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Empire Builders

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #16630 · 490,969 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Empire Builders

Author: Francis Lynde

Illustrator: Jay Hambidge


        
Release date: August 31, 2005 [eBook #16630]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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EMPIRE BUILDERS

by

FRANCIS LYNDE

Author of
The Quickening, The Grafters
A Fool for Love, etc.

With Illustrations by Jay Hambidge

Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Press of
Braunworth & Co.
Bookbinders and Printers
Brooklyn, N.Y.

1907







[Illustration: "I won't attempt to apologize--it's beyond all that"]




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                               PAGE

    I A MASTER OF MEN                    1

   II A SPIKED SWITCH                   13

  III LOSS AND DAMAGE                   30

   IV COLD STORAGE                      38

    V WANTED: THIRTY-FIVE MILLIONS      47

   VI THE AWAKENING OF CHARLES EDWARD   59

  VII HAMMER AND TONGS                  66

 VIII THE AUTOMATIC AIR                 75

   IX THE RACE TO THE SLOW              90

    X THE SINEWS OF WAR                100

   XI HURRY ORDERS                     120

  XII THE ENTERING WEDGE               141

 XIII THE BARBARIANS                   155

  XIV THE DRAW-BAR PULL                166

   XV AN UNWILLING HOST                177

  XVI THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES           186

 XVII A NIGHT OF ALARMS                198

XVIII THE MORNING AFTER                217

  XIX THE RELUCTANT WHEELS             238

   XX THE CONSPIRATORS                 254

  XXI THE MILLS OF THE GODS            271

 XXII THE MAN ON HORSEBACK             285

XXIII THE DEADLOCK                     311

 XXIV RUIZ GREGORIO                    325

  XXV THE SIEGE OF THE NADIA           336

 XXVI THE STAR OF EMPIRE               362




EMPIRE BUILDERS


I

A MASTER OF MEN


Engine Number 206, narrow gauge, was pushing, or rather failing to push,
the old-fashioned box-plow through the crusted drifts on the uptilted
shoulder of Plug Mountain, at altitude ten thousand feet, with the
mercury at twelve below zero. There was a wind--the winter day above
timber-line without its wind is as rare as a thawing Christmas--and it
cut like knives through any garmenting lighter than fur or leather. The
cab of the 206 was old and weather-shaken, and Ford pulled the collar of
his buffalo coat about his ears when the grunting of the exhaust and the
shrilling of the wheels on the snow-shod rails stopped abruptly.

"Gar-r-r!" snarled Gallagher, the red-headed Irish engineer, shutting
off the steam in impotent rage. "The power is not in this dommed ould
camp-kittle sewin' machine! 'Tis heaven's pity they wouldn't be givin'
us wan man-sized, fightin' lokimotive on this ind of the line, Misther
Foord."

Ford, superintendent and general autocrat of the Plug Mountain branch of
the Pacific Southwestern, climbed down from his cramped seat on the
fireman's box and stood scowling at the retracting index of the
steam-gauge. When he was on his feet beside the little Irishman, you saw
that he was a young man, well-built, square-shouldered and athletic
under the muffling of the shapeless fur greatcoat; also, that in spite
of the scowl, his clean-shaven face was strong and manly and good to
look upon.

"Power!" he retorted. "That's only one of the hundred things they don't
give us, Mike. Look at that steam-gauge--freezing right where she
stands!"

"'Tis so," assented Gallagher. "She'd be dead and shtiff in tin minutes
be the clock if we'd lave her be in this drift."

Ford motioned the engineer aside and took the throttle himself. It was
the third day out from Cherubusco, the station at the foot of the
mountain; and in the eight-and-forty hours the engine, plow and crew of
twenty shovelers had, by labor of the cruelest, opened eleven of the
thirteen blockaded miles isolating Saint's Rest, the mining-camp
end-of-track in the high basin at the head of the pass.

The throttle opened with a jerk under the superintendent's hand. There
was a snow-choked drumming of the exhaust, and the driving-wheels spun
wildly in the flurry beneath. But there was no inch of forward motion,
and Ford gave it up.

"We're against it," he admitted. "Back her down and we'll put the
shovelers at it again while you're nursing her up and getting more
steam. We're going to make it to Saint's Rest to-day if the Two-six has
to go in on three legs."

Gallagher pulled the reversing lever into the back gear and sent the
failing steam whistling into the chilled cylinders with cautious little
jerks at the throttle. The box-plow came out of the clutch of its snow
vise with shrillings as of a soul in torment, and the bucking outfit
screeched coldly down over the snowy rails to the "let-up," where the
shovelers' box-car had been uncoupled.

Ford swung off to turn out the shoveling squad; and presently the
laborers, muffled to the eyes, were filing past the 206 to break a path
for the plow. Gallagher was on the running-board with his flare torch,
thawing out an injector. He marked the cheerful swing of the men and
gave credit where it was due.

"'Tis a full-grown man, that," he commented, meaning Ford. "Manny's the
wan would be huggin' the warm boiler-head these times, and shtickin' his
head out of the windy to holler, 'G'wan, boys; pitch it out lively now,
and be dommed to yez!' But Misther Foord ain't built the like o' that.
He'll be as deep in that freezin' purgatory up yander in th' drift as
the foremist wan of thim."

The Irishman's praise was not unmerited. Whatever his failings,
and he groaned under his fair human share of them, Stuart Ford had
the gift of leadership. Before he had been a month on the branch
as its "old man" and autocrat, he had won the good-will and loyalty
of the rank and file, from the office men in the headquarters to the
pick-and-shovel contingent on the sections. Even the blockade-breaking
laborers--temporary helpers as they were--stood by him manfully in the
sustained battle with the snow. Ford spared them when he could, and they
knew it.

"Warm it up, boys!" he called cheerily, climbing to the top of the
frozen drift to direct the attack. "It's been a long fight, but we're in
sight of home now. Come up here with your shovels, Olsen, and break it
down from the top. It's the crust that plugs Mike's wedge."

He looked the fighting leader, standing at the top of the wind-swept
drift and crying on his shovelers. It was the part he had chosen for
himself in the game of life, and he quarreled only when the stake was
small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts. The
Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern
system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads, and
upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders. It barely
paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow blockades
in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss account.

This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to
find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug
Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble
one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and
he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific
Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain
line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the great Granger
roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction, transferring an
energetic young man with ambitions from the bald plains of the Dakotas
to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.

Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a
syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then
prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction,
and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at
once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be
discovered.

Failing to tap their bonanza freight-producer on the route up Blue
Canyon, the projectors--small fish in the great money-pool--had talked
vaguely of future extensions to Salt Lake, to San Francisco, to Puget
Sound, or to some other of the far-beyonds, and had even gone the length
of surveying a line over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin,
on the Pacific slope of the range. But they had prudently stopped
building; and the pause continued until the day of the great silver
strike at Saint's Rest.

The new carbonate beds chanced to lie within easy rifle-shot of the
summit of Plug Pass; in other words, they were precisely on the line of
the extension survey of the narrow gauge. The discovery was a piece of
sheer luck for the amateur railroad builders. For a time, as all the
world knows, Saint's Rest headed the mining news column in all the
dailies, and the rush for the new camp fairly swamped the meager
carrying facilities of the incomplete line and the stages connecting its
track-end with the high-mountain Mecca of the treasure-seekers.

Then, indeed, the Denver syndicate saw its long deferred opportunity and
grasped it. Long purses might be lacking, but not shrewd heads. The
unfinished Plug Mountain was immediately bonded for more than it ever
promised to be worth, and in the hottest heat of the forwarding strife
it was extended at the rate of a mile a day until the welcome screech of
its locomotive whistles was added to the perfervid clamor of the new
camp in the Plug Pass basin.

The goal reached, the Denver folk took a fresh leaf out of the book of
shrewdness. Holding the completed line only long enough to skim the
cream of the rush earnings, they sold their stock at a sound premium to
the Pacific Southwestern, pocketed their winnings cannily, and escaped a
short half-year before the slump in silver, and the consequent collapse
of Saint's Rest, came to establish the future Waterloo for Napoleonic
young superintendents in the Southwestern's service.

This was all ancient history when Ford left the Granger road to climb,
at President Colbrith's behest, into the Plug Mountain saddle; and a
round half-dozen of the young Napoleons had been broken before he put
foot in stirrup for the mounting. While his attacking of the problem had
been open-eyed, he had not stopped to specialize in the ancient history
of the Plug Mountain branch. When he did specialize, his point of view
was pretty clearly defined in a letter to Mr. Richard Frisbie, of St.
Paul, written after he had been for six months the master of the Plug
Mountain destinies.

"I'm up against it, good and solid," was the way he phrased it to
Frisbie. "My hundred and fifty miles of 'two streaks of rust and a
right-of-way' has never paid a net dollar since the boom broke at
Saint's Rest, and under present conditions it never will. If I had known
the history of the road when President Colbrith went fishing for me--as
I didn't--I wouldn't have touched the job with a ten-foot pole.

"But now I'm here, I'm going to do something with my two streaks of rust
to make them pay--make a spoon or spoil a horn. Just what shall be done
I haven't decided fully, but I have a notion in the back part of my
head, and if it works out, I shall need you first of all. Will you come?

"Have I told you in any of my earlier letters that I have personally
earned the ill-will of General Manager North? I have, and it is distinct
from and in addition to his hostility for the unearning branch for which
I am responsible. I'm sorry for it, because I may need his good word for
my inchoate scheme later on. It came up over some maintenance-of-way
charges. He is as shrewd as he is unscrupulous, and he knows well how to
pile the sins of the congregation on the back of the poor scapegoat. To
make a better showing for the main line, and at the same time to show
what a swilling pig the Plug Mountain is, he had the branch charged up
with a lot of material we didn't get. Naturally, I protested--and was
curtly told to mind my own business, which had no ramifications reaching
into the accounting department. Then I threatened to carry it over his
head to President Colbrith; whereupon I gained my point temporarily, and
lost a possible stepping-stone to success.

"None the less, I am going to win out if it costs me the best year of
my life. I'm going to swing to this thing till I make something out of
it, if I have to put in some more winters like the one I have just come
through--which was Sheol, with ice and snow in the place of the
traditional fire and brimstone. If I have one good quality--as I
sometimes doubt--it's the inability to know when I am satisfactorily and
permanently licked."

Stuart Ford was shivering through the second of the winters on the gray,
needle-winded day when he stood on the crusted drift, heartening his men
who were breaking the way for further rammings of the scrap-heap 206 and
her box-plow. During the summer which lay behind the pitiless storms and
the blockading snows he had explored and planned, studied and schemed;
and now a month of good weather would put the finishing touches
preparatory upon the "notion" hinted at in the letter to Frisbie.

"That'll do, boys; we'll let Gallagher hit it a few times now," he sang
out, when he saw that the weaker ones among the shovelers were stumbling
numbly and throwing wild. "Get back to the car and thaw yourselves out."

The safety-valve of the 206 was stuttering under a gratifying increase
of steam pressure when the superintendent climbed to the canvas-shrouded
cab.

"Ha! two hundred and fifty pounds! That looks a little more like it,
Michael. Now get all the run you can and hit her straight from the
shoulder," he ordered, mounting to his seat on the fireman's box, and
bracing himself for what should come.

Gallagher released the driver-brakes and let the 206 and the plow drift
down the grade until his tender drawhead touched the laborers' car. Then
the reversing lever went forward with a clang, and the steam squealed
shrilly in the dry-pipe. For a thunderous second or two the
driving-wheels slipped and whirled futilely on the snowy rails.
Gallagher pounced upon the sand lever, whereat the tires suddenly bit
and held and a long-drawn, fire-tearing exhaust sobbed from the stack.

"You've got her!" shouted Ford. "Now hit it--hit it hard!"

Swiftly the huge mass of engine and plow gathered headway, the pounding
exhausts quickening until they blended in a continuous roar. The little
Irishman stayed himself with a foot against the boiler brace; the
fireman ducked under the canvas curtain and clung to the coal bulkhead;
and Ford held on as he could.

The shock came like the crashing blow of a collision. The box-plow
buckled and groaned with fine cracklings as of hard-strained timbers,
and an avalanche of snow thrown up from its inclined plane buried engine
and cab and tender in a smothering drift. Ford slid his window and
looked out.

"Good work, Michael; good work! You gained a full car-length that time.
Try it again."

Gallagher backed the plow carefully out of the cutting, and the fireman
opened the blower and nursed his fire. Again and again the wheeled
projectile was hurled into the obstruction, and Ford watched the
steadily retrograding finger of the steam-gauge anxiously. Would the
pressure suffice for the final dash which should clear the cutting? Or
would they have to stop and turn out the wretched shovelmen again?

The answer came with the fourth drive into the stubborn barrier. There
was the same nerve-racking shock of impact; but now the recoil was
followed by a second forward plunge, and Gallagher yelled his triumph
when the 206 burst through the remaining lesser drifts and shot away on
the clear track beyond.

Ford drew a long breath of relief, and the engineer checked the speed of
the runaway, stopped, and started back to couple on the car-load of
laborers.

Ford swung around and put his back to the open window.

"Let's hope that is the worst of it and the last of it for this winter,
Mike," he said, speaking as man to man. "I believe the weather will
break before we have any more snow; and next year--"

The pause was so long that Gallagher took his chance of filling it.

"Don't be tellin' me the big boss has promised us a rotary for next
winter, Misther Foord. That'd be too good to be thrue, I'm thinking."

"No; but next winter you'll be doing one of two things, Michael. You
will be pulling your train through steel snow-sheds on Plug Mountain--or
you'll be working for another boss. Break her loose, and let's get to
camp as soon as we can. Those poor devils back in the box-car are about
dead for sleep and a square meal."




II

A SPIKED SWITCH


Ford's hopeful prophecy that the snow battles were over for the season
proved true. A few weeks later a warm wind blew up from the west, the
mountain foot-trails became first packed ice-paths and then slippery
ridges to trap the unwary; the great drifts began to settle and melt,
and the spring music of the swollen mountain torrents was abroad in the
land.

At the blowing of the warm wind Ford aimed the opening gun in his
campaign against fate--the fate which seemed to be bent upon adding his
name to the list of failures on the Plug Mountain branch. The gun-aiming
was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering
office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug
Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.

"I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a
bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay," wrote Ford, "and the
chance has come. Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place
is yours if you will take it. If you are willing to tie up to the most
harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a
thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country
of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come."

This letter was written on a Friday. Frisbie got it out of the carriers'
delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing
westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal. Not that the
destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as
willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford's finger.

It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track
debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint's Rest, stretched his
legs gratefully on _terra firma_, had his first deep lungful of the
ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him. Ford
would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the
little shack "hotel," and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the
tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the
boxed-off den in the station building which served as the
superintendent's office.

"I've been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing
threatened to take shape in my head," Ford began. "First, let me ask
you: do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four
good constructing engineers--men you could turn loose absolutely and
trust implicitly? I'm putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain
exile has taken me a bit out of touch."

"Why--yes," said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll. "There
are Major Benson and his son Jack--you know 'em both--just in off their
job in the Selkirks. Then there is Roy Brissac; he'd be a pretty good
man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,--he's got a job in
Winnipeg, but he'll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man
I know. But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?"

Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.

"I'll go into the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty
of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good
bit more privacy. The thing I'm trying to figure out will burst like a
bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and"--lowering his
voice--"I can't trust my office force here. _Savez?_"

"I _savez_ nothing as yet," laughed the new supervisor, "but perhaps I
shall if you'll tell me what is going to happen in the next month or six
weeks."

"I'm coming to that, right now. How would you like to take a hunting
trip over on the wilderness side of the range? There are big woods and
big game."

Frisbie grinned. He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by
the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches
and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated
faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in _Faust_.
Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic.

"You needn't ask me what I'd like; you just tell me what you want me to
do," he rejoined, with clansman loyalty.

"So I will," said Ford, taking the reins of authority. "We leave here
to-morrow morning for a trip over the Pass and down the Pannikin on the
other side, and if anybody asks you why, you can say that we expect to
kill a deer or two, and possibly a bear. Your part of the outsetting,
however, is to pack your surveying instruments on the burro saddles so
they'll pass for grub-boxes, tent-poles, and the like."

"Call it done," said Frisbie. "But why all this stage play? Can't you
anticipate that much without endangering your bubble?"

Ford lowered his voice again.

"I gave you the hint. Penfield, my chief clerk--his desk is just on the
other side of that partition--is an ex-main-line man, shoved upon me
when I didn't want him. He was General Manager North's stenographer.
For reasons which will be apparent to you a little later on, I want to
blow my bubble in my own way; or, to change the figure, I'd like to fire
the first volley myself."

Frisbie's grin was rather more than less diabolic.

"Then I'd begin by firing Mr. Penfield, himself," he remarked.

"No, you wouldn't," said Ford. "There are going to be obstacles enough
in the way without slapping Mr. North in the face as a preliminary.
Under the circumstances, he'd take it that way; Penfield would make sure
that he took it that way."

It was at this point in the low-toned conference that the ingenious
young man in the outer office put down the desk telephone ear-piece long
enough to smite with his fist at some air-drawn antagonist. Curiosity
was this young man's capital weakness, and he had tinkered the wires of
the private telephone system so that the flicking of a switch made him
an auditor at any conversation carried on in the private office. He was
listening intently and eagerly again when Ford said, still in the same
guarded tone:

"No, I can't fire Penfield, and I don't particularly want to. He is a
good office man, and loyal to his salt: it's my misfortune that it is
Mr. North's salt-cellar, and not mine, that he dips into. Besides, I'd
have trouble in replacing him. Saint's Rest isn't exactly the paradise
its name implies--for a clean-cut, well-mannered young fellow with
social leanings."

"Now, what in the mischief does all that mean?" mused the chief clerk,
when Ford and his new track man had gone out. "A month's hunting trip
over the range, with the surveying instruments taken along. And last
summer Mr. Ford spent a good part of his time over there--also hunting,
so he said. Confound it all! I wish I could get into that private drawer
of his in the safe. That would tell the story. I wonder if Pacheco
couldn't make himself an errand over the Pass in the morning? By
George!" slapping his thigh and apostrophizing the superintendent, "I'll
just go you once, Mr. Ford, if I lose!"

Now the fruit, of which this little soliloquy was the opening blossom,
matured on the second day after Ford and Frisbie had started out on the
mysterious hunting trip across the range. Pacheco, the half-breed
Mexican who freighted provisions by jack train to the mining-camps on
the head waters of the Pannikin, came in to report to the chief clerk.

"Well, 'Checo, what did you find out?" was the curt inquiry.

The half-breed spread his palms.

"W'at I see, I know. Dey'll not gone for hunt much. One day out, dey'll
make-a da camp and go for squint t'rough spy-glass, so"--making an
imaginary transit telescope of his hands. "Den dey'll measure h-on da
groun' and squint some more, so."

Penfield nodded and a gold piece changed hands silently.

"That's all, 'Checo; much obliged. Don't say anything about this over in
the camp. Mr. Ford said he was going hunting, and that's what we'll say,
if anybody asks us."

That night the chief clerk sent a brief cipher telegram to the general
manager at Denver.

     Ford and his new track supervisor, who is really a high-priced
     constructing engineer, gone over the range for a month's absence.
     Gave it out here that they were going after big game, but they took
     a transit and are picking up the line of the old S. L. & W.
     extension in the upper Pannikin.

It was late in the month of June when Ford and Frisbie, tanned,
weathered and as gaunt as pioneers, returned to Saint's Rest; and for
those who were curious enough to be interested, there were a couple of
bear-skins and one of a mountain lion to make good the ostensible object
of the absence.

But the most important trophies of the excursion were two engineers'
note-books, well filled with memoranda; and these they did not exhibit.
On the contrary, they became a part of the collection of maps,
statistics, estimates and private correspondence which Chief Clerk
Penfield was so anxious to examine, and which Ford kept under lock and
key when he and Frisbie were not poring over some portion of it in the
seclusion of the private office.

None the less, Penfield kept his eyes and ears open, and before long he
had another detail to report by cipher telegram to the general manager.
Ford was evidently preparing for another absence, and from what the
chief clerk could overhear, he was led to believe that the pseudo
supervisor of track would be left in charge of Plug Mountain affairs.

It was on the day before Ford's departure for Denver that a letter came
from General Manager North. Ford read it with a scowl of disapproval and
tossed it across the double desk to Frisbie.

