Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 14/Number 3/Signals Against Him/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
THU MISSING NIGHT MAN.
BLACK clouds were rolling across the sky, and a wind that smelled of rain sprang up as Harding started down the mountainside. The wind was from the northwest, and it blew him along and increased his difficulties.
The grades were steep, and the little speeder needed a curb, rather than a spur, every foot of the way. With the gale at his back, Harding exerted his strength against the jumping levers. Hard work had strengthened his muscles, but they buckled under the fierce strain he imposed on them.
The question that early presented itself to. him was this: Could he hold out until he reached the foot of that twisting twenty-mile grade? There was but one answer to that question: He must hold out, for if the speeder got beyond his control, it would leave the rails and either maim or kill him.
Before he had dropped two miles down that treacherous descent, the whipping wind had snuffed out his lantern. By then the night was so black he could. scarcely see the thrashing levers in front of him. He was bowling onward at terrific speed, grinding around curves and darting over trestles, flinging madly onward into depths it was impossible to see.
To loosen his feet from the stirrups, or his fingers from the handle bars, meant that the levers could never be recovered. Under the momentum of the car the levers were jumping back and forth in a frenzy almost demoniacal. He fought with them, gritting his teeth and calling upon the last ounce of his strength. The battle, time and again, fairly lifted him from the seat, threatening to hurl him at the trackside while the car itself charged wildly on.
Then the rain came, driving down on him in a flood. His hat was torn from his head, the wet hair tumbled about his eyes, and he was drenched through and through; but still the levers tore at him as though seeking to batter him, cripple him, and toss him to his doom on the rocks of the right of way.
Lightning zigzagged out of the inky clouds. In the glare he might have taken some account of his desperate situation had the rain not blinded him. As it was, he was conscious of no more than a dull gleam through the curtain of water. The ripping roar of the thunder seemed to shake the whole mountain.
Never before had his endurance been tried as it was then. He held to his work because his life depended on it, and if he had one thought apart from his task of checking the car's speed it was a curse upon his heedlessness for not waiting at Divide for a ride with Kent.
But, as Harding had told O'Grady, Fortune had him by the elbow, and he was doing her will. Impulse had mastered him, and he had pinned his faith to impulse as the urging of destiny.
His brain grew fagged, and he dropped into a half trance from which he roused, now and again, to find his hands and feet keeping up the struggle against the momentum of the speeder. Self-preservation persisted in holding him to that trying ordeal, even when his faculties failed him.
To guess at the passing time was beyond him. Hours may have passed, or only minutes; he could not tell. He was conscious only of those beating levers, and of the necessity of keeping up the fight.
At last the jumping fiends in front of him lost their energy. He realized that they were battling with less and less vigor against his aching muscles. Tired as he was, he mastered them. The speeder stopped, and he drooped side ways from the seat and fell sprawling beside the rails. After that, his mind plunged into total darkness.
How long he was unconscious was a point which did not interest him. Reason returned, and that was enough. He sat up in the gravel and discovered that the rain had ceased, that station lights and the red eyes of switch lamps were in front of him, and that he was still alive.
Aching and bruised and soaking wet, he managed to regain his feet. With a trembling hand he wiped the sweat from his eyes, and stared through the dark toward the station. He knew, then, that, beyond all doubt, he had negotiated the mountainside in safety and had reached Cardigan.
With a final mustering of his strength he hauled the speeder from the track and stumbled to the station platform, and along it to the door of the waiting room. Staggering into the station, he made his way mechanically to the cubby-hole given over to the operator. But there was no operator in sight.
A chair in front of the operator's table was overturned, an iron letter press had been knocked from its stand and lay under the ticket case, and there was a scattering of papers about the floor. Harding set the chair upright and dropped into it.
His jaded wits were asking what all this could mean? Where was the night man at Cardigan? What had happened in that room?
Oppressed somehow with a feeling of calamity, Harding's eyes wandered vacantly here and there. A clip on the table held a print of bloody fingers. He picked it up, stated at the red marks, and the omen of calamity was lost in a sensation of panic.
There had been foul play in that room! But who had been the cause of it? And what was the motive?
Excitement brought fresh strength to Harding's faltering limbs. He looked around the place for the night man; he called to him, but all without result. The man on the night trick at Cardigan was mysteriously, tragically missing!
There was nothing at Cardigan but the station, a water tank, a store, and a boarding house. It was at the foot of the big grade, however, and was so important as an order point that a night man was a necessity.
Harding, racking his brain for some solution of the mystery, leaned against the table. Then he became aware that the key was steadily snapping the call “Cn, Cn, Cn.” It was the dispatcher calling Cardigan. How long that call had been echoing, unanswered, through the operator's room, Harding did not know; but his fingers jumped to the key, and he slumped into the chair. “I, I, Cn,” he rapped out.
