The Taming of Red Butte Western

by Francis Lynde

  XVI

  THE SHADOWGRAPH

  Forty-two miles south-west of Angels, at a point where all furtherprogress seems definitely barred by the huge barrier of the greatmountain range, the Red Butte Western, having picked its devious way toan apparent _cul-de-sac_ among the foot-hills and hogbacks, plungesabruptly into the echoing canyon of the Eastern Timanyoni.

  For forty added miles the river chasm, throughout its length a narrow,tortuous crevice, with sheer and towering cliffs for its walls, affordsa precarious footing for the railway embankment, leading the double lineof steel with almost sentient reluctance, as it seems, through themighty mountain barrier. At its western extremity the canyon forms thegate-way to a shut-in valley of upheaved hills and inferior mountainsisolated by wide stretches of rolling grassland. To the eastward andwestward of the great valley rise the sentinel peaks of the twoenclosing mountain ranges; and across the shut-in area the riverplunges from pool to pool, twisting and turning as the craggy anddensely forested lesser heights constrain it.

  Red Butte, the centre of the evanescent mining excitement which wasoriginally responsible for the building of the railroad, lieshigh-pitched among the shouldering spurs of the western boundary range.Seeking the route promising the fewest cuts and fills and the easiestgrades, Chandler, the construction chief of the building company, hadfollowed the south bank of the river to a point a short distance beyondthe stream-fronting cliffs of the landmark hill known as Little Butte;and at the station of the same name he had built his bridge across theTimanyoni and swung his line in a great curve for the northward climbamong the hogbacks to the gold-mining district in which Red Butte wasthe principal camp.

  Elsewhere than in a land of sky-piercing peaks and continent-crestinghighlands, Little Butte would have been called a true mountain. On theengineering maps of the Red Butte Western its outline appears as aroughly described triangle with five-mile sides, the three angles of thefigure marked respectively by Silver Switch, Little Butte station andbridge, and the Wire-Silver mine.

  Between Silver Switch and the bridge station, the main line of therailroad follows the base of the triangle, with the precipitous bluffsof the big hill on the left and the torrenting flood of the Timanyoni onthe right. Along the eastern side of the triangle, and leaving the maintrack at Silver Switch, ran the spur which had formerly served theWire-Silver when the working opening of the mine had been on the easternslope of the ridge-like hill. For some years previous to the summer ofoverturnings this spur had been disused, though its track, ending amonga group of the old mine buildings five miles away, was still incommission.

  Along the western side of the triangle, with Little Butte station forits point of divergence from the main line, ran the new spur, built toaccommodate Flemister after he had dug through the hill, ousted therightful owner of the true Wire-Silver vein, and had transferred hislabor hamlet and his plant--or the major part of both--to the westernslope of the butte, at this point no more than a narrow ridge separatingthe eastern and western gulches.

  Train 205, with ex-engineer Judson apparently sound asleep in one of therearward seats of the day coach, was on time when it swung out of thelower canyon portal and raced around the curves and down the grades inits crossing of Timanyoni Park. At Point-of-Rocks Judson came awakesufficiently to put his face to the window, with a shading hand to cutoff the car lights; but having thus located the train's placement in thePark-crossing race, he put his knees up against the back of theadjoining seat, pulled his cap over his eyes, and to all outwardappearances went to sleep again. Four or five miles farther along,however, there came a gentle grinding of brake-shoes upon the chilledwheel-treads that aroused him quickly. Another flattening of his noseagainst the window-pane showed him the familiar bulk of Little Buttelooming black in the moonlight, and a moment later he had let himselfsilently into the rear vestibule of the day coach, and was as silentlyopening the folding doors of the vestibule itself.

  Hanging off by the hand-rails, he saw the engine's headlight pick up theswitch-stand of the old spur. The train was unmistakably slowing now,and he made ready to jump if the need should arise, picking his place atthe track side as the train lights showed him the ground. As the speedwas checked, Judson saw what he was expecting to see. Precisely at theinstant of the switch passing, a man dropped from the forward step ofthe smoker and walked swiftly away up the disused track of the oldspur. Judson's turn came a moment later, and when his end of the daycoach flicked past the switch-stand he, too, dropped to the ground, and,waiting only until he could follow without being detected, set out afterthe tall figure, which was by that time scarcely more than an indistinctand retreating blur in the moonlight.

  The chase led directly up the old spur, but it did not continue quite tothe five-mile-distant end of it. A few hundred yards short of thestockade enclosing the old buildings the shadowy figure took to theforest and began to climb the ridge, going straight up, as nearly asJudson could determine. The ex-engineer followed, still keeping hisdistance. From the first bench above the valley level he looked back anddown into the stockade enclosure. All of the old buildings were dark,but one of the two new and unpainted ones was brilliantly lighted, andthere were sounds familiar enough to Judson to mark it as theWire-Silver power-house. Notwithstanding his interest in the chase,Judson was curious enough to stand a moment listening to the sharplydefined exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine driving thegenerators.

