When Kirgan told me he was shy a whole locomotive, I began to see all sorts of fireworks. Of course, there was nothing on earth to connect the boss's disappearance with that of the engine which had been left standing below the coal chutes, but the two things snapped themselves together for me like the halves of an automatic coupling, and I couldn't wedge them apart.

"An engine—even a little old Atlantic-type—is a pretty big thing to lose, isn't it, Kirgan?" I asked.

Kirgan righted his chair with a crash.

"Jimmie, I've sifted this blamed outfit through an eighty-mesh screen!" he growled. "With all the devil-to-pay that's goin' on over at the headquarters, I didn't want to bother Mr. Van Britt, and I haven't been advertisin' in the newspapers. But it's a holy fact, Jimmie. That engine's faded away, and nobody saw or heard it go. I've had men out for four days, now, lookin' and pryin' 'round and askin' questions in every hole and corner of the three divisions. It ain't any use. The 'Sixteen's gone!"

"But, listen," I broke in. "If anybody tried to steal it, it couldn't pass the first telegraph station east or west without being reported. And that isn't saying anything at all about the risk of hypering a wild engine over the main line without orders."

"I know all that, Jimmie," he agreed. "But the fact's right here amongst us. The Ten-Sixteen's lost."

I was still trying to pry myself loose from the notion that the loss of the engine, and the boss's disappearance at about the same time, were in some way connected with each other. It was no use; the idea refused to let go.

"Look here, Kirgan," I shoved in; "can you think of any possible reason why Mr. Norcross should write Mr. Van Britt a letter saying that he had quit and was going east on the midnight train, and then should change his mind and come down here and go somewhere on that engine?"

After I had said it, it sounded so foolish that I wanted to take it back. But Kirgan didn't seem to look at it that way.

"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "I never once thought of that! But where the devil would he go? And how would he get there without somebody findin' out? And why in Sam Hill would he do a thing like that, anyway? Why, sufferin' Moses! if he wanted to go anywhere, all he had to do was to order out his car and tell the despatcher, and go."

"I can't figure it out any better than you can," I confessed. "At the same time, I can't break away from the notion. Mr. Norcross is gone, and the Ten-Sixteen is gone, and they both dropped out between ten and twelve o'clock on the same night. Mart, I don't believe Mr. Norcross went east at all! I believe, when we find that engine, we'll find him!"

Kirgan got out of his chair and began to walk up and down in the little space between his desk and the drawing-board. Besides being the best boss mechanic in the West, he was a first-class fighting man, with a clear head and nerve to burn. When he had got as far as he could go alone he turned on me.

"Jimmie, do you reckon this Red Tower outfit was far enough along in its scrap with the boss to put up a job to pass him out of the game?" he demanded.

I told him it didn't seem to fit into any twentieth-century scheme of things, and past that I mentioned the fact that the Hatch people had taken the back track and were now offering to sell out and stop chocking the wheels of reform.

"I know," he put in. "But I've been readin' the papers, Jimmie, and it ain't all Red Tower, not by a jugful. The big graft in this neck-a woods is political, and the Red Tower gang is only set-a cogs in the bull-wheel. Mr. Norcross was gettin' himself mighty pointedly disliked; you know that. The way he was aimin' to run things, it was beginnin' to look as if maybe the people of this State might wake up some day and turn in and help him."

"I know all about that," I threw in. "But where are you trying to land, Mart?"

"Right here. Mr. Norcross was the whole show. Take him out of it and the whole shootin'-match would fall to pieces—as it's doin', right now. They didn't need to slug him or shoot him up or anything like that: if it could be made to look as if he'd jumped the job, quit, chucked it all up, why there you are. A new boss would be sent out here, and you could bet your sweet life he wouldn't be anybody like Mr. Norcross. Not so you could notice it. The New York people would take blamed good care-a that."

"You think the Dunton people are standing in with the graft?"

"Nobody could've grabbed off the motive-power job on this railroad, as I did, Jimmie, and not think it—and be damn' sure of it. Why, Lord o' Heavens, the Red Tower bunch was usin' us just the same as if we belonged to 'em!—orderin' our men to do their machinery repairs, helpin' themselves to any railroad material that they happened to need, usin' our cars and engines on their loggin' roads and mine branches."

"You stopped all this?"

"You bet I did—between two days! They've been makin' seventeen different kinds of a roar ever since, but I've had Mr. Van Britt and the Big Boss behind me, so I just shoved ahead."

