E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Janet Blenkinship, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 16630-h.htm or 16630-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/3/16630/16630-h/16630-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/6/3/16630/16630-h.zip)
EMPIRE BUILDERS
by
FRANCIS LYNDE
Author of
The Quickening, The Grafters
A Fool for Love, etc.
With Illustrations by Jay Hambidge
Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Press of
Braunworth & Co.
Bookbinders and Printers
Brooklyn, N.Y.
1907
[Illustration: "I won't attempt to apologize--it's beyond all that"]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A MASTER OF MEN 1
II A SPIKED SWITCH 13
III LOSS AND DAMAGE 30
IV COLD STORAGE 38
V WANTED: THIRTY-FIVE MILLIONS 47
VI THE AWAKENING OF CHARLES EDWARD 59
VII HAMMER AND TONGS 66
VIII THE AUTOMATIC AIR 75
IX THE RACE TO THE SLOW 90
X THE SINEWS OF WAR 100
XI HURRY ORDERS 120
XII THE ENTERING WEDGE 141
XIII THE BARBARIANS 155
XIV THE DRAW-BAR PULL 166
XV AN UNWILLING HOST 177
XVI THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES 186
XVII A NIGHT OF ALARMS 198
XVIII THE MORNING AFTER 217
XIX THE RELUCTANT WHEELS 238
XX THE CONSPIRATORS 254
XXI THE MILLS OF THE GODS 271
XXII THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 285
XXIII THE DEADLOCK 311
XXIV RUIZ GREGORIO 325
XXV THE SIEGE OF THE NADIA 336
XXVI THE STAR OF EMPIRE 362
EMPIRE BUILDERS
I
A MASTER OF MEN
Engine Number 206, narrow gauge, was pushing, or rather failing to push,
the old-fashioned box-plow through the crusted drifts on the uptilted
shoulder of Plug Mountain, at altitude ten thousand feet, with the
mercury at twelve below zero. There was a wind--the winter day above
timber-line without its wind is as rare as a thawing Christmas--and it
cut like knives through any garmenting lighter than fur or leather. The
cab of the 206 was old and weather-shaken, and Ford pulled the collar of
his buffalo coat about his ears when the grunting of the exhaust and the
shrilling of the wheels on the snow-shod rails stopped abruptly.
"Gar-r-r!" snarled Gallagher, the red-headed Irish engineer, shutting
off the steam in impotent rage. "The power is not in this dommed ould
camp-kittle sewin' machine! 'Tis heaven's pity they wouldn't be givin'
us wan man-sized, fightin' lokimotive on this ind of the line, Misther
Foord."
Ford, superintendent and general autocrat of the Plug Mountain branch of
the Pacific Southwestern, climbed down from his cramped seat on the
fireman's box and stood scowling at the retracting index of the
steam-gauge. When he was on his feet beside the little Irishman, you saw
that he was a young man, well-built, square-shouldered and athletic
under the muffling of the shapeless fur greatcoat; also, that in spite
of the scowl, his clean-shaven face was strong and manly and good to
look upon.
"Power!" he retorted. "That's only one of the hundred things they don't
give us, Mike. Look at that steam-gauge--freezing right where she
stands!"
"'Tis so," assented Gallagher. "She'd be dead and shtiff in tin minutes
be the clock if we'd lave her be in this drift."
Ford motioned the engineer aside and took the throttle himself. It was
the third day out from Cherubusco, the station at the foot of the
mountain; and in the eight-and-forty hours the engine, plow and crew of
twenty shovelers had, by labor of the cruelest, opened eleven of the
thirteen blockaded miles isolating Saint's Rest, the mining-camp
end-of-track in the high basin at the head of the pass.
The throttle opened with a jerk under the superintendent's hand. There
was a snow-choked drumming of the exhaust, and the driving-wheels spun
wildly in the flurry beneath. But there was no inch of forward motion,
and Ford gave it up.
"We're against it," he admitted. "Back her down and we'll put the
shovelers at it again while you're nursing her up and getting more
steam. We're going to make it to Saint's Rest to-day if the Two-six has
to go in on three legs."
Gallagher pulled the reversing lever into the back gear and sent the
failing steam whistling into the chilled cylinders with cautious little
jerks at the throttle. The box-plow came out of the clutch of its snow
vise with shrillings as of a soul in torment, and the bucking outfit
screeched coldly down over the snowy rails to the "let-up," where the
shovelers' box-car had been uncoupled.
Ford swung off to turn out the shoveling squad; and presently the
laborers, muffled to the eyes, were filing past the 206 to break a path
for the plow. Gallagher was on the running-board with his flare torch,
thawing out an injector. He marked the cheerful swing of the men and
gave credit where it was due.
"'Tis a full-grown man, that," he commented, meaning Ford. "Manny's the
wan would be huggin' the warm boiler-head these times, and shtickin' his
head out of the windy to holler, 'G'wan, boys; pitch it out lively now,
and be dommed to yez!' But Misther Foord ain't built the like o' that.