  "Say!" he ejaculated, under his breath, "if that engine ain't a deadmatch for the old 216 pullin' a grade, I don't want a cent! Doublecylinder, set on the quarter, and _choo-chooin_' like it ought to have apair o' steel rails under it. If I had time I'd go down yonder and breaka winder in that power-shack; blamed if I wouldn't!"

  But, unhappily, there was no time to spare; as it was, he had lingeredtoo long, and when he came out upon the crest of the narrow ridge andattained a point of view from which he could look down upon thebuildings clustering at the foot of the western slope, he had lost thescent. The tall man had disappeared as completely and suddenly as if theearth had opened and swallowed him.

  This, in Judson's prefiguring, was a small matter. The tall man, whomthe ex-engineer had unmistakably recognized at the moment oftrain-forsaking as Rankin Hallock, was doubtless on his way toFlemister's head-quarters at the foot of the western slope. Why heshould take the roundabout route up the old spur and across themountain, when he might have gone on the train to Little Butte stationand so have saved the added distance and the hard climb, was a questionwhich Judson answered briefly: for some reason of his own, Hallock didnot wish to be seen going openly to the Wire-Silver head-quarters. Hencethe drop from the train at Silver Switch and the long tramp up thegulch and over the ridge.

  Forecasting it thus, Judson lost no time on the summit of mysteriousdisappearances. Choosing the shortest path he could find which promisedto lead him down to the mining hamlet at the foot of thewestward-fronting slope, he set his feet in it and went stumbling downthe steep declivity, bringing up, finally, on a little bench just abovethe mine workings. Here he stopped to get his breath and his bearings.From his halting-place the mine head-quarters building lay just belowhim, at the right of the tunnel entrance to the mine. It was a long logbuilding of one story, with warehouse doors in the nearer gable andlighted windows to mark the location of the offices at the opposite end.

  Making a detour to dodge the electric-lighted tunnel mouth, Judsoncarefully reconnoitred the office end of the head-quarters building.There was a door, with steps giving upon the down-hill side, and therewere two windows, both of which were blank to the eye by reason of thedrawn-down shades. Two persons, at least, were in the lighted room;Judson could hear their voices, but the thick log walls muffled thesounds to an indistinct murmur. On the mountain-facing side of thebuilding, which was in shadow, the ex-engineer searched painstakinglyfor some open chink or cranny between the logs, but there was no avenueof observation either for the eye or the ear. Just as he had made up hismind to risk the moonlight on the other
side of the head-quarters, asound like the moving of chairs on a bare floor made him dodge quicklybehind the bole of a great mountain pine which had been left standing atthe back of the building. The huge tree was directly opposite one of thewindows, and when Judson looked again the figure of a man sitting in achair was sharply silhouetted on the drawn window-shade.

  Judson stared, rubbed his eyes, and stared again. It had never occurredto him before that the face of a man, viewed in blank profile, coulddiffer so strikingly from the same face as seen eye to eye. That the manwhose shadow was projected upon the window-shade was Rankin Hallock, hecould not doubt. The bearded chin, the puffy lips, the prominent nosewere all faithfully outlined in the exaggerated shadowgraph. But the hatwas worn at an unfamiliar angle, and there was something in the erect,bulking figure that was still more unfamiliar. Judson backed away andstared again, muttering to himself. If he had not traced Hallock almostto the door of Flemister's quarters, there might have been room for thethin edge of the doubt wedge. The unfamiliar pose and the rakish tilt ofthe soft hat were not among the chief clerk's rememberedcharacteristics; but making due allowance for the distortion of themagnified facial outline, the profile was Hallock's.

  Having definitely settled for himself the question of identity, Judsonrenewed his search for some eavesdropping point of vantage. Risking themoonlight, he twice made the circuit of the occupied end of thebuilding. There was a line of light showing under the ill-fitting door,and with the top step of the down-hill flight for a perching-place onemight lay an ear to the crack and overhear. But door and steps weresharply struck out in the moonlight, and they faced the mining hamletwhere the men of the day shift were still stirring.

  Judson knew the temper of the Timanyoni miners. To be seen crouching onthe boss's doorstep would be to take the chance of making a target ofhimself for the first loiterer of the day shift who happened to look hisway. Dismissing the risky expedient, he made a third circuit frommoon-glare to shadow, this time upon hands and knees. To the lowly comethe rewards of humility. Framed level upon stout log pillars on thedown-hill side, the head-quarters warehouse and office sheltered a spacebeneath its floor which was roughly boarded up with slabs from thelog-sawing. Slab by slab the ex-engineer sought for his rat-hole, tryingeach one softly in its turn. When there remained but three more to betugged at, the loosened one was found. Judson swung it cautiously asideand wriggled through the narrow aperture left by its removal. A crawlingminute later he was crouching beneath the loosely jointed floor of thelighted room, and the avenue of the ear had broadened into a fairhighway.

