Читать книгу The Ball of Fire - George Randolph Chester - Страница 7

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Edward E. Allison walked into the offices of the Municipal Transportation Company at nine o’clock, and set his basket of opened and carefully annotated letters out of the mathematical centre of his desk; then he touched a button, and a thin young man, whose brow, at twenty, wore the traces of preternatural age, walked briskly in.

“Has Mr. Greggory arrived?”

The intensely earnest young man glanced at the clock.

“Yes, sir,” he replied.

“Take him these letters, and ask him if he will be kind enough to step here.”

“Yes, sir,” and the concentrated young man departed with the basket, feeling that he had quite capably borne his weight of responsibility.

Allison, looking particularly fresh and buoyant this morning, utilised his waiting time to the last fraction of a second. He put in a telephone call, and took from the drawer of his desk a packet of neatly docketed papers, an index memorandum book, a portfolio of sketches, and three cigars, the latter of which he put in his cigar case; then, his desk being empty, except for a clean memorandum pad and pencil, he closed it and locked it. The telephone girl reported his number on the wire, and, the number proving to be that of a florist, he ordered some violets sent to Gail Sargent.

Greggory walked in, a fat man with no trace of nonsense about him.

“Out for the day, Ed?” he surmised, gauging that probability by the gift of the letters.

“A month or so,” amended Allison, rising, and surveying the three articles on his desk calculatingly. “I’m going to take a vacation.”

“It’s about time,” agreed his efficient general manager. “I think it’s been four years since you stopped to take a breath. Going to play a little?”

“That’s the word,” and Allison chuckled like a boy. “Take care of these things,” and tossing him the packet of papers and the memorandum book, he took the portfolio of sketches under his arm.

“I suppose we’ll have your address,” suggested Greggory.

“No.”

Greggory pondered frowningly. He began to see a weight piling up on him, and, though he was capable, he loved his flesh.

“About that Shell Beach extension?” he inquired. “There’s likely to be trouble with the village of Waveview. Their local franchises—”

“Settle it yourself,” directed Allison carelessly, and Greggory stared. During the long and arduous course of Allison’s climb, he had built his success on personal attention to detail. “Good-bye,” and Allison walked out, lighting a cigar on his way to the door.

He stopped his runabout in front of a stationer’s, and bought the largest globe they had in stock.

“Address, please?” asked the clerk, pencil poised over delivery slip.

“I’ll take it with me,” and Allison helped them secure the clumsy thing in the seat beside him. Then he streaked up the Avenue to the small and severely furnished house where four ebony servants protected him from the world.

“Out of town except to this list,” he directed his kinky-haired old butler, and going into the heavy oak library, he closed the door. On the wall, depending from the roller case, was a huge map of the boroughs of New York, which had hung there since he had first begun to group transportation systems together. It was streaked and smudged with the marks of various coloured pencils, some faded and some fresh, and around one rectangle, lettered Vedder Court, was a heavy green mark. He picked up a pencil from the stand, but laid it down again with a smile. There was no need for that new red line; nor need, either, any longer, for the map itself; and he snapped it up into its case, on roller-springs stiff with disuse. In its place he drew down another one, a broad familiar domain between two oceans, and he smiled as his eye fell upon that tiny territory near the Atlantic, which, up to now, he had called a world, because he had mastered it.

His library phone rang.

“Mr. Allison?” a woman’s voice. Gail Sargent, Mrs. Sargent, Mrs. Davies, or Lucile Teasdale. No other ladies were on his list. The voice was not that of Gail. “Are you busy to-night?” Oh, yes, Lucile Teasdale.

“Free as air,” he gaily told her.

“I’m so glad,” rattled Lucile. “Ted’s just telephoned that he has tickets for ‘The Lady’s Maid.’ Can you join us?”

“With pleasure.” No hesitation whatever; prompt and agreeable; even pleased.

