Empire Builders Part 46

"You know where Ford is," he began accusingly. "You needn't deny it. I was in hopes we wouldn't have to ask him to sell us more than one share of his stock, which he couldn't decently refuse to do if we let him set his own price. But since we can't trace that block that Grigsby let go, we must have nearly all of Ford's. Find him: get his stock if you have to pay twice par for it. If you don't, I--I shall be the heaviest loser in this camp, Charles Edward." It was gall and wormwood to the old man, but it had to be swallowed.

"So you are coming around to ask a favor of Ford?" said the young man unfeelingly. "He won't help you out. You mustn't forget that you kicked him out of the family; or rather you kicked him to prevent his getting into it."

"But think of the profit to him!" protested the president. "He paid only twenty cents for his half of the Alicia; he told me so himself. At two hundred he'd clear ninety thousand; a magnificent amount for so young a man!"

"Ford doesn't care anything about money. You can't move him that way."

"Well, then, find him for me and I'll--I'll apologize," said Mr.

Colbrith, pressed now to the last extremity.

"He doesn't want your apologies, Uncle Sidney. Your little tiff was between man and man, and he'd never think of holding you accountable for anything you were foolish enough to say."

"Then what in heaven's name does he want?"--irascibly.

"Oh, a lot of things: reinstatement; your order to investigate the Denver management; a chance to build his railroad unmolested; and, as a side issue, a chance to whitewash your administration of Pacific Southwestern by conducting the house-cleaning in your name--this last because he thinks something of the family honor. He doesn't have to consider us, you know. At the next annual meeting he can elect Brewster president over your head: then you will have to stand for all the grafting and deviltry that will be unearthed."

The ground for this duel between President Colbrith and the determined young pace-setter was the lobby of the tar-paper-covered hotel, cleared now of the impromptu mining-stock exchange, which had moved into permanent quarters. The old man rose stiffly and stood grasping the chair-back.

"The same reckless charges against Mr. North and his subordinates--and now _you_ are making them!" he rasped. "They are groundless; groundless, I tell you!"

Adair looked at his watch, listened a moment as for some expected sound from out-of-doors, and motioned toward the vacated chair.

"Sit down, Uncle Sidney, and let me tell you what happened at Horse Creek camp a week ago last night," he said evenly; and then he told the story of the attempt upon Ford's life, of the siege of the Nadia, of the terrible catastrophe which had involved all three of the MacMorroghs, the commissary staff, Eckstein, and the headquarters camp. When he finished, the president was shaking as if from a chill. Yet one thread of the strong strand of loyalty still held.

"It was horrible--fiendish!" he shuddered. "But it was the MacMorroghs'

fight. It does not necessarily incriminate North."

"It does," said Adair, in the same even tone. "I told you that we left a few men at the wrecked camp to warn the incoming material trains. They found a single survivor of the thirteen men who tried to destroy us and the Nadia. It was Eckstein, North's secretary, and before he died he amply confirmed all of our guesses. They had plotted to have you quarrel with Ford. Ford had bought his half of the Little Alicia without any prompting, but from that as a starting point the entire scheme was worked up. The MacMorroghs' bookkeeper, a man named Merriam--who is at present in Copah, and whose deposition I have had taken before a justice of the peace--was detailed to win Frisbie over to the change of route--no difficult thing, since the change was for the better. But Merriam's part was chiefly to keep Frisbie from finding out anything about Ford's mine; which he did. Am I making it clear?"

The president bowed his head.

"Then, when you came West on your inspection trip, the trap was sprung.

You were told that Ford had been doing a dishonorable thing, and you were urged to come over here and see for yourself. To make sure that there should be no slips, Penfield was sent with you, ostensibly as your acting secretary, but really as a spy--"

"Oh, no; I can't think that of young Penfield," protested the president.

"I say yes; and the proof is that Penfield has confessed. He was scared into it when I told him what had happened at Horse Creek and gave him his choice of telling me what he knew, or going to jail. Then I came on the scene at the inopportune moment, and after North had carefully issued instructions intended to delay me as much as possible, he sent Eckstein in post-haste by way of Jack's Canyon and the stage trail to get ahead of me. You see, he was afraid to trust matters to Penfield, who would most certainly have stopped short of the desperate measures Eckstein and the MacMorroghs finally took. It was decided at a council in which Penfield was present, that Ford's elimination must go through.

If you didn't quarrel with him and drop him, he was to be murdered."

Mr. Colbrith was silent for a long minute after Adair ceased speaking.

Then he looked up to say: "What was Ford doing at Horse Creek that night? He had left me only a few hours before; and, as I have said, we had--we had some words."

Adair smiled. "He was about to begin doing what he has been doing ever since: flogging the extension into shape night and day to get it ready to carry pa.s.sengers and freight. He conceived it to be his duty--to you as well as to the other stock-holders. And he _has_ flogged it into shape. Look out of that window, Uncle Sidney!"

