“That Mesquite project is another of the grafts that are continually giving this country a black eye, Jack. It’s ‘bunk,’ pure and simple. Everybody who has ever been in the Mesquite knows that you couldn’t raise little white beans in that disintegrated sandstone!”
“It’ll do for an excuse to rake in a few hundred thousand Eastern shekels,” Benson remarked. “There will be plenty of ‘come-ons’ to buy the land when the dam is built.”
Bascom’s great crane was poising a crushed and mangled box-car in air, and when the crooking steel finger swung its burden aside and dropped it with a crash out of the way, Maxwell turned upon his heel.
“I have my car here, and I’m going back to Angels to do some wiring,” he said. “Come along, if you want to see those irrigation people. But I’ll tell you right now, I won’t approve any recommendation for more track-laying for them.”
They had walked possibly half the length of the long blockade when a noisy automobile, dust-covered and filled with men, drew up on the mesa flat above the wreck. Benson looked up with a scowl.
“There’s another gang of those newspaper ghouls!” he commented, as two of the three men in the tonneau got out and began to unlimber their cameras and tripods. “It’s no picnic to drive a car from Brewster over the range, to say nothing of the danger; and this is the second squad since daylight. There have been enough pictures taken of this wreck to fill all the newspapers between New York and San Francisco for a week!”
Maxwell’s smile was a mere teeth-baring.
“Yes; we’re getting the advertising all right,” he said. “We’ve been getting it for a month or more.” Then, as they tramped on out of the wreck raffle and headed for the waiting office-car: “I had a talk with Ford last night; that is what took me to Copah. We’re in bad, Benson. Ford says they’ve taken to calling us ‘the sick railroad’ on the Stock Exchange, and our securities are simply going to the puppies. Another month like this one we’ve just stumbled through will either wipe us from the map or clean us up definitely and put us into the hands of a receiver.”
“Does Ford say that?” gasped the young chief engineer.
“He said a good bit more than that. He still insists that these troubles of ours are helped along from the outside; that they are in reality just so many moves in the game that a certain Wall Street pool is playing to get control of our road. I tried to show him how impossible it was; how the entire slump in discipline which causes all the trouble is merely one of those crazy epidemics that now and then sweep over the length of the best-managed railroads on earth.”