"I have worked here on a small salary and done everything but maul
spikes to keep down expenses on the division, because we had to make
some showing to whoever wanted to buy our junk. In this way I took a
roving commission and packed my bag from an office where I could
acquire nothing I did not already know to a position where I could get
hold of the problem of mountain transportation and cut the coal bills
of the road in two."
"Have you done it?"
"Have I cut the coal bills in two? No; but I have learned how. It
will cost money to do that----"
"How much money?"
"Thirty millions of dollars."
"A good deal of money."
"No."
"No?"
"No. Don't let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred
millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred
millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought
to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them.
I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear
Dance--yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for
transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will
rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send
freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of
to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains."
"Go ahead."
"Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him--Callahan, Blood and
the rest of us--are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know
nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer
came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily," Glover
bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, "he isn't; but he might have been----"
"I see."
"We were prepared for that."
"How?"
"I shouldn't speak of this if I did not know you were Mr. Bucks'
closest friend. Even he doesn't know it, but six months of my own
time--not the company's--I put in on a matter that concerned my friends
and myself, and I have the notes for a new line to parallel this if it
were needed--and Blood and I have the only pass within three hundred
miles north or south to run it over. These were some of the reasons,
Mr. Brock, why I came to the mountains."
"I understand. I understand perfectly. Mr. Glover, what is your age,
sir?"
The time seemed ripe to put Gertrude's second hint into play.
"That is a subject I never discuss with anyone, Mr. Brock."
He waited just a moment to let the magnate get his breath, and
continued, "May I tell you why? When the road went into the
receivership, I was named as one of the receivers on behalf of the
Government. The President, when I first met him during my term, asked
for my father, thinking he was the man that had been recommended to
him. He wouldn't believe me when I assured him I was his appointee.
'If I had known how young you were, Glover,' said he to me, afterward,
'I never should have dared appoint you.' The position paid me
twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; but the incident
paid me better than that, for it taught me never to discuss my age."