.
On either side of Ralph was a card. That on the right hand side had the names of all the stations from Stanley Junction to Rockton. The one on the left side had all the stations from Rockton to Stanley Junction. On both cards some of the stations had been crossed off, particularly on the right hand card. In fact only one station this side of terminus remained.
Glidden went quickly over to Ralph’s table as a message ticked out that both had been waiting for. With a somewhat triumphant smile Ralph checked off the last station with a dash of his pencil.
“Gone through, eh?” spoke Glidden with a grin.
“Safe and snug,” answered Ralph. “You heard-one hour late on account of the snow, but no attack.”
“Good thing for the conspirators,” observed Glidden. “Either they found out it was a trap or saw the half dozen armed guards inside.”
“Perhaps they fancied we knew too much and gave up the experiment of robbing the pay car.”
“Well, she’s through-now for the other one. How is it?”
“Heavy snow, but she’s making time,” reported Ralph, glancing at the remaining card. “83 is a hundred miles out of Rockton. Just passed Shoreham on the Mountain Division.”
“Say, those fellows will never guess what they’ve missed till it’s too late, hey?”
“It seems so,” nodded Ralph.
There was a lapse of messages now. Only the ceaseless grind of press dispatches clicked from the instrument over in the corner. Ralph sat back and took a breathing spell.
The pay car had gone through-the dummy pay car rather-which had left the Junction at eight o’clock that morning. It had been loaded up pretentiously with the apparent usual bags of coin and little safes that were used on regular trips. These, however, contained no money. The paymaster went aboard ostentatiously. The doors and windows were securely locked as usual. Inside, however, were half a dozen men armed to the teeth. The dummy pay car was a bait for the robbers. They had not appeared. The cypher message to Ralph just received told him that the train had reached terminus without hindrance or damage.
“Now for the other one,” Glidden had said. This meant a good deal. The “other one” was the real pay car, loaded with real treasure. To checkmate any possible attack, the railroad officials with great secrecy had loaded up an ordinary baggage car with the pay safes and bullion in transit for banks. It was proposed to distribute this in parcels at section centers out of the usual routine.
So far it looked as if it would be smooth sailing except for the snow storm. No. 83 was reported as having passed over one hundred miles on the route. There was a train hand on guard on the front platform of the car and two guards inside, according to the advices Ralph had received.
The impromptu pay car had been hitched to the rear of a long train of milk cars. This had been done because she was to be switched at four different points before she reached Stanley Junction. The pay safes had been boxed up and burlapped, giving the appearance of ordinary freight.
There was some inconsequential messages during the ensuing half hour. Then a chance to tally on the route card on Ralph’s table as No. 83 was reported to have passed Fletcher, one hundred and twenty-five miles out of Rockton.
Then the commercial wire slowed down for a spell. The operator got up, stretching his cramped fingers.
“Snow two feet on the level at Rockton,” he reported, “and coming down like an avalanche. Why don’t they send me 30? I’ve got the grist up to 29. Hello, here she comes. No, she don’t. Another item.”
The operator jumped to his instrument and began to flimsy the message. Ralph arose sharply from his chair. He had lost most of the message, but one part of it had caught his hearing.
It startled him, for a name had tapped out clear and distinct, a familiar name-Glen Palmer.
CHAPTER XXVI – AN AMAZING ANNOUNCEMENT
The press operator rapidly wrote out the message coming over the wire, took the finished sheet, folded it, and sent it down a chute. This led to the room below where messengers were waiting for the service. The duplicate sheet he slipped over a spindle. Ralph hurriedly reached his side.
“Let me look at that last flimsy, will you?”
“Cert,” bobbed the accommodating operator, handing it to Ralph.
The latter read the hurriedly traced lines with a falling face.
“That’s my 30,” announced the operator, shutting off his key and arising to drop work for the night.
Ralph paid no attention to him. The young railroader was conscious of a decidedly painful impression. He had heard nothing of Glen Palmer or his grandfather since the night the jumbled up “Look out for the pay car” telegram had arrived. Ralph, however, had frequently thought of the lad whom he had started in at the chicken farm.
