The other shook his head. "Can't do it, Jeff. You know the situation as well as I. If the river comes in the whole country will go to smash; and with the class of structures they have put in to control it and with an eastern engineer in charge, it's too big a chance. The S. & C. is not spending money to help out wild-cat projects promoted by eastern capital."
"But if you give us the branch line it will insure the success of the project, for it will make the Company property so valuable that they will spend more money to protect it."
"Or"—added the other—"we would have to spend more money to protect it. I'm sorry Jeff, if that's what you have been figuring on, but we are not an insurance company—we are in the transportation business."
"Then you won't build into the Basin?"
"Not under existing conditions, Jeff."
With as little show of emotion as he would have exhibited had he merely proposed to purchase a morning paper, Jefferson Worth said: "All right, then I'll build it myself."
The railroad man knew that the quietly spoken words meant that the banker had determined to stake everything he had in the world upon a chance that even the S. & C., with its unlimited capital, refused to take. With his already large investments in the new country, the building of the railroad would tax Worth's resources to the very limit and the failure of the Company's project would mean for him financial ruin.
During the flood season just past Jefferson Worth had seen the safety of the Reclamation work hanging on a very slender thread. Every hour he had looked for the disaster that would bring to nothing all that had been accomplished by the desert pioneers, whose ruin he would share, yet he calmly proposed now to throw into the venture everything that years of unceasing toil had brought him—his capital, his credit, his reputation.
"Don't do it, Jeff," said his friend. "You are in deep enough now.
Better keep an anchor to windward."
"I figured on taking a chance when I went into that country," said Worth simply. It was as if he had foreseen this situation from the very beginning and had planned how he would meet it. The railroad man's face expressed his admiration for this display of nerve.