The Wire Devils. Frank L. Packard
“All he’d have to do would be to beat it then—and the next time start in fifty miles away, and you’d have to begin all over again. And, besides, who’s receiving the messages? You can’t put any tabs on that. Every sounder from Selkirk City to Rainy River registers them, and all a man’s got to do is listen. You see, Lanson, it’s not so easy—eh?”
Lanson frowned.
“Well, what do you suggest?” he asked uncomfortably. “We can stop it.”
“But we don’t want to stop it!” returned MacVightie. “We could have done that from the first. What we want is our man now. And it strikes me that the first thing to do is to find out whether one of our own operators is in on this or not. Unless the line is tapped somewhere, it’s a cinch that a station key is being used, isn’t it? Send some linemen that you can trust over the division. If they find anything at all, they’ll find the spot where the messages are coming from, won’t they? If they find nothing, we’ll know we’ve got to look nearer home—amongst our own men.”
Lanson, in his turn, shook his head.
“Not necessarily,” he objected. “We’ve a number of small stations where there’s no night operator. They might have got into one of those. The messages all come through at night.”
“Well, I’ll call the turn there!” responded Mac-Vightie, with a short laugh. “See that I get a list of those stations in the morning, and I’ll detail men to take care of that end of it.”
The Hawk drew back a little, shifting his strained position—the amused smile was no longer on his lips.
“And as for that ‘ground’ business,” went on Mac-Vightie, “go slow with it till you get your linemen’s report. Don’t do any more than try it out with some operator you can absolutely depend upon, say, about halfway down the line. You say you would be able to tell whether the messages were coming from east or west of that point; that’ll cut the division in half for us as far as our search is concerned, and that’s worth taking a chance on. But don’t overdo it, Lanson. We don’t want to throw any scare into him—yet.”
“All right,” agreed Lanson. “I’ll start things moving to-night. Martin, at Bald Creek, will be the best man, I guess. I’ll send a letter down to him on No. 8.”
“And warn him to make no reports by wire,” cautioned MacVightie.
“All right—yes, naturally,” agreed the superintendent again. Then, after a short pause, anxiously: “Anything turned up at all, MacVightie? Any clue to that necklace? The governor’s wife is making a holler that’s reached from here to the road’s directors down in Wall Street.”
“Damn it,” growled MacVightie. “I’m well enough aware of it—but the necklace isn’t any more important than any one of the other affairs, is it? No; there’s nothing—not a blamed thing!”
“Well, what about this Sing Sing convict, the Hawk, that the papers are featuring to-night?” Lanson asked. “Anything in that?”
“I don’t know—maybe,” McVightie answered viciously. “He’s only one more, anyway. This gang was operating before he was released—and it’s likely enough, if they’re old pals of his, that he’s come out here to give them a hand. The New York police say he went to Chicago immediately after his release, two weeks ago. The Chicago police reported him there, and then he disappeared; then Denver spotted him a few days later—and that’s the last that’s been seen of him. You can make what you like of that. He’s certainly been hitting a pretty straight trail west. He wasn’t stopped, of course, because he isn’t ‘wanted’ at present; he’s only a man with a bad record, and labelled dangerous. We were warned to look out for him, that’s all.”
“Got his description?” inquired Lanson.
“Yes”—MacVightie’s laugh was a short bark. “Medium height, broad-shouldered, muscular, black hair, black eyes, straight nose, good-looking, and gentlemanly in appearance and manner, dresses well, age twenty-four to twenty-six, no distinctive marks or disfigurement.”
“There’s probably not more than twenty-five thousand men in Selkirk City who would answer to every detail of that!” Lanson commented sarcastically.
“Exactly!” admitted MacVightie. “And that’s——”
The Hawk was creeping forward again in the shadows of the roundhouse.
“Yes, I guess it interested me,” muttered the Hawk; “I guess it did. I guess I’m playing in luck to-night.”
III.
The Paymaster’s Safe
From the roundhouse it was only a few yards to the rear of the long, low-lying freight sheds and, unobserved, the Hawk gained this new shelter. He stole quickly along to the further end of the sheds; and there, crouched down again in the shadows, halted to make a critical survey of his surroundings. .
Just in front of him, divided only by a sort of driveway for the convenience of the teamsters, was the end wall of the station, and, in the end wall—the window of the divisional paymaster’s office. The Hawk glanced to his left. The street upon which the station fronted, an ill-savoured section of the city, was dark, dimly lighted, and deserted; the only sign of life being the lighted windows of a saloon on the corner of a narrow lane that bisected the block of somewhat disreputable, tumble-down wooden structures that faced the station. To his right, on the other side of the freight shed, the railroad yard had narrowed down to the station tracks and a single spur alongside the shed. There was no one in sight in either direction.
The Hawk’s eyes strayed back to the paymaster’s window. The station, like its surrounding neighbours, was an old wooden building; and, being low and only two-storied, the second-story window offered inviting possibilities. From the sill of the lower window, a man who was at all agile had the upper window at his mercy. Against this mode of attack, however, was the risk of being seen by any one who might pass along the street, or by any one who might chance upon the end of the station platform.
“What’s the use!” decided the Hawk, with an abrupt shrug of his shoulders. “Play safe. There’s a better way.”
The Hawk crept across the driveway, reached the street side of the station, peered cautiously around the corner of the building, and, satisfied that he was unobserved, edged down along the building for a short distance, paused in a doorway, glanced quickly about him again—and then the door opened and closed, and he was standing in a murky passageway, that was lighted only by a single incandescent far back by a stair well.
He stood motionless, listening. From above, through the stillness, came the faint drumming of a telegraph key. There should be no one upstairs now but the dispatcher, whose room was at the opposite end of the building from the paymaster’s office—and, possibly, with the dispatcher, a call boy or two. And the hallway above, he could see, was dark.
Moving stealthily forward, as noiseless as a cat in his tread, the Hawk took a mask from his pocket, slipped it over his face, and began to mount the stairs. He gained the landing—and halted again. It was pitch black here, since even the door of the dispatcher’s room, where there would be a light, was closed.
And then once more the Hawk moved forward—and an instant later, the paymaster’s door at the extreme end of the corridor, under the deft persuasion of his skeleton keys, had closed behind him.
It was not quite so dark here. The lights from the platform and the yard filtered in through the window in a filmy sort of way; but it was too dark to distinguish objects in anything more than grotesque, shapeless outlines.
The Hawk produced his flashlight, and turned it upon the lock he had just picked. It was a spring lock, opened readily from the inside by the mere turning of the doorhandle. He tried it