BUSINESS
Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that
night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken
into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after
the fall on the south arête the hill blockade had been broken. With
word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost,
effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief
train run in on the mine track.
Morris Blood, unconscious, was lifted from the narrow shelf at four
o'clock and put under a surgeon's care in time to save his life. To
rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even
while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable
equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital
was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the
three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them
before sunset.
Last to come up, because he still gave the orders, Glover, cushioned
and strapped in the tackle, was lifted out of the blackness of the
night into the streaming glare of the headlights. Very carefully he
was swung down to the mattresses piled on the track, and, before all
that looked and waited, a woman knelt and kissed his sunken eyes. Not
then did the men, dim in the circle about them, show what they felt,
though they knew, to the meanest trackhand, all it meant; not when,
after a bare moment of hesitation, Gertrude's father knelt opposite on
the mattress-pile, did they break their silence, though they shrewdly
guessed what that meant.
But when Glover pulled together his disordered members and at
Gertrude's side walked without help to the step of the car, the murmur
broke into a cheer that rang from Pilot to Glen Tarn.
"It was more than half my fault," he breathed to her, after his broken
arms had been set and the long gash on his head stitched. "I need not
have lost my balance if I had kept my head. Gertrude, I may as well
admit it--I'm a coward since I've begun to love you. I've never told
you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper.
But it came back to me just as Dancing's shoulder slipped--that's why I
went. I'm done forever with long chances." And she, silent, tried
only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from
Pilot together.
"Do you know what day to-morrow is?" Gertrude was opening a box of
flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover,
plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the
hotel parlor.
"To-morrow?" he echoed. "Sunday."
"Sunday! Why do you always guess Sunday when I ask you what day it is?"
"You would think every day Sunday if you had had as good a time as I
have for six weeks."
"The doctor does say you're doing beautifully. I asked him yesterday
how soon you would be well and he said you never had been so well since
he knew you. But what is to-morrow?"
"Thanksgiving."
"Thanksgiving, indeed! Yes, every day is Thanksgiving for us. But
it's not especially _that_."
"Christmas."
"Nonsense! To-morrow is the second anniversary of our engagement."
"My Lord, Gertrude, have we been engaged two years? Why, at that rate
I can't possibly marry you till I'm forty-four."
"It isn't two years, it's two months. And to-night they have their
memorial services for poor Paddy McGraw. And, do you know, your friend
Mr. Foley has our engine now? Yes; he came up the other day to ask
about you, but in reality to tell me he had been promoted. I think he
ought to have been, after I spoke myself to Mr. Archibald about it.
But what touched me was, the poor fellow asked if I wouldn't see about
getting some flowers for the memorial at the engineer's lodge
to-night--and he didn't want his wife to know anything about it,
because she would scold him for spending his money--see what you are
coming to! So I suggested he should let me provide his flowers and
ours together, and when I tried to find out what he wanted, he asked if
a throttle made of flowers would be all right."
"Your heart would not let you say no?"
"I told him it would be lovely, and to leave it all to me."
She brought forward the box she was opening. "See how they have laid
this throttle-bar of violets across these Galax leaves--and latched it
with a rose. Here, Solomon," she exiled the boy from an adjoining
room, "take this very carefully. No. There isn't any card. Oh," she
exclaimed, as he left, and she clasped her lifted hands, "I am glad, I
am glad we are leaving these mountains. Do you know papa is to be here
to-morrow? And that your speech must be ready? He isn't going to give
his consent without being asked."
"I suppose not," said Glover, dejectedly.
"What are you going to say?"
"I shall say that I consider him worthy of my confidence and esteem."
"I think you would make more headway, dearest, if you should tell him
you considered yourself worthy of _his_ confidence and esteem."
"But, hang it, I don't."
"Well, couldn't you, for once, fib a little? Oh, Ab; I'll tell you
what I wish you _could_ do."
"Pray what?"
"Talk a little business to him. I feel sure, if you could only talk
business awhile, papa would be _all_ right."
"Business! If it's only a question of talking business, the thing's as
good as done. I can't talk anything but business."
