stock of the
Union Pacific infinitely more valuable. The shares advanced
enormously. At this time I undertook to negotiate bonds in London for
a bridge to cross the Missouri at Omaha, and while I was absent upon
this business Mr. Scott decided to sell our Union Pacific shares. I
had left instructions with my secretary that Mr. Scott, as one of the
partners in the venture, should have access to the vault, as it might
be necessary in my absence that the securities should be within reach
of some one; but the idea that these should be sold, or that our party
should lose the splendid position we had acquired in connection with
the Union Pacific, never entered my brain.

I returned to find that, instead of being a trusted colleague of the
Union Pacific directors, I was regarded as having used them for
speculative purposes. No quartet of men ever had a finer opportunity
for identifying themselves with a great work than we had; and never
was an opportunity more recklessly thrown away. Mr. Pullman was
ignorant of the matter and as indignant as myself, and I believe that
he at once re-invested his profits in the shares of the Union Pacific.
I felt that much as I wished to do this and to repudiate what had been
done, it would be unbecoming and perhaps ungrateful in me to separate
myself so distinctly from my first of friends, Mr. Scott.

At the first opportunity we were ignominiously but deservedly expelled
from the Union Pacific board. It was a bitter dose for a young man to
swallow. And the transaction marked my first serious difference with a
man who up to that time had the greatest influence with me, the kind
and affectionate employer of my boyhood, Thomas A. Scott. Mr. Thomson
regretted the matter, but, as he said, having paid no attention to it
and having left the whole control of it in the hands of Mr. Scott and
myself, he presumed that I had thought best to sell out. For a time I
feared I had lost a valued friend in Levi P. Morton, of Morton, Bliss
& Co., who was interested in Union Pacific, but at last he found out
that I was innocent.

The negotiations concerning two and a half millions of bonds for the
construction of the Omaha Bridge were successful, and as these bonds
had been purchased by persons connected with the Union Pacific before
I had anything to do with the company, it was for them and not for the
Union Pacific Company that the negotiations were conducted. This was
not explained to me by the director who