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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

1907
August

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.

CONTENTS

"I won't attempt to apologise—it's beyond all that"

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."

"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 cast 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!"

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. They are not; they are merely the employees of a close corporation. Among the profit sharers you'll find the MacMorroghs at the top, and Mr. North's little ring of Denver officials close seconds."

"Do you honestly believe that, Ford?"

"I do. I can't prove it, of course. If I could, I'd go to New York and fight it out. And the whisky isn't all of it, or even the worst: there are women in some of these camps, and there would be more if Leckhard didn't stand guard at Saint's Rest and turn them back."

"Heavens—what a cesspool!" said the attorney. "Does a laboring man ever get out of here with any of his earnings?"

"Not if the MacMorroghs can help it. And you can figure for yourself what the moral atmosphere must be. We are less than two months old on the work, but already the Western Extension is a streak of crime; crime unpunished, and at times tacitly encouraged. You may say that my department isn't responsible—that this is the contractors' day and game. If that is true now—which it isn't—it will no longer be true when we come in with our own employees, the track-layers."

But now Kenneth was shaking his head.

"I can't believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't let it make you color-blind."

Ford said nothing. The day was yet young, and the long journey was still younger. It was at the noon halt, made at a subcontractor's camp near a great earth-cutting and a huge fill, that Kenneth had his object lesson.

They were standing at the door of the timekeeper's shanty—they had been the timekeeper's guests for the noon meal—and the big gang of Italians, with its inevitable Irish foreman, was already at work. Out at the head of the great fill a dozen men were dumping the carts as they came in an endless stream from the cutting. Suddenly there was a casting down of shovels, a shrill altercation, a clinch, a flash of steel in the August sunlight, and one of the disputants was down, his heels drumming on the soft earth in the death agony.

"Good God!" said Kenneth. "It's a murder!" and he would have rushed in if Ford and the timekeeper had not held him back.

The object lesson was sufficiently shocking, but its sequel was still more revolting. Without one to kneel beside the dying man; indeed, without waiting until the drumming heels were still; the men callously put their shovels under the body, slid it over the lip of the dump and left it to be covered by the tumbling cataract of earth pouring from the tip-carts whose orderly procession had scarcely been interrupted by the tragedy.

Kenneth was silent for many minutes after they had left the camp of the Italians. He was a Western man only by adoption; of Anglo-Saxon blood, and so unable to condone the Latin's disregard for the sacredness of human life.

"That was simply terrible, Ford," he said finally, and his voice was still in sympathy with the shaking hand that held the bridle-reins. "Will nothing be done?"

"Nothing; unless the murdered man chances to have relatives or clansmen in one of the near-by camps—in which case there'll be another killing."

"But the law," said Kenneth.

"There is no law here higher than the caprice of Brian MacMorrogh. Besides, it's too common—a mere episode; one of those which you said you couldn't believe, a little while back."

"But can't you make the MacMorroghs do a little police work, for common decency's sake?"

Ford shook his head. "They are quite on the other side of the fence, as I told you in the beginning. By winking at lawlessness of all kinds, their own particular brands of lawlessness, by which they and their backers make money, go unquestioned. So far from helping, they'd make it exceedingly difficult for any sheriff who should have the temerity to come in here in the discharge of his duty."

"You foresaw all this before the contract was awarded?"

"Not all—though I had been told that the MacMorroghs ran 'open camps' where the work was far enough from civilization to take the curse off. What you've seen, and what I've been telling you, is bad enough, God knows; but it will be worse before it is better. After we've had a few pay-days, and the men begin to realize that they are here to toil and to be robbed ... Kenneth, it will be hell on earth; and the company will pay for it—the company always pays in the end."

"I've got a notion," said the attorney, after another plodding mile of reflection; but what it was he did not say.

Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day out from Saint's Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason. What Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims, Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the obstructors in holding out.

Ford was for starting back the next morning: he had missed Brissac and both of the Bensons on the way over. But Kenneth confessed to being saddle-sore, and begged for another day's respite. Ford agreed without giving the matter a second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles—an indifferent "yes" or "no"—turn the poised scales of life. For one other day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union, Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at the moment as a mess of pottage.

It was in this wise. At this period of its existence Copah, the future great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects. Isolated by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation. As a gold camp it was an anomaly. With a single exception its ores were low grade, and the wagon-road and pack-trail freightage made them practically profitless to the miners.

The single exception was the "Little Alicia," and it was the coincidence of the name, rather than the eloquence of its impoverished owner, that first attracted Ford. From first to last he did not know the exact location of the mine. It was somewhere in the hills back of Copah, and Grigsby, the prospector who had discovered and opened it, had an office in the camp.

