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, reassuring the timid, assorting 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 coöperation 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 principals 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 assault 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?
He decided that he could not; and when he reached a decision, Ford was not the man to hesitate before taking the plunge. On the morning of the third day he called Truitt, sometime superintendent of the C.P. & D., and now acting manager of the Chicago Extension, and gave him his instructions.
“You say there are three grain trains moving on the line now, Mr. Truitt: there will be three more before night. Keep them coming, and give them the right of way over everything but the United States mails. Can you handle this without help from me?”
“We’ll give it a pretty stiff try,” was the prompt rejoinder. “But you are not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Ford?”
“No; but for the next forty-eight hours I am going to lock my door, and I don’t want to be disturbed for anything less than a disaster or a wire from New York. Please give orders accordingly, will you?”
The orders were given; and, left with his force of stenographers, Ford began to walk the floor, dictating right and left. Letters and telegrams to steel mills, to contractors, to bridge builders, to the owners of grading outfits, and to labor agencies, clicked out of the typewriters in a steady and unbroken stream, and the din was like that of a main-line telegraph office on a hot piece of track.
All day long, and far into the night, the office force wrought unceasingly, digging away at the mountain of preliminary correspondence; and by the next morning the wire replies were beginning to come in.
Then came the crux. To insure prompt delivery of material, definite orders must be placed immediately. A delay of a single day might entail a delay of weeks in the shipments. Yet the risk of plunging the company into debts it might never be able to pay was appalling. What if the stock should not go up as prefigured?—if the bonds could not be floated?
It was with the feeling that he might well be signing his own death-warrant that Ford put his name to the first order for two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of steel rails for immediate delivery to the company’s line in Chicago. But after the first cold submergence it came more easily, and when he left the office an hour before midnight, a cool million would not have covered the obligations he had assumed during the strenuous day.
Kenneth was sitting up for him when he reached his hotel, and the usually impassive face of the general counsel reflected trouble.
“Out with it,” said Ford wearily; and suddenly the new million of indebtedness became a mountain weight to grind him to powder.
“We’re blocked,” was the brief announcement. “Two of the grain trains are in, and the Transcontinental lawyers have won the toss. We’re enjoined by the court from using the service tracks to the elevators. Didn’t your local people tell you?”
“No,” said Ford. “I had given orders that I was not to be disturbed. But what of it? You expected something of the sort, didn’t you?”
“Yes; and I provided for it. The injunction will be dissolved when we have our final hearing; but long before that time the mischief will be irreparable, I’m afraid.”
“How?”
“It will be blazoned far and wide that we can’t deliver the goods—that the opposition has done us up. I’ve tried to keep it out of the newspapers, or, rather, to persuade them not to make too much of it. But it wouldn’t go. The Transcontinental has all the pull in this town, it appears.”
“And you think it will affect the price of the stock?”
“It is bound to, temporarily, at least. And coming upon the heels of to-day’s sudden tumble—”
“What’s that?” demanded Ford, dry-lipped, adding: “I haven’t seen a paper since morning.”
Kenneth wagged his head gloomily. “It’s pretty bad. P. S-W. closed at thirty-three—five points off yesterday’s market.”
“Good Lord!” Ford’s groan was that of a man smitten down in the heat of the fight. “Say, Kenneth, within a single sweep of the clock-hands I have contracted for more than a million dollars’ worth of material for the western extension—more than a million dollars’ worth!”
“Well, I’m afraid you have sinned in haste to repent at leisure,” said the lawyer, with a weary man’s disregard for the amenities. Then he added: “I’m going to bed. I’ve had about all I can stand for one day.”
Ford went to the room clerk for his key; reeled would be the better word, since his brain was whirling. There was a telegram in his box, and he tore it open with fresh and sharper misgivings. It was from Adair.
The sick man’s getting sicker. What is the matter with your prescription? Stock gone off five points, and the bears are squeezing us to beat the band. Stories flying on the Street that we are a kite without an effective tail; that the courts will keep us out of the elevators. What do you say?
Ford consulted his watch. There was barely time to catch the midnight train for New York, and his determination was taken on the spur of the moment. It was all or nothing, now.
