"When must it be in Denver?"

"Ten o'clock to-morrow morning."

The president nearly jumped the wire.

"McWilliams, you're crazy. What on earth do you mean?"

The talk came back so low that the wires hardly caught it. There were
occasional outbursts such as, "situation is extremely critical," "grave
danger," "acute distress," "must help me out."

But none of this would ever have moved the president had not Peter
McWilliams been a bigger man than most corporations; and a personal
request from Peter, if he stuck for it, could hardly be refused; and for
this he most decidedly stuck.

"I tell you it will turn us upside-down," stormed the president.

"Do you recollect," asked Peter McWilliams, "when your infernal old pot
of a road was busted eight years ago--you were turned inside out then,
weren't you? and hung up to dry, weren't you?"

The president did recollect; he could not decently help recollecting.
And he recollected how, about that same time, Peter McWilliams had one
week taken up for him a matter of two millions floating, with a personal
check; and carried it eighteen months without security, when money could
not be had in Wall Street on government bonds.

Do you--that is, have you heretofore supposed that a railroad belongs to
the stockholders? Not so; it belongs to men like Mr. McWilliams, who own
it when they need it. At other times they let the stockholders carry
it--until they want it again.

"We'll do what we can, Peter," replied the president, desperately
amiable. "Good-bye."

I am giving you only an inkling of how it started. Not a word as to how
countless orders were issued, and countless schedules were cancelled.
Not a paragraph about numberless trains abandoned _in toto_, and
numberless others pulled and hauled and held and annulled. The
McWilliams Special in a twinkle tore a great system into great
splinters.

It set master-mechanics by the ears and made reckless falsifiers of
previously conservative trainmen. It made undying enemies of rival
superintendents, and incipient paretics of jolly train-dispatchers. It
shivered us from end to end and stem to stern, but it covered 1026 miles
of the best steel in the world in rather better than twenty hours and a
blaze of glory.

"My word is out," said the president in his message to all
superintendents, thirty minutes later. "You will get your division
schedule in a few moments. Send no reasons for inability to make it;
simply deliver the goo