XXIV

FIELD HEADQUARTERS

In the great world-battles of yesterday, or the day before, the commanding general rode, with a few chosen officers of his staff, to some near-by hill-top, shell-swept and perilous, and with the help of a pair of field-glasses and a corps of hard-riding aides kept in touch as he could with the shifting fortunes of his divisions and brigades.  It would be small credit to an up-to-date day of progress and invention if this were not all changed.  The present-moment commander-in-chief—­warring, industrial, or political—­may sit, thanks to the Morses and the Edisons, comfortably in office-coat and slippers, far removed from the battle turmoil, directing his forces with the pressure of a finger upon the appropriate electric button, or in a few words dictated to the human ear of a clicking telegraph-instrument.

By all these adventitious aids Vice-President McVickar was profiting on the Saturday morning following the mysterious disappearance on the Friday of the gasolene unit-car somewhere between Bald Butte and the capital.  The small resort hotel at the head of Shonoho Canyon had been transformed into a field headquarters.  The hotel manager’s desk, wheeled out in front of a crackling wood-fire in the ornate little lobby, was studded with its row of electric call-buttons; a railroad dining-car crew had taken possession of the kitchen; and the spacious writing-and lounging-room, sacred, in the season, to the guests of the exclusive hotel, housed a ranking of glass-topped telegraph-tables and impromptu desks—­a work-room manned by a dozen picked young men, with O’Brien, the vice-president’s private secretary, acting as the chief.

Though the momentous Tuesday was still three days in the future, Mr. McVickar was actively at work on the Saturday morning, gathering in the loose ends and strengthening the railroad company’s defences.  With his arm-chair drawn up to the borrowed desk he was running rapidly through the telegrams filtering in a steady shower from the crackling sounders in the writing-room.  When the situation had begun to outline itself with something like coherence, he pressed a call-button for O’Brien.

“How about that wire to Detwiler at Ophir—­any reply yet?” was the rasping demand shot at the secretary.

“Nothing yet; no, sir.”

“Go after him again!  There’s a screw loose among those miners!  How about Hathaway?  Did you phone Twin Buttes?”

“Yes; and Grogan, the mill time-keeper, answered.  He says Mr. Hathaway is in the capital and something has gone wrong—­he doesn’t know what.”

“Keep the wires hot until you can get hold of Hathaway himself, and when you nail him, switch him over to my phone.  Any word from the irrigation people at Natcho?”

“Yes.  They say that the farmers under the High Line have been getting restive and forming associations.  Daniels was the man who talked to me, and he says it’s a Gordon movement, though the ranchmen are trying to keep it quiet.”