Hastily writing a wire to the cashier of the Denver bank where he kept his personal account, and another to Adair, and leaving brief notes for Kenneth and Truitt, he took a cab and had himself driven at a gallop to the Union Station. He was the last man through the platform gates, but he made his train, and was settling himself in the sleeper when another telegram was thrust into his hand. This was from Frisbie, at Saint’s Rest; and that it brought more bad news might be argued from the way in which he crushed it slowly in his hand and jammed it into his pocket. On this day, if never before, he was proving the truth of the old adage that misfortunes do not come singly.
Upon arriving in New York late the following evening, he had himself driven to the Waldorf, where he found Adair waiting for him. A few words sufficed to outline the situation, which the lapse of another day had made still more desperate. So far from recovering, the falling stock had dropped to twenty-nine and a half, and there was every indication that the bottom was not yet reached.
“How do you account for it?” asked Ford, when the dismal tale had been told.
“Oh, it’s easy enough, when you know how,” was the light-hearted rejoinder. “As I wired you, there was something of a scramble on the floor of the Exchange last week when we were fighting to find out whether we should control our own majority or let the Transcontinental have it. Our pool got its fifty-one per cent. all right, but in the nature of things the enemy stood as the next largest stock-holder in P. S-W., since they’d been buying right and left against us. Now, since we don’t need any more, and nobody else wants it, all the Transcontinental people have to do is to unload on the market, and down she goes.”
Ford looked incredulous, and then wrathful.
“Adair, tell me: did I have to stop my work when my time is worth fifty dollars a minute, and come all the way to New York to tell you folks what to do?” he demanded.
Adair’s laugh was utterly and absolutely care-free.
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? Have you got the compelling club up your sleeve, as usual?”
“A boy might carry it—and swing it, too,” was the disgusted answer. “When does the board meet again? Or has it concluded to lie down in the harness?”
“Oh, it gets together every morning—got the meeting habit, you know. Everybody’s in a blue funk, but we still have the daily round-up to swap funeral statistics.”
“All right. Meet me here in the morning, and we’ll go and join the procession. Can you make it nine o’clock?”
“Sure. It’s too late to go home, and I’ll stay here. Then you’ll be measurably certain that I can’t escape. May I see the tip end of the club?”
“No,” said Ford grumpily. “You don’t deserve it. Go to bed and store up a head of steam that will carry you through the hardest day’s work you ever hoped to do. Good night.”
They met again at the breakfast-table the following morning, and Ford talked pointedly of everything save the P. S-W. predicament. One of Adair’s past fads had been the collecting of odd weapons; Ford discovered this and drew the young man skilfully into a discussion of the medieval secrets of sword-tempering.
“I’ve a bit of the old Damascus, myself,” said the engineer. “Tybee—he was on the Joppa-Jerusalem road in the building—picked it up for me. Curious piece of old steel; figured and flowered and etched and inlaid with silver. There were jewels in the pommel once, I take it; the settings are still there to show where some practical-turned vandal dug them out.”
Adair was quite at a loss to guess how old swords and their histories could bear upon the financial situation, but he was coming to know Ford better. Some one has said that it is only the small men who are careful and troubled on the eve of a great battle. So the talk was of ancient weapons until the time for action arrived; and a smooth-faced gentleman sitting at a near-by table and marked down by Ford—though not by Ford’s companion—listened for some word of enlightenment on the railroad situation, and was cruelly disappointed.
“Why wouldn’t you talk?” asked Adair, when they were driving down-town in the young millionaire’s auto. “Or rather, why did you persist in keeping me to the old swords?”
Ford laughed.
“For one reason, I enjoy the old swords—as a relaxation. For another, Mr. Jeffers Hawley, who was once one of the Transcontinental lawyers in Denver, was sitting just behind you, with eager ears. You didn’t know that. Hold on a minute; tell your man to stop at the Chemical Bank. I want you to introduce me to the cashier.”
“Now, what the deuce are you starting a New York bank account for?” queried Adair, as they came out of the bank together and climbed into the tonneau of the waiting touring car. “Couldn’t you draw on the treasurer? What’s the use of your being the assistant to the president, I’d like to know?”
“Wait,” was the answer; and the questioner waited, perforce.
The board was already in session when the two young men were admitted to the private room in the rear of the Broad Street offices, and Ford was welcomed as a man who has recklessly steered the ship upon the rocks. There were even some open recriminations, notably on the part of the president; but Ford sat quietly under them, making no defense, and folding and refolding a slip of paper in his fingers as he listened.