He'll be as deep in that freezin' purgatory up yander in th' drift as
the foremist wan of thim."
The Irishman's praise was not unmerited. Whatever his failings,
and he groaned under his fair human share of them, Stuart Ford had
the gift of leadership. Before he had been a month on the branch
as its "old man" and autocrat, he had won the good-will and loyalty
of the rank and file, from the office men in the headquarters to the
pick-and-shovel contingent on the sections. Even the blockade-breaking
laborers--temporary helpers as they were--stood by him manfully in the
sustained battle with the snow. Ford spared them when he could, and they
knew it.
"Warm it up, boys!" he called cheerily, climbing to the top of the
frozen drift to direct the attack. "It's been a long fight, but we're in
sight of home now. Come up here with your shovels, Olsen, and break it
down from the top. It's the crust that plugs Mike's wedge."
He looked the fighting leader, standing at the top of the wind-swept
drift and crying on his shovelers. It was the part he had chosen for
himself in the game of life, and he quarreled only when the stake was
small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts. The
Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern
system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads, and
upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders. It barely
paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow blockades
in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss account.
This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to
find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug
Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble
one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and
he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific
Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain
line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the great Granger
roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction, transferring an
energetic young man with ambitions from the bald plains of the Dakotas
to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.
Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a
syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then
prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction,
and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at
once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be
discovered.
Failing to tap their bonanza freight-producer on the route up Blue
Canyon, the projectors--small fish in the great money-pool--had talked
vaguely of future extensions to Salt Lake, to San Francisco, to Puget
Sound, or to some other of the far-beyonds, and had even gone the length
of surveying a line over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin,
on the Pacific slope of the range. But they had prudently stopped
building; and the pause continued until the day of the great silver
strike at Saint's Rest.
The new carbonate beds chanced to lie within easy rifle-shot of the
summit of Plug Pass; in other words, they were precisely on the line of
the extension survey of the narrow gauge. The discovery was a piece of
sheer luck for the amateur railroad builders. For a time, as all the
world knows, Saint's Rest headed the mining news column in all the
dailies, and the rush for the new camp fairly swamped the meager
carrying facilities of the incomplete line and the stages connecting its
track-end with the high-mountain Mecca of the treasure-seekers.
Then, indeed, the Denver syndicate saw its long deferred opportunity and
grasped it. Long purses might be lacking, but not shrewd heads. The
unfinished Plug Mountain was immediately bonded for more than it ever
promised to be worth, and in the hottest heat of the forwarding strife
it was extended at the rate of a mile a day until the welcome screech of
its locomotive whistles was added to the perfervid clamor of the new
camp in the Plug Pass basin.
The goal reached, the Denver folk took a fresh leaf out of the book of
shrewdness. Holding the completed line only long enough to skim the
cream of the rush earnings, they sold their stock at a sound premium to
the Pacific Southwestern, pocketed their winnings cannily, and escaped a
short half-year before the slump in silver, and the consequent collapse
of Saint's Rest, came to establish the future Waterloo for Napoleonic
young superintendents in the Southwestern's service.
This was all ancient history when Ford left the Granger road to climb,
at President Colbrith's behest, into the Plug Mountain saddle; and a
round half-dozen of the young Napoleons had been broken before he put
foot in stirrup for the mounting. While his attacking of the problem had
been open-eyed, he had not stopped to specialize in the ancient history
of the Plug Mountain branch. When he did specialize, his point of view
was pretty clearly defined in a letter to Mr. Richard Frisbie, of St.
Paul, written after he had been for six months the master of the Plug
Mountain destinies.
"I'm up against it, good and solid," was the way he phrased it to
Frisbie. "My hundred and fifty miles of 'two streaks of rust and a
right-of-way' has never paid a net dollar since the boom broke at
Saint's Rest, and under present conditions it never will. If I had known
the history of the road when President Colbrith went fishing for me--as
I didn't--I wouldn't have touched the job with a ten-foot pole.
"But now I'm here, I'm going to do something with my two streaks of rust
to make them pay--make a spoon or spoil a horn. Just what shall be done
I haven't decided fully, but I have a notion in the back part of my
head, and if it works out, I shall need you first of all. Will you come?
"Have I told you in any of my earlier letters that I have personally
earned the ill-will of General Manager North? I have, and it is distinct
from and in addition to his hostility for the unearning branch for which
I am responsible. I'm sorry for it, because I may need his good word for
my inchoate scheme later on. It came up over some maintenance-of-way
charges. He is as shrewd as he is unscrupulous, and he knows well how to
pile the sins of the congregation on the back of the poor scapegoat. To
make a better showing for the main line, and at the same time to show
what a swilling pig the Plug Mountain is, he had the branch charged up
with a lot of material we didn't get. Naturally, I protested--and was
curtly told to mind my own business, which had no ramifications reaching
into the accounting department. Then I threatened to carry it over his
head to President Colbrith; whereupon I gained my point temporarily, and
lost a possible stepping-stone to success.
