John Steele arrived in America to learn that it was easier to make good resolutions than to keep them. He settled down in Chicago and found there was little difficulty in placing his money on mortgage at attractive rates of interest. He gave, however, his personal care to the securities offered, trusted no man’s word, and always viewed the spot and made close inquiries before he drew a cheque for investment. He divided his money between city and country, not depending on any one lawyer to do the business for him, but seeking local advice and local watchfulness wherever a mortgage was drawn. His eggs were in many baskets, or hatching nests, with a different legal hen to sit on each. The only gentleman of the law he had heretofore known was Beck, and his opinion of the profession seemed to be tinctured by his dislike of the gallant Colonel. He gave work to many legal experts, but never allowed the left-hand lawyer to know what the right-hand lawyer was doing.
He was shocked to find himself so suspicious of everyone except Philip Manson, but even more perturbed to learn that all his old delight in work was gone. Philip Manson was ambitious to make the Wheat Belt Line the model railway of the West, and in his quiet intense purposeful way was accomplishing that object. To John this ambition seemed trivial and above all futile, when it was possible for some speculator in New York or a combination of speculators to make the road a mere pawn in a gamble; to wreck it if its ruin suited the game, to discharge every employee at a week’s notice. His liking for Manson, his reluctance to disillusionise the one man on earth who was friend and believed in him, held him for more than a year at his task of division superintendent and the work that was growing more and more irksome to him. Then an incident at Slocum Junction gave the necessary impetus which finally shifted him from a career of usefulness into the predatory class. The faithful watch-dog became the ravenous wolf.
CHAPTER X—BUYING A RAILWAY
THE station-master said nonchalantly that he had nothing to do with it, and from out the telegraph office he brought a stout wooden chair which he set down in the dark strip of shade which ran along the pine platform under the eaves of the station. The back of this chair being tilted against the building, the station-master sat down in it, put his heels on the wooden round, took from his pocket a jack-knife, and began to whittle a stick, an occupation which the momentary pausing of the express seemed to have interrupted. There was nothing of the glass of fashion or the mould of form about the station-master. He was dressed in weather-worn trousers, held to his thin frame by a pair of suspenders quite evidently home-made, which came over his shoulders, and underneath this was a coarse woollen shirt, open at the throat because the button had gone. On top of all this there perched a three-year-old, dilapidated straw hat which had once possessed a wide brim, but was now in a state of disrepair in thorough keeping with the costume. Yet in spite of appearances he was a capable young man who could manipulate a telegraphic machine at reasonable speed, was well up in the business pertaining to Slocum Junction, and had definite opinions regarding the manner in which the affairs of the nation should be carried on. Indeed, at that moment he was an exemplification of the independence for which his country had fought and bled. No one knew better than he that the Greased Lightning Express would never have halted for an instant at Slocum Junction unless it did so to put off a person of some importance. But that important person had begun to give his opinion of the locality in language that was painful and free the moment he realised the situation, and the station-master signified his resentment by sitting down in the chair and assuming a careless attitude, which told the stranger plainer than words that he could go to the devil if he wished. For all he knew, the obstreperous person who had stepped from the express might be his chief, but the station-master made no concession to this possibility.
Opposite him in the blazing sunlight stood a dapper young man grasping a neat handbag. He might have posed as a tailor’s model, and he offered a striking contrast to the unkempt station-master. He cast an almost despairing look at the vanishing express, now a mere dot in the horizon, with a trail of smoke, as if it were a comet that had run aground. Then he turned an exasperated face upon the nonchalant station-master.
“You are not responsible for the situation, eh? You don’t seem to care much, either.”
“Well, to tell the truth, stranger, I don’t.”
“You mean to tell me there’s no train for two hours and a half on the branch line?”