I—THE SECRET CODE

TWO switch lights twinkled; one at the east, and one at the west end of the siding. For the rest all was blackness. Half way between the switch lights, snuggled close against the single-tracked main line, the station, little more than a shanty and too insignificant to boast a night operator, loomed up shadowy and indistinct. Away to the westward, like jagged points sticking up into the night and standing out in relief against the skyline, the Rockies reared their peaks. And the spell of the brooding mountains seemed to lie over all the desolate, butte-broken surrounding country—for all was utter silence.

And then there came a sound, low at first, like a strange muttering from somewhere to the westward.

It died away, grew louder, was hushed again—and broke into a sustained roar. Came then the quick, short gasps of the exhaust—it was a freight, and a heavy one. And suddenly, from up the track, circling an intervening butte, an electric headlight cut streaming through the black. It touched the little station in a queerly inquisitive way in the sweep of its arc, lingered an instant over the platform, then swung to the right of way, and held there, the metals glistening like polished silver ribbons under the flood of light.

Straining, panting at its load, reddening the sky as the fire-box door was flung open, the big tenwheeler stormed by, coughing the sparks heavenward from its stack. The roar in the still night grew deafening, as boxcar, flat and gondola, lurching, swaying, clanking, groaning, an endless string, tugging at one another, grinding their flanges, screaming as they took up the axle play, staggered with a din infernal past the lonely and unlighted station.

The roar sank into a gradually diminishing murmur. The tail-lights winked like mischievous little red eyes in the distance—and vanished.

All was stillness and that brooding silence again.

And then a man's form, like a black shadow in the darkness, rose from the trackside, and crept to the platform, and along the platform to the station door.

The man bent forward, and the round, white ray of a pocket flashlight played upon the lock. He examined the lock for an instant appraisingly, then drew a bunch of skeleton keys from his pocket, and, selecting one of the number without hesitation, unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

The flashlight swept in a circle around the interior of the little station. There were but two rooms—the small waiting room which he had entered, and in which he now stood; and, partitioned off from this, the door open, a still smaller inner room, the agent's office. He moved at once into the latter, and his flashlight, swiftly now, searched around the walls and held upon the clock. It was six minutes to ten.

“Pretty close work!” muttered the man. “Six minutes to wait.”

The ray travelled now over the operator's table, and from the table to the switchboard. He reached out, “cut in” the office circuit, listened for an instant as the sounder began to chatter—then the ray swept over the table again. Under a newspaper, that the day man had apparently flung down at haphazard on leaving the office, he found a pad of telegraph blanks, from which, evidently wary of the consequences of using a pad with its resultant tell-tale impressions on the under sheets, he tore off a sheet and laid it down ready to hand before him.

This done, he nodded complacently, sat down in the operator's chair, tilted the chair back, put his feet up on the table, and coolly picked up the newspaper. It was the evening edition of the Selkirk City Journal, that had presumably been tossed off at the station by a charitable train crew of some late afternoon train out from the city. He held the paper in one hand, the flashlight in the other, scanned the page, which happened to be an inner one, cursorily, turned it over, and suddenly leaned forward a little in his seat. He was staring at the headline at the top right-hand corner of the front page.

NOTORIOUS CRIMINAL RELEASED FROM SING SING

POLICE ARE WARNED THAT MAN MAY BE IN THIS VICINITY

HARRY MAUL, ALIAS THE HAWK, KNOWN TO BE IN THE WEST

The telegraph sounder chattered volubly for an instant, as though to challenge and silence the raucous ticking of the clock, and ended in a splutter of wrath, as it were, at the futility of its attempt. The clock ticked on. There was no other sound. And then the man spoke aloud.

“That's me,” he said. “The Hawk.” The paper rattled in his hand. There was a twisted smile on his lips in the darkness. “I guess I'm pretty well known.”

The Hawk's eyes fixed on the text, and he began to read:

“It is reported that Harry Maul, better known to the police as the Hawk, safe-breaker, forger and thief, one of the cleverest 'gentleman' crooks in the country, who is at large again after a five-years' penitentiary term, is somewhere in the West.

“The crime wave that has recently been sweeping over Selkirk City and its vicinity, and particularly the daring and, in too many cases, successful outrages with which the railroad officials and detectives have been called upon to cope of late, may, as a very plausible theory, have lured the Hawk here as to a promising field in which to resume his criminal operations. Certain it is that, while we have been the victims of a band of mysterious desperadoes for some time past, the last week or so has seen a very marked increase in the number of crimes that have been committed—a significant coincidence with the Hawk's release from Sing Sing.

“A twenty-thousand-dollar diamond necklace was stolen from a private car two nights ago; there was an express car robbery on Monday of this week; and a sleeping car was thoroughly and systematically looted the night before. True, it is mere conjecture to connect the Hawk with these in any way, since the gang that has been operating in this neighbourhood has proved itself quite capable of all and more than this without any outside and highly specialised assistance, and it would appear is in no whit inferior in resource and devilish ingenuity to the best, or worst, that Sing Sing has to offer in the shape of this so-called Hawk; but, out of conjecture, one question naturally suggests itself.

“Granting the presence of the Hawk, is he here as a rival of the criminals of whose existence we are already only too well aware, or is he one of them through old-time associations before Sing Sing put a temporary check upon his activities?”

There was more—a virulent outpouring of wrath at the intolerable extent to which the community, its life and property, was being endangered, and a promise of summary vengeance upon the criminals if caught.

“Quite so!” murmured the Hawk, lowering his feet slowly to the floor. “I guess it wouldn't be healthy to get caught around these parts. I have a feeling that it would be the nearest telegraph pole instead of a trial!”

