II A Spiked Switch
Ford’s hopeful prophecy that the snow battles were over for the season proved true. A few weeks later a warm wind blew up from the west, the mountain foot-trails became first packed ice-paths and then slippery ridges to trap the unwary; the great drifts began to settle and melt, and the spring music of the swollen mountain torrents was abroad in the land.
At the blowing of the warm wind Ford aimed the opening gun in his campaign against fate—the fate which seemed to be bent upon adding his name to the list of failures on the Plug Mountain branch. The gun-aiming was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.
“I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay,” wrote Ford, “and the chance has come. Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place is yours if you will take it. If you are willing to tie up to the most harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come.”
This letter was written on a Friday. Frisbie got it out of the carriers’ delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal. Not that the destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford’s finger.
It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint’s Rest, stretched his legs gratefully on terra firma, had his first deep lungful of the ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him. Ford would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the little shack “hotel,” and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the boxed-off den in the station building which served as the superintendent’s office.
“I’ve been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing threatened to take shape in my head,” Ford began. “First, let me ask you: do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four good constructing engineers—men you could turn loose absolutely and trust implicitly? I’m putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain exile has taken me a bit out of touch.”
“Why—yes,” said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll. “There are Major Benson and his son Jack—you know ’em both—just in off their job in the Selkirks. Then there is Roy Brissac; he’d be a pretty good man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,—he’s got a job in Winnipeg, but he’ll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man I know. But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?”
Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.
“I’ll go into the details with you a little later. We shall have plenty of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good bit more privacy. The thing I’m trying to figure out will burst like a bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and”—lowering his voice—“I can’t trust my office force here. Savez?”
“I savez nothing as yet,” laughed the new supervisor, “but perhaps I shall if you’ll tell me what is going to happen in the next month or six weeks.”
“I’m coming to that, right now. How would you like to take a hunting trip over on the wilderness side of the range? There are big woods and big game.”
Frisbie grinned. He was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in Faust. Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic.
“You needn’t ask me what I’d like; you just tell me what you want me to do,” he rejoined, with clansman loyalty.
“So I will,” said Ford, taking the reins of authority. “We leave here to-morrow morning for a trip over the Pass and down the Pannikin on the other side, and if anybody asks you why, you can say that we expect to kill a deer or two, and possibly a bear. Your part of the outsetting, however, is to pack your surveying instruments on the burro saddles so they’ll pass for grub-boxes, tent-poles, and the like.”
“Call it done,” said Frisbie. “But why all this stage play? Can’t you anticipate that much without endangering your bubble?”
Ford lowered his voice again.
“I gave you the hint. Penfield, my chief clerk—his desk is just on the other side of that partition—is an ex-main-line man, shoved upon me when I didn’t want him. He was General Manager North’s stenographer. For reasons which will be apparent to you a little later on, I want to blow my bubble in my own way; or, to change the figure, I’d like to fire the first volley myself.”
Frisbie’s grin was rather more than less diabolic.
“Then I’d begin by firing Mr. Penfield, himself,” he remarked.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Ford. “There are going to be obstacles enough in the way without slapping Mr. North in the face as a preliminary. Under the circumstances, he’d take it that way; Penfield would make sure that he took it that way.”
It was at this point in the low-toned conference that the ingenious young man in the outer office put down the desk telephone ear-piece long enough to smite with his fist at some air-drawn antagonist. Curiosity was this young man’s capital weakness, and he had tinkered the wires of the private telephone system so that the flicking of a switch made him an auditor at any conversation carried on in the private office. He was listening intently and eagerly again when Ford said, still in the same guarded tone:
“No, I can’t fire Penfield, and I don’t particularly want to. He is a good office man, and loyal to his salt: it’s my misfortune that it is Mr. North’s salt-cellar, and not mine, that he dips into. Besides, I’d have trouble in replacing him. Saint’s Rest isn’t exactly the paradise its name implies—for a clean-cut, well-mannered young fellow with social leanings.”
