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“I’ve tried hard enough for it,” declared Ferris during a final dinner at the Ellistons that night. “There isn’t much doing this year, and I figured closer than anybody in my employ would dared to have done. In view of my estimate I can not for the life of me see how your local company overbid us all by over a million dollars.”
“It is curious,” admitted Bobby, still much puzzled.
“It’s rather unsportsmanlike in me to whine,” resumed Ferris, “but I am bound to believe that there is a colored gentleman in the woodpile somewhere.”
“That would be no novelty,” returned Bobby. “Ever since I bought the Bulletin I have been gunning for Ethiopians amid the fuel and always found them. The Middle West Construction Company, however, is a new load of kindling to me. I never heard of it until it was announced this morning as the lowest bidder.”
“Nobody ever heard of it,” asserted Ferris. “It was no doubt organized for the sole purpose of bidding on this job. Probably when you delve into the matter you will discover the fine Italian hand of your political boss.”
“Hardly,” chuckled Uncle Dan, indulging in his recent propensity to brag on Bobby. “Our local boss was Sam Stone, and Bobby has just succeeded in running him and two of his expert wire workers out of the country.”
“If anybody here is the political boss it is Bobby,” observed Agnes, laughing.
“I’m sorry to have to suspect him,” laughed Ferris. “Well, there is no use crying over spilled milk; but I had hoped to bring Mrs. Ferris out for a good long visit.”
“Give your wife my regards, Mr. Ferris, and tell her she must come anyhow,” insisted Mrs. Elliston. “Since I have heard that you married the daughter of my old schoolmate, I have been wanting the Keystone Construction Company to have a big contract here more than you have, I think.”
“Sounds very nice, Constance,” said her husband dryly, “but I doubt if any woman ever wanted to see the daughter of her old schoolmate as badly as any man ever wanted to make a million dollars. Bobby, I’ll make you a small bet. I’ll bet your new construction company is composed of the shattered fragments of the old Stone crowd. I’ll even bet that Silas Trimmer is in it.”
“If he is,” suddenly declared Agnes, “I’m going to go into the detective business,” whereat Uncle Dan enjoyed himself hugely. Her vindictiveness whenever the name of Silas Trimmer was mentioned had become highly amusing to him, in spite of the fact that he admired her for it.
“Go right ahead,” said Bobby approvingly. “If you find anything that will enable me to give that gentleman a financial backset I’ll see that you get a handsome reward. In the meantime I’m going to find out something about the Middle West Construction Company myself.”
Accordingly he asked his managing editor about that concern the first thing in the morning.
Ben Jolter lit his old pipe, folded his bare arms and patted them alternately in speculative enjoyment.
“I have something like two pages of information about them, if we could use it,” he announced. “I have been getting reports from the entire scouting brigade ever since the contract was let yesterday, and you may now prepare for a shock. The largest stock-holders of the concern are Silas Trimmer and Frank Sharpe, and the minor stock-holders, almost to a man, consist of those who had their little crack at the public crib under your old, time-tried and true friend, Sam Stone.”
“I admit that I am properly shocked,” responded Bobby.
“It hinges together beautifully,” Jolter went on. “The whole waterworks project was a Stone scheme, and Stone people – even though Stone himself is wiped out – secure the contract. The last expiring act of the Stone administration was to employ Ed Scales as chief engineer until the completion of the waterworks, which may occupy eight or ten years, and the contract with Scales is binding on the city unless he can be impeached for cause. Scales was city engineer under the previous reform spasm, but Stone probably found him good material and kept him on. The waterworks plans were prepared under his supervision and he got them ready for bidding. Now what’s the answer?”
“Easy,” returned Bobby. “The city loses.”
“Right,” agreed Jolter; “but how? I don’t see that we can do anything. Scales, having prepared the plans, is the logical man to see that they are carried out, and he is perfectly competent. His record is clean, so that he owns no property, nor does any of his family – although that may be because he never had a chance. The Middle West Construction Company, though just incorporated, is financially sound, thoroughly bonded, and, moreover, has put into the hands of the city ample guarantee for its twenty per cent. forfeit as required by the terms of the contract. There isn’t a thing that the Bulletin can do except to boost local enterprise with a bit of reservation, then lay low and wait for developments.”