"A polite invitation for me to stay at home and to attend to my
business," he commented.

"Had you written him that you were going away?" inquired Frisbie.

"No; but evidently somebody else has."

Frisbie read the letter again.

"'So that all heads of departments may be on duty when the president
makes his annual inspection trip over the lines,'" he quoted. "Is Mr.
Colbrith coming out this early in the summer?"

"No, of course not. He never comes before August."

"Then this is only a trumped-up excuse to make you stay here?"

"That's all," Ford replied laconically.

Mr. Richard Frisbie got up and walked twice the length of the little
room before he said:

"This Denver gentleman is going to knock your little scheme into a
cocked hat, if he can, Stuart."

"I am very much afraid we'll have to reckon upon that. As a matter of
fact, I've been reckoning upon it, all along."

"How much of a pull has he with the New York money-people?"

"I don't know that: I wish I did. It would simplify matters somewhat."

Frisbie took another turn up and down the room, with his head down and
his hands in his pockets.

"Stuart, I believe, if I were in your place, I'd enlist Mr. North, if I
had to make it an object for him," he said, at length.

"Certainly, I mean to go to him first," said Ford. "That is his due. But
I am counting upon opposition rather than help. Wait a minute"--he
jerked the door open suddenly and made sure that the chief clerk's chair
was unoccupied. "The worst of it is that I don't trust North," he went
on. "He is a grafter in small ways, and he'd sell me out in a minute if
he felt like it and could see any chance of making capital for himself."

"Then don't go to him with your scheme," urged Frisbie. "If you enlist
him, you won't be sure of him; and if you don't, you'll merely leave an
active opponent behind you instead of a passive one."

"I guess you're right, Dick; but I'll have to be governed by conditions
as I find them. Aside from North's influence with Mr. Colbrith, which is
considerable, I believe, he can't do much to help. But he can do a
tremendous lot to hinder. I think I shall try to choke him with butter,
if I can."

Notwithstanding the general manager's letter, Ford took the train for
Denver the following morning, and the chief clerk remarked that he
checked a small steamer trunk in addition to his hand baggage.

"Going to be gone some time, Mr. Ford?" he asked, when he brought the
night mail down for the superintendent to look over.

"Yes," said Ford absently.

"You'll let me know where to reach you from time to time, I suppose?"
ventured Penfield.

Ford looked up quickly.

"It won't be necessary. You can handle the office work, as you have
heretofore, and Mr. Frisbie will have full charge out of doors."

Penfield looked a little crestfallen.

"Am I to take orders from Mr. Frisbie?" he asked, as one determined to
know the worst.

"Just the same as you would from me," said the superintendent, swinging
up to the step of the moving car. And the chief clerk went back to his
office busily concocting another cipher message to the general manager.

On the way down the canyon Ford was saying to himself that he was now
fairly committed to the scheme over which he had spent so many toilful
days and sleepless nights, and that he would have it out with Mr. North
to a fighting conclusion before he slept.

But a freight wreck got in the way while the down passenger train was
measuring the final third of the distance, and it was long after office
hours in the Pacific Southwestern headquarters when Ford reached Denver.

By consequence, the crucial interview with the general manager had to be
postponed; and the enthusiast was chafing at his ill luck when he went
to his hotel--chafing and saying hard words, for the waiting had been
long, and now that the psychologic moment had arrived, delays were
intolerable.

Now it sometimes happens that seeming misfortunes are only blessings in
disguise. When Ford entered the hotel café to eat his belated dinner, he
saw Evans, the P. S-W. auditor, sitting alone at a table-for-two. He
crossed the room quickly and shook hands with the man he had meant to
interview either before or after the meeting with North.

It was after they had chatted comfortably through to the coffee that
the auditor said, blandly: "What are you down for, Ford?--anything
special?"

"Yes. I am down to get leave of absence to go East," said Ford warily.

"But that isn't all," was the quiet rejoinder. "In fact, it's only the
non-committal item that you'd give to a _Rocky Mountain News_ reporter."

Ford was impatient of diplomatic methods when there was no occasion for
them.

"Give it a name," he said bluntly. "What do you think you know, Evans?"

The auditor smiled.

"There is a leak in your office up at Saint's Rest, I'm afraid. What
sort of a bombshell are you fixing to fire at Mr. North?"

Ford grew interested at once.

"Tell me what you know, and perhaps I can piece it out for you."

"I'll tell you what Mr. North knows--which will be more to the purpose,
perhaps. For a year or more you have been figuring on some kind of a
scheme to pull the company's financial leg in behalf of your
good-for-nothing narrow gauge. A month ago, for example, you went all
over the old survey on the other side of the mountains and verified the
original S. L & W. preliminaries and rights-of-way on its proposed
extension."

Ford's eyes narrowed. He was thinking of the warning letter he would
have to write to Frisbie. But what he said was:

"I'd like to know how the dickens you guessed all that. But no matter;
supposing I did?"

"It's no good," said the auditor, shaking his head. "I'm talking as a
friend. North doesn't like you, personally; and if he did, you couldn't
persuade him to recommend anything in the way of an experiment on the
Plug Mountain. So far from extending your two-by-four branch--if that is
what you have in mind--he'd be much more likely to counsel its
abandonment, if the charter didn't require us to keep it going."

Ford found a cigar for the auditor, and lighted one for himself.

"From all of which I infer that the semiannual report of the Pacific
Southwestern is going to be a pretty bad one," he said, with carefully
assumed indifference.

Evans regarded him shrewdly.

"Are you guessing at that? Or is there a leak at our end of the line as
well as at yours?"

"Oh, it's a guess," laughed Ford. "Call it that, anyhow. At least, I
haven't any of your confidential clerks in my pay. But just how bad is
the report going to be?"

The auditor shook his head.

"Worse than the last one. Perhaps you have noticed that the stock has
dropped six points in the past week. You're one of the official family:
I don't mind telling you that we are in the nine-hole, Ford."

"Of course we are," said Ford, with calm conviction. "That much is
pretty evident to a man who merely reads the Wall Street news bulletins.
What is the matter with us--specifically, I mean?"

Evans shrugged.

"Are you a division superintendent on the system and don't know?" he
demanded. "We are too short at both ends. With our eastern terminal only
half-way to Chicago, we can't control the east-bound grain which grows
on our own line; and with the other end stopping short here at Denver,
we can't bid for west-bound transcontinental business. It's as simple as
twice two. Our competitors catch us going and coming."

"Precisely. And if we don't get relief?"

The auditor smiled grimly.

"As I've said, you're one of us, Ford, and I don't mind speaking freely
to you. A receivership is looming in the distance, and the not very dim
distance, for the P. S-W."

"I thought so. How near is it?"

"I don't know--nobody knows definitely. If we had a man of resources at
the head of things--as we have not--it might be stood off for another
six months."

"I'm on the way to stand it off permanently, if I can get any backing,"
said Ford quietly.

"You!" was the astonished reply.

"Yes, I. Listen, Evans. For two years I have been buried up yonder in
the hills, with not enough to do in the summer season to keep me out of
mischief. I am rather fond of mathematics, and I am telling you I have
this thing figured out to the fourth decimal. If President Colbrith and
his associates can be made to see that the multiplication of two by two
gives an invariable resultant of four, there will be no receivership for
the P. S-W. this year, or next."

"Show me," said the auditor.

Ford hesitated for a moment. Then he took a packet of papers, estimates,
exhibits and fine-lined engineer's maps from his pocket and tossed it
across the table.

"That is for you, personally--for David Evans; not the P. S-W. auditor.
You've got to keep it to yourself."

The auditor went through the papers carefully, shifting his cigar slowly
from one corner of his mouth to the other as he read and examined. When
he handed them back he was shaking his head, almost mournfully.

"It's a big thing, Ford; the biggest kind of a thing. And it is
beautifully worked out. But I know our people, here and in New York.
They will simply give you the cold stare and say that you are crazy."

"Because it can't be financed?"

"Because it doesn't come from Hill or Harriman or Morgan, or some other
one of the big captains. You'll never be able to stand it upon its feet
by your single-handed lonesome."

Ford set his teeth, and his clean-cut face seemed to grow suddenly older
and harder as the man in him came to the fore.

"By heavens! if I put my back under it, it's got to stand upon its feet!
I'm not going into it with the idea that there is any such thing in the
book as failure."

The auditor looked darkly into the cool gray eyes of the man facing him.

"Then let me give you a word of advice before you start in. Skip North,
absolutely; don't breathe a word of it to him. Don't ask me why; but do
as I say. And another thing: drop into my office to-morrow before you
leave. I'll show you some figures that may help you to stir things up
properly at the New York end. Do you go direct from here?"

"No; I shall have to stop over a few days in Chicago. I know pretty well
where to put my hands on what I need; I have laid the foundations from
the bottom up by correspondence. But I want to go over the situation on
the ground before I make my grand-stand play before Mr. Colbrith and the
board of directors."

"Well, come in and get the figures, anyway: come to the private door of
my office and rap three times. It will be just as well if it isn't
generally known that you are confabbing with me. Our semiannual report
will probably be in New York ahead of you, but it won't hurt if you have
the information to work with." Evans was pushing his chair from the
table when he added: "By the way, you happened upon the exact
psychological moment to make your raid; the report coming out, and
things going to the dogs generally."

Ford's laugh was genially shrewd.

"Perhaps it wasn't so much of a happening as it appears. Didn't I tell
you that I had figured this thing out to the fourth decimal place?
Psychological moments are bigger arguments than dollars and cents,
sometimes."

The auditor had taken his hat from the waiter and was shaking hands with
his dinner companion.

"I'd like to believe you're a winner, Ford; you deserve to be. Come and
see me--and make your call upon Mr. North as brief as possible. He'll
probe you if you don't."

This was how it came about that the next morning, when Ford went to call
upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the glass
door lettered "General Manager, Private,"--this after half an hour spent
in Auditor Evans' private office,--it was only to ask for leave of
absence to go East--on business of a personal nature, he explained, when
Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.




III

LOSS AND DAMAGE


At this period of his existence, Stuart Ford troubled himself as little
as any anchorite of the desert about the eternal feminine.

It was not that he was more or less than a man, or in any sense that
anomalous and impossible thing called a woman-hater. On the contrary,
his attitude toward women in the mass was distinctly and at times
boyishly sentimental. But when a young man is honestly in love with his
calling, and is fully convinced of its importance to himself and to a
restlessly progressive world, single-heartedness becomes his watchword,
and what sentiment there is in him will be apt to lie comfortably
dormant.

For six full working-days Ford had been immersed to the eyes in the
intricacies of his railway problem, acquiring in Chicago a valiseful of
documentary data that demanded to be classified and thoroughly digested
before he reached New York and the battle-field actual. This was why he
was able to ride all day in studious abstraction in his section of the
Chicago-New York Pullman, without so much as a glance for the young
woman in the modest gray traveling coat directly across the aisle.

She was well worth the glance, as he admitted willingly enough
afterward. She was the dainty type, with fluffy bright brown hair, eyes
the color of wood violets, a nose tilted to the precise angle of
bewitching piquancy, and the adorable mouth and chin familiarized to two
continents by the artistic pen of the Apostle of the American Girl. How
he could have ridden within arm's reach of her through all the daylight
hours of a long summer day remained as one of Ford's unanswered enigmas;
but it required an accident and a most embarrassing _contretemps_ to
make him aware of her existence.

The accident was one of the absurd sort. The call for dinner in the
dining-car had been given, and Ford was just behind the young woman in
the rear of the procession which filed forward out of the Pullman. The
train had at that moment left a way station, and the right-hand
vestibule door was still open and swinging disjointedly across the
narrow passage. Ford reached an arm past the young woman to fold the
two-leaved door out of her way. As he did it, the door-knob hooked
itself mischievously in the loop of her belt chatelaine, snatched it
loose, and flung it out into the backward-rushing night.

Whereupon: "Oh!--my purse!" with a little gasp of sudden bereavement,
and a quick turning to face the would-be helper.

Ford was honestly aghast when the situation fully enveloped him.

"Heavens and earth! Did you ever see such idiotic clumsiness!" he
ejaculated. And then, in deepest contrition: "I won't attempt to
apologize--it's beyond all that. But you must let me make your loss
good."

In all the pin-pricking embarrassment of the moment, he did not fail to
remark that she quickly recovered the serenity which belongs to the
well-bred. She was even smiling, rather ruefully, when she said:

"Fortunately, the conductor has my passes. But really"--and now she
laughed outright--"I am afraid I shall have to go hungry if I can't
borrow enough to pay for my dinner."

Another man, a man less purposefully lost in the purely practical
labyrinth of professional work, would have found something fitting to
say. But Ford, having discovered a thing to do, did it painstakingly and
in solemn silence. There was an unoccupied table for two in the
dining-car; he seated her, gave her his purse, called a waiter, and
would have betaken himself forthwith to another table if she had not
detained him.

"No," she said decisively, with a charming little uptilt of the adorable
chin. "I do not forget that you were trying to do me a kindness. Please
sit down here and take your purse. I'm sure I don't want it."

He obeyed, still in somber silence, gave his dinner order after she had
given hers, and was wondering if he might venture to bury himself in a
bundle of the data papers, when she spoke again.

"Are you provoked with yourself, or with me?" she asked--rather
mockingly, he thought.

"Neither," he said promptly. "I was merely saying to myself that my
wretched awkwardness didn't give me an excuse for boring you."

"It was an accident--nothing more or less," she rejoined, with an air of
dismissing finally the purse-snatching episode. Then she added: "I am
the one who ought to be embarrassed."

"But you are not," he returned quickly. "You are quite the mistress of
yourself--which is more than most women would be, under the
circumstances."

"Is that a compliment?" she asked, with latent mockery in the violet
eyes. "Because if it is, I think you must be out of the West; the--the
unfettered West: isn't that what it is called?"

"I am," Ford acknowledged. "But why do you say that? Was I rude? I beg
you to believe that I didn't mean to be."

"Oh, no; not rude--merely sincere. We are not sincere any more, I think;
except on the frontier edges of us. Are we?"

Ford took exceptions to the charge for the sheer pleasure of hearing her
talk.

"I'd be sorry to believe that," he protested. "The conventions account
for something, of course; and I suppose the polite lie which deceives no
one has to have standing-room. But every now and then one is surprised
into telling the truth, don't you think?"

"If I can't fully agree with you, I can at least admire your point of
view," she said amiably. "Is it Western--or merely human?"

He laughed.

"Shall we assume that the one implies the other? That would be in
accordance with your point of view, wouldn't it?"

"Yes; but it would be a distinct reversal of yours. Truth belongs to
another and simpler time than ours. We are conventional first and
everything else afterward."

"Are we?" he queried. "Some few hundreds or thousands of us may be; but
for the remainder of our eighty-odd millions the conventions are things
to be put on and off like Sunday garments. And even the chosen few of
us brush them aside upon occasion; ignore them utterly, as we two are
ignoring them at this moment."

She proved his assertion by continuing to talk to him, and the
dining-car was emptying itself when they realized that there is an end
even to a most leisurely dinner. Ford paid the steward as they left the
car, but in the Pullman he went back to first principles and insisted
upon some kind of a definite accounting for the lost purse.

"Now you will tell me now much I threw away for you, and I'll pay my
debt," he said, when she had hospitably made room for him in the
opposing seat of her section.

"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind!" she asserted. "You will give
me your card--we're going back to the conventions now--and when we reach
the city you may lend me enough money to take me up-town. And to-morrow
morning my brother will pay you back."

He gave in because he had to.

"You are much more lenient than I deserve. Really, you ought to stick me
good and hard for my awkwardness. It would serve me right."

"I am considering the motive," she said almost wistfully, he fancied.
"We have drifted very far from all those quiet anchorages of courtesy
and helpfulness. If we lived simpler lives--"

He smiled at the turn she was giving it.

"Are you, too, bitten with the fad of the moment, 'the simple life'?" he
asked. "Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look
down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income. I know,
because I've been living it for the past two years."

She looked as if she were sorry for him.

"That is rank heresy!" she declared. "Our forefathers had the better of
us in many ways, and their simpler manner of living was one of them.
They had time for all the little courtesies and kindnesses that make
life truly worth living."

Ford's laugh was boyishly derisive.

"Yes; they certainly had plenty of time; but they didn't have much else.
Why, just think, for a moment, of what our own America would be if
merely one of the modern civilizers, the railroads, had never existed.
There simply wouldn't be any America, as we know it now."

"How can you say that?"

"Because it is so. For nearly two centuries we stood still, because
there were no means of locomotion--which is another word for progress
and civilization. But in less than fifty years after the first railroad
was built we had become a great nation."

She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and a few minutes later the
train drew into the Forty-second Street Station. When the parting time
came, Ford dutifully gathered her belongings, said good-by, and put her
on a north-bound subway; all this without remembering that he did not
know her name. The recollection came, however, when the subway train
shot away into the tunnel.

"Of all the blockheads!" he growled, apostrophizing his own unreadiness.
"But I'll find her again. She said she'd send her brother to the hotel
with the dinner money, and when I get hold of him it will go hard with
me if I don't manage some way to get an introduction."

This was what was in his mind when he sought the down-town hotel whose
name he had written on his card for her; it was his latest waking
thought when he went to sleep that night, and his earliest when he awoke
the following morning.

But when he went to the clerk's desk, after a leisurely breakfast, to
get his mail, he found that the sure thread of identification had broken
in his fingers. There was a square envelope among the other letters in
his key-box containing the exact amount of the young woman's
indebtedness to him; this, with a brief note of thanks--unsigned.




IV

COLD STORAGE


If courage, of the kind fitted to lead forlorn hopes, or marchings
undaunted up to the muzzles of loaded cannon, be a matter of gifts and
temperament, it is also in some degree a matter of environment.

Stuart Ford was Western born and bred; a product of the wider breathing
spaces. Given his proper battle-field, where the obstacles were
elemental and the foes to be overcome were mere men of flesh and blood
fighting freely in the open, he was a match for the lustiest. But New
York, with its submerging, jostling multitudes, its thickly crowding
human vastness, and, more than all, its atmosphere of dollar-chasing,
apparent and oppressive even to the transient passer-by, disheartened
him curiously.

It was not that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that
matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging,
striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to
be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their
work,--of narrowing, as well as of broadening,--and the plunge into the
chilling sea of the money-mad metropolis made him shiver and wish he
were out.

This feeling was really at the bottom of the late rising and the
leisurely breakfast, making him temporize where he had meant to be
prompt, energetic and vigorously aggressive. Having pocketed the young
woman's unsigned note, he glanced at his watch and decided that it was
still too early to go in search of President Colbrith.

"I don't suppose he'll be in his office for an hour yet," he mused
reflectively; "and anyway, I guess I'd better go over the papers again,
so I can be sure to speak my piece right end to. By Jove! I didn't
suppose a couple of thousand miles of easting would take the heart out
of things the way it does. If I didn't know better, I should think I'd
come here to float the biggest kind of a fake, instead of a life-boat
for the shipwrecked people in the Pacific Southwestern. It is beginning
to look that way in spite of all I can do."

Going once again over his carefully tabulated argument did not help
matters greatly. He was beginning to realize now how vastly, antipodally
different the New York point of view might be from his own. It came to
him with the benumbing effect of a blow that his own ambitions had
persistently looked beyond the mere money-making results of his scheme.
Also, that President Colbrith and his fellow-investors might very easily
refuse to consider any other phase of the revolutionary proposition he
was about to lay before them.

By ten o'clock postponement was no longer a tenable city of refuge: the
plunge had to be taken. Accordingly, he fared forth to present himself
at the Broadway address given in the Pacific Southwestern printed matter
as the New York headquarters of the company.

The number proved to be a ground floor, with the business office of the
eastern traffic representative in front, and three or four private
desk-rooms in the rear, one of them labeled "President" in inconspicuous
gilt lettering. Entering, with less assurance than if he had been the
humblest of place-seekers out of a job, Ford was almost relieved to find
only a closed desk, and a young man absently scanning a morning paper.

Inquiry developed a few facts, tersely stated but none the less
enlightening. Mr. Colbrith was not in: the office was merely his nominal
headquarters in the city and he occupied it only occasionally. His
residence? It was in the Borough of the Bronx, pretty well up toward
Yonkers--locality and means of access obligingly written out on a card
for the caller by the clerk. Was Mr. Ford's business of a routine
nature? If so, perhaps, Mr. Ten Eyck, the general agent, could attend to
it. Ford said it was not of a routine nature, and made his escape to
inquire his way to the nearest subway station. To pause now was to lose
the precious impetus of the start.

