Five days the young engineer waited for news from New York—­waited and worked like a high-pressure motor while he waited.  Each day’s financial news showed the continued and growing success of the home-made “corner,” and now the reporters were predicting that the stock would go to par before the price should break.

Ford trembled for the good faith of his backers on the board.  When one has bought at twenty-nine and a half and can sell within the week for eighty-seven, the temptation is something tremendous.  But at the closing hour of the fifth day the demand was still good; and when Ford reached the hotel that night there was a telegram from Adair awaiting him.

He tore it open and read it, with the blood pounding through his veins and a roar which was not of the street traffic drumming in his ears.

     P. S-W. closed at ninety-two to-day, and a Dutch syndicate will take
     the bonds.  Success to you in the Western wilderness.  Brewster wants
     to know how soon you’ll reach his Utah copper mines.  ADAIR.

XI

HURRY ORDERS

“I’m no cold-water thrower, Ford, as you know.  But if I were a contractor, and you were trying to get me to commit myself to any such steeplechase, I should say no, and confirm it with a cuss-word.”

It was a week after the successful placing of the Western Extension building-fund bonds with the Dutch syndicate, and Ford, having ordered things to his liking on the newly opened Chicago line, had taken the long step westward to Denver to begin the forging of the third link in the great railway chain.

Frisbie, now first assistant engineer in charge of construction, had come down from Saint’s Rest for a conference with his chief, and the place of conferrings was a quiet corner in one of the balconies overlooking the vast rotunda of the Brown Palace Hotel; this because the carpenters were still busy in the suite of rooms set apart for the offices of the assistant to the president in the Pacific Southwestern headquarters down-town.

“You mean that the time is too short?” said Ford, speaking to Frisbie’s emphatic objection.

“Too short at both ends,” contended the little man with the devilish mustaches and chin beard.  “The Copah mining district is one hundred and twenty miles, as the crow flies, from the summit of Plug Pass—­say one hundred and forty by the line of our survey down the Pannikin, through the canyon and up to the town.  Giving you full credit for more getting-ready than I supposed any man could compass in the three weeks you’ve been at it, I still think it is impossible for us to reach Copah this season.”

“You must change your belief, Dick,” was the curt rejoinder.  “This is to be a campaign, not only of possibilities, but of things done.  We go into Copah with the steel gangs before snow flies.”

“I know; that’s what you’ve been saying all along.  But you’re looking at the thing by and large, and I’m figuring on the flinty details.  For example:  you’ll admit that we can’t work to any advantage west of the mountains until we have made a standard gauge out of the Plug Mountain branch.  How much time have you been allowing for that?”