CHAPTER II
WHERE THE MONEY CAME FROM
Doubtless there were official persons to be found at the time of thisnarrative--which is a matter of some thirty years back--who would haveinsisted that the letters "S. & W." meant "Sherman and Western." Butevery one who lived within two days' ride of the track knew that thereal name of the road was the "Shaky and Windy."
Shaky the "S. & W." certainly was--physically, and, if newspapergossip and apparent facts were to be trusted, financially. The railsweighed thirty-five pounds to the yard, and had been laid in scallops,with high centres and low joints,--"sight along the rails and it lookslike a washboard," said John Flint, describing it. For ballast theclay and sand of the region were used. And, as for the financial part,everybody knew that old De Reamer had been forced to abandon theconstruction work on the Red Hills extension, after building fullyfive-sixths of the distance. The hard times had, of course, somethingto do with that,--roads were going under all through the West;receiverships were quite the common thing,--but De Reamer and the S. &W. did not seem to revive so quickly as certain other lines. This wasthe more singular in that the S. & W., extending as it did from theSabine country to the Staked Plains, really justified the popularremark that "the Shaky and Windy began in a swamp and ended in adesert." On the face of things, without the Red Hills connection withthe bigger C. & S. C., and without an eastern connection with one ofthe New Orleans or St. Louis lines, the road was an absurdity.
Then, only a few months before the time of our narrative, the railroadworld began to wake up. Commodore Durfee, one of "the big fellows,"surprised the Southwest by buying in the H. D. & W. (which meant, andwill always mean, the High, Dry, and Wobbly). The surprise wasgreater when the Commodore began building southwestward, in thegeneral direction of Red Hills. As usual when the big men are playingfor position, the public and the wise-acres, even Wall Street, weremystified. For the S. & W. was so obviously the best and shortesteastern connection for the C. & S. C.,--the H. D. & W. would soplainly be a differential line,--that it was hard to see what theCommodore was about. He had nothing to say to the reporters. OldGeneral Carrington, of the C. & S. C., the biggest and shrewdest ofthem all, was also silent. And Daniel De Reamer couldn't be seen atall.
And finally, by way of a wind-up to the first skirmish of thepicturesque war in which our engineers were soon to find themselvestaking part, there was a western breeze and a flurry of dust in WallStreet. Somebody was fighting. S. & W. shares ran up in a day fromtwenty-two to forty-six, and, which was more astonishing, sold at thatfigure for another day before dropping. Other mysterious things weregoing on. Suddenly De Reamer reappeared in the Southwest, and thatmost welcome sign of vitality, money,--red gold corpuscles,--began toflow through the arteries of the S. & W. "system." The constructionwork started up, on rush orders. Paul Carhart was specially engaged totake out a force and complete the track--any sort of a track--to RedHills. And as he preferred not to take this rush work through verydifficult country on any other terms, De Reamer gave him somethingnear a free hand,--ordered Chief Engineer Tiffany to let him alone,beyond giving every assistance in getting material to the front, andaccepting the track for the company as fast as it was laid.
And as Tiffany was not at all a bad fellow, and had admired Carhart'spart in the Rio Grande fight (though he would have managed some thingsdifferently, not to say better, himself), the two engineers seemedlikely to get on very well.
Carhart's three trains would hardly get over the five hundred mileswhich lay between Sherman and the end of the track in less thantwenty-seven or twenty-eight hours. "The private car," as the boyscalled it, was of an old type even for those days, and was veryuncomfortable. Everybody, from the chief down, had shed coat andwaistcoat before the ragged skyline of Sherman slipped out of viewbehind the yellow pine trees. The car swayed and lurched so violentlythat it was impossible to stand in the aisle without support. As thehours dragged by, several of the party curled up on the hard seats andtried to sleep. The instrument and rod and stake men and the pileinspectors, mostly young fellows recently out of college or technicalinstitute, got together at one end of the car and sang college songs.
Carhart was sitting back, his feet up on the opposite seat, watchingfor the pines to thin out, and thinking of the endless gray chaparraland sage-brush which they would find about them in the morning,--ifthe train didn't break down,--when he saw Tiffany's big personbalancing down the aisle toward him. Tiffany had been quiet a longtime; now he had a story in his eye.
"Well," he said, as he slid down beside Carhart, "I knew the oldgentleman would pull it off in time, but I never supposed he couldmake the Commodore pay the bills."
Carhart glanced up inquiringly.
"Didn't you hear about it? Well, say! I happen to know that a monthago Mr. De Reamer actually didn't have the money to carry this workthrough. Even when Commodore Durfee started building for Red Hills, hedidn't know which way to turn. The Commodore, you know, hadn't anynotion 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 Highand Dry, corner the stock." Tiffany chuckled. "But he knew he'd haveto corner Daniel De Reamer first. If he didn't, the old gentlemanwould manufacture shares by the hundred thousand and pump 'em rightinto him. There's the Paradise Southern,--that's been a regularfountain of stock. You knew about that."
Carhart shook his head.
"We passed through Paradise this noon."
"Yes, I know the line. It runs down from Paradise to Total Wreck. ButI didn't know it had anything to do with S. & W. capital stock."
"Didn't, eh?" chuckled Tiffany. "Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers ownit, you know, and they're directors in both lines. The old game wasfor them, as P. S. directors, to lease the short line to themselves asS. & 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 readyfor S. & W. buyers."
Carhart smiled. The car lurched and shivered. Such air as came inthrough the open door and windows was tainted with the gases of thelocomotive, and with the mingled odors of the densely packed laborersin the cars ahead.