It was worth something to be whirled away blindly out of the stifling
human vortex of the lower city; but Ford's first glimpse of the Colbrith
mansion depressed him again. The huge, formal house had once been the
country residence of a retired dry-goods merchant. It fronted the river
brazenly, and the fine old trees of a ten-acre park shamed its
architectural stiffness. Ford knew the president a little by family
repute and more particularly as a young subordinate knows the general in
command. It struck him forcibly that the aspect of the house fitted the
man. With the broad river and the distant Palisades to be dwelt upon,
its outlook windows were narrow. With the sloping park and the great
trees to give it dignity, it seemed to assume an artificial, plumb-line
dignity of its own, impressive only as the product of rigid measurements
and mechanical uprightness.

From the boulevard there was a gravelled driveway with a stone portal.
The iron gates were thrown wide, and at his entrance Ford stood aside to
let an outgoing auto-car have the right of way. Being full of his
errand, and of the abstraction of a depressed soul, Ford merely remarked
that there were two persons in the car; a young man driving, and a young
woman, veiled and dust-coated, in the mechanician's seat beside him.
None the less, there floated out of the mist of abstraction an instantly
vanishing phantom of half-recognition for the Westerner. Something in
the pose of the young woman, the way she leaned forward and held her hat
with the tips of her gloved fingers, was, for the fleeting moment,
almost reminiscent.

If Ford had wished to speculate upon abstruse problems of identity,
there was neither time nor the mental aptitude. A little later he had
given his card to the servant at the door and was waiting in a darkened
and most depressive library for the coming of the master of the house.
The five minutes of waiting nearly finished him. As the absurdly formal
clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his
plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass
impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause
decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with his face to the
front.

After all, the beginning of the interview with the tall, thin,
gray-haired and hatchet-faced old man, who presently stalked into the
library and gave his hand with carefully adjusted cordiality to the son
of one of his college classmates, was only a little more depressing: it
was not mortal. Ford had been born in Illinois; and so, something better
than a third of a century earlier, had the president. Moreover, Mr.
Colbrith had, in the hey-day of his youth, shared rooms with the elder
Ford in the fresh-water university which had later numbered the younger
Ford among its alumni. These things count for somewhat, even when the
gap to be bridged is that between the president of a railroad and one of
his minor officials.

But when the revolutionary project was introduced, the president's
guarded cordiality faded like a photographic proof-print in the
sunlight, and the air of the darkened library grew coldly inclement.

"So you came to talk business, did you?" said the high, rasping voice
out of the depths of the easy-chair opposite; and Ford raged inwardly at
the thought that he had clearly placed himself at a disadvantage by
becoming even constructively the guest of the president. "As a rule, I
positively refuse to discuss such matters outside of their proper
environment; but I'll make an exception for Douglas Ford's son. Your
plan is simply impossible. I can understand how it may appear possible,
and even attractive, to a young man, and especially to the young man who
has invented it. But as an investment for capital--my dear young sir, go
back to your division, and strive by faithful service to rise in the
accepted and time-honored way. You are wasting your time in New York."

Curiously enough, Ford found his evaporated courage recrystallizing
under opposition.

"I can not believe that I have made the plan, and the present condition
of the system, sufficiently clear to you," he insisted; whereupon he
went patiently and good-naturedly over the argument again, emphasizing
the desperate straits to which the Pacific Southwestern was reduced.

"We know all that, Mr. Ford," was the unyielding reply. "But granting it
to be the fact, don't you see the absolute futility of asking for
thirty-five millions additional capital at such a crisis?"

"No, I don't," said Ford stubbornly. "I know--as I can not explain to
you in detail in a half-hour interview--that this plan of mine can be
made successful. For two years, Mr. Colbrith, I have been the man on the
ground: no word that I am saying to you is speculative. Every clause of
the proposition has a carefully established fact behind it."

"No doubt it seems so to you," came the rasping voice from the
chair-depths. "But thirty-five millions!"--with a quavering gasp. "And
at a time when our earnings are falling off steadily and the stock is
going down day by day. It's--it's simply preposterous! I must really
decline to discuss it any further."

Ford had his packet of data in hand.

"I have all the exhibits here, carefully tabulated and condensed. Won't
you reconsider far enough to examine them, Mr. Colbrith?"

A thin white hand of negation and protest waved out of the depths of
the engulfing easy-chair.

"I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Ford. I knew your father, and we were
great friends. You are like him," he added reminiscently. "He might have
died rich if he had gone into corn-buying with me when we were
graduated, as I wanted him to. But he was too enthusiastic. He wanted to
turn the world upside down--just as you do, my dear young man; just as
you do."

Ford got upon his feet. The time had arrived for the firing of the shot
of last resort, and he aimed it deliberately.

"I came first to you, Mr. Colbrith, because it was my duty as a
subordinate, and your own appointee, and because you were my father's
friend so many years ago. I may say, frankly, that I did it against good
advice. Men who profess to know you have counseled me to appeal directly
to the board. What I wish to know now is if you are willing to take the
entire responsibility of turning this plan of mine down. Will it not
relieve you of all responsibility if you will call a meeting of the
directors, and let me lay this absurd proposal of mine before it? You
can surely have no fears for the result."

The shot told. The president struggled to his feet and took a nervous
turn up and down the long room. When he replied, it was with the
indecisive man's reluctance to commitment of any sort.

"If I call the meeting, I shall be ridiculed; and if I don't call it, I
suppose you'll go to Brewster and Magnus and tell them I've muzzled you.
Have it your own way. I'll issue the call for ten o'clock, the day after
to-morrow, in McVeigh and Mackie's offices in Broad Street. But I warn
you in advance, Mr. Ford, I shall not be able to help you in the least.
And I may add this: that when you reach that part of your proposal where
you call for thirty-five millions additional capital, you may as well
put on your hat and go home. That will be the end of it."

"And of me," laughed the enthusiast. But in spite of the cold comfort,
and of the still colder promise of opposition, he took his leave with a
lighter heart, refusing Mr. Colbrith's rather perfunctory invitation to
stay to luncheon.

And on the gravelled drive, where he again had to make way for the
auto-car purring in on its return, he did not so much as look up at the
pair in the driving-seat.




V

WANTED: THIRTY-FIVE MILLIONS


The offices of McVeigh and Mackie, brokers and financial agents, are in
Broad Street, and the windows of the room used for board meetings look
down upon the angle where beats the money pulse of the nation.

Ford had successfully resisted the temptation to lobby for his scheme
during the one-day interval between his conference with Mr. Colbrith and
the date of the called meeting of the directors. It was not any mistaken
sense of loyalty to the president that restrained him; on the contrary,
he decided that Mr. Colbrith's declaration of war left him free to fight
as he would. But upon due consideration he concluded to set the
advantage of an assault _en masse_ over against the dubious gain of an
advanced skirmish line, and when he turned out of Broadway into Wall
Street on the morning of destiny the men whom he was to meet and
convince were still no more to him than a list of names in the _Poor's
Manual_, consulted within the hour for the purpose.

He was early on the battle-ground; much too early, he thought, when a
clerk ushered him into the board room in the rear of the brokers'
offices. As yet there was only one person present--a young man who was
lounging in the easiest of the leather-covered chairs and yawning
dismally. At the first glance the face seemed oddly and strikingly
familiar; but when the young man marked the new-comer's entrance, the
small hand-bag in which the amateur promoter carried his papers, and got
up to shake hands, Ford found the suggestive gropings baffled.

"My name is Adair," said the lounger genially; "and I suppose you are
the Mr. Ford Uncle Sidney has been telling us about. Pull up a chair and
sit by the window. It's the only amusement you'll have until the clan
gathers."

Ford looked at his watch.

"I seem to be ahead of time," he remarked. "I understood Mr. Colbrith to
say that the meeting would be called for ten o'clock."

"Oh, that's all right; and so he did," rejoined the other cheerfully.
"But that means anything up to noon for a directors' meeting in New
York." Then, after a pause: "Do you know any of us personally, Mr.
Ford?"

Ford was rummaging in his memory again. "I ought to know you, Mr.
Adair. It isn't very decent to drag in resemblances, but--"

"The resemblance is the real thing, this time," said Adair. "You saw me
day before yesterday, driving out of the Overlook grounds as you were
going in."

Ford shook his head.

"No; it goes back of that; sometime I'll remember how and where. But to
answer your question: I know Mr. Colbrith slightly, but I've never met
any of the directors."

"Well, you are meeting one at this moment," laughed the young man,
crossing his legs comfortably. "But I am the easiest mark of the lot,"
he added. "I inherited my holdings in Pacific Southwestern."

Ford was crucially anxious to find out how the battle was likely to go,
and his companion seemed amiably communicative.

"Since you call Mr. Colbrith 'Uncle Sidney,' I infer that you know what
I am here for, Mr. Adair. How do you think my proposition is likely to
strike the board?"

Again the young man laughed.

"Fancy your asking me!" he said. "I haven't talked with any one but
Uncle Sidney; and the most I could get out of him was that you wanted
thirty-five million dollars to spend."

"Well," said the Westerner anxiously, "am I going to get it?"

"You can search me," was the good-natured rejoinder. "But from my
knowledge of the men you are going presently to wrestle with, I should
say 'no' and italicize it."

"Perhaps it might help me a little if I could know in advance the
particular reason for the italics," Ford suggested.

"Oh, sure. The principal reason is that your name isn't Hill or Harriman
or Morgan or Gates. Money is ridiculously sheepish. It will follow a
known leader blindly, idiotically. But if it doesn't hear the familiar
tinkle of the leader's bell, it is mighty apt to huddle and run back."

Ford's smile was grim.

"I don't mind saying to you, Mr. Adair, that this is one of the times
when it will be much safer to huddle and run forward. Have you seen the
half-yearly report?"

"I? Heaven forbid! I have never seen anything out of the Pacific
Southwestern--not even a dividend."

Ford would very willingly have tried to share his enthusiasm with the
care-free young man, whose face was still vaguely but persistently
remindful of some impression antedating the automobile passing; but now
the other members of the board were dropping in by twos and threes, and
privacy was at an end.

Just before President Colbrith took his place at the head of the long
table to call the meeting to order, Adair leaned forward to say in low
tones: "I couldn't give you the tip you wanted, Mr. Ford, but I can give
you another which may serve as well. If your good word doesn't win out,
scare 'em--scare 'em stiff! I don't know but you could frighten half a
million or so out of me if you should try."

"Thank you," said Ford. "I may take you at your word,"--and just then
Mr. Colbrith rose in his place, fingering his thin white beard rather
nervously, Ford thought, and rapping on the table for silence.

It was admitted on all hands that the president of the Pacific
Southwestern was a careful man and a thrifty. It was these qualities
which had first determined his election. There were many small
stock-holders in the company, and it is the foible of small
stock-holders to believe that rigid economy counts for more than
adventurous outreachings in the larger field.

"Gentlemen," he began, his high, raucous voice rasping the silence like
the filing of a saw, "this meeting is called, as you have probably been
informed, for the purpose of considering a plan for betterments
submitted by Mr. Stuart Ford, who is at the present time superintendent
of our Plug Mountain Division.

"In making this unusual innovation, and in introducing Mr. Ford, I
desire to say that I have been actuated by that motive of prudence
which, while it stands firmly upon its own feet, is willing to consider
suggestions from without, even when these suggestions appear to be
totally at variance with a policy of careful and judicious financiering.

"In presenting Mr. Ford as the son of an old friend, long since gone to
his reward, I wish it distinctly understood that I am in no sense
committed to his plan. The policy of this company under the present
administration has been uniformly cautious and prudent: Mr. Ford would
throw caution and prudence to the winds. Our best efforts have been
directed toward the saving of the ultimate dollar of expense: Mr. Ford
urges us to spend millions. We have been trying to dispose of some of
our non-paying branches: Mr. Ford would have us acquire others and build
new lines."

While Mr. Colbrith was speaking, Adair was rapidly characterizing the
members for Ford, checking them off upon his fingers.

"The little man at Uncle Sidney's right is Mackie, and the miserly
looking one next to him is McVeigh," he whispered. "One of them will
furnish your coffin, and the other will drive the nails into it. The big
man with the beard is Brewster--a multimillionaire; and the one who
looks like Senator Bailey is Magnus, president of the Mohican National.
Connolly, the fat Irishman, is a politician--wads of money, but not much
interest in the game. The other three--"

But now the president had made an end and was beckoning to Ford.

The young engineer rose, feeling much as if a bucket of ice-water had
been suddenly emptied down the back of his neck. But one of his saving
qualities was the spring-like resilience which responds instantly to a
shock. Spreading his papers on the table, he began with a little
apology.

"I didn't come here this morning prepared to make a promoter's speech;
and perhaps it is just as well, since my gift, if I have one, lies in
doing things rather than in talking about them. But I can lay a few
facts before you which you may deem worthy of consideration."

From this as a beginning he went on swiftly and incisively. The Pacific
Southwestern, in its present condition, was a failure. It was an
incomplete line, trying vainly to hold its own against great and
powerful systems overlapping it at either end. The remedy lay in
extension. The acquisition of a controlling interest in three short
roads, which, pieced together, would bridge the gap between the Missouri
River and Chicago, would place the Pacific Southwestern upon an equal
footing with its competitors as a grain carrier. By standardizing the
Plug Mountain narrow gauge and extending it to Salt Lake and beyond, the
line would secure a western outlet, and would be in a position to demand
its share of transcontinental business.

To finance these two extensions a capital of thirty-five million
dollars would be needed; five million dollars for the purchase of the
majority stock in the three short roads, and the remainder for the
western outlet. These assertions were not guesses: by referring to
exhibits marked "a" "b" and "f," his hearers would find accurate
estimates of cost, not only of construction, but also of stock
purchases.

As to the manner of providing the capital, he had only a suggestion to
offer. The five million dollars necessary for the acquirement of a
controlling interest in the three short roads would be a fair
investment. It could be covered immediately by a reissue--share for
share--of the reorganization stock of the P. S-W., which would amply
secure the investors, since the stock of the most prosperous of the
three local roads was listed at twenty-eight, ten points lower than the
present market quotation of P. S-W.

The thirty million dollar extension fund might be raised by issuing
second mortgage bonds upon the entire system, or the new line itself
could be bonded mile for mile under a separate charter. Ford modestly
disclaimed any intention of dictating the financial policy; this was not
in his line. But again he would submit facts. The grain crop in the West
was phenomenally large in prospect. With its own eastern terminal in
Chicago, the Pacific Southwestern could control the grain shipments in
its own territory. With the moving of the grain, the depressed P. S-W.
stock would inevitably recover, and on a rising market the new issue of
bonds could doubtless be floated.

The enthusiast closed his argument with a hasty summing-up of the
benefits which must, in the nature of things, accrue. From being an
alien link in the great transcontinental chain, the Pacific Southwestern
would rise at a bound to the dignity of a great railway system; a power
to be reckoned with among the other great systems gridironing the West.
Its earnings would be enhanced at every point; cross lines which now fed
its competitors would become its allies; the local lines to be welded
into the eastern end of the system would share at once in the prosperity
of a strong through line.

For the western extension he could speak from personal knowledge of the
region to be penetrated. Apart from the new line's prime object--that of
providing an outlet for the system--there was a goodly heritage of local
business awaiting the first railroad to reach the untapped territory.
Mines, valueless now for the lack of transportation facilities, would
become abundant producers; and there were many fertile valleys and mesas
to attract the ranchman, who would find on the western slopes of the
mountains an unfailing water supply for his reservoirs and ditches. Ford
did not hesitate to predict that within a short time the extension would
earn more, mile for mile, than the grain-belt portion of the system.

When he sat down he felt that his cause was lost. There was no
enthusiasm, no approval, in the faces of his auditors. After a short and
informal discussion, in which the engineer was called on to explain his
plans and estimates in detail to one and another of the members, Magnus,
the bank president, sufficiently summed up the sense of the meeting when
he said:

"There is no question about the ingenuity of your plan, Mr. Ford. You
must have given a great deal of time and thought to it. But it is rather
too large for us, I'm afraid, and there are too many contingencies. Your
province, I understand, is the building and operating of railroads, and
it is nothing to your discredit that you are unfamiliar with the
difficulties of financing an undertaking as vast as this proposal of
yours."

"I don't deny the difficulties," said Ford. "But they wouldn't seem to
be insuperable."

"Not from your point of view," rejoined the banker suavely. "But you
will admit that they are very considerable. The opposition on the part
of the competing systems would be something tremendous. No stone would
be left unturned in the effort to dismount us. To go no further into the
matter than the proposed purchase of the majority stocks in the three
short roads: at the first signal in that field you would find those
stocks flying skyward in ten-point advances, and your five millions
wouldn't be a drop in the bucket. In view of the difficulties, I think I
voice the conviction of the board when I say that the plan is too
hazardous."

The nods of assent were too numerous to leave Ford any hope of turning
the tide in his favor. He rose, gathered up his papers, and reached for
his hat.

"It is very pointedly your own funeral, gentlemen," he said curtly.
"'Nothing venture, nothing have' is an old proverb, but it is as true
now as it was when it was coined. With P. S-W. stock at thirty-eight and
steadily declining; with another dividend about to be passed; and with
the certainty that the July interest on the bonds will have to be
defaulted unless some compromise can be effected with the bondholders--"

"What's that you're saying?" broke in Mackie, whose P. S-W. holdings were
large.

Ford drew a folded paper from his pocket and laid it on the table.

"I was merely quoting from the auditor's semiannual report, of which
that is a summary," he said, indicating the folded paper. "The report
itself will doubtless reach you in a day or two. It would seem to an
unprejudiced observer that the present condition spells something like a
receivership, unless you have the bondholders with you."

"One moment, Mr. Ford," interposed the banker member; but Ford was
working up to his climax and refused to be side-tracked.

"Of course, as an officer of the company, I have felt in duty bound to
bring my grist first to the company's mill. But if you gentlemen don't
wish to grind it, it will be ground, notwithstanding. I could very
easily have found a market for my proposal without coming to New York."

With which parting shot, and a word of apology for having taken the time
of the board to no good purpose, he bowed himself out, closing the door
upon a second attempt on the part of the banker member to renew the
argument.




VI

THE AWAKENING OF CHARLES EDWARD


Ford went directly to his hotel from the meeting in the Broad Street
board room, paid his bill, and had himself shot up to the fifth floor to
prepare for a swift retreat from the scene of his humiliating defeat. It
was hardly in keeping with his boast of persistence that he should
suffer himself to be thus routed by a single reverse, however crushing.
But in a world where every problem contains its human factor, red wrath
accounts for much that is otherwise unaccountable.

Ford was thoroughly and unreasoningly angry and disgusted when he began
to fling his belongings into the small steamer trunk, and it was only
natural that he should turn with a little brow-wrinkling of resentment
when, a little later, Mr. Charles Edward Adair, following his card up to
the fifth floor front, lounged good-naturedly into the room.

"Beg pardon, I'm sure," said the intruder easily. "Didn't know you were
busy. I thought maybe you'd like to know the effect of your little
double-headed bombshell, and I couldn't be sure Uncle Sidney would take
the trouble to tell you."

Ford made no effort to conceal his contempt for the financial gods.

"I don't imagine it will take you very long to tell it," he retorted.
"Nothing short of a combined earthquake and volcanic eruption would have
any effect upon that crowd."

"Oh, but you're wrong!" protested Adair. "That shot of yours with the
semiannual summary for a projectile stirred 'em up good. It seems that
Uncle Sidney and Hertford and Morelock--they're the executive committee,
you know--have had the auditor's figures for some days, but they hadn't
thought it necessary to harrow the feelings of the other members of the
board with the cataclysmic details. So there was a jolly row. Magnus
wanted to know, top-loftily, why a small official from the farther end
of the system should be the first to bring the news; and Mackie was so
wrathy that he inadvertently put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth.
Even Connolly woke up enough to say that it was blanked bad politics."

"But nothing came of it?" said Ford, hope rising in spite of the
negative query.

"No; nothing but a general hand-out of pretty sharp talk. What was
needed right then was a unifier--somebody who could take command and
coax or bully the scrapping factions into line. Magnus tried it, but
he's too smooth. Brewster was the man, but he has too many other and
bigger irons in the fire to care much about P. S-W. Connolly could have
done it if the scrap had been a political split, but he was out of his
element."

