CHAPTER IV
ZEPH FATHERS AN IDEA
Under the present arrangement of his duties as chief dispatcher for the division, Ralph Fairbanks seldom took the “graveyard trick,” as it is called. Yet occasionally he went downtown and looked in at the office in the late evening.
Especially when he knew that a particular schedule was being put through. Just now the division was handling extra wheat trains, and although he had O.K.’d his assistant’s schedule for that night, Ralph somehow felt that he should see if all was going smoothly on this particular evening.
The trouble over Mr. Hopkins and his daughter had perhaps gotten on the young chief dispatcher’s nerves—if he really possessed such things. He tried to read an exciting book of travel and adventure after supper while his mother did some darning; but exciting things which had happened in his own career came to Ralph’s mind so insistently that he lost the thread of the writer’s story. With several friends, including Mr. Bob Adair, chief of the Great Northern’s detective force, Ralph had fought many an enemy of the road to a standstill. There was another person, too, who was sure to turn up in the vicinity of any railroad trouble.
Ralph suddenly started out of his chair. “There!” he exclaimed, as his mother looked at him wonderingly. “I had forgotten something. Do you know who I thought I saw to-day downtown?”
“I have no idea, Ralph.”
“I believe Zeph is in Rockton. I saw a fellow who looked very much like him passing along the street. But it was when I was in conference with the G. M. and I could not hail him. Afterward—being mixed up in Miss Hopkins’ trouble, and all—I forgot Zeph.”
“Zeph Dallas?” repeated Mrs. Fairbanks. “I would dearly love to see the boy again. He is so unsettled.”
“He is a bird on the wing, I guess,” said Ralph. “Never know where he will perch next. But while he is in Rockton I think I know where to find him,” and he reached his hat down from its peg.
“Will you go downtown to look him up, Ralph?” asked the widow placidly.
“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to see Zeph.”
“So would I. Bring him home with you, Ralph. You know we have a spare bed, and Zeph Dallas is just as welcome to it as though he were your brother.”
“I don’t know,” laughed Ralph, going to the door. “Zeph is a born vagabond. Nothing keeps him long in one place but some intrigue in which he can have a part. He says he is preparing himself to wear Bob Adair’s shoes.”
“Mr. Adair is a very fine man,” said Mrs. Fairbanks. “But his calling is hazardous. I should not like to bring up a son to be a detective.”
“Zeph never had any bringing up,” declared Ralph, as he went out, and the echoes of his mother’s last remark, “Poor fellow!” rang in his ears as he started downtown.
Like most railroad terminal towns, Rockton had a poor section, inhabited by railroad laborers and those hanging to their skirts, and also a much better group of dwellings. Ralph passed through the better part of town without, of course, apprehending any trouble.
Nor was he accosted when he crossed the tracks and approached the station, over which the dispatchers’ offices were situated. For his first thought was, after all, of the night’s schedule. One cannot have the responsibility that Ralph Fairbanks shouldered without having one’s work uppermost in one’s mind all of the time.
The two men on duty welcomed their young chief cheerfully. There really was not an employee of the road about the Rockton terminal who had not some reason for liking Ralph. They might not all agree with him on railroad matters; but they had to respect his independence.
“Fellow in here to see you a while back, Chief,” said one of the men on duty.
“Who was it?”
“Nobody I ever saw before,” was the reply. “Kind of an odd stick.” Ralph described his friend, Zeph Dallas, and the operator nodded. “That’s the fellow. Can’t be any mistake.”
“Didn’t he say where he could be found?” asked Ralph.
“No, Chief. A close-mouthed duck, if you ask me. He slipped in and slid out again like an eel through a sewer pipe.”
Ralph laughed. “Some metaphor, I’ll say, Johnny. Well, the sched.’s all right, I guess?”
“Things are going sweet,” he was told. “But when they come to double up those wheat trains next week, how we going to get the new Midnight Flyer into the clear between here and Oxford? That is what is bothering me, Chief.”
