the consequent larger field. Later, enough money to enable me to think
of money only as a stepping-stone to better things. Later still,
perhaps--"
He stopped abruptly, as though willing to leave the third desideratum in
the air, but she would not let him.
"Go on," she said. "Last of all?"
"Last of all, the love of a true woman."
"Oh!" she scoffed, with a little uptilt of the admirable chin. "Then
love must come trailing along at the very end, after we have skimmed
the cream from all the other milk pans in orderly succession."
"No," he rejoined gravely. "I put it clumsily--as I snatch purses. As a
matter of sober fact, love sets the mile-stones along any human road
that is worth traversing."
She glanced up at him and the blue eyes were dancing. Miss Alicia Adair
knew no joy to compare with that of teasing, and it was not often that
the fates gave her such a pliable subject.
"Tell me, Mr. Ford; is--is she pretty?"
"She is beautiful; the most beautiful woman in the world, Miss Adair."
"How fine! And, of course, she is a paragon of all the virtues?--an
angel without the extremely inconvenient wings?"
"You have said it: and I have never doubted it from the moment I first
laid eyes on her."
"Better and better," she murmured. Then: "She has money?"
"I suppose she has; yes, she certainly has money. But that doesn't make
any difference--to her or to me."
"It is simply idyllic!" was the ecstatic comment. "After all this there
remains but one other possible contingency. Has she a willing mind, Mr.
Ford?"
They had reached the steps of the Nadia, and the others had gone within.
Ford looked soberly into the depths of the laughing eyes and said: "I
would give all my chances of success in this Pacific Southwestern affair
to be able to say 'yes' to that."
The station gong was clanging the departure signal for the New York
train, and he swung her lightly up to the step of the car.
"Good-by," she said, turning to smile down upon him. And then, "I don't
believe you, you know; not the least bit in the world."
"Why don't you?" he demanded.
"Because the woman doesn't live who would be worth such a sacrifice as
that would be--to Mr. Stuart Ford."
And this was her leave-taking.
X
THE SINEWS OF WAR
The general offices of the C. P. & D. Railway were crowded into a
half-dozen utilitarian rooms on the second floor of the company's
freight station building in the Chicago yards. In two of these rooms,
with a window outlook upon a tangle of switching tracks with their
shifting panorama of cars and locomotives, Ford set up his standard as
chief executive of the three "annexed" roads, becoming, in the eyes of
three separate republics of minor officials and employees, the arbiter
of destiny.
Naturally, the announcement that their railroads had been swallowed
whole by the Pacific Southwestern had fallen as a thunderclap upon the
rank and file of the three local companies; and since, in railway
practice, a change of owners usually carries with it a sweeping change
in department heads, the service was instantly demoralized.
During the first few hours of Ford's administration, therefore, the
wires were buzzing with hasty resignations; and those whose courage was
not whetted to the quitting point took a loose hold upon their duties
and waited to see what would happen. Under such chaotic conditions Ford
took his seat in the mean little office over the freight station, and
flung himself ardently into the task of bringing order out of the sudden
confusion. Effectively to support Adair and the reconstructionists on
the board it was critically necessary that there be immediate and
cheering news from the front.
It was in the preliminary wrestle with disintegration that the young
engineer's gift of insight and his faculty of handling men as men stood
him in good stead. He was fresh from his trip over the new extension, on
which he had met and shrewdly appraised the men who were now his
subordinates. With the human field thus mentally mapped and
cross-sectioned he was enabled to make swift and sure selections,
cutting out the dead timber remorselessly, encouraging the doubtful,
reassuring the timid, assorting and combining and ordering until, at the
close of the second day of fierce toil, he was ready to make his first
report to Adair.
Track connections at junction points completed to-day. General and
division operating and traffic departments in the saddle and
effectively organized. With proper coöperation on part of General
Manager North, grain should begin to move eastward to-morrow. Can
get no satisfactory replies from North. Have him disciplined from
your end. Answer. FORD.
To this telegram there was a prompt and voluminous reply from the seat
of war in the East. In a free fight on the Stock Exchange, a battle
royal generaled by Brewster and Magnus in which every inch of ground had
been sharply contested by brokers buying up P. S-W. in the interest of
principals unnamed, a majority of the Southwestern stock--safe but
exceedingly narrow--had been secured by the reconstructionists.
