Empire Builders Part 36

"He is innocent; as innocent as some hundreds of other narrow-minded, short-sighted old men whom chance, or the duplicity of the real rascals, puts at the head of corporations."

"Yet you would make him suffer with the guilty."

"Not willingly, you may be sure. Not at all, if he would listen to reason. But he won't. He'll stand by North till the last gun is fired; and while North stays, there'll be graft, big or little, as the opportunities warrant."

Alicia held her peace while the caravan was measuring another half-mile of the boulder-strewn road. Then she said: "I feel so wretchedly inadequate to help you, Mr. Ford. I wish you could wait until you have talked it over with brother."

"So do I. But I am afraid postponement doesn't lie with me, now. From your uncle's manner and from what he said to me yesterday, I can't help feeling that the crisis is right here. For two days Mr. Colbrith has been very plainly leading up to some sort of dramatic climax. I can't remotely guess what it is going to be; though I can guess that the plot isn't his."

Again she took time to consider, and when she spoke they were nearing the scene of strenuous activities at the moving track-end.

"You don't think you could postpone it?" she asked, almost wistfully, he thought. "I think--I hope--my brother will become interested again. It is your fault that he lost interest, Mr. Ford."

"My fault?" reproachfully.

"Certainly. You didn't give him enough to do. He was happy and contented while you kept him hard at work. But after the bonds were placed and the money raised--"

"I'm a miserable sinner!" Ford confessed. "And I had promised you, too!

But the battle has been so fierce at this end of the line; and I couldn't be in two places at one time. Your brother should have been made first vice-president, instead of North. Perhaps we can bring it about yet--if you don't call it all off."

"There it is again," she retorted. "You are dragging me in--and trying to bribe me, too!"

"G.o.d forbid!" he said, so earnestly that she forgave him. And then: "I wish your brother were here--now."

"So do I," she admitted. Then she told him of the wire summons sent from Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.

"Where was your brother then?" he asked.

"I don't know, positively. I hope he was in New York. He was to come over in the _Campania_, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan."

"You've had no word from him?"

"None."

They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the actual throes of evolution.

In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked enthusiasm. Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer's inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious. On the leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the cross-ties in position. On a train of specially constructed flat-cars another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge. At the word, "Ready!" a hauling chain, pa.s.sing through an anch.o.r.ed pulley-block far up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties. With the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army, spike-drivers these, fell upon the newly placed steel, shouting their chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters deftly preparing another section, was slowly pushed to the new front for another advance.

"It is like clockwork," was Miss Alicia's enthusiastic comment. "Did you invent it, Mr. Ford?"

Now the combination of flat-car bolting-table, and the shifting and laying by sections, was Ford's invention, but he modestly stood from under.

"Frisbie gets the medal," he said. "It's all in the drill--every man knowing what he has to do, and doing it at the proper moment. I'd give something if I had d.i.c.k's knack in detail organizing."

She looked up, laughing. "You have the funniest way of ducking to cover if you think a bit of honest appreciation is coming your way, Mr. Ford.

You know you told Mr. Frisbie how to do it."

"Did I? I suppose it wouldn't be polite to contradict you."

"Or any use. Is Mr. Frisbie here now?--Oh, yes; there he is." And then, in a half-awed whisper: "Who is that dreadful, Grand-Opera-villain looking man he is talking to?"

Ford's eyes sought and found Frisbie. He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian in its repulsiveness.

"That is 'Mexican George'; the MacMorrogh Brothers' 'killer'," said Ford evenly. "Have you ever heard of a professional man-killer, Miss Adair; a man whose calling is that of a hired a.s.sa.s.sin?"

She shuddered. "You are jesting, I know. But the word fits his face so accurately. I saw him lounging about the store at the camp yesterday, and it gave me the creeping shivers every time I looked at him. Do you ever have such instantaneous and unreasoning hatreds at first sight?"

"Now and then; yes. But I was not jesting about Mexican George. He is precisely what the word implies; is hired for it and paid for it.

Nominally, he guards the commissary and stores, and is the paymaster's armed escort. Really, it is his duty to shoot down any desperate laborer who, in the MacMorroghs' judgment, needs to be killed out of the way."

"Mercy!" Miss Alicia was shuddering again. "What hideously primitive conditions! What is this terrible man doing out here?"

"Oh, he is a free lance; comes and goes as he pleases. No, he's not quarreling with d.i.c.k"--answering her look of anxiety.

"How do you know he isn't?"

Ford laughed. "Because d.i.c.k wouldn't let him get that near. He knows--h.e.l.lo; I wonder what your good uncle wants of us."

Mr. Colbrith was standing up in his place in the leading buckboard and making signals to the rear guard of two. Ford shook the reins over his broncos and drove around.

The president was fingering his thin beard and waving an arm toward the track-layers.

"Mr.--ah--Ford," he began critically, "is it necessary to have such a vast army of men as that to lay the track?"

"I don't think we are over-manned," said Ford good-naturedly. It was comparatively easy to be patient with Alicia looking on and listening.

But it was against Mr. Colbrith's principles to let a man off with a single reb.u.t.tal.

"I am not at all convinced of the worth of these new-fangled ideas, Mr.

Ford; not at all. We built the Pacific Southwestern main line in the old, approved way--a rail at a time--with less than one-quarter of the men you have over there."

"I don't question it: and you were three years building some six hundred miles in a prairie country. We are to-day just six weeks out of Saint's Rest with the track gang, and in six more, if the weather holds, we shall be laying the switches in the Green b.u.t.te yards. That is the difference between the old way and the new."

The president was turned aside but not stopped.

"I understand," he objected raucously. "But your expense bills are something tremendous; tre-_men_dous, Mr. Ford! You have spent more money in three months than we spent in a full year on the main line."

"Quite likely," agreed Ford, losing interest in the pointless discussion. "But with us, time is an object; and we have the results to show for the expenditure."

At this, Mr. Colbrith took refuge in innuendo, as seemed to be his lately acquired habit.

"You are very ready with your answers, Mr. Ford; very ready, indeed. Let us see if you can continue as you have begun."

It was Miss Alicia who resented this final speech of the president's when the buckboards were once more in motion, following the unrailed grade around the swelling shoulders of the huge hills.

"I think that last remark of Uncle Sidney's was rather uncalled for,"

she said, after Ford had driven in grim silence at the tail of the procession for a full mile.