VIII The Automatic Air
Set out in cold type, Ford’s itinerary for the four days following his conference with Kenneth would read like the abbreviated diary of a man dodging the sheriff. His “ticker” memorandum for that period is still in existence, but the notes are the hurried strokes of the pen of haste, intelligible, we may say, only to the man who made them. To quote:
“Thursday, nine a.m., Peoria—see Sedgwick; ten—make trackage contract with T.P. & W.; eleven a.m., Davenport—inventory motive power—see chief despatcher—get profiles and maps—get copies of yard contracts—get crossing rights—get total tonnage of grain cars. Three p.m., Hannibal—see Berdan and whip him into line—inspect shops—get contracts—get—”
But the string of “gets” fills the page, and is vital now to no living soul of man, least of all to us who are interested only in finding out if our young captain of industry actually did make good his boast of flogging the three short roads into some semblance of a through line in the brief interval at his disposal; and this without advertising to the railroad world at large who he represented and what he was doing.
He did it, and without a slip for which he could be held responsible. It was a wire from the chief office of the Transcontinental in New York, a telegram inspired by sundry leakages from Pacific Southwestern sources, that gave him a silent and observant follower in all of his dodgings. Of this, however, he was in blissful ignorance. Twice, indeed, he sat in the same Pullman section with his “shadow,” quite without suspecting it; and once he was saved from disaster—also without suspecting it.
It was at a way station in Missouri, and the section-sharing traveling companion, who had paid only for an hour’s ride in the Pullman, was leaving the train. His hand-bag chanced to be the exact counterpart of Ford’s: what more natural than that he should make the mistake of taking the wrong one? Ford caught him in the vestibule, and there was a reëxchange, accompanied by grateful acknowledgments and profuse apologies from the debarking one. Ford, immersed fathoms deep in his problems, thought nothing of it; but a moment lost would have been a cause lost, if he had guessed it. For the mistake was no mistake, and the hand-bag rescued contained documents for which the Transcontinental Company would have paid a month’s salary of its board of vice-presidents, charging the amount, not to profit and loss, but rather to salvage.
It was on the fourth day of the campaign, while Ford was working his way on an inspection trip over the third link in the short-lines chain, that two telegrams overtook him.
One was from Adair, announcing the tardy, but now certain triumph of the expansionist faction in the board of P.S-W. directors, and begging pathetically for news of the option-getting. The other was signed “K,” and Ford had a sharp attack of joy when he read it. The attorney had been successful at all points. The necessary stock majorities were secured and the certificates were safely on deposit in the Algonquin National Bank, in Chicago. What remained was only a matter of routine, provided the P. S-W. bidders would furnish the capital for the purchases.
Ford swamped the local operator at the next way station with a thick sheaf of “rush” telegrams, left the west-bound train at the first cross-road junction, and caught a night express on a fast line for Chicago. Kenneth was waiting for him at the hotel; and after breakfast there was another telegram from Adair. Matters were still progressing favorably, and President Colbrith, traveling in his private car, “Nadia,” via the Lake Shore, would be in Chicago the following morning to take final action in the stock purchases.
Ford gave the message to Kenneth, and the attorney drummed softly on the table with his finger-tips when he read the announcement.
“We are in for it now,” he said with a grimace of dismay. “If Mr. Colbrith doesn’t manage to queer the whole deal, it will be because he has suffered a complete change of heart.”
Ford answered the grimace with a scowl, and the masterful side of him came uppermost.
“What in the name of common sense were they thinking of to send him out here?” he gritted.
The general counsel laughed.
“You don’t know Mr. Colbrith as well as I do, I fancy,” he suggested. “He is rather hard to suppress. He’ll be president until his successor is elected—or he’ll know all the reasons why.”
“Well, I hope you’ve got everything straight in the option business,” said Ford. “If there is so much as a hair displaced, he will be sure to find it.”
“It is all straight enough,” was the confident rejoinder. “Only I had to bid five points over the market on odd lots of the stock. I’m not sure, but I think the Transcontinental people got wind of us during the last day or two and bid against us.”
“But you have safe majorities?”
“Oh, yes; we are all in.”