In accordance with Ford's suggestion, North had been "called down" by
wire, and Ford was instructed to report instantly any failure of effort
on the part of the Denver headquarters to set the grain trains in
motion.
Otherwise, and from the New York point of view, the situation remained
most hopeful. The fight in the Street had unified the factions in the
board of directors, and even the timid ones were beginning to clamor for
an advance into the territory of the enemy.
Ford read Adair's letter-length and most unbusiness-like telegram with
the zest of the fine wine of triumph tingling in his blood. With the
Chicago outlet fairly open and in working order, and a huge tributary
grain crop to be moved, it should be only a matter of days until the
depressed Pacific Southwestern stock would begin to climb toward the
bonding figure.
This was the first triumphant conclusion, but afterward came reaction
and a depressive doubt. Would the stock go up? Or would the enemy devise
some assault that would keep it down in spite of the money-earning,
dividend-promising facts? Upon the expected rise hung the fate of Ford's
cherished ambition--the building of the western extension. Without a
dividend-paying Chicago-Denver main line, there could be no bond issue,
no thirty millions for the forging of the third and most important link
in the great traffic chain.
Ford walked the floor of his office, called by courtesy, "private," for
an anxious hour, balancing the probabilities, and finally determined to
take the desperate chance. There was a vast mountain of preliminary work
to be leveled, huge purchasing expenses to be incurred, before the first
step could be taken in the actual building of the western extension; and
the summer was advancing day by day. He did not hope to get the
extension completed in a single season. But to get it over into the
promising mining field on the lower Pannikin before snow-flying meant
work of the keenest, without the loss of a single day. Could he afford
to play the safe game and wait until the building capital should be
cannily in Mr. Magnus' bank vaults?
He decided that he could not; and when he reached a decision, Ford was
not the man to hesitate before taking the plunge. On the morning of the
third day he called Truitt, sometime superintendent of the C. P. & D.,
and now acting manager of the Chicago Extension, and gave him his
instructions.
"You say there are three grain trains moving on the line now, Mr.
Truitt: there will be three more before night. Keep them coming, and
give them the right of way over everything but the United States mails.
Can you handle this without help from me?"
"We'll give it a pretty stiff try," was the prompt rejoinder. "But you
are not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Ford?"
"No; but for the next forty-eight hours I am going to lock my door, and
I don't want to be disturbed for anything less than a disaster or a wire
from New York. Please give orders accordingly, will you?"
The orders were given; and, left with his force of stenographers, Ford
began to walk the floor, dictating right and left. Letters and telegrams
to steel mills, to contractors, to bridge builders, to the owners of
grading outfits, and to labor agencies, clicked out of the typewriters
in a steady and unbroken stream, and the din was like that of a
main-line telegraph office on a hot piece of track.
All day long, and far into the night, the office force wrought
unceasingly, digging away at the mountain of preliminary correspondence;
and by the next morning the wire replies were beginning to come in.
Then came the crux. To insure prompt delivery of material, definite
orders must be placed immediately. A delay of a single day might entail
a delay of weeks in the shipments. Yet the risk of plunging the company
into debts it might never be able to pay was appalling. What if the
stock should not go up as prefigured?--if the bonds could not be
floated?
It was with the feeling that he might well be signing his own
death-warrant that Ford put his name to the first order for two hundred
thousand dollars' worth of steel rails for immediate delivery to the
company's line in Chicago. But after the first cold submergence it came
more easily, and when he left the office an hour before midnight, a cool
million would not have covered the obligations he had assumed during the
strenuous day.
Kenneth was sitting up for him when he reached his hotel, and the
usually impassive face of the general counsel reflected trouble.
"Out with it," said Ford wearily; and suddenly the new million of
indebtedness became a mountain weight to grind him to powder.
"We're blocked," was the brief announcement. "Two of the grain trains
are in, and the Transcontinental lawyers have won the toss. We're
enjoined by the court from using the service tracks to the elevators.
Didn't your local people tell you?"
