When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed.

He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was pa.s.sing the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.

The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and ran to the stairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash, as of a m.u.f.fled explosion, and two or three of the gla.s.s doors in the street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.

With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air, and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.

Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling lights, the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he pa.s.sed to leave the rooms in darkness.

Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which circled the elevator-shaft.

Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night captain contented himself with asking a single question.

"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"

"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering, with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."

"We'll catch him, come morning," was the a.s.surance, and then Blount went away and carried out his original intention of going to the Inter-Mountain and to bed.

To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.

And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his father which had been pa.s.sed on to tell the sham burglar where to look and what to look for.

XVII

ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH G.o.dS

In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing in Blount's office, a one-car train, running as second section of the Overland, slipped unostentatiously into the capital railroad yard. With as little stir as it had made in its arrival, the single-car train took a siding below the freight station, where it would be concealed from the prying eyes of any chance prowler from the newspaper offices.

Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the vice-president's stenographer, dropped from the step of the car and went in search of a telephone. When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small man, clean-shaven and alert in his movements, whipped out of the shadows of the nearest string of box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding porter, and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office compartment of the private car.

The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How are you, Gibbert?" he said, and then: "You may condense your report. I have seen the newspapers. In pa.s.sing I may say that it isn't much to your credit that you had to fall back upon the methods of the yeggmen."

"There wasn't any other way," protested the small man. "The papers were locked up in the cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the only key."

"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of your ability, Gibbert. And if the newspapers tell it straight, you came near being caught. How did that happen?"

"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him. His girl was there, and it looked like a safe bet that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he didn't."

"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"

The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the hold of the bra.s.s fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in h.e.l.l every man in this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."

The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.

"Any other orders?" he asked.

"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been recognized here by any of our local people?"

"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of them caught on to me."

"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain anything to them."

Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008,"

to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a question at the two who were waiting.

"You got my message?"

Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders have been carried out. The yards are posted, and n.o.body, outside of a few of our own men, knows that your car is here."

The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box on the flat-topped desk, and pa.s.sed the box to his two lieutenants.

"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change in the situation since your last report?"

Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done, n.o.body seems to know."

"Well, what came of it?"

"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager.

"Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got away."

"Did Blount lose anything?"

"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the fellow even if he was caught."

To a disinterested observer it might have seemed a little singular that the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.

"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.

"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at h.e.l.lersville. I understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to election day."

"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"

"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which to file the public notice of the change in rates."

"What did you do?"

"I filed the notice--taking care that the only copy should be the one I sent to Blount's office."

The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.

"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"

"I had to take a chance--I've had to take a good many chances,"

protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he has worn out three of my best office men on the job."