It was in the preliminary wrestle with disintegration that the young engineer’s gift of insight and his faculty of handling men as men stood him in good stead.  He was fresh from his trip over the new extension, on which he had met and shrewdly appraised the men who were now his subordinates.  With the human field thus mentally mapped and cross-sectioned he was enabled to make swift and sure selections, cutting out the dead timber remorselessly, encouraging the doubtful, reassuring the timid, assorting and combining and ordering until, at the close of the second day of fierce toil, he was ready to make his first report to Adair.

Track connections at junction points completed to-day.  General and division operating and traffic departments in the saddle and effectively organized.  With proper cooeperation on part of General Manager North, grain should begin to move eastward to-morrow.  Can get no satisfactory replies from North.  Have him disciplined from your end.  Answer.  Ford.

To this telegram there was a prompt and voluminous reply from the seat of war in the East.  In a free fight on the Stock Exchange, a battle royal generaled by Brewster and Magnus in which every inch of ground had been sharply contested by brokers buying up P. S-W. in the interest of principals unnamed, a majority of the Southwestern stock—­safe but exceedingly narrow—­had been secured by the reconstructionists.

In accordance with Ford’s suggestion, North had been “called down” by wire, and Ford was instructed to report instantly any failure of effort on the part of the Denver headquarters to set the grain trains in motion.

Otherwise, and from the New York point of view, the situation remained most hopeful.  The fight in the Street had unified the factions in the board of directors, and even the timid ones were beginning to clamor for an advance into the territory of the enemy.

Ford read Adair’s letter-length and most unbusiness-like telegram with the zest of the fine wine of triumph tingling in his blood.  With the Chicago outlet fairly open and in working order, and a huge tributary grain crop to be moved, it should be only a matter of days until the depressed Pacific Southwestern stock would begin to climb toward the bonding figure.

This was the first triumphant conclusion, but afterward came reaction and a depressive doubt.  Would the stock go up?  Or would the enemy devise some assault that would keep it down in spite of the money-earning, dividend-promising facts?  Upon the expected rise hung the fate of Ford’s cherished ambition—­the building of the western extension.  Without a dividend-paying Chicago-Denver main line, there could be no bond issue, no thirty millions for the forging of the third and most important link in the great traffic chain.