“It was dastardly!” he shrilled.  “We had some words; I don’t deny that we had some words.  But he was most unreasonable.  He should have gone about his business and let me have time to consider.  Here are thousands of people pouring into this place, everything at famine prices, no supplies for our miners, no railroad to bring them.  What’s this I hear about an accident at Horse Creek?  Why isn’t Ford on the ground attending to his railroad building and straightening things out?  Have I got to forfeit the money-making chance of a lifetime and go and drag that track into Copah with my own hands?”

Adair seemed suddenly to have lost his tongue, which was certainly glib enough ordinarily.  All he would say was that the engineering department was still at work, he believed; that the track was approaching Copah, slowly, perhaps, but pretty surely.

“But without a head!” snapped the irate president.  “Ford is a traitor to the company.  Tell him so from me, sir, if you know where he is skulking.”

Adair did tell Ford, circumstantially, when he rode the cart mule out of town the next morning and met the young engineer at the head of a tremendously augmented track force, rushing the rails around the swelling hills on the approach to the mining-camp-city.

“Oh, he’s still up in the air,” laughed the director, when he had repeated the president’s wrathful outburst.  “Frantic because the road isn’t finished; frantic because he can’t get in on all the ground-floors in all the mining deals; frantic some more because he has to live in a shack hotel while he has a private car and a good cook, as he thinks, only a few miles away.  Which reminds me:  the ‘01’ has a pretty good cook, and the incomparible Johnson,—­don’t let them escape.  Have you sent the Nadia back to Denver for repairs?”

“Yes; Frisbie went over in it this morning.”

“Frisbie?”

“Yes, I had to let him go.  Word came from Leckhard as soon as we got the wire reestablished, which was late last night.  North was taken suddenly ill the day after the explosion.  He resigned at once by wire to the executive committee in New York, and two days later he took a steamer from Galveston for nobody knows where; health trip—­doctor’s orders—­Leckhard said.  I sent Frisbie over to be acting manager of the system, pending the president’s—­er—­recovery from his sudden illness.  Leckhard says the New York people are burning the wires trying to get word to Mr. Colbrith.”

“They may go on burning them,” said Adair calmly.  “Uncle Sidney isn’t going to quit until he owns a good half of the Copah district—­or gets his armature burned out.  And if he were ready to quit, we shouldn’t let him.  But how are things working out on the extension?—­that is what interests me.”