“Sorry to interrupt pleasure, my boy; but since you’re determined to become a business man, you will find that pleasure has no rights that business is bound to respect. I want to speak to you.”
After preliminary explanations Mr. Smith took Billy into his confidence in a remarkable way. “I have a piece of work that you may be able to do for me, that’s beyond your years. If you fail I shall not blame you,—others have failed before you. Here is the situation: That interurban line I’m building, the Washington Railway line between the city front and Tum-wah, is a small matter in itself, but it is the key to a big situation.
“We have pushed our bill through the Legislature, allowing the canal between the two big lakes, and we are going to change that little Tum-wah Valley into a great city with a payroll of thousands of men. We’ll dredge the small river right to the falls, make our own power, and load our own ships,—while they clean off the barnacles in fresh water,—load them for the world’s ports. In a few years the plant will be worth ten or fifteen millions.”
Billy gasped in astonishment. The narrow little valley along the Tum-wah Creek was within the city limits, yet it showed nothing now but the vegetable gardens of the Italian colony, sordid little huts, dirty children, and the rickety old electric line where dirty cars went bumping along on an elastic schedule that got people to town along in the forenoon, and home some time in the evening. This seemed as distant from Mr. Smith’s fifteen-million dollar dream as is heaven from a very dirty earth.
Something of this Billy ventured to express.
“The only heaven we have is right here. If it isn’t clean, it’s up to us to make it so. And one thing sure: it will never be any bigger or any cleaner than we imagine it to be.”
The boy thought of May Nell. This was off the same pattern of life as hers. As if in answer to his thought, Mr. Smith went on.
“Business is merely realized dreams; preferred stock in imagination. But it takes sweat to realize on them. And it’s your sweat, boy, that I am asking. The people who own that old teetering string they call the Tum-wah Railroad are down on me because I’m paralleling them. They will give me all the trouble they can,—they’ve served one injunction, but it didn’t stick. I have men watching them, but they suspect these men. You see they are stirring up those Italians to believe that as soon as I get my business started I will take their lands from them.”
“You’ll have to have them, won’t you?” Billy questioned as the other paused; Billy’s vision had run forward to the teeming city Mr. Smith had prophesied.
“Surely. And those Italians will get more for their land than they can make in raising vegetables all their lives. But of course I’m not advertising that now; and the other concern is, I have reason to believe, making the Dagos think I shall steal them out of their homes. What I want of you is to keep on the lookout, let me know things before they happen. Go to work with the other laborers, run errands, keep your ears open, your mouth shut, and look as stupid as you can. Will you do it?”