WHERE THE MONEY CAME FROM
Doubtless there were official persons to be found at the time of this
narrative--which is a matter of some thirty years back--who would have
insisted that the letters “S. & W.” meant “Sherman and Western.” But
every one who lived within two days’ ride of the track knew that the
real name of the road was the “Shaky and Windy.”
Shaky the “S. & W.” certainly was--physically, and, if newspaper
gossip and apparent facts were to be trusted, financially. The rails
weighed thirty-five pounds to the yard, and had been laid in scallops,
with high centres and low joints,--“sight along the rails and it looks
like a washboard,” said John Flint, describing it. For ballast the
clay and sand of the region were used. And, as for the financial part,
everybody knew that old De Reamer had been forced to abandon the
construction work on the Red Hills extension, after building fully
five-sixths of the distance. The hard times had, of course, something
to do with that,--roads were going under all through the West;
receiverships were quite the common thing,--but De Reamer and the S. &
W. did not seem to revive so quickly as certain other lines. This was
the more singular in that the S. & W., extending as it did from the
Sabine country to the Staked Plains, really justified the popular
remark that “the Shaky and Windy began in a swamp and ended in a
desert.” On the face of things, without the Red Hills connection with
the bigger C. & S. C., and without an eastern connection with one of
the New Orleans or St. Louis lines, the road was an absurdity.
Then, only a few months before the time of our narrative, the railroad
world began to wake up. Commodore Durfee, one of “the big fellows,”
surprised the Southwest by buying in the H. D. & W. (which meant, and
will always mean, the High, Dry, and Wobbly). The surprise was
greater when the Commodore began building southwestward, in the
general direction of Red Hills. As usual when the big men are playing
for position, the public and the wise-acres, even Wall Street, were
mystified. For the S. & W. was so obviously the best and shortest
eastern connection for the C. & S. C.,--the H. D. & W. would so
plainly be a differential line,--that it was hard to see what the
Commodore was about. He had nothing to say to the reporters. Old
General Carrington, of the C. & S. C., the biggest and shrewdest of
them all, was also silent. And Daniel De Reamer couldn’t be seen at
all.
And finally, by way of a wind-up to the first skirmish of the
picturesque war in which our engineers were soon to find themselves
taking part, there was a western breeze and a flurry of dust in Wall
Street. Somebody was fighting. S. & W. shares ran up in a day from
twenty-two to forty-six, and, which was more astonishing, sold at that
figure for another day before dropping. Other mysterious things were
going on. Suddenly De Reamer reappeared in the Southwest, and that
most welcome sign of vitality, money,--red gold corpuscles,--began to
flow through the arteries of the S. & W. “system.” The construction
work started up, on rush orders. Paul Carhart was specially engaged to
take out a force and complete the track--any sort of a track--to Red
Hills. And as he preferred not to take this rush work through very
difficult country on any other terms, De Reamer gave him something
near a free hand,--ordered Chief Engineer Tiffany to let him alone,
beyond giving every assistance in getting material to the front, and
accepting the track for the company as fast as it was laid.
And as Tiffany was not at all a bad fellow, and had admired Carhart’s
part in the Rio Grande fight (though he would have managed some things
differently, not to say better, himself), the two engineers seemed
likely to get on very well.
Carhart’s three trains would hardly get over the five hundred miles
which lay between Sherman and the end of the track in less than
twenty-seven or twenty-eight hours. “The private car,” as the boys
called it, was of an old type even for those days, and was very
uncomfortable. Everybody, from the chief down, had shed coat and
waistcoat before the ragged skyline of Sherman slipped out of view
behind the yellow pine trees. The car swayed and lurched so violently
that it was impossible to stand in the aisle without support. As the
hours dragged by, several of the party curled up on the hard seats and
tried to sleep. The instrument and rod and stake men and the pile
inspectors, mostly young fellows recently out of college or technical
institute, got together at one end of the car and sang college songs.