He tossed the newspaper back on the table. The sounder, spasmodic in its chatter, for the moment was still. All was silence, profound, absolute. Then the clock struck, loud, resonant, smashing through the silence, startling. And at the same instant the sounder broke into a quick tattoo. The Hawk snatched a pencil from his pocket, and jerked his body forward—then relaxed again.

“Stray stuff,” he muttered. “Got in ahead of him. We'll get it in a minute now.”

Pencil poised in his hand, the flashlight playing on the blank sheet of paper before him, the Hawk waited. The sounder ceased—and almost instantly broke again, rattling sharply through the room. The Hawk nodded, as his pencil began to travel across the paper.

“'mtlky'—stroke at five. Two-three-one tonight,” he said aloud.

Without pause, without hesitation, without the slightest indication of spacing to break its continuity, the sounder rattled on—and finally, as abruptly as it had begun, it stopped.

On the sheet of paper the Hawk had written this:

mtlkyeqodktrpcvkqlmtp kpwrtrgtftuqcyqtnt tsghv ukopgfkxtiku kqprelcn rcatocuvgdatf gumttlvgpvjf qwucpmtfkp uckjihg vqptkijvrsa wvpxodtt dgtqprg qplqosd

He reached out for the pad, tore off another sheet, and in two parallel columns set down the letters of the alphabet, one column transposed. There was a faint smile on his lips, as he turned again to the cipher and began to write in another line of letters under the original message.

“I wonder what Poe and his predominant 'e' would do with this!” he chuckled. “'Combi'—stroke two. Key letter—stroke three.” He frowned the next instant. “What's this! Ah—stroke three, instead of one.” He completed the transposition, stared at the several lines which were now scattered with vertically crossed-out letters, whistled low under his breath, and a grim look settled on his face.

The message now read:

—-combi—natio—-ninup-perdr—eftsi—dediv—sion—al paymasterdesk—fousan dinsaj—feton-ight-autnum—-beron-eonjob

Mechanically, he separated words and sentences, and, eliminating the superfluous letters, wrote out the translation at the bottom of the sheet:

“Combination in upper drawer left side divisional paymaster ('.) desk. Ten thousand in safe to-night. Put Number One on job.”

The Hawk stood up, “plugged out” the station circuit, and, gathering up the two sheets of paper he had used, put them in his pocket; then, leaving the door of the operator's room open behind him, as he had found it, he stepped out from the station to the platform, and, with his skeleton key, relocked the station door. He stood for a moment staring up and down the track. The switchlights blinked back at him confidentially. He listened. The eastbound freight, from which he had jumped some twenty minutes before, would cross Extra No. 83, the westbound way freight, at Elkton, seven miles away, but there was no sound of the latter as yet.

He turned then, and, jumping from the platform to the track, swung into a dog-trot along the roadbed. The Hawk smiled contentedly to himself. It was all timed to a nicety! A mile or so to the west, the right of way rose in a stiff grade that the way freight would be able to negotiate at no better speed than the pace at which a man could crawl. He could make the distance readily, board her there, and the way freight would get him to Selkirk—and the divisional paymaster's office!—by about midnight.

He ran on, the swing and ease of a trained athlete in his stride. And, as he ran, he took the sheets of paper from his pocket, and, tearing them into small fragments, scattered the pieces at intervals here and there.

He reached the foot of the grade, and paused to look back along the track, as suddenly from behind him came the hoarse scream of an engine whistle. That was the way freight now, whistling perfunctorily for the deserted station! He had made the grade in plenty of time, though the nearer to the top he could get the better, for the freight, requiring all the initial impetus it could attain, would hit the foot of the grade wide open.

The Hawk broke into a run again, glancing constantly back over his shoulder as he sped on up the grade. And then, when he was well on toward the summit, opening the night like a blazing disk as it rounded a curve, he caught the gleam of the headlight. It grew larger and larger, until, beginning to fling a luminous pathway up the track that, gradually lengthening, crept nearer and nearer to him, he swerved suddenly, plunged down the embankment, and, well away from the trackside, dropped flat upon the ground.

The engine, slowed, was grunting heavily on the incline as it strained by the spot where he lay; there was the glimmer of the front-end brakeman's lamp from the top of one of the forward cars—and, with a quick, appraising glance to measure the length of the train, the Hawk, on hands and knees, crawled forward, and up the embankment, and, in the shadow of the rolling cars themselves, stood up. There would be sharp eyes watching from the cupola of the caboose. He laughed a little. And not only the train crew there, perhaps! The railroad detectives, at their wits' ends, had acquired the habit of late of turning up in the most unexpected places!

A boxcar rolled by him, another, and still another—but the Hawk's eyes were fixed a little further along toward the rear on an open space, where, in the darkness, a flat car gave the appearance of a break in the train. The flat car came abreast of him. He caught the iron foot-rung, jumped, and, with a powerful, muscular swing, flung himself aboard.

The car was loaded with some kind of carriage, or wagon, tarpaulin-covered. The Hawk crawled in under the tarpaulin, and lay down upon his back, pillowing his head on a piece of timber that blocked the carriage wheels.

The train topped the grade, gained speed, and roared on through the night. Occasionally, during what was close to a two-hours' run, it stopped at intermediate stations, and the Hawk peered furtively out from under the tarpaulin to locate the surroundings, with which he appeared to be intimately familiar; and once, nearing the end of the run, as the faint-suffused glow from the city's lights in the distance showed under the shadows of the towering peaks, he spoke aloud, “Ten thousand dollars,” remarked the Hawk pleasantly. “Nice picking for a few hours' work—ten thousand dollars!”