Mr. Ford. I'm one of the family, if I haven't any initials after my
name. I know--we all know--that there are certain profits--not made out
of the company, of course--that a contractor is always willing to share
with his good friends, the engineers."
Ford's attitude instantly became that of a freshman wishing to learn the
ropes.
"Consider me, Mr. Eckstein," he said. "I'm new to the construction
business--or at least, I've never been at the head of it before. What
are these--er--perquisites?"
The private secretary thought he had entered the thin edge of the wedge
and he drove it heartily.
"They are perfectly legitimate, of course. The contractors run a
commissary to supply the workmen--nobody suspects them of doing it at
cost. Then there are the fines imposed to secure faithful work, the _per
capita_ commission paid on the labor sent in by the engineers, the
discounts on time-checks, the weekly hospital and insurance dues
collected from the men. All those things amount to a good round profit
on a contract like ours."
"To about how much, in figures, should you say?" queried Ford, with an
air of the deepest interest.
"To enough to make your share, as head of the construction department,
touch ten thousand a year, on a job as big as ours--with a liberal
provision for Mr. Frisbie, besides."
Ford blew reflective smoke rings toward the ceiling for a full minute or
more before he said quietly: "Do I understand that you are authorized to
guarantee me ten thousand a year in commissions from the MacMorrogh
Brothers, Mr. Eckstein?"
Eckstein laughed.
"You forget that I'm only a clerk, and an onlooker, as you may say. But
if you accept MacMorrogh's bid, and he doesn't do the square thing by
you and Mr. Frisbie, you may call me in as a witness, Mr. Ford. Does
that clear up the doubt?"
"Perfectly," was the quiet rejoinder. "Under these conditions, I suppose
it is up to me to wire the executive committee, withdrawing my
objections to the MacMorroghs, isn't it?"
"That is the one thing Mr. MacMorrogh asks." The secretary whipped out a
note-book and pencil. "Shall I take your message? I can send it when I
go back to the office."
"Thank you," said Ford; then he began to dictate, slowly and
methodically: "To S.J. Colbrith, care McVeigh and Mackie, New York. This
is to recall my objections to MacMorrogh Brothers, as stated in letter
of the twenty-fifth from Chicago. Further investigation develops the
fact that they are quite honest and capable, and that they will pay me
ten thousand dollars a year for withdrawing my opposition."
Eckstein's pencil had stopped and he was gasping for breath.
"Great Scott!" he ejaculated. "That won't do, Mr. Ford! You can't put
a thing like that into a telegram to the president!"
[Illustration: Eckstein's pencil had stopped and he was gasping for
breath]
"Why not?" was the cool inquiry. "You said it was perfectly legitimate,
didn't you?"
"Yes, but--" the entrance of a waiter to clear the table provided a
merciful stop-gap, and Eckstein, hurriedly consulting his watch,
switched abruptly. "By Jove! I'm due at the office this minute to meet a
lot of cattlemen," he stammered, and escaped like a man hastening for
first aid to the mistaken.
Ford laughed long and silently when he found himself alone in the
private dining-room; and he was still chuckling by fits and starts when,
after an afternoon spent with Auditor Evans, he recounted his adventure
to Frisbie over the Brown café dinner table that evening. But Frisbie
took all the humor out of the luncheon episode when he said soberly:
"He laughs best who laughs last, Stuart. Eckstein took a fall out of you
one way, even if he did fail in the other; he kept you safely shut up at
Tortoni's while Mr. North and the chief of the MacMorroghs got away on a
special train for New York. Beard, the Union Station operator, told me.
Which means that they'll have a full day with Mr. Colbrith and the
executive committee before you can possibly get there to butt in."
"No, it doesn't; necessarily," Ford contradicted, rising suddenly and
signaling a waiter.
"What are you going to do?" queried Frisbie, dropping his knife and
fork and preparing to second his chief.
"Come and see. I'm going to get out another special train and give Mr.
North a run for his money," was the incisive answer. "Hike down to the
despatcher's office with me and help cut out the minutes."