“If you want to know,” admitted Ralph, as he opened the door to depart, “that little thing is bothering me, too.”
He was not, however, bothering his mind over railroad affairs when he descended the stairs to the yard. He was thinking of Zeph. That peculiar and vagabondish fellow must be around Rockton for some pertinent design. And it was evident that he wanted to see his old chum, Ralph Fairbanks.
The latter walked down the yard and looked in at the open windows of one of the lighted shops. The night crew was at work on one of the big freight haulers. Like a row of giant elephants a number of other locomotives stood in the gloomy end of the shop. Repairs were away behind schedule. He heard the hoarse voice of McGuire, one of the oldest and most faithful shop foremen, bawling his crew out for their clumsiness.
“It’s touch and go, sure enough,” considered Ralph. “I wonder just how much power that Andy McCarrey has over the men employed by the Great Northern? Of course, he has no standing with any of the Brotherhoods; but these roughnecks—Hullo! Who goes there?”
He had passed the shop and had turned toward a small gate in the stockade which he believed would be unlocked. A shadowy figure flashed into a deeper covert of shadow beside one of the tool houses.
“And only one of two classes try to hide around a railroad yard—a crook or a yard detective. Humph!” muttered Ralph.
He walked on toward the gate. But just as he got to the end of the shed he jumped sidewise and dived into the deeper shadow with arms outstretched. He grabbed somebody almost instantly.
“Stand still!” he commanded. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Instantly the struggling person he had seized stood still. He no longer offered to fight for his liberty. Ralph made out that he was tall—taller than himself—roughly dressed, and that he had lost his hat.
Then, as the young dispatcher passed his hand over the mop of hair the fellow wore and his palm traversed the other’s face, he marked a big and high-arched nose and high cheekbones. He had a wide mouth.
“By George!” exclaimed Ralph, “I believe you are the fellow I am looking for.”
“Just so,” chuckled his prisoner.
“Zeph!”
“Same to you, Ralph!”
The two shook hands warmly, and then Zeph picked up his cap and stuck it sideways upon his thatch of hair.
“How’s the boy?” asked Zeph, and Ralph knew he was grinning.
“I’ll tell you,” chuckled Ralph. “I’m gravely disturbed over a friend of mine——”
“Is his name Andy McCarrey?” whispered Zeph, with his lips close to his friend’s ear.
“Goodness!” gasped the dispatcher. “What do you mean? I’ve been troubled about a fellow named Dallas. But what do you know about McCarrey?”
“I know enough to believe it is not best to take his name in vain around these yards,” muttered Zeph. “Come on out of here. I’ll give it up for to-night. It was you I wanted to talk to, anyway, Ralph.”
“I don’t understand you at all, Zeph,” complained the young dispatcher, as they walked toward the gate in the yard fence.
“Come on over to the Owl Lunch, and I’ll give you an earful,” said Zeph. “The missus all right?”
“She is fine, and was asking after you. When you come to town, Zeph, you should come to our house.”
“Can’t do it. No knowing who or what may be trailing me,” declared the vagabond.
“Nonsense!”
“That’s the truth. Right now I got the tail end of something that I want to look up. This McCarrey——”
“Is the leader of the men who are trying to engineer the wildcat strike,” explained Ralph.
“Uh-huh? He’s more than that.”
“What do you mean?” Ralph asked curiously.
They stepped into the narrow space in the owl car and climbed on two stools.
“Milk and mince pie,” said Zeph.
“What a stomach!” exclaimed Ralph, smiling. “Don’t you ever have indigestion?”
“That is what I’m ordering it for. I have to stay awake all night. Can’t sleep much with cold milk and ‘graveyard pie’ fighting for possession of the digestive tract.”
“You are as bad as ever,” sighed Ralph.
“Worse,” admitted Zeph, taking his first bite of the pie. Then, out of the corner of his mouth he mumbled: “Know where I just came from?”
