Adair paused with the cigarette half way to his lips. "Ah," he said, after a thoughtful moment. "Perhaps that was what I needed. No; they will not gibbet any of us to-day; and possibly not to-morrow." Then, with a sudden dropping of the mask of easy-going indifference: "Give me the key to your room, and find me a swift stenographer. Then go over to the Lake Sh.o.r.e headquarters and ask to have the Nadia coupled to the evening train for New York."
"But the president?" Ford began. "Didn"t he say something about going over these new lines on an inspection trip?"
"Never mind Uncle Sidney: on this one occasion he will change his plans and go back to New York with us," said Adair curtly.
"Good," said Ford approvingly. "And how about opening the new through line for business? Do we go on? Or do we hang it up until we find out where we are "at"?"
"Don"t hold it up a single minute. Drive it for all the power you can get behind it. If we have to collide with things, let"s do it with the throttle wide open. Now find me that shorthand person quickly, will you?"
By what means the president was persuaded or coerced into doing the thing he had not planned to do, Ford was not to know. But for that matter, after carrying out Adair"s instructions the engineer plunged at once into his own Herculean task of reorganization, emerging only when he made a tardy sixth at the president"s dinner table in the hotel cafe in the evening.
The dinner, which the young engineer had been fondly counting upon as a momentary relaxation from the heart-breaking business strain, was a dismal failure on its social side. President Colbrith, as yet, it appeared, in blissful ignorance of the latest news from New York, had reserved the seat of honor for his new a.s.sistant, and the half-hour was filled to overflowing with minute and cautionary definitions of the a.s.sistant"s powers and duties.
Ford listened with a blank ear on that side. There was work to do, and one man to do it. He did not care particularly to hear instructions which he would probably have to disregard at the first experimental dash into the new field. He meant to hold himself rigidly to account for results; more than this he thought not even Mr. Colbrith had a right to require.
After dinner he indemnified himself for the kindergarten lecture by boldly taking possession of Miss Adair for the short walk over to the private car. The entire world of work was still ahead, and a corps of expert stenographers was at the moment awaiting his return to the C. P.
& D. offices, where he had established temporary headquarters; but he shut the door upon the exigencies and listened to Miss Alicia.
"I am so sorry we are not going to be here to see your triumph," she was saying; adding: "It is a triumph, isn"t it?""
"Only a beginning," he amended. "And it won"t be spectacular, if we can help it. Besides, this east-end affair is only a preliminary. A little later on, if our tackle doesn"t break, we shall land the really big fish for which this is only the bait."
"Shall you never be satisfied?" she asked jestingly. And then, more seriously: "What is your ambition? To be able to buy what your neighbor can not afford?"
"Big money, you mean? No, I think not. But I like to win, as well as other men."
"To win what?"
"Whatever seems worth winning--this fight, in the present instance, and 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, rea.s.suring the timid, a.s.sorting 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 cooperation 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 princ.i.p.als 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 a.s.sault 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?