  Almost at once he was able to verify his guess that there were only twomen in the room above. At all events, there were only two speakers. Theywere talking in low tones, and Judson had no difficulty in identifyingthe rather high-pitched voice of the owner of the Wire-Silver mine. Theman whose profile he had seen on the window-shade had the voice whichbelonged to the outlined features, but the listener under the floor hada vague impression that he was trying to disguise it. Judson knewnothing about the letter in which Flemister had promised to arrange fora meeting between Lidgerwood and the ranchman Grofield. What he did knowwas that he had followed Hallock almost to the door of Flemister'soffice, and that he had seen a shadowed face on the office window-shadewhich could be no other than the face of the chief clerk. It was inspite of all this that the impression that the second speaker was tryingto disguise his voice persisted. But the ex-engineer of fastpassenger-trains was able to banish the impression after the first fewminutes of eavesdropping.

  Judson had scarcely found his breathing space between the floor timbers,and had not yet overheard enough to give him the drift of the low-tonedtalk, when the bell of the private-line telephone rang in the roomabove. It was Flemister who answered the bell-ringer.

  "Hello! Yes; this is Flemister.... Yes, I say; _this_ is Flemister;you're talking to him.... What's that?--a message about Mr.Lidgerwood?... All right; fire away."

  "Who is it?" came the inquiry, in the grating voice which fitted, andyet did not fit, the man whom Judson had followed from his boarding ofthe train at Angels to Silver Switch, and from the gulch of the old spurto his disappearance on the wooded slope of Little Butte ridge.

  The listener heard the click of the telephone ear-piece replacement.

  "It's Goodloe, talking from his station office at Little Butte,"replied the mine owner. "The despatcher has just called him up to saythat Lidgerwood left Angels in his service-car, running special, ateight-forty, which would figure it here at about eleven, or a littlelater."

  "Who is running it?" inquired the other man rather anxiously, Judsondecided.

  "Williams and Bradford. A fool for luck, every time. We might have hadto _ecraser_ a couple of our friends."

  The French was beyond Judson, but the mine-owner's tone supplied themissing meaning, and the listener under the floor had a sensation likethat which might be produced by a cold wind blowing up the nape of hisneck.

  "There is no such thing as luck," rasped the other voice. "My time wasdamned short--after I found out that Lidgerwood wasn't coming on thepassenger. But I managed to send word to Matthews and Lester, tellingthem to make sure of Williams and Bradford. We could spare both of them,if we have to."

  "Good!" said Flemister. "Then you had some such alternative in mind asthat I have just been proposing?"

  "No," was the crusty rejoinder. "I was merely providing for thehundredth chance. I don't like your alternative."

  "Why don't you?"

  "Well, for one thing, it's needlessly bloody. We don't have to go atthis thing like a bull at a gate. I've had my finger on the pulse ofthings ever since Lidgerwood took hold. The dope is working all right ina purely natural way. In the ordinary run of things, it will be only afew days or weeks before Lidgerwood will throw up his hands and quit,and when he goes out, I go in. That's straight goods this time."

  "You thought it was before," sneered Flemister, "and you got beautifullyleft." Then: "You're talking long on 'naturals' and the 'ordinary run ofthings,' but I notice you schemed with Bart Rufford to put him out ofthe fight with a pistol bullet!"

  Judson felt a sudden easing of strains. He had told McCloskey that hewould be willing to swear to the voice of the man whom he had overheardplotting with Rufford in Cat Biggs's back room. Afterward, after he hadsufficiently remembered that a whiskey certainty might easily lead up toa sober perjury, he had admitted the possible doubt. But now Flemister'staunt made assurance doubly sure. Moreover, the arch-plotter was notdenying the fact of the conspiracy with "The Killer."

  "Rufford is a blood-thirsty devil--like yourself," the other man wassaying calmly. "As I have told you before, I've discovered Lidgerwood'sweakness--he can't call a sudden bluff. Rufford's play--the play I toldhim to make--was to get the drop on him, scare him up good, and chasehim out of town--out of the country. He overran his orders--and went tojail for it."

  "Well?" said the mine-owner.

  "Your scheme, as you outlined it to me in your cipher wire thisafternoon, was built on this same weakness of Lidgerwood's, and I agreedto it. As I understood it, you were to toll him up here with some lieabout meeting Grofield, and then one of us was to put a pistol in hisface and bluff him into throwing up his job. As I say, I agreed to it.He'll have to go when the fight with the men gets hot enough; but hemight hold on too long for our comfort."