Young Palmer had been disappointing. All along the line Ralph had to admit this. Once in a while, however, when he realized the lonely bedouin-like existence of Glen, certain pity and indulgence were evoked. Now, however, a grave, hurt look came into Ralph’s eyes.
“Too bad,” he said, softly and sorrowfully. “I fancy Bob Adair was right.”
The road detective had forcibly expressed the opinion that Glen Palmer had been a jail bird. More than that, Adair believed him to be in league with the conspirators. Ralph thought not. Glen had sent him two warning messages under extraordinary circumstances. The press telegram just over the wires, however, certainly coincided with the charges of Ike Slump that Glen was a criminal.
It was one of a batch of items that had come over the commercial line that evening. The message was dated at a small interior city, Fordham, and it read:
“The system adopted by the Bon Ton department store here to discourage theft, bore practical results today, and their publicly offered reward of ten dollars was claimed by an amateur detective. The latter discovered a boy in the act of removing a valuable ring from a display tray, and informed on him. The thief was searched and the stolen article found secreted on his person. He unblushingly admitted his guilt. The thief gave the name of Sam Jones, but some papers found on him disclosed his correct name, which is Glen Palmer. He was brought before Justice Davis, who sentenced him promptly to sixty days in the county workhouse.”
“What’s hitting you so glum, Fairbanks?” inquired Glidden, as Ralph kept poring over the telegram in a depressed way.
“A friend of mine gone wrong,” replied Ralph simply.
He was glad that he was not called on for any further explanation. Just then Tipton broke in with a crisp short wire-No. 83 had just passed, only fifteen minutes late.
“She’s getting in among the bad mountain cuts,” observed Glidden, as Ralph crossed off the station on his check card. “If the pull isn’t too hard, I reckon she’ll make her first switch nearly on time.”
There was now in the dispatcher’s room a dead calm of some duration. Glidden sat figuring up some details from the business of the night. Ralph rested back in his chair, thinking seriously of Glen Palmer, and wondering what mystery surrounded him and his grandfather.
The silence was broken finally with a sharp tanging challenge, always stimulating and startling to the operator. It was the manager’s call:
“25-25-25.”
Ralph swept his key in prompt response.
“Hello!” said the aroused Glidden, listening keenly, “thought Tipton was off for the night after 83 had passed. What’s-that!”
Ralph, deeply intent, took in the rapid tickings eagerly. The message was from the station which had reported No. 83 passed in good shape three-quarters of an hour before.
Here was the hurry message that came over the wire:
“83 something wrong. Just found brakeman of train lying in snow at side of track. Hurt or drugged. Mumbled about foul play. Catch Maddox and advise conductor of 83.”
“I say!” exclaimed Glidden, jumping to his feet. “Get Maddox, Fairbanks. 83 is due or passed.”
“M-x M-x-stop 83,” tapped Ralph quickly.
“Too late,” muttered Glidden in a sort of groan. “Thunder! she can’t be reached till she gets to Fairview, forty miles ahead.”
Maddox had wired back to headquarters the following message:
“83 just passed after coaling. Fairview reports four feet of snow in the cuts. No stop this side.”
Then Ralph did the only thing he could. He wired to the operator at Fairview:
“Hold 83 on arrival for special orders.”
The sleepy look left Glidden’s eyes and Ralph was all nerved up. There had come a break in the progress of the substitute pay car, and both felt anxiously serious as to its significance.
“There’s something mighty wrong in this business,” declared Glidden.
“It looks that way,” assented Ralph.
“Get Tipton.”
Ralph called over the wire and repeated.
“Something has shut out Tipton,” he reported.
“Wires down or cut,” observed Glidden. “Try Maddox.”
Ralph did so.
“Maddox not open,” he said. His mind ran over the situation. He recalled a night like this when he and Fireman Fogg had run alone a battered locomotive over the same stretch of road on a Special for President Grant of the Great Northern. It had been a hairbreadth experience, and he wondered if No. 83 would get through.