"Humph!" growled Ford. "It didn't occur to me that there were any
differences of opinion to be reconciled. The entire board sat on my
proposition--as a unit."

Adair laughed with imperturbable good-humor.

"The factions were there, just the same. You see, it's like this:
Brewster and Magnus and two or three more are pretty well-to-do, and
their holdings in P. S-W. don't cut much of a figure with them, one way
or another. The others have more stock in the company, and fewer
millions. When the jangle came, Brewster and the heavy men said, 'Oh,
let it go; it isn't worth bothering with.' Naturally, the little
fellows, with more to lose and less money-nerve, said, 'No.'"

"It spells the same word for me, in any event," Ford commented, and went
on pitching things into his steamer trunk.

Adair got upon his feet and strolled away to the window.

When he turned again to face the beaten one he said:

"If I wasn't so infernally lazy, Mr. Ford, I more than half believe that
I could pull this thing off for you, myself. But that is the curse of
being born with too much money. I can take a plunge into business now
and then--I've done it. But my best friend couldn't bet on me two days
in succession."

Ford looked up quickly.

"Then don't put your hand to this plow, Mr. Adair. I'll be frank with
you. I can fit the mechanical parts of this scheme of mine together, so
that they will run true and do business. But I, or any man in my place,
would have to have solid backing here in New York; a board that would be
as aggressive as a handful of rebels fighting for life, and every man of
it determined to win out or smash something. Mr. Magnus spoke of the
opposition we should encounter from our competitors. He might have said
more. What the Transcontinental, for example, wouldn't do to obliterate
us needn't be catalogued. How do you suppose the present P. S-W. board
would fare in such a fight?"

The youngest member of the flouted board laughed again.

"You mustn't say in your wrath that all men are liars--or cowards. There
is plenty of fight in our crowd; and plenty of money, too, if you could
only get it sufficiently scared."

"I've done my best," said Ford, slamming the lid of the trunk and
buckling the straps vigorously. "The next time I'll find my market first
and build my scheme afterward."

"Well, if I can say it without offense, I'm honestly sorry for you, Mr.
Ford; you've been butchered to make a Broad Street holiday," said Adair,
lounging toward the door. "You are going back to the West, I suppose?"

"Yes."

"What line?"

"Pennsylvania; five-ten this afternoon."

"That is a long time between drinks. Suppose you come up to the club and
have luncheon with me?"

Ford hesitated, watch in hand.

"I was about to lie to you, Mr. Adair, and plead business; but I shan't.
I'll tell you the plain truth. I'm too sore just now to be any good
fellow's good company."

"Which is precisely the reason why I asked you," laughed the golden
youth. "Come on; let's go now. You can take it out on me as much as you
like, you know. I shan't mind."

But the club luncheon ignored the business affair completely, as Adair
intended it should. Ford came out of the shell of disappointment with
the salad course, and by way of reparation for his former attitude
talked rather more freely of himself than he was wont to do on such
short acquaintance with any one. The young millionaire met him quite
half-way on this road to a better understanding, contrasting with mild
envy Ford's well-filled, busy life with his own erratic efforts at
time-killing.

"You make me half sorry for myself," he said, when they went to the
smoking-room to light their cigars. "It's no less than a piteous
misfortune when a fellow's father has beaten all the covers of
accomplishment for him."

Ford could laugh now without being bitter.

"The game isn't all corralled, even for you, Mr. Adair. There was
excellent good shooting for you in that directors' meeting this morning,
but you wouldn't take the trouble."

"That's the fact," was the easy-going rejoinder. "That is just what my
sister is always telling me--that I won't take the trouble. And yet I do
take the trouble to begin a lot of things; only they never seem worth
while after a few days' dip into them."

"Pick out bigger ones," suggested Ford. "My trouble is just the other
way about; I am always tackling things that are worlds too big for
me--just as I have this time."

"It isn't too big for you, Mr. Ford. It was too big for Colbrith,
Magnus, _et al_. And, besides, you're not going to give it up. You'll
drop off in Chicago, hunt up some meat-packer or other Croesus, and
land your new railroad independently of the P. S-W."

It was a measure of the sincerity of Ford's liking for his host when he
said: "That little shot of mine at your colleagues was merely a long
bluff. If my scheme can't be worked with the P. S-W., it can't well be
worked without it. We are lacking the two end-links in the chain--which
I could forge. But my two end-links without the middle one wouldn't
attract anybody."

It was quite late in the afternoon when they left the club, and Ford had
no more than time to check his luggage and get to his train. He wondered
a little when Adair went with him to the ferry, and was not ungrateful
for the hospitality which seemed to be directed toward a lightening of
the burden of failure. But Adair's word of leave-taking, flung across
the barrier when the chains of the landing-stage were rattling to their
rise, was singularly irrelevant.

"By the way, Mr. Ford; what time did you say your train would reach
Chicago?"

"At eight forty-five to-morrow evening," replied the beaten one; and
then the boat swung out of its slip and the retreat without honor was
begun.




VII

HAMMER AND TONGS


It was raining dismally the evening of the following day when Ford saw
from his Pullman window the dull sky-glow of the metropolis of the
Middle West. It had been a dispiriting day throughout. When a man has
flung himself at his best into a long battle which ends finally in
unqualified loss, the heavens are as brass, and the future is apt to
reflect only the pale light of the past failure.

It was after the train had entered the suburbs of Chicago that a
blue-coated messenger boy came through the Pullman, with the car
conductor for his guide. Ford saw himself pointed out, and a moment
later was reading a telegram, with a tumult, not of the drumming car
wheels, roaring in his ears.

     Had a talk with my sister and made up my mind to see you
     through--if I don't get tired and quit, as usual. Secure
     options on that short-road stock quick, and wire me care McV. & M.
     Funds to your credit in Algonquin National, Chicago. Another
     directors' meeting to-day, and things look a little less chaotic.
     Answer.                           ADAIR.

For some time Ford could only read and re-read the exciting telegram,
scarcely trusting the evidence of his senses. That the coldly
indifferent members of the P. S-W. board, with a man like President
Colbrith at their head, could be swung into line in the short space of a
single day by a young fellow who seemed to be little more than a spoiled
son of fortune, was blankly incredible.

But he was not long in realizing that the cherished scheme for which he
had studied and struggled was actually beginning to stagger to its feet;
or in reaching the equally stirring conclusion that his part in the
suddenly reopened game called instantly for shrewd blows and the
swiftest possible action.

The stock-holders in the three local roads which were to be united to
bridge the Chicago-Missouri River gap were scattered all over the Middle
West. To secure the necessary options on working majorities of the stock
would be a task for a financial diplomat, and one who could break the
haste-making record by being in a dozen different places at one and the
same moment. Moreover, secrecy became a prime factor in the problem. If
the opposition, and particularly the Transcontinental people, should
get wind of the move, it would take fifteen millions to do the work of
five, as Banker Magnus had intimated.

Notwithstanding the thickly marshaled obstacles, Ford had his plan of
campaign pretty well thought out by the time his train was slowing into
the Union Station. Before going to New York he had painstakingly
"located" the required holdings of the three stocks. Some of them were
in Chicago, but the greater number of the men to be bargained with were
local capitalists living in the smaller cities along the lines of the
three short railroads.

In his bag was a carefully compiled list of these stock-holders, with
their addresses and the amounts of their respective holdings. At the
worst, he concluded, it should mean nothing more formidable than a deal
of quick traveling, some anxious bargaining, perhaps, and a little
finesse to keep his object in securing the options safely in the
background.

This was how it appeared in the prospect; and the young engineer had yet
to learn that the securing of options is a trade by itself--a trade by
no means to be caught up in passing, even by the most gifted of tyros.

Hence, it was extremely fortunate for this particular tyro--more
fortunate than he could possibly know at the moment--that his telephone
message sent from the first telephone he could reach after his train
stopped in the Union Station, caught Kenneth at the Green Bag Club. It
was a mere chance that he knew that Kenneth, the senior member of the
firm of attorneys having general oversight of the Pacific Southwestern's
legal department, was at the moment in Chicago; a chance hanging upon
the fact that he had met Kenneth as he was passing through on his way
eastward. But it was not by chance that the first familiar face he saw
on entering the rotunda of the Grand Pacific Hotel was that of Kenneth.
The sight was merely the logical result of Ford's urgent request
telephoned to the lawyer's club.

"By Jove, Kenneth; this comes within two inches of being a miracle!--my
catching you here before you had started West," Ford ejaculated. And
then: "When are you going back?"

"I am supposed to be on the way now," was the lawyer's reply. "I had
made all my arrangements to start back to-night on the slow train, but I
dined with some friends on the North Side and made a miss. Where have
you been?"

"I'm just in from New York. Let me register and get a room; and you put
away any lingering notion you may have of heading westward to-night.
I've got to have your ear for a few hours to begin with, and the whole
of you for the next few days. No; don't probe me here. Wait, and I'll
unload on you gradually. You won't be sorry you missed your train."

Fifteen minutes later Ford had his adviser safely behind a closed door,
and had put him succinctly in possession of the world-subverting facts,
as far as they went. When he concluded, the lawyer was shaking his head
dubiously, just as Auditor Evans had done.

"Ford, have you any adequate idea of what a tremendous proposition you
are up against?" he asked quietly, helping himself to a cigar out of the
engineer's freshly opened box.

"I don't believe I have underrated the difficulties, any of them," said
Ford, matching the attorney's gravity. "There are bones all the way
along, but I think I have struck the biggest of them just here. I ought
to be in a dozen places at once, and not later than to-morrow noon.
That's something I can't quite compass."

"Getting these options, you mean? That is very true; but it isn't all of
it, by long odds. There are the thousand and one mechanical details to
be worked out: the coupling up of these three local lines at their
connecting points, the securing of proper trackage or trackage rights at
these junctions, the general ordering of things so that a through line
may be opened immediately when the stock is secured. If there were ten
of you, you couldn't get things licked into shape in time to get in on
the grain carrying this season."

Ford had relighted his cigar, which had gone out in the explanatory
interval, and was blowing smoke-rings toward the ceiling.

"I may be the biggest ass this side of the jack trails, and the most
conceited, Kenneth; but you're over on my side of the ring when you talk
about the mechanical obstacles. What I'm worrying about now is the fact
that I can't do two things at once. The options must be secured before
we can make the fifth part of a move in the other field; and the Lord
only knows how long that will take. To hurry is to lose out."

The lawyer nodded. "And not to hurry is to lose out, too," he qualified.
Then he smoked in thoughtful silence for five full minutes before he
said, abruptly: "Give me your list of stock-holders and turn the option
business over to the legal department, where it properly belongs. That
will leave you foot-loose to go after the mechanical matter. How does
that suit you?"

Ford sprang to his feet.

"By Jove, Kenneth, you're a man and a brother; I'm not forgetting that
you are taking this entire fairy tale on my personal say-so; and I
shan't forget it, either. It's what I wanted to ask--and was afraid to
ask, after I got you safely jailed up here."

The attorney's smile was grim but friendly.

"I'm not forgetting how you took a sick man over into the Pannikin
wilderness on a two-months hunting trip last fall and made a well man of
him, Ford," he said. "Any man who can shoot as straight as you do
wouldn't be sitting here telling me lies about a trifling little matter
involving the expenditure of a beggarly thirty-five millions. But to
come down to earth again: you haven't shifted any considerable part of
the burden, you know. I can do this bit of routine work; but the main
thing is up to you, just as it was before I said yes."

Ford rose, stretching himself like a man who has just been relieved of a
burden whose true weight was appreciable only in its lifting.

"I know," he said cheerfully. "It has been up to me, all along. In the
morning we'll go around to the Algonquin National, and I'll put you into
the financial saddle. Then I'll get out on the line, and by the time you
have the stock corralled, we'll be practically ready to pull through
freight--if not passengers--from Denver to Chicago. Oh, I know what I am
talking about," he added, when the general counsel smiled his
incredulity. "This is no affair of yesterday with me. I have every mile
of these three short roads mapped and cross-sectioned; I have copies of
all their terminal and junction-point contracts. I know exactly what we
can do, and what we can't do."

The lawyer's comment was frankly praiseful, not to say flattering.

"You're a wonder, Ford--and that's no figure of speech. How on earth did
you manage to do it all at such long range?"

Ford's smile was reminiscent of the obstacles.

"It would take me all night to tell you in detail, Kenneth. But I did
it. It's no mere brag to say that I could walk into the Chicago, Peoria
& Davenport general offices here to-morrow morning and organize a
through service over the P. S-W. and the three stub lines within
twenty-four hours, if I had to."

"Well, that part of it is far enough beyond me," said the attorney. "The
stock-chasing is more in my line. I hope we can keep quiet enough about
it so that the opposition won't guess what we are trying to do. You're
sure it won't be given away from the New York end?"

It was the engineer's turn to shake his head and to look dubious.

"Now you are shouting, Kenneth. I can't tell anything about it. You'll
remember that when I left New York the board had turned the plan down,
definitely and permanently, as I supposed. I should say that our only
safety lies in lightning speed. When you get the options on those
controlling stock majorities snugly on deposit in the Algonquin
National, we can draw our first long breath. Isn't that about the way it
strikes you?"

"It is, precisely," agreed the general counsel, rising and finding his
hat. "And because it does strike me that way, I think I'll go down and
do a little telegraphing to-night."

"Hold on a minute," said Ford, "and I'll give you a message to take
down, if you don't mind. I must answer Adair, and it won't do any harm
to prod him a little--on the secrecy side."

Kenneth waited, with his hand on the door-knob, as it chanced. Hence the
opening of the door a minute or two later was quite without any
preliminary stir of warning in the room of conference. That was possibly
the reason why the lawyer almost fell over a man crouching in the
corridor.

"Hello, there!" said Kenneth; "I beg your pardon."

The man got upon his feet, exhibiting all the signs of intoxication.

"Beg yoursh, I'm sure," he mumbled, and was lurching crookedly away when
the lawyer suddenly came to his senses and grabbed at him. The clutching
hand fell short, and there was an agile foot-race down the corridor,
fruitless for Kenneth, since the fugitive suddenly developed sobriety
enough to run like a deer. Beaten in the foot-race, Kenneth went back
for a word with Ford.

"The battle is on," was the form the word took. "There was a man here,
listening at the key-hole, when I opened the door. How much he overheard
we'll be likely to find out to-morrow when we begin to pull the strings.
Thought I'd give you the pointer. Good night, again."




VIII

THE AUTOMATIC AIR


Set out in cold type, Ford's itinerary for the four days following his
conference with Kenneth would read like the abbreviated diary of a man
dodging the sheriff. His "ticker" memorandum for that period is still in
existence, but the notes are the hurried strokes of the pen of haste,
intelligible, we may say, only to the man who made them. To quote:

"Thursday, nine a.m., Peoria--see Sedgwick; ten--make trackage
contract with T.P. & W.; eleven a.m., Davenport--inventory
motive power--see chief despatcher--get profiles and maps--get copies of
yard contracts--get crossing rights--get total tonnage of grain cars.
Three p.m., Hannibal--see Berdan and whip him into line--inspect
shops--get contracts--get--"

But the string of "gets" fills the page, and is vital now to no living
soul of man, least of all to us who are interested only in finding out
if our young captain of industry actually did make good his boast of
flogging the three short roads into some semblance of a through line in
the brief interval at his disposal; and this without advertising to the
railroad world at large who he represented and what he was doing.

He did it, and without a slip for which he could be held responsible. It
was a wire from the chief office of the Transcontinental in New York, a
telegram inspired by sundry leakages from Pacific Southwestern sources,
that gave him a silent and observant follower in all of his dodgings. Of
this, however, he was in blissful ignorance. Twice, indeed, he sat in
the same Pullman section with his "shadow," quite without suspecting it;
and once he was saved from disaster--also without suspecting it.

It was at a way station in Missouri, and the section-sharing traveling
companion, who had paid only for an hour's ride in the Pullman, was
leaving the train. His hand-bag chanced to be the exact counterpart of
Ford's: what more natural than that he should make the mistake of taking
the wrong one? Ford caught him in the vestibule, and there was a
reëxchange, accompanied by grateful acknowledgments and profuse
apologies from the debarking one. Ford, immersed fathoms deep in his
problems, thought nothing of it; but a moment lost would have been a
cause lost, if he had guessed it. For the mistake was no mistake, and
the hand-bag rescued contained documents for which the Transcontinental
Company would have paid a month's salary of its board of
vice-presidents, charging the amount, not to profit and loss, but rather
to salvage.

It was on the fourth day of the campaign, while Ford was working his way
on an inspection trip over the third link in the short-lines chain, that
two telegrams overtook him.

One was from Adair, announcing the tardy, but now certain triumph of the
expansionist faction in the board of P. S-W. directors, and begging
pathetically for news of the option-getting. The other was signed "K,"
and Ford had a sharp attack of joy when he read it. The attorney had
been successful at all points. The necessary stock majorities were
secured and the certificates were safely on deposit in the Algonquin
National Bank, in Chicago. What remained was only a matter of routine,
provided the P. S-W. bidders would furnish the capital for the purchases.

Ford swamped the local operator at the next way station with a thick
sheaf of "rush" telegrams, left the west-bound train at the first
cross-road junction, and caught a night express on a fast line for
Chicago. Kenneth was waiting for him at the hotel; and after breakfast
there was another telegram from Adair. Matters were still progressing
favorably, and President Colbrith, traveling in his private car,
"Nadia," _via_ the Lake Shore, would be in Chicago the following
morning to take final action in the stock purchases.

Ford gave the message to Kenneth, and the attorney drummed softly on the
table with his finger-tips when he read the announcement.

"We are in for it now," he said with a grimace of dismay. "If Mr.
Colbrith doesn't manage to queer the whole deal, it will be because he
has suffered a complete change of heart."

Ford answered the grimace with a scowl, and the masterful side of him
came uppermost.

"What in the name of common sense were they thinking of to send him out
here?" he gritted.

The general counsel laughed.

"You don't know Mr. Colbrith as well as I do, I fancy," he suggested.
"He is rather hard to suppress. He'll be president until his successor
is elected--or he'll know all the reasons why."

"Well, I hope you've got everything straight in the option business,"
said Ford. "If there is so much as a hair displaced, he will be sure to
find it."

"It is all straight enough," was the confident rejoinder. "Only I had to
bid five points over the market on odd lots of the stock. I'm not sure,
but I think the Transcontinental people got wind of us during the last
day or two and bid against us."

"But you have safe majorities?"

"Oh, yes; we are all in."

"Good," said Ford. "That puts it up to Mr. Colbrith, at all events. And
now, while we have a clear day before us, I want to go over these
C. P. & D. terminal contracts with you. Right here in Chicago is where
the Transcontinental will try hardest to balk us. The C. P. & D. has
trackage rights to the elevators; but I want to be sure that the
contracts will hold water under a transfer of ownership."

Subjected to legal scrutiny, the contracts promised to be defensible,
and Ford came through the day with his apprehensive burdens considerably
lightened. After dinner he took his papers to Kenneth's room, and
together they went carefully over all the legal points involved in the
welding of the three local lines into the Pacific Southwestern system,
Ford furnishing the data gathered by him during the four days.

Kenneth was shrewdly inquisitive, as his responsibilities constrained
him to be, and it was deep in the small hours when Ford made his escape
and went to bed. By consequence, he was scarcely more than half awake
the next morning, when he dressed hurriedly and hastened over to the Van
Buren Street station to see if the president's car had arrived.

The Nadia was in and side-tracked, with a sleepy porter on guard. Ford
climbed to the platform and asked for the president.

"Yas, suh; dis is Mr. Colbrith's cyar; but he don't see no newspapuh
men--no, suh. Besides, dey's just gettin' up," was the rebuff; but Ford
ignored it.

"'They?' Then Mr. Colbrith isn't alone?"

"No, suh; got a pahty 'long with him--a young gentleman and two ladies;
yes, suh. Mr. Colbrith nebber goes nowhah's 'dout he teks a pahty in de
cyar."

"Heavens!" groaned Ford, under his breath; "as if the thing wasn't
complicated enough without making a picnic of it!" Then aloud. "I wish
to go in. My name is Ford, and Mr. Colbrith is expecting me."

"Sho' you isn't a newspapuh man?"

"Of course not," said Ford shortly.

"All right, suh," said the negro; and he made way and opened the door.

The Nadia was a commodious hotel on wheels, with a kitchen and buffet
forward, four state-rooms opening upon a narrow side vestibule, and a
large dining and lounging room looking out through full-length windows
upon a deep, "umbrella-roofed" platform at the rear.