“Good,” said Ford. “That puts it up to Mr. Colbrith, at all events. And now, while we have a clear day before us, I want to go over these C.P. & D. terminal contracts with you. Right here in Chicago is where the Transcontinental will try hardest to balk us. The C. P. & D. has trackage rights to the elevators; but I want to be sure that the contracts will hold water under a transfer of ownership.”
Subjected to legal scrutiny, the contracts promised to be defensible, and Ford came through the day with his apprehensive burdens considerably lightened. After dinner he took his papers to Kenneth’s room, and together they went carefully over all the legal points involved in the welding of the three local lines into the Pacific Southwestern system, Ford furnishing the data gathered by him during the four days.
Kenneth was shrewdly inquisitive, as his responsibilities constrained him to be, and it was deep in the small hours when Ford made his escape and went to bed. By consequence, he was scarcely more than half awake the next morning, when he dressed hurriedly and hastened over to the Van Buren Street station to see if the president’s car had arrived.
The Nadia was in and side-tracked, with a sleepy porter on guard. Ford climbed to the platform and asked for the president.
“Yas, suh; dis is Mr. Colbrith’s cyar; but he don’t see no newspapuh men—no, suh. Besides, dey’s just gettin’ up,” was the rebuff; but Ford ignored it.
“‘They?’ Then Mr. Colbrith isn’t alone?”
“No, suh; got a pahty ’long with him—a young gentleman and two ladies; yes, suh. Mr. Colbrith nebber goes nowhah’s ’dout he teks a pahty in de cyar.”
“Heavens!” groaned Ford, under his breath; “as if the thing wasn’t complicated enough without making a picnic of it!” Then aloud. “I wish to go in. My name is Ford, and Mr. Colbrith is expecting me.”
“Sho’ you isn’t a newspapuh man?”
“Of course not,” said Ford shortly.
“All right, suh,” said the negro; and he made way and opened the door.
The Nadia was a commodious hotel on wheels, with a kitchen and buffet forward, four state-rooms opening upon a narrow side vestibule, and a large dining and lounging room looking out through full-length windows upon a deep, “umbrella-roofed” platform at the rear.
There was no one in the large compartment when Ford reached it; but a moment later a door opened and closed in the vestibule, and Adair made his appearance. Ford drew a breath of relief and shook hands with his backer.
“I’m glad it’s you, Mr. Adair. I’ve been scenting all sorts of hindrances since the porter told me there was a party aboard.”
The young man without an avocation dropped into the easiest of the wicker chairs and felt in his pockets for his cigarette case.
“Your prophetic soul didn’t deceive you any,” he laughed. “The hindrances are here in full force. It is one of Uncle Sidney’s notions never to travel without a tail like a Highland chieftain’s. I had a foreboding that he’d ask somebody, so I took it upon myself to fill up his passenger list with Aunt Hetty, my sister, and my uncle’s nephew.”
“I understand,” said Ford, and would have plunged forthwith into the business pool; but Adair stopped him with a gesture of dismay.
“Not before breakfast, if you love me, my dear fellow!” he protested, with a little grimace that instantly set the reminiscent part of Ford’s brain at work. “After I’ve had something to eat—”
The interruption was the noiseless entrance of a motherly little lady in gray, with kindly eyes and a touch of silver in the fair hair drawn smoothly back from her forehead.
“This is Mr. Stuart Ford, I am sure,” she said, giving her hand to the young engineer before Adair could introduce him. “You look enough like your father to make me recognize you at once.”
Ford was a little embarrassed by the gratefully informal greeting.
“Ought I to remember you, Mrs. Adair?” he asked ingenuously.
“Oh, no, indeed. I knew your father as a young man before he married and went to the farther West. The Fords and the Colbriths and the Stanbrooks are all from the same little town in central Illinois, you know.”
“I didn’t know it,” said Ford, “though now I recall it, I used often to hear my father speak of Miss Hester Stanbrook.” Then he was going on to say that trite thing about the smallness of the world when Adair broke in.
“I’d like to know what is keeping Uncle Sidney and Alicia. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
As if his protest had evoked her, a young woman drew the portière of the vestibule—a young woman with bright brown hair, eyes like dewy wood violets, and an adorable chin. Ford stared helplessly, and Adair laughed.