"No," said Ford. "I had given orders that I was not to be disturbed. But
what of it? You expected something of the sort, didn't you?"
"Yes; and I provided for it. The injunction will be dissolved when we
have our final hearing; but long before that time the mischief will be
irreparable, I'm afraid."
"How?"
"It will be blazoned far and wide that we can't deliver the goods--that
the opposition has done us up. I've tried to keep it out of the
newspapers, or, rather, to persuade them not to make too much of it. But
it wouldn't go. The Transcontinental has all the pull in this town, it
appears."
"And you think it will affect the price of the stock?"
"It is bound to, temporarily, at least. And coming upon the heels of
to-day's sudden tumble--"
"What's that?" demanded Ford, dry-lipped, adding: "I haven't seen a
paper since morning."
Kenneth wagged his head gloomily. "It's pretty bad. P. S-W. closed at
thirty-three--five points off yesterday's market."
"Good Lord!" Ford's groan was that of a man smitten down in the heat of
the fight. "Say, Kenneth, within a single sweep of the clock-hands I
have contracted for more than a million dollars' worth of material for
the western extension--more than a million dollars' worth!"
"Well, I'm afraid you have sinned in haste to repent at leisure," said
the lawyer, with a weary man's disregard for the amenities. Then he
added: "I'm going to bed. I've had about all I can stand for one day."
Ford went to the room clerk for his key; reeled would be the better
word, since his brain was whirling. There was a telegram in his box, and
he tore it open with fresh and sharper misgivings. It was from Adair.
The sick man's getting sicker. What is the matter with your
prescription? Stock gone off five points, and the bears are
squeezing us to beat the band. Stories flying on the Street that we
are a kite without an effective tail; that the courts will keep us
out of the elevators. What do you say?
Ford consulted his watch. There was barely time to catch the midnight
train for New York, and his determination was taken on the spur of the
moment. It was all or nothing, now.
Hastily writing a wire to the cashier of the Denver bank where he kept
his personal account, and another to Adair, and leaving brief notes for
Kenneth and Truitt, he took a cab and had himself driven at a gallop to
the Union Station. He was the last man through the platform gates, but
he made his train, and was settling himself in the sleeper when another
telegram was thrust into his hand. This was from Frisbie, at Saint's
Rest; and that it brought more bad news might be argued from the way in
which he crushed it slowly in his hand and jammed it into his pocket. On
this day, if never before, he was proving the truth of the old adage
that misfortunes do not come singly.
Upon arriving in New York late the following evening, he had himself
driven to the Waldorf, where he found Adair waiting for him. A few words
sufficed to outline the situation, which the lapse of another day had
made still more desperate. So far from recovering, the falling stock had
dropped to twenty-nine and a half, and there was every indication that
the bottom was not yet reached.
"How do you account for it?" asked Ford, when the dismal tale had been
told.
"Oh, it's easy enough, when you know how," was the light-hearted
rejoinder. "As I wired you, there was something of a scramble on the
floor of the Exchange last week when we were fighting to find out
whether we should control our own majority or let the Transcontinental
have it. Our pool got its fifty-one per cent. all right, but in the
nature of things the enemy stood as the next largest stock-holder in
P. S-W., since they'd been buying right and left against us. Now, since
we don't need any more, and nobody else wants it, all the
Transcontinental people have to do is to unload on the market, and down
she goes."
Ford looked incredulous, and then wrathful.
"Adair, tell me: did I have to stop my work when my time is worth fifty
dollars a minute, and come all the way to New York to tell you folks
what to do?" he demanded.
Adair's laugh was utterly and absolutely care-free.
"It looks that way, doesn't it? Have you got the compelling club up your
sleeve, as usual?"
"A boy might carry it--and swing it, too," was the disgusted answer.
"When does the board meet again? Or has it concluded to lie down in the
harness?"
"Oh, it gets together every morning--got the meeting habit, you know.
Everybody's in a blue funk, but we still have the daily round-up to swap
funeral statistics."
"All right. Meet me here in the morning, and we'll go and join the
procession. Can you make it nine o'clock?"
"Sure. It's too late to go home, and I'll stay here. Then you'll be
measurably certain that I can't escape. May I see the tip end of the
club?"
