Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 14/Number 3/Signals Against Him/Chapter 4

ARDING had been away from the Jerkwater Division for a year, but he had managed at least once a month to get back to Divide. The old mother was there, and William was all she had left. No matter how difficult it was for William to “breast the blows of circumstance,” he never forgot or neglected his filial duties.

The women in the homes of railroad men, of men who run the trains, never know when they send their breadwinners forth whether they will ever come back. The little, gray lady at Divide had for years tried to shake off the forebodings that clustered about her husband, but she could not; and in the end his calling had taken him from her. That he had died a hero was something; yet that others should honor and revere his memory scarcely made her loss the less bitter.

Then her husband's brother had gone, and young William, at the same time had come near going. To the woman, it seemed as though fate had bound the Hardings to a life that must ultimately spell destruction to the very last of the line. She had begged William to give up the road, and she had been secretly pleased when the division superintendent had asked him to seek employment elsewhere.

After that, Mrs. Harding had followed her son's career of misfortune with a troubled soul. Her keen intuition told her that he would come back to the railroad again—that the same fate which had forced him away would force him to return. So she was not surprised when he came home in the midnight hour and announced that he was to wait there for Trawl to find a place for him on the division; she was not surprised, but her heart was heavy.

That night William slept in his old room under the gable; and peace, and comfort, and hope filled him, and a great thankfulness that he should have such a port to come to in the hour of his troubles, and such a loyal friend as his mother to give him welcome.

The sun was high before he opened his eyes, and when he dressed and went downstairs he found the breakfast waiting. Old blue china was on the table, and a savory smell of bacon came from a covered skillet, and an odor of coffee from the old coffeepot. Outside the kitchen window were the morning-glories, and in the rocking-chair was his mother, reading a morning paper, and patiently waiting for him to come in his own good time.

“I'm a lazy hunks, eh, mother?” he asked, putting his arm around her and kissing her withered cheek.

“You were up late, Willie,” she answered, “and I wanted you to have all the sleep you needed.”

Oh, yes, he might be Bill to some of the boys on the division, plain William to others, and Hardluck to a few more, but to his mother he had been Willie from the time he wore short trousers, and to her he would probably be Willie to the end of the chapter.

“Gee, but it's good to be home!” he murmured, as he took his place at the table.

While they ate he told her of his determination to master his misfortunes in the same place where they had first overtaken him, of how he had slipped up from Sweetbriar to Crook on a semicolon, so to speak, had secured a promise from Trawl, and had reached Divide on the Extra West. He did not tell her of the trouble on the extra—that was beside the matter, and would only have caused her worry—but he did mention what Trawl had said about growing a beard, going down to the Junction, and applying for work under a fictitious name.

“No!” cried Mrs. Harding sharply. “Does the superintendent think your own name is something to be ashamed of, Willie?”

He explained, as well as he could, Trawl's reason for making the suggestion.

“I can't think that the superintendent is right,” his mother went on, “and that your old friends will refuse to work with you because you are William Horace Harding. You will not do this with my consent, Willie. I don't believe in false names—they mean deceit—and if you are to win in your fight, I'm sure that is a bad way begin.”

“That's what I think, mother; but”

“Then,” she cut in eagerly, “don't do something which you know is not square and aboveboard. When you hear from Mr. Trawl, write him and tell him that you will take a place under your own name, or not at all.”

“That might set him against the whole scheme.”

“Then let it. Matters have come to a pretty pass, I think, if all the Hardings have done for this road has not earned you a chance in your own right. We'll get along, Willie, until matters change for you. It is a long lane, you know, that has no turning.”

“Mother,” he cried, “you're a brick! I'll fight it out on that line,” he added, with a boyish laugh, “if it takes all summer.”

She smiled at him bravely and sympathetically.

“Go out on the porch and read, son,” said she, handing him the paper. “There was a robbery at Crook last evening, and maybe the account of it will interest you. As soon as the breakfast work is done I'll come.”

He took the paper, went to the front of the house, sat down in a comfortable chair, and put his feet on the porch railing. A white house, farther down the street, drew his attention for some time. At last, with a faint smile, he gave up his staring and read about the robbery.

In the early evening of the preceding day, at eight or eight-thirty, a man named Jonas Prebble, a miner, had been murderously assaulted and robbed. Prebble was the owner of a little five-stamp mill, and he had come to town during the day with a bar of bullion. He had had the bar assayed, and the bank had figured the value of the bar from the assayer's certificate, and advanced five hundred dollars.

This was the usual proceeding in deals of that character where miners were in need of ready money. The bank, assuming charge of the bullion after making the advance, forwarded it to a San Francisco smelting and refining company, received a check in settlement, and then paid over to the miner whatever balance might be due him.

Prebble, his five hundred dollars in his pocket, had been watched and waylaid within a stone's throw of Crook City's main street. Badly beaten up and stripped of his possessions, he had been found and taken to the railroad company's hospital. He had revived and told what he knew of the robbers.

There were two of the scoundrels, but they had sprung upon him so suddenly that he could give absolutely no description of them. He had been struck down, and remembered nothing more until regaining his wits in the hospital. The police, the paper stated, had absolutely no clew to work on, and it was doubtful whether the robbers would ever be apprehended or the stolen money recovered.

“I'm not the only fellow that's playing in hard luck,” thought Harding, as he tossed the paper aside and reached into a pocket for his pipe. “We're never so bad off in this world, I guess, but what we can look around and see some one else who is worse off. Now I guess”

He had his pipe, and was fishing in his coat for the half bag of “smoking” given to him by Lansing. When he drew out the tobacco sack, he saw that it was yellow, while the one contributed by the agent at Sweetbriar had been a dingy white. This wasn't the same bag, that was evident.

Then Harding recalled the “find” made by the rear-end brakeman on top of the box car. In the dim glow of the lantern Harding had paid but scant attention to the object Joe had handed him. He had thought, very naturally, that Lansing's half bag of tobacco had fallen from his pocket during his struggle with the man in the leather cap, and had become wedged between the toe-path and the top of the car. So far as the “feel” of the bag to Harding's fingers was concerned, it had seemed the same.

Yet now, examining the object by broad daylight, he could see clearly that the sack was not the one given to him by Lansing. Indeed, after a brief search, he found the small package which he had brought from Sweetbriar. He placed the two bags on his knee and surveyed them critically. The contents of the yellow sack were bulkier than the tobacco in the white one. What the brakeman had found had plainly not been lost by Harding at all, but by the fellow who had followed him from the cupola of the waycar.

In some excitement, Harding loosened the string of the yellow sack, dug into it with his fingers, and brought out—a compact roll of bank notes! He gasped with astonishment, and the next moment eased his feelings with a low whistle.

“Queer sort of a pocketbook!” he muttered. “I guess that guy in the leather cap is sorry, about now, that he tried to help Davy pitch me off the train. Didn't the fellow discover his loss before I dropped off at Divide? If he did; why didn't he come looking for the money?”

But Harding reasoned that the man, if he had learned of his loss, must have supposed that the bag with the money had fallen into the right of way at about the spot where the set-to occurred, and to go hunting for so small an object as a tobacco sack among the rocks would have been worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Harding removed a rubber band from the tight roll, and spread but the bills. On top of them, and in such a position that it had been concealed by the bank notes when rolled, lay an oblong, crumpled slip of paper.

It was a memorandum of gold bullion deposited with the Crook City bank; weight, gold, 49.02 ounces; fineness in one-thousandths, 709$1/2$; value, $718.37; silver, fineness in one-thousandths, 196; value, $5.14; charges, $3.03. Net value, $720.48. And the certificate was issued in the name of Jonas Prebble!