“Shocked, aren’t you?” he jested. “But you needn’t be alarmed. I have persuaded my sister not to prosecute in the case of the snatched purse. Alicia, this is Mr. Stuart Ford, and he desires me to say that he is not often reduced to the necessity of robbing unprotected young women for the sake of scraping an acquaintance.”
Ford lost sight of the Pacific Southwestern exigencies for the moment, and surely the lapse was pardonable. If the truth must be told, this young woman, who had been discovered and lost in the same unforgetable evening, had stirred the neglected pool of sentiment in him to its profoundest depths, and thoughts of her had been dividing time pretty evenly with some parts of the strenuous business affair. Indeed, the hopelessness of any effort toward rediscovering her had been one of his reasons for hurrying away from New York. He knew himself—a little—and that quality of unreasoning persistence which other people called his strong point. The search he had been half-minded to make once begun—
“I hope you haven’t forgotten me so soon, Mr. Ford,” she was saying; and he recovered himself with a start.
“Forgotten you? No, indeed!”—this with almost lover-like emphasis. “I—I think I am just a trifle aghast at my good luck in finding you again. It seemed so utterly hopeless, you know. Don’t you think—”
But now the president had stalked in, and his high querulous voice was marshaling the party breakfastward. Ford manoeuvered skilfully in the pairing off, and so succeeded in securing Miss Adair for a companion on the short walk across to the Grand Pacific.
“You were about to ask me something when Uncle Sidney interrupted you,” she prompted, when they were clear of the throng in the station vestibule.
“Yes; I was going to ask if you don’t think it was unnecessarily cruel to send me that note of thanks unsigned.”
“Cruel?” she echoed, and her laugh was so exactly a replica of her brother’s that Ford wondered why the reminiscent arrow had not gone at once to its mark. “How absurd! What possible difference could it make?”
“It made a lot of difference to me,” said Ford, refusing to be brushed aside. “How did you expect I was ever going to be able to find you again, without even your name as a clue?”
She glanced up at him with unfeigned interest. The men of her world were not altogether unappreciative; neither were they so primitively straightforward as this young industry captain out of the West.
“It is not impossible that I never thought of your finding me again,” she said, and only the tone saved it from being a small slap in the face.
Ford took the rebuff as a part of the day’s work.
“Perhaps you didn’t,” he admitted. “But I mean to go on hoping that you did.”
“The idea!” she scoffed; but this time she blunted the keen edge of the rebuke by adding: “I thought, perhaps, we might meet again, sometime. You see, we are all stock-holders in the Pacific Southwestern; my brother, Aunt Hetty and I; and Uncle Sidney had shown us a letter—it was from Mr. North, I think—saying that you were likely to come to New York with some kind of a plan of reorganization. So when you gave me your card, I knew at once who you were.”
Ford made an immediate mental note of the bit of information implicating Mr. North, but did not allow himself to be diverted by the business affair.
“Yes, I know; but that didn’t help me a little bit,” he protested, wishing that the distance to the hotel were twice as far.
“That was just because it happened so; you ran away before my brother had a chance to offer you any hospitality,” she explained. Then, before he could say any more straightforward things: “Tell me, Mr. Ford; are you really going to find something to interest brother?—something that will keep him actually and enthusiastically busy for more than a few days at a time?”
Ford laughed. “I fancy he hasn’t been bored for the lack of work since I left New York, has he?”
“No; and it has made such a difference! Won’t you please try and keep him going?”
“You may rest assured that I shall do what I can. But you see he has quit already.”
“By coming to Chicago with us? Oh, no, indeed; you are quite mistaken. He is here to help you to—to ‘minimize’ Uncle Sidney; I think that is the word he used. He was afraid you had been finding Uncle Sidney rather difficult. Have you?”
“I have, for a fact,” said Ford, out of the depths of sincerity. And, again out of a full heart: “Your brother is a brick, Miss Adair.”
“Isn’t he?” and she laughed in sheer good comradeship. “If you can only manage to make him rise to his capabilities—”
“He’ll never be able to live the simple life for a single waking hour,” said the engineer, finishing the sentence for her.
“Oh, but that is a mistake!” she objected. “The very first requirement is work; plenty of work of the kind one can do best.”