“Now, what in the mischief does all that mean?” mused the chief clerk, when Ford and his new track man had gone out. “A month’s hunting trip over the range, with the surveying instruments taken along. And last summer Mr. Ford spent a good part of his time over there—also hunting, so he said. Confound it all! I wish I could get into that private drawer of his in the safe. That would tell the story. I wonder if Pacheco couldn’t make himself an errand over the Pass in the morning? By George!” slapping his thigh and apostrophizing the superintendent, “I’ll just go you once, Mr. Ford, if I lose!”
Now the fruit, of which this little soliloquy was the opening blossom, matured on the second day after Ford and Frisbie had started out on the mysterious hunting trip across the range. Pacheco, the half-breed Mexican who freighted provisions by jack train to the mining-camps on the head waters of the Pannikin, came in to report to the chief clerk.
“Well, ‘Checo, what did you find out?” was the curt inquiry.
The half-breed spread his palms.
“W’at I see, I know. Dey’ll not gone for hunt much. One day out, dey’ll make-a da camp and go for squint t’rough spy-glass, so”—making an imaginary transit telescope of his hands. “Den dey’ll measure h-on da groun’ and squint some more, so.”
Penfield nodded and a gold piece changed hands silently.
“That’s all, ‘Checo; much obliged. Don’t say anything about this over in the camp. Mr. Ford said he was going hunting, and that’s what we’ll say, if anybody asks us.”
That night the chief clerk sent a brief cipher telegram to the general manager at Denver.
Ford and his new track supervisor, who is really a high-priced constructing engineer, gone over the range for a month’s absence. Gave it out here that they were going after big game, but they took a transit and are picking up the line of the old S.L. & W. extension in the upper Pannikin.
It was late in the month of June when Ford and Frisbie, tanned, weathered and as gaunt as pioneers, returned to Saint’s Rest; and for those who were curious enough to be interested, there were a couple of bear-skins and one of a mountain lion to make good the ostensible object of the absence.
But the most important trophies of the excursion were two engineers’ note-books, well filled with memoranda; and these they did not exhibit. On the contrary, they became a part of the collection of maps, statistics, estimates and private correspondence which Chief Clerk Penfield was so anxious to examine, and which Ford kept under lock and key when he and Frisbie were not poring over some portion of it in the seclusion of the private office.
None the less, Penfield kept his eyes and ears open, and before long he had another detail to report by cipher telegram to the general manager. Ford was evidently preparing for another absence, and from what the chief clerk could overhear, he was led to believe that the pseudo supervisor of track would be left in charge of Plug Mountain affairs.
It was on the day before Ford’s departure for Denver that a letter came from General Manager North. Ford read it with a scowl of disapproval and tossed it across the double desk to Frisbie.
“A polite invitation for me to stay at home and to attend to my business,” he commented.
“Had you written him that you were going away?” inquired Frisbie.
“No; but evidently somebody else has.”
Frisbie read the letter again.
“‘So that all heads of departments may be on duty when the president makes his annual inspection trip over the lines,’” he quoted. “Is Mr. Colbrith coming out this early in the summer?”
“No, of course not. He never comes before August.”
“Then this is only a trumped-up excuse to make you stay here?”
“That’s all,” Ford replied laconically.
Mr. Richard Frisbie got up and walked twice the length of the little room before he said:
“This Denver gentleman is going to knock your little scheme into a cocked hat, if he can, Stuart.”
“I am very much afraid we’ll have to reckon upon that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been reckoning upon it, all along.”
“How much of a pull has he with the New York money-people?”
“I don’t know that: I wish I did. It would simplify matters somewhat.”
Frisbie took another turn up and down the room, with his head down and his hands in his pockets.
“Stuart, I believe, if I were in your place, I’d enlist Mr. North, if I had to make it an object for him,” he said, at length.
“Certainly, I mean to go to him first,” said Ford. “That is his due. But I am counting upon opposition rather than help. Wait a minute”—he jerked the door open suddenly and made sure that the chief clerk’s chair was unoccupied. “The worst of it is that I don’t trust North,” he went on. “He is a grafter in small ways, and he’d sell me out in a minute if he felt like it and could see any chance of making capital for himself.”
“Then don’t go to him with your scheme,” urged Frisbie. “If you enlist him, you won’t be sure of him; and if you don’t, you’ll merely leave an active opponent behind you instead of a passive one.”