"None the less, I am going to win out if it costs me the best year of
my life. I'm going to swing to this thing till I make something out of
it, if I have to put in some more winters like the one I have just come
through--which was Sheol, with ice and snow in the place of the
traditional fire and brimstone. If I have one good quality--as I
sometimes doubt--it's the inability to know when I am satisfactorily and
permanently licked."
Stuart Ford was shivering through the second of the winters on the gray,
needle-winded day when he stood on the crusted drift, heartening his men
who were breaking the way for further rammings of the scrap-heap 206 and
her box-plow. During the summer which lay behind the pitiless storms and
the blockading snows he had explored and planned, studied and schemed;
and now a month of good weather would put the finishing touches
preparatory upon the "notion" hinted at in the letter to Frisbie.
"That'll do, boys; we'll let Gallagher hit it a few times now," he sang
out, when he saw that the weaker ones among the shovelers were stumbling
numbly and throwing wild. "Get back to the car and thaw yourselves out."
The safety-valve of the 206 was stuttering under a gratifying increase
of steam pressure when the superintendent climbed to the canvas-shrouded
cab.
"Ha! two hundred and fifty pounds! That looks a little more like it,
Michael. Now get all the run you can and hit her straight from the
shoulder," he ordered, mounting to his seat on the fireman's box, and
bracing himself for what should come.
Gallagher released the driver-brakes and let the 206 and the plow drift
down the grade until his tender drawhead touched the laborers' car. Then
the reversing lever went forward with a clang, and the steam squealed
shrilly in the dry-pipe. For a thunderous second or two the
driving-wheels slipped and whirled futilely on the snowy rails.
Gallagher pounced upon the sand lever, whereat the tires suddenly bit
and held and a long-drawn, fire-tearing exhaust sobbed from the stack.
"You've got her!" shouted Ford. "Now hit it--hit it hard!"
Swiftly the huge mass of engine and plow gathered headway, the pounding
exhausts quickening until they blended in a continuous roar. The little
Irishman stayed himself with a foot against the boiler brace; the
fireman ducked under the canvas curtain and clung to the coal bulkhead;
and Ford held on as he could.
The shock came like the crashing blow of a collision. The box-plow
buckled and groaned with fine cracklings as of hard-strained timbers,
and an avalanche of snow thrown up from its inclined plane buried engine
and cab and tender in a smothering drift. Ford slid his window and
looked out.
"Good work, Michael; good work! You gained a full car-length that time.
Try it again."
Gallagher backed the plow carefully out of the cutting, and the fireman
opened the blower and nursed his fire. Again and again the wheeled
projectile was hurled into the obstruction, and Ford watched the
steadily retrograding finger of the steam-gauge anxiously. Would the
pressure suffice for the final dash which should clear the cutting? Or
would they have to stop and turn out the wretched shovelmen again?
The answer came with the fourth drive into the stubborn barrier. There
was the same nerve-racking shock of impact; but now the recoil was
followed by a second forward plunge, and Gallagher yelled his triumph
when the 206 burst through the remaining lesser drifts and shot away on
the clear track beyond.
Ford drew a long breath of relief, and the engineer checked the speed of
the runaway, stopped, and started back to couple on the car-load of
laborers.
Ford swung around and put his back to the open window.
"Let's hope that is the worst of it and the last of it for this winter,
Mike," he said, speaking as man to man. "I believe the weather will
break before we have any more snow; and next year--"
The pause was so long that Gallagher took his chance of filling it.
"Don't be tellin' me the big boss has promised us a rotary for next
winter, Misther Foord. That'd be too good to be thrue, I'm thinking."
"No; but next winter you'll be doing one of two things, Michael. You
will be pulling your train through steel snow-sheds on Plug Mountain--or
you'll be working for another boss. Break her loose, and let's get to
camp as soon as we can. Those poor devils back in the box-car are about
dead for sleep and a square meal."
II
A SPIKED SWITCH
Ford's hopeful prophecy that the snow battles were over for the season
proved true. A few weeks later a warm wind blew up from the west, the
mountain foot-trails became first packed ice-paths and then slippery
ridges to trap the unwary; the great drifts began to settle and melt,
and the spring music of the swollen mountain torrents was abroad in the
land.
At the blowing of the warm wind Ford aimed the opening gun in his
campaign against fate--the fate which seemed to be bent upon adding his
name to the list of failures on the Plug Mountain branch. The gun-aiming
was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering
office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug
Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.
"I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a
bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay," wrote Ford, "and the
chance has come. Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place
is yours if you will take it. If you are willing to tie up to the most
harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a
thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country
of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come."
This letter was written on a Friday. Frisbie got it out of the carriers'
delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing
westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal. Not that the
destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as
willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford's finger.
It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track
debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint's Rest, stretched his
legs gratefully on _terra firma_, had his first deep lungful of the
ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him. Ford
would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the
little shack "hotel," and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the
tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the
boxed-off den in the station building which served as the
superintendent's office.