XII
THE ENTERING WEDGE
Has civilized humanity, in the plenitude of twentieth century
sophistication, fully determined that there is no such thing as
luck?--that all things are ordered, if not by Providence, at least by an
unchangeable sequence of cause and effect?
Stuart Ford was a firm believer in the luck of the energetic; which is
to say that he regarded obstacles only as things to be beaten down and
abolished. But in the dash to overtake and pass the general manager's
one-car special, the belief was shaken almost to its reversal.
He knew the Pacific Southwestern locomotives--and something of the men
who ran them. The 1016 was one of the fast eight-wheelers; and Olson,
the engineer, who had once pulled passenger on the Plug Mountain, was
loyal and efficient. Happily, both the man and the machine were
available; and while Frisbie was calling up the division superintendent
at his house to ask the loan of his private car for the assistant to
the president, Ford was figuring the schedule with the despatcher, and
insisting upon speed--more speed.
"What's come over you big bosses, all at once?" said Darby, to whom
Ford's promotion was no bar to fellowship or free speech. "First Mr.
North wants me to schedule a special that will break the record; and now
you want to string one that will beat his record."
"Never mind my troubles, Julius," was the evasive reply. "Just you
figure to keep things out of my way and give me a clear track. Let's
see--where were we? Cheyenne Crossing at 2 a.m., water at Riddle Creek,
coal at Brockton--"
The schedule was completed when Frisbie came back to say that the 1016,
with the superintendent's car attached, was waiting on track Six. Ford
went down, looked the gift horse in the mouth, and had the running gear
of the car overhauled under his own supervision before he would give
Olson the word to go, pressing the night car inspectors into service and
making them repack the truck journals while he waited.
"I'm taking no chances," he said to Frisbie; and truly it seemed that
all the hindrances had been carefully forestalled when he finally
boarded the "01" and ordered his flagman to give Olson the signal. Yet
before the one-car train was well out of the Denver yards there was a
jolting stop, and the flagman came in to report that the engine had
dropped from the end of an open switch, blocking the main line.
Ford got out and directed the reënrailment of the 1016, carefully
refraining from bullying the big Swede, whose carelessness must have
been accountable. It was the simplest of accidents, with nothing broken
or disabled. Under ordinary conditions, fifteen minutes should have
covered the loss of time. But the very haste with which the men wrought
was fatal. Enrailing frogs have a way of turning over at the critical
instant when the wheels are climbing, and jack-screws bottomed on the
tie-ends do not always hold.
Eight several times were the jack-screws adjusted and the frogs clamped
into position; but not until the ninth trial could the perverse wheels
be induced to roll workmanlike up the inclined planes and into place on
the rails. Ford looked at his watch when his special was free of the
switches and Olson was speeding up on the first long tangent. With the
chase still in its opening mile, Mr. North's lead had been increased
from seven hours to eight.
Leaving Denver on the spur of the moment, Ford had necessarily left many
things at a standstill; and his first care, after he had assured himself
that the race was fairly begun, was to write out a handful of telegrams
designed to keep the battle alive during his enforced absence from the
firing line. The superintendent's desk was hospitably unlocked, and for
a busy half-hour Ford filled blank after blank, steadying himself
against the pounding swing of the heavily ballasted car with a
left-handed grip on the desk end. When there remained no one else to
remind, he wrote out a message to Adair, forecasting the threatened
disaster, and urging the necessity of rallying the reconstructionists on
the board of directors.
"That ought to stir him up," he said to himself, bunching Adair's
telegram with the others to be sent from the first stop where the
Western Union wires could be tapped. Then he whirled around in the swing
chair and scowled up at the little dial in the end of the car; scowled
at the speed-recorder, and went to the door to summon the flagman.
"What's the matter with Olson?" he demanded. "Has he forgotten how to
run since he left the Plug Mountain? Climb up over the coal and tell him
that forty miles an hour won't do for me to-night."
The flagman picked up his lantern and went forward; and in a minute or
two later the index finger of the speed-recorder began to mount slowly
toward the fifties. At fifty-two miles to the hour, Ford, sitting in the
observation end of the car where he could see the ghostly lines of the
rails reeling backward into the night, smelled smoke--the unmistakable
odor of burning oil. In three strides he had reached the rear platform,
and a fourth to the right-hand railing showed him one of the car-boxes
blazing to heaven.
