Adair smiled.  “He was about to begin doing what he has been doing ever since:  flogging the extension into shape night and day to get it ready to carry passengers and freight.  He conceived it to be his duty—­to you as well as to the other stock-holders.  And he has flogged it into shape.  Look out of that window, Uncle Sidney!”

A long passenger train, crowded to the platforms, and with the private car “01” in tow, was winding down the grade of the opposite hillside, and as they stepped to the windows the engineer woke the echoes with the engine whistle.

“The first one of many, let us hope,” said the young man, standing at his uncle’s elbow.  Then, with quite a different note in his voice:  “It’s Stuart’s work, all of it.  He has scarcely stopped to eat or sleep since that horrible night in the Pannikin valley.  And that night, Uncle Sidney, I fought shoulder to shoulder with him—­as a brother should; he is a man, and—­there are not many more—­like him.”

The president’s thin lips were drawn into straight lines, and the thin goat’s-beard stood out at the argumentative angle.  Mr. Colbrith was chary of his emotions.

“Will he sell us that stock in the Little Alicia, Charles Edward?”

Adair smiled at the determined return to the practical.

“No,” he said; “I don’t think he will—­I shouldn’t, if I were in his place.  But he will do the next best thing:  he will marry Alicia and so bring it into the family.  And on the railroad conditions I have named, I am quite sure he will make you his voting proxy if you want to use it in forcing the combine.”

The president took a turn as far as the clerk’s counter and back.  The lobby was deserted, everybody having gone to welcome the first train into Copah.

“You seem to have North against the wall,” he said when he came back.  “Yet, for the sake of—­of, well of his wife and children, he must have even-handed justice.  I must insist upon that.”

It was the most lovable thing in the irascible old man—­his undying loyalty to a man in whom he had once believed.  Adair slew the last hope with reluctance.  Drawing a thick packet of undelivered telegrams from his pocket, he handed it to his uncle.

“Justice is the one thing Mr. North is most anxious to dodge,” he said gravely.  “When the news of the catastrophe reached him, he resigned by wire—­to New York; not to you—­got his physician to order him out of the country, and left Denver between two days.  Ford has sent Frisbie to Denver to hold things together, and there has been a number of removals—­subject, of course, to your approval.  You will find the history of all these minor happenings in those telegrams, which I have been collecting—­and holding—­until you had leisure to look them over.”

“Where is Mr. Ford now?” asked the president crisply.

“He is not very far away; in fact, he is up-stairs in the sitting-room of our suite with Aunt Hetty and the two Van Bruce ladies and Alicia.  Incidentally,—­quite incidentally, you understand,—­he is waiting to be asked to help you out in that mining deal.”