“I dislike to do it,” objected Bobby. “It hurts me to think of mentioning Stone or Trimmer in any complimentary way whatsoever.”
Jolter laughed. “You’re a fine and consistent enemy,” he said.
“I guess I came by it honestly,” smiled Bobby, and from a drawer in his desk took one of the gray John Burnit letters.
“‘Always forgive your enemies,’” read Jolter aloud; “‘that is, after you are good and even with them.’”
“Here goes for them, then,” said Jolter, passing back the letter with an approving chuckle. “We’ll let them go right ahead, and in the meantime the Bulletin will do a lot of real nifty old sleuthing.”
But the Bulletin’s sleuthing brought nothing wrong to light, and work upon the big waterworks contract was begun with a rush.
In the meantime Agnes, true to her threat, was doing some investigating on her own account. She renewed her girlhood acquaintance with Trimmer’s daughter, who was now Mrs. Clarence Smythe, and with others of the Trimmer connection, and she saw these women folk frequently for the sole purpose of gathering up any scraps of information that might drop. The best she could gather, however, was that Clarence Smythe and Silas Trimmer were no longer upon very friendly terms; that Mrs. Smythe had quarreled with her father about Clarence; also that Clarence’s Trimmer and Company stock was in Mrs. Smythe’s name. These scraps of information, slight as they were, she religiously brought to Bobby. When the new waterworks began Agnes saved all the newspaper clippings relating to that tremendous undertaking, and she frequently drove out there of evenings after the workmen had all gone home; with just what purpose she could not say, but she felt impelled, as she half-sheepishly confessed to her Uncle Dan, to “keep an eye on the job.” She kept up her absurd surveillance in spite of all Uncle Dan’s ridicule, and one evening she came home in a state of quivering excitement. She called up Bobby at once.
“Bobby,” she wanted to know, “has the city decided to cut down expenses on the waterworks, or have the plans been changed for any reason?”
“Not that the public knows about,” replied Bobby. “Why?”
“The pumping station is not so big as the newspapers said it was to be. It is over thirty feet shorter and over twenty feet narrower.”
“How do you know?” demanded Bobby.
“I took Wilkins out there with me to-night and had him measure it for me with a yard-stick while the watchman had gone for his supper,” replied Agnes triumphantly.
Bobby stopped to laugh.
“Impossible,” said he. “You have measured it wrong or misunderstood it in some way or other.”
“You go out and measure it for yourself,” insisted Agnes.
Partly to humor her and partly because his interest had been aroused, Bobby went out the next night and measured the pumping station, the excavation for which was already completed, and to his astonishment found that Agnes’ measurements were correct. He immediately wrote to Ferris about it, told him the present dimensions and asked him upon what basis he had figured. In place of replying Ferris came on. Arriving in the city on Saturday, on Sunday he and Bobby went out to the site, and Ferris examined the new waterworks with a deliberation which well-nigh got him into serious trouble with the watchman.
“Well, young man, your fair city is stung,” declared Ferris. “The trenches are not so deep as specified by two feet, and from their width I can tell that the foundation walls are to be at least six inches thinner. I bid on the best grade of Portland cement for that job. It was spelled with a B, however, in my copy of the specification, and I asked your man Scales about it. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘that’s a misprint in the typewriting,’ and he changed the B to P with a lead pencil. Under that shed are about a thousand barrels of Bortland cement. I never heard of that brand, but I can tell cement when I see it, and this stuff will have no more adhesive power than plain mud. Bedford stone was specified. They have several car-loads of stone dumped down here which is not Bedford stone at all. I could tell a piece of Bedford in the dark. This is an inferior rock which will discolor in six months and will disintegrate in five years.”
Bobby thought the thing over quietly for some minutes.
“About the dimensions of the building, Ferris, you might possibly be mistaken, might you not?” asked Bobby.
“Impossible,” returned Ferris. “I have not figured on many jobs for years, but our chief estimator had been sent down to Cuba when this thing came up and I did the work myself, so I have a very vivid memory of it and can not possibly have it confused with any other bid. Moreover, we have all those things on record in our office and I looked it up before I came away. The dimensions of the power house and pumping station were to be one hundred and ninety by one hundred and sixty feet. The present dimensions are one hundred and fifty-eight by one hundred and thirty-three.”