There was no one in the large compartment when Ford reached it; but a
moment later a door opened and closed in the vestibule, and Adair made
his appearance. Ford drew a breath of relief and shook hands with his
backer.

"I'm glad it's you, Mr. Adair. I've been scenting all sorts of
hindrances since the porter told me there was a party aboard."

The young man without an avocation dropped into the easiest of the
wicker chairs and felt in his pockets for his cigarette case.

"Your prophetic soul didn't deceive you any," he laughed. "The
hindrances are here in full force. It is one of Uncle Sidney's notions
never to travel without a tail like a Highland chieftain's. I had a
foreboding that he'd ask somebody, so I took it upon myself to fill up
his passenger list with Aunt Hetty, my sister, and my uncle's nephew."

"I understand," said Ford, and would have plunged forthwith into the
business pool; but Adair stopped him with a gesture of dismay.

"Not before breakfast, if you love me, my dear fellow!" he protested,
with a little grimace that instantly set the reminiscent part of Ford's
brain at work. "After I've had something to eat--"

The interruption was the noiseless entrance of a motherly little lady in
gray, with kindly eyes and a touch of silver in the fair hair drawn
smoothly back from her forehead.

"This is Mr. Stuart Ford, I am sure," she said, giving her hand to the
young engineer before Adair could introduce him. "You look enough like
your father to make me recognize you at once."

Ford was a little embarrassed by the gratefully informal greeting.

"Ought I to remember you, Mrs. Adair?" he asked ingenuously.

"Oh, no, indeed. I knew your father as a young man before he married and
went to the farther West. The Fords and the Colbriths and the Stanbrooks
are all from the same little town in central Illinois, you know."

"I didn't know it," said Ford, "though now I recall it, I used often to
hear my father speak of Miss Hester Stanbrook." Then he was going on to
say that trite thing about the smallness of the world when Adair broke
in.

"I'd like to know what is keeping Uncle Sidney and Alicia. _I_ haven't
had breakfast yet."

As if his protest had evoked her, a young woman drew the portière of the
vestibule--a young woman with bright brown hair, eyes like dewy wood
violets, and an adorable chin. Ford stared helplessly, and Adair
laughed.

"Shocked, aren't you?" he jested. "But you needn't be alarmed. I have
persuaded my sister not to prosecute in the case of the snatched purse.
Alicia, this is Mr. Stuart Ford, and he desires me to say that he is not
often reduced to the necessity of robbing unprotected young women for
the sake of scraping an acquaintance."

Ford lost sight of the Pacific Southwestern exigencies for the moment,
and surely the lapse was pardonable. If the truth must be told, this
young woman, who had been discovered and lost in the same unforgetable
evening, had stirred the neglected pool of sentiment in him to its
profoundest depths, and thoughts of her had been dividing time pretty
evenly with some parts of the strenuous business affair. Indeed, the
hopelessness of any effort toward rediscovering her had been one of his
reasons for hurrying away from New York. He knew himself--a little--and
that quality of unreasoning persistence which other people called his
strong point. The search he had been half-minded to make once begun--

"I hope you haven't forgotten me so soon, Mr. Ford," she was saying; and
he recovered himself with a start.

"Forgotten you? No, indeed!"--this with almost lover-like emphasis.
"I--I think I am just a trifle aghast at my good luck in finding you
again. It seemed so utterly hopeless, you know. Don't you think--"

But now the president had stalked in, and his high querulous voice was
marshaling the party breakfastward. Ford manoeuvered skilfully in the
pairing off, and so succeeded in securing Miss Adair for a companion on
the short walk across to the Grand Pacific.

"You were about to ask me something when Uncle Sidney interrupted you,"
she prompted, when they were clear of the throng in the station
vestibule.

"Yes; I was going to ask if you don't think it was unnecessarily cruel
to send me that note of thanks unsigned."

"Cruel?" she echoed, and her laugh was so exactly a replica of her
brother's that Ford wondered why the reminiscent arrow had not gone at
once to its mark. "How absurd! What possible difference could it make?"

"It made a lot of difference to me," said Ford, refusing to be brushed
aside. "How did you expect I was ever going to be able to find you
again, without even your name as a clue?"

She glanced up at him with unfeigned interest. The men of her world were
not altogether unappreciative; neither were they so primitively
straightforward as this young industry captain out of the West.

"It is not impossible that I never thought of your finding me again,"
she said, and only the tone saved it from being a small slap in the
face.

Ford took the rebuff as a part of the day's work.

"Perhaps you didn't," he admitted. "But I mean to go on hoping that you
did."

"The idea!" she scoffed; but this time she blunted the keen edge of the
rebuke by adding: "I thought, perhaps, we might meet again, sometime.
You see, we are all stock-holders in the Pacific Southwestern; my
brother, Aunt Hetty and I; and Uncle Sidney had shown us a letter--it
was from Mr. North, I think--saying that you were likely to come to New
York with some kind of a plan of reorganization. So when you gave me
your card, I knew at once who you were."

Ford made an immediate mental note of the bit of information implicating
Mr. North, but did not allow himself to be diverted by the business
affair.

"Yes, I know; but that didn't help me a little bit," he protested,
wishing that the distance to the hotel were twice as far.

"That was just because it happened so; you ran away before my brother
had a chance to offer you any hospitality," she explained. Then, before
he could say any more straightforward things: "Tell me, Mr. Ford; are
you really going to find something to interest brother?--something that
will keep him actually and enthusiastically busy for more than a few
days at a time?"

Ford laughed. "I fancy he hasn't been bored for the lack of work since I
left New York, has he?"

"No; and it has made such a difference! Won't you please try and keep
him going?"

"You may rest assured that I shall do what I can. But you see he has
quit already."

"By coming to Chicago with us? Oh, no, indeed; you are quite mistaken.
He is here to help you to--to 'minimize' Uncle Sidney; I think that is
the word he used. He was afraid you had been finding Uncle Sidney rather
difficult. Have you?"

"I have, for a fact," said Ford, out of the depths of sincerity. And,
again out of a full heart: "Your brother is a brick, Miss Adair."

"Isn't he?" and she laughed in sheer good comradeship. "If you can only
manage to make him rise to his capabilities--"

"He'll never be able to live the simple life for a single waking hour,"
said the engineer, finishing the sentence for her.

"Oh, but that is a mistake!" she objected. "The very first requirement
is work; plenty of work of the kind one can do best."

The short walk to the hotel, where Kenneth was waiting to go to
breakfast with the president's party, came to an end, and the social
amenities died of inanition. For one thing, President Colbrith insisted
upon learning the minutest ins and outs of the business matter, making
the table-talk his vehicle; and for another, Miss Adair's place was on
the opposite side of the table, and two removes from Ford's. Time and
again the young engineer tried to side-track business in the interests
of something a little less banal to the two women; but the president was
implacable and refused to be pulled out of the narrow rut of details;
was still running monotonously and raspingly in it when Kenneth glanced
at his watch and suggested that the time for action was come.

After breakfast the party separated. Mrs. Adair and Miss Alicia were to
spend the day with friends in South Chicago, and Mr. Colbrith carried
the attorney off to his room to dig still deeper into the possible legal
complications which might arise out of the proposed transfer of the
three short roads. Ford and Adair sat in the lobby and smoked while they
were waiting for the president and the general counsel to conclude their
conference, and the young millionaire gave his companion the story of
the fight in the directory.

"We have Brewster to thank for the lift which finally pulled our wheel
out of the mud," said the young man, modestly effacing himself in the
summing up. "Or rather I should say that we have the enemy to thank for
stirring Brewster into action. Brewster's got some copper mines out in
Utah that he nurses like a sick child. Just at the critical moment some
of the people who control the Transcontinental began to worry his copper
stock. In the hot part of it he came to me and said, 'Adair, will that
western extension of yours be able to fry any fat out of
Transcontinental?' I told him it would, most assuredly; that next to
making money for ourselves, and, incidentally, saving the Pacific
Southwestern from going smash, our chief object was to give the
Transcontinental a wholesome drubbing."

"You are progressing rapidly," said Ford, with a grin of appreciation.
"Did that fetch him?"

"It did, for a fact. He looked like one of those old bushy-bearded
vikings when he said, 'By thunder, I'm with you, young man! And I'll
answer for Scott and Magnus and Harding. Get your board together, and
we'll settle it to-day."

Ford looked up quickly. "If Mr. Colbrith wasn't the chief of your family
clan, Adair, I could wish that we had this Mr. Brewster at the head of
things."

The rejoinder was heartily prompt. "You don't wish it any more fervently
than I do, Ford. That is why I am here to-day. The board, in spite of
all that our handful of revolutionaries could do, has armed Uncle Sidney
with almost dictatorial powers in this stock-purchasing deal; and if he
doesn't contrive to strangle things by the slow process, it will be
simply and solely because you and Kenneth and I are here to see that he
does not. Do you know what the men call him out on the main line? When
they see the Nadia trundling in, they say, 'Here comes old Automatic
Air-Brakes.' And it fits him."

"But I don't quite understand why he should want to put the brakes on
here and now," Ford interposed. "I know he is against the scheme,
personally; but he is here as the representative of a majority which has
committed itself to the expansion measure, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes; and he has no thought of playing the traitor--you mustn't
think that of him. But it isn't in his nature to facilitate things. In
the present crisis he will feel that he is personally responsible for
the expenditure of five million dollars. He will examine and
investigate, and probe and pry, and will want to worry through every
pen-scratch which has been made up to date."

"Well, there is one comfort; he can't take much time for his worrying,"
said Ford. "Some of the options expire to-morrow noon."

Adair sat up as one who suddenly takes notice.

"What?--to-morrow? Land of glory! but you two fellows took short
chances! Why, any little hitch--"

"I know," said the engineer evenly. "But we took what we could get--and
were thankful. Somebody was bidding against us, and prices began to
jump. Incidentally, I may say that Kenneth deserves to be made a
vice-president of the new company, at the very least. He has done ten
men's work in the last three or four days."

"I don't doubt it. Neither do I suspect you of loafing. For that matter,
I've been hustling a few lines, myself, since I sent you that first
telegram."

"Do you find it exciting enough to keep you interested, as far as you've
gone?" inquired Ford, mindful of Miss Alicia's longings.

"It's the best yet," declared the idler. "Only, you mustn't lean too
heavily on me, you know. I'm the most uncertain quantity you ever
experienced. But here comes Uncle Sidney, with a cowed and brow-beaten
Kenneth in tow--say your prayers, and get ready for the battle royal."




IX

THE RACE TO THE SLOW


Adair's prophecy that President Colbrith would prove himself an
obstructor of the stubbornest was amply fulfilled during the short
interval which remained for decisive action. Truly, in the battle for
business celerity the odds were three to one against Mr. Colbrith; yet
the three were as those who buffet the wind. The president must see and
feel, know and fully understand; and at the very last moment, when the
shortest of the options had no more than an hour to live, he was
proposing to summon General Manager North from Denver to make a fifth in
the council of discord.

It was Adair who took the bull by the horns when the president's caution
was about to turn victory into defeat. What was said or done after the
young man drew Mr. Colbrith into the private committee-room at the bank
and shut the door, Ford and Kenneth, who were excluded, could only
surmise. But whatever was done was well done. When the two, uncle and
nephew, came out of the room of privacy, the old man was shaking his
head and the young one was smiling serenely. So it came about that
between eleven and twelve o'clock, when Ford, grimly battling to the
last, fought as one without hope, a few strokes of the pen opened the
doors upon the new creation; five million dollars, more or less, changed
hands, and the Pacific Southwestern took the long leap eastward from the
Missouri River to its new base in Chicago.

"It's you for the hustle now, Ford," said Adair, linking arms with the
engineer when the quartet left the bank. "How soon do you think you can
get that first train-load of grain in transit?"

"I wish I could tell you," said Ford.

"Why can't you?"

"Because it will depend very largely upon the authority Mr. Colbrith or
the board sees fit to give me. At present, you will remember, I am still
only a division superintendent--Mr. North's subordinate, in fact, and--"

"Say it out loud," encouraged Adair.

"I don't like to, but I suppose it can't be helped. Up to now I have
been acting under special orders, as you may say, in a purely financial
transaction. But my commission expired five minutes ago when the stock
deal went through. When it comes to issuing orders in the operating and
transportation department, I have no authority whatever. Mr. North is
general manager, and I suppose his jurisdiction will now be extended to
cover the new line, won't it?"

"Not much!" retorted the amateur promoter. "You are going to be given a
free hand in this from the word go. From what I can learn, North has
been an obstructor, all along, hasn't he?"

"I can't say that," said Ford, just, even to an enemy. "To be right
honest about it, I shall have to confess that I slurred him
entirely--went over his head."

"For good reasons, no doubt, only you are too charitable to give them.
Never mind: as I say, you are going to have a free hand. This is your
pie and nobody else is going to cut it for you." And when the party
reached the hotel there was another conference of two behind closed
doors, in which Ford and the general counsel did not participate.

An hour later, when Adair came down from the president's room, he thrust
a sheaf of penciled printers' copy into Ford's hands.

"There you are," he said. "I've done the best I could for you on such
short notice--with Uncle Sidney trying his level best to get a cross
reference to the board before taking action. Get these circulars through
a print shop and into the mails. You'll see that one of them announces
your appointment, effective to-day, as Assistant to the President. That
was as far as Uncle Sidney could be dragged. It doesn't give you a
straight flush; but your hand will beat North's if it comes to a
show-down between you. Just the same, I shouldn't quarrel with North, if
I were you. Uncle Sidney thinks the sun rises and sets in him."

Ford nodded, and while he was reading hastily through the sheaf of
pencilings a boy brought him a telegram. When he opened the envelope,
Kenneth had turned away. But Adair was looking on, and he did not fail
to remark the startling effect of the few typewritten words upon the
engineer.

"Whereabouts does it hit us this time?" he inquired, lighting a fresh
cigarette.

"In the neck," said Ford curtly. "The possibility occurred to me
yesterday--Pacific Southwestern stock being so badly scattered among
small holders. I wired a broker, a good friend of mine, to pick up a few
shares on my account. Here is what he says: 'Market bone dry. No
offerings of P. S-W. at any price.'"

Adair whistled softly. "That's getting next to us with a vengeance!" he
commented. "And it can be done, too. Half a dozen of the small
stock-holders have been to me since the fire was lighted, trying to get
me to take their stock at market."

"How much do we control--that we are sure of?" Ford asked.

"I don't know--in figures. Not more than two-fifths, I should say. At
the last board meeting I proposed that we make a safe majority pool
among ourselves, but Uncle Sidney sat on me. Said his own personal
constituency among the little people was big enough amply to secure us."

Ford swore pathetically.

"The one single instance when his caution might have steered him
straight--and it went to sleep!" he raged.

"Exactly," laughed Adair. "And now the Transcontinental moguls are
buying up a majority of their own, meaning to capture the main-line dog
and leaving us to wag the extension tail which we have just acquired.
Say, Ford; doesn't that appeal to your sense of humor?"

"No, it doesn't," said Ford savagely. To see one's air-castles crumbling
at the very moment when they were to be transmuted into solid realities
is apt to provoke a reversion to type; and Ford's type was Gothic.

"That's a pity," said Adair, absently rolling his cigarette between his
thumb and finger. "Also, it's another pity that I am such a hopeless
quitter. I believe I could pull this thing out yet, if I could only get
up sufficient steam."

"For heaven's sake, tell me what you burn, and I'll furnish the fuel,"
said Ford desperately.

"Will you? I guess I need something pretty inflammatory."

"Lord of love! haven't you good and plenty, without calling upon me?
Are you going to let these stock-jobbing land-pirates on 'Change gibbet
you as a solemn warning to aspiring young promoters?"

Adair paused with the cigarette half way to his lips. "Ah," he said,
after a thoughtful moment. "Perhaps that was what I needed. No; they
will not gibbet any of us to-day; and possibly not to-morrow." Then,
with a sudden dropping of the mask of easy-going indifference: "Give me
the key to your room, and find me a swift stenographer. Then go over to
the Lake Shore headquarters and ask to have the Nadia coupled to the
evening train for New York."

"But the president?" Ford began. "Didn't he say something about going
over these new lines on an inspection trip?"

"Never mind Uncle Sidney: on this one occasion he will change his plans
and go back to New York with us," said Adair curtly.

"Good," said Ford approvingly. "And how about opening the new through
line for business? Do we go on? Or do we hang it up until we find out
where we are 'at'?"

"Don't hold it up a single minute. Drive it for all the power you can
get behind it. If we have to collide with things, let's do it with the
throttle wide open. Now find me that shorthand person quickly, will
you?"

By what means the president was persuaded or coerced into doing the
thing he had not planned to do, Ford was not to know. But for that
matter, after carrying out Adair's instructions the engineer plunged at
once into his own Herculean task of reorganization, emerging only when
he made a tardy sixth at the president's dinner table in the hotel café
in the evening.

The dinner, which the young engineer had been fondly counting upon as a
momentary relaxation from the heart-breaking business strain, was a
dismal failure on its social side. President Colbrith, as yet, it
appeared, in blissful ignorance of the latest news from New York, had
reserved the seat of honor for his new assistant, and the half-hour was
filled to overflowing with minute and cautionary definitions of the
assistant's powers and duties.

Ford listened with a blank ear on that side. There was work to do, and
one man to do it. He did not care particularly to hear instructions
which he would probably have to disregard at the first experimental dash
into the new field. He meant to hold himself rigidly to account for
results; more than this he thought not even Mr. Colbrith had a right to
require.

After dinner he indemnified himself for the kindergarten lecture by
boldly taking possession of Miss Adair for the short walk over to the
private car. The entire world of work was still ahead, and a corps of
expert stenographers was at the moment awaiting his return to the C. P.
& D. offices, where he had established temporary headquarters; but he
shut the door upon the exigencies and listened to Miss Alicia.

"I am so sorry we are not going to be here to see your triumph," she was
saying; adding: "It is a triumph, isn't it?"'

"Only a beginning," he amended. "And it won't be spectacular, if we can
help it. Besides, this east-end affair is only a preliminary. A little
later on, if our tackle doesn't break, we shall land the really big fish
for which this is only the bait."

"Shall you never be satisfied?" she asked jestingly. And then, more
seriously: "What is your ambition? To be able to buy what your neighbor
can not afford?"

"Big money, you mean? No, I think not. But I like to win, as well as
other men."

"To win what?"

"Whatever seems worth winning--this fight, in the present instance, and
the consequent larger field. Later, enough money to enable me to think
of money only as a stepping-stone to better things. Later still,
perhaps--"

He stopped abruptly, as though willing to leave the third desideratum in
the air, but she would not let him.

"Go on," she said. "Last of all?"

"Last of all, the love of a true woman."

"Oh!" she scoffed, with a little uptilt of the admirable chin. "Then
love must come trailing along at the very end, after we have skimmed
the cream from all the other milk pans in orderly succession."

"No," he rejoined gravely. "I put it clumsily--as I snatch purses. As a
matter of sober fact, love sets the mile-stones along any human road
that is worth traversing."

She glanced up at him and the blue eyes were dancing. Miss Alicia Adair
knew no joy to compare with that of teasing, and it was not often that
the fates gave her such a pliable subject.

"Tell me, Mr. Ford; is--is she pretty?"

"She is beautiful; the most beautiful woman in the world, Miss Adair."

"How fine! And, of course, she is a paragon of all the virtues?--an
angel without the extremely inconvenient wings?"

"You have said it: and I have never doubted it from the moment I first
laid eyes on her."

"Better and better," she murmured. Then: "She has money?"

"I suppose she has; yes, she certainly has money. But that doesn't make
any difference--to her or to me."

"It is simply idyllic!" was the ecstatic comment. "After all this there
remains but one other possible contingency. Has she a willing mind, Mr.
Ford?"

They had reached the steps of the Nadia, and the others had gone within.
Ford looked soberly into the depths of the laughing eyes and said: "I
would give all my chances of success in this Pacific Southwestern affair
to be able to say 'yes' to that."

The station gong was clanging the departure signal for the New York
train, and he swung her lightly up to the step of the car.

"Good-by," she said, turning to smile down upon him. And then, "I don't
believe you, you know; not the least bit in the world."

"Why don't you?" he demanded.

"Because the woman doesn't live who would be worth such a sacrifice as
that would be--to Mr. Stuart Ford."

