IX The Race to the Slow
Adair’s prophecy that President Colbrith would prove himself an obstructor of the stubbornest was amply fulfilled during the short interval which remained for decisive action. Truly, in the battle for business celerity the odds were three to one against Mr. Colbrith; yet the three were as those who buffet the wind. The president must see and feel, know and fully understand; and at the very last moment, when the shortest of the options had no more than an hour to live, he was proposing to summon General Manager North from Denver to make a fifth in the council of discord.
It was Adair who took the bull by the horns when the president’s caution was about to turn victory into defeat. What was said or done after the young man drew Mr. Colbrith into the private committee-room at the bank and shut the door, Ford and Kenneth, who were excluded, could only surmise. But whatever was done was well done. When the two, uncle and nephew, came out of the room of privacy, the old man was shaking his head and the young one was smiling serenely. So it came about that between eleven and twelve o’clock, when Ford, grimly battling to the last, fought as one without hope, a few strokes of the pen opened the doors upon the new creation; five million dollars, more or less, changed hands, and the Pacific Southwestern took the long leap eastward from the Missouri River to its new base in Chicago.
“It’s you for the hustle now, Ford,” said Adair, linking arms with the engineer when the quartet left the bank. “How soon do you think you can get that first train-load of grain in transit?”
“I wish I could tell you,” said Ford.
“Why can’t you?”
“Because it will depend very largely upon the authority Mr. Colbrith or the board sees fit to give me. At present, you will remember, I am still only a division superintendent—Mr. North’s subordinate, in fact, and—”
“Say it out loud,” encouraged Adair.
“I don’t like to, but I suppose it can’t be helped. Up to now I have been acting under special orders, as you may say, in a purely financial transaction. But my commission expired five minutes ago when the stock deal went through. When it comes to issuing orders in the operating and transportation department, I have no authority whatever. Mr. North is general manager, and I suppose his jurisdiction will now be extended to cover the new line, won’t it?”
“Not much!” retorted the amateur promoter. “You are going to be given a free hand in this from the word go. From what I can learn, North has been an obstructor, all along, hasn’t he?”
“I can’t say that,” said Ford, just, even to an enemy. “To be right honest about it, I shall have to confess that I slurred him entirely—went over his head.”
“For good reasons, no doubt, only you are too charitable to give them. Never mind: as I say, you are going to have a free hand. This is your pie and nobody else is going to cut it for you.” And when the party reached the hotel there was another conference of two behind closed doors, in which Ford and the general counsel did not participate.
An hour later, when Adair came down from the president’s room, he thrust a sheaf of penciled printers’ copy into Ford’s hands.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve done the best I could for you on such short notice—with Uncle Sidney trying his level best to get a cross reference to the board before taking action. Get these circulars through a print shop and into the mails. You’ll see that one of them announces your appointment, effective to-day, as Assistant to the President. That was as far as Uncle Sidney could be dragged. It doesn’t give you a straight flush; but your hand will beat North’s if it comes to a show-down between you. Just the same, I shouldn’t quarrel with North, if I were you. Uncle Sidney thinks the sun rises and sets in him.”
Ford nodded, and while he was reading hastily through the sheaf of pencilings a boy brought him a telegram. When he opened the envelope, Kenneth had turned away. But Adair was looking on, and he did not fail to remark the startling effect of the few typewritten words upon the engineer.
“Whereabouts does it hit us this time?” he inquired, lighting a fresh cigarette.
“In the neck,” said Ford curtly. “The possibility occurred to me yesterday—Pacific Southwestern stock being so badly scattered among small holders. I wired a broker, a good friend of mine, to pick up a few shares on my account. Here is what he says: ‘Market bone dry. No offerings of P. S-W. at any price.’”
Adair whistled softly. “That’s getting next to us with a vengeance!” he commented. “And it can be done, too. Half a dozen of the small stock-holders have been to me since the fire was lighted, trying to get me to take their stock at market.”
“How much do we control—that we are sure of?” Ford asked.
“I don’t know—in figures. Not more than two-fifths, I should say. At the last board meeting I proposed that we make a safe majority pool among ourselves, but Uncle Sidney sat on me. Said his own personal constituency among the little people was big enough amply to secure us.”
Ford swore pathetically.
“The one single instance when his caution might have steered him straight—and it went to sleep!” he raged.
“Exactly,” laughed Adair. “And now the Transcontinental moguls are buying up a majority of their own, meaning to capture the main-line dog and leaving us to wag the extension tail which we have just acquired. Say, Ford; doesn’t that appeal to your sense of humor?”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Ford savagely. To see one’s air-castles crumbling at the very moment when they were to be transmuted into solid realities is apt to provoke a reversion to type; and Ford’s type was Gothic.
“That’s a pity,” said Adair, absently rolling his cigarette between his thumb and finger. “Also, it’s another pity that I am such a hopeless quitter. I believe I could pull this thing out yet, if I could only get up sufficient steam.”
“For heaven’s sake, tell me what you burn, and I’ll furnish the fuel,” said Ford desperately.