"Can't you, indeed! I like that. Pray what did you talk to me on the
platform of my father's own car?"
"Business."
"You talked the silliest stuff I ever listened to----"
"Not reflecting on anyone present, of course."
"And, Ab----"
"Yes."
"If you could take him aback somehow--nothing would give him such an
idea of you. I think that was what--well, I was so _completely_
overcome by your audacity----"
"You seemed so," commented Glover, rather grimly. "Very well, if you
want him taken aback, I will take him aback, even if I have to resort
to force." He withdrew his right arm from its sling and began
unwrapping the bandages and throwing the splints Into the fire.
"What in the world are you doing?" asked Gertrude, in consternation.
"There's no use carrying these things any longer. My right arm is just
as strong as it ever was--and to tell the truth----"
"Now keep your distance, if you please."
"To tell the truth, I never could play ball left-handed, anyway,
Gertrude. Now, let's begin easy. Just shake hands with me."
"I'll do nothing of the sort. It's bad form, anyway. You may just
shake hands with yourself. All things considered, I think you have
good reason to."
"I understand you were chief engineer of this system at one time,"
began Mr. Brock, at the very outset of the dreaded interview.
"I was," answered Glover.
"And that you resigned voluntarily to take an inferior position on the
Mountain Division?"
"That is true."
"Railroad men with ambition," commented Mr. Brock, dryly, "don't
usually turn their faces from responsibility in that way. They look
higher, and not lower."
"I thought I was looking higher when I came to the mountains."
"That may do for a joke, but I am talking business."
"I, too; and since I am, let me explain to you why I resigned a higher
position for a lower one. The fact is well known; the reason isn't. I
came to this road at the call of your second vice-president, Mr. Bucks.
I have always enjoyed a large measure of his confidence. We saw some
years ago that a reorganization was inevitable, and spent many nights
discussing the different features of it. This is what we determined:
That the key to this whole system with its eight thousand miles of main
line and branches is this Mountain Division. To operate the system
economically and successfully means that the grades must be reduced and
the curvature reduced on this division. Surely, with you, I need not
dwell on the A B C's of twentieth century railroading. It is the road
that can handle the tonnage cheapest that will survive. All this we
knew, and I told him to put me out on this division. It was during the
receivership and there was no room for frills.
"I have worked here on a small salary and done everything but maul
spikes to keep down expenses on the division, because we had to make
some showing to whoever wanted to buy our junk. In this way I took a
roving commission and packed my bag from an office where I could
acquire nothing I did not already know to a position where I could get
hold of the problem of mountain transportation and cut the coal bills
of the road in two."
"Have you done it?"
"Have I cut the coal bills in two? No; but I have learned how. It
will cost money to do that----"
"How much money?"
"Thirty millions of dollars."
"A good deal of money."
"No."
"No?"
"No. Don't let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred
millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred
millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought
to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them.
I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear
Dance--yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for
transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will
rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send
freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of
to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains."
"Go ahead."
"Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him--Callahan, Blood and
the rest of us--are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know
nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer
came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily," Glover
bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, "he isn't; but he might have been----"
"I see."
"We were prepared for that."
"How?"
"I shouldn't speak of this if I did not know you were Mr. Bucks'
closest friend. Even he doesn't know it, but six months of my own
time--not the company's--I put in on a matter that concerned my friends
and myself, and I have the notes for a new line to parallel this if it
were needed--and Blood and I have the only pass within three hundred
miles north or south to run it over. These were some of the reasons,
Mr. Brock, why I came to the mountains."
"I understand. I understand perfectly. Mr. Glover, what is your age,
sir?"
The time seemed ripe to put Gertrude's second hint into play.
"That is a subject I never discuss with anyone, Mr. Brock."
He waited just a moment to let the magnate get his breath, and
continued, "May I tell you why? When the road went into the
receivership, I was named as one of the receivers on behalf of the
Government. The President, when I first met him during my term, asked
for my father, thinking he was the man that had been recommended to
him. He wouldn't believe me when I assured him I was his appointee.