“That’s jolly. I think six makes such a nice crowd. Besides you and ourselves, there’ll be Arly and Dick Rodley and Gail.” Gail, of course. He had known that. “We’ll start from Uncle Jim’s at eight o’clock.”

Allison called old Ephraim.

“I want to begin dressing at seven-fifteen,” he directed. “At three o’clock set some sandwiches inside the door. Have some fruit in my dressing-room.”

He went back to his map, remembering Lucile with a retrospective smile. The last time he had seen that vivacious young person she had been emptying a box of almonds, at the side of the camp fire at the toboggan party. He jotted down a memorandum to send her some, and drew a high stool in front of the map.

Strange this new ambition which had come to him. Why, he had actually been about to consider his big work finished; and now, all at once, everything he had done seemed trivial. The eager desire of youth to achieve had come to him again, and the blood sang in his veins as he felt of his lusty strength. He was starting to build, with a youth’s enthusiasm but with a man’s experience, and with the momentum of success and the power of capital. Something had crystallised him in the past few days.

At 7:15 Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations

Across the fertile fields and the mighty mountains and the arid deserts of the United States, there angled four black threads, from coast to coast, and everywhere else were shorter main lines and shorter branches, and, last of all, mere fragments of railroads. He began with the long, angling threads, but he ended with the fragments, and these, in turns, he gave minute and careful study. At three o’clock he took a sandwich and ordered his car. He was gone less than an hour, and came back with an armload of books; government reports, volumes of statistics, and a file of more intimate information from the office of his broker. He threw off his coat when he came in this time, and spread, on the big, lion-clawed table at which Napoleon had once planned a campaign, a vari-coloured mass of railroad maps. At seven-fifteen old Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations.

“Time to dress, sir,” suggested Ephraim.

Allison pushed to the floor the railroad map upon which he had been working, and pulled another one towards him. Ephraim waited one minute.

“I’ve run your tub, sir.”

Allison leafed rapidly through the pages of an already hard-used book, to the section concerning the Indianapolis and St. Joe Railroad. Ephraim looked around calculatingly, and selected an old atlas from the top of the case near the door. He held it aloft an instant, and let it fall with a slam.

“Oh, it’s you,” remarked the absorbed Allison, glancing up.

“Yes, sir,” returned Ephraim. “You told me to come for you at seven-fifteen.”

Allison arose, and rubbed the tips of his fingers over his eyes.

“Keep this room locked,” he ordered, and stalked obediently upstairs. For the next thirty minutes he belonged to Ephraim.

He was as carefree as a boy when he reached Jim Sargent’s house, and his eyes snapped when he saw Gail come down the stairs, in a pearl tinted gown, with a triple string of pearls in her waving hair, and a rose-coloured cloak depending from her gracefully sloping shoulders.

Her own eyes brightened at the sight of him. He had been much in her mind to-day; not singly but as one of a group. She was quite conscious that she liked him, but she was more conscious that she was curious about him. She was curious about most men, she suddenly found, comparing them, sorting them, weighing them; and Allison was one of the most perplexing specimens. A little heavy in his evening clothes, but not awkward, and not without dignity of bearing. He stepped forward to shake hands with her, and, for a moment, she found in her an inclination to cling to the warm thrill of his clasp. She had never before been so aware of anything like that. Nevertheless, when she had withdrawn her hand, she felt a sense of relief.

“Hello, Allison,” called the hearty voice of Jim Sargent. “You’re looking like a youngster to-night.”

“I feel like one,” replied Allison, smiling. “I’m on a vacation.” He was either vain enough or curious enough to glance at himself in the big mirror as he passed it. He did look younger; astonishingly so; and he had about him a quality of lightness which made him restless. He had been noted among his business associates for a certain dry wit, scathing, satirical, relentless; now he used that quality agreeably, and when Lucile and Ted, and Arly and Dick Rodley joined them, he was quite easily a sharer in the gaiety. At the theatre he was the same. He participated in all the repartee during the intermissions, and the fact that he found Gail studying him, now and then, only gave him an added impulse. He was frank with himself about Gail. He wanted her, and he had made up his mind to have her. He was himself a little surprised at his own capacity of entertainment, and when he parted from Gail at the Sargent house, he left her smiling, and with a softer look in her eyes than he had yet seen there.

