The Wire Devils. Frank L. Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ the gloves off on this wire game.”

      Lanson smashed his fist down on the table top. “Good!” he exclaimed grimly. “I’d like to make things hot for somebody, and it’ll at least be easy enough to catch whoever is using the wire.” MacVightie shook his head.

      “Oh, no; it won’t!” he said evenly. “I didn’t mean to give you that impression, and don’t you make the mistake of under-estimating the brains we’re up against, Lanson. I’m no expert on telegraphy, that’s your end of it, but I know they wouldn’t sit in on any game where they didn’t hold trumps up their sleeves. Get me? Now let’s see what it looks like. As I understand it, these messages, no matter from what point on the division they are sent, would be heard on every sounder on the line—that’s right, isn’t it?”

      “Yes—sure! Of course!” agreed Lanson.

      “And it might be an operator working with them as an inside man; or, with the necessary outfit, the wire could be tapped at any point, couldn’t it?”

      “Yes,” said Lanson; “but the minute he starts in, we could begin to ‘ground’ him out.”

      “Go on!” invited MacVightie. “I’m listening.”

      “We could tell whether he was working east or west of any given point,” explained the superintendent; “and, with the operators instructed beforehand, practically narrow him down to, say, between two stations.”

      The Hawk, as he, too, listened, permitted an amused smile to flicker across his lips.

      “Um!” said MacVightie. “And would he be aware that this ‘grounding’ process was going on?”

      “Yes—naturally,” admitted Lanson. “We can’t prevent that.”

      MacVightie shook his head again.

      “That doesn’t sound good to me,” he said slowly. “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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