Set out in cold type, Ford’s itinerary for the four days following his conference with Kenneth would read like the abbreviated diary of a man dodging the sheriff.  His “ticker” memorandum for that period is still in existence, but the notes are the hurried strokes of the pen of haste, intelligible, we may say, only to the man who made them.  To quote: 

“Thursday, nine a.m., Peoria—­see Sedgwick; ten—­make trackage contract with T.P. & W.; eleven a.m., Davenport—­inventory motive power—­see chief despatcher—­get profiles and maps—­get copies of yard contracts—­get crossing rights—­get total tonnage of grain cars.  Three p.m., Hannibal—­see Berdan and whip him into line—­inspect shops—­get contracts—­get—­”

But the string of “gets” fills the page, and is vital now to no living soul of man, least of all to us who are interested only in finding out if our young captain of industry actually did make good his boast of flogging the three short roads into some semblance of a through line in the brief interval at his disposal; and this without advertising to the railroad world at large who he represented and what he was doing.

He did it, and without a slip for which he could be held responsible.  It was a wire from the chief office of the Transcontinental in New York, a telegram inspired by sundry leakages from Pacific Southwestern sources, that gave him a silent and observant follower in all of his dodgings.  Of this, however, he was in blissful ignorance.  Twice, indeed, he sat in the same Pullman section with his “shadow,” quite without suspecting it; and once he was saved from disaster—­also without suspecting it.

It was at a way station in Missouri, and the section-sharing traveling companion, who had paid only for an hour’s ride in the Pullman, was leaving the train.  His hand-bag chanced to be the exact counterpart of Ford’s:  what more natural than that he should make the mistake of taking the wrong one?  Ford caught him in the vestibule, and there was a reexchange, accompanied by grateful acknowledgments and profuse apologies from the debarking one.  Ford, immersed fathoms deep in his problems, thought nothing of it; but a moment lost would have been a cause lost, if he had guessed it.  For the mistake was no mistake, and the hand-bag rescued contained documents for which the Transcontinental Company would have paid a month’s salary of its board of vice-presidents, charging the amount, not to profit and loss, but rather to salvage.

It was on the fourth day of the campaign, while Ford was working his way on an inspection trip over the third link in the short-lines chain, that two telegrams overtook him.

One was from Adair, announcing the tardy, but now certain triumph of the expansionist faction in the board of P. S-W. directors, and begging pathetically for news of the option-getting.  The other was signed “K,” and Ford had a sharp attack of joy when he read it.  The attorney had been successful at all points.  The necessary stock majorities were secured and the certificates were safely on deposit in the Algonquin National Bank, in Chicago.  What remained was only a matter of routine, provided the P. S-W. bidders would furnish the capital for the purchases.