Chapter 3

If courage, of the kind fitted to lead forlorn hopes, or marchings undaunted up to the muzzles of loaded cannon, be a matter of gifts and temperament, it is also in some degree a matter of environment.

Stuart Ford was Western born and bred; a product of the wider breathing spaces. Given his proper battle-field, where the obstacles were elemental and the foes to be overcome were mere men of flesh and blood fighting freely in the open, he was a match for the lustiest. But New York, with its submerging, jostling multitudes, its thickly crowding human vastness, and, more than all, its atmosphere of dollar-chasing, apparent and oppressive even to the transient passer-by, disheartened him curiously.

It was not that he was more provincial than he had to be; for that matter, there is no provincialism so rampant as that of the thronging, striving, self-sufficient city. But isolation in any sort is a thing to be reckoned with. The two pioneering years in the Rockies had done their work,--of narrowing, as well as of broadening,--and the plunge into the chilling sea of the money-mad metropolis made him shiver and wish he were out.

This feeling was really at the bottom of the late rising and the leisurely breakfast, making him temporize where he had meant to be prompt, energetic and vigorously aggressive. Having pocketed the young woman's unsigned note, he glanced at his watch and decided that it was still too early to go in search of President Colbrith.

"I don't suppose he'll be in his office for an hour yet," he mused reflectively; "and anyway, I guess I'd better go over the papers again, so I can be sure to speak my piece right end to. By Jove! I didn't suppose a couple of thousand miles of easting would take the heart out of things the way it does. If I didn't know better, I should think I'd come here to float the biggest kind of a fake, instead of a life-boat for the shipwrecked people in the Pacific Southwestern. It is beginning to look that way in spite of all I can do."

Going once again over his carefully tabulated argument did not help matters greatly. He was beginning to realize now how vastly, antipodally different the New York point of view might be from his own. It came to him with the benumbing effect of a blow that his own ambitions had persistently looked beyond the mere money-making results of his scheme. Also, that President Colbrith and his fellow-investors might very easily refuse to consider any other phase of the revolutionary proposition he was about to lay before them.

By ten o'clock postponement was no longer a tenable city of refuge: the plunge had to be taken. Accordingly, he fared forth to present himself at the Broadway address given in the Pacific Southwestern printed matter as the New York headquarters of the company.

The number proved to be a ground floor, with the business office of the eastern traffic representative in front, and three or four private desk-rooms in the rear, one of them labeled "President" in inconspicuous gilt lettering. Entering, with less assurance than if he had been the humblest of place-seekers out of a job, Ford was almost relieved to find only a closed desk, and a young man absently scanning a morning paper.

Inquiry developed a few facts, tersely stated but none the less enlightening. Mr. Colbrith was not in: the office was merely his nominal headquarters in the city and he occupied it only occasionally. His residence? It was in the Borough of the Bronx, pretty well up toward Yonkers--locality and means of access obligingly written out on a card for the caller by the clerk. Was Mr. Ford's business of a routine nature? If so, perhaps, Mr. Ten Eyck, the general agent, could attend to it. Ford said it was not of a routine nature, and made his escape to inquire his way to the nearest subway station. To pause now was to lose the precious impetus of the start.

It was worth something to be whirled away blindly out of the stifling human vortex of the lower city; but Ford's first glimpse of the Colbrith mansion depressed him again. The huge, formal house had once been the country residence of a retired dry-goods merchant. It fronted the river brazenly, and the fine old trees of a ten-acre park shamed its architectural stiffness. Ford knew the president a little by family repute and more particularly as a young subordinate knows the general in command. It struck him forcibly that the aspect of the house fitted the man. With the broad river and the distant Palisades to be dwelt upon, its outlook windows were narrow. With the sloping park and the great trees to give it dignity, it seemed to assume an artificial, plumb-line dignity of its own, impressive only as the product of rigid measurements and mechanical uprightness.

From the boulevard there was a gravelled driveway with a stone portal. The iron gates were thrown wide, and at his entrance Ford stood aside to let an outgoing auto-car have the right of way. Being full of his errand, and of the abstraction of a depressed soul, Ford merely remarked that there were two persons in the car; a young man driving, and a young woman, veiled and dust-coated, in the mechanician's seat beside him. None the less, there floated out of the mist of abstraction an instantly vanishing phantom of half-recognition for the Westerner. Something in the pose of the young woman, the way she leaned forward and held her hat with the tips of her gloved fingers, was, for the fleeting moment, almost reminiscent.

If Ford had wished to speculate upon abstruse problems of identity, there was neither time nor the mental aptitude. A little later he had given his card to the servant at the door and was waiting in a darkened and most depressive library for the coming of the master of the house. The five minutes of waiting nearly finished him. As the absurdly formal clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with his face to the front.

