“What!” roared Rogers. “Cash that check? I wouldn’t take a hundred thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it. I’m not in this game for money.”
To indicate the general temper of those early construction days in the prairie country one can take room for only two sidelights on the Van Horne regime, which became traditional with all the surviving old-timers who were lucky enough to behold it. Van Horne wasn’t an engineer, but he had all the natural aptitudes of one, and a Napoleonic hatred of “can’t”. One day he sent for a locating engineer, threw a profile to him and said:
“Look at that. Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want you to go up and take it out.”
“But this is on the Bow River—a troublesome section. There may be no other way.”
“Make another way.”
The engineer stood, irresolute. Then, Van Horne:
“This is a mud tunnel, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How long would it take to build it?”
“A year or eighteen months.”