What Kirgan said about the Red Tower people using our rolling stock on their private branch roads set a bee to buzzing in my brain. What if they had stolen the 1016 to use in that way? I let the bee loose, and Kirgan grabbed at it like a cat jumping for a grasshopper.

"Say, Jimmie, boy—you've got a pretty middlin' long head on you when you give it room to play in," he grunted. "The string's tangled up about as bad as it was before, but I believe you're gettin' hold of the loose end."

"You have a blue-print of the Portal Division here, haven't you?" I asked. "Dig it up and let's have a look at it."

He didn't know where to look for the blue-print, but just then his boy stenographer came back and found it for us. The shop whistle had blown and it was quitting time, so Kirgan told the boy he could go on home. When we were alone again I unrolled the blue-print and we began to study it carefully with an eye to the possibilities.

At first the facts threatened to bluff us. The blue-print engineers' map was an old one, but it showed the spurs and side-tracks, the stations and water tanks. Since the lost engine had been standing at the western end of the Portal City yards, we didn't try to trace it eastward. To get out in that direction it would have had to pass the round-house, the shops, the passenger station and the headquarters building, and, even at that time of night, somebody would have been sure to see it.

Tracing the other way—westward—we had a clear track for ten miles to Arroyo. Arroyo had no night operator, so we agreed that the stolen engine might easily have slipped past there without being marked down. Eight miles beyond Arroyo we came to Banta, the first night station west of Portal City. Here, as we figured it, the wild engine must have been seen by the operator, if by no one else. Banta was an apple town, and the town itself might have been asleep, but the wire man at the station shouldn't have been.

"Let's hold Banta in suspense a bit, and allow that by some means or other the thieves managed to get by," I suggested. "The next thing to be considered is the fact that the Ten-Sixteen must now have been running—without orders, we must remember—against the Fast Mail coming east. The Mail didn't pass her anywhere—not officially, at least; if it had, the fact would show up in some station's report to the despatcher's office."

At this, we hunted up an official time-card and began to figure on the "meet" proposition. The Fast Mail was due at Portal City at twelve-twenty, and on the night in question it had been on time. Making due time allowances for inaccuracy in the yard watchman's story, the missing engine could hardly have left the Portal City yard much before ten-forty-five.

The Fast Mail was scheduled at forty miles an hour. Its time at Banta was eleven-fifty-three. Allowing the 1016 the same rate of speed in the opposite direction, it would have passed Banta at eleven-twelve or thereabouts. Hence there would still be forty-one minutes running time to be divided between the eastbound train and the westbound engine. In other words, the meeting-point, with the two running at the same speed, would fall about twenty minutes west of Banta.

When we tried to figure this meeting-point out we were stuck. Banta lay in the lap of an irrigated valley in the hogback, a valley which the diverted waters of Banta Creek had turned into an orchardist's paradise. West of the town the railroad ran through a hill country, winding around among the spurs of the Timber Mountain range and heading for the Sand Creek desert where Mr. Chadwick had had his adventure with the hold-ups.

Tracing the line on the blue-print, we hunted for a possible passing point, which, according to the way we had things doped out, should have been not more than thirteen or fourteen miles west of Banta. There was a blind siding ten miles west, but beyond that, nothing east of Sand Creek, which was twenty-one miles farther along; at least, there was nothing that showed up on the map. The ten-mile siding might have served for the passing point, but in that case the crew of the Fast Mail would surely have seen the 1016 waiting on the siding as they came by. And they hadn't seen it; Kirgan said they had been questioned promptly the following morning.

Though I had been over the road with Mr. Norcross in his private car any number of times since we had taken hold, I didn't recall the detail topographies very clearly, and I couldn't seem to remember anything about this siding ten miles west of Banta. So I asked Kirgan.

"That siding isn't in any such shape that the Fast Mail could get by without seeing a 'meet' train on the side-track, is it?"

The big master-mechanic shook his head.

"Hardly, you'd think. I reckon we're up a stump, Jimmie. That siding is part of an old 'Y' at the mouth of a gulch that runs back into the mountains for maybe a dozen miles or so. They tell me the 'Y' was put in for the Timber Mountain Lumber outfit when they used the gulch mouth for their shipping point. They had one of their saw-mills up in the gulch somewhere, but the business died out when they got the timber all cut off."

This time I was the one who did the cat-and-grasshopper act.

"Tell me this, Mart," I put in quickly. "The Timber Mountain company is one of the Red Tower monopolies: did it have a railroad track up that gulch connecting with our 'Y'?"