After all, the beginning of the interview with the tall, thin, gray-haired and hatchet-faced old man, who presently stalked into the library and gave his hand with carefully adjusted cordiality to the son of one of his college classmates, was only a little more depressing: it was not mortal. Ford had been born in Illinois; and so, something better than a third of a century earlier, had the president. Moreover, Mr. Colbrith had, in the hey-day of his youth, shared rooms with the elder Ford in the fresh-water university which had later numbered the younger Ford among its alumni. These things count for somewhat, even when the gap to be bridged is that between the president of a railroad and one of his minor officials.

But when the revolutionary project was introduced, the president's guarded cordiality faded like a photographic proof-print in the sunlight, and the air of the darkened library grew coldly inclement.

"So you came to talk business, did you?" said the high, rasping voice out of the depths of the easy-chair opposite; and Ford raged inwardly at the thought that he had clearly placed himself at a disadvantage by becoming even constructively the guest of the president. "As a rule, I positively refuse to discuss such matters outside of their proper environment; but I'll make an exception for Douglas Ford's son. Your plan is simply impossible. I can understand how it may appear possible, and even attractive, to a young man, and especially to the young man who has invented it. But as an investment for capital--my dear young sir, go back to your division, and strive by faithful service to rise in the accepted and time-honored way. You are wasting your time in New York."

Curiously enough, Ford found his evaporated courage recrystallizing under opposition.

"I can not believe that I have made the plan, and the present condition of the system, sufficiently clear to you," he insisted; whereupon he went patiently and good-naturedly over the argument again, emphasizing the desperate straits to which the Pacific Southwestern was reduced.

"We know all that, Mr. Ford," was the unyielding reply. "But granting it to be the fact, don't you see the absolute futility of asking for thirty-five millions additional capital at such a crisis?"

"No, I don't," said Ford stubbornly. "I know--as I can not explain to you in detail in a half-hour interview--that this plan of mine can be made successful. For two years, Mr. Colbrith, I have been the man on the ground: no word that I am saying to you is speculative. Every clause of the proposition has a carefully established fact behind it."

"No doubt it seems so to you," came the rasping voice from the chair-depths. "But thirty-five millions!"--with a quavering gasp. "And at a time when our earnings are falling off steadily and the stock is going down day by day. It's--it's simply preposterous! I must really decline to discuss it any further."

Ford had his packet of data in hand.

"I have all the exhibits here, carefully tabulated and condensed. Won't you reconsider far enough to examine them, Mr. Colbrith?"

A thin white hand of negation and protest waved out of the depths of the engulfing easy-chair.

"I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Ford. I knew your father, and we were great friends. You are like him," he added reminiscently. "He might have died rich if he had gone into corn-buying with me when we were graduated, as I wanted him to. But he was too enthusiastic. He wanted to turn the world upside down--just as you do, my dear young man; just as you do."

Ford got upon his feet. The time had arrived for the firing of the shot of last resort, and he aimed it deliberately.

"I came first to you, Mr. Colbrith, because it was my duty as a subordinate, and your own appointee, and because you were my father's friend so many years ago. I may say, frankly, that I did it against good advice. Men who profess to know you have counseled me to appeal directly to the board. What I wish to know now is if you are willing to take the entire responsibility of turning this plan of mine down. Will it not relieve you of all responsibility if you will call a meeting of the directors, and let me lay this absurd proposal of mine before it? You can surely have no fears for the result."

The shot told. The president struggled to his feet and took a nervous turn up and down the long room. When he replied, it was with the indecisive man's reluctance to commitment of any sort.

"If I call the meeting, I shall be ridiculed; and if I don't call it, I suppose you'll go to Brewster and Magnus and tell them I've muzzled you. Have it your own way. I'll issue the call for ten o'clock, the day after to-morrow, in McVeigh and Mackie's offices in Broad Street. But I warn you in advance, Mr. Ford, I shall not be able to help you in the least. And I may add this: that when you reach that part of your proposal where you call for thirty-five millions additional capital, you may as well put on your hat and go home. That will be the end of it."

"And of me," laughed the enthusiast. But in spite of the cold comfort, and of the still colder promise of opposition, he took his leave with a lighter heart, refusing Mr. Colbrith's rather perfunctory invitation to stay to luncheon.

And on the gravelled drive, where he again had to make way for the auto-car purring in on its return, he did not so much as look up at the pair in the driving-seat.

V

WANTED: THIRTY-FIVE MILLIONS

The offices of McVeigh and Mackie, brokers and financial agents, are in Broad Street, and the windows of the room used for board meetings look down upon the angle where beats the money pulse of the nation.