Immediately on his return to his library, Allison threw off his coat and waistcoat, collar and tie, and sat at the table.

“What is there in the ice box?” he wanted to know.

“Well, sir,” enumerated Ephraim carefully; “Mirandy had a chicken pot-pie for dinner, and then there’s—”

“That will do; cold,” interrupted Allison. “Bring it here with as few service things as possible, a bottle of Vichy and some olives.”

He began to set down some figures, and when Ephraim came, shaking his head to himself about such things as cold dumplings at night, Allison stopped for ten minutes, and lunched with apparent relish. At seven-thirty he called Ephraim and ordered a cold plunge and some breakfast. He had been up all night, and on the map of the United States there were pencilled two thin straight black lines; one from New York to Chicago, and one from Chicago to San Francisco. Crossing them, and paralleling them, and angling in their general direction, but quite close to them in the main, were lines of blue and lines of green and lines of orange; these three.

Another day and another night he spent with his maps, and his books, and his figures; then he went to his broker with a list of railroads.

“Get me what stock you can of these,” he directed. “Pick it up as quietly as possible.”

The broker looked them over and elevated his eyebrows, There was not a road in the list which was important strategically, but he had ceased to ask questions of Edward Allison.

Three days later, Allison went into the annual stockholders’ meeting of the L. and C. Railroad, and registered majority of the stock in that insignificant line, which ran up the shore opposite Crescent Island, joined the Towando Valley shortly after its emergence from its hired entrance into New York, ran for fifty miles over the roadway of the Towando, with which it had a long-time tracking contract, and wandered up into the country, where it served as an outlet to certain conservatively profitable territory.

The secretary of the L. and C., a man of thick spectacles and a hundred wrinkles, looked up with fear in his eyes as his cramped old fingers clutched his pen.

“I suppose you’ll be making some important changes, Mr. Allison,” he quavered.

“Not in the active officers,” returned Allison with a smile, and the president, who wore flowing side-whiskers, came over to shake hands with him. “How soon can you call the meeting?”

“Almost immediately,” replied the president. “I suppose there’ll be a change in policies.”

“Not at all,” Allison reassured him, and walked into the board room, where less than a dozen stockholders, as old and decrepit as the road itself, had congregated.

The president, following him, invited him to a seat next his own chair, and laid before him a little slip of paper.

“This is the official slate which had been prepared,” he explained, with a smile which it took some bravery to produce.

“It’s perfectly satisfactory,” pronounced Allison, glancing at it courteously, and the elderly stockholders, knotted in little anxious groups, took a certain amount of reassurance from the change of expression on the president’s face.

The president reached for his gavel and called the meeting. The stockholders, grey and grave, and some with watery eyes, drew up their chairs to the long table; for they were directors, too. They answered to their names, and they listened to the minutes, and waded mechanically through the routine business, always with their gaze straying to the new force which had come among them. Every man there knew all about Edward E. Allison. He had combined the traction interests of New York by methods as logical and unsympathetic as geometry, and where he appeared, no matter how pacific his avowed intentions, there were certain to be radical upheavings.

Election of officers was reached in the routine, and again that solemn inquiry in the faded eyes. The “official slate” was proposed in nomination. Edward E. Allison voted with the rest. Every director was re-elected!

New business. Again the solemn inquiry.

“Move to amend Article Three Section One of the constitution, relating to duration of office,” announced Allison, passing the written motion to the secretary. “On a call from the majority of stock, the stockholders of the L. and C. Railroad have a right to demand a special meeting, on one week’s notice, for the purpose of re-organisation and re-election.”

