I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.
"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand, not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."
"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors' meeting in the Bullard.
"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had to swallow you whole or take the consequences—and the consequences were going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."
The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when he has got hold of the gist of a thing.
"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and relatives. I'll have to clean house."
"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to draw from?"
"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully. "There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college, and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies—I'll try it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around traffic man this side of the Missouri—only his present employers don't seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good lawyer, Uncle John."
"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries, the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."
The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."