“Is the gold insured?”
Sir Ralph shook his head.
“Not wholly. It was fully insured as far as Seahampton,” he said grimly. “After that the responsibility is partly mine and partly Flanborough’s and partly the underwriters’. Isn’t it too awful for words?”
T. B. came into the waiting room at that moment, clad in oilskins and sou’wester.
“You had better take complete charge of this case, Mike,” he said. “Sir Ralph will give you any assistance, I’m sure.”
“Can I have a breakdown train?”
“I can bring one down here in twenty minutes,” said Sir Ralph.
“Is it equipped with searchlights?”
Sir Ralph consulted an official.
“We’ve naphtha flares. Will they do?”
“They will do,” said Michael; “put a truck in front of the engine and arrange the flares so that they light up the line.”
He spent the night in an open truck, slowly passing down the line searching for some clue which would afford a solution to the mystery. Particularly thorough was his search of the three tunnels, but they yielded nothing, and he reached Seahampton as the dawn was breaking without having made any discovery which would help him.
He went back to town by the breakdown train, sleeping in the guard’s caboose, and reached Quexley in time to receive from the retiring signalman the story of his eccentric gates.
Michael was interested and with the man for a guide he followed the course of the controlling wire which passed through a length of iron piping from the signal box to the gate.
“The electrician tells me that the wire has been cut somewhere,” said the man. “He has tried his instrument on it.”
“The wire cannot be cut if it is inside the iron casing,” said Michael.
“It is either cut or fused,” said the man.
The detective walked very slowly, pausing now and again to examine the black painted pipe. Presently he stopped. He had detected something and stooped to examine the pipe more closely. It was clear that it had been freshly painted. He passed his hand round it slowly and suddenly he felt an unexpected softness.
“This isn’t iron,” he said.
He took out his pocketknife and scraped. A little hole had been burnt into the steel by a portable blowpipe and the wires inside had been fused together by the heat.
“That explains it,” said Michael. “What effect would this have on the gates?” he asked.
“Well, you couldn’t open them from the box,” said the man.
“Could you open them by hand?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve got a chap on duty now who does nothing but open and shut them,” said the man. “While the current is on, they are locked. They work like ordinary gates, except you have to be very careful when you lock them.”
Michael waited until a train had passed and then experimented.
The gates opened and closed easily enough.
“What do you mean when you tell me that you have to be careful with the catch?”
“Well, ordinarily, when you use it without the current,” said the man, “the catch falls and cannot be lifted except by electric control.”
Michael made an inspection of the “catch.” It was a steel block working on a pivot and obviously operated magnetically.
“It doesn’t go up or down, now,” said Michael after testing it.
“It looks to me,” said the man, “as though it has been forced up.”
There was no doubt that what he said was true for the detective saw the unmistakable mark of a jemmy on the wooden casing about the lock.
But why on earth did they want to open the gate? If the train had been rifled on this stretch of line the need for an open gate would have been easy to explain. The train would have been stopped here and, supposing they could force the locks of the safe, the thieves could have loaded their gold and got away—but no train had been found.
Michael passed through the turnstile and examined the road for something to guide him to a solution.
It had been raining throughout the night and more than one traction engine had passed, as was evident from the wheel marks. He explored the road for a hundred yards and found nothing. Then he tried the other gate and found that there the catch had also been forced. The first twenty yards of the road was soft and the wheel tracks were indistinguishable. At the end of this patch, however, the going was harder, the crown of the road had drained off the rain and even the traction engine had left no great impression.
Michael walked a pace or two, then stopped and whistled, and well might he whistle, for there plain to be seen and not to be confused with any other track was the deep and narrow furrow and the broad impression which could have only been made by railway wheels!
He followed the track for another hundred yards where it struck the main road and a tram line and from there every trace disappeared.
Very weary and dishevelled he presented himself to T. B. Smith and made his report.
“You don’t seriously suggest that they took a railway train off the line and put it on the road, do you?” asked T. B. in wonder. “It’s impossible!”
“Of course it’s impossible,” said Michael irritably; “the whole thing is impossible. You can’t steal a railway train—but they’ve done it!”
He found with the assistant commissioner Sir Ralph whose agitation was pathetic.
“It’s pretty rough on me, old man,” said the baronet with that friendliness which the superior person invariably adopts in a moment of his misfortune. “I have lost a wife and a railway train in twenty-four hours. What the dickens are you laughing at?”
“Nothing,” said Michael recovering his gravity. “It was almost worth everything to see your face!”
XIV
The Remarkable Train That Did Strange Tricks
By six o’clock that evening Michael Pretherston was back again at his work, passing down from station to
