“Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you?  How like a woman!  But I am afraid it can’t be done.  I had been trying to keep away from that point of view....  There is much to be said on both sides.  There was a time when I wouldn’t have gone into such a thing as this fight with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of the public welfare—­ignoring that side of it.  I can’t do it now; you have shown me that I can’t.”

“But I don’t want to be a stumbling-block,” she insisted.  “Won’t you believe that I wanted to help?”

“I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes.  But the result is the same.”

Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at hand.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know:  nothing that I had meant to do.  It was a false start and I am back under the wire again.”

“But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of going on,” she protested.

“Didn’t you mean to convince me?”

“No—­yes—­I don’t know.  I—­it seems very clear to me; but I want it to seem clear to you.  Doesn’t your conscience tell you that you ought to turn back?”

“No,” he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial.  “You may be right:  I am afraid you are right.  But I shall have to fight it out for myself.  There are many things to consider.  If I hold my hand, these bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent people will suffer loss.”  Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her eyes:  “But you mustn’t be sorry for having done what you had to do; you have nothing to reproach yourself for.”

“Oh, but I have!” she said; and so they parted.

XXIII

THE INSURRECTIONARIES

When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.

The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism.  Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply contested field of competition.  To these leaders the rank and file is loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to their successors who inherit and tear down.  Add to this the supplanting of competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western service since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order Number One.