It was in Grigsby's town office that Ford saw the ore specimens and the certified assays, and listened not too credulously to Grigsby's enthusiastic description of the Little Alicia. To be a half-owner in this mine of mines was to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice—when the railroad should come: if one might take Grigsby's word for it.

It is a curious fever, that which seizes upon the new-comer in an unexploited mining field. Ford was far from being money-mad; but there were times when he could not help contrasting a railroad salary with Miss Adair's millions. True, he had once said to her, in the fulness of confident belief, that the money of the woman he loved would make no difference—to her or to him. But the point of view, wise or foolish, is not always the same. There were moments when the Adair millions loomed large, and the salary of an assistant to the president—who was in fact little more than a glorified chief of construction—shrank in proportion. He was free of obligation and foot-loose. His twenty thousand dollars invested in P. S-W. stock at twenty-nine and a half had grown with the rising market to sixty-odd. What did it matter to any one if he chose to put ten thousand of the sixty-odd on a turn of the Little Alicia card?

While it was gambling, pure and simple, he did not bet with his eyes shut. Inquiry at the Bank of Copah established Grigsby's reputation for truth-telling. The specimens and the assay certificates were beyond doubt genuine. More than this, Grigsby had made a number of ore shipments by freighters' wagon and jack train over the range, and the returns had enabled him to keep a small force of men at work in the mine.

Ford made his bet through the bank. The cashier was willing to take a P. S-W. official's note of hand, to be canceled when Ford could deposit to the bank's credit in Denver, and to give Grigsby an open account for his immediate needs. Grigsby accepted joyfully, and the thing was done. Ford's mess of pottage was a deed of half-ownership in the Little Alicia, executed and recorded in the afternoon of the day of stop-overs, and he was far enough from suspecting that he had exchanged for it all that a man of honor holds dearest. But, as a matter of fact, the birthright had not yet been handed over: that came later.

XIV

THE DRAW-BAR PULL

Attorney Kenneth had many more object-lessons in the study of "open camps" on the three-day return ride to Saint's Rest. The day of stop-over in Copah chanced to be the MacMorrogh Brothers' monthly pay-day, and until the men's money was spent pandemonium reigned along the line of the extension.

Some of it they dodged, riding wide to pass the larger camps, and hearing from afar the noise of carousal, the fierce drinking songs of the Magyars, the fusillades of pistol-shots. So far as they could see, all work appeared to be suspended; and Major Benson, whose camp of engineers they picked up in one of the detours around a gulch head, confirmed that conclusion.

"It was the same way last month," raged the major, twisting his fierce white mustaches and looking as if he would like to blot the name of MacMorrogh from the roster of humanity. "It'll take a full week to get them into the swing again, and MacMorrogh will be up with his estimates just the same as if he had been working full time. I'll cut 'em; by the gods, I'll cut 'em! And you must stand by me, Mr. Ford."

There was the same story to be listened to at Brissac's tie camp; and again at young Benson's headquarters, which were on the mountain section. This last was on the third day, however, when the madness was dying down. Some of the rock men were back on the job, but many of the gangs were still grievously short-handed. Ford said little to Kenneth. The pandemonium spoke for itself. But on the third night, when the long ride was ended, and Pietro, Ford's cook and man-of-all-work, was serving supper in the caboose office-on-wheels, some of the bitterness in Ford's heart slipped into speech.

"Can you see now how it takes the very marrow out of a man's bones, Kenneth? You may think of an engineer as a man of purely bull-headed purposes, merely trying, in a crass, materialistic way, to get a material thing done. I want to do a big thing, and I'd like to do it in a big way. It is a big thing—the building of this extension. If it doesn't add another star to the flag, it will at least make one state twice as populous, twice as prosperous. It will add its quota to the habitable surfaces; and it's a good quota—a land that some future generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be. And to think that for one man's narrow-mindedness and another's greed we've got to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty—it makes me sore, Kenneth; sore and disheartened."

"I don't blame you," said the lawyer, reveling, though he would never have admitted it, in the comfort of the caboose headquarters journey's end. "But you'll pull through; you'll build your railroad, and the mistakes that are made won't be your mistakes. It's a horrible state of affairs, that in the MacMorrogh camps; a blot on our boasted civilization. But you can't help it. Or rather you will help it if, and when, you can."

Ford was shaking his head dejectedly.