"No," said Ford grumpily. "You don't deserve it. Go to bed and store up
a head of steam that will carry you through the hardest day's work you
ever hoped to do. Good night."
They met again at the breakfast-table the following morning, and Ford
talked pointedly of everything save the P. S-W. predicament. One of
Adair's past fads had been the collecting of odd weapons; Ford
discovered this and drew the young man skilfully into a discussion of
the medieval secrets of sword-tempering.
"I've a bit of the old Damascus, myself," said the engineer. "Tybee--he
was on the Joppa-Jerusalem road in the building--picked it up for me.
Curious piece of old steel; figured and flowered and etched and inlaid
with silver. There were jewels in the pommel once, I take it; the
settings are still there to show where some practical-turned vandal dug
them out."
Adair was quite at a loss to guess how old swords and their histories
could bear upon the financial situation, but he was coming to know Ford
better. Some one has said that it is only the small men who are careful
and troubled on the eve of a great battle. So the talk was of ancient
weapons until the time for action arrived; and a smooth-faced gentleman
sitting at a near-by table and marked down by Ford--though not by Ford's
companion--listened for some word of enlightenment on the railroad
situation, and was cruelly disappointed.
"Why wouldn't you talk?" asked Adair, when they were driving down-town
in the young millionaire's auto. "Or rather, why did you persist in
keeping me to the old swords?"
Ford laughed.
"For one reason, I enjoy the old swords--as a relaxation. For another,
Mr. Jeffers Hawley, who was once one of the Transcontinental lawyers in
Denver, was sitting just behind you, with eager ears. You didn't know
that. Hold on a minute; tell your man to stop at the Chemical Bank. I
want you to introduce me to the cashier."
"Now, what the deuce are you starting a New York bank account for?"
queried Adair, as they came out of the bank together and climbed into
the tonneau of the waiting touring car. "Couldn't you draw on the
treasurer? What's the use of your being the assistant to the president,
I'd like to know?"
"Wait," was the answer; and the questioner waited, perforce.
The board was already in session when the two young men were admitted to
the private room in the rear of the Broad Street offices, and Ford was
welcomed as a man who has recklessly steered the ship upon the rocks.
There were even some open recriminations, notably on the part of the
president; but Ford sat quietly under them, making no defense, and
folding and refolding a slip of paper in his fingers as he listened.
When they gave him leave to speak, he still made no attempt to explain.
Instead, he rose, walked to the other end of the table, and tossed the
bit of folded paper across to Mackie, the broker.
"I inherited a little money, and I have made and saved enough more to
make it an even twenty thousand dollars," he said. "I don't know of any
more promising investment just now than Pacific Southwestern at
twenty-nine and a half. Will you be good enough to buy for my account,
Mr. Mackie?"
The effect was electrical. President Colbrith sat up very straight in
his chair; two or three of the anxious ones opened on Ford with a rapid
fire of questions; and Brewster, the copper magnate, sat back and
chuckled softly in his beard.
"No, gentlemen; there is no change in the situation, so far as I know.
Of course, you are not so foolish as to let the newspaper talk of the
tie-up at the Chicago elevators influence you," Ford was saying to the
anxious inquirers. "And, apart from that, everything is going our way.
As I have remarked, our stock at the present figure is good enough for
me, and I only wish I had two hundred thousand, instead of twenty
thousand, to put into it."
Brewster stopped chuckling long enough to hold up a finger to the
broker. "You may buy for my account, too, Mackie, while you are at
it--and keep on buying till I tell you to quit."
This broke the deadlock instantly, and for a few minutes the board room
was as noisy as the wheat pit with a corner threatening. Brewster, still
laughing in his beard, pulled Ford out of the press at the broker's end
of the table.
"I'm going to ask only one thing of you, young man," he began, his
shrewd little eyes twinkling. "Just let me know when you are going to
get out, so I can pull through without having to take the bankruptcy."
[Illustration: "Will you be good enough to buy for my account, Mr.
Mackie"]
"I'll do it, Mr. Brewster," laughed Ford. "Only I'm not going to get
out--unless you folks freeze me out."
"Then it isn't a long bluff on your part?"