Bobby was thoughtfully silent for a while.
“Do you remember who else bid on the contract?” he inquired presently.
“Every one of them,” smiled Ferris. “I can give you their addresses and the names of the people to wire to if that is what you want. We meet them on every big job.”
“Do you mind wiring yourself?” asked Bobby. “They would be more apt to give you confidential information.”
“With pleasure,” agreed Ferris, and wrote the telegrams.
On the following morning Bobby received answers at his office to all but one of his telegrams, and the information was unanimous that the original plans had called for a building one hundred and ninety by one hundred and sixty feet.
“Now I begin to understand,” said Ferris. “This was the first set of important plans I ever saw in which the dimensions were not marked, but they were most accurately drawn to scale, one-fourth inch to the foot. They are probably using the same drawings with an altered scale, although it would be an absurdly clumsy trick. If that is the case it is easy to see how the Middle West Construction Company could under-bid us by more than a million dollars and still make more money than we figured on.”
Bobby reached for the telephone.
“Get me the mayor’s office,” he called to the girl at his private telephone exchange. “Will you ‘stick around’ to see the fuss?” he inquired with grim pleasure, as he hung up the receiver.
Ferris grinned as he noted the light of battle dawning in Bobby’s eyes.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It depends on the size and duration of the fuss.”
“If you don’t stay I’ll have you subpœnaed. I may have to, anyhow. As for the size of the fuss, I can promise you a bully one if what you surmise is correct.”
His telephone bell rang and Bobby turned to it quickly.
“Hello, Chalmers!” he began, then laughed. “Beg pardon, Agnes; I thought it was the mayor’s office;” he apologized, then listened intently. There were a few eager queries, and when Bobby hung up the telephone receiver it was with great satisfaction. “I haven’t seen as much fun in sight since I began my fight on Stone,” he declared. “Miss Elliston, who has developed a marvelous new capacity for finding out other men’s business secrets through their women folk, has just telephoned me the results of her last night’s detective work. It seems that Silas Trimmer, one of the heavy backers of the Middle West Construction Company, has just negotiated a loan upon his stock in the mercantile establishment of Trimmer and Company, my share of which was known as the John Burnit Store until Trimmer beat me out of control. I understand that Trimmer has mortgaged everything to the hilt to go into this waterworks deal.”
The bell rang again. This time it was Chalmers.
“Say, Chalmers,” said Bobby, “I want you to get me some sort of a legal document that will allow me to take possession of and examine all the books, papers and drawings of the city engineer’s department, including the waterworks engineer’s office… Yes, you can, Chalmers,” he insisted, against an obvious protest. “There is some legal machinery you can put in motion to get it, and I want it right away. Moreover, I want you to secure me somebody to serve the writ and to keep it quiet.”
Then he explained briefly what had been partly discovered and partly surmised. Next Bobby sent for Jolter and laid the facts before him, to the great joy of that aggressive gentleman. Then he called up Biff Bates, and made an appointment with him to meet him at Jimmy Platt’s office in half an hour. He would have telephoned Platt, but the engineer had no telephone.
CHAPTER XXVIII
BIFF RENEWS A PLEASANT ACQUAINTANCE AND BOBBY INAUGURATES A TRAGEDY
“Is Mr. Platt in?”
Biff stood hesitantly in the door when he found the place occupied only by a brown-haired girl, who was engaged in the quiet, unprofessional occupation of embroidering a shirtwaist pattern.
The girl looked up with a smile at the young man’s awkwardness, and felt impelled to put him at his ease.
“He’s not in just now, but I expect him within ten or fifteen minutes at the outside. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Bates?”
He looked at her much mystified at this calling of his name, but he mumbled his thanks for the chair which she put forward for him, and, sitting with his hat upon his knees, contemplated her furtively.
“I guess you don’t remember me,” she said in frank enjoyment of his mystification, “but I remember you perfectly. I used to see you quite often out at Westmarsh when Mr. Burnit was trying to redeem that persistent swamp. I am Mr. Platt’s sister.”
“No!” exclaimed Biff in amazement. “You can’t be the kid that used to ride on the excavating cars, and go home with yellow clay on your dresses every day.”
“I’m the kid,” said she with a musical laugh; “and I’m afraid I haven’t quite outgrown my hoydenish tendencies even yet.”