When they gave him leave to speak, he still made no attempt to explain. Instead, he rose, walked to the other end of the table, and tossed the bit of folded paper across to Mackie, the broker.
“I inherited a little money, and I have made and saved enough more to make it an even twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “I don’t know of any more promising investment just now than Pacific Southwestern at twenty-nine and a half. Will you be good enough to buy for my account, Mr. Mackie?”
The effect was electrical. President Colbrith sat up very straight in his chair; two or three of the anxious ones opened on Ford with a rapid fire of questions; and Brewster, the copper magnate, sat back and chuckled softly in his beard.
“No, gentlemen; there is no change in the situation, so far as I know. Of course, you are not so foolish as to let the newspaper talk of the tie-up at the Chicago elevators influence you,” Ford was saying to the anxious inquirers. “And, apart from that, everything is going our way. As I have remarked, our stock at the present figure is good enough for me, and I only wish I had two hundred thousand, instead of twenty thousand, to put into it.”
Brewster stopped chuckling long enough to hold up a finger to the broker. “You may buy for my account, too, Mackie, while you are at it—and keep on buying till I tell you to quit.”
This broke the deadlock instantly, and for a few minutes the board room was as noisy as the wheat pit with a corner threatening. Brewster, still laughing in his beard, pulled Ford out of the press at the broker’s end of the table.
“I’m going to ask only one thing of you, young man,” he began, his shrewd little eyes twinkling. “Just let me know when you are going to get out, so I can pull through without having to take the bankruptcy.”
“Will You Be Good Enough to Buy for My Account, Mr. Mackie”
“I’ll do it, Mr. Brewster,” laughed Ford. “Only I’m not going to get out—unless you folks freeze me out.”
“Then it isn’t a long bluff on your part?”
“It is, and it isn’t. We still stand to win if we have the nerve to hold on—in which event P. S-W. at twenty-nine and a fraction is a gold mine. That’s one view of it, and the other is this: we’ve simply got to corner our own stock if we expect to sell thirty millions additional bonds.”
“Well, I guess you’ve gone the right way about it. But are you sure about these Chicago terminals? A legal friend of mine here says you’ll never get in.”
“He was possibly paid to say it,” said Ford hotly. “There has never been a shadow of doubt touching our trackage rights on the C.P. & D. contracts, or upon our ability to maintain them. All the Transcontinental people hoped to do was to make a newspaper stir to help keep our stock down. They know what we are going to do to them over in their western territory, and they won’t stop at anything to block us.”
“Of course; I think we were all inclined to be a little short-sighted and pessimistic here, Mr. Ford. When do you go back to your fighting ground?”
“To-night.”
“You won’t wait to see what happens here?”
“I don’t need to, I am sure. And the minutes—my minutes—are worth dollars to the company just now.”
“Well, go in and win—only don’t forget to give me that tip. You wouldn’t want to see a man of my age going to the poorhouse.”
“One other word, Mr. Brewster,” Ford begged, as the copper magnate was pointing for the door of escape. “Please don’t let any of these timid gentlemen sell till we get our bonds floated. You mark my word: the temptation to make a big killing is going to be very great, within a week.”
The copper king laughed; openly, this time.
“You overrate my influence, Mr. Ford; but I’ll do what I can—by word of mouth and by example. You can count on me—as long as you let me stay on your side of the market.”
Ford had three several invitations to luncheon after the meeting adjourned, but he accepted none of them. To Adair he made the declination courteous while they were trundling back to the Waldorf in the big touring car.
“I have lost an entire day because I could not take the time to secure a stenographer before leaving Chicago night before last. I must find one now and go to work.”
“All right; if you must. But I was hoping I could take you out to Overlook to dinner this evening. Can’t you come anyhow, and take a later train west?”
“Don’t tempt me,” said Ford. And then: “The ladies are quite well, I hope?”
“Oh, yes; they are in town to-day, and we are all going to luncheon together—though I shan’t know just where until I go to the club. Failing the dinner, won’t you make a knife and fork with us at one o’clock?”
“I should like to—more than anything else in the world,” Ford protested, meaning it. “But you’ll make my excuses to Mrs. Adair, won’t you? We’ve simply got to get a three-cornered hustle on now, if we want to save the day in the West.”
“Why? Is there anything new in that quarter?”
