f it to know
it. They used to say of me in Washington that I could sit in my office
chair and overlook a line of men and spot every last one of them that
was going to get on. I never went wrong but once, and that was because
the poor devil began to swell and thought he was as big as his own
shadow. But if the look's there, I see it--it's something in the eye and
the jaw, and the grip of the hands that nobody can give you except God
Almighty--and by George, it turns me into a downright heathen and makes
me believe in fate. When a man has that something in the eye and in the
jaw and in the grip of the hand, there ain't enough devils in the
universe to keep him from coming out on top at the last. He may go
under, but he won't stay under--no, sir, not if they pile all the
bu'sted stocks in the market on top his shoulders."

"Anyway, you've started me rolling, General, whether I spin on or come
to a dead stop."

"Then remember," he retorted slyly, as we parted,' "that my earnest
advice to a young man starting in business is--don't begin to swell!"

There was small danger of that, I thought, as I went on alone with my
vision of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. From my
childhood I had seen the big road, as I saw it to-day, sweeping in a
bright track over the entire South, lengthening, branching, winding away
toward the distant horizon, girdling the cotton fields, the rice fields,
and the coal fields, like a protecting arm. One by one, I saw now, the
small adjunct lines, absorbed by the main system, until in the whole
South only the Great South Midland and Atlantic would be left. To
dominate that living organism, to control, in my turn, that splendid
liberator of a people's resources, this was still the inaccessible hope
upon which I had fixed my heart.

In my room I found young George Bolingbroke, who had been waiting, as he
at once informed me, "a good half an hour."

"I say, Ben," he broke out the next minute, "why don't you get the
housemaid to tie your cravats? She'd do it a long sight better. Are your
fingers all thumbs?"

"They must be," I replied with a humility I had never assumed before the
General, "I can't do the thing properly to save my life."

"I wonder it doesn't give you a common look," he remarked
dispassionately, while I winced at the word, "but somehow it only makes
you appear superior to such trifles, like a giant gazing over molehills
at a mountain. It's your size, I reckon, but you'r