"Why, yes; I reckon so. I'm not right sure that there ain't one there yet. But if there is, it's been disconnected from the 'Y'. I'm sure of that, because I went in on that 'Y' one day with the wrecker."

You'd think this would have settled it. But I hung on like a dog to a root.

"Say, Mart," I insisted, "this 'Y' siding we're talking about is just around where the Ten-Sixteen ought to have met the Mail; so far as we can tell by this map it's the only place where it could have met it. And the old gulch track would have been a mighty good hiding-place for the stolen engine!"

"There ain't any track there," said Kirgan, shaking his head; "or, leastwise, if there is, it hasn't any rail connection with our siding, just as I'm tellin' you. We'll have to look farther along."

Somehow, I couldn't get it out of my head but that I was right. Our guesses all went as straight as a string to that 'Y' siding ten miles west of Banta, and I was sure that if I had been talking to Mr. Van Britt I could have convinced him. But Kirgan was awfully hard-headed.

"It's supper time," he said, after we had mulled a while longer over the map. "To-morrow, if you like, we'll take an engine and run down there. But we ain't goin' to find anything. I can tell you that, right now."

"Yes, and to-morrow we may have the new general manager, and then you and I and all the others will be hunting for some other railroad to work on," I retorted.

I pretty nearly had him over the edge, but I couldn't push him the rest of the way to save my life.

"If there was the least little scrap—a reason even to imagine that Mr. Norcross had gone off on that stolen eight-wheeler, it would be different, Jimmie," he protested. "But there ain't; and you know doggoned well there ain't. Let's go up-town and hunt up something to eat. You'll feel a heap clearer in your mind when you get a good square meal inside o' your clothes."

We left the shop offices together, and got shut out, crossing the yard, by a freight that was pulling in from the West. There was a yard crew shifting on the other side of the incoming train, and rather than wait for the double obstruction to clear itself, we walked down the shop track, meaning to go around the lower end of things.

This detour took us past the round-house, and when we reached the turn-table lead, the engine of the just-arrived freight came backing down the skip-track. Seeing Kirgan, the engineer swung down from the step at the lead switch, leaving the hostler to "spot" the engine on the table. I knew the engineer by sight. His name was Gorcher, and he was a reformed cow-punch'—with a record for getting out of more tight places with a heavy train than any other man on the division.

"Here's lookin' at you, Mr. Kirgan," he said, with a sort of Happy Hooligan grin on his smutty face. "You been passin' the word, quiet, among the boys to keep an eye out f'r that Atlantic-type that got lost in the shuffle, ain't you? Well, I found her."

"What's that—where?" snapped Kirgan, in a tone that made a noise like the pop of a whip-lash.

"You know that old gravel pit that digs into the hill a mile west of the old 'Y' on the Timber Mountain grade? Well, she's there; plumb at the far end o' that gravel track, cold and dead."

"When did you see her?"

"Just now—comin' in. We had to cut and double, comin' up Timber Mountain hill. 'Stead o' pullin' all the way up to the 'Y' and losin' more time, I doubled in on that old gravel track. There she was, as big as a house."

"Crippled?" Kirgan rapped out.

"Not as we could see; just dead. She's got her nose shoved a piece into the gravel bank, but she ain't off the rail."

Kirgan nodded. "That counts one for you, Billy. Who else saw her?"

"Nobody but the boys on our train, I reckon."

"All right. Don't spread it. And get hold of the others and tell 'em not to spread it. Want to make a little overtime?"

"I ain't kickin' none."

"That's business. After you've had your supper, call up your fireman and report to me here at the round-house. We'll take a light engine and go down along and get that runaway."

This seemed to settle Kirgan's half of the puzzle. We hadn't taken the gravel track into our calculations simply because it wasn't marked on the map we had been studying; but that merely meant that the pit had been opened some time after the map had been made.

When Gorcher had gone into the round-house to wash up and tell his fireman to report back, Kirgan and I crossed the yard and headed for town. I left the master-mechanic at the door of a Greek eat-shop that he patronized and went on up to the Bullard. There had been nothing more said about connecting the boss's disappearance with that of the stolen engine, and the idea seemed too ridiculous to hold on to, anyway. Mr. Norcross had said, in the letter to Mr. Van Britt, that he was going to quit; and, so far as we knew—or didn't know, rather—he had done it and had taken his grips and gone to the midnight Mail.

Against this, of course, there was the Mail conductor's positive assertion that he hadn't carried the boss. But conductors are no more infallible than other people, and once in a blue moon in going through a train they miss a passenger. I remembered the one thing that might have made the boss desperate. If somebody had slammed the Mrs. Sheila story at him there was reason enough for a blow-up.