Carhart was sitting back, his feet up on the opposite seat, watching
for the pines to thin out, and thinking of the endless gray chaparral
and sage-brush which they would find about them in the morning,--if
the train didn’t break down,--when he saw Tiffany’s big person
balancing down the aisle toward him. Tiffany had been quiet a long
time; now he had a story in his eye.
“Well,” he said, as he slid down beside Carhart, “I knew the old
gentleman would pull it off in time, but I never supposed he could
make the Commodore pay the bills.”
Carhart glanced up inquiringly.
“Didn’t you hear about it? Well, say! I happen to know that a month
ago Mr. De Reamer actually didn’t have the money to carry this work
through. Even when Commodore Durfee started building for Red Hills, he
didn’t know which way to turn. The Commodore, you know, hadn’t any
notion of stopping with the H.D.& W.”
“No,” said Carhart, “I didn’t suppose he had.”
“He was after us, too--wanted to do the same as he did with the High
and Dry, corner the stock.” Tiffany chuckled. “But he knew he’d have
to corner Daniel De Reamer first. If he didn’t, the old gentleman
would manufacture shares by the hundred thousand and pump ’em right
into him. There’s the Paradise Southern,--that’s been a regular
fountain of stock. You knew about that.”
Carhart shook his head.
“We passed through Paradise this noon.”
“Yes, I know the line. It runs down from Paradise to Total Wreck. But
I didn’t know it had anything to do with S. & W. capital stock.”
“Didn’t, eh?” chuckled Tiffany. “Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers own
it, you know, and they’re directors in both lines. The old game was
for them, as P. S. directors, to lease the short line to themselves as
S. & W. directors. Then the S.& W. directors pay the P. S.
directors--only they’re it both ways--in S. & W. stock. Don’t you see?
And it’s only one of a dozen schemes. The old gentleman’s always ready
for S. & W. buyers.”
Carhart smiled. The car lurched and shivered. Such air as came in
through the open door and windows was tainted with the gases of the
locomotive, and with the mingled odors of the densely packed laborers
in the cars ahead.
“That’s really the only reason they’ve kept up the Paradise
Southern--for there isn’t any business on the line. Well, as I was
saying, the Commodore knew that the first thing he had to do was
corner Mr. De Reamer, and keep him from creating stock. So he came
down on him all at once, with a heap of injunctions and court orders.
He did it thorough: restrained the S. & W. board from issuing any more
stock, or from completing any of the transactions on hand, and
temporarily suspended the old gentleman and Mr. Chambers, pending an
investigation of their accounts, and ordered ’em to return to the
treasury of the company the seventy thousand shares they created last
year. There was a lot more, but that’s the gist of it. He did it
through Waring and his other minority directors on the board. And
right at the start, you see, when he began to buy, he made S. & W.
stock so scarce that the price shot up.”
“Seems as if he had sewed up the S. & W. pretty tight,” observed
Carhart.
“Didn’t it, though? But the Commodore didn’t know the old gentleman as
well as he thought. Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers got another judge
to issue orders for them to do everything the Commodore’s judge
forbid--tangled it all up so that everything they did or didn’t do,
they’d be disobeying somebody, and leaving it for the judges to settle
among themselves. Then they issued ten million dollars in convertible
bonds to a dummy, representing themselves, turned ’em right into
stock,--and tangled that transaction up so nobody in earth or heaven
will ever know just exactly _what_ was done,--and sold ‘most seventy
thousand shares of it to Commodore Durfee before he had a glimmer of
where it was coming from. And then it was too late for him to stop
buying, so he had to take in the whole hundred thousand shares. I
heard Mr. Chambers say that when the Commodore found ’em out, he was
so mad he couldn’t talk,--stormed stormed around his office trying to
curse Daniel De Reamer, but he couldn’t even swear intelligent.”
“So Mr. De Reamer beat him,” said Carhart.
“Beat him?--I wonder--”
“But that’s not all, surely. Commodore Durfee isn’t the man to swallow
that.”
“He _had_ to swallow it.--Oh, he did kick up some fuss, but it didn’t
do him any good. His judge tried to jerk up our people for contempt,
but they were warned and got out of Mr. De Reamer’s Broad Street
office, and over into New Jersey with all the documents and money.”
