“Oho! general favorite all around, is he?”
Maxwell laughed dryly. “He has captured everybody except the one man who has had the most to do with him; that’s Benson, our chief engineer. Jack is a sort of two-fisted bluffer himself—though it is only fair to say that he usually makes his bluff good—and I think he’d always bet on the field against a favorite. He says Stribling is too smooth; too damned smooth, is the way he generally phrases it.”
“I shall have great pleasure in making the acquaintance of this Mr. Benson of yours some day,” said the man from Washington. And after that he smoked on in silence until Maxwell was about to bid him good-night and suggest a bell-hop and the elevator—did suggest them, in fact.
“No, I’m not sleepy,” was the rejoinder. “I was just thinking about railroads and tunnels and the like. If I were a railroad man, Dick, I believe I should have a crazy horror of a tunnel.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know; superstition, perhaps. You know the old saying:
Every superstition
Is a foolish superstition
Save the little superstition
Of me.
A tunnel always seems to me like a man’s neck. One little grip and a squeeze, and your man, though he may have a couple of hundred pounds of other organs in perfect working order, is dead.”
Maxwell laughed at the quaint conceit, though he was prompt to make the timely application.
“That would be true enough for us if Tunnel Number Three should ever be wiped out,” he admitted. “As I have said, it is in dry shale, a good part of it, and it had to be carefully supported by follow-up timbering as we went along in the digging. I wanted Ford to let us keep the roundabout track in commission, against emergencies, but he decided it would be too expensive—as it probably would have been.”