'If I had known how young you were, Glover,' said he to me, afterward,
'I never should have dared appoint you.' The position paid me
twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; but the incident
paid me better than that, for it taught me never to discuss my age."
"I see. I see. A fine point. You have taught _me_ something. By the
way, about the pass you spoke of--I suppose you understand the
importance of getting hold of a strategic point like that
to--a--forestall--competition?"
"I have hold of it."
"I do not mind saying to you, under all the circumstances, that there
has been a little friction with the Harrison people. Do you see? And,
for reasons that may suggest themselves, there may be more. They might
conclude to run a line to the coast themselves. The young man has, I
believe, been turned down----"
"I understood the--the slate had been--changed slightly," stammered
Glover, coloring.
"There might be resentment, that's all. Blood is loyal to us, I
presume."
"There's no taint anywhere in Morris Blood. He is loyalty itself."
"What would you think of him as General Manager? Callahan goes to the
river as Traffic Manager. Mr. Bucks, you know, is the new President;
these are his recommendations. What do you think of them?"
"No better men on earth for the positions, and I'm mighty glad to see
them get what they deserve."
"Our idea is to leave you right here in the mountains." It was hard to
be left completely out of the new deal, but Glover did not visibly
wince. "With the title," added Mr. Brock, after he knew his arrow had
gone home, "with the title of Second Vice-president, which Mr. Bucks
now holds. That will give you full swing in your plans for the
rebuilding of the system. I want to see them carried out as the
estimates I've been studying this winter show. Don't thank me. I did
not know till yesterday they were entirely your plans. You can have
every dollar you need; it will rest with you to produce the results. I
guess that's all. No, stop. I want you to go East with us next week
for a month or two as our guest. You can forward your work the faster
when you get back, and I should like you to meet the men whose money
you are to spend. Were you waiting to see Gertrude?"
"Why--yes, sir--I----"
"I'll see whether she's around."
Gertrude did not appear for some moments, then she half ran and half
glided in, radiant. "I couldn't get away!" she exclaimed. "He's
talking about you yet to Aunt Jane and Marie. He says you're charged
with dynamite--_I_ knew that--a most remarkable young man. How did you
ever convince him you knew anything? I am confident you don't. You
must have taken him somehow aback, didn't you?"
"If you want to give your father a touch of asthma," suggested Glover,
"ask him how old I am; but he had me scared once or twice," admitted
the engineer, wiping the cold sweat from his wrists.
"_Did_ he give his consent?"
"Why--hang it--I--we got to talking business and I forgot to----"
"So like you, dear. However, it must be all right, for he said he
should need your help in buying the coast branches and The Short Line."
"The Short Line," gasped Glover. "Well, I haven't inventoried lately.
If we marry in June----"
"Don't worry about that, for we sha'n't marry in June, my love."
"But when we do, we shall need some money for a wedding-trip----"
"We certainly shall; a lot of it, dearie."
"I may have ten or twelve hundred left after that is provided for. But
my confidence in your father's judgment is very great, and if he's
going to make up a pool, my money is at his service, as far as it will
go, to buy The Short Line--or any other line he may take a fancy to."
"Why, he's just telling Marie about your making a hundred thousand
dollars in four years by being wonderfully shrewd----"
"But that confounded mine that I told you about----"
"You dear old stupid. Never mind, you have made a real strike to-day.
But if you ever again delude papa into thinking you know more than I
do, I shall expose you without mercy."
The train, a private car special, carrying Mr. Brock, chairman of the
board, and his family, the new president and the second vice-president
elect, was pulling slowly across the long, high spans of the Spider
bridge. Glover and Gertrude had gone back to the observation platform.
Leaning on his arm, she was looking across the big valley and into the
west. The sun, setting clear, tinged with gold the far snows of the
mountains.
"It is less than a year," she was murmuring, "since I crossed this
bridge; think of it. And what bridges have I not crossed since! See.
Your mountains are fading away----"
"My mountains faded away, dear heart, don't you know, when you told me
I might love you. As for those"--his eyes turned from the distant
ranges back to her eyes--"after all, they brought me you."