“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 shares by the hundred thousand and pump ’em right into him. There’s the Paradise Southern, – that’s been a regular fountain 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. 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 door and windows was tainted with the gases of the locomotive, and with the mingled odors of the densely packed laborers in the cars ahead.
“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 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,” 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 Mr. Chambers say that when the Commodore found ’em out, he was so mad he couldn’t talk, – stormed stormed around his office trying to curse Daniel 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 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, young Crittenden, crossed the ferry in a cab with four million five hundred thousand dollars in bills– just tied up rough in bundles so they could be thrown around. And there you are, – Commodore Durfee is paying for this extension that’s going to cut him out of the C. & S. C. through business. The money and papers are out of his reach. The judges are fighting among themselves, and will be doing well if they ever come to a settlement. And now if that ain’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 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 unlike that of a military commander who finds himself dependent for subsistence on five hundred miles of what Scribner called “very sketchy” single track. It would be more serious; for not only must food, and in the desert, water, be brought out over the 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 operating department, to deliver the material from day to day, and week to week, at the end of the last completed section, where the working train would be made up each night for the construction work of the following day.
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, would have to be shipped forward from the long-leaf-pine forests of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
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 Sierras. Carhart was not sure that he was still among the living; but a few searching telegrams brought out a characteristic message from John himself, to the effect that he was very much alive, and was ready to bridge the Grand Cañon of the Colorado at a word from Paul Carhart.
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 Sherman and Western; and it was an open question whether his minority directors would continue to support the De Reamer interests or would be ordered to ally themselves with 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 to hold up his head in the fight General Carrington would probably stand behind him. Commodore Durfee was too big in the East to be encouraged in the West. And yet – there was no telling.
It was very pretty indeed. Carhart was a quiet man,