“I guess you’re right, Dick; but I’ll have to be governed by conditions as I find them. Aside from North’s influence with Mr. Colbrith, which is considerable, I believe, he can’t do much to help. But he can do a tremendous lot to hinder. I think I shall try to choke him with butter, if I can.”
Notwithstanding the general manager’s letter, Ford took the train for Denver the following morning, and the chief clerk remarked that he checked a small steamer trunk in addition to his hand baggage.
“Going to be gone some time, Mr. Ford?” he asked, when he brought the night mail down for the superintendent to look over.
“Yes,” said Ford absently.
“You’ll let me know where to reach you from time to time, I suppose?” ventured Penfield.
Ford looked up quickly.
“It won’t be necessary. You can handle the office work, as you have heretofore, and Mr. Frisbie will have full charge out of doors.”
Penfield looked a little crestfallen.
“Am I to take orders from Mr. Frisbie?” he asked, as one determined to know the worst.
“Just the same as you would from me,” said the superintendent, swinging up to the step of the moving car. And the chief clerk went back to his office busily concocting another cipher message to the general manager.
On the way down the canyon Ford was saying to himself that he was now fairly committed to the scheme over which he had spent so many toilful days and sleepless nights, and that he would have it out with Mr. North to a fighting conclusion before he slept.
But a freight wreck got in the way while the down passenger train was measuring the final third of the distance, and it was long after office hours in the Pacific Southwestern headquarters when Ford reached Denver.
By consequence, the crucial interview with the general manager had to be postponed; and the enthusiast was chafing at his ill luck when he went to his hotel—chafing and saying hard words, for the waiting had been long, and now that the psychologic moment had arrived, delays were intolerable.
Now it sometimes happens that seeming misfortunes are only blessings in disguise. When Ford entered the hotel café to eat his belated dinner, he saw Evans, the P. S-W. auditor, sitting alone at a table-for-two. He crossed the room quickly and shook hands with the man he had meant to interview either before or after the meeting with North.
It was after they had chatted comfortably through to the coffee that the auditor said, blandly: “What are you down for, Ford?—anything special?”
“Yes. I am down to get leave of absence to go East,” said Ford warily.
“But that isn’t all,” was the quiet rejoinder. “In fact, it’s only the non-committal item that you’d give to a Rocky Mountain News reporter.”
Ford was impatient of diplomatic methods when there was no occasion for them.
“Give it a name,” he said bluntly. “What do you think you know, Evans?”
The auditor smiled.
“There is a leak in your office up at Saint’s Rest, I’m afraid. What sort of a bombshell are you fixing to fire at Mr. North?”
Ford grew interested at once.
“Tell me what you know, and perhaps I can piece it out for you.”
“I’ll tell you what Mr. North knows—which will be more to the purpose, perhaps. For a year or more you have been figuring on some kind of a scheme to pull the company’s financial leg in behalf of your good-for-nothing narrow gauge. A month ago, for example, you went all over the old survey on the other side of the mountains and verified the original S.L. & W. preliminaries and rights-of-way on its proposed extension.”
Ford’s eyes narrowed. He was thinking of the warning letter he would have to write to Frisbie. But what he said was:
“I’d like to know how the dickens you guessed all that. But no matter; supposing I did?”
“It’s no good,” said the auditor, shaking his head. “I’m talking as a friend. North doesn’t like you, personally; and if he did, you couldn’t persuade him to recommend anything in the way of an experiment on the Plug Mountain. So far from extending your two-by-four branch—if that is what you have in mind—he’d be much more likely to counsel its abandonment, if the charter didn’t require us to keep it going.”
Ford found a cigar for the auditor, and lighted one for himself.
“From all of which I infer that the semiannual report of the Pacific Southwestern is going to be a pretty bad one,” he said, with carefully assumed indifference.
Evans regarded him shrewdly.
“Are you guessing at that? Or is there a leak at our end of the line as well as at yours?”
“Oh, it’s a guess,” laughed Ford. “Call it that, anyhow. At least, I haven’t any of your confidential clerks in my pay. But just how bad is the report going to be?”
The auditor shook his head.
“Worse than the last one. Perhaps you have noticed that the stock has dropped six points in the past week. You’re one of the official family: I don’t mind telling you that we are in the nine-hole, Ford.”
