Doubtless there were official persons to be found at the time of this narrative—which is a matter of some thirty years back—who would have insisted that the letters “S. & W.” meant “Sherman and Western.” But every one who lived within two days’ ride of the track knew that the real name of the road was the “Shaky and Windy.” Shaky the “S. & W.” certainly was—physically, and, if newspaper gossip and apparent facts were to be trusted, financially. The rails weighed thirty-five pounds to the yard, and had been laid in scallops, with high centres and low joints,—“sight along the rails and it looks like a washboard,” said John Flint, describing it. For ballast the clay and sand of the region were used. And, as for the financial part, everybody knew that old De Reamer had been forced to Then, only a few months before the time of our narrative, the railroad world began to wake up. Commodore Durfee, one of “the big fellows,” surprised the Southwest by buying in the H. D. & W. (which meant, and will always mean, the High, Dry, and Wobbly). The surprise And finally, by way of a wind-up to the first skirmish of the picturesque war in which our engineers were soon to find themselves taking part, there was a western breeze and a flurry of dust in Wall Street. Somebody was fighting. S. & W. shares ran up in a day from twenty-two to forty-six, and, which was more astonishing, sold at that figure for another day before dropping. Other mysterious things were going And as Tiffany was not at all a bad fellow, and had admired Carhart’s part in the Rio Grande fight (though he would have managed some things differently, not to say better, himself), the two engineers seemed likely to get on very well. Carhart’s three trains would hardly get over Carhart was sitting back, his feet up on the opposite seat, watching for the pines to thin out, and thinking of the endless gray chaparral and sage-brush which they would find about them in the morning,—if the train didn’t break down,—when he saw Tiffany’s big “Well,” he said, as he slid down beside Carhart, “I knew the old gentleman would pull it off in time, but I never supposed he could make the Commodore pay the bills.” Carhart glanced up inquiringly. “Didn’t you hear about it? Well, say! I happen to know that a month ago Mr. De Reamer actually didn’t have the money to carry this work through. Even when Commodore Durfee started building for Red Hills, he didn’t know which way to turn. The Commodore, you know, hadn’t any notion of stopping with the H.D.& W.” “No,” said Carhart, “I didn’t suppose he had.” “He was after us, too—wanted to do the same as he did with the High and Dry, corner the stock.” Tiffany chuckled. “But he knew he’d have to corner Daniel De Reamer first. If he didn’t, the old gentleman would manufacture Carhart shook his head. “We passed through Paradise this noon.” “Yes, I know the line. It runs down from Paradise to Total Wreck. But I didn’t know it had anything to do with S. & W. capital stock.” “Didn’t, eh?” chuckled Tiffany. “Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers own it, you know, and they’re directors in both lines. The old game was for them, as P. S. directors, to lease the short line to themselves as S. & W. directors. Then the S.& W. directors pay the P. S. directors—only they’re it both ways—in S. & W. stock. Don’t you see? And it’s only one of a dozen schemes. The old gentleman’s always ready for S. & W. buyers.” Carhart smiled. The car lurched and shivered. Such air as came in through the open “That’s really the only reason they’ve kept up the Paradise Southern—for there isn’t any business on the line. Well, as I was saying, the Commodore knew that the first thing he had to do was corner Mr. De Reamer, and keep him from creating stock. So he came down on him all at once, with a heap of injunctions and court orders. He did it thorough: restrained the S. & W. board from issuing any more stock, or from completing any of the transactions on hand, and temporarily suspended the old gentleman and Mr. Chambers, pending an investigation of their accounts, and ordered ’em to return to the treasury of the company the seventy thousand shares they created last year. There was a lot more, but that’s the gist of it. He did it through Waring and his other minority directors on the board. And right at the start, you see, when he began “Seems as if he had sewed up the S. & W. pretty tight,” observed Carhart. “Didn’t it, though? But the Commodore didn’t know the old gentleman as well as he thought. Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers got another judge to issue orders for them to do everything the Commodore’s judge forbid—tangled it all up so that everything they did or didn’t do, they’d be disobeying somebody, and leaving it for the judges to settle among themselves. Then they issued ten million dollars in convertible bonds to a dummy, representing themselves, turned ’em right into stock,—and tangled that transaction up so nobody in earth or heaven will ever know just exactly what was done,—and sold ‘most seventy thousand shares of it to Commodore Durfee before he had a glimmer of where it was coming from. And then it was too late for him to stop buying, so he had to take in the whole hundred thousand shares. I heard “So Mr. De Reamer beat him,” said Carhart. “Beat him?—I wonder—” “But that’s not all, surely. Commodore Durfee isn’t the man to swallow that.” “He had to swallow it.—Oh, he did kick up some fuss, but it didn’t do him any good. His judge tried to jerk up our people for contempt, but they were warned and got out of Mr. De Reamer’s Broad Street office, and over into New Jersey with all the documents and money.” Tiffany’s good-humored eyes lighted up as his mind dwelt on the fight. Never was there a more loyal railroad man than this one. Daniel De Reamer was his king, and his king could do no wrong. “Not that they didn’t have some excitement getting away,” he continued. “They say,—mind, I don’t know this, but they say that Mr. De Reamer’s secretary, Carhart almost laughed aloud. He turned and looked out the window for a few moments. Finally he said, “If you have that straight, Tiffany, it’s undoubtedly the worst defeat Commodore Durfee ever had. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the S. & W. is through with him.” “Maybe not,” Tiffany replied, “but I’ll bet proper on the old gentleman.” Carhart’s position as the engineer in charge of a thousand and more men would be not If the existing track was sketchy, the new track would be worse. Everything was to be sacrificed to speed. The few bridges were to be thrown up hastily in the form of primitive wooden trestles. There would be no masonry, excepting the abutments of the La Paz bridge,—which masonry, or rather the stone for it, was about the only material they would find at hand. All the timber, even to the cross ties, Ordinarily, Carhart would not have relished undertaking such a hasty job; but in this case there were compensations. When he had first looked over the location maps, in Daniel De Reamer’s New York office, his quiet eyes had danced behind their spectacles; for it promised to be pretty work, in which a man could use his imagination. There was the bridge over the La Paz River, for instance. He should have to send a man out there with a long wagon train of materials, and with orders to have the bridge ready when the track should reach the river. He knew just the man—John B. Flint, who built the Desplaines bridge for the three I’s. He had not heard from John since the doctors had condemned his lungs, and ordered him to a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, and John had compromised by going West, and hanging that very difficult bridge between the walls of Brilliant Gorge in the Then there was always to be considered the broad outline of the situation as it was generally understood in the railway world. Details apart, it was known that Commodore Durfee and Daniel De Reamer were fighting for that through connection, and that old General Carrington,—czar of the C. & S. C., holder of one and owner of several other seats in the Senate of these United States, chairman of the National Committee of his party,—that General Carrington was sitting on the piazza of his country house in California, smoking good cigars and talking horse and waiting to see whether he should gobble Durfee or De Reamer, or both of them. For the general, too, was represented on the directorate of the It was very pretty indeed. Carhart was a quiet man, given more to study than to speech; but he liked pretty things. |