Biff had no comment to make. He was lost in wonder over that eternal mystery – the transformation which occurs when a girl passes from fourteen to eighteen.
“Don’t you remember?” she gaily went on. “You gave me a boxing lesson out there one afternoon and promised to give me more of them, but you never did.”
Biff cleared a sudden huskiness from his throat.
“I’d be tickled black in the face to make good any day,” he urged earnestly, and then hastily corrected the offer to: “That is, I mean I’ll be very glad to – to finish the job.”
Immediately he turned violently red.
“I don’t seem to care as much for the accomplishment as I did then,” observed the girl with a smile, “but I do wish I could learn to swing my nice Indian clubs without cracking the back of my head.”
“I got a medal for club swinging,” said Biff diffidently. “I’ll teach you any time you like. It’s easy. Come right over to the gym on Tuesday and Friday forenoons. Those are ladies’ mornings, and I’ve got nothing but real classy people at that.”
The entrance of Mr. Platt interrupted Biff just as he was beginning to feel at ease, and threw that young gentleman, who always appropriated and absorbed other people’s troubles, into much concern; for Mr. Platt was hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked from worry. His coat was very shiny, and his hat was shabby. The dusty and neglected drawing on his crude drawing-table told the story all too well. The engineering business, so far as Mr. Platt was concerned, seemed to be a total failure. Nevertheless, he greeted Mr. Bates warmly, and inquired after Mr. Burnit.
“He’s always fine,” said Biff. “He had me come up here to meet him.”
“I should scarcely think he would care to come here after the unfortunate outcome of the work I did for him,” said Mr. Platt.
“You mean on old Applerod’s Subtraction?”
“You couldn’t hardly call it the Applerod Addition, could you?” responded Jimmy with a smile. “That was a most unlucky transaction for me as well as for Mr. Burnit.”
Biff looked about the room comprehendingly.
“I guess it put you on the hummer, all right,” said he. “It don’t look as if you done anything since.”
“But very little,” confessed Mr. Platt. “My failure on that job hurt my reputation almost fatally.”
Biff gravely sought within himself for words of consolation, one of his fleeting ideas being to engage Mr. Platt on the spot to survey the site of Bates’ Athletic Hall, although there was not the slightest possible need for such a survey. In the midst of his sympathetic gloom came in Mr. Ferris and Bobby.
“Jimmy, how would you like to be chief construction engineer of the new waterworks?” asked Bobby, with scant waste of time, after he had introduced Ferris.
Mr. Platt gasped and paled.
“I think I could be urged, from a sense of public duty, to give up my highly lucrative private practice,” he said with a pitiful attempt at levity, though his voice was husky, and his tightly clenched hand, where the white knuckles rested upon his drawing-table, trembled.
“Don’t build up too much hope on it, Jimmy; but if what we surmise is correct you will have a chance at it,” and he briefly explained. “We’re going right out there,” concluded Bobby, “and I want you to go along to help investigate. We have to find some incriminating evidence, and you’d be more likely to know how and where to look for it than any of us.”
It is needless to say that Jimmy Platt took his hat with alacrity. Before he went out, with new hope in his heart, he turned and shook hands ecstatically with his sister. Still holding Jimmy’s hand she turned to Bobby impulsively:
“I do hope, Mr. Burnit, that this turns out right for Jimmy.”
Bobby turned to her abruptly and with a trace of a frown. It was a rather poorly trained office employee, he thought, who would intrude herself into conversation that it was her duty to forget, but Biff Bates caught that look and stepped into the breach.
“This is Nellie, Bobby – that is, it used to be Nellie,” he stated with a quick correction, and blushed violently.
“It is Nellie still,” laughed that young lady to Bobby, and the puzzled look upon his face was swiftly driven away by a smile, as he suddenly recognized in her traces of the long-legged girl who had been always present at the Applerod Addition, who had ridden in his automobile, and had confided to him most volubly, upon innumerable occasions, that her brother Jimmy was about the smartest man who ever sighted through a transit.
In the hastily constructed frame office out at the waterworks site, Ed Scales, pale and emaciated and with black rings under his eyes, looked up nervously as Bobby’s little army, reënforced from four to six by the addition of a “plain clothes man” and Dillingham, the Bulletin’s star reporter, invaded the place. Before a word was spoken, Feeney, the plain clothes man, presented Scales with a writ, which the latter attempted to read with unseeing eyes, his fingers trembling.
