River Range, and from whose roof, on a
clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the
distant western horizon.

Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the
dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain
synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences
by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda
of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was
ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.

On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in
the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was
illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a
notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast
region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the
name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a
very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age,
large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master
of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven;
hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination
about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the
region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the
massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the
Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured only as the first
vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was
really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.

Across the small round table sat the railway magnate's dinner-guest, a
man who was more than McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered
physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled
hair and heavy, graying mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like
face of mastership, but the fine wrinkles at the corners of the wide-set
eyes postulated a sense of humor which was lacking in his table
companion. His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches, needed the
relieving wrinkles at the corners of the eyes; it was a grim,
straight-lined inheritance from his pioneer ancestors--the mouth of a
man who may yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.

"I wish I could convince you that it isn't worth while to hold me at
arm's-length, Senator," McVickar was saying, as he clipped the end from
hi