And this was her leave-taking.




X

THE SINEWS OF WAR


The general offices of the C. P. & D. Railway were crowded into a
half-dozen utilitarian rooms on the second floor of the company's
freight station building in the Chicago yards. In two of these rooms,
with a window outlook upon a tangle of switching tracks with their
shifting panorama of cars and locomotives, Ford set up his standard as
chief executive of the three "annexed" roads, becoming, in the eyes of
three separate republics of minor officials and employees, the arbiter
of destiny.

Naturally, the announcement that their railroads had been swallowed
whole by the Pacific Southwestern had fallen as a thunderclap upon the
rank and file of the three local companies; and since, in railway
practice, a change of owners usually carries with it a sweeping change
in department heads, the service was instantly demoralized.

During the first few hours of Ford's administration, therefore, the
wires were buzzing with hasty resignations; and those whose courage was
not whetted to the quitting point took a loose hold upon their duties
and waited to see what would happen. Under such chaotic conditions Ford
took his seat in the mean little office over the freight station, and
flung himself ardently into the task of bringing order out of the sudden
confusion. Effectively to support Adair and the reconstructionists on
the board it was critically necessary that there be immediate and
cheering news from the front.

It was in the preliminary wrestle with disintegration that the young
engineer's gift of insight and his faculty of handling men as men stood
him in good stead. He was fresh from his trip over the new extension, on
which he had met and shrewdly appraised the men who were now his
subordinates. With the human field thus mentally mapped and
cross-sectioned he was enabled to make swift and sure selections,
cutting out the dead timber remorselessly, encouraging the doubtful,
reassuring the timid, assorting and combining and ordering until, at the
close of the second day of fierce toil, he was ready to make his first
report to Adair.

     Track connections at junction points completed to-day. General and
     division operating and traffic departments in the saddle and
     effectively organized. With proper coöperation on part of General
     Manager North, grain should begin to move eastward to-morrow. Can
     get no satisfactory replies from North. Have him disciplined from
     your end. Answer.                            FORD.

To this telegram there was a prompt and voluminous reply from the seat
of war in the East. In a free fight on the Stock Exchange, a battle
royal generaled by Brewster and Magnus in which every inch of ground had
been sharply contested by brokers buying up P. S-W. in the interest of
principals unnamed, a majority of the Southwestern stock--safe but
exceedingly narrow--had been secured by the reconstructionists.

In accordance with Ford's suggestion, North had been "called down" by
wire, and Ford was instructed to report instantly any failure of effort
on the part of the Denver headquarters to set the grain trains in
motion.

Otherwise, and from the New York point of view, the situation remained
most hopeful. The fight in the Street had unified the factions in the
board of directors, and even the timid ones were beginning to clamor for
an advance into the territory of the enemy.

Ford read Adair's letter-length and most unbusiness-like telegram with
the zest of the fine wine of triumph tingling in his blood. With the
Chicago outlet fairly open and in working order, and a huge tributary
grain crop to be moved, it should be only a matter of days until the
depressed Pacific Southwestern stock would begin to climb toward the
bonding figure.

This was the first triumphant conclusion, but afterward came reaction
and a depressive doubt. Would the stock go up? Or would the enemy devise
some assault that would keep it down in spite of the money-earning,
dividend-promising facts? Upon the expected rise hung the fate of Ford's
cherished ambition--the building of the western extension. Without a
dividend-paying Chicago-Denver main line, there could be no bond issue,
no thirty millions for the forging of the third and most important link
in the great traffic chain.

Ford walked the floor of his office, called by courtesy, "private," for
an anxious hour, balancing the probabilities, and finally determined to
take the desperate chance. There was a vast mountain of preliminary work
to be leveled, huge purchasing expenses to be incurred, before the first
step could be taken in the actual building of the western extension; and
the summer was advancing day by day. He did not hope to get the
extension completed in a single season. But to get it over into the
promising mining field on the lower Pannikin before snow-flying meant
work of the keenest, without the loss of a single day. Could he afford
to play the safe game and wait until the building capital should be
cannily in Mr. Magnus' bank vaults?

He decided that he could not; and when he reached a decision, Ford was
not the man to hesitate before taking the plunge. On the morning of the
third day he called Truitt, sometime superintendent of the C. P. & D.,
and now acting manager of the Chicago Extension, and gave him his
instructions.

"You say there are three grain trains moving on the line now, Mr.
Truitt: there will be three more before night. Keep them coming, and
give them the right of way over everything but the United States mails.
Can you handle this without help from me?"

"We'll give it a pretty stiff try," was the prompt rejoinder. "But you
are not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Ford?"

"No; but for the next forty-eight hours I am going to lock my door, and
I don't want to be disturbed for anything less than a disaster or a wire
from New York. Please give orders accordingly, will you?"

The orders were given; and, left with his force of stenographers, Ford
began to walk the floor, dictating right and left. Letters and telegrams
to steel mills, to contractors, to bridge builders, to the owners of
grading outfits, and to labor agencies, clicked out of the typewriters
in a steady and unbroken stream, and the din was like that of a
main-line telegraph office on a hot piece of track.

All day long, and far into the night, the office force wrought
unceasingly, digging away at the mountain of preliminary correspondence;
and by the next morning the wire replies were beginning to come in.

Then came the crux. To insure prompt delivery of material, definite
orders must be placed immediately. A delay of a single day might entail
a delay of weeks in the shipments. Yet the risk of plunging the company
into debts it might never be able to pay was appalling. What if the
stock should not go up as prefigured?--if the bonds could not be
floated?

It was with the feeling that he might well be signing his own
death-warrant that Ford put his name to the first order for two hundred
thousand dollars' worth of steel rails for immediate delivery to the
company's line in Chicago. But after the first cold submergence it came
more easily, and when he left the office an hour before midnight, a cool
million would not have covered the obligations he had assumed during the
strenuous day.

Kenneth was sitting up for him when he reached his hotel, and the
usually impassive face of the general counsel reflected trouble.

"Out with it," said Ford wearily; and suddenly the new million of
indebtedness became a mountain weight to grind him to powder.

"We're blocked," was the brief announcement. "Two of the grain trains
are in, and the Transcontinental lawyers have won the toss. We're
enjoined by the court from using the service tracks to the elevators.
Didn't your local people tell you?"

"No," said Ford. "I had given orders that I was not to be disturbed. But
what of it? You expected something of the sort, didn't you?"

"Yes; and I provided for it. The injunction will be dissolved when we
have our final hearing; but long before that time the mischief will be
irreparable, I'm afraid."

"How?"

"It will be blazoned far and wide that we can't deliver the goods--that
the opposition has done us up. I've tried to keep it out of the
newspapers, or, rather, to persuade them not to make too much of it. But
it wouldn't go. The Transcontinental has all the pull in this town, it
appears."

"And you think it will affect the price of the stock?"

"It is bound to, temporarily, at least. And coming upon the heels of
to-day's sudden tumble--"

"What's that?" demanded Ford, dry-lipped, adding: "I haven't seen a
paper since morning."

Kenneth wagged his head gloomily. "It's pretty bad. P. S-W. closed at
thirty-three--five points off yesterday's market."

"Good Lord!" Ford's groan was that of a man smitten down in the heat of
the fight. "Say, Kenneth, within a single sweep of the clock-hands I
have contracted for more than a million dollars' worth of material for
the western extension--more than a million dollars' worth!"

"Well, I'm afraid you have sinned in haste to repent at leisure," said
the lawyer, with a weary man's disregard for the amenities. Then he
added: "I'm going to bed. I've had about all I can stand for one day."

Ford went to the room clerk for his key; reeled would be the better
word, since his brain was whirling. There was a telegram in his box, and
he tore it open with fresh and sharper misgivings. It was from Adair.

     The sick man's getting sicker. What is the matter with your
     prescription? Stock gone off five points, and the bears are
     squeezing us to beat the band. Stories flying on the Street that we
     are a kite without an effective tail; that the courts will keep us
     out of the elevators. What do you say?

Ford consulted his watch. There was barely time to catch the midnight
train for New York, and his determination was taken on the spur of the
moment. It was all or nothing, now.

Hastily writing a wire to the cashier of the Denver bank where he kept
his personal account, and another to Adair, and leaving brief notes for
Kenneth and Truitt, he took a cab and had himself driven at a gallop to
the Union Station. He was the last man through the platform gates, but
he made his train, and was settling himself in the sleeper when another
telegram was thrust into his hand. This was from Frisbie, at Saint's
Rest; and that it brought more bad news might be argued from the way in
which he crushed it slowly in his hand and jammed it into his pocket. On
this day, if never before, he was proving the truth of the old adage
that misfortunes do not come singly.

Upon arriving in New York late the following evening, he had himself
driven to the Waldorf, where he found Adair waiting for him. A few words
sufficed to outline the situation, which the lapse of another day had
made still more desperate. So far from recovering, the falling stock had
dropped to twenty-nine and a half, and there was every indication that
the bottom was not yet reached.

"How do you account for it?" asked Ford, when the dismal tale had been
told.

"Oh, it's easy enough, when you know how," was the light-hearted
rejoinder. "As I wired you, there was something of a scramble on the
floor of the Exchange last week when we were fighting to find out
whether we should control our own majority or let the Transcontinental
have it. Our pool got its fifty-one per cent. all right, but in the
nature of things the enemy stood as the next largest stock-holder in
P. S-W., since they'd been buying right and left against us. Now, since
we don't need any more, and nobody else wants it, all the
Transcontinental people have to do is to unload on the market, and down
she goes."

Ford looked incredulous, and then wrathful.

"Adair, tell me: did I have to stop my work when my time is worth fifty
dollars a minute, and come all the way to New York to tell you folks
what to do?" he demanded.

Adair's laugh was utterly and absolutely care-free.

"It looks that way, doesn't it? Have you got the compelling club up your
sleeve, as usual?"

"A boy might carry it--and swing it, too," was the disgusted answer.
"When does the board meet again? Or has it concluded to lie down in the
harness?"

"Oh, it gets together every morning--got the meeting habit, you know.
Everybody's in a blue funk, but we still have the daily round-up to swap
funeral statistics."

"All right. Meet me here in the morning, and we'll go and join the
procession. Can you make it nine o'clock?"

"Sure. It's too late to go home, and I'll stay here. Then you'll be
measurably certain that I can't escape. May I see the tip end of the
club?"

"No," said Ford grumpily. "You don't deserve it. Go to bed and store up
a head of steam that will carry you through the hardest day's work you
ever hoped to do. Good night."

They met again at the breakfast-table the following morning, and Ford
talked pointedly of everything save the P. S-W. predicament. One of
Adair's past fads had been the collecting of odd weapons; Ford
discovered this and drew the young man skilfully into a discussion of
the medieval secrets of sword-tempering.

"I've a bit of the old Damascus, myself," said the engineer. "Tybee--he
was on the Joppa-Jerusalem road in the building--picked it up for me.
Curious piece of old steel; figured and flowered and etched and inlaid
with silver. There were jewels in the pommel once, I take it; the
settings are still there to show where some practical-turned vandal dug
them out."

Adair was quite at a loss to guess how old swords and their histories
could bear upon the financial situation, but he was coming to know Ford
better. Some one has said that it is only the small men who are careful
and troubled on the eve of a great battle. So the talk was of ancient
weapons until the time for action arrived; and a smooth-faced gentleman
sitting at a near-by table and marked down by Ford--though not by Ford's
companion--listened for some word of enlightenment on the railroad
situation, and was cruelly disappointed.

"Why wouldn't you talk?" asked Adair, when they were driving down-town
in the young millionaire's auto. "Or rather, why did you persist in
keeping me to the old swords?"

Ford laughed.

"For one reason, I enjoy the old swords--as a relaxation. For another,
Mr. Jeffers Hawley, who was once one of the Transcontinental lawyers in
Denver, was sitting just behind you, with eager ears. You didn't know
that. Hold on a minute; tell your man to stop at the Chemical Bank. I
want you to introduce me to the cashier."

"Now, what the deuce are you starting a New York bank account for?"
queried Adair, as they came out of the bank together and climbed into
the tonneau of the waiting touring car. "Couldn't you draw on the
treasurer? What's the use of your being the assistant to the president,
I'd like to know?"

"Wait," was the answer; and the questioner waited, perforce.

The board was already in session when the two young men were admitted to
the private room in the rear of the Broad Street offices, and Ford was
welcomed as a man who has recklessly steered the ship upon the rocks.
There were even some open recriminations, notably on the part of the
president; but Ford sat quietly under them, making no defense, and
folding and refolding a slip of paper in his fingers as he listened.

When they gave him leave to speak, he still made no attempt to explain.
Instead, he rose, walked to the other end of the table, and tossed the
bit of folded paper across to Mackie, the broker.

"I inherited a little money, and I have made and saved enough more to
make it an even twenty thousand dollars," he said. "I don't know of any
more promising investment just now than Pacific Southwestern at
twenty-nine and a half. Will you be good enough to buy for my account,
Mr. Mackie?"

The effect was electrical. President Colbrith sat up very straight in
his chair; two or three of the anxious ones opened on Ford with a rapid
fire of questions; and Brewster, the copper magnate, sat back and
chuckled softly in his beard.

"No, gentlemen; there is no change in the situation, so far as I know.
Of course, you are not so foolish as to let the newspaper talk of the
tie-up at the Chicago elevators influence you," Ford was saying to the
anxious inquirers. "And, apart from that, everything is going our way.
As I have remarked, our stock at the present figure is good enough for
me, and I only wish I had two hundred thousand, instead of twenty
thousand, to put into it."

Brewster stopped chuckling long enough to hold up a finger to the
broker. "You may buy for my account, too, Mackie, while you are at
it--and keep on buying till I tell you to quit."

This broke the deadlock instantly, and for a few minutes the board room
was as noisy as the wheat pit with a corner threatening. Brewster, still
laughing in his beard, pulled Ford out of the press at the broker's end
of the table.

"I'm going to ask only one thing of you, young man," he began, his
shrewd little eyes twinkling. "Just let me know when you are going to
get out, so I can pull through without having to take the bankruptcy."

[Illustration: "Will you be good enough to buy for my account, Mr.
Mackie"]

"I'll do it, Mr. Brewster," laughed Ford. "Only I'm not going to get
out--unless you folks freeze me out."

"Then it isn't a long bluff on your part?"

"It is, and it isn't. We still stand to win if we have the nerve to hold
on--in which event P. S-W. at twenty-nine and a fraction is a gold mine.
That's one view of it, and the other is this: we've simply _got_ to
corner our own stock if we expect to sell thirty millions additional
bonds."

"Well, I guess you've gone the right way about it. But are you sure
about these Chicago terminals? A legal friend of mine here says you'll
never get in."

"He was possibly paid to say it," said Ford hotly. "There has never been
a shadow of doubt touching our trackage rights on the C. P. & D.
contracts, or upon our ability to maintain them. All the
Transcontinental people hoped to do was to make a newspaper stir to help
keep our stock down. They know what we are going to do to them over in
their western territory, and they won't stop at anything to block us."

"Of course; I think we were all inclined to be a little short-sighted
and pessimistic here, Mr. Ford. When do you go back to your fighting
ground?"

"To-night."

"You won't wait to see what happens here?"

"I don't need to, I am sure. And the minutes--my minutes--are worth
dollars to the company just now."

"Well, go in and win--only don't forget to give me that tip. You
wouldn't want to see a man of my age going to the poorhouse."

"One other word, Mr. Brewster," Ford begged, as the copper magnate was
pointing for the door of escape. "Please don't let any of these timid
gentlemen sell till we get our bonds floated. You mark my word: the
temptation to make a big killing is going to be very great, within a
week."

The copper king laughed; openly, this time.

"You overrate my influence, Mr. Ford; but I'll do what I can--by word of
mouth and by example. You can count on me--as long as you let me stay on
your side of the market."

Ford had three several invitations to luncheon after the meeting
adjourned, but he accepted none of them. To Adair he made the
declination courteous while they were trundling back to the Waldorf in
the big touring car.

"I have lost an entire day because I could not take the time to secure a
stenographer before leaving Chicago night before last. I must find one
now and go to work."

"All right; if you must. But I was hoping I could take you out to
Overlook to dinner this evening. Can't you come anyhow, and take a later
train west?"

"Don't tempt me," said Ford. And then: "The ladies are quite well, I
hope?"

"Oh, yes; they are in town to-day, and we are all going to luncheon
together--though I shan't know just where until I go to the club.
Failing the dinner, won't you make a knife and fork with us at one
o'clock?"

"I should like to--more than anything else in the world," Ford
protested, meaning it. "But you'll make my excuses to Mrs. Adair, won't
you? We've simply got to get a three-cornered hustle on now, if we want
to save the day in the West."

"Why? Is there anything new in that quarter?"

"There is: something that I didn't dare to mention back yonder in the
board meeting. You may remember that I told you I had left a man in my
place on the Plug Mountain--Frisbie? I had a wire from him, night before
last, just as I was leaving Chicago. As you know, the Pacific
Southwestern inherits, from the old narrow-gauge purchase, the
right-of-way over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin. Frisbie
wires that the Transcontinental people have begun massing building
material at the terminus of their Saguache branch, only twenty miles
from the Pass."

"And that means?--I'm lame on geography."

"It means that they'll cut in ahead of us, if they can. Plug Pass is the
only available unoccupied outlet through the mountains for thirty or
forty miles north or south; and if we don't get our building force on
the ground mighty suddenly, we'll find it fortified and held by the
enemy."

The touring car had turned into Broadway, and the traffic roar precluded
further talk. But when Ford was dismounting from the tonneau at the
entrance to his hotel, Adair said: "There appears to be no rest for the
wicked. You ought to have some of that thirty million dollars to spend
right now."

Ford's smile was little more than a sardonic grin.

"Adair," he said, "I'm going to tell you something else that I didn't
dare tell those money-tremulous people in McVeigh and Mackie's private
office. I have been signing contracts and buying material by the
train-load ever since the first grain shipment was started eastward on
our main line. Also, I've got my engineering corps mobilized, and it
will take the field under Frisbie as its chief not later than to-morrow.
Putting one thing with another, I should say that we are something over
a fresh million of dollars on the wrong side of solvency for these
little antics of mine, and I'm adding to the deficit by the hundred
thousand every time I can get a chance to dictate a letter."

Adair lighted a cigarette and made a fair show of taking it easily. But
a moment later he was lifting his hat to wipe the perspiration from his
forehead.

"Lord! but you have the confidence of your convictions!" he said,
breathing hard. "If we shouldn't happen to be able to float the bonds--"

"We are in too deep to admit the 'if.' The bonds must be floated, and at
the earliest possible moment that Magnus will move in it. You wanted
something big enough to keep you interested. I have been trying my best
to accommodate you."

Adair leaned forward and spoke to his chauffeur. The man watched his
chances for room to turn in the crowded street.

"Where are you going?" asked Ford.

"Back to McVeigh and Mackie's--where I can watch a ticker and go broke
buying more Pacific Southwestern," was the reply, and just then the
chauffeur found his opening and the big car whirled and plunged into the
down-town stream.

In the financial news the next morning there was a half-column or more
devoted to the sudden and unaccountable flurry in Pacific Southwestern.
Ford got it in the Pittsburg papers and read it while the picked-up
stenographer was wrestling with his notes. After the drop in the stock,
caused, in the estimation of the writer, by the company's sudden plunge
into railroad buying at wholesale, P. S-W. had recovered with a bound,
advancing rapidly in the closing hours of the day from the lower
thirties to forty-two, with a strong demand. The utmost secrecy was
maintained, but it was shrewdly suspected that one of the great
companies, of which the Pacific Southwestern was now a competitor on an
equal footing for the grain-carrying trade, had gone in to absorb the
new factor in trans-Missouri traffic. Other and more sensational
developments might be expected if the battle should be fought to a
finish. Then followed a brief history of the Pacific Southwestern, with
a somewhat garbled account of the late dash for a Chicago terminal, but
lacking--as Ford remarked gratefully--any hint of the company's designs
in the farther West.

"If Adair and Brewster and the others only have the nerve to keep it
up!" said Ford to himself. Then he tossed the paper aside and dived once
more into the deep sea of extension building, working the picked-up
stenographer until the young man was ready with his resignation the
moment the final letter was filed for mailing in the Chicago station.

Five days the young engineer waited for news from New York--waited and
worked like a high-pressure motor while he waited. Each day's financial
news showed the continued and growing success of the home-made "corner,"
and now the reporters were predicting that the stock would go to par
before the price should break.