“What does this mean?”
“That I have come to take possession,” said Bobby, “with power to make an examination of every scrap of paper in the place. Frankly, Scales, we expect to find something crooked about the waterworks contract. If we do you know the result. If we do not, the interruption will be only temporary, and you will have very pretty grounds for action; for I am taking a long shot, and if I don’t find what I am after I have put myself and the mayor into a bad scrape.”
Scales thrice opened his mouth to speak, and thrice there came no sound from his lips. Then he laid a bunch of keys upon his desk, shoving them toward Feeney, and rose. He half-staggered into the large coat room behind him. He had scarcely more than disappeared when there was the startling roar of a shot, and the body of Scales, with a round hole in the temple, toppled, face downward, out of the door. It was Scales’ tragic confession of guilt. They sprang instantly to him, but nothing could be done for him. He was dead when they reached him.
“Poor devil,” said Ferris brokenly. “It is probably the first crooked thing he ever did in his life, and he hadn’t nerve enough to go through with it. I feel like a murderer for my share in the matter.”
Bobby, too, had turned sick; his senses swam and he felt numb and cold. He was aroused by a calm, dispassionate voice at the telephone. It was Dillingham, sending to the Bulletin a carefully lurid account of the tragedy, and of the probable causes leading up to it.
“We’ll have an extra on the street in five minutes,” he told Bobby with satisfaction as he rose. “That means that the Chronicle men will come out in a swarm, but it will take them a half-hour to get here. We have that much time, then, to dig up the evidence we are after, and if we hustle we can have a second extra out before the Chronicle can get a line. It’s the biggest beat in years. Come on, boys, let’s get busy,” and he took up the keys that Scales had left on the desk.
Dillingham had no sooner left the telephone than Feeney took up the receiver and called for a number. The reporter turned upon him like a flash, recognizing that call as the number of the coroner’s office. Dillingham suddenly caught himself before he had spoken, and looked hastily about the room. In the corner near the floor was a little box with the familiar bells upon it, and binding screws that held the wires. Quickly Dillingham slipped over to that corner just as Feeney was saying:
“Hello! Coroner’s office, this is Feeney. Is that you, Jack?.. Well – ”
At that instant Dillingham loosened a binding screw and slipped off the loop of the wire.
“Hello, coroner!” repeated Feeney. “I say, Jack! Hello! Hello! Hello, there! Hello! Hello!” Then Feeney pounded the mouthpiece, jerked the receiver hook up and down, yelled at exchange, and worked himself into a vast fever.
“What’s the matter with this thing, anyhow, Dill?” he finally demanded.
“Exchange probably went to sleep on you,” said Dillingham.
Easily he was now opening one by one the immense flat drawers of a drawing-case, and with much interest delving into the huge drawings that it contained.
“Come here, Mr. Platt,” Dillingham went on. “You cast your eagle eye over these drawings while I do a little job of interviewing,” and he walked over to the employees of the office, who, since they had been roughly warned by Feeney not to go near “that body,” had huddled, scared and limp, in the far corner of the room.
Perspiring and angry, Feeney tried for five solid minutes to obtain some response from the dead telephone, then he gave it up.
“I’ve got to go out and hunt up another ’phone,” he declared. “Biff, I’ll appoint you my deputy. Don’t let anybody touch the corpse till the coroner comes.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Bobby hastily, very glad to leave the room, and both he and Mr. Ferris accompanied Feeney. No sooner was Feeney out of the place than Dillingham reconnected the telephone and went back to his investigations. He was thoroughly satisfied, after a few questions, that the present employees knew nothing whatever, and Platt reported to him that every general drawing he could find was marked three-tenths inch to the foot, none being marked one-fourth.
“That doesn’t matter so much,” mused Dillingham. “It will be easy enough to prove that these are the same drawings that were provided the contestants, and six firms will swear that they were marked one-fourth of an inch to the foot. What we have to do is to prove that the drawings the Middle West Company used as the basis of their bid were marked one-fourth inch to the foot.”
The telephone bell rang violently while Dillingham was puzzling over this matter, and one of the employees started to answer it.