Camilla shook her head. "It can do Jeff no good. It will do Gladys and Cortland harm. Jeff has forgotten the past. It has done him no harm—except that he has no name. He has won his way without a name—even this will not give him one. Jeff's poor incubus will be a grim reality—tangible flesh—to be despised."
Mrs. Rumsen looked long into the fire. "I can't believe it," she said slowly. "My brother and I are not on the best of terms—we have never been intimate, because we could not understand each other. But he is not the kind of man any one despises. People downtown say he has no soul. If he hasn't, then this news can be no blow to him. If he has——"
She paused. And then, instead of going on, took Camilla by the hand.
"Camilla," she said gently, "we must think long over this—but not now. It must be slept on. Get dressed while I read these letters, and we'll take a spin into the country. Perhaps by to-morrow we'll be able to see things more clearly."
CHAPTER XVIII
COMBAT
It had been a time of terrific struggles. For four months Wray's enemies had used every device that ingenuity could devise to harass him in the building of his new road, the Saguache Short Line; had attacked the legality of every move in the courts; hampered and delayed, when they could, the movement of his material; bribed his engineers and employes; offered his Mexicans double wages elsewhere; found an imaginary flaw in his title to the Hermosa Estate which for a time prevented the shipment of ties until Larry came on and cleared the matter up. Finally they caused a strike at the Pueblo Steel Works, where his rails were made, so that before the completion of the contract the works were shut down. Tooth and nail Jeff fought them at every point, and Pete Mulrennan's judge at Kinney, whose election had taken place before the other crowd had made definite plans, had been an important asset in the fight for supremacy.
The other crowd had appealed from his decisions, of course, but the law so far had been on Wray's side, and there was little chance that the decisions would be overruled in the higher court. But as Jeff well knew, the Amalgamated crowd had no intention of standing on ceremony, and what they couldn't do in one way they attempted to accomplish in, another. Five carloads of ties on the Denver and Saguache railroad were ditched in an arroyo between Mesa City and Saguache. Wray's engineers reported that the trestles had been tampered with. Jeff satisfied himself that this was true, then doubled his train crews, supplied the men with Winchesters and revolvers, and put a deputy sheriff in the cab of each locomotive. After that an explosion of dynamite destroyed a number of his flat cars, and a fire in the shops was narrowly averted. A man caught at the switches had been shot and was now in the hospital at Kinney with the prospect of a jail sentence before him. Judge Weigel was a big gun in Kinney, and he liked to make a big noise. He would keep the law in Saguache County, he said, if he had to call on the Governor to help him.
More difficult to combat were the dissensions Jeff found among his own employes. The German engineers, like other men, were fallible, and left him when the road was half done because they were offered higher salaries elsewhere. His under-engineers, his contractors, his foremen were all subject to the same influences, but he managed somehow to keep the work moving. New men, some of them just out of college, were imported from the East and Middle West, and the Development Company was turned into an employment agency to keep the ranks of workmen filled. Mexicans went and Mexicans came, but the building of the road went steadily on. There were no important engineering problems to solve, since the greater part of the line passed over the plains, where the fills and cuts were small and the grading inexpensive. Seven months had passed since ground had been broken and the road, in spite of obstacles, had been nearly carried to completion.
Already Wray had had a taste of isolation. For two months there had been but one passenger train a day between Kinney and Saguache. To all intents and purposes Kinney was now the Western terminus of the road, and Saguache was beginning to feel the pinch of the grindstones. Notwithstanding the findings of the Railroad Commission, Judge Weigel's decision, and Jeff's representations through his own friends at Washington, the Denver and Western refused to put on more trains. Saguache, they contended, was not the real terminus of the road; that the line had been extended from Kinney some years before to tap a coal field which had not proved successful; that Saguache was not a growing community, and that the old stage line still in operation between the two towns would be adequate for every purpose. These were lies of course, vicious lies, for every one knew that since the development of the Mesa City properties Saguache had trebled in size, and that the freight business alone in ten years would have provided for the entire bonded indebtedness of the road. What might happen in time Jeff did not know or care. It was a matter which must be fought out at length and might take years to settle. The Chicago and Utah Railroad Company for the present had command of the situation. To handle the business Jeff had put on a dozen four-mule teams between Kinney and Saguache, which carried his freight and necessary supplies along the old trail over the Boca Pass, which was shorter by ten miles than the railroad, a heart-breaking haul and a dangerous one to man and beast. But it was the only thing left for him to do.