De Spain himself expressed contemptuous impatience when Lefever told him the superintendent wanted him to go to work at Sleepy Cat. He declared he had always hated the town; and Lefever readily understood why he should especially detest it just now. Every horseman’s yell that rang on the sunny afternoon air through the open windows––and from up the street and down there were still a good many––was one of 10 derision at de Spain’s galling defeat. When he at length consented to talk with Jeffries about coming to Sleepy Cat, the interview was of a positive sort on the one side and an obstinate sort on the other. De Spain raised one objection after another to leaving Medicine Bend, and Jeffries finally summoned a show of impatience.
“You are looking for promotion, aren’t you?” he demanded threateningly.
“Yes, but not for motion without the ‘pro,’” objected de Spain. “I want to stick to the railroad business. You want to get me into the stage business.”
“Temporarily, yes. But I’ve told you when you come back to the division proper, you come as my assistant, if you make good running the Thief River stages. Think of the salary.”
“I have no immediate heirs.”
“This is not a matter for joking, de Spain.”
“I know that, too. How many men have been shot on the stages in the last six months?”
“Why, now and again the stages are held up, yes,” admitted Jeffries brusquely; “that is to be expected where the specie shipments are large. The Thief River mines are rotten with gold just now. But you don’t have to drive a stage. We supply you with good men for that, and good guards––men willing to take any kind of a chance 11 if the pay is right. And the pay is right, and yours as general manager will be right.”
“I have never as yet generally managed any stage line,” remarked de Spain, poking ridicule at the title, “no matter how modest an outfit.”
“You will never learn younger. There is a fascination,” declared Jeffries, ignoring the fling, and tilting his chair eloquently back to give ease and conviction to his words, “about running a good stage line that no railroad business can ever touch. There is, of course, nothing in the Rocky Mountains, for that matter in the United States––nothing, I guess, in the world––that approaches the Thief River line in its opportunities. Every wagon we own, from the lightest to the heaviest, is built to order on our particular specifications by the Studebaker people.” Here Jeffries pointed his finger sharply at de Spain as if to convict him of some dereliction. “You’ve seen them! You know what they are.”