Ford had successfully resisted the temptation to lobby for his scheme during the one-day interval between his conference with Mr. Colbrith and the date of the called meeting of the directors. It was not any mistaken sense of loyalty to the president that restrained him; on the contrary, he decided that Mr. Colbrith's declaration of war left him free to fight as he would. But upon due consideration he concluded to set the advantage of an assault _en masse_ over against the dubious gain of an advanced skirmish line, and when he turned out of Broadway into Wall Street on the morning of destiny the men whom he was to meet and convince were still no more to him than a list of names in the _Poor's Manual_, consulted within the hour for the purpose.

He was early on the battle-ground; much too early, he thought, when a clerk ushered him into the board room in the rear of the brokers' offices. As yet there was only one person present--a young man who was lounging in the easiest of the leather-covered chairs and yawning dismally. At the first glance the face seemed oddly and strikingly familiar; but when the young man marked the new-comer's entrance, the small hand-bag in which the amateur promoter carried his papers, and got up to shake hands, Ford found the suggestive gropings baffled.

"My name is Adair," said the lounger genially; "and I suppose you are the Mr. Ford Uncle Sidney has been telling us about. Pull up a chair and sit by the window. It's the only amusement you'll have until the clan gathers."

Ford looked at his watch.

"I seem to be ahead of time," he remarked. "I understood Mr. Colbrith to say that the meeting would be called for ten o'clock."

"Oh, that's all right; and so he did," rejoined the other cheerfully. "But that means anything up to noon for a directors' meeting in New York." Then, after a pause: "Do you know any of us personally, Mr. Ford?"

Ford was rummaging in his memory again. "I ought to know you, Mr. Adair. It isn't very decent to drag in resemblances, but--"

"The resemblance is the real thing, this time," said Adair. "You saw me day before yesterday, driving out of the Overlook grounds as you were going in."

Ford shook his head.

"No; it goes back of that; sometime I'll remember how and where. But to answer your question: I know Mr. Colbrith slightly, but I've never met any of the directors."

"Well, you are meeting one at this moment," laughed the young man, crossing his legs comfortably. "But I am the easiest mark of the lot," he added. "I inherited my holdings in Pacific Southwestern."

Ford was crucially anxious to find out how the battle was likely to go, and his companion seemed amiably communicative.

"Since you call Mr. Colbrith 'Uncle Sidney,' I infer that you know what I am here for, Mr. Adair. How do you think my proposition is likely to strike the board?"

Again the young man laughed.

"Fancy your asking me!" he said. "I haven't talked with any one but Uncle Sidney; and the most I could get out of him was that you wanted thirty-five million dollars to spend."

"Well," said the Westerner anxiously, "am I going to get it?"

"You can search me," was the good-natured rejoinder. "But from my knowledge of the men you are going presently to wrestle with, I should say 'no' and italicize it."

"Perhaps it might help me a little if I could know in advance the particular reason for the italics," Ford suggested.

"Oh, sure. The principal reason is that your name isn't Hill or Harriman or Morgan or Gates. Money is ridiculously sheepish. It will follow a known leader blindly, idiotically. But if it doesn't hear the familiar tinkle of the leader's bell, it is mighty apt to huddle and run back."

Ford's smile was grim.

"I don't mind saying to you, Mr. Adair, that this is one of the times when it will be much safer to huddle and run forward. Have you seen the half-yearly report?"

"I? Heaven forbid! I have never seen anything out of the Pacific Southwestern--not even a dividend."

Ford would very willingly have tried to share his enthusiasm with the care-free young man, whose face was still vaguely but persistently remindful of some impression antedating the automobile passing; but now the other members of the board were dropping in by twos and threes, and privacy was at an end.

Just before President Colbrith took his place at the head of the long table to call the meeting to order, Adair leaned forward to say in low tones: "I couldn't give you the tip you wanted, Mr. Ford, but I can give you another which may serve as well. If your good word doesn't win out, scare 'em--scare 'em stiff! I don't know but you could frighten half a million or so out of me if you should try."

"Thank you," said Ford. "I may take you at your word,"--and just then Mr. Colbrith rose in his place, fingering his thin white beard rather nervously, Ford thought, and rapping on the table for silence.

It was admitted on all hands that the president of the Pacific Southwestern was a careful man and a thrifty. It was these qualities which had first determined his election. There were many small stock-holders in the company, and it is the foible of small stock-holders to believe that rigid economy counts for more than adventurous outreachings in the larger field.

"Gentlemen," he began, his high, raucous voice rasping the silence like the filing of a saw, "this meeting is called, as you have probably been informed, for the purpose of considering a plan for betterments submitted by Mr. Stuart Ford, who is at the present time superintendent of our Plug Mountain Division.

"In making this unusual innovation, and in introducing Mr. Ford, I desire to say that I have been actuated by that motive of prudence which, while it stands firmly upon its own feet, is willing to consider suggestions from without, even when these suggestions appear to be totally at variance with a policy of careful and judicious financiering.