"I've been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing
threatened to take shape in my head," Ford began. "First, let me ask
you: do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four
good constructing engineers--men you could turn loose absolutely and
trust implicitly? I'm putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain
exile has taken me a bit out of touch."
"Why--yes," said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll. "There
are Major Benson and his son Jack--you know 'em both--just in off their
job in the Selkirks. Then there is Roy Brissac; he'd be a pretty good
man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,--he's got a job in
Winnipeg, but he'll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man
I know. But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?"
Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.
"I'll go into the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty
of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good
bit more privacy. The thing I'm trying to figure out will burst like a
bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and"--lowering his
voice--"I can't trust my office force here. _Savez?_"
"I _savez_ nothing as yet," laughed the new supervisor, "but perhaps I
shall if you'll tell me what is going to happen in the next month or six
weeks."
"I'm coming to that, right now. How would you like to take a hunting
trip over on the wilderness side of the range? There are big woods and
big game."
Frisbie grinned. He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by
the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches
and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated
faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in _Faust_.
Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic.
"You needn't ask me what I'd like; you just tell me what you want me to
do," he rejoined, with clansman loyalty.
"So I will," said Ford, taking the reins of authority. "We leave here
to-morrow morning for a trip over the Pass and down the Pannikin on the
other side, and if anybody asks you why, you can say that we expect to
kill a deer or two, and possibly a bear. Your part of the outsetting,
however, is to pack your surveying instruments on the burro saddles so
they'll pass for grub-boxes, tent-poles, and the like."
"Call it done," said Frisbie. "But why all this stage play? Can't you
anticipate that much without endangering your bubble?"
Ford lowered his voice again.
"I gave you the hint. Penfield, my chief clerk--his desk is just on the
other side of that partition--is an ex-main-line man, shoved upon me
when I didn't want him. He was General Manager North's stenographer.
For reasons which will be apparent to you a little later on, I want to
blow my bubble in my own way; or, to change the figure, I'd like to fire
the first volley myself."
Frisbie's grin was rather more than less diabolic.
"Then I'd begin by firing Mr. Penfield, himself," he remarked.
"No, you wouldn't," said Ford. "There are going to be obstacles enough
in the way without slapping Mr. North in the face as a preliminary.
Under the circumstances, he'd take it that way; Penfield would make sure
that he took it that way."
It was at this point in the low-toned conference that the ingenious
young man in the outer office put down the desk telephone ear-piece long
enough to smite with his fist at some air-drawn antagonist. Curiosity
was this young man's capital weakness, and he had tinkered the wires of
the private telephone system so that the flicking of a switch made him
an auditor at any conversation carried on in the private office. He was
listening intently and eagerly again when Ford said, still in the same
guarded tone:
"No, I can't fire Penfield, and I don't particularly want to. He is a
good office man, and loyal to his salt: it's my misfortune that it is
Mr. North's salt-cellar, and not mine, that he dips into. Besides, I'd
have trouble in replacing him. Saint's Rest isn't exactly the paradise
its name implies--for a clean-cut, well-mannered young fellow with
social leanings."
"Now, what in the mischief does all that mean?" mused the chief clerk,
when Ford and his new track man had gone out. "A month's hunting trip
over the range, with the surveying instruments taken along. And last
summer Mr. Ford spent a good part of his time over there--also hunting,
so he said. Confound it all! I wish I could get into that private drawer
of his in the safe. That would tell the story. I wonder if Pacheco
couldn't make himself an errand over the Pass in the morning? By
George!" slapping his thigh and apostrophizing the superintendent, "I'll
just go you once, Mr. Ford, if I lose!"
Now the fruit, of which this little soliloquy was the opening blossom,
matured on the second day after Ford and Frisbie had started out on the
mysterious hunting trip across the range. Pacheco, the half-breed
Mexican who freighted provisions by jack train to the mining-camps on
the head waters of the Pannikin, came in to report to the chief clerk.
"Well, 'Checo, what did you find out?" was the curt inquiry.
The half-breed spread his palms.
"W'at I see, I know. Dey'll not gone for hunt much. One day out, dey'll
make-a da camp and go for squint t'rough spy-glass, so"--making an
imaginary transit telescope of his hands. "Den dey'll measure h-on da
groun' and squint some more, so."
Penfield nodded and a gold piece changed hands silently.
"That's all, 'Checo; much obliged. Don't say anything about this over in
the camp. Mr. Ford said he was going hunting, and that's what we'll say,
if anybody asks us."
That night the chief clerk sent a brief cipher telegram to the general
manager at Denver.
Ford and his new track supervisor, who is really a high-priced
constructing engineer, gone over the range for a month's absence.
Gave it out here that they were going after big game, but they took
a transit and are picking up the line of the old S. L. & W.
extension in the upper Pannikin.
It was late in the month of June when Ford and Frisbie, tanned,
weathered and as gaunt as pioneers, returned to Saint's Rest; and for
those who were curious enough to be interested, there were a couple of
bear-skins and one of a mountain lion to make good the ostensible object
of the absence.