Ford trembled for the good faith of his backers on the board. When one
has bought at twenty-nine and a half and can sell within the week for
eighty-seven, the temptation is something tremendous. But at the closing
hour of the fifth day the demand was still good; and when Ford reached
the hotel that night there was a telegram from Adair awaiting him.

He tore it open and read it, with the blood pounding through his veins
and a roar which was not of the street traffic drumming in his ears.

     P. S-W. closed at ninety-two to-day, and a Dutch syndicate will take
     the bonds. Success to you in the Western wilderness. Brewster wants
     to know how soon you'll reach his Utah copper mines.         ADAIR.




XI

HURRY ORDERS


"I'm no cold-water thrower, Ford, as you know. But if I were a
contractor, and you were trying to get me to commit myself to any such
steeplechase, I should say no, and confirm it with a cuss-word."

It was a week after the successful placing of the Western Extension
building-fund bonds with the Dutch syndicate, and Ford, having ordered
things to his liking on the newly opened Chicago line, had taken the
long step westward to Denver to begin the forging of the third link in
the great railway chain.

Frisbie, now first assistant engineer in charge of construction, had
come down from Saint's Rest for a conference with his chief, and the
place of conferrings was a quiet corner in one of the balconies
overlooking the vast rotunda of the Brown Palace Hotel; this because the
carpenters were still busy in the suite of rooms set apart for the
offices of the assistant to the president in the Pacific Southwestern
headquarters down-town.

"You mean that the time is too short?" said Ford, speaking to Frisbie's
emphatic objection.

"Too short at both ends," contended the little man with the devilish
mustaches and chin beard. "The Copah mining district is one hundred and
twenty miles, as the crow flies, from the summit of Plug Pass--say one
hundred and forty by the line of our survey down the Pannikin, through
the canyon and up to the town. Giving you full credit for more
getting-ready than I supposed any man could compass in the three weeks
you've been at it, I still think it is impossible for us to reach Copah
this season."

"You must change your belief, Dick," was the curt rejoinder. "This is to
be a campaign, not only of possibilities, but of things done. We go into
Copah with the steel gangs before snow flies."

"I know; that's what you've been saying all along. But you're looking at
the thing by and large, and I'm figuring on the flinty details. For
example: you'll admit that we can't work to any advantage west of the
mountains until we have made a standard gauge out of the Plug Mountain
branch. How much time have you been allowing for that?"

"No time at all for the delay: about three weeks, maybe, for the actual
changing of the gauge," said Ford coolly.

"All right," laughed Frisbie. "Only you'll show us how. It doesn't lie
in the back of my head--or in Crapsey's, unless he's a better man than I
hired him for."

"Who is Crapsey?"

"He is a Purdue man that I picked up and started out on the branch to
make figures on the change of gauge. The other three parties, under
Major Benson, Jack Benson and Roy Brissac, are setting the grade stakes
down the Pannikin, and Leckhard is wrestling with the construction
material you've been dumping in upon us at Saint's Rest. That left me
short, and I hired Crapsey."

"Good. If he is capable, he may do the broadening. Call him in and set
him at it."

"But, man! Don't you want the figures first?"

"My dear Dick! I've had those figures for two years, and there's nothing
very complicated about that part of our problem. Call your man in and
let him attack the thing itself."

"Everything goes: you may consider him recalled. But broadening the Plug
Mountain to standard gauge doesn't put us into Copah this summer, does
it?"

"No; our necessities will do that for us. See here; let me show you."
Ford took out his note-book and on a blank page of it outlined a rough
map, talking as he sketched. "Three weeks ago you wired me that the
Transcontinental people were massing building material at the terminus
of their Saguache branch."

"So I did," said Frisbie.

"And the day before yesterday you wired again to say that it was
apparently a false alarm. What made you change your mind?"

"They are hauling the stuff away--over to their Green Butte line, I'm
told."

"Why are they hauling it away?"

"The bluff--their bluff--was called. We had got busy on Plug Pass, and
they saw there was no hope of cutting in ahead of us at that point."

"Exactly. Now look at this map for a minute. Here is Saint's Rest; here
is the Copah district; and here is Green Butte, the junction of their
narrow gauge with the standard-gauge Salt Lake and Eastern. If you were
on the Transcontinental executive committee and saw an active competing
line about to build a standard-gauge railroad through the Copah district
and on to a connection with your narrow gauge's outlet at Green Butte,
what would you advise?"

Frisbie nodded. "It's easy, when you know how, isn't it They'll
standardize their narrow gauge to Green Butte, make an iron-clad traffic
contract with the S. L & E. to exclude us, and build a branch from
Jack's Canyon, say, up into the Copah country." And then in loyal
admiration: "That's what I call the sure word of prophecy--your
specialty, Stuart. How many nights' sleep did you lose figuring that
out?"

"Not any, as it happens," laughed Ford. "It was a straight tip out of
the East. The plan, just about as you've outlined it, was adopted by the
Transcontinental powers that be, sitting in New York last week. By some
means unknown to me, Mr. Adair got wind of it, and made a flying trip to
Chicago to put me on--wouldn't even trust the wire with it. Now you
understand why we've got to wake the Copah echoes with a locomotive
whistle this season."

"Copah--yes," said Frisbie doubtfully. "But that is only a way station.
What we need is Green Butte and the Pacific coast outlet over the S. L &
E.; and they stand to euchre us out of that, hands down. What's to
prevent their making that traffic contract with the Mormon people right
now?"

"Nothing; if the S. L & E. management were willing. But just here the
political situation in Mormondom fights for us. Last year the
Transcontinental folk turned heaven and earth over to defeat the Mormon
candidate for the United States Senate. The quarrel wasn't quite mortal
enough to stand in the way of a profitable business deal; but all things
being equal, the Salt Lake line will favor us as against its political
enemy."

"You're sure of that?" queried Frisbie.

"As sure as one can be of anything that isn't cash down on the
nail--with the money locked up in a safety deposit vault. By the
sheerest good luck, the Mormon president of the S. L & E. happened to
be in New York at the time when Adair had his ear to the
Transcontinental keyhole. Adair hunted him up and made a hypothetical
case of a sure thing: if our Western Extension and the Transcontinental,
standard-gauged, should be knocking at the Green Butte door at the same
time, what would the S. L & E. do? The Mormon answer was a bid for
speed; first come, first served. But Adair was given to understand,
indirectly, that on an equal footing, our line would be given the
preference as a friendly ally."

"Bully for the Mormon! But you say Copah--this summer. When we reach
Copah we are still one hundred and forty miles short of Green Butte. And
if you can broaden the Plug Mountain in three weeks--which you'll still
allow me to doubt--the Transcontinental ought to be able to broaden its
Green Butte narrow gauge in three months."

"If you had cross-sectioned both lines as I have, you wouldn't stumble
over that," said Ford, falling back, as he commonly did, upon the things
he knew. "We shall broaden the Plug Mountain without straightening a
curve or throwing a shovelful of earth on the embankment, from beginning
to end. On the other hand, the Green Butte narrow gauge runs for seventy
miles through the crookedest canyon a Rocky Mountain river ever got lost
in. There is more heavy rock work to be done in that canyon than on our
entire Pannikin division from start to finish."

"That's bully for us," quoth the first assistant. "But, all the same, we
shouldn't stop at Copah, this fall."

"We shall not stop at Copah," was the decisive rejoinder. "The winters
on the western side of the range are much milder than they are here, and
not to be spoken of in the same day with your Minnesota and Dakota
stamping-ground. If we can get well out of the mountains before the
heavy snows come--"

Frisbie wagged his head.

"I guess I've got it all, now--after so long a time. We merely break the
record for fast railroad building--all the records--for the next six
months or so. Is that about it?"

"You've surrounded it," said Ford tersely.

"Good enough: we're ready to make the break when you give the word. What
are we waiting for?"

"Just at this present moment, for the contractors."

"Why, I understood you had closed with the MacMorrogh Brothers," said
Frisbie.

"No. At the last moment--to relieve me of a responsibility which might
give rise to charges of favoritism, as he put it--Mr. Colbrith took the
bids out of my hands and carried the decision up to the executive
committee. Hence, we wait; and keep a growing army of laborers here
under pay while we wait," said Ford, with disgust thinly masked. Then
he added: "With all due respect to Mr. Colbrith, he is simply a senile
frost!"

Frisbie chuckled.

"Been cooling your fingers, has he? But I understood from the
headquarters people down-town, that the MacMorroghs had a sure thing on
the grading and rock work. Their bid was the lowest, wasn't it?"

"Yes; but not the cheapest for the company, Dick. I've been keeping tab
on the MacMorroghs for a good while: they are grafters; the kind of men
who take it out of the company and out of their labor in a thousand
petty little steals--three profits on the commissary, piece-work for
subs where they know a man's got to lose out, steals on the working
hours, fines and drawbacks and discounts on the pay-rolls, and all that.
You know how it's done."

"Sure," agreed Frisbie, with his most diabolical grin. "Also, I know how
it keeps the engineering department on the hottest borders of Hades,
trying to hold them down. The good Lord deliver us!"

"I wanted to throw their bid out without consideration," Ford went on.
"But again Mr. Colbrith said 'No,' adding that the MacMorroghs were old
contractors on the line, and that Mr. North had always spoken very
highly of them."

"Ah; the fine Italian hand of Mr. North again," said Frisbie. "And that
reminds me: are we going to be at war with the main line operating
department?"

Ford shook his head. "Not openly, at least. North was down to meet my
train when I came in last night, and you would never have suspected that
I left Denver six weeks ago without his blessing. And now I'm reminded.
I have a luncheon appointment with him at twelve, and a lot of letters
to dictate before I can keep it. Go down and do your wiring for Crapsey,
and if we lose each other this afternoon, I'll meet you here at dinner
this evening."

It was while Ford was working on his mail, with one of the hotel
stenographers for a helper, that a thick-set, bull-necked man with
Irish-blue eyes and a face two-thirds hidden in a curly tangle of
iron-gray beard, stubbed through the corridor on the Pacific
Southwestern floor of the Guaranty Building, and let himself cautiously
into the general manager's outer office. The private secretary, a
faultlessly groomed young fellow with a suggestion of the Latin races in
his features, looked up and nodded.

"How are you, Mr. MacMorrogh?" he said; and without waiting for a reply:
"Go on in. Mr. North is expecting you."

The burly one returned the nod and passed on to the inner room. The
general manager, a sallow, heavy-visaged man who might have passed in a
platform gathering for a retired manufacturer or a senator from the
Middle West, swung in his pivot-chair to welcome the incomer.

"Glad to see you, MacMorrogh. Sit down. What's the news from New York?"

The contractor found a chair; drew it close to the general manager's
desk, and filled it.

"I'm thinking you'll know more about that than I will, Misther North,"
he replied, in a voice that accorded perfectly with the burly figure and
piratical beard. "Ford's fighting us with his fishtes."

"Why?" asked the general manager, holding his chin in his hand--a
gesture known the entire length of the Pacific Southwestern as a signal
of trouble brewing, for somebody.

"God knows, then; I don't," said the MacMorrogh. "I wint to Chicago to
see him when the bid was in, and d'ye think he would lave me talk it
over with him? Not him! Wan day he'd be too busy; and the next, I'd have
to call again. 'Twas good for him I was not me brother Dan. Dan would've
kicked the dure in and t'rown him out av the windy."

The wan ghost of a smile flitted across the impassive face of the big
man at the desk.

"Let me tell you something, MacMorrogh. If you, or your brother Dan,
ever find it necessary to go after Ford, don't give him notice by
battering down doors. You won't, I know. But about the contract: you
haven't heard from the executive committee?"

"Not the half of wan wor-rd."

"Have you any idea of what is causing the delay?"

"'Tis dommed well I know, Misther North. Ford is keeping the wires hot
against us. If I could have Misther Colbrith here with you for wan five
minutes--"

The general manager broke in, following his own line of thought.

"Ford is in Denver; he came in from Chicago last night. Why don't you go
up to the Brown and have it out with him?"

"Fight it out, d'ye mean?"

"Certainly not. Make friends with him."

The contractor sat back in his chair and plunged his stubby hands deep
into his pockets.

"Give me the sthraight tip, Misther North."

"It ought to suggest itself to you. This is a big job, with a great deal
of money passing. Your profits, over and above what you will make out of
the company, will be quite large. Ford is an ambitious young man, and he
is not building railroads for his health."

The MacMorrogh was nodding slowly. Nevertheless, he made difficulties.

"Me hand's not light enough for that, Misther North."

Again the general manager smiled.

"You require a deal of prompting, sometimes, Brian. What's the matter
with a trusty go-between?"

"H'm, that's it, now. But where to lay me finger on the right man. 'Tis
a risk to run--with a yooung fire-brand like Ford holding the other end
iv the string."

"Still I think the man can be found. But first we must make sure of your
contract, with or without Ford. Your suggestion about taking the matter
up with Mr. Colbrith in person strikes me favorably. Can you spare the
time to go to New York?"

"Sure I can."

"At once?"

"The wan minute for sthriking is whin the iron's hot, Misther North."

The general manager put aside the thick file of papers he had been
examining when MacMorrogh entered, and began to set his desk in order.

"I have been thinking I might make it convenient to go with you. I
presume you have no objection to going as my guest in the Naught-Seven?"

"'Tis an honor you're doing me, Misther North, and I'll not be
forgetting it."

"Not at all. There are some matters connected with this contract that
I'd like to talk over with you privately, and if we can agree upon them,
I may be able to help you with Mr. Colbrith and the executive
committee."

The general manager pressed one of the electric buttons on the side of
the desk, and to the clerk who answered gave a brief order: "Have the
Naught-Seven provisioned and made up to go east as a special at
twelve-ten to-day. Tell Despatcher Darby to make the schedule
fast--nineteen hours or less to the River."

The clerk nodded and disappeared, and North turned again to MacMorrogh.

"Now about that other matter: I'll find you a go-between to approach
Ford; but to be quite frank with you, you'll have to be liberal with the
young man for his services. When you go into the diplomatic field, you
have to spend money." He was pressing another of the electric buttons as
he spoke, and to the office boy who put his face in at the door, he
said: "Ask Mr. Eckstein to step in here a minute."

It was the private secretary, the well-groomed young man with the alien
eyes and nose who answered the summons. North gave him his instructions
in a curt sentence.

"Mr. MacMorrogh would like to have a little talk with you, Eckstein:
take him into the other room where you can be undisturbed."

It was half an hour later when the door of the library opened to readmit
the private secretary and the contractor, and in the interval the
division superintendent's clerk had returned to say that the special
train schedule was made up, and that the Naught-Seven would be waiting
at the Union Station at twelve-ten.

"Well?" said the general manager, lifting a slow eyebrow at MacMorrogh
and compressing into the single word his wish to know what had been done
in the conference of two.

"'Tis all right, Misther North," said the contractor, rubbing his hands.
"'Tis a crown jewel ye have in this yooung--"

North cut the eulogy short in a word to his secretary.

"I go east, special, at twelve-ten, Eckstein, as Mr. MacMorrogh has
probably told you. I have a luncheon appointment at twelve with Mr.
Ford. Meet him when he comes, and make my excuses--without telling him
anything he ought not to know. If you can take my place as his host, do
so; but in any event, keep him from finding out where we have gone until
we are well on the way. That's all."

This was why Ford, walking the few blocks from his hotel at noon to keep
his engagement with North, found the general manager's private office
closed, and a suave, soft-spoken young man with a foreign east of
countenance waiting to make his superior's excuses.

"Mr. North was called out of town quite unexpectedly on a wire," was the
private secretary's explanation. "He tried to telephone you at the
Brown, but the operator couldn't find you. He left me to explain, and
I've been wondering if you'd let me take his place as your host, Mr.
Ford."

Now Ford's attitude toward his opponents was, by reason of his gifts,
openly belligerent; wherefore he fought against it and tried to be as
other men are.

"I am sure Mr. North is quite excusable, and it is good-natured in you
to stand in the breach, Mr. Eckstein," he said. "Of course, I'll be glad
to go with you."

They went to Tortoni's, and to a private room; and the luncheon was an
epicurean triumph. Eckstein talked well, and was evidently a young man
of parts. Not until the cigars were lighted did he suffer the table-talk
to come down to the railroad practicalities; and even then he merely
followed Ford's lead.

"Oh, yes; we have made arrangements to give you a clear deck in the
Denver yards for your material and supplies," he said, in answer to a
question of Ford's about side-track room and yard facilities at the
point which would have to serve as his base. "Following your orders, we
have been forwarding all that your Plug Mountain rolling stock could
handle, but there is considerable more of it side-tracked here. After
the MacMorrogh grading outfit has gone to the front, we shall have more
room, however."

"The MacMorrogh outfit?" queried Ford. "Do they store it in our yards?"

"Oh, no. They have a pretty complete railroad yard of their own at
their headquarters in Pueblo. But they have three train-loads of tools
and machinery here now, waiting for your orders to send them to the
front."

Ford weighed the possibilities thoughtfully and concluded that nothing
could be lost by a frank declaration of principles.

"They have given you folks a wrong impression, Mr. Eckstein," he said
mildly. "The contract for the grading on the Western Extension is not
yet awarded; and if I can compass it, the MacMorrogh Brothers' bid will
be thrown out."

The private secretary tried to look mystified, with just the proper
touch of a subordinate's embarrassment.

"I'm only a clerk, Mr. Ford," he said, "and, of course, I'm not supposed
to know more than I see and hear in the regular way of business. But I
understood that the MacMorroghs were in the saddle; that they were only
waiting for you to provide track-room at Saint's Rest for their tool
cars and outfit."

"No," said Ford. "It hasn't got that far along yet."

Eckstein looked at his watch.

"Don't let me keep you, if there is anything else you want to do, Mr.
Ford; but I'll confess you've aroused my curiosity. What is the matter
with the MacMorroghs?"

Ford answered the question by asking another.

"Do you know them, Mr. Eckstein?"

"Why--yes; as Mr. North's chief clerk would be likely to know the firm
of contractors which has been given a good share of the Pacific
Southwestern work for a number of years."

"Do you know any good of them?"

"Bless me! yes: I don't know anything else of them. Three hearty, bluff,
rough-tongued Irishmen; lacking diplomacy and all the finer touches, if
you like, but good fellows and hustlers of the keenest."

Ford fastened his companion in a steady eye-grip. "One question, Mr.
Eckstein; do they play fair with all concerned?"

"They are more than fair; they are generous--with the company, and with
the company's representatives with whom they have to do business. On two
contracts with us they have lost money; but I happen to know that in
both instances they kept their promises to the engineering department to
the letter."

Ford had cast off the eye-grip and he appeared to be studying the fresco
design of the ceiling over the private secretary's head.

"And those promises were--?"

Eckstein laughed boyishly. "You needn't make a mystery of it with me,
Mr. Ford. I'm one of the family, if I haven't any initials after my
name. I know--we all know--that there are certain profits--not made out
of the company, of course--that a contractor is always willing to share
with his good friends, the engineers."

Ford's attitude instantly became that of a freshman wishing to learn the
ropes.

"Consider me, Mr. Eckstein," he said. "I'm new to the construction
business--or at least, I've never been at the head of it before. What
are these--er--perquisites?"

The private secretary thought he had entered the thin edge of the wedge
and he drove it heartily.

"They are perfectly legitimate, of course. The contractors run a
commissary to supply the workmen--nobody suspects them of doing it at
cost. Then there are the fines imposed to secure faithful work, the _per
capita_ commission paid on the labor sent in by the engineers, the
discounts on time-checks, the weekly hospital and insurance dues
collected from the men. All those things amount to a good round profit
on a contract like ours."

"To about how much, in figures, should you say?" queried Ford, with an
air of the deepest interest.

"To enough to make your share, as head of the construction department,
touch ten thousand a year, on a job as big as ours--with a liberal
provision for Mr. Frisbie, besides."

Ford blew reflective smoke rings toward the ceiling for a full minute or
more before he said quietly: "Do I understand that you are authorized to
guarantee me ten thousand a year in commissions from the MacMorrogh
Brothers, Mr. Eckstein?"

Eckstein laughed.

"You forget that I'm only a clerk, and an onlooker, as you may say. But
if you accept MacMorrogh's bid, and he doesn't do the square thing by
you and Mr. Frisbie, you may call me in as a witness, Mr. Ford. Does
that clear up the doubt?"