One o’clock-two o’clock. The young dispatcher and his first trick man found it hard to endure the irksome monotony of those two anxious hours. It was like a tensioned cord breaking when at last the welcome call from Fairview came over the wires.
“83,” the message ticked out, “crippled; six feet of snow ahead, and will have to lay over. Send orders.”
“She’s got through safe, that’s a consolation,” said Glidden, with a vast sigh of satisfaction.
Ralph simply clicked an “O. K.” It had been arranged that at Fairview the conductor would wire for instructions. These had been purposely withheld for secrecy’s sake. A transfer of two pay safes was due at the next station and Ralph waited, knowing that as soon as he could leave his train the conductor would send a personal message.
Suddenly the instrument began to click again.
“From conductor 83: metaphor, resolve, adirondacks, typists.”
“What!” shouted Glidden, jumping to his feet in a frenzy.
Ralph’s hand shook and the color left his face.
Translated, the message from the conductor of train No. 83 meant:
“The substitute pay car has disappeared.”
CHAPTER XXVII – THE STOLEN PAY CAR
Long before the whistles blew for seven o’clock at Stanley Junction the news had spread like wildfire-train No. 83, carrying the substitute pay car, containing two hundred thousand dollars in cash and a king’s ransom in bullion for the banks, had disappeared.
Somewhere between Fairview and Maddox, the time, and means unknown, the car containing all this treasure had been boldly stolen, disconnected from the train, had vanished.
One minute after receiving the startling cypher message, Ralph had telephoned to the superintendent of the road at his home in Stanley Junction. Within an hour that official and two assistants in hastily donned garb and with perturbed faces were at headquarters trying to solve a situation enshrouded in the densest mystery.
The wires were kept hot with messages to and from Fairview. The conductor of No. 83 could simply repeat his amazing story. When the train arrived at Maddox they found the precious treasure car missing. Their crippled engine could not be brought into service. The snow-clogged rails offered no chance for a hand car.
Had the car broken loose? was the question put. No, was the answer. The bumper of the last milk car showed no evidences of unusual strain or break. The coupling pin had simply been removed, how far back the line it was impossible to surmise, certainly between Fairview and Maddox.
And then, linking in the discovery of the brakeman lying drugged or hurt at the side of the track by the station agent at Tipton, the irresistible conclusion was arrived at by the anxious railroad officials that their careful plans to delude the conspirators and safely get the substitute pay car through had failed utterly.
There was only one thing to do. This was to make an immediate search for the missing car. Belleville, ten miles distant from Fairview, was wired an urgency call. The snowplow service with one caboose was ordered out. The division superintendent at Belleville was instructed concerning the situation, and at four a. m. the train started for Fairview, to plow its way back over the route of No. 83 to seek a trace of the missing car.
It was before daylight when a report came in. Nowhere along the sharp curves or deep gullies of the route was a single trace of the car discovered. It had disappeared as absolutely and completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed it up.
The falling snow had obliterated all recent marks on its surface. By the merest chance, ten miles out of Maddox, the division superintendent had noticed a small mound that was unfamiliar. Stopping the train, an investigation disclosed the two guards who had been locked in the pay car when it left Rockton.
It had been hard work to arouse the men, but finally one of them was restored to consciousness sufficiently to relate a clear story.
Their instructions had been simple-to use their rifles if any stranger attempted to enter the car on its journey. Between stations the brakeman on duty on the rear platform of the car was allowed to enter to get warm. He had always, however, given an agreed-on signal at the door of the car.
It was just after leaving Tipton that his familiar knock had called one of them to the door to let him in. Taken completely off their guard, as four men one after the other jumped in among them, the guards had no opportunity to seize their firearms. They had been knocked down on the floor of the car, cloths drugged with some subtle acid had been held over their faces. They knew no more until they had been discovered by the division superintendent.