But the most important trophies of the excursion were two engineers'
note-books, well filled with memoranda; and these they did not exhibit.
On the contrary, they became a part of the collection of maps,
statistics, estimates and private correspondence which Chief Clerk
Penfield was so anxious to examine, and which Ford kept under lock and
key when he and Frisbie were not poring over some portion of it in the
seclusion of the private office.
None the less, Penfield kept his eyes and ears open, and before long he
had another detail to report by cipher telegram to the general manager.
Ford was evidently preparing for another absence, and from what the
chief clerk could overhear, he was led to believe that the pseudo
supervisor of track would be left in charge of Plug Mountain affairs.
It was on the day before Ford's departure for Denver that a letter came
from General Manager North. Ford read it with a scowl of disapproval and
tossed it across the double desk to Frisbie.
"A polite invitation for me to stay at home and to attend to my
business," he commented.
"Had you written him that you were going away?" inquired Frisbie.
"No; but evidently somebody else has."
Frisbie read the letter again.
"'So that all heads of departments may be on duty when the president
makes his annual inspection trip over the lines,'" he quoted. "Is Mr.
Colbrith coming out this early in the summer?"
"No, of course not. He never comes before August."
"Then this is only a trumped-up excuse to make you stay here?"
"That's all," Ford replied laconically.
Mr. Richard Frisbie got up and walked twice the length of the little
room before he said:
"This Denver gentleman is going to knock your little scheme into a
cocked hat, if he can, Stuart."
"I am very much afraid we'll have to reckon upon that. As a matter of
fact, I've been reckoning upon it, all along."
"How much of a pull has he with the New York money-people?"
"I don't know that: I wish I did. It would simplify matters somewhat."
Frisbie took another turn up and down the room, with his head down and
his hands in his pockets.
"Stuart, I believe, if I were in your place, I'd enlist Mr. North, if I
had to make it an object for him," he said, at length.
"Certainly, I mean to go to him first," said Ford. "That is his due. But
I am counting upon opposition rather than help. Wait a minute"--he
jerked the door open suddenly and made sure that the chief clerk's chair
was unoccupied. "The worst of it is that I don't trust North," he went
on. "He is a grafter in small ways, and he'd sell me out in a minute if
he felt like it and could see any chance of making capital for himself."
"Then don't go to him with your scheme," urged Frisbie. "If you enlist
him, you won't be sure of him; and if you don't, you'll merely leave an
active opponent behind you instead of a passive one."
"I guess you're right, Dick; but I'll have to be governed by conditions
as I find them. Aside from North's influence with Mr. Colbrith, which is
considerable, I believe, he can't do much to help. But he can do a
tremendous lot to hinder. I think I shall try to choke him with butter,
if I can."
Notwithstanding the general manager's letter, Ford took the train for
Denver the following morning, and the chief clerk remarked that he
checked a small steamer trunk in addition to his hand baggage.
"Going to be gone some time, Mr. Ford?" he asked, when he brought the
night mail down for the superintendent to look over.
"Yes," said Ford absently.
"You'll let me know where to reach you from time to time, I suppose?"
ventured Penfield.
Ford looked up quickly.
"It won't be necessary. You can handle the office work, as you have
heretofore, and Mr. Frisbie will have full charge out of doors."
Penfield looked a little crestfallen.
"Am I to take orders from Mr. Frisbie?" he asked, as one determined to
know the worst.
"Just the same as you would from me," said the superintendent, swinging
up to the step of the moving car. And the chief clerk went back to his
office busily concocting another cipher message to the general manager.
On the way down the canyon Ford was saying to himself that he was now
fairly committed to the scheme over which he had spent so many toilful
days and sleepless nights, and that he would have it out with Mr. North
to a fighting conclusion before he slept.
But a freight wreck got in the way while the down passenger train was
measuring the final third of the distance, and it was long after office
hours in the Pacific Southwestern headquarters when Ford reached Denver.
By consequence, the crucial interview with the general manager had to be
postponed; and the enthusiast was chafing at his ill luck when he went
to his hotel--chafing and saying hard words, for the waiting had been
long, and now that the psychologic moment had arrived, delays were
intolerable.
Now it sometimes happens that seeming misfortunes are only blessings in
disguise. When Ford entered the hotel café to eat his belated dinner, he
saw Evans, the P. S-W. auditor, sitting alone at a table-for-two. He
crossed the room quickly and shook hands with the man he had meant to
interview either before or after the meeting with North.
It was after they had chatted comfortably through to the coffee that
the auditor said, blandly: "What are you down for, Ford?--anything
special?"
"Yes. I am down to get leave of absence to go East," said Ford warily.
"But that isn't all," was the quiet rejoinder. "In fact, it's only the
non-committal item that you'd give to a _Rocky Mountain News_ reporter."
Ford was impatient of diplomatic methods when there was no occasion for
them.
"Give it a name," he said bluntly. "What do you think you know, Evans?"
The auditor smiled.
"There is a leak in your office up at Saint's Rest, I'm afraid. What
sort of a bombshell are you fixing to fire at Mr. North?"
