BY FRANCIS LYNDE ILLUSTRATED BY E. ROSCOE SHRADER CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK :::::::::: 1912 Copyright, 1912, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published October, 1912 Scientific Sprague...

C ONNOLLY, off-trick division despatcher, doubling on the early night trick for Jenner, whose baby was sick, snapped his key-switch at the close of a rapid fire of orders sent to straighten out a freight-train tangle on the Magdalene district, sat back in his chair, and reached for his corn-cob pipe with a fat man’s sigh of relief. Over in the corner of the bare, dingy office, Bolton, night man on the car-record wire, was rattling away at his type-writer; and on the wall opposite the despatcher’

I T was a warm night for altitude five thousand feet, and the last few lingerers in the dining-car on the eastbound “Flying Plainsman” had their windows open. Midway of the car a quartette of light-hearted young people were exchanging guesses as to the proper classification of a big man with laughing eyes and a fighting jaw who was dining alone at one of the end tables. “He looks like money—nice, large, ready money—to me,” commented the prettiest of the three young women; but her seat-mate, a ha

A T ten o’clock on the second Tuesday after the return of the lately promoted chief night despatcher, Dan Connolly, from his wedding trip, the business of the Brewster wire office had settled down, momentarily at least, into the comfortable rut of routine. Everything was moving smoothly on the double division, and between the leisurely inscribing of the figured entries on the train-sheet, the fat, jolly-looking night chief had a chance to fill his corn-cob pipe and to swap a word of gossip now a

T HE wreck at Lobo Cut, half-way between Angels and the upper portal of Timanyoni Canyon, was a pretty bad one. Train Six, known in the advertising folders as “The Fast Mail,” had collided in the early-morning darkness with the first section of a westbound freight which, though it was an hour and fifty minutes off its schedule time, had run past Angels without heeding the “stop for orders” signal plainly displayed. Ten minutes after the crash, the second section of the freight had shot around th

I T was an article in the news columns of The Brewster Morning Tribune which first called attention—the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general—to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company. Connabel, a hard-working reporter on The Tribune , had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s pla

S INCE it is a Western boast that the West does nothing by halves, the Brewster Town and Country Club owns two houses; a handsome pink-lava home on one of the quieter business streets of the city, and a rambling, overgrown bungalow at the golf-links on the north shore of the High Line reservoir lake, rechristened, in honor of Colonel Baldwin’s pretty daughter, “Lake Corona.” On Saturday afternoons, which are bank holidays in the progressive little inter-mountain city, the links at Lake Corona ar