"That's really the only reason they've kept up the ParadiseSouthern--for there isn't any business on the line. Well, as I wassaying, the Commodore knew that the first thing he had to do wascorner Mr. De Reamer, and keep him from creating stock. So he camedown 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 morestock, or from completing any of the transactions on hand, andtemporarily suspended the old gentleman and Mr. Chambers, pending aninvestigation of their accounts, and ordered 'em to return to thetreasury of the company the seventy thousand shares they created lastyear. There was a lot more, but that's the gist of it. He did itthrough Waring and his other minority directors on the board. Andright at the start, you see, when he began to buy, he made S. & W.stock so scarce that the price shot up."
"Seems as if he had sewed up the S. & W. pretty tight," observedCarhart.
"Didn't it, though? But the Commodore didn't know the old gentleman aswell as he thought. Mr. De Reamer and Mr. Chambers got another judgeto issue orders for them to do everything the Commodore's judgeforbid--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 settleamong themselves. Then they issued ten million dollars in convertiblebonds to a dummy, representing themselves, turned 'em right intostock,--and tangled that transaction up so nobody in earth or heavenwill ever know just exactly _what_ was done,--and sold 'most seventythousand shares of it to Commodore Durfee before he had a glimmer ofwhere it was coming from. And then it was too late for him to stopbuying, so he had to take in the whole hundred thousand shares. Iheard Mr. Chambers say that when the Commodore found 'em out, he wasso mad he couldn't talk,--stormed stormed around his office trying tocurse Dan
iel De Reamer, but he couldn't even swear intelligent."
"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 swallowthat."
"He _had_ to swallow it.--Oh, he did kick up some fuss, but it didn'tdo 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 Streetoffice, 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 DeReamer was his king, and his king could do no wrong. "Not that theydidn't have some excitement getting away," he continued. "Theysay,--mind, I don't know this, but _they_ say that Mr. De Reamer'ssecretary, young Crittenden, crossed the ferry in a cab with fourmillion five hundred thousand dollars _in bills_--just tied up roughin bundles so they could be thrown around. And there youare,--Commodore Durfee is paying for this extension that's going tocut him out of the C. & S. C. through business. The money and papersare out of his reach. The judges are fighting among themselves, andwill be doing well if they ever come to a settlement. And now if thatain't pretty slick business, I'd like to know what the word 'slick'means."
Carhart almost laughed aloud. He turned and looked out the window fora few moments. Finally he said, "If you have that straight, Tiffany,it's undoubtedly the worst defeat Commodore Durfee ever had. But don'tmake the mistake of thinking that the S. & W. is through with him."
"Maybe not," Tiffany replied, "but I'll bet proper on the oldgentleman."
Carhart's position as the engineer in charge of a thousand and moremen would be not unlike that of a military commander who findshimself dependent for subsistence on five hundred miles of whatScribner called "very sketchy" single track. It would be more serious;for not only must food, and in the desert, water, be brought out overthe line, but also the vast quantity of material needed in the work.It would be the business of Peet, as the working head of the operatingdepartment, to deliver the material from day to day, and week to week,at the end of the last completed section, where the working trainwould be made up each night for the construction work of the followingday.
If the existing track was sketchy, the new track would be worse.Everything was to be sacrificed to speed. The few bridges were to bethrown up hastily in the form of primitive wooden trestles. Therewould be no masonry, excepting the abutments of the La Pazbridge,--which masonry, or rather the stone for it, was about the onlymaterial they would find at hand. All the timber, even to the crossties, would have to be shipped forward from the long-leaf-pineforests of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
Ordinarily, Carhart would not have relished undertaking such a hastyjob; but in this case there were compensations. When he had firstlooked over the location maps, in Daniel De Reamer's New York office,his quiet eyes had danced behind their spectacles; for it promised tobe pretty work, in which a man could use his imagination. There wasthe bridge over the La Paz River, for instance. He should have to senda man out there with a long wagon train of materials, and with ordersto have the bridge ready when the track should reach the river. Heknew just the man--John B. Flint, who built the Desplaines bridge forthe three I's. He had not heard from John since the doctors hadcondemned his lungs, and ordered him to a sanatorium in theAdirondacks, and John had compromised by going West, and hanging thatvery difficult bridge between the walls of Brilliant Gorge in theSierras. Carhart was not sure that he was still among the living; buta few searching telegrams brought out a characteristic message fromJohn himself, to the effect that he was very much alive, and was readyto bridge the Grand Canyon of the Colorado at a word from Paul Carhart.
Then there was always to be considered the broad outline of thesituation as it was generally understood in the railway world. Detailsapart, it was known that Commodore Durfee and Daniel De Reamer werefighting for that through connection, and that old GeneralCarrington,--czar of the C. & S. C., holder of one and owner ofseveral other seats in the Senate of these United States, chairman ofthe National Committee of his party,--that General Carrington wassitting on the piazza of his country house in California, smoking goodcigars and talking horse and waiting to see whether he should gobbleDurfee or De Reamer, or both of them. For the general, too, wasrepresented on the directorate of the Sherman and Western; and it wasan open question whether his minority directors would continue tosupport the De Reamer interests or would be ordered to ally themselveswith the Durfee men. Either way, there would be no sentiment wasted.But it seemed to Carhart that so long as De Reamer should be able tohold up his head in the fight General Carrington would probably standbehind him. Commodore Durfee was too big in the East to be encouragedin the West. And yet--there was no telling.
It was very pretty indeed. Carhart was a quiet man, given more tostudy than to speech; but he liked pretty things.