Ford grew interested at once.
"Tell me what you know, and perhaps I can piece it out for you."
"I'll tell you what Mr. North knows--which will be more to the purpose,
perhaps. For a year or more you have been figuring on some kind of a
scheme to pull the company's financial leg in behalf of your
good-for-nothing narrow gauge. A month ago, for example, you went all
over the old survey on the other side of the mountains and verified the
original S. L & W. preliminaries and rights-of-way on its proposed
extension."
Ford's eyes narrowed. He was thinking of the warning letter he would
have to write to Frisbie. But what he said was:
"I'd like to know how the dickens you guessed all that. But no matter;
supposing I did?"
"It's no good," said the auditor, shaking his head. "I'm talking as a
friend. North doesn't like you, personally; and if he did, you couldn't
persuade him to recommend anything in the way of an experiment on the
Plug Mountain. So far from extending your two-by-four branch--if that is
what you have in mind--he'd be much more likely to counsel its
abandonment, if the charter didn't require us to keep it going."
Ford found a cigar for the auditor, and lighted one for himself.
"From all of which I infer that the semiannual report of the Pacific
Southwestern is going to be a pretty bad one," he said, with carefully
assumed indifference.
Evans regarded him shrewdly.
"Are you guessing at that? Or is there a leak at our end of the line as
well as at yours?"
"Oh, it's a guess," laughed Ford. "Call it that, anyhow. At least, I
haven't any of your confidential clerks in my pay. But just how bad is
the report going to be?"
The auditor shook his head.
"Worse than the last one. Perhaps you have noticed that the stock has
dropped six points in the past week. You're one of the official family:
I don't mind telling you that we are in the nine-hole, Ford."
"Of course we are," said Ford, with calm conviction. "That much is
pretty evident to a man who merely reads the Wall Street news bulletins.
What is the matter with us--specifically, I mean?"
Evans shrugged.
"Are you a division superintendent on the system and don't know?" he
demanded. "We are too short at both ends. With our eastern terminal only
half-way to Chicago, we can't control the east-bound grain which grows
on our own line; and with the other end stopping short here at Denver,
we can't bid for west-bound transcontinental business. It's as simple as
twice two. Our competitors catch us going and coming."
"Precisely. And if we don't get relief?"
The auditor smiled grimly.
"As I've said, you're one of us, Ford, and I don't mind speaking freely
to you. A receivership is looming in the distance, and the not very dim
distance, for the P. S-W."
"I thought so. How near is it?"
"I don't know--nobody knows definitely. If we had a man of resources at
the head of things--as we have not--it might be stood off for another
six months."
"I'm on the way to stand it off permanently, if I can get any backing,"
said Ford quietly.
"You!" was the astonished reply.
"Yes, I. Listen, Evans. For two years I have been buried up yonder in
the hills, with not enough to do in the summer season to keep me out of
mischief. I am rather fond of mathematics, and I am telling you I have
this thing figured out to the fourth decimal. If President Colbrith and
his associates can be made to see that the multiplication of two by two
gives an invariable resultant of four, there will be no receivership for
the P. S-W. this year, or next."
"Show me," said the auditor.
Ford hesitated for a moment. Then he took a packet of papers, estimates,
exhibits and fine-lined engineer's maps from his pocket and tossed it
across the table.
"That is for you, personally--for David Evans; not the P. S-W. auditor.
You've got to keep it to yourself."
The auditor went through the papers carefully, shifting his cigar slowly
from one corner of his mouth to the other as he read and examined. When
he handed them back he was shaking his head, almost mournfully.
"It's a big thing, Ford; the biggest kind of a thing. And it is
beautifully worked out. But I know our people, here and in New York.
They will simply give you the cold stare and say that you are crazy."
"Because it can't be financed?"
"Because it doesn't come from Hill or Harriman or Morgan, or some other
one of the big captains. You'll never be able to stand it upon its feet
by your single-handed lonesome."
Ford set his teeth, and his clean-cut face seemed to grow suddenly older
and harder as the man in him came to the fore.
"By heavens! if I put my back under it, it's got to stand upon its feet!
I'm not going into it with the idea that there is any such thing in the
book as failure."
The auditor looked darkly into the cool gray eyes of the man facing him.
"Then let me give you a word of advice before you start in. Skip North,
absolutely; don't breathe a word of it to him. Don't ask me why; but do
as I say. And another thing: drop into my office to-morrow before you
leave. I'll show you some figures that may help you to stir things up
properly at the New York end. Do you go direct from here?"
"No; I shall have to stop over a few days in Chicago. I know pretty well
where to put my hands on what I need; I have laid the foundations from
the bottom up by correspondence. But I want to go over the situation on
the ground before I make my grand-stand play before Mr. Colbrith and the
board of directors."