He pulled the cord of the air-whistle, and after the stop stood by in
sour silence while the crew repacked the hot box. Since he had made the
car inspectors carefully overhaul the truck gear in the Denver station,
there was no one to swear at. Olson bossed the job, did it neatly and in
silence, and no one said anything when the fireman, in his haste to be
useful, upset the dope-kettle and got its contents well sanded before he
had overtaken it in its rolling flight down the embankment.
Ford turned away and climbed into his car at the dope-kettle incident.
There are times when retreat is the only recipe for self-restraint; and
in imagination he could see the general manager's special ticking off
the miles to the eastward while his own men were sweating over the
thrice-accursed journal-bearing under the "01."
Now, as every one knows, hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable,
are the sworn enemies of high speed. At forty miles to the hour the
journal was smoking again. At forty-five it burst into flames. Once more
it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine
tank; after which necessary preliminary Olson spoke his mind.
"Ay tank ve never get someveres vit dat hal-fer-damn brass, Meester
Ford. Ay yust see if Ay can't find 'noder wone." And he rummaged in the
car lockers till he did find another.
Unfortunately, however, the spare brass proved to be of the wrong
pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard. Olson was a trained
mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at
the misfit brass until he made it serve. But when he climbed again to
the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the
white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full
hour's run to the rear, came in sight from the observation platform of
the laboring special.
These were the inauspicious beginnings of the pursuit; and the middle
part and the ending varied only in degree. All the way up to midnight,
at which hour a station of a bigness to supply a standard brass was
reached, the tinkered journal-bearing gave trouble and killed speed. Set
once more in running order upon its full quota of sixteen practicable
wheels, the special had fallen so far behind its Denver-planned schedule
as not only to be in the way of everything else on the division, but to
find everything else in its way. Ford held on stubbornly until the lead
of the train he was trying to outrun had increased to twelve hours. Then
he gave it up, directing his crew to turn the train on the nearest "Y,"
and to ask for retracing orders to Denver. After which he went to bed in
the state-room of the borrowed car, and for the first time in his
experience was a man handsomely beaten by the perversity of insensate
things.
The request for the retracing orders was sent from Coquina; and when it
came clicking into the despatcher's office at Denver, a sleep-sodden
young man with an extinct cigar between his teeth rose up out of his
chair, stretched, yawned, and pointed for the door.
"Going to leave us, Mr. Eckstein?" said the trick despatcher who was
sitting at the train table.
"Yes. If Mr. Ford has changed his mind, I may as well go home and go to
bed."
"Reckon he forgot something, and has to come back after it?" laughed the
operator.
"Maybe," said the private secretary, and he went out, shutting the door
behind him with the bat-like softness and precision that was his
distinguishing characteristic.
The sounders were clicking monotonously when the trick man turned to the
relief operator who was checking Darby's transfer sheet.
"What do you suppose Eckstein was up to, sitting here all night, Jim?"
"Give it up," said the relief man. "Ask me something easy."
"I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars I can guess. He didn't want Mr. Ford
to make time."
The relief man looked up from his checking.
"Why? He didn't do anything. He was asleep more'n half the time."
"Don't you fool yourself," said the other. "He heard every word that
came in about that hot box. And if the hot box hadn't got in the way,
I'll bet a cockerel worth seventy-five dollars, to go with that
fifty-dollar hen, that he would have tangled me up somehow till I had
shuffled a freight train or something in Mr. Ford's way. He's Mr.
North's man, body and soul; and Mr. North doesn't love Mr. Ford."
"Oh, rats, Billy!" scoffed the relief man, getting up to fill his
corn-cob pipe from the common tobacco bag. "You're always finding a
nigger in the wood-pile, when there isn't any. Say; that's 201 asking
for orders from Calotte. Why don't you come to life and answer 'em?"
Frisbie, breakfasting early at the Brown Palace on the morning following
the night of hinderings, was more than astonished when Ford came in and
took the unoccupied seat at the table-for-two.
"Let me eat first," said the beaten one, when Frisbie would have whelmed
him with curious questions; and with the passing of the cutlets and the
coffee he told the tale of the hindrances.