Tiffany’s good-humored eyes lighted up as his mind dwelt on the fight.
Never was there a more loyal railroad man than this one. Daniel De
Reamer was his king, and his king could do no wrong. “Not that they
didn’t have some excitement getting away,” he continued. “They
say,--mind, I don’t know this, but _they_ say that Mr. De Reamer’s
secretary, young Crittenden, crossed the ferry in a cab with four
million five hundred thousand dollars _in bills_--just tied up rough
in bundles so they could be thrown around. And there you
are,--Commodore Durfee is paying for this extension that’s going to
cut him out of the C. & S. C. through business. The money and papers
are out of his reach. The judges are fighting among themselves, and
will be doing well if they ever come to a settlement. And now if that
ain’t pretty slick business, I’d like to know what the word ‘slick’
means.”
Carhart almost laughed aloud. He turned and looked out the window for
a few moments. Finally he said, “If you have that straight, Tiffany,
it’s undoubtedly the worst defeat Commodore Durfee ever had. But don’t
make the mistake of thinking that the S. & W. is through with him.”
“Maybe not,” Tiffany replied, “but I’ll bet proper on the old
gentleman.”
Carhart’s position as the engineer in charge of a thousand and more
men would be not unlike that of a military commander who finds
himself dependent for subsistence on five hundred miles of what
Scribner called “very sketchy” single track. It would be more serious;
for not only must food, and in the desert, water, be brought out over
the line, but also the vast quantity of material needed in the work.
It would be the business of Peet, as the working head of the operating
department, to deliver the material from day to day, and week to week,
at the end of the last completed section, where the working train
would be made up each night for the construction work of the following
day.
If the existing track was sketchy, the new track would be worse.
Everything was to be sacrificed to speed. The few bridges were to be
thrown up hastily in the form of primitive wooden trestles. There
would be no masonry, excepting the abutments of the La Paz
bridge,--which masonry, or rather the stone for it, was about the only
material they would find at hand. All the timber, even to the cross
ties, would have to be shipped forward from the long-leaf-pine
forests of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
Ordinarily, Carhart would not have relished undertaking such a hasty
job; but in this case there were compensations. When he had first
looked over the location maps, in Daniel De Reamer’s New York office,
his quiet eyes had danced behind their spectacles; for it promised to
be pretty work, in which a man could use his imagination. There was
the bridge over the La Paz River, for instance. He should have to send
a man out there with a long wagon train of materials, and with orders
to have the bridge ready when the track should reach the river. He
knew just the man--John B. Flint, who built the Desplaines bridge for
the three I’s. He had not heard from John since the doctors had
condemned his lungs, and ordered him to a sanatorium in the
Adirondacks, and John had compromised by going West, and hanging that
very difficult bridge between the walls of Brilliant Gorge in the
Sierras. Carhart was not sure that he was still among the living; but
a few searching telegrams brought out a characteristic message from
John himself, to the effect that he was very much alive, and was ready
to bridge the Grand Cañon of the Colorado at a word from Paul Carhart.
Then there was always to be considered the broad outline of the
situation as it was generally understood in the railway world. Details
apart, it was known that Commodore Durfee and Daniel De Reamer were
fighting for that through connection, and that old General
Carrington,--czar of the C. & S. C., holder of one and owner of
several other seats in the Senate of these United States, chairman of
the National Committee of his party,--that General Carrington was
sitting on the piazza of his country house in California, smoking good
cigars and talking horse and waiting to see whether he should gobble
Durfee or De Reamer, or both of them. For the general, too, was
represented on the directorate of the Sherman and Western; and it was
an open question whether his minority directors would continue to
support the De Reamer interests or would be ordered to ally themselves
with the Durfee men. Either way, there would be no sentiment wasted.
But it seemed to Carhart that so long as De Reamer should be able to
hold up his head in the fight General Carrington would probably stand
behind him. Commodore Durfee was too big in the East to be encouraged
in the West. And yet--there was no telling.
It was very pretty indeed. Carhart was a quiet man, given more to
study than to speech; but he liked pretty things.