“It’s easy to guess it out,” whispered Glidden to Ralph while the officials in the room were piecing all these bits of information together.
“Yes,” responded Ralph, “the conspirators in some way received advance information of every step we intended to make.”
“They must have got aboard secretly beyond Tipton, or have been hidden in the last milk car,” suggested Glidden. “They jumped on and doped the brakeman, disposed of him, later of the two guards, and were in possession. The division superintendent reports that the wires were found cut just out of Tipton. The crowd had planned out everything to a second, with conspirators posted all along the line.”
“But the missing car,” said Ralph thoughtfully; “what has become of it?”
Neither he nor Glidden could figure out a solution of this difficult problem. Even the experienced official after a long confab gave it up. The only thing they could do was to order a hasty search for Bob Adair, the road detective, to rush to the spot with all the force he needed.
The superintendent spoke pleasantly to Ralph and Glidden as the day force relieved them. He even forgot his anxieties long enough to commend them for the hard work they had done and the close tab they had kept on all the occurrences of the night.
“It’s a bad mess for the Great Northern,” he said with a worried face, “and it proves that our enemies are not as dull as we thought they were.”
Ralph went home tired out. He found it hard, however, to get to sleep. The strain and excitement of the preceding twelve hours told severely on his nerves. All through the morning his vivid dreams were of snow blockades, cut wires, and stolen treasure cars.
On account of their special service on behalf of the pay car affair, Glidden and himself were relieved from duty for twenty-four hours. The old dispatcher dropped in at the Fairbanks home shortly after noon.
“Have they found any trace of the missing pay car?” at once inquired Ralph.
“Stolen, you mean,” corrected Glidden. “No. Theories? Lots of them. She was simply cut off from the train. She couldn’t have derailed, for there’s no trace of that unless she went up in the air. Of course, whoever manipulated her sent her off on a siding among the mountains on a down grade.”
“And that is the last known of it. Well, what later?”
“Adair will be over to find out soon, or else he won’t,” retorted Glidden crisply. “You know that web of old abandoned sidings and spurs branching out the other side of Maddox?”
“Near Eagle Pass, you mean?”
“Yes. The superintendent thinks the car will be found somewhere on the branches, looted, of course, for the robbers have had hours to handle the booty.”
Nothing but theory, however, resulted from official investigations during the ensuing two days. The following Monday morning the assistant superintendent met Ralph on his way to work. The missing car problem was still unsolved, he told the young railroader.
Adair and his men had explored every spur and siding the entire length of Eagle Pass. Not a trace of the stolen car had been discovered, and the road officer was working on a theory that it might have been run off on connecting private switches onto the Midland Central, and the collusion of important influences exercised.
When Ralph got home that evening he found an old time friend awaiting him. It was Zeph Dallas, just arrived.
“Why, hello!” hailed Ralph heartily, walking into the sitting room where he had spied Zeph. “I’m glad to see you, Zeph-why, what’s the matter?”
Zeph was indeed an object to excite wonderment and attention. His face was about the forlornest that Ralph had ever seen. His eyes were like two holes burned in his head, his clothes were wrinkled as if he had slept in them for a week.
In a limp, hopeless fashion the “boy detective,” all his plumes of ambition sadly trailing in the dust of humiliation and defeat, allowed his hand to rest lifelessly in that of Ralph. His throat choked up with a sob, and his eyes filled with tears.
“Ralph,” he almost whispered, “they’ve fooled me, I’m beaten out.”
“You mean the men who stole the pay car?”
“Yes; oh, they put it over on me good. They pulled the wool over my eyes. I thought I had them, and they let me think so. I’ve got to find them, I’ve got to make good, or I’ll never hold up my head in Stanley Junction again.”
“You did the best you could, I am sure, Zeph,” encouraged Ralph soothingly.
“The best won’t do!” almost shouted out Zeph. “There’s got to be better. Oh, Ralph, it will break my heart if I fail. I’ve got to find that stolen pay car, and you’ve got to help me.”