"It is, and it isn't. We still stand to win if we have the nerve to hold
on--in which event P. S-W. at twenty-nine and a fraction is a gold mine.
That's one view of it, and the other is this: we've simply _got_ to
corner our own stock if we expect to sell thirty millions additional
bonds."
"Well, I guess you've gone the right way about it. But are you sure
about these Chicago terminals? A legal friend of mine here says you'll
never get in."
"He was possibly paid to say it," said Ford hotly. "There has never been
a shadow of doubt touching our trackage rights on the C. P. & D.
contracts, or upon our ability to maintain them. All the
Transcontinental people hoped to do was to make a newspaper stir to help
keep our stock down. They know what we are going to do to them over in
their western territory, and they won't stop at anything to block us."
"Of course; I think we were all inclined to be a little short-sighted
and pessimistic here, Mr. Ford. When do you go back to your fighting
ground?"
"To-night."
"You won't wait to see what happens here?"
"I don't need to, I am sure. And the minutes--my minutes--are worth
dollars to the company just now."
"Well, go in and win--only don't forget to give me that tip. You
wouldn't want to see a man of my age going to the poorhouse."
"One other word, Mr. Brewster," Ford begged, as the copper magnate was
pointing for the door of escape. "Please don't let any of these timid
gentlemen sell till we get our bonds floated. You mark my word: the
temptation to make a big killing is going to be very great, within a
week."
The copper king laughed; openly, this time.
"You overrate my influence, Mr. Ford; but I'll do what I can--by word of
mouth and by example. You can count on me--as long as you let me stay on
your side of the market."
Ford had three several invitations to luncheon after the meeting
adjourned, but he accepted none of them. To Adair he made the
declination courteous while they were trundling back to the Waldorf in
the big touring car.
"I have lost an entire day because I could not take the time to secure a
stenographer before leaving Chicago night before last. I must find one
now and go to work."
"All right; if you must. But I was hoping I could take you out to
Overlook to dinner this evening. Can't you come anyhow, and take a later
train west?"
"Don't tempt me," said Ford. And then: "The ladies are quite well, I
hope?"
"Oh, yes; they are in town to-day, and we are all going to luncheon
together--though I shan't know just where until I go to the club.
Failing the dinner, won't you make a knife and fork with us at one
o'clock?"
"I should like to--more than anything else in the world," Ford
protested, meaning it. "But you'll make my excuses to Mrs. Adair, won't
you? We've simply got to get a three-cornered hustle on now, if we want
to save the day in the West."
"Why? Is there anything new in that quarter?"
"There is: something that I didn't dare to mention back yonder in the
board meeting. You may remember that I told you I had left a man in my
place on the Plug Mountain--Frisbie? I had a wire from him, night before
last, just as I was leaving Chicago. As you know, the Pacific
Southwestern inherits, from the old narrow-gauge purchase, the
right-of-way over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin. Frisbie
wires that the Transcontinental people have begun massing building
material at the terminus of their Saguache branch, only twenty miles
from the Pass."
"And that means?--I'm lame on geography."
"It means that they'll cut in ahead of us, if they can. Plug Pass is the
only available unoccupied outlet through the mountains for thirty or
forty miles north or south; and if we don't get our building force on
the ground mighty suddenly, we'll find it fortified and held by the
enemy."
The touring car had turned into Broadway, and the traffic roar precluded
further talk. But when Ford was dismounting from the tonneau at the
entrance to his hotel, Adair said: "There appears to be no rest for the
wicked. You ought to have some of that thirty million dollars to spend
right now."
Ford's smile was little more than a sardonic grin.
"Adair," he said, "I'm going to tell you something else that I didn't
dare tell those money-tremulous people in McVeigh and Mackie's private
office. I have been signing contracts and buying material by the
train-load ever since the first grain shipment was started eastward on
our main line. Also, I've got my engineering corps mobilized, and it
will take the field under Frisbie as its chief not later than to-morrow.
Putting one thing with another, I should say that we are something over
a fresh million of dollars on the wrong side of solvency for these
little antics of mine, and I'm adding to the deficit by the hundred
thousand every time I can get a chance to dictate a letter."