  "Well?" said Flemister again, this time more impatiently, Judsonthought.

  "He queered your lay-out by carefully omitting to come on the passenger,and now you propose to fall back upon Rufford's method. I don'tapprove."

  Again the mine-owner said "Why don't you?" and the other voice took upthe question argumentatively.

  "First, because it is unnecessary, as I have explained. Lidgerwood isofficially dead, right now. When the grievance committees tell him whathas been decided upon, he will put on his hat and go back to wherever itwas that he came from."

  "And secondly?" suggested Flemister, still with the nagging sneer in histone.<
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  There was a little pause, and Judson listened until the effort grewpositively painful.

  "The secondly is a weakness of mine, you'll say, Flemister. I want hisjob; partly because it belongs to me, but chiefly because if I don't getit a bunch of us will wind up breaking stone for the State. But Ihaven't anything against the man himself. He trusts me; he has defendedme when others have tried to put him wise; he has been damned white tome, Flemister."

  "Is that all?" queried the mine-owner, in the tone of the prosecutingattorney who gives the criminal his full length of the rope with whichto hang himself.

  "All of that part of it--and you are saying to yourself that it is agood deal more than enough. Perhaps it is; but there is still anotherreason for thinking twice before burning all the bridges behind us.Lidgerwood is Ford's man; if he throws up his job of his own accord, Imay be able to swing Ford into line to name me as his successor. On theother hand, if Lidgerwood is snuffed out and there is the faintestsuspicion of foul play.... Flemister, I'm telling you right here and nowthat that man Ford will neither eat nor sleep until he has set the dogson us!"

  There was another pause, and Judson shifted his weight cautiously fromone elbow to the other. Then Flemister began, without heat and equallywithout compunction. The ex-engineer shivered, as if the measured wordshad been so many drops of ice-water dribbling through the cracks in thefloor to fall upon his spine.

  "You say it is unnecessary; that Lidgerwood will be pushed out by thelabor fight. My answer to that is that you don't know him quite as wellas you think you do. If he's allowed to live, he'll stay--unlesssomebody takes him unawares and scares him off, as I meant to doto-night when I wired you. If he continues to live, and stay, you knowwhat will happen, sooner or later. He'll find you out for thedouble-faced cur that you are--and after that, the fireworks."

  At this the other voice took its turn at the savage sneering.

  "You can't put it all over me that way, Flemister; you can't, and, byGod, you sha'n't! You're in the hole just as deep as I am, foot forfoot!"

  "Oh, no, my friend," said the cooler voice. "I haven't been stealing incar-load lots from the company that hires me; I have merely been buyinga little disused scrap from you. You may say that I have planned a fewof the adverse happenings which have been running the loss-and-damageaccount of the road up into the pictures during the past fewweeks--possibly I have; but you are the man who has been carrying outthe plans, and you are the man the courts will recognize. But we'rewasting time sitting here jawing at each other like a pair of old women.It's up to us to obliterate Lidgerwood; after which it will be up to youto get his job and cover up your tracks as you can. If he lives, he'lldig; and if he digs, he'll turn up things that neither of us can standfor. See how he hangs onto that building-and-loan ghost. He'll treesomebody on that before he's through, you mark my words! And it runs inmy mind that the somebody will be you."

  "But this trap scheme of yours," protested the other man; "it's a frost,I tell you! You say the night passenger from Red Butte is late. I knowit's late, now; but Cranford's running it, and it is all down-hill fromRed Butte to the bridge. Cranford will make up his thirty minutes, andthat will put his train right here in the thick of things. Call it offfor to-night, Flemister. Meet Lidgerwood when he comes and tell him aneasy lie about your not being able to hold Grofield for the right-of-waytalk."

  Judson heard the creak and snap of a swing-chair suddenly righted, andthe floor dust jarred through the cracks upon him when the mine-ownersprang to his feet.

  "Call it off and let you drop out of it? Not by a thousand miles, mycautious friend! Want to stay here and keep your feet warm while I goand do it? Not on your tintype, you yapping hound! I'm about ready tofreeze you, anyway, for the second time--mark that, will you?--for thesecond time. No, keep your hands where I can see 'em, or I'll knife youright where you sit! You can bully and browbeat a lot of railroadbuckies when you're playing the boss act, _but I know you_! You comewith me or I'll give the whole snap away to Vice-President Ford. I'lltell him how you built a street of houses in Red Butte out of companymaterial and with company labor. I'll prove to him that you've scrappedfirst one thing and then another--condemned them so you might sell themfor your own pocket. I'll----"

  "Shut up!" shouted the other man hoarsely. And then, after a momentthat Judson felt was crammed to the bursting point with murderouspossibilities: "Get your tools and come on. We'll see who's got theyellows before we're through with this!"