"I don't know, Kenneth. It's getting next to me, even at this early stage of the game. Have you ever stood on the front car platform of a train nearest to the engine and watched the jiggling draw-bar? It is apparently loose; its hold on the engine seems to be no more than that of the touch of clasped hands in a gipsy dance. Yet it never lets go, and the drag of it is always there. By and by, when the coal is all burned, and the fire is out, and the water is drained from the tank, those gentle little multiplied jerks will pull the big engine down—kill it—make it a mere mass of inert metal blocking the way of progress."

"Well?" said the attorney.

"It's an allegory. I'm beginning to feel the draw-bar pull. Sooner or later, North and his clique will drag me down. I can't fight as the under dog—I never learned how; and they've fixed it so that I can't fight any other way."

Kenneth had lighted his cigar and was lying back against the cushion of the car-seat. After a little, he said: "Just after we saw the Italian killed last week I told you I had a notion, Ford. I've got it yet, and I've been turning it over in my mind and wondering if I'd better explode it on you. On the whole, I think I'd better not. It's a case of surgery. If the patient lives, you'll know about it. If the patient dies, you'll be no worse off than you are now. Shall we let it rest at that?"

Ford acquiesced. He was too utterly disheartened to be curious. But if he could have foreseen the results of Kenneth's notion it is conceivable that he would have been aroused to some effort of protest, as even in deep waters one prays sometimes to be delivered from his friends.

It was a week after this farewell supper in the caboose hotel at Saint's Rest when Ford went down to Denver to borrow, on his P. S-W. stock, the ten thousand dollars to be deposited to the credit of the Bank of Copah. Following him, and only one train behind, came Frisbie, new from a confirmatory survey of the extension beyond the Copah district.

On his return from the Green Butte end of the proposed line, the little man with the diabolical fashion of beard trimming had spent a week in and around Copah, picking up yard rights-of-way, surveying approaches, and setting grade stakes for the outlying MacMorrogh gangs. During that week he had made a discovery, and since he believed it to be all his own, he journeyed eastward to share it quickly with his chief.

Ford was dining alone at the Brown Palace when Frisbie, coming straight from the Plug Mountain train, found him. There was an entire western desert to be talked over during the courses, and Frisbie held his discovery in reserve until they had gone to smoke in a quiet corner of the great rotunda. Even then he approached it indirectly.

"In taking up the line down the Pannikin we have followed the old S.L. & W. survey pretty closely all the way from start to finish. What were your reasons, Stuart?" he asked.

"There didn't seem to be any good reason for not following it. Brandreth made the S.L. & W. preliminary, and there isn't a better locating engineer in this country."

"I know," said Frisbie. "But the best of us make mistakes, now and then. Brandreth made a pretty sizable one, I think."

"How is that?"

"You know where the big rock-cutting is to be made in the lower canyon, about ten miles this side of the point where we begin to swing south for the run to Copah—a mile and a half of heavy work that will cost away up into the pictures?"

"Yes; I've estimated that rock work at not a cent less than two hundred thousand dollars."

"You're shy, rather than over, at that. And two hundred thousand would build a number of miles of ordinary railroad, wouldn't it? But that isn't all. The cliffs along that canyon are shale-topped and shale-undermined, the shale alternating with loose rock about fifty feet above our line of grade in quarter-mile stretches all along. That means incessant track-walking day and night through the mile and a half of cutting, and afterward—for all time afterward—a construction train kept handy under steam to clear away débris that will never quit sliding down on the embankment."

"I'm afraid you are right," said Ford. "It's the worst bit on the entire extension; the most costly to build, as it will be the most expensive to maintain. But I guess Brandreth knew what he was about when he surveyed it."

"Brandreth is a short-line man. He wouldn't lengthen his line ten miles to dodge an earthquake. Ford, we can save a hundred thousand dollars on that piece of track in first cost—to say nothing of the future."

"How? I'm always open to conviction."

"By leaving the S.L. & W. survey at Horse Creek, following up to the low divide at Emory's Mine, and crossing to enter Copah from the southeast instead of from the northeast. I came out that way from Copah five days ago. It's perfectly feasible; straight-away, easy earth work for the greater part, and the only objection is that it adds about twelve running miles to the length of the extension. It's for you to say whether or not the added distance will be warranted by the lessened cost and the assurance of safety in operating. If we cut through that lower canyon cliff it will be only a question of time until we bury somebody, no matter how closely it is watched."

Ford took time to consider the proposal. There were objections, and he named one of them.

"The MacMorroghs have based their bid on the present survey: they will not want to let that piece of rock work drop out of sight."

"They'll have to, if you say so. And you can afford to be pretty liberal with them on the substituted twelve miles."