“Of course we are,” said Ford, with calm conviction. “That much is pretty evident to a man who merely reads the Wall Street news bulletins. What is the matter with us—specifically, I mean?”
Evans shrugged.
“Are you a division superintendent on the system and don’t know?” he demanded. “We are too short at both ends. With our eastern terminal only half-way to Chicago, we can’t control the east-bound grain which grows on our own line; and with the other end stopping short here at Denver, we can’t bid for west-bound transcontinental business. It’s as simple as twice two. Our competitors catch us going and coming.”
“Precisely. And if we don’t get relief?”
The auditor smiled grimly.
“As I’ve said, you’re one of us, Ford, and I don’t mind speaking freely to you. A receivership is looming in the distance, and the not very dim distance, for the P. S-W.”
“I thought so. How near is it?”
“I don’t know—nobody knows definitely. If we had a man of resources at the head of things—as we have not—it might be stood off for another six months.”
“I’m on the way to stand it off permanently, if I can get any backing,” said Ford quietly.
“You!” was the astonished reply.
“Yes, I. Listen, Evans. For two years I have been buried up yonder in the hills, with not enough to do in the summer season to keep me out of mischief. I am rather fond of mathematics, and I am telling you I have this thing figured out to the fourth decimal. If President Colbrith and his associates can be made to see that the multiplication of two by two gives an invariable resultant of four, there will be no receivership for the P. S-W. this year, or next.”
“Show me,” said the auditor.
Ford hesitated for a moment. Then he took a packet of papers, estimates, exhibits and fine-lined engineer’s maps from his pocket and tossed it across the table.
“That is for you, personally—for David Evans; not the P. S-W. auditor. You’ve got to keep it to yourself.”
The auditor went through the papers carefully, shifting his cigar slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other as he read and examined. When he handed them back he was shaking his head, almost mournfully.
“It’s a big thing, Ford; the biggest kind of a thing. And it is beautifully worked out. But I know our people, here and in New York. They will simply give you the cold stare and say that you are crazy.”
“Because it can’t be financed?”
“Because it doesn’t come from Hill or Harriman or Morgan, or some other one of the big captains. You’ll never be able to stand it upon its feet by your single-handed lonesome.”
Ford set his teeth, and his clean-cut face seemed to grow suddenly older and harder as the man in him came to the fore.
“By heavens! if I put my back under it, it’s got to stand upon its feet! I’m not going into it with the idea that there is any such thing in the book as failure.”
The auditor looked darkly into the cool gray eyes of the man facing him.
“Then let me give you a word of advice before you start in. Skip North, absolutely; don’t breathe a word of it to him. Don’t ask me why; but do as I say. And another thing: drop into my office to-morrow before you leave. I’ll show you some figures that may help you to stir things up properly at the New York end. Do you go direct from here?”
“No; I shall have to stop over a few days in Chicago. I know pretty well where to put my hands on what I need; I have laid the foundations from the bottom up by correspondence. But I want to go over the situation on the ground before I make my grand-stand play before Mr. Colbrith and the board of directors.”
“Well, come in and get the figures, anyway: come to the private door of my office and rap three times. It will be just as well if it isn’t generally known that you are confabbing with me. Our semiannual report will probably be in New York ahead of you, but it won’t hurt if you have the information to work with.” Evans was pushing his chair from the table when he added: “By the way, you happened upon the exact psychological moment to make your raid; the report coming out, and things going to the dogs generally.”
Ford’s laugh was genially shrewd.
“Perhaps it wasn’t so much of a happening as it appears. Didn’t I tell you that I had figured this thing out to the fourth decimal place? Psychological moments are bigger arguments than dollars and cents, sometimes.”
The auditor had taken his hat from the waiter and was shaking hands with his dinner companion.
“I’d like to believe you’re a winner, Ford; you deserve to be. Come and see me—and make your call upon Mr. North as brief as possible. He’ll probe you if you don’t.”
This was how it came about that the next morning, when Ford went to call upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the glass door lettered “General Manager, Private,”—this after half an hour spent in Auditor Evans’ private office,—it was only to ask for leave of absence to go East—on business of a personal nature, he explained, when Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.