One or two of his colleagues saw the drift of his policy and would have
thrown him over if they could have replaced him by a man as capable, who
would, at the time, consent to grow rich on their terms.

They could not understand a man who would stand for a half-hour watching
a sunset, or a morning sky dappled with all the colours that shake from
a prism; they were suspicious of a business-mind which could gloat over
the light falling on snow-peaked mountains, while it planned a great
bridge across a gorge in the same hour; of a man who would quote a verse
of poetry while a flock of wild pigeons went whirring down a pine-girt
valley in the shimmer of the sun.

On the occasion when he had quoted a verse of poetry to them, one of
them said to him with a sidelong glance: "You seem to be dead-struck on
Nature, Ingolby."

To that, with a sly quirk of the mouth, and meaning to mystify his
wooden-headed questioner still more, he answered: "Dead-struck?
Dead-drunk, you mean. I'm a Nature's dipsomaniac--as you can see," he
added with a sly note of irony.

Then instantly he had drawn the little circle of experts into a
discussion upon technical questions of railway-building and finance,
which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge. In that
conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who
had sneered at his love of Nature. He tied his critic up in knots of
self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and
skilfully untied, to the delight of all the group.

"He's got as much in his ten years in the business as we've got out
of half a life-time," said the chief of his admirers. This was the
President who had first welcomed him into business, and introduced him
to his colleagues in enterprise.

"I shouldn't be surprised if the belt flew off the wheel some day,"
savagely said Ingolby's snub-souled critic, whose enmity was held in
check by the fact that on Ingolby, for the moment, depended the safety
of the hard cash he had invested.

But the qualities which alienated an expert here and there caught the
imagination of the pioneer spirits of Lebanon. Except those who,
for financial reasons, were opposed to him, and must therefore pit
themselves against him, as the representatives of bigger forces behind
them, he was a leader of whom Lebanon was combatively proud. At last he
came to the point where his merger was practically accomplished, and a
problem arising out of it ha