Through Ephraim they came to the stocky, square-standing, square-faced chess player who was called Allison. They found him pleasant, agreeable, but hardly of their class. He was so forceful as to be necessarily more or less crude, and he had an unpleasant fashion of waving aside all the decent little pretences about money. That was the fault of this whole rude country, where luxury had been brought to the greatest refinement ever known in the history of the world; it was so devoted to money, and the cultured gentlemen did their best to get all they could.
To Ivan Strolesky Allison was frank and friendly, for there was something in the big Russian which was different from these others, so he hastened to have business out of the way.
“Here are your lines,” he said, spreading down a map which had been brought up-to-date by hand. “The ones I want are checked in blue. The others I do not care for.”
The Grand Duke looked them over with a keen eye.
“I am rather disappointed,” he confessed in excellent English. “I had understood that you wished to control our entire railway system.”
“I do,” assented Allison; “but I don’t wish to pay out money for them all. If I can acquire the lines I have marked, the others will be controlled quite easily from the fact that I shall have the only outlet.”
The Grand Duke, who had played poker in America and fan-tan in China and roulette in Monte Carlo, and all the other games throughout the world, smiled with his impressive big eyes, and put his hand up under his beard.
“The matter then seems to resolve itself into a question of price,” he commented.
“No; protection,” responded Allison. “If I were buying these railroads outright, I should expect my property interests to be guarded, even if I had to appeal to international equity; but I am not.”
“No,” admitted the Grand Duke. “They can not be purchased.”