"Well, come in and get the figures, anyway: come to the private door of
my office and rap three times. It will be just as well if it isn't
generally known that you are confabbing with me. Our semiannual report
will probably be in New York ahead of you, but it won't hurt if you have
the information to work with." Evans was pushing his chair from the
table when he added: "By the way, you happened upon the exact
psychological moment to make your raid; the report coming out, and
things going to the dogs generally."
Ford's laugh was genially shrewd.
"Perhaps it wasn't so much of a happening as it appears. Didn't I tell
you that I had figured this thing out to the fourth decimal place?
Psychological moments are bigger arguments than dollars and cents,
sometimes."
The auditor had taken his hat from the waiter and was shaking hands with
his dinner companion.
"I'd like to believe you're a winner, Ford; you deserve to be. Come and
see me--and make your call upon Mr. North as brief as possible. He'll
probe you if you don't."
This was how it came about that the next morning, when Ford went to call
upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the glass
door lettered "General Manager, Private,"--this after half an hour spent
in Auditor Evans' private office,--it was only to ask for leave of
absence to go East--on business of a personal nature, he explained, when
Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.
III
LOSS AND DAMAGE
At this period of his existence, Stuart Ford troubled himself as little
as any anchorite of the desert about the eternal feminine.
It was not that he was more or less than a man, or in any sense that
anomalous and impossible thing called a woman-hater. On the contrary,
his attitude toward women in the mass was distinctly and at times
boyishly sentimental. But when a young man is honestly in love with his
calling, and is fully convinced of its importance to himself and to a
restlessly progressive world, single-heartedness becomes his watchword,
and what sentiment there is in him will be apt to lie comfortably
dormant.
For six full working-days Ford had been immersed to the eyes in the
intricacies of his railway problem, acquiring in Chicago a valiseful of
documentary data that demanded to be classified and thoroughly digested
before he reached New York and the battle-field actual. This was why he
was able to ride all day in studious abstraction in his section of the
Chicago-New York Pullman, without so much as a glance for the young
woman in the modest gray traveling coat directly across the aisle.
She was well worth the glance, as he admitted willingly enough
afterward. She was the dainty type, with fluffy bright brown hair, eyes
the color of wood violets, a nose tilted to the precise angle of
bewitching piquancy, and the adorable mouth and chin familiarized to two
continents by the artistic pen of the Apostle of the American Girl. How
he could have ridden within arm's reach of her through all the daylight
hours of a long summer day remained as one of Ford's unanswered enigmas;
but it required an accident and a most embarrassing _contretemps_ to
make him aware of her existence.
The accident was one of the absurd sort. The call for dinner in the
dining-car had been given, and Ford was just behind the young woman in
the rear of the procession which filed forward out of the Pullman. The
train had at that moment left a way station, and the right-hand
vestibule door was still open and swinging disjointedly across the
narrow passage. Ford reached an arm past the young woman to fold the
two-leaved door out of her way. As he did it, the door-knob hooked
itself mischievously in the loop of her belt chatelaine, snatched it
loose, and flung it out into the backward-rushing night.
Whereupon: "Oh!--my purse!" with a little gasp of sudden bereavement,
and a quick turning to face the would-be helper.
Ford was honestly aghast when the situation fully enveloped him.
"Heavens and earth! Did you ever see such idiotic clumsiness!" he
ejaculated. And then, in deepest contrition: "I won't attempt to
apologize--it's beyond all that. But you must let me make your loss
good."
In all the pin-pricking embarrassment of the moment, he did not fail to
remark that she quickly recovered the serenity which belongs to the
well-bred. She was even smiling, rather ruefully, when she said:
"Fortunately, the conductor has my passes. But really"--and now she
laughed outright--"I am afraid I shall have to go hungry if I can't
borrow enough to pay for my dinner."
Another man, a man less purposefully lost in the purely practical
labyrinth of professional work, would have found something fitting to
say. But Ford, having discovered a thing to do, did it painstakingly and
in solemn silence. There was an unoccupied table for two in the
dining-car; he seated her, gave her his purse, called a waiter, and
would have betaken himself forthwith to another table if she had not
detained him.
"No," she said decisively, with a charming little uptilt of the adorable
chin. "I do not forget that you were trying to do me a kindness. Please
sit down here and take your purse. I'm sure I don't want it."
He obeyed, still in somber silence, gave his dinner order after she had
given hers, and was wondering if he might venture to bury himself in a
bundle of the data papers, when she spoke again.
"Are you provoked with yourself, or with me?" she asked--rather
mockingly, he thought.
"Neither," he said promptly. "I was merely saying to myself that my
wretched awkwardness didn't give me an excuse for boring you."
"It was an accident--nothing more or less," she rejoined, with an air of
dismissing finally the purse-snatching episode. Then she added: "I am
the one who ought to be embarrassed."
"But you are not," he returned quickly. "You are quite the mistress of
yourself--which is more than most women would be, under the
circumstances."
"Is that a compliment?" she asked, with latent mockery in the violet
eyes. "Because if it is, I think you must be out of the West; the--the
unfettered West: isn't that what it is called?"
"I am," Ford acknowledged. "But why do you say that? Was I rude? I beg
you to believe that I didn't mean to be."
