“I must say you don't want a little thing, my boy,” he said, indulgently. “Remember you are talking to a fellow that has rubbed up against the moneyed world considerable for a chap raised in the country. The trouble with you, Alan, is that you have got heredity to contend with; you are a chip off the old block in spite of your belonging to a later generation. You have inherited your father's big ideas. You are a sort of Colonel Sellers, who sees millions in everything you look at.”
Alan' s face fell, but there remained in it a tenacious expression that won Miller's admiration even while he deplored it. There was, too, a ring of confidence in the young farmer's tone when he replied:
“How much would a railroad through that country, eighteen miles in length, cost?”
“Nothing but a survey by an expert could answer that, even approximately,” said the lawyer, leaning back in his creaking chair. “If you had the right of way, a charter from the State, and no big tunnels to make nor long bridges to build, you might, I should say, construct the road alone—without locomotives and rolling-stock generally—for a little matter of one hundred and fifty thousand. I don't know; I'm only guessing; but it wouldn't fall under that estimate.”
“I didn't think it would,” replied Alan, growing more enthusiastic. “Now then, if there was a railroad to my father's property, how much would his twenty thousand acres be worth?”
Miller smiled again and began to figure on a scrap of paper with a pencil. “Oh, as for that,” he said, “it would really be worth—standing uncut, unsawn, including a world of tan-bark—at least twenty-five dollars an acre, say a clear half million for it all. Oh, I know it looks as plain as your nose on your face; things always do on paper. It looks big and it shines; so does a spider-web in the sunshine to a fly; but you don't want to be no fly, my boy; and you don't want any spider-webs—on the brain, anyway.”
Alan stood up and walked to the door and back; finally he shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don't care what you say,” he declared, bringing his hand down firmly on Miller's desk. “It will pay, as sure as I'm alive. There's no getting around the facts. It will take a quarter of a million investment to market a half-million-dollar bunch of timber with the land thrown in and the traffic such a road would secure to help pay expenses. There are men in the world looking for such opportunities and I'm going to give somebody a chance.”
“You have not looked deep enough into it, my boy,” mildly protested Miller. “You haven't figured on the enormous expense of running such a road and the dead loss of the investment after the lumber is moved out. You'd have a railroad property worth a quarter of a million on your hands. I can't make you see my position. I simply say to you that I wouldn't touch a deal like that with a ten-foot pole.”
Alan laughed good-naturedly as he laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. “I reckon you think I'm off,” he said, “but sooner or later I'm going to put this thing through. Do you hear me? I 'll put it through if it takes ten years to do it. I want to make the old man feel that he has not made such a fool of himself; I want to get even with the Thompson crowd, and Perkins, and everybody that is now poking fun at a helpless old man. I shall begin by raising money some way or other to pay taxes, and hold on to every inch of the ground.”
Miller's glance fell before the fierce fire of Alan's eyes, and for the first time his tone wavered.