



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
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THE SPECULATIONS OF JOHN STEELE

By Robert Barr

Illustrated By F. R. Gruger

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company

1905

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THE SPECULATIONS OF JOHN STEELE




CHAPTER I--A NARROW ESCAPE

IT was a nasty night, with a drizzling rain nearly as thick as a fog--a
rain which obscured the signals and left the rails so slippery that a
quick stop was almost impossible--yet just the sort of night to make a
quick stop imperative if disaster were to be averted.

Young John Steele, station-master, telegrapher, ticket-agent, and
man-of-all-work in the lone shanty known on the railway map as Hitchen’s
Siding, ignored by all other maps, stood beside the telegraph instrument
wondering whether the rain had affected the efficiency of the wires, or
whether the train despatcher had gone crazy. Here was Number Sixteen,
the freight from the west, coming in, and there were no orders for her.
Number Three, known to the outside world as the “Pacific Express,” the
fastest train on the road, was already forty minutes overdue, tearing
westward through the night somewhere, and John did not know where. All
he knew was that she was trying to make up lost time as well as the
greasy metals would allow, and here he stood without orders!

Once more he seized the key, and calling the despatched office in
Warmington again demanded: “What orders for Sixteen?” Then he went
outside, and on his own initiative kicked away the iron clutch that
released the distant semaphore. The red star of danger glimmering
through the drizzle to the east might hold the express if the driver saw
it in time.

Number Sixteen had drawn up to the platform, and as her conductor came
forward Steele ran to meet him, shouting: “Sidetrack your train, Flynn!
Sidetrack her on the jump!”

“Where’s my orders?” asked the conductor.

“There’s no orders. _I_ order you. Get her off the main line at once.”

“_Your_ orders! Well, for cold cheek----”

Steele lost none of the precious moments in argument, but, turning from
the angry conductor, yelled to the engineer: “Whistle for the switch,
and kick her back on to the siding. Number Three may be into you any
moment.”

No youth in Steele’s position has the right to give a command to an
engineer over the head of a conductor, neither should his orders to the
conductor be oral--they must be documentary. Steele was shattering fixed
rules of the road, and he knew it.

The conductor of a perishable goods train thinks himself nearly as
important as if he ran an express, so Flynn was rightly indignant at
this sudden assumption of unlawful authority by a no-account youth at
a noaccount station. But a conductor is usually in a comparatively safe
place, while the driver of an engine must bear the brunt of a head-on
collision, so the grimy Morton at the throttle did not stand on
etiquette, but blew the whistle for an open switch and backed his train
into the siding. Steele watched the switch light turn to safety again,
heaved a sigh of relief, then put his stalwart arms to the lever and
slowly pulled off the danger signal to the east, and left the main line
clear for the through express.

“What’s all this sweat about?” cried Flynn. “Where’s Number Three?”

“I don’t know,” replied John quietly.

“You don’t know? Well, I’m blessed! I’ll tell you one thing, my
impetuous youngster. If Number Three has lost more time, and I’m ordered
on to the next siding, you’ll lose your job.”

“I know it.”

John turned in from the platform to the telegraph-room, and Flynn
followed him. As they advanced the instrument began a wild rataplan,
and Steele paused, raising his hand for silence. Even Flynn, who did
not understand its language, felt that the machine was making a frantic,
agonised appeal.

“Listen to that!” cried Steele, a note of triumph in his voice.

“What’s it saying?” whispered the conductor, awed in spite of himself.

‘“Sidetrack Sixteen! Sidetrack Sixteen! In God’s name sidetrack
Sixteen!’ There’s your orders at last, Flynn. It’s lucky you didn’t wait
for them.”

The final words were obliterated by a roar as of a descending avalanche,
and the express tore past, ripping the night and the silence; fifty
miles an hour at the least; the long line of curtained windows in the
sleeping-cars shimmering in the station lights like a wavering biograph
picture--there and away while you drew your breath. In the stillness
that followed, the brass instrument kept up its useless, idiotic
chatter. A heavy step sounded on the platform, and the engineer appeared
at the door, his face ghastly in its pallor, the smudges on it giving a
heightening effect of contrast.

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“God, Flynn,” he gasped, “that was a close call.”

The conductor nodded, and each man strode forward as if impelled by a
single impulse to grasp hands with the youngster, who laughed nervously,
saying:

“They’re pretty anxious in the city. I must answer.” Then he went to the
instrument and sent the most undisciplined message that had ever gone
over the wires from a subordinate to a superior.




CHAPTER II--PROMOTION

IN the train despatcher’s office at Warmington, one hundred and twenty
miles to the east of Hitchen’s Siding, the force was hard at work under
the electric light. Philip Manson, division superintendent, strolled
in, although it was long past his office hours, for he was one of those
indefatigable railroad men loth to take his fingers off the pulse of the
great organisation he controlled, and no employee of the road could be
certain of any hour, night or day, when Manson might not be standing
unexpectedly beside him. As this silent man surveyed the busy room,
listening to the click of the telegraphic sounders, which spoke to him
as plainly as if human lips were uttering the language of the land, he
was startled by a cry from Hammond, the train despatcher. Hammond sprang
like a madman to the sender, and the key, at lightning speed, rattled
forth--“Sidetrack Sixteen. Sidetrack Sixteen.”

Instinctively the division superintendent knew what had happened. To the
most accurate of men, faithful and exact through years of service, may
come an unaccountable momentary lapse of vigilance. The train despatcher
had forgotten Number Sixteen! Instantly the road spread itself out
before the mind’s eye of the superintendent. He knew every inch of it.
The situation revealed itself to his mathematical brain as a well-known
arrangement of men and pawns would display to an expert what could or
could not be done on the chess-board. He knew where Number Three would
lose further time on the up-grades, but now, alas! it was speeding along
a flat country, where every minute meant a mile. Nevertheless, there was
one chance in a thousand that the express had not yet reached Hitchen’s,
and his quick mind indicated the right thing to be done.

“Tell him to stop Number Three,” he snapped forth.

The despatcher obeyed. Where disaster was a matter of moments, there was
little use in awaiting the slow movements of a heavy freight-train when
the express, a demon of destruction, was swooping down on the scene.
There came no answer to the frenzied appeal. Every man in the room was
on his feet, and each held his breath as if the crash and the shrieks
could leap across one hundred and twenty miles and penetrate into that
appalled office. Then the sounder began, leisurely and insolent:

“_I sidetracked Sixteen on my own, and set the signal against Three
until Sixteen was in. Are you people crazy, or merely plain drunk?_”

The tension snapped like an overstrained wire. One man went into shriek
after shriek of laughter; another laid his head on his desk and sobbed.
Hammond staggered into a chair, and an assistant held a glass of water
to his ashen lips. The division superintendent stood like a statue, a
deep frown marking his displeasure at the flippant message that had come
in upon such a tragic crisis. But the assurance that the express was
safe