“Thank God!” said the superintendent; and then again, as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, “Thank God!”
Sprague looked up quickly.
“You’ve been taking it pretty hard, haven’t you, Dick? Any special reason?”
“Yes. You know Ford, our president: he has made the Pacific Southwestern System—made it out of whole cloth; and, incidentally, he has made a good few of us fellows who have fought with him shoulder to shoulder from the first. When I was last in New York, a couple of months ago, he rode from the club to the station in the taxi with me. He was in trouble of some sort—he didn’t tell me what it was; but the last thing he said as I was boarding the train gave me some notion of it. ‘Run that jerk-water Short Line of yours, Dick, as if you were carrying all your eggs to market and had them all in one basket,’ he said, and then he added: ‘No wrecks, Dick, if you have to sit up nights to head them off.’”
Sprague was smoking peacefully. It was perhaps too much to expect that a man whose problems were chiefly in the field of laboratory science should be very deeply interested in one in which the elements were merely human. When he spoke again it was to recur to his favorable impression of Tarbell. “I like that young fellow,” he said in conclusion. “He’ll pull you out of the hole—with a little timely help from the newspapers. When he gets the ball into his hands and starts down the field with it, you’d best be prepared for some pretty sensational developments. They’re due.”
For a little while Maxwell said nothing, and the fine lines between his eyes deepened slowly into a frown of anxiety. Finally he said: “I’ve got ’em, too, Calvin—the ‘jimmies,’ I mean. My wife and the two kiddies are coming home on the ‘Apache’ to-night, and don’t you know, I had half a mind to wire her to stop over in Copah until I could go after her? That’s a pretty pass for things to come to, isn’t it?—when a man’s afraid to have the members of his family ride over his own particular piece of railroad?”
Sprague flipped the ash from his cigar.
“That’s one of the bridges you don’t have to cross until you come to it.”
Maxwell got out of his chair and refused Sprague’s offer of a fresh cigar.
“No,” he said; “this has been one of the days when I’ve smoked too much. I’m going over to the office to keep my finger on the pulse of things. When it gets too dull for you over here, come across and break in. If I’m not in my own office, you’ll find me in room eleven—the despatcher’s—keeping tab on the movements of the Apache Limited.”