"You're not telling me anything I don't already know," Hennessy snapped. "Four track layers and a locomotive engineer dead. Ten off the job with broken limbs. Construction delayed eight days."

"And one railway police detective crushed to death in the pioneer tunnel."

"What? Oh yes. I forgot. One of my cinder dicks."

"His name was Clarke. Aloysius Clarke. His friends called him Wish."

"We knew the man," Joseph Van Dorn explained. "He used to work for my agency. Crackerjack detective. But he had his troubles."

Bell looked each person in the face, and in a clear voice spoke the highest compliment paid in the West. "Wish Clarke was a man to ride the river with."

Then he said to Hennessy, "I stopped in hobo jungles on my way here. Outside Crescent City on the Siskiyou line"--he pointed on the map at the north coast of California--"I caught wind of a radical or an anarchist the hobos call the Wrecker."

"A radical! Just like I said."

"The hobos know little about him, but they fear him. Men who join his cause are not seen again. From what I have gleaned so far, he may have recruited an accomplice for the tunnel job. A young agitator, a miner named Kevin Butler, was seen hopping a freight train south from Crescent City."

"Toward Eureka!" Hennessy broke in. "From Santa Rosa, he cut up to Redding and Weed and onto the Cascades Cutoff. Like I've been saying all along. Labor radicals, foreigners, anarchists. Did this agitator confess his crime?"

"Kevin Butler will be confessing to the devil, sir. His body was found beside Detective Clarke's in the pioneer tunnel. However, nothing in his background indicates the ability to carry out such an attack by himself. The Wrecker, as he is called, is still at large."

A telegraph key rattled in the next room. Lillian Hennessy cocked her ear. When the noise stopped, the telegrapher hurried in with his transcription. Bell noticed that Lillian did not bother to read what was written on the paper, as she said to her father, "From Redding. Collision north of Weed. A workmen's train fouled a signal. A materials train following didn't know the freight was in the section and plowed into the back of it. The caboose telescoped into a freight car. Two train crew killed."

Hennessy leaped to his feet, red faced. "No sabotage? Fouled a signal, my eye. Those trains were bound for the Cascades Cutoff. Which means another delay."

Joseph Van Dorn stepped forward to calm the apoplectic railroad president.

Bell moved closer to Lillian.

"You know the Morse alphabet?" he asked quietly.

"You're observant, Mr. Bell. I've traveled with my father since I was a little girl. He's never far from a telegraph key."

Bell reconsidered the young woman. Perhaps Lillian was more than the spoiled, headstrong only child she appeared to be. She could be a font of valuable information about her father's inner circle. "Who is that lady who just joined us?"