“I don’t suppose he’ll be in his office for an hour yet,” he mused reflectively; “and anyway, I guess I’d better go over the papers again, so I can be sure to speak my piece right end to.  By Jove!  I didn’t suppose a couple of thousand miles of easting would take the heart out of things the way it does.  If I didn’t know better, I should think I’d come here to float the biggest kind of a fake, instead of a life-boat for the shipwrecked people in the Pacific Southwestern.  It is beginning to look that way in spite of all I can do.”

Going once again over his carefully tabulated argument did not help matters greatly.  He was beginning to realize now how vastly, antipodally different the New York point of view might be from his own.  It came to him with the benumbing effect of a blow that his own ambitions had persistently looked beyond the mere money-making results of his scheme.  Also, that President Colbrith and his fellow-investors might very easily refuse to consider any other phase of the revolutionary proposition he was about to lay before them.

By ten o’clock postponement was no longer a tenable city of refuge:  the plunge had to be taken.  Accordingly, he fared forth to present himself at the Broadway address given in the Pacific Southwestern printed matter as the New York headquarters of the company.

The number proved to be a ground floor, with the business office of the eastern traffic representative in front, and three or four private desk-rooms in the rear, one of them labeled “President” in inconspicuous gilt lettering.  Entering, with less assurance than if he had been the humblest of place-seekers out of a job, Ford was almost relieved to find only a closed desk, and a young man absently scanning a morning paper.

Inquiry developed a few facts, tersely stated but none the less enlightening.  Mr. Colbrith was not in:  the office was merely his nominal headquarters in the city and he occupied it only occasionally.  His residence?  It was in the Borough of the Bronx, pretty well up toward Yonkers—­locality and means of access obligingly written out on a card for the caller by the clerk.  Was Mr. Ford’s business of a routine nature?  If so, perhaps, Mr. Ten Eyck, the general agent, could attend to it.  Ford said it was not of a routine nature, and made his escape to inquire his way to the nearest subway station.  To pause now was to lose the precious impetus of the start.

It was worth something to be whirled away blindly out of the stifling human vortex of the lower city; but Ford’s first glimpse of the Colbrith mansion depressed him again.  The huge, formal house had once been the country residence of a retired dry-goods merchant.  It fronted the river brazenly, and the fine old trees of a ten-acre park shamed its architectural stiffness.  Ford knew the president a little by family repute and more particularly as a young subordinate knows the general in command.  It struck him forcibly that the aspect of the house fitted the man.  With the broad river and the distant Palisades to be dwelt upon, its outlook windows were narrow.  With the sloping park and the great trees to give it dignity, it seemed to assume an artificial, plumb-line dignity of its own, impressive only as the product of rigid measurements and mechanical uprightness.