"Perfectly," was the quiet rejoinder. "Under these conditions, I suppose
it is up to me to wire the executive committee, withdrawing my
objections to the MacMorroghs, isn't it?"

"That is the one thing Mr. MacMorrogh asks." The secretary whipped out a
note-book and pencil. "Shall I take your message? I can send it when I
go back to the office."

"Thank you," said Ford; then he began to dictate, slowly and
methodically: "To S.J. Colbrith, care McVeigh and Mackie, New York. This
is to recall my objections to MacMorrogh Brothers, as stated in letter
of the twenty-fifth from Chicago. Further investigation develops the
fact that they are quite honest and capable, and that they will pay me
ten thousand dollars a year for withdrawing my opposition."

Eckstein's pencil had stopped and he was gasping for breath.

"Great Scott!" he ejaculated. "That won't do, Mr. Ford! You can't put
a thing like that into a telegram to the president!"

[Illustration: Eckstein's pencil had stopped and he was gasping for
breath]

"Why not?" was the cool inquiry. "You said it was perfectly legitimate,
didn't you?"

"Yes, but--" the entrance of a waiter to clear the table provided a
merciful stop-gap, and Eckstein, hurriedly consulting his watch,
switched abruptly. "By Jove! I'm due at the office this minute to meet a
lot of cattlemen," he stammered, and escaped like a man hastening for
first aid to the mistaken.

Ford laughed long and silently when he found himself alone in the
private dining-room; and he was still chuckling by fits and starts when,
after an afternoon spent with Auditor Evans, he recounted his adventure
to Frisbie over the Brown café dinner table that evening. But Frisbie
took all the humor out of the luncheon episode when he said soberly:

"He laughs best who laughs last, Stuart. Eckstein took a fall out of you
one way, even if he did fail in the other; he kept you safely shut up at
Tortoni's while Mr. North and the chief of the MacMorroghs got away on a
special train for New York. Beard, the Union Station operator, told me.
Which means that they'll have a full day with Mr. Colbrith and the
executive committee before you can possibly get there to butt in."

"No, it doesn't; necessarily," Ford contradicted, rising suddenly and
signaling a waiter.

"What are you going to do?" queried Frisbie, dropping his knife and
fork and preparing to second his chief.

"Come and see. I'm going to get out another special train and give Mr.
North a run for his money," was the incisive answer. "Hike down to the
despatcher's office with me and help cut out the minutes."




XII

THE ENTERING WEDGE


Has civilized humanity, in the plenitude of twentieth century
sophistication, fully determined that there is no such thing as
luck?--that all things are ordered, if not by Providence, at least by an
unchangeable sequence of cause and effect?

Stuart Ford was a firm believer in the luck of the energetic; which is
to say that he regarded obstacles only as things to be beaten down and
abolished. But in the dash to overtake and pass the general manager's
one-car special, the belief was shaken almost to its reversal.

He knew the Pacific Southwestern locomotives--and something of the men
who ran them. The 1016 was one of the fast eight-wheelers; and Olson,
the engineer, who had once pulled passenger on the Plug Mountain, was
loyal and efficient. Happily, both the man and the machine were
available; and while Frisbie was calling up the division superintendent
at his house to ask the loan of his private car for the assistant to
the president, Ford was figuring the schedule with the despatcher, and
insisting upon speed--more speed.

"What's come over you big bosses, all at once?" said Darby, to whom
Ford's promotion was no bar to fellowship or free speech. "First Mr.
North wants me to schedule a special that will break the record; and now
you want to string one that will beat his record."

"Never mind my troubles, Julius," was the evasive reply. "Just you
figure to keep things out of my way and give me a clear track. Let's
see--where were we? Cheyenne Crossing at 2 a.m., water at Riddle Creek,
coal at Brockton--"

The schedule was completed when Frisbie came back to say that the 1016,
with the superintendent's car attached, was waiting on track Six. Ford
went down, looked the gift horse in the mouth, and had the running gear
of the car overhauled under his own supervision before he would give
Olson the word to go, pressing the night car inspectors into service and
making them repack the truck journals while he waited.

"I'm taking no chances," he said to Frisbie; and truly it seemed that
all the hindrances had been carefully forestalled when he finally
boarded the "01" and ordered his flagman to give Olson the signal. Yet
before the one-car train was well out of the Denver yards there was a
jolting stop, and the flagman came in to report that the engine had
dropped from the end of an open switch, blocking the main line.

Ford got out and directed the reënrailment of the 1016, carefully
refraining from bullying the big Swede, whose carelessness must have
been accountable. It was the simplest of accidents, with nothing broken
or disabled. Under ordinary conditions, fifteen minutes should have
covered the loss of time. But the very haste with which the men wrought
was fatal. Enrailing frogs have a way of turning over at the critical
instant when the wheels are climbing, and jack-screws bottomed on the
tie-ends do not always hold.

Eight several times were the jack-screws adjusted and the frogs clamped
into position; but not until the ninth trial could the perverse wheels
be induced to roll workmanlike up the inclined planes and into place on
the rails. Ford looked at his watch when his special was free of the
switches and Olson was speeding up on the first long tangent. With the
chase still in its opening mile, Mr. North's lead had been increased
from seven hours to eight.

Leaving Denver on the spur of the moment, Ford had necessarily left many
things at a standstill; and his first care, after he had assured himself
that the race was fairly begun, was to write out a handful of telegrams
designed to keep the battle alive during his enforced absence from the
firing line. The superintendent's desk was hospitably unlocked, and for
a busy half-hour Ford filled blank after blank, steadying himself
against the pounding swing of the heavily ballasted car with a
left-handed grip on the desk end. When there remained no one else to
remind, he wrote out a message to Adair, forecasting the threatened
disaster, and urging the necessity of rallying the reconstructionists on
the board of directors.

"That ought to stir him up," he said to himself, bunching Adair's
telegram with the others to be sent from the first stop where the
Western Union wires could be tapped. Then he whirled around in the swing
chair and scowled up at the little dial in the end of the car; scowled
at the speed-recorder, and went to the door to summon the flagman.

"What's the matter with Olson?" he demanded. "Has he forgotten how to
run since he left the Plug Mountain? Climb up over the coal and tell him
that forty miles an hour won't do for me to-night."

The flagman picked up his lantern and went forward; and in a minute or
two later the index finger of the speed-recorder began to mount slowly
toward the fifties. At fifty-two miles to the hour, Ford, sitting in the
observation end of the car where he could see the ghostly lines of the
rails reeling backward into the night, smelled smoke--the unmistakable
odor of burning oil. In three strides he had reached the rear platform,
and a fourth to the right-hand railing showed him one of the car-boxes
blazing to heaven.

He pulled the cord of the air-whistle, and after the stop stood by in
sour silence while the crew repacked the hot box. Since he had made the
car inspectors carefully overhaul the truck gear in the Denver station,
there was no one to swear at. Olson bossed the job, did it neatly and in
silence, and no one said anything when the fireman, in his haste to be
useful, upset the dope-kettle and got its contents well sanded before he
had overtaken it in its rolling flight down the embankment.

Ford turned away and climbed into his car at the dope-kettle incident.
There are times when retreat is the only recipe for self-restraint; and
in imagination he could see the general manager's special ticking off
the miles to the eastward while his own men were sweating over the
thrice-accursed journal-bearing under the "01."

Now, as every one knows, hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable,
are the sworn enemies of high speed. At forty miles to the hour the
journal was smoking again. At forty-five it burst into flames. Once more
it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine
tank; after which necessary preliminary Olson spoke his mind.

"Ay tank ve never get someveres vit dat hal-fer-damn brass, Meester
Ford. Ay yust see if Ay can't find 'noder wone." And he rummaged in the
car lockers till he did find another.

Unfortunately, however, the spare brass proved to be of the wrong
pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard. Olson was a trained
mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at
the misfit brass until he made it serve. But when he climbed again to
the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the
white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full
hour's run to the rear, came in sight from the observation platform of
the laboring special.

These were the inauspicious beginnings of the pursuit; and the middle
part and the ending varied only in degree. All the way up to midnight,
at which hour a station of a bigness to supply a standard brass was
reached, the tinkered journal-bearing gave trouble and killed speed. Set
once more in running order upon its full quota of sixteen practicable
wheels, the special had fallen so far behind its Denver-planned schedule
as not only to be in the way of everything else on the division, but to
find everything else in its way. Ford held on stubbornly until the lead
of the train he was trying to outrun had increased to twelve hours. Then
he gave it up, directing his crew to turn the train on the nearest "Y,"
and to ask for retracing orders to Denver. After which he went to bed in
the state-room of the borrowed car, and for the first time in his
experience was a man handsomely beaten by the perversity of insensate
things.

The request for the retracing orders was sent from Coquina; and when it
came clicking into the despatcher's office at Denver, a sleep-sodden
young man with an extinct cigar between his teeth rose up out of his
chair, stretched, yawned, and pointed for the door.

"Going to leave us, Mr. Eckstein?" said the trick despatcher who was
sitting at the train table.

"Yes. If Mr. Ford has changed his mind, I may as well go home and go to
bed."

"Reckon he forgot something, and has to come back after it?" laughed the
operator.

"Maybe," said the private secretary, and he went out, shutting the door
behind him with the bat-like softness and precision that was his
distinguishing characteristic.

The sounders were clicking monotonously when the trick man turned to the
relief operator who was checking Darby's transfer sheet.

"What do you suppose Eckstein was up to, sitting here all night, Jim?"

"Give it up," said the relief man. "Ask me something easy."

"I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars I can guess. He didn't want Mr. Ford
to make time."

The relief man looked up from his checking.

"Why? He didn't do anything. He was asleep more'n half the time."

"Don't you fool yourself," said the other. "He heard every word that
came in about that hot box. And if the hot box hadn't got in the way,
I'll bet a cockerel worth seventy-five dollars, to go with that
fifty-dollar hen, that he would have tangled me up somehow till I had
shuffled a freight train or something in Mr. Ford's way. He's Mr.
North's man, body and soul; and Mr. North doesn't love Mr. Ford."

"Oh, rats, Billy!" scoffed the relief man, getting up to fill his
corn-cob pipe from the common tobacco bag. "You're always finding a
nigger in the wood-pile, when there isn't any. Say; that's 201 asking
for orders from Calotte. Why don't you come to life and answer 'em?"

Frisbie, breakfasting early at the Brown Palace on the morning following
the night of hinderings, was more than astonished when Ford came in and
took the unoccupied seat at the table-for-two.

"Let me eat first," said the beaten one, when Frisbie would have whelmed
him with curious questions; and with the passing of the cutlets and the
coffee he told the tale of the hindrances.

"I guess it was foreordained not to be," he admitted, in conclusion. "We
tried mighty hard to bully it through, but the fates were too many and
too busy for us."

"Tricks?" suggested Frisbie, suspecting North of covering his flight
with special instructions to delay a possible pursuit.

"Oh, no; nothing of that sort: just the cursed depravity of inanimate
things. Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith. It was luck.
No one of us happened to have a rabbit's foot in his pocket."

"You don't believe in luck," laughed the assistant.

"Don't I? I know I used to say that I didn't. But after last night I
can't be so sure of it."

"Well, what's the cost to us?" inquired Frisbie, coming down out of the
high atmosphere of the superstitious to stand upon the solid earth of
railway-building fact.

"I don't know: possibly failure. There is no guessing what sort of a
scheme North will cook up when he and MacMorrogh get Mr. Colbrith
_cornered_."

"Oh, it can't be as bad as that. Take it at the worst--admitting that we
may have to struggle along with the MacMorroghs for our general
contractors; they can't addle the egg entirely, can they?"

Ford tabulated it by length and breadth.

"With the MacMorroghs in the forefront of things to steal and cheat and
make trouble with the labor, and Mr. North in the rear to back them up
and to retard matters generally, we are in for a siege to which
purgatory, if we ever go there, will seem restful, Richard my son. Our
one weapon is my present ranking authority over the general manager. If
he ever succeeds in breaking that, you fellows in the field would better
hunt you another railroad to build."

"It's a comfort to know that you _are_ the big boss, Stuart. North can't
knock you out of that when it comes to a show-down."

"I don't know," said Ford, whose night ride had made him pessimistic. "I
am Mr. Colbrith's appointee, you know--not an elected officer. And what
Mr. Colbrith has done, he may be induced to undo. Adair has been my
backer in everything; but while he is the best fellow in the world, he
is continually warning me that he may lose interest in the game at any
minute and drop it. He doesn't care a rap for the money-making part of
it--doesn't have to."

"Wouldn't Adair be a good safety-switch to throw in front of Mr. North
and MacMorrogh in New York?"

Ford nodded. "I thought of that last night, and sent a wire. We'll hear
from it to-day."

Frisbie ate through the remainder of the breakfast in silence.
Afterward, at the pipe-lighting, he asked if Ford's wire instructions of
the night before still held good.

"They do," was the emphatic reply. "We go on just as if nothing had
happened, or was due to happen. You say your man Crapsey will be in this
morning: gather up your laborers and turn the Plug Mountain into a
standard-gauge railroad while we wait. That's all, Dick; all but one
word--hustle."

"Hustle it is. But say: you were going to give me a pointer on that
broad-gauging. I've been stewing over it for a day and a night, and I
don't think of any scheme that won't stop the traffic."

"Don't you? That is because you haven't mulled over it as long as I
have. In the first place, you have no curves to straighten and no
cross-ties to relay--our predecessors having set the good example of
using standard length ties for their three-foot road. String your men
out in gangs as far as they'll go, and swing the three-foot track, as a
whole, ten inches out of center to the left. You can do that without
stopping trains, can't you?"

"Sure."

"All right. When you swing, spike the right-hand rail lightly. Then
string your gangs again and set a line of spikes for the outside of the
standard-gauge right-hand rail straight through to Saint's Rest. Got
that?"

"Yes; I guess I've got it all. But go on."

"Now you are ready for the grand-stand play. Call in all your
narrow-gauge rolling stock, mass your men at this end of the branch,
shove the right-hand rail over to the line of gauge spikes in sections
as long as your force will cover, and follow up with a standard-gauge
construction train to pick up the men and carry them forward as fast as
a section is completed. If you work it systematically, a freight train
could leave Denver two hours behind your track-gangs and find a
practical standard gauge all the way to Saint's Rest."

"Of course!" said Frisbie, in workmanlike disgust for his own
obtuseness. "I'm going back to the Tech when your railroad is finished
and learn a few things. I couldn't think of anything but the old Erie
Railroad scheme, when it was narrowed down from the six-foot gauge. They
did it in one night; but they had a man to every second cross-tie over
the whole four hundred miles from New York to Buffalo."

Ford nodded, adding:

"And we're not that rich in labor. By the way, how are the men coming?"

"A car-load or two, every little while. Say, Stuart, you must have had a
rabbit's foot with you when you touched up the eastern labor agencies.
Every other railroad in this neck of woods is skinned, and M'Grath is
having the time of his life trying to hold our levies together. There is
a small army of them under canvas at Saint's Rest, waiting for the
contractors, and another with between two and three hundred hands camped
at the mouth of the canyon."

Ford knocked the ashes from his pipe so hard that the pipestem fell in
two.

"Yes! all waiting on Mr. Colbrith's leisurely motions! Well, jump in on
the Plug Mountain. That will utilize some of the waste for a few days."

Frisbie went down to the Plug Mountain yard office, and to a wire-end,
to begin the marshaling of his forces; and Ford, with three picked-up
stenographers to madden him, took up the broken threads of his
correspondence with a world which seemed to have become suddenly peopled
to suffocation with eager sellers of railroad material and supplies.

Late in the afternoon, when he was tired enough to feel the full force
of the blow, a New York telegram came. It was from Miss Alicia Adair,
and Ford groaned in spirit when he read it.

     Brother left here yesterday in the Vanderdecken yacht for Nova
     Scotia. Can not reach him by telegraph until next Friday or
     Saturday. Aunt Hester wants to know if there is anything she can
     do.

One way to save a man's life at a crisis is to appeal to his sense of
humor. Miss Alicia's closing sentence did that for Ford, and he was
smiling grimly when he put the telegram away, not in the business file,
but in his pocket.

Three days later, however, when Frisbie was half-way to Saint's Rest
with his preliminary track-swinging, another New York telegram found
Ford in his newly established quarters in the Guaranty Building. This
was from some one acting as President Colbrith's secretary, and its
wording was concisely mandatory.

     Contract has been awarded MacMorrogh Brothers. President directs
     that you afford contractors every facility, and that you confer
     with Mr. North in all cases of doubt.




XIII

THE BARBARIANS


It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the
cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned
by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint's Rest over the standardized
Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a
twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.

The occasion of Kenneth's calling was a right-of-way dispute on the
borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining
claims having been staked off across the old S. L & W. survey. The
owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened
injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private
property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by
the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made
haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.

"If I hadn't known you for a pretty good mountaineer, Kenneth,
you would have missed this," he said, making his guest free of the
limited hospitality of the caboose-hotel. "Are you good for a
two-hundred-and-eighty-mile cayuse ride, there and back, on the same
trail we tramped over a year ago last spring?"

"I'm good for everything on the bill of fare," was the heartening reply.
"How are things going?"

Ford's rejoinder began with a non-committal shrug. "We're building a
railroad, after a fashion."

"After a good fashion, I hope?"

Another shrug.

"We're doing as well as we can with the help we have. But about this
right-of-way tangle--" and he plunged his guest into a discussion of the
Copah situation which ran on unbroken until bedtime.

They took the westward trail together in the morning, mounted upon wiry
little mountain-bred ponies furnished by one Pacheco, the half-breed
Mexican who had once earned an easy double-eagle by spying upon two men
who were out hunting with an engineer's transit. For seven weeks Frisbie
had been pushing things, and the grade from Saint's Rest to the summit
of the pass was already a practicable wagon road, deserted by the
leveling squads and ready for the ties and the steel.

From the summit of the pass westward, down the mountain and through the
high-lying upper valley of the Pannikin, the grade work was in full
swing. The horse trail, sometimes a rough cart-road, but oftener a mere
bridle-path, followed the railroad in its loopings and doublings; and on
the mountain sections where the work was heaviest the two riders were
never out of sight of the heavily manned grading gangs.

"To a man up a tree you appear to be doing a whole lot, and doing it
quickly, Ford," commented the lawyer, when they had passed camp after
camp of the workers. Then he added: "You are not having any trouble with
the MacMorroghs, are you?"

"Not what the legal department would call trouble," answered Ford
evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of the bridle-path
discouraged conversation.

Farther down in the valley of the Pannikin the activities were less
thickly sown. On many sections the work was light; no more than the
throwing up of an embankment in the park-like intervales, with now and
then a rock-or earth-cutting through some jutting spur of the inclosing
mountains. Here the men were bunched on the rock work and the fills,
though the camp sites were commonly in the park-like interspaces where
wood and water, the two sole commodities for which the contractors could
make no deductions on the pay-roll, lay conveniently at the doors of the
rude sleeping shacks.

Since he was not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously
observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its
neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess
tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the
contractors' "commissary," fell into the Charybdis of the common table,
and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built
bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its sad-faced,
slouch-hatted, pistol-carrying keeper.

"What is that Bible-saying about the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty
land?" said Kenneth, as they were passing one of the wilderness
bar-rooms buttressing a huge boulder by the trail side. "I should think
you'd rule those fellows emphatically and peremptorily out of the game,
Ford. They must make a lot of trouble for you, first and last."

"They do," was the sober response. "But how would you go about it to
rule them out?"

The lawyer laughed. "My writs don't run this far. But I thought yours
did. Why don't you fire 'em bodily; tell 'em their number is
23--skiddoo! Aren't you the Sublime Porte--the court of last resort--the
big boss--over here?"

Ford pulled his horse down to a walk.

"Kenneth, let me tell you: behind those barkeepers are the contractors;
behind the contractors is Mr. North; behind Mr. North, the president. My
little lever isn't long enough to turn the world over."

"Pshaw!" said Kenneth. "Mr. Colbrith wouldn't stand for anything like
that! Why, he's a perfect fanatic on the whisky question."

"That's all right," said Ford acidly. "It doesn't go as far as Mr.
Colbrith in the matter of the debauching particulars. It stops in
Denver; and Mr. Colbrith approves Denver in the lump--signs the vouchers
without looking at them, as Evans would say. I tell you what I
believe--what I am compelled to believe. These individual saloon-keepers
are supposed to be in here on their own hook, on sufferance. The

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