A long pa.s.senger train, crowded to the platforms, and with the private car "01" in tow, was winding down the grade of the opposite hillside, and as they stepped to the windows the engineer woke the echoes with the engine whistle.

"The first one of many, let us hope," said the young man, standing at his uncle's elbow. Then, with quite a different note in his voice: "It's Stuart's work, all of it. He has scarcely stopped to eat or sleep since that horrible night in the Pannikin valley. And that night, Uncle Sidney, I fought shoulder to shoulder with him--as a brother should; he is a man, and--there are not many more--like him."

The president's thin lips were drawn into straight lines, and the thin goat's-beard stood out at the argumentative angle. Mr. Colbrith was chary of his emotions.

"Will he sell us that stock in the Little Alicia, Charles Edward?"

Adair smiled at the determined return to the practical.

"No," he said; "I don't think he will--I shouldn't, if I were in his place. But he will do the next best thing: he will marry Alicia and so bring it into the family. And on the railroad conditions I have named, I am quite sure he will make you his voting proxy if you want to use it in forcing the combine."

The president took a turn as far as the clerk's counter and back. The lobby was deserted, everybody having gone to welcome the first train into Copah.

"You seem to have North against the wall," he said when he came back.

"Yet, for the sake of--of, well of his wife and children, he must have even-handed justice. I must insist upon that."

It was the most lovable thing in the irascible old man--his undying loyalty to a man in whom he had once believed. Adair slew the last hope with reluctance. Drawing a thick packet of undelivered telegrams from his pocket, he handed it to his uncle.

"Justice is the one thing Mr. North is most anxious to dodge," he said gravely. "When the news of the catastrophe reached him, he resigned by wire--to New York; not to you--got his physician to order him out of the country, and left Denver between two days. Ford has sent Frisbie to Denver to hold things together, and there has been a number of removals--subject, of course, to your approval. You will find the history of all these minor happenings in those telegrams, which I have been collecting--and holding--until you had leisure to look them over."

"Where is Mr. Ford now?" asked the president crisply.

"He is not very far away; in fact, he is up-stairs in the sitting-room of our suite with Aunt Hetty and the two Van Bruce ladies and Alicia.

Incidentally,--quite incidentally, you understand,--he is waiting to be asked to help you out in that mining deal."

"Fetch him," was the curt command; and Mr. Colbrith sat down to wade resignedly through the ma.s.s of delayed wire correspondence.

What remains of the story of the Pacific Southwestern is a chapter, as yet unfinished, in the commercial history of the great and growing empire of the West.

Of the rush to the Copah gold field; of the almost incredible celerity with which a stretch of one hundred and forty-odd miles of construction track was opened for the enormous traffic which was instantly poured in upon it; of the rapid extension of the line to a far western outlet; of the steady advance of P. S-W. shares to a goodly premium: these are matters which are recorded in the newspaper files of the period.

For the typically American success of the Southwestern's dramatic upward leap to the rank of a great railway system, President Colbrith has the name and the fame. Yet here and there in the newspaper record there is mention of one Stuart Ford, "our rising young railroad magnate," in the unashamed phrase of the _Copah Megaphone_, first as the president's a.s.sistant; later, as first vice-president and general manager of the system, in the Chicago headquarters, with Mr. Richard Frisbie as his second in command on the western lines, and Mr. Charles Edward Adair as comptroller and chief of finances on the executive committee in New York.

Ford's prophecies predicting the development of the new empire first traversed by the Western Extension have long since found ample fulfilment, as all the world knows. Copah gave the region its first and largest advertis.e.m.e.nt; but other mining districts, with their imperative beckonings to a food-producing population, have followed in due course.

It was early in June of the year marking the opening of the completed Western Extension for through Pacific Coast traffic that a one-car train, drawn by the smartest of pa.s.senger engines in charge of a diminutive, red-headed Irishman, stormed bravely up the glistening steel on the eastern approach to Plug Pa.s.s. The car was the rebuilt Nadia; and in obedience to a shrill blast of the cab air-whistle, Gallagher brought it to a stand on the summit of the mountain.

Alicia looked more than ever the artist's ideal of the American womanly felicities when Ford lifted her from the step of the Nadia.

"You are quite sure Mr. Gallagher won't mind?" she was saying, as they walked forward together.

"Mind? Wait till you hear what he says. Michael is an Irish diamond in the rough, and he knows when he is honored."

They discovered the red-headed little man industriously "oiling around"

for the swift glide down the western declivities.

"Michael," said the first vice-president, "Mrs. Ford thinks she would like to take the Pannikin loop in the cab of the Six-eighty-eight. Can you make room for us?"

Gallagher s.n.a.t.c.hed his cap from his fiery head.

"Could we make room? 'Tis by the blessing av the saints that I'm a little man, meself, Missis Foord, and don't take up much room in the c-yab. And as f'r Johnny Shovel, he'll be riding on the coal f'r the pure playsure av ut. My duty to ye, ma'am; and 'tis a pity ut isn't a black night, whin the swate face av ye would be lighting the thrack f'r us."