“What action did the directors’ meeting take?”
“Instructed me to feel Judge Watson on the question of holding things up with an injunction. I did it, and it turned out as you intimated it would; nothing doing. Smith asked me to borrow Maxwell’s special officer, Arch Tarbell, suggesting that we ought to keep in touch with Jennings. Archer was going over to Angels on the afternoon train, but Jennings has saved him the trouble by coming to town.”
“Well, what next?” Sprague inquired.
“That is just what I’d like to ask you,” was the lawyer’s frank admission. “We’re all looking to you to set the pace. You’re the one man with the holy gift of initiative, Mr. Sprague. You haven’t admitted it in so many words, but I know as well as I know anything that you are the man who started this newspaper talk.”
“Pshaw!” said the expert, in genial raillery; “I’m only a Government chemist, Mr. Stillings.”
“That’s all right, too; but that isn’t why the railroad men call you ‘Scientific Sprague.’ Four times this summer you’ve dug Maxwell and his railroad out of a hole when the rest of us didn’t know there was any hole. What I’m most afraid of now is that Jennings will put up some sort of a scheme to get you out of the way. He knows well enough by this time that you are the key to his situation.”
“I’m a tenderfoot,” said the big man, with naïve irony. “What would you suggest?”
“That you go to Sheriff Harding and get him to swear you in as a special deputy. Then you can be prepared to defend yourself.”
Sprague’s mellow laugh rumbled deep in his big body.
“I guess I can take care of myself, if it comes to that, without ‘packing hardware,’ as Starbuck would put it,” he averred. “There won’t be more than three or four of them to tackle me at once, will there? But about your campaign—I have been hoping that the High Line people, backed by public sentiment, would be able to head this thing off. I am still hoping it. It will be altogether better if the railroad doesn’t have to take a hand on its own account. The New Yorkers would be sure to make capital out of it, holding the Ford-Maxwell management up to public execration as a corporation which deliberately strangles development propositions in its own territory.”