“Will you? I guess I need something pretty inflammatory.”
“Lord of love! haven’t you good and plenty, without calling upon me? Are you going to let these stock-jobbing land-pirates on ‘Change gibbet you as a solemn warning to aspiring young promoters?”
Adair paused with the cigarette half way to his lips. “Ah,” he said, after a thoughtful moment. “Perhaps that was what I needed. No; they will not gibbet any of us to-day; and possibly not to-morrow.” Then, with a sudden dropping of the mask of easy-going indifference: “Give me the key to your room, and find me a swift stenographer. Then go over to the Lake Shore headquarters and ask to have the Nadia coupled to the evening train for New York.”
“But the president?” Ford began. “Didn’t he say something about going over these new lines on an inspection trip?”
“Never mind Uncle Sidney: on this one occasion he will change his plans and go back to New York with us,” said Adair curtly.
“Good,” said Ford approvingly. “And how about opening the new through line for business? Do we go on? Or do we hang it up until we find out where we are ‘at’?”
“Don’t hold it up a single minute. Drive it for all the power you can get behind it. If we have to collide with things, let’s do it with the throttle wide open. Now find me that shorthand person quickly, will you?”
By what means the president was persuaded or coerced into doing the thing he had not planned to do, Ford was not to know. But for that matter, after carrying out Adair’s instructions the engineer plunged at once into his own Herculean task of reorganization, emerging only when he made a tardy sixth at the president’s dinner table in the hotel café in the evening.
The dinner, which the young engineer had been fondly counting upon as a momentary relaxation from the heart-breaking business strain, was a dismal failure on its social side. President Colbrith, as yet, it appeared, in blissful ignorance of the latest news from New York, had reserved the seat of honor for his new assistant, and the half-hour was filled to overflowing with minute and cautionary definitions of the assistant’s powers and duties.
Ford listened with a blank ear on that side. There was work to do, and one man to do it. He did not care particularly to hear instructions which he would probably have to disregard at the first experimental dash into the new field. He meant to hold himself rigidly to account for results; more than this he thought not even Mr. Colbrith had a right to require.
After dinner he indemnified himself for the kindergarten lecture by boldly taking possession of Miss Adair for the short walk over to the private car. The entire world of work was still ahead, and a corps of expert stenographers was at the moment awaiting his return to the C.P. & D. offices, where he had established temporary headquarters; but he shut the door upon the exigencies and listened to Miss Alicia.
“I am so sorry we are not going to be here to see your triumph,” she was saying; adding: “It is a triumph, isn’t it?”’
“Only a beginning,” he amended. “And it won’t be spectacular, if we can help it. Besides, this east-end affair is only a preliminary. A little later on, if our tackle doesn’t break, we shall land the really big fish for which this is only the bait.”
“Shall you never be satisfied?” she asked jestingly. And then, more seriously: “What is your ambition? To be able to buy what your neighbor can not afford?”
“Big money, you mean? No, I think not. But I like to win, as well as other men.”
“To win what?”
“Whatever seems worth winning—this fight, in the present instance, and the consequent larger field. Later, enough money to enable me to think of money only as a stepping-stone to better things. Later still, perhaps—”
He stopped abruptly, as though willing to leave the third desideratum in the air, but she would not let him.
“Go on,” she said. “Last of all?”
“Last of all, the love of a true woman.”
“Oh!” she scoffed, with a little uptilt of the admirable chin. “Then love must come trailing along at the very end, after we have skimmed the cream from all the other milk pans in orderly succession.”
“No,” he rejoined gravely. “I put it clumsily—as I snatch purses. As a matter of sober fact, love sets the mile-stones along any human road that is worth traversing.”
She glanced up at him and the blue eyes were dancing. Miss Alicia Adair knew no joy to compare with that of teasing, and it was not often that the fates gave her such a pliable subject.
“Tell me, Mr. Ford; is—is she pretty?”
“She is beautiful; the most beautiful woman in the world, Miss Adair.”
“How fine! And, of course, she is a paragon of all the virtues?—an angel without the extremely inconvenient wings?”
“You have said it: and I have never doubted it from the moment I first laid eyes on her.”
“Better and better,” she murmured. Then: “She has money?”
“I suppose she has; yes, she certainly has money. But that doesn’t make any difference—to her or to me.”
“It is simply idyllic!” was the ecstatic comment. “After all this there remains but one other possible contingency. Has she a willing mind, Mr. Ford?”
They had reached the steps of the Nadia, and the others had gone within. Ford looked soberly into the depths of the laughing eyes and said: “I would give all my chances of success in this Pacific Southwestern affair to be able to say ‘yes’ to that.”
The station gong was clanging the departure signal for the New York train, and he swung her lightly up to the step of the car.
“Good-by,” she said, turning to smile down upon him. And then, “I don’t believe you, you know; not the least bit in the world.”
“Why don’t you?” he demanded.
“Because the woman doesn’t live who would be worth such a sacrifice as that would be—to Mr. Stuart Ford.”
And this was her leave-taking.