"Oh, no; not rude--merely sincere. We are not sincere any more, I think;
except on the frontier edges of us. Are we?"
Ford took exceptions to the charge for the sheer pleasure of hearing her
talk.
"I'd be sorry to believe that," he protested. "The conventions account
for something, of course; and I suppose the polite lie which deceives no
one has to have standing-room. But every now and then one is surprised
into telling the truth, don't you think?"
"If I can't fully agree with you, I can at least admire your point of
view," she said amiably. "Is it Western--or merely human?"
He laughed.
"Shall we assume that the one implies the other? That would be in
accordance with your point of view, wouldn't it?"
"Yes; but it would be a distinct reversal of yours. Truth belongs to
another and simpler time than ours. We are conventional first and
everything else afterward."
"Are we?" he queried. "Some few hundreds or thousands of us may be; but
for the remainder of our eighty-odd millions the conventions are things
to be put on and off like Sunday garments. And even the chosen few of
us brush them aside upon occasion; ignore them utterly, as we two are
ignoring them at this moment."
She proved his assertion by continuing to talk to him, and the
dining-car was emptying itself when they realized that there is an end
even to a most leisurely dinner. Ford paid the steward as they left the
car, but in the Pullman he went back to first principles and insisted
upon some kind of a definite accounting for the lost purse.
"Now you will tell me now much I threw away for you, and I'll pay my
debt," he said, when she had hospitably made room for him in the
opposing seat of her section.
"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind!" she asserted. "You will give
me your card--we're going back to the conventions now--and when we reach
the city you may lend me enough money to take me up-town. And to-morrow
morning my brother will pay you back."
He gave in because he had to.
"You are much more lenient than I deserve. Really, you ought to stick me
good and hard for my awkwardness. It would serve me right."
"I am considering the motive," she said almost wistfully, he fancied.
"We have drifted very far from all those quiet anchorages of courtesy
and helpfulness. If we lived simpler lives--"
He smiled at the turn she was giving it.
"Are you, too, bitten with the fad of the moment, 'the simple life'?" he
asked. "Let me assure you that it is beautiful only when you can look
down upon it from the safe altitude of a comfortable income. I know,
because I've been living it for the past two years."
She looked as if she were sorry for him.
"That is rank heresy!" she declared. "Our forefathers had the better of
us in many ways, and their simpler manner of living was one of them.
They had time for all the little courtesies and kindnesses that make
life truly worth living."
Ford's laugh was boyishly derisive.
"Yes; they certainly had plenty of time; but they didn't have much else.
Why, just think, for a moment, of what our own America would be if
merely one of the modern civilizers, the railroads, had never existed.
There simply wouldn't be any America, as we know it now."
"How can you say that?"
"Because it is so. For nearly two centuries we stood still, because
there were no means of locomotion--which is another word for progress
and civilization. But in less than fifty years after the first railroad
was built we had become a great nation."
She was silenced, if not wholly convinced; and a few minutes later the
train drew into the Forty-second Street Station. When the parting time
came, Ford dutifully gathered her belongings, said good-by, and put her
on a north-bound subway; all this without remembering that he did not
know her name. The recollection came, however, when the subway train
shot away into the tunnel.
"Of all the blockheads!" he growled, apostrophizing his own unreadiness.
"But I'll find her again. She said she'd send her brother to the hotel
with the dinner money, and when I get hold of him it will go hard with
me if I don't manage some way to get an introduction."
This was what was in his mind when he sought the down-town hotel whose
name he had written on his card for her; it was his latest waking
thought when he went to sleep that night, and his earliest when he awoke
the following morning.
But when he went to the clerk's desk, after a leisurely breakfast, to
get his mail, he found that the sure thread of identification had broken
in his fingers. There was a square envelope among the other letters in
his key-box containing the exact amount of the young woman's
indebtedness to him; this, with a brief note of thanks--unsigned.
IV
COLD STORAGE
If courage, of the kind fitted to lead forlorn hopes, or marchings
undaunted up to the muzzles of loaded cannon, be a matter of gifts and
temperament, it is also in some degree a matter of environment.
Stuart Ford was Western born and bred; a product of the wider breathing
spaces. Given his proper battle-field, where the obstacles were
elemental and the foes to be overcome were mere men of flesh and blood
fighting freely in the open, he was a match for the lustiest. But New
York, with its submerging, jostling multitudes, its thickly crowding
human vastness, and, more than all, its atmosphere of dollar-chasing,
apparent and oppressive even to the transient passer-by, disheartened
him curiously.
It was not that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that
matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging,
striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to
be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their
work,--of narrowing, as well as of broadening,--and the plunge into the
chilling sea of the money-mad metropolis made him shiver and wish he
were out.
This feeling was really at the bottom of the late rising and the
leisurely breakfast, making him temporize where he had meant to be
prompt, energetic and vigorously aggressive. Having pocketed the young
woman's unsigned note, he glanced at his watch and decided that it was
still too early to go in search of President Colbrith.