"I guess it was foreordained not to be," he admitted, in conclusion. "We
tried mighty hard to bully it through, but the fates were too many and
too busy for us."
"Tricks?" suggested Frisbie, suspecting North of covering his flight
with special instructions to delay a possible pursuit.
"Oh, no; nothing of that sort: just the cursed depravity of inanimate
things. Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith. It was luck.
No one of us happened to have a rabbit's foot in his pocket."
"You don't believe in luck," laughed the assistant.
"Don't I? I know I used to say that I didn't. But after last night I
can't be so sure of it."
"Well, what's the cost to us?" inquired Frisbie, coming down out of the
high atmosphere of the superstitious to stand upon the solid earth of
railway-building fact.
"I don't know: possibly failure. There is no guessing what sort of a
scheme North will cook up when he and MacMorrogh get Mr. Colbrith
_cornered_."
"Oh, it can't be as bad as that. Take it at the worst--admitting that we
may have to struggle along with the MacMorroghs for our general
contractors; they can't addle the egg entirely, can they?"
Ford tabulated it by length and breadth.
"With the MacMorroghs in the forefront of things to steal and cheat and
make trouble with the labor, and Mr. North in the rear to back them up
and to retard matters generally, we are in for a siege to which
purgatory, if we ever go there, will seem restful, Richard my son. Our
one weapon is my present ranking authority over the general manager. If
he ever succeeds in breaking that, you fellows in the field would better
hunt you another railroad to build."
"It's a comfort to know that you _are_ the big boss, Stuart. North can't
knock you out of that when it comes to a show-down."
"I don't know," said Ford, whose night ride had made him pessimistic. "I
am Mr. Colbrith's appointee, you know--not an elected officer. And what
Mr. Colbrith has done, he may be induced to undo. Adair has been my
backer in everything; but while he is the best fellow in the world, he
is continually warning me that he may lose interest in the game at any
minute and drop it. He doesn't care a rap for the money-making part of
it--doesn't have to."
"Wouldn't Adair be a good safety-switch to throw in front of Mr. North
and MacMorrogh in New York?"
Ford nodded. "I thought of that last night, and sent a wire. We'll hear
from it to-day."
Frisbie ate through the remainder of the breakfast in silence.
Afterward, at the pipe-lighting, he asked if Ford's wire instructions of
the night before still held good.
"They do," was the emphatic reply. "We go on just as if nothing had
happened, or was due to happen. You say your man Crapsey will be in this
morning: gather up your laborers and turn the Plug Mountain into a
standard-gauge railroad while we wait. That's all, Dick; all but one
word--hustle."
"Hustle it is. But say: you were going to give me a pointer on that
broad-gauging. I've been stewing over it for a day and a night, and I
don't think of any scheme that won't stop the traffic."
"Don't you? That is because you haven't mulled over it as long as I
have. In the first place, you have no curves to straighten and no
cross-ties to relay--our predecessors having set the good example of
using standard length ties for their three-foot road. String your men
out in gangs as far as they'll go, and swing the three-foot track, as a
whole, ten inches out of center to the left. You can do that without
stopping trains, can't you?"
"Sure."
"All right. When you swing, spike the right-hand rail lightly. Then
string your gangs again and set a line of spikes for the outside of the
standard-gauge right-hand rail straight through to Saint's Rest. Got
that?"
"Yes; I guess I've got it all. But go on."
"Now you are ready for the grand-stand play. Call in all your
narrow-gauge rolling stock, mass your men at this end of the branch,
shove the right-hand rail over to the line of gauge spikes in sections
as long as your force will cover, and follow up with a standard-gauge
construction train to pick up the men and carry them forward as fast as
a section is completed. If you work it systematically, a freight train
could leave Denver two hours behind your track-gangs and find a
practical standard gauge all the way to Saint's Rest."
"Of course!" said Frisbie, in workmanlike disgust for his own
obtuseness. "I'm going back to the Tech when your railroad is finished
and learn a few things. I couldn't think of anything but the old Erie
Railroad scheme, when it was narrowed down from the six-foot gauge. They
did it in one night; but they had a man to every second cross-tie over
the whole four hundred miles from New York to Buffalo."
