Carhart almost laughed aloud. He turned and looked out the window for a few moments. Finally he said, “If you have that straight, Tiffany, it’s undoubtedly the worst defeat Commodore Durfee ever had. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the S. & W. is through with him.”
“Maybe not,” Tiffany replied, “but I’ll bet proper on the old gentleman.”
Carhart’s position as the engineer in charge of a thousand and more men would be not unlike that of a military commander who finds himself dependent for subsistence on five hundred miles of what Scribner called “very sketchy” single track. It would be more serious; for not only must food, and in the desert, water, be brought out over the line, but also the vast quantity of material needed in the work. It would be the business of Peet, as the working head of the operating department, to deliver the material from day to day, and week to week, at the end of the last completed section, where the working train would be made up each night for the construction work of the following day.
If the existing track was sketchy, the new track would be worse. Everything was to be sacrificed to speed. The few bridges were to be thrown up hastily in the form of primitive wooden trestles. There would be no masonry, excepting the abutments of the La Paz bridge,—which masonry, or rather the stone for it, was about the only material they would find at hand. All the timber, even to the cross ties, would have to be shipped forward from the long-leaf-pine forests of eastern Texas and western Louisiana.
Ordinarily, Carhart would not have relished undertaking such a hasty job; but in this case there were compensations. When he had first looked over the location maps, in Daniel De Reamer’s New York office, his quiet eyes had danced behind their spectacles; for it promised to be pretty work, in which a man could use his imagination. There was the bridge over the La Paz River, for instance. He should have to send a man out there with a long wagon train of materials, and with orders to have the bridge ready when the track should reach the river. He knew just the man—John B. Flint, who built the Desplaines bridge for the three I’s. He had not heard from John since the doctors had condemned his lungs, and ordered him to a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, and John had compromised by going West, and hanging that very difficult bridge between the walls of Brilliant Gorge in the Sierras. Carhart was not sure that he was still among the living; but a few searching telegrams brought out a characteristic message from John himself, to the effect that he was very much alive, and was ready to bridge the Grand Cañon of the Colorado at a word from Paul Carhart.
Then there was always to be considered the broad outline of the situation as it was generally understood in the railway world. Details apart, it was known that Commodore Durfee and Daniel De Reamer were fighting for that through connection, and that old General Carrington,—czar of the C. & S. C., holder of one and owner of several other seats in the Senate of these United States, chairman of the National Committee of his party,—that General Carrington was sitting on the piazza of his country house in California, smoking good cigars and talking horse and waiting to see whether he should gobble Durfee or De Reamer, or both of them. For the general, too, was represented on the directorate of the Sherman and Western; and it was an open question whether his minority directors would continue to support the De Reamer interests or would be ordered to ally themselves with the Durfee men. Either way, there would be no sentiment wasted. But it seemed to Carhart that so long as De Reamer should be able to hold up his head in the fight General Carrington would probably stand behind him. Commodore Durfee was too big in the East to be encouraged in the West. And yet—there was no telling.
It was very pretty indeed. Carhart was a quiet man, given more to study than to speech; but he liked pretty things.