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After a little silence he spoke again. "What do I make of it? Why, that there are some folks up on Big Unaka who need pretty badly to appear as very law-abiding citizens. I'll wager anything that Groner and Rudd Dawson brought Shade in." Uncle Pros nodded seriously. "Them's the very fellers," he said. "Reckon they've talked pretty free to you. I never axed ye, Gray how did they treat ye?"
When it was found, it proved Cranford's assertion in part. There was a gap in the rail on the river side of the line, but it was not a fracture. At one of the joints the fish-plates were missing, and the rail-ends were sprung apart sidewise sufficiently to let the wheel flanges pass through. Groner went down on his hands and knees with the lantern held low, and made another discovery.
Line up down to the river, and pass water in anything you can get hold of! Here, Groner" to the train conductor, who was picking himself up out of the ditch into which the shock had thrown him "send somebody to the Pullman for blankets. Jump for it, man, before this fire gets headway!" Luckily, there were by this time plenty of willing hands to help.
"This ain't no happen-so, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, when he got up. "The spikes are pulled!" Lidgerwood said nothing. There are discoveries which are beyond speech. But he stooped to examine for himself. Groner was right. For a distance of eight or ten feet the rail had been loosened, and the spikes were gone out of the corresponding cross-ties.
"It is very difficult," he said, "with us it is so simple; six and a half groner are equal to one and a third gross-groner or the quarter part of our Rigsdaler. Here it is so complicated." We ventured to show the Prince a fifty-cent piece and to explain its value by putting two quarters beside it.
I ain't never asked you, but you'd have knowed if they had." "I should have known anything that Rudd Dawson or Groner or Venters knew," Gray said, "but I'm not sure about Buckheath or Himes. However, Himes is dead, and Buckheath I don't suppose anybody in Cottonville will ever see him again." Pros's face changed instantly. He leaned abruptly forward and laid a hand on the other's knee.
Bradford's slow drawl dispelled a little of the mystery. "It wasn't meant for Groner and his passenger-wagons, I reckon. In the natural run of things, it was the 266 and the service-car that ought to've hit this thing first 204 bein' supposed to be a half-hour off her schedule. It was aimed for us, all right enough. And it wasn't meant to throw us into the hill, neither.
"Dawson was the best friend I had," Stoddard returned promptly. "When I got to the big turn on Sultan coming home that Friday morning Buckheath met me, and asked me to go down to Burnt Cabin and help him with a man that had fallen and hurt himself on the rocks. Dawson told me afterward that he and Jesse Groner were posted at the roadside to stop me and hem me in before I got to the bluff.
He says some thinks the moonshiners have taken him in mistake for a revenuer; and some believe it was robbery for his watch and money; and Mr. Hardwick is blaming it on the Groner crowd that raised up such a fuss when Lura Dawson died in the hospital here. Gid says they've searched every ridge and valley this side of Big Unaka. He Johnnie, he says he believes Mr. Stoddard suicided."
"We couldn't foresee this, any of us," he made haste to say. "Now, if you'll do what you suggested go and build a fire to wait by? I hope it won't be very long." Freed of the more crushing responsibilities, Lidgerwood found Bradford and Groner, and with the two conductors went down the track to the point of derailment to make the technical investigation of causes.
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