"It isn't Ford; it is the New York bankers. You can read that between the lines in your man Ackerman's telegram."
The stocky gentleman in the pivot-chair thrust out his jaw and tilted his freshly lighted cigar to the aggressive angle.
"Say, Brouillard, we've got to throw a fresh piece of bait into the cage, something that will make the railroad crowd sit up and take notice. By George, if those gold hunters up on Jack's Mountain would only stumble across something big enough to advertise——"
Brouillard started as if the wishful musing had been a blow. Like a hot wave from a furnace mouth it swept over him—the sudden realization that the means, the one all-powerful, earth-moving lever the promoter was so anxiously seeking, lay in his hands.
"The Buckskin people, yes," he said, making talk as the rifleman digs a pit to hold his own on the firing-line. "If they should happen to uncover a gold reef just now it would simplify matters immensely for Mirapolis, wouldn't it? The railroad would come on, then, without a shadow of doubt. All the bankers in New York couldn't hold it back."
Now came Mr. Cortwright's turn to get up and walk the floor, and he took it, tramping solidly back and forth in the clear space behind the table-topped desk. It was not until he had extended the meditative stump-and-go to one of the windows that he stopped short and came out of the inventive trance with a jerk.
"Come here," he called curtly, with a quick finger crook for the engineer, and when Brouillard joined him: "Can you size up that little caucus over yonder?"
The "caucus" was a knot of excited men blocking the sidewalk in front of Garner's real-estate office on the opposite side of the street. The purpose of the excited ones was not difficult to divine. They were all trying to crowd into the Kansas City man's place of business at once.
"It looks like a run on a bank," said Brouillard.
"It is," was the crisp reply. "Garner has beaten everybody else to the home plate, but he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He's been talking, and every man in that mob is a potential panic breeder. That thing has got to be nipped in the bud, right now!"