The dispatcher had been calling for fifteen minutes and wanted to know where the deuce he had been. Harding, with the beautiful, flowing Morse he always used—Morse whose brilliancy racked limbs and tired muscles could not dim—explained that the regular night man was missing.
“No need to tell me that,” said the dispatcher, “from your sending I know you're neither Higgins, the night man, nor Blake, of the day trick. Who are you?”
And then, very calmly, and with a touch of pride, the weary but determined job hunter spelled it out—“William Horace Harding.” Then the sounder stuttered, symbolizing a gasp of astonishment—perhaps of consternation—by the man in charge of the train sheet.
“How you got there, or what's happened to Higgins, will have to wait,” said the instrument. “Cloudburst and washout at Hesperus, and engine and two cars of fast freight in the ditch. Wrecking outfit just leaving here for over the mountain. Number Twenty-eight left Divide two-fifteen. Hold and back into the clear for Wreck Extra.”
“S. D.” reported Harding, meaning that a stop signal was displayed to catch Twenty-eight with fresh orders. Then he added, “Signal displayed ever since I got here.”
“That's queer,” came from the man at the other end of the wire; “Higgins had no orders to hold Twenty-eight. If Twenty-eight isn't in sight, run over to boarding house and get Blake on the job.”
There it was! The same old distrust of Hardluck Harding was cropping out. Perhaps it was only natural that the dispatcher should want a regular employee of the road on the job instead of a chance outsider. Harding was worn and tired, and an easy prey to bitterness. He had little time to consider the matter, and left the key to hurry out on the station platform.
A hill to the west hid trains approaching from that direction until they were close upon the Cardigan station. That hill should have been leveled, and the scheme of improvements now inaugurated over the division embraced its cutting away, but the engineers had not yet got around to it. Harding could neither see nor hear anything of Twenty-eight, and he dashed across the three hundred yards of open to the boarding house.
His loud summons was answered by a head from an upper window. Blake wasn't at home. He had gone to a dance at a ranch, miles away in the hills, and wouldn't be back till morning. Harding laughed grimly as he turned back.
“It's up to me to find Higgins,” he thought, “and if I can't find him in time it's up to me to lay out the fast mail and express and give the wreckers a clear track through Cardigan.”
He reasoned swiftly as to what had happened. The fast freight that had gone into the ditch at Hesperus, followed Twenty-eight, the fast mail and express. Hesperus lay to the west of the mountain about as Cardigan lay to the east.
News of the washout had not reached Crook City in time to catch. Twenty-eight with a change of orders at Divide, and usually Twenty-eight went through Cardigan like greased lightning. The wreckers had been started from division headquarters with orders to run regard less of other trains clear to their destination, the dispatcher figuring on get ting instructions to Cardigan well ahead of the wreckers and in time to get Twenty-eight on the siding.
Usually on such a night as that had been, the wrecking crew slept in a waycar at the tail of a derrick, with an engine under steam and ready for any call. Something was always bound to go wrong on that Jerkwater Division, if given half a chance.
As Harding hit the station platform on his return to the operator's room, he stopped short. The stop signal had been taken in!
Now what the blazes could that mean? Who had been interfering with a signal that meant so much to lives and property as that one? With an angry exclamation, he started along the platform at a run, only to bump into some one who staggered across his path.
“Who are you?” demanded Harding, drawing back to peer at the form that stood swaying before him.
“Help! I want help!” came an answer, in a choking voice.
“Who are you?” shouted Harding again.
“Higgins,” was the gasping response, “Higgins, the night man. And I—I'm all shot up. Just came to my senses and crawled out of the baggage room.”
“Did you take in that stop signal?”
“Yes! I”
Harding would have rushed on, for away off in the direction of Crook City he caught the faint gleam of a headlight. The wreckers were coming, and it was a certainty that Twenty-eight was even closer at hand.
But Harding did not go far. Higgins flung out his arms and grabbed him desperately.
“Wait!” mumbled the night man; “you don't understand. Two men jumped me in the ticket office. One hit me with the ticket stamp and the other put a bullet through my shoulder. I went down, but I kept my wits for a few minutes. I heard 'em talk. They're planning to stop Twenty-eight with the signal and hold up the express messenger. There's treasure on the fast train to-night”
Harding was astounded. It was the holdup men who had set the stop signal, after murderously assaulting Higgins and throwing him, badly wounded, into the baggage room. Higgins, reviving, knew of that, but did not know of the washout, the Wreck Extra, or the fresh orders for Twenty-eight—and he had changed the signal, in order to foil the would-be robbers, and thereby thrown Twenty-eight against the wreckers!
Harding, at that moment, became conscious of a muffled rattle and roar behind him; and he whirled to see the gleam of Twenty-eight's headlight around the hill!