A few minutes after the start Paul Carhart, who was writing a letter in pencil, looked up and saw Young Van beside him, and tried not to smile at his sorry appearance.
“I think I owe you an explanation, Mr. Carhart,” began the young man, in embarrassment which took the form of stiffness.
But the chief shook his head. “I’m not asking any questions, Gus,” he replied. Then the smile escaped him, and he turned it off by adding, “I’m writing to Mrs. Carhart.” He held up the letter and glanced over the first few lines with a twinkle in his eyes. “I was just telling her,” he went on, “that the cook problem in Chicago is in its infancy.”
[CHAPTER II]
WHERE THE MONEY CAME FROM
Doubtless there were official persons to be found at the time of this narrative—which is a matter of some thirty years back—who would have insisted that the letters “S. & W.” meant “Sherman and Western.” But every one who lived within two days’ ride of the track knew that the real name of the road was the “Shaky and Windy.”
Shaky the “S. & W.” certainly was—physically, and, if newspaper gossip and apparent facts were to be trusted, financially. The rails weighed thirty-five pounds to the yard, and had been laid in scallops, with high centres and low joints,—“sight along the rails and it looks like a washboard,” said John Flint, describing it. For ballast the clay and sand of the region were used. And, as for the financial part, everybody knew that old De Reamer had been forced to abandon the construction work on the Red Hills extension, after building fully five-sixths of the distance. The hard times had, of course, something to do with that,—roads were going under all through the West; receiverships were quite the common thing,—but De Reamer and the S. & W. did not seem to revive so quickly as certain other lines. This was the more singular in that the S. & W., extending as it did from the Sabine country to the Staked Plains, really justified the popular remark that “the Shaky and Windy began in a swamp and ended in a desert.” On the face of things, without the Red Hills connection with the bigger C. & S. C., and without an eastern connection with one of the New Orleans or St. Louis lines, the road was an absurdity.
Then, only a few months before the time of our narrative, the railroad world began to wake up. Commodore Durfee, one of “the big fellows,” surprised the Southwest by buying in the H. D. & W. (which meant, and will always mean, the High, Dry, and Wobbly). The surprise was greater when the Commodore began building southwestward, in the general direction of Red Hills. As usual when the big men are playing for position, the public and the wise-acres, even Wall Street, were mystified. For the S. & W. was so obviously the best and shortest eastern connection for the C. & S. C.,—the H. D. & W. would so plainly be a differential line,—that it was hard to see what the Commodore was about. He had nothing to say to the reporters. Old General Carrington, of the C. & S. C., the biggest and shrewdest of them all, was also silent. And Daniel De Reamer couldn’t be seen at all.
And finally, by way of a wind-up to the first skirmish of the picturesque war in which our engineers were soon to find themselves taking part, there was a western breeze and a flurry of dust in Wall Street. Somebody was fighting. S. & W. shares ran up in a day from twenty-two to forty-six, and, which was more astonishing, sold at that figure for another day before dropping. Other mysterious things were going on. Suddenly De Reamer reappeared in the Southwest, and that most welcome sign of vitality, money,—red gold corpuscles,—began to flow through the arteries of the S. & W. “system.” The construction work started up, on rush orders. Paul Carhart was specially engaged to take out a force and complete the track—any sort of a track—to Red Hills. And as he preferred not to take this rush work through very difficult country on any other terms, De Reamer gave him something near a free hand,—ordered Chief Engineer Tiffany to let him alone, beyond giving every assistance in getting material to the front, and accepting the track for the company as fast as it was laid.