Ford nodded, adding:
"And we're not that rich in labor. By the way, how are the men coming?"
"A car-load or two, every little while. Say, Stuart, you must have had a
rabbit's foot with you when you touched up the eastern labor agencies.
Every other railroad in this neck of woods is skinned, and M'Grath is
having the time of his life trying to hold our levies together. There is
a small army of them under canvas at Saint's Rest, waiting for the
contractors, and another with between two and three hundred hands camped
at the mouth of the canyon."
Ford knocked the ashes from his pipe so hard that the pipestem fell in
two.
"Yes! all waiting on Mr. Colbrith's leisurely motions! Well, jump in on
the Plug Mountain. That will utilize some of the waste for a few days."
Frisbie went down to the Plug Mountain yard office, and to a wire-end,
to begin the marshaling of his forces; and Ford, with three picked-up
stenographers to madden him, took up the broken threads of his
correspondence with a world which seemed to have become suddenly peopled
to suffocation with eager sellers of railroad material and supplies.
Late in the afternoon, when he was tired enough to feel the full force
of the blow, a New York telegram came. It was from Miss Alicia Adair,
and Ford groaned in spirit when he read it.
Brother left here yesterday in the Vanderdecken yacht for Nova
Scotia. Can not reach him by telegraph until next Friday or
Saturday. Aunt Hester wants to know if there is anything she can
do.
One way to save a man's life at a crisis is to appeal to his sense of
humor. Miss Alicia's closing sentence did that for Ford, and he was
smiling grimly when he put the telegram away, not in the business file,
but in his pocket.
Three days later, however, when Frisbie was half-way to Saint's Rest
with his preliminary track-swinging, another New York telegram found
Ford in his newly established quarters in the Guaranty Building. This
was from some one acting as President Colbrith's secretary, and its
wording was concisely mandatory.
Contract has been awarded MacMorrogh Brothers. President directs
that you afford contractors every facility, and that you confer
with Mr. North in all cases of doubt.
XIII
THE BARBARIANS
It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the
cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned
by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint's Rest over the standardized
Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a
twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.
The occasion of Kenneth's calling was a right-of-way dispute on the
borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining
claims having been staked off across the old S. L & W. survey. The
owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened
injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private
property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by
the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made
haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.
"If I hadn't known you for a pretty good mountaineer, Kenneth,
you would have missed this," he said, making his guest free of the
limited hospitality of the caboose-hotel. "Are you good for a
two-hundred-and-eighty-mile cayuse ride, there and back, on the same
trail we tramped over a year ago last spring?"
"I'm good for everything on the bill of fare," was the heartening reply.
"How are things going?"
Ford's rejoinder began with a non-committal shrug. "We're building a
railroad, after a fashion."
"After a good fashion, I hope?"
Another shrug.
"We're doing as well as we can with the help we have. But about this
right-of-way tangle--" and he plunged his guest into a discussion of the
Copah situation which ran on unbroken until bedtime.
They took the westward trail together in the morning, mounted upon wiry
little mountain-bred ponies furnished by one Pacheco, the half-breed
Mexican who had once earned an easy double-eagle by spying upon two men
who were out hunting with an engineer's transit. For seven weeks Frisbie
had been pushing things, and the grade from Saint's Rest to the summit
of the pass was already a practicable wagon road, deserted by the
leveling squads and ready for the ties and the steel.
From the summit of the pass westward, down the mountain and through the
high-lying upper valley of the Pannikin, the grade work was in full
swing. The horse trail, sometimes a rough cart-road, but oftener a mere
bridle-path, followed the railroad in its loopings and doublings; and on
the mountain sections where the work was heaviest the two riders were
never out of sight of the heavily manned grading gangs.
"To a man up a tree you appear to be doing a whole lot, and doing it
quickly, Ford," commented the lawyer, when they had passed camp after
camp of the workers. Then he added: "You are not having any trouble with
the MacMorroghs, are you?"
"Not what the legal department would call trouble," answered Ford
evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of the bridle-path
discouraged conversation.