STILL PIECING OUT THE WORLD
The map of the United States in Edward E. Allison’s library began, now,
to develop little streaks of red. They were not particularly long
streaks, but they were boldly marked, and they hugged, with
extraordinary closeness, the pencil mark which Allison had drawn from
New York to Chicago and from Chicago to San Francisco. There were long
gaps between them, but these did not seem to worry him very much. It was
the little stretches, sometimes scarcely over an inch, which he drew
with such evident pleasure from day to day, and now, occasionally, as he
passed in and out, he stopped by the big globe and gave it a
contemplative whirl. On the day he joined his far western group of
little marks by bridging three small gaps, he received a caller in the
person of a short, well-dressed, old man, who walked with a cane and
looked half asleep, by reason of the many puffs which had piled up under
his eyes and nearly closed them.
“I’m ready to wind up, Tim,” remarked Allison, offering his caller a
cigar, and lighting one himself. “When can we have that Vedder Court
property condemned?”
“Whenever you give the word,” reported Tim Corman, who spoke with an
asthmatic voice, and with the quiet dignity of a man who had borne grave
business responsibilities, and had borne them well.
Allison nodded his head in satisfaction.
“You’re sure there can’t be any hitch in it.”
“Not if I say it’s all right,” and the words were Tim’s only reproof.
His tone was perfectly level, and there was no glint in his eyes.
Offended dignity had nothing to do with business. “Give me one week’s
notice, and the Vedder Court property will be condemned for the city
terminal of the Municipal Transportation Company. Appraisement,
thirty-one million.”
“I only wanted to be reassured,” apologised Allison. “I took your word
that you could swing it when I made my own gamble, but now I have to
drag other people into it.”
“That’s right,” agreed Tim. “I never get offended over straight
business.” In other times Tim Corman would have said “get sore,” but, as
he neared the end of his years of useful activity, he was making quite a
specialty of refinement, and stocking a picture gallery, and becoming a
connoisseur collector of rare old jewels. He dressed three times a day.
“How about the Crescent Island subway?”
“Ripe any time,” and Tim Corman flecked the ashes from his cigar with a
heavily gemmed hand. “The boosters have been working on it right along,
but never too strong.”
“There’s no need for any particular manipulation in that,” decided
Allison, who knew the traction situation to the last nickel. “The city
needs that outlet, and it needs the new territory which will be opened
up. I think we’d better push the subway right on across to the mainland.
The extension would have to be made in ten years anyhow.”
“It’s better right now,” immediately assented Corman. In ten years he
might be dead.
“I think, too, that we’d better provide for a heavy future expansion,”
went on Allison, glancing expectantly into Tim’s old eyes. “We’d
probably better provide for a double-deck, eight track tube.”
Tim Corman drew a wheezy breath, and then he grinned the senile shadow
of his old-time grin; but it still had the same spirit.
“You got a hen on,” he deduced. In “society,” Tim could manage very
nicely to use fashionable language, but, in business, he found it
impossible after the third or fourth minute of conversation. He had
taken in every detail of the room on his entrance, and his glance had
strayed more than once to the red streaks on the big map. Now he
approached it, and studied it with absorbed interest. “You’re a smart
boy, Ed,” he concluded. “Across Crescent Island is the only leak where
you could snake in a railroad. You found the only crack that the big
systems haven’t tied up.”
“All you can get me to admit, just now, is that the city needs an eight
track tube across Crescent Island, under lease to the Municipal
Transportation Company,” stated Allison, smiling with gratification. A
compliment of this sort from shrewd old Tim Corman, who was reputed to
be the foxiest man in the world, was a tribute highly flattering.
“That’s right,” approved Tim. “All I know is a guess, and I don’t tell
guesses. This is a big job, though, Eddie. A subway to Crescent Island,
under proper restrictions, is just an ordinary year’s work for the boys,
but this tube pokes its nose into Oakland Bay.”
“I’m quite aware of the size of the job,” chuckled Allison. “However,
Tim, there’ll be money enough behind this proposition to fill that tube
with greenbacks.”
Between the narrow-slitted and puffy eyelids of Tim Corman there gleamed
a trace of the old-time genii.
“Then it’s built.” He rose and leaned on his cane, twinkling down on the
man who, years before, he had picked as a “comer.” “I’ve heard people
say that money’s wicked, but they never had any. When I die, and go down
to the big ferry, if the Old Boy comes along and offers me enough money,
I’ll go to Hell.”
Still laughing, Allison telephoned to the offices of the Midcontinent
Railroad, and dashed out to his runabout just in time to see Tim Corman
driving around the corner in his liveried landau. He found in President
Urbank, of the Midcontinent, a spare man who had worn three vertical
creases in his brow over one thwarted ambition. His rich but sprawling
railroad system ran fairly straight after it was well started for
Chicago, and fairly straight from that way-point until it became drunken
with the monotony of the western foot-hills, where it gangled and angled
its way to the far south and around up the Pacific coast, arriving there
dusty and rattling, after a thousand mile detour from its course—but
that road had no direct entrance into New York city. It approached from
the north, and was compelled to circle completely around, over hired
tracks, to gain a ferryboat entrance. Passengers inured to coming in
over the Midcontinent, which was a well-equipped road otherwise, counted
but half their journey done when they came in sight of New York, no
matter from what distance they had come.