"I'll have to think about it over night," was Ford's final answer. "Arrange to give me an hour to-morrow morning and we'll go over the maps and your notes together."

Frisbie slept soundly on the gained inch, hoping to make it the coveted ell in the morning. He knew the chief objection, which was that Ford, too, was a "short-line" engineer; a man who would lay down his railroad as the Czar of Russia did the St. Petersburg-Moscow line—by placing a ruler on the map and drawing a straight mark beside it between the two cities—if that were an American possibility. But he knew, too, that the safety clause would weigh heavily with Ford, and there was no minimizing the danger to future traffic if the canyon route should be retained.

It turned out finally as the first assistant had hoped and believed it would. Ford spent a thoughtful hour at his office in the Guaranty Building before Frisbie came down—the little man being trail-weary enough to sleep late in the comfortable room at the Brown Palace. The slight change of route was hardly a matter to be carried up to the executive committee, and Ford's decision turned upon quite another pivot—the addition of twelve miles of distance. As against this, safety and economy won the day; and when Frisbie came in the talk was merely of ways and means.

"Fix up the change with the MacMorroghs the best way you can," was Ford's concluding instruction to his lieutenant. "They will kick, of course; merely to be kicking at anything I suggest. But you can bring them to terms, I guess."

"By my lonesome?" said Frisbie. "Aren't you going over to see the new route with your own eyes?"

"No. I'm perfectly willing to trust your judgment, Dick. Besides, I've got other fish to fry. I'm going east to-night to have one more tussle with the steel mills. We must have quicker deliveries and more of them. When I get back, we'll organize the track-layers and begin to make us a railroad."

"Good," said Frisbie, gathering up his maps and sketches of the detour country; and so, in the wording of a brief sentence or two it came to pass that Ford delivered himself bound and unarmed into the hands of his enemies.

A little light was thrown upon this dark passage that night in the office of the general manager, after Ford's train had gone eastward, and Frisbie was on his way back to the MacMorrogh headquarters on the lower Pannikin. North was waiting when Eckstein came in, flushed as from a rapid walk.

"It's all settled?" asked the general manager, with a slow lift of the eyebrow to betray his anxiety.

"To the queen's taste, I should say," was the secretary's not too deferential reply. "Ford's out of the way, to be gone ten days or a fortnight, and Frisbie has gone back to dicker with MacMorrogh, and to survey the new route up Horse Creek. Ford doesn't know; I doubt if he will ever know until we spring the trap on him. The one thing I was most afraid of was that he would insist upon going over the new line himself. Then, of course, he would have found out—he couldn't help finding out."

The general manager squared his huge shoulders against the back of the chair.

"You think he would call it off if he knew?" he queried. "You give him credit for too much virtue, Eckstein. But I think we have him now. By the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge. MacMorrogh will see to that."

Eckstein nodded. "I made a point of that with Brian," he said. "The minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon the new roundabout. But Ford won't find out. He'll be too busy on this end of the line with the track-layers. I'm a little nervous about Merriam, though."

"He's the man who talked Frisbie into championing the new route?"

"Yes. He did it pretty skilfully: made Frisbie think he was finding it out himself, and never let the little man out of his sight while they were in Copah. But I am afraid Merriam himself knows too much."

"Get him out of the country—before Ford gets back," was the crisp order. "If he isn't here when the gun goes off, he can't tell anybody how it was loaded."

"An appointment—" Eckstein began.

"That is what I mean," said the general manager, turning back to his desk. "We need a traffic agency up in the Oregon country. See Merriam—to-night. Find out if he'd like to have the general agency at, say, twenty-five hundred a year; and if he agrees, get out the circular appointing him."

"He'll agree, fast enough," laughed the secretary. "But I'll nail him—to-night."

Ford spent rather more than two weeks in his round-up of the eastern steel mills, and there was a terrific accumulation of correspondence awaiting him when he reached Denver. At the top of the pile was an official circular appointing one George Z. Merriam, a man whom Ford remembered, or seemed vaguely to remember, as one of the MacMorrogh bookkeepers, general agent of the P. S-W., with headquarters at Portland, Oregon. And at the bottom of the accumulation was a second official printing, bearing the approval of the president, this; and Ford's eyes gloomed angrily when he read it.

PACIFIC SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY CO.

Office of the President.

New York, August 24.

To All Officials and Employees:

At a called meeting of the stock-holders of this company, held in New York, August 23, Mr. John C. North was elected First Vice-President and General Manager of all lines of this company, operative and under construction. All officers and employees will govern themselves accordingly.