“Can you see now how it takes the very marrow out of a man’s bones, Kenneth?  You may think of an engineer as a man of purely bull-headed purposes, merely trying, in a crass, materialistic way, to get a material thing done.  I want to do a big thing, and I’d like to do it in a big way.  It is a big thing—­the building of this extension.  If it doesn’t add another star to the flag, it will at least make one state twice as populous, twice as prosperous.  It will add its quota to the habitable surfaces; and it’s a good quota—­a land that some future generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be.  And to think that for one man’s narrow-mindedness and another’s greed we’ve got to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty—­it makes me sore, Kenneth; sore and disheartened.”

“I don’t blame you,” said the lawyer, reveling, though he would never have admitted it, in the comfort of the caboose headquarters journey’s end.  “But you’ll pull through; you’ll build your railroad, and the mistakes that are made won’t be your mistakes.  It’s a horrible state of affairs, that in the MacMorrogh camps; a blot on our boasted civilization.  But you can’t help it.  Or rather you will help it if, and when, you can.”

Ford was shaking his head dejectedly.

“I don’t know, Kenneth.  It’s getting next to me, even at this early stage of the game.  Have you ever stood on the front car platform of a train nearest to the engine and watched the jiggling draw-bar?  It is apparently loose; its hold on the engine seems to be no more than that of the touch of clasped hands in a gipsy dance.  Yet it never lets go, and the drag of it is always there.  By and by, when the coal is all burned, and the fire is out, and the water is drained from the tank, those gentle little multiplied jerks will pull the big engine down—­kill it—­make it a mere mass of inert metal blocking the way of progress.”

“Well?” said the attorney.

“It’s an allegory.  I’m beginning to feel the draw-bar pull.  Sooner or later, North and his clique will drag me down.  I can’t fight as the under dog—­I never learned how; and they’ve fixed it so that I can’t fight any other way.”

Kenneth had lighted his cigar and was lying back against the cushion of the car-seat.  After a little, he said:  “Just after we saw the Italian killed last week I told you I had a notion, Ford.  I’ve got it yet, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind and wondering if I’d better explode it on you.  On the whole, I think I’d better not.  It’s a case of surgery.  If the patient lives, you’ll know about it.  If the patient dies, you’ll be no worse off than you are now.  Shall we let it rest at that?”

Ford acquiesced.  He was too utterly disheartened to be curious.  But if he could have foreseen the results of Kenneth’s notion it is conceivable that he would have been aroused to some effort of protest, as even in deep waters one prays sometimes to be delivered from his friends.