“I have no idea. Haven’t heard from you for weeks. You can’t write, I suppose?”
“Never write letters. Have to explain ’em afterward, perhaps. Besides, a letter has often traced a man. ‘Leave no trace’ is my motto.”
“Talk sense,” urged Ralph.
“Am.”
“It doesn’t sound like it. Tell me what makes you so mysterious?”
“I am as mysterious as this ‘graveyard pie,’ ain’t I?” suddenly chuckled Zeph Dallas, holding up the wedge of pie to look at it. “Hullo! Here’s a splinter,” and he picked out the bit of wood. “The beef they ground up for this mince meat must have had a wooden leg. Anyhow, listen.”
“Shoot!” exclaimed Ralph anxiously, sipping his coffee. “Where did you come from?”
“Down the road. I was working for a few days with Section Twenty.”
“A section gang hand! Believe me, that’s some job,” said Ralph, in wonder.
“Somebody has been doing some reefing down there, and Mr. Adair put me wise to it. Eh? You don’t know what ‘reefing’ is?”
“No,” admitted the dispatcher.
“It’s when fellows get a chance to open cases and crates in transit, remove the goods, fill ’em up with rocks and rubbish, and send ’em on to the consignees. It was a pretty job, too. I didn’t find out who did it.”
“What? A failure to your account?” laughed Ralph, knowing how Zeph prided himself upon carrying through every little job the chief detective gave him to handle.
“Not a failure yet,” mumbled Zeph. “’Tain’t finished.”
“Then it brought you back here to Rockton?”
“Nothing like that. There was an accident on our section and we got over-time work last night. We had just got the tracks clear when this new Midnight Flyer came through. Say! who’s handling the throttle on that big engine?”
“Old Byron Marks.”
“Wow! That antediluvian pill?”
“Seniority does it,” said Ralph briefly. “It’s the men’s own fault if the dead ones get the best runs.”
“Well, believe me,” muttered Zeph, “if old By Marks heard what I heard last night you couldn’t hoist him into the cabin of that locomotive with a derrick.”
“What do you mean, Zeph?” and now Ralph Fairbanks was immensely interested in what his peculiar friend had to say.
“I tell you what, Ralph, I’ve got an idea. It’s my own idea, and it is worth somebody’s attention.”
“Let us have it,” said the dispatcher. “You have always been original, if nothing more, Zeph.”
“Many thanks, dear boy! Well, listen! This Andy McCarrey.” He stared all about, noting that the man running the lunch wagon had stepped out. “Take note I’ve heard a deal about that fellow up and down the road.”
“You’ve heard nothing good of him, I warrant,” grumbled Ralph.
“According to which side your bread is buttered on,” was the reply. “Most of these roughnecks swear by him.”
“But not the officials,” said Ralph.
“Right-o. Now, last night, as we section men stood beside the tracks down there waiting for the Midnight Flyer to pass, I heard one fellow say: ‘Andy McCarrey says “Thumbs up!”’ And his mate said right back: ‘Ye-as. And suppose Andy says “Thumbs down!” How about it?’
“Now, you know, and I know, Ralph, the old game of ‘thumbs up and thumbs down.’ And then, in the times of the old Roman gladiators, the populace condemned the fallen gladiator to death or reprieved him by a turn of the thumb. Get me?”
“I can’t say I do wholly,” admitted Ralph.
“That Midnight Flyer whizzed by. Those two fellows looked at it and at old man Marks’s head sticking out of the cab window—if that’s who it was. They were speaking of that new fast train, the crack train of this division. Eh?”
“It would seem so,” confessed Ralph, in a worried tone.
“And it is in Andy McCarrey’s hands whether that train goes through safely or not,” whispered Zeph, his lips close to Ralph’s ear again. “That is my idea, my boy. And it is that idea that has brought me to Rockton to-day.”