The short walk to the hotel, where Kenneth was waiting to go to breakfast with the president’s party, came to an end, and the social amenities died of inanition. For one thing, President Colbrith insisted upon learning the minutest ins and outs of the business matter, making the table-talk his vehicle; and for another, Miss Adair’s place was on the opposite side of the table, and two removes from Ford’s. Time and again the young engineer tried to side-track business in the interests of something a little less banal to the two women; but the president was implacable and refused to be pulled out of the narrow rut of details; was still running monotonously and raspingly in it when Kenneth glanced at his watch and suggested that the time for action was come.
After breakfast the party separated. Mrs. Adair and Miss Alicia were to spend the day with friends in South Chicago, and Mr. Colbrith carried the attorney off to his room to dig still deeper into the possible legal complications which might arise out of the proposed transfer of the three short roads. Ford and Adair sat in the lobby and smoked while they were waiting for the president and the general counsel to conclude their conference, and the young millionaire gave his companion the story of the fight in the directory.
“We have Brewster to thank for the lift which finally pulled our wheel out of the mud,” said the young man, modestly effacing himself in the summing up. “Or rather I should say that we have the enemy to thank for stirring Brewster into action. Brewster’s got some copper mines out in Utah that he nurses like a sick child. Just at the critical moment some of the people who control the Transcontinental began to worry his copper stock. In the hot part of it he came to me and said, ‘Adair, will that western extension of yours be able to fry any fat out of Transcontinental?’ I told him it would, most assuredly; that next to making money for ourselves, and, incidentally, saving the Pacific Southwestern from going smash, our chief object was to give the Transcontinental a wholesome drubbing.”
“You are progressing rapidly,” said Ford, with a grin of appreciation. “Did that fetch him?”
“It did, for a fact. He looked like one of those old bushy-bearded vikings when he said, ‘By thunder, I’m with you, young man! And I’ll answer for Scott and Magnus and Harding. Get your board together, and we’ll settle it to-day.”
Ford looked up quickly. “If Mr. Colbrith wasn’t the chief of your family clan, Adair, I could wish that we had this Mr. Brewster at the head of things.”
The rejoinder was heartily prompt. “You don’t wish it any more fervently than I do, Ford. That is why I am here to-day. The board, in spite of all that our handful of revolutionaries could do, has armed Uncle Sidney with almost dictatorial powers in this stock-purchasing deal; and if he doesn’t contrive to strangle things by the slow process, it will be simply and solely because you and Kenneth and I are here to see that he does not. Do you know what the men call him out on the main line? When they see the Nadia trundling in, they say, ‘Here comes old Automatic Air-Brakes.’ And it fits him.”
“But I don’t quite understand why he should want to put the brakes on here and now,” Ford interposed. “I know he is against the scheme, personally; but he is here as the representative of a majority which has committed itself to the expansion measure, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes; and he has no thought of playing the traitor—you mustn’t think that of him. But it isn’t in his nature to facilitate things. In the present crisis he will feel that he is personally responsible for the expenditure of five million dollars. He will examine and investigate, and probe and pry, and will want to worry through every pen-scratch which has been made up to date.”
“Well, there is one comfort; he can’t take much time for his worrying,” said Ford. “Some of the options expire to-morrow noon.”
Adair sat up as one who suddenly takes notice.
“What?—to-morrow? Land of glory! but you two fellows took short chances! Why, any little hitch—”
“I know,” said the engineer evenly. “But we took what we could get—and were thankful. Somebody was bidding against us, and prices began to jump. Incidentally, I may say that Kenneth deserves to be made a vice-president of the new company, at the very least. He has done ten men’s work in the last three or four days.”
“I don’t doubt it. Neither do I suspect you of loafing. For that matter, I’ve been hustling a few lines, myself, since I sent you that first telegram.”
“Do you find it exciting enough to keep you interested, as far as you’ve gone?” inquired Ford, mindful of Miss Alicia’s longings.
“It’s the best yet,” declared the idler. “Only, you mustn’t lean too heavily on me, you know. I’m the most uncertain quantity you ever experienced. But here comes Uncle Sidney, with a cowed and brow-beaten Kenneth in tow—say your prayers, and get ready for the battle royal.”