“There is: something that I didn’t dare to mention back yonder in the board meeting. You may remember that I told you I had left a man in my place on the Plug Mountain—Frisbie? I had a wire from him, night before last, just as I was leaving Chicago. As you know, the Pacific Southwestern inherits, from the old narrow-gauge purchase, the right-of-way over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin. Frisbie wires that the Transcontinental people have begun massing building material at the terminus of their Saguache branch, only twenty miles from the Pass.”
“And that means?—I’m lame on geography.”
“It means that they’ll cut in ahead of us, if they can. Plug Pass is the only available unoccupied outlet through the mountains for thirty or forty miles north or south; and if we don’t get our building force on the ground mighty suddenly, we’ll find it fortified and held by the enemy.”
The touring car had turned into Broadway, and the traffic roar precluded further talk. But when Ford was dismounting from the tonneau at the entrance to his hotel, Adair said: “There appears to be no rest for the wicked. You ought to have some of that thirty million dollars to spend right now.”
Ford’s smile was little more than a sardonic grin.
“Adair,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something else that I didn’t dare tell those money-tremulous people in McVeigh and Mackie’s private office. I have been signing contracts and buying material by the train-load ever since the first grain shipment was started eastward on our main line. Also, I’ve got my engineering corps mobilized, and it will take the field under Frisbie as its chief not later than to-morrow. Putting one thing with another, I should say that we are something over a fresh million of dollars on the wrong side of solvency for these little antics of mine, and I’m adding to the deficit by the hundred thousand every time I can get a chance to dictate a letter.”
Adair lighted a cigarette and made a fair show of taking it easily. But a moment later he was lifting his hat to wipe the perspiration from his forehead.
“Lord! but you have the confidence of your convictions!” he said, breathing hard. “If we shouldn’t happen to be able to float the bonds—”
“We are in too deep to admit the ‘if.’ The bonds must be floated, and at the earliest possible moment that Magnus will move in it. You wanted something big enough to keep you interested. I have been trying my best to accommodate you.”
Adair leaned forward and spoke to his chauffeur. The man watched his chances for room to turn in the crowded street.
“Where are you going?” asked Ford.
“Back to McVeigh and Mackie’s—where I can watch a ticker and go broke buying more Pacific Southwestern,” was the reply, and just then the chauffeur found his opening and the big car whirled and plunged into the down-town stream.
In the financial news the next morning there was a half-column or more devoted to the sudden and unaccountable flurry in Pacific Southwestern. Ford got it in the Pittsburg papers and read it while the picked-up stenographer was wrestling with his notes. After the drop in the stock, caused, in the estimation of the writer, by the company’s sudden plunge into railroad buying at wholesale, P. S-W. had recovered with a bound, advancing rapidly in the closing hours of the day from the lower thirties to forty-two, with a strong demand. The utmost secrecy was maintained, but it was shrewdly suspected that one of the great companies, of which the Pacific Southwestern was now a competitor on an equal footing for the grain-carrying trade, had gone in to absorb the new factor in trans-Missouri traffic. Other and more sensational developments might be expected if the battle should be fought to a finish. Then followed a brief history of the Pacific Southwestern, with a somewhat garbled account of the late dash for a Chicago terminal, but lacking—as Ford remarked gratefully—any hint of the company’s designs in the farther West.
“If Adair and Brewster and the others only have the nerve to keep it up!” said Ford to himself. Then he tossed the paper aside and dived once more into the deep sea of extension building, working the picked-up stenographer until the young man was ready with his resignation the moment the final letter was filed for mailing in the Chicago station.
Five days the young engineer waited for news from New York—waited and worked like a high-pressure motor while he waited. Each day’s financial news showed the continued and growing success of the home-made “corner,” and now the reporters were predicting that the stock would go to par before the price should break.
Ford trembled for the good faith of his backers on the board. When one has bought at twenty-nine and a half and can sell within the week for eighty-seven, the temptation is something tremendous. But at the closing hour of the fifth day the demand was still good; and when Ford reached the hotel that night there was a telegram from Adair awaiting him.
He tore it open and read it, with the blood pounding through his veins and a roar which was not of the street traffic drumming in his ears.
P. S-W. closed at ninety-two to-day, and a Dutch syndicate will take the bonds. Success to you in the Western wilderness. Brewster wants to know how soon you’ll reach his Utah copper mines. Adair.