“Out marketing for railroads to-day, Gil?” suggested Allison.
“I don’t know,” smiled Urbank. “I might look at a few.”
“Here they are,” and Allison tossed him a memorandum slip.
Urbank glanced at the slip, then he looked up at Allison in perplexity.
He had a funny forward angle to his neck when he was interested, and the
creases in his brow were deepened until they looked like cuts.
“I thought you were joking, and I’m still charitable enough to think so.
What’s all this junk?”
“Little remnants and job lots of railroads I’ve been picking up,” and
Allison drew forward his chair. “Some I bought outright, and in some I
hold control.”
“If you’re serious about interesting the Midcontinent in any of this
property, we don’t need to waste much time.” Urbank leaned back and held
his knee. “There are only two of these roads approach the Midcontinent
system at any point, and they are useless property so far as we are
concerned; the L. and C., in the east, and the Silverknob and Nugget
City, in the west, which touches our White Range branch at its southern
terminus. We couldn’t do anything with those.”
“You landed on the best ones right away,” smiled Allison. “However, I
don’t propose to sell these to the Midcontinent. I propose to absorb the
Midcontinent with them.”
Urbank suddenly remembered Allison’s traction history, and leaned
forward to look at the job lots and remnants again.
“This list isn’t complete,” he judged, and turned to Allison with a
serious question in his eye.
“Almost,” and Allison hitched a little closer to the desk. “There
remains an aggregate of three hundred and twenty miles of road to be
built in four short stretches. In addition to this, I have a twenty year
contract over a hundred mile stretch of the Inland Pacific, a track
right entry into San Francisco, and this,” and he displayed to Urbank a
preliminary copy of an ordinance, authorising the immediate building of
an eight track tube through Crescent Island to the mainland. “Possibly
you can understand this whole project better if I show you a map,” and
he spread out his little pocket sketch.
If it had been possible to reverse the processes of time and worry and
wearing concentration, President Urbank, of the Midcontinent, would have
raised from his inspection of that map with a brow as smooth as a
baby’s. Instead, his lips went dry, as he craned forward his neck at
that funny angle, and projected his chin with the foolish motion of a
goose.
“A direct entrance right slam into the centre of New York!” he
exclaimed, cracking all his knuckles violently one by one. “Vedder
Court! Where’s that?”
“That’s the best part of the joke,” exulted Allison, with no thought
that Vedder Court was, at this present moment, church property. “It’s
just where you said; right slam in the centre of New York; and the
building into which the Midcontinent will run its trains will be also
the terminal building of every municipal transportation line in
Manhattan! From my station platforms, passengers from Chicago or the Far
West will step directly into subway, L., or trolley. When they come in
over the line which is now the Midcontinent, they will be landed, not
across the river, or in some side street, but right at their own doors,
scattering from the Midcontinent terminal over a hundred traction
lines!” His voice, which had begun in the mild banter of a man passing
an idle joke, had risen to a ring so triumphant that he was almost
shouting.
“But—but—wait a minute!” Urbank protested. He was stuttering. “Where
does the Midcontinent get to the Crescent Island tube?”
“Right here,” and Allison pointed to his map. “You come out of the tube
to the L. and C., which has a long-time tracking privilege over fifty
miles of the Towando Valley, and terminates at Windfield. At Forgeson,
however, just ten miles after the L. and L. leaves the Towando, that
road—”
“Is crossed by our tracks!” Urbank eagerly interpreted. “The
Midcontinent, after its direct exit, saves a seventy mile detour! Then
it’s a straight shoot for Chicago! Straight on again out west—Why,
Allison, your route is almost as straight as an arrow! It will have a
three hundred mile shorter haul than even the Inland Pacific! You’ll put
that road out of the business! You’ll have the king of transcontinental
lines, and none can ever be built that will save one kink!” His neck
protruded still further from his collar as he bent over the map. “Here
you split off from the Midcontinent’s main line and utilise the White
Range branch; from Silverknob—My God!” and his mouth dropped open.
“Why—why—why, you cross the big range _over the Inland Pacific’s own
tracks!_” and his voice cracked.
Edward E. Allison, his vanity gratified to its very core, sat back
comfortably, smiling and smoking, until Urbank awoke.
“I suppose we can come to some arrangement,” he mildly suggested.
Urbank looked at him still in a daze for a moment, and a trace of the
creases came back into his brow, then they faded away.
“You figured all this out before you came to me,” he remarked. “On what
terms do we get in?”