"No. I'm perfectly willing to trust your judgment, Dick. Besides, I've got other fish to fry. I'm going east to-night to have one more tussle with the steel mills. We must have quicker deliveries and more of them. When I get back, we'll organize the track-layers and begin to make us a railroad."
"Good," said Frisbie, gathering up his maps and sketches of the detour country; and so, in the wording of a brief sentence or two it came to pass that Ford delivered himself bound and unarmed into the hands of his enemies.
A little light was thrown upon this dark passage that night in the office of the general manager, after Ford's train had gone eastward, and Frisbie was on his way back to the MacMorrogh headquarters on the lower Pannikin. North was waiting when Eckstein came in, flushed as from a rapid walk.
"It's all settled?" asked the general manager, with a slow lift of the eyebrow to betray his anxiety.
"To the queen's taste, I should say," was the secretary's not too deferential reply. "Ford's out of the way, to be gone ten days or a fortnight, and Frisbie has gone back to dicker with MacMorrogh, and to survey the new route up Horse Creek. Ford doesn't know; I doubt if he will ever know until we spring the trap on him. The one thing I was most afraid of was that he would insist upon going over the new line himself. Then, of course, he would have found out—he couldn't help finding out."
The general manager squared his huge shoulders against the back of the chair.
"You think he would call it off if he knew?" he queried. "You give him credit for too much virtue, Eckstein. But I think we have him now. By the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge. MacMorrogh will see to that."
Eckstein nodded. "I made a point of that with Brian," he said. "The minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon the new roundabout. But Ford won't find out. He'll be too busy on this end of the line with the track-layers. I'm a little nervous about Merriam, though."
"He's the man who talked Frisbie into championing the new route?"
"Yes. He did it pretty skilfully: made Frisbie think he was finding it out himself, and never let the little man out of his sight while they were in Copah. But I am afraid Merriam himself knows too much."