"In presenting Mr. Ford as the son of an old friend, long since gone to his reward, I wish it distinctly understood that I am in no sense committed to his plan. The policy of this company under the present administration has been uniformly cautious and prudent: Mr. Ford would throw caution and prudence to the winds. Our best efforts have been directed toward the saving of the ultimate dollar of expense: Mr. Ford urges us to spend millions. We have been trying to dispose of some of our non-paying branches: Mr. Ford would have us acquire others and build new lines."

While Mr. Colbrith was speaking, Adair was rapidly characterizing the members for Ford, checking them off upon his fingers.

"The little man at Uncle Sidney's right is Mackie, and the miserly looking one next to him is McVeigh," he whispered. "One of them will furnish your coffin, and the other will drive the nails into it. The big man with the beard is Brewster--a multimillionaire; and the one who looks like Senator Bailey is Magnus, president of the Mohican National. Connolly, the fat Irishman, is a politician--wads of money, but not much interest in the game. The other three--"

But now the president had made an end and was beckoning to Ford.

The young engineer rose, feeling much as if a bucket of ice-water had been suddenly emptied down the back of his neck. But one of his saving qualities was the spring-like resilience which responds instantly to a shock. Spreading his papers on the table, he began with a little apology.

"I didn't come here this morning prepared to make a promoter's speech; and perhaps it is just as well, since my gift, if I have one, lies in doing things rather than in talking about them. But I can lay a few facts before you which you may deem worthy of consideration."

From this as a beginning he went on swiftly and incisively. The Pacific Southwestern, in its present condition, was a failure. It was an incomplete line, trying vainly to hold its own against great and powerful systems overlapping it at either end. The remedy lay in extension. The acquisition of a controlling interest in three short roads, which, pieced together, would bridge the gap between the Missouri River and Chicago, would place the Pacific Southwestern upon an equal footing with its competitors as a grain carrier. By standardizing the Plug Mountain narrow gauge and extending it to Salt Lake and beyond, the line would secure a western outlet, and would be in a position to demand its share of transcontinental business.

To finance these two extensions a capital of thirty-five million dollars would be needed; five million dollars for the purchase of the majority stock in the three short roads, and the remainder for the western outlet. These assertions were not guesses: by referring to exhibits marked "a" "b" and "f," his hearers would find accurate estimates of cost, not only of construction, but also of stock purchases.

As to the manner of providing the capital, he had only a suggestion to offer. The five million dollars necessary for the acquirement of a controlling interest in the three short roads would be a fair investment. It could be covered immediately by a reissue--share for share--of the reorganization stock of the P. S-W., which would amply secure the investors, since the stock of the most prosperous of the three local roads was listed at twenty-eight, ten points lower than the present market quotation of P. S-W.

The thirty million dollar extension fund might be raised by issuing second mortgage bonds upon the entire system, or the new line itself could be bonded mile for mile under a separate charter. Ford modestly disclaimed any intention of dictating the financial policy; this was not in his line. But again he would submit facts. The grain crop in the West was phenomenally large in prospect. With its own eastern terminal in Chicago, the Pacific Southwestern could control the grain shipments in its own territory. With the moving of the grain, the depressed P. S-W. stock would inevitably recover, and on a rising market the new issue of bonds could doubtless be floated.

The enthusiast closed his argument with a hasty summing-up of the benefits which must, in the nature of things, accrue. From being an alien link in the great transcontinental chain, the Pacific Southwestern would rise at a bound to the dignity of a great railway system; a power to be reckoned with among the other great systems gridironing the West. Its earnings would be enhanced at every point; cross lines which now fed its competitors would become its allies; the local lines to be welded into the eastern end of the system would share at once in the prosperity of a strong through line.

For the western extension he could speak from personal knowledge of the region to be penetrated. Apart from the new line's prime object--that of providing an outlet for the system--there was a goodly heritage of local business awaiting the first railroad to reach the untapped territory. Mines, valueless now for the lack of transportation facilities, would become abundant producers; and there were many fertile valleys and mesas to attract the ranchman, who would find on the western slopes of the mountains an unfailing water supply for his reservoirs and ditches. Ford did not hesitate to predict that within a short time the extension would earn more, mile for mile, than the grain-belt portion of the system.

When he sat down he felt that his cause was lost. There was no enthusiasm, no approval, in the faces of his auditors. After a short and informal discussion, in which the engineer was called on to explain his plans and estimates in detail to one and another of the members, Magnus, the bank president, sufficiently summed up the sense of the meeting when he said:

"There is no question about the ingenuity of your plan, Mr. Ford. You must have given a great deal of time and thought to it. But it is rather too large for us, I'm afraid, and there are too many contingencies. Your province, I understand, is the building and operating of railroads, and it is nothing to your discredit that you are unfamiliar with the difficulties of financing an undertaking as vast as this proposal of yours."