"I do!" answered Martin, with the first real enthusiasm he had known in weeks. "'Tis me budget I'll be fixin' up immejiate at once. Ye'll get action, ye will." He departed for a frenzied month. Then he returned at the request of President Barstow.
"You're doing wonderful work, Martin," said that official. "It's coming along splendidly. But—but——I understand there's a bit of a laugh going around among the railroad men about you."
"About me?" Garrity's chest bulged aggressively. "An' who's laughin?"
"Nearly everybody in the railroad game in Missouri. They say you let some slick salesman sting you for a full set of Rocky Mountain snow-fighting machinery, even up to a rotary snow plough. I——"
"Sting me?" Martin bellowed the words. "That I did not!"
"Good! I knew——"
"I ordered it of me own free will. And if annybody laughs——"
"But, Martin"—and there was pathos in the voice—"a rotary snow plough? On a Missouri railroad? Flangers, jull-ploughs, wedge ploughs—tunnel wideners—and a rotary? Here? Why—I—I thought better of you than that. We haven't had a snow in Missouri that would require all of those things, not in the last ten years. What did they cost?"
"Eighty-three thousand, fi'hunnerd an' ten dollars," answered Martin gloomily. He had pulled a boner. Mr. Barstow figured on a sheet of paper.
"At three dollars a day, that would hire nearly a thousand track labourers for thirty days. A thousand men could tamp a lot of ballast in a month, Martin."