The Wreckers

d Cree

like those patent barometers that are always pointing to "Set Fair" when it is raining like Noah's flood. But there are exceptions to a

eer little premonitory chills you hear so much about and knew just as well as could be that we were never going to pull through to Chicago without getting a jolt of some sort. The reason-if you'll call it a reason-was that,

er, Idaho, where we lost twelve hours. It looked as if that didn't amount to much, because we weren't due anywhere at any particular time. The boss was on his way home for a little

had been confidential clerk and shorthand man for the boss on the Midland construction, and he was taking me along partly bec

ine, instead of the day train Sunday morning, and there would have been no meeting with Mrs. Sheila and Maisie Ann; no telegram from Mr. Chadwick, becaus

soon after breakfast, with the help of a little Pullman berth table and me and my typewriter, he turned our section into a business office, saying that now we had a good qui

From where he sat dictating to me the boss was facing forward and now and then an absent sort of look came into his eyes while he was talking off his letters, and i

catch up, I made a discovery. There were two people in Section Five just ahead of us, a young woman and a girl of maybe fifteen or so, and the Pullman was the old-fashioned kind, wit

he boss's temporary lapses any more whatever. The young woman was pretty enough to start a stopped clock-only "pretty" isn't just the word, either; there wasn't any word, when you come right down to it. A

about worn the day out, and at the second call to dinner Mr. Norcross told me to strap up the machine and put the files away in the grips and we'd go eat. Though I was only his stenographer, a

y quiet, breaking out once in the meat course to tell me that he'd just had a forwarded telegram from an old friend of his that would stop us off for a day or two in Portal City, the headquarters of t

shock; said they were ticketed to Portal City-and to find that out he must have asked the train conductor-adding that when we reached P

t is, if the lady's husband

out. "You know he

her," I shuffled. "But s

ou don't know her?" he

dy does who goes up against Mr. Graham Norc

isle, and I saw the tag. It has her

nkles and a little curved horse-shoe line come b

," he said, sort of gruff; and he ate straight through to

eila.' Most likely the names, both of them, are o

k anything," I threw in, jus

are only a boy and probably you haven't-but there are so many women who don't measure up to the promises they make when you see 'em fr

parisons for goodness knows how long, and I couldn't surround that, all at once. You see, he was such a picture of a man's man in every sense of the word; a fighter and a hard-

o be the last car in the train. As we walked back after dinner Mr. Norcross gave me a cigar and said we'd go out to the observatio

nroll itself under the trucks and go sliding backwards into the starlight; or at least that was what they seemed to be doing. The young lady was wearing a coat with a storm collar,

door which, with the railing gate on that side, had been left open by a careless rear flagman. Just then the big "Pacific type" that was pulling us let out a whistl

it snapped the young woman and the girl away from the railing so suddenly that the little o

l direction of the Pacific Coast; the young woman shrieked after her, "Maisie Ann!-come back here-you'll be left!" and then took her turn at disappearing by the same route; and, on top

y cord if the train should start. But of course I had to take a chance and spill the gravy all over the tablecloth. The stop was at a blind siding in the edge of a mountain desert, and when I squin

elling them that they'd be left to a dead moral certainty if they didn't run. They couldn't run because their skirts were too fashionably narrow, and there were st

t another word he grabbed those two hobbled women folks up under his arm

f couldn't have run very far or very fast with the handicap the boss had taken on, and in less than half a minute the "Pacific type" had caught her stride and the red tail lights of th