"Thirty millions of dollars."
"A good deal of money."
"No."
"No?"
"No. Don't let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them. I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear Dance—yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains."
"Go ahead."
"Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him—Callahan, Blood and the rest of us—are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily," Glover bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, "he isn't; but he might have been——"
"I see."
"We were prepared for that."
"How?"