They knew it. It had to come. However, three men on the board had long held the opinion that any change was for the better, and one of these, a thin, old man with a nose so blue that it looked as if it had been dyed to match his necktie, immediately seconded.

Edward E. Allison waited just long enough to vote his majority stock, and left the meeting in a hurry, for he had an engagement to take tea with Gail Sargent.

He allowed himself four hours for sleep that night, and the next afternoon headed for Denver. On the way he studied maps again, but the one to which he paid most attention was a new one drawn by himself, on which the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains were represented by scrawled, lead-pencilled spirals. Right where his thin line crossed these spirals at a converging point, was Yando Chasm, a pass created by nature, which was the proud possession of the Inland Pacific, now the most prosperous and direct of all the Pacific systems; and the Inland, with an insolent pride in the natural fortune which had been found for it by the cleverest of all engineers, guarded its precious right of way as no jewel was ever protected. Just east of Yando Chasm there crossed a little “one-horse” railroad, which, starting at the important city of Silverknob, served some good mining towns below the Inland’s line, and on the north side curved up and around through the mountains, rambling wherever there was freight or passengers to be carried, and ending on the other side of the range at Nugget City, only twenty miles north of the Inland’s main line, and a hundred miles west, into the fair country which sloped down to the Pacific. This road, which had its headquarters in Denver, was called the Silverknob and Nugget City; and into its meeting walked Allison, with control.

His course here was different from that in Jersey City. He ousted every director on the board, and elected men of his own. Immediately after, in the directors’ meeting, he elected himself president, and, kindly consenting to talk with the reporters of the Denver newspapers, hurried back to Chicago, where he drove directly to the head offices of the Inland Pacific.

“I’ve just secured control of the Silverknob and Nugget City,” he informed the general manager of the Inland.

“So I noticed,” returned Wilcox, who was a young man of fifty and wore picturesque velvet hats. “The papers here made quite a sensation of your going into railroading.”

“They’re welcome,” grinned Allison. “Say Wilcox, if you’ll build a branch from Pines to Nugget City, we’ll give you our Nugget City freight where we cross, at Copperville, east of the range.”

Wilcox headed for his map.

“What’s the distance?” he inquired.

“Twenty-two miles; fairly level grade, and one bridge.”

“Couldn’t think of it,” decided Wilcox, looking at the map. “We’d like to have your freight, for there’s a lot of traffic between Silverknob and Nugget City, but it’s not our territory. The smelters are at Silverknob, and they ship east over the White Range Line. Anyway, why do you want to take away the haulage from your northern branch?”

“Figure on discontinuing it. The grades are steep, the local traffic is light, and the roadbed is in a rotten condition. It needs rebuilding throughout. I’ll make you another proposition. I’ll build the line from Pines to Nugget City myself, if you’ll give us track connection at Copperville and at Pines, and will give us a traffic contract for our own rolling stock on a reasonable basis.”

Again Wilcox looked at the map. The Silverknob and Nugget City road began nowhere and ran nowhere, so far as the larger transportation world was concerned, and it could never figure as a competitor. The hundred miles through the precious natural pass known as Yando Chasm, was not so busy a stretch of road as it was important, and the revenue from the passage of the Silverknob and Nugget City’s trains would deduct considerably from the expense of maintaining that much-prized key to the golden west.

“I’ll take it up with Priestly and Gorman,” promised Wilcox.

“How soon can you let me know?”

“Monday.”

That afternoon saw Allison headed back for New York, and the next morning he popped into the offices of the Pacific Slope and Puget Sound, where he secured a rental privilege to run the trains of the Orange Valley Road into San Francisco, and down to Los Angeles, over the tracks of the P. S. and P. S. The Orange Valley was a little, blind pocket of a road, which made a juncture with the P. S. and P. S. just a short haul above San Francisco, and it ran up into a rich fruit country, but its terminus was far, far away from any possible connection with a northwestern competitor; and that bargain was easy.

That night, Allison, glowing with an exultation which erased his fatigue, dressed to call on Gail Sargent.