I was just getting around to my piece of canned pumpkin pie—which wasn't half as good as the kind Maisie Ann fed me out at the major's—when the kid from the despatcher's office came into the grill-room, stretching his neck as if he were looking for somebody. When he got his eye on me he came across to my corner and handed me a telegram. It was from Mr. Chadwick, under a Chicago date line, and it was addressed "To the General Manager's Office," just like that. There were only nine words in it, but they were all strictly to the point: "What's gone wrong? Where is Mr. Norcross? Answer quick."

I saw in half a second at least a part of what had happened. Mr. Chadwick was back from his Canadian trip, and somebody—the New York people, perhaps—had wired him that a new general manager had been appointed for Pioneer Short Line. The old wheat king's quick shot at our office showed that he wasn't in the plot, and that, whatever else had become of him, Mr. Norcross hadn't as yet turned up in Chicago!

Gee! but that brought on more talk—a whaling lot of it. I meant to find out, right away, if Mr. Van Britt had come back from the Cross Creek wreck. He was the man to answer Mr. Chadwick's wire. But an interruption butted in suddenly, just as I was signing the dinner check. The head waiter, who knew me from having seen me so often with the boss, came over to say that I was wanted quick at the telephone.

It was Mrs. Sheila on the wire, and I could tell by the way her voice sounded that she was mightily excited.

"I've been calling you on every phone I could think of," was the way she began; and then: "Where is Mr. Van Britt?"

I told her about the wreck, and said I was afraid he hadn't got back yet. I heard something that sounded like a muffled and half-impatient, "Oh, dear!" and then she went on. "I have just had a phone message from Mr. Cantrell, the editor of the Mountaineer. He called the house to try to find Major Kendrick. He has heard something which may explain about Mr. Norcross. He said he didn't want to put it on the wire."

That was enough for me. "I'll go right over to the Mountaineer office," I told her; and in just about two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, I was standing at Mr. Cantrell's elbow in his little den on the third floor of the newspaper building across the Avenue.

"Mrs. Macrae telephoned you?" he asked, pushing his bunch of copy paper aside.

"Yes; just a minute ago."

"I'll give you what I have, and you may do what you please with it. One of our young men—Branderby—has a clue; a very slight one. He has discovered—in some way that he didn't care to explain over the phone—that there was a plot of some kind concocted in the back room of a dive on lower Nevada Avenue on the night Mr. Norcross disappeared. From what Branderby says, I take it that the plot was overheard, in part, at least, by some habitue of the place who was too drunk to get it entirely straight and intelligible. The plotters were four of Clanahan's men, and, as Branderby got it, they were planning to steal a locomotive. Do you know anything about that?"

"I do. The engine was stolen all right, that very night. Kirgan, our master-mechanic, has known it was gone, but he has been keeping quiet in hopes he'd be able to find the engine without making any public stir about it."

"The story, as it has been handed on to Branderby, is pretty badly muddled," the editor went on. "There was something in it about an attempt to wreck and rob the Fast Mail, and something else about sending a note to somebody at the Bullard—a note that 'would do the business,' was the way it was put."

"That note was sent to Mr. Norcross!" I broke in excitedly, taking a running jump at the guess.

"If you will wait until Branderby comes in, he may be able to give you more of the particulars," Cantrell was beginning to say; but good gosh!—I couldn't wait. I was scared stiff for fear I shouldn't be able to get back to the round-house before Kirgan started out on that engine-rescuing trip.

"That's enough," I gasped; "I'm gone!" and I tumbled down the two flights of stairs and sprinted for the railroad yard, reaching the round-house not one half-second too soon. Kirgan was there, with Gorcher and two firemen. They had a light engine out on the tank track and were filling her with water.

It was Kirgan himself who gave me a hand up the steps to the high foot-plate. Gorcher was oiling around and the two firemen were up on the tender.

"They took Mr. Norcross with them on the Ten-Sixteen!" was all I could say and then I guess my late electric knock-out got in its work to pay for the quick sprint down from the newspaper office, for I keeled over into Kirgan's arms and sort of half fainted, it seemed.

Because, when I came to, right good again, Kirgan had me up on the fireman's box, with an arm around me to hold me there: Billy Gorcher was on the other side of the cab, niggling at the throttle; and the light engine was clicking it off about fifty miles an hour on the straight piece of track between Portal City and Arroyo.