hat the young
engineer's gift of insight and his faculty of handling men as men stood
him in good stead. He was fresh from his trip over the new extension, on
which he had met and shrewdly appraised the men who were now his
subordinates. With the human field thus mentally mapped and
cross-sectioned he was enabled to make swift and sure selections,
cutting out the dead timber remorselessly, encouraging the doubtful,
reassuring the timid, assorting and combining and ordering until, at the
close of the second day of fierce toil, he was ready to make his first
report to Adair.

Track connections at junction points completed to-day. General and
division operating and traffic departments in the saddle and
effectively organized. With proper cooeperation on part of General
Manager North, grain should begin to move eastward to-morrow. Can
get no satisfactory replies from North. Have him disciplined from
your end. Answer. FORD.

To this telegram there was a prompt and voluminous reply from the seat
of war in the East. In a free fight on the Stock Exchange, a battle
royal generaled by Brewster and Magnus in which every inch of ground had
been sharply contested by brokers buying up P. S-W. in the interest of
principals unnamed, a majority of the Southwestern stock--safe but
exceedingly narrow--had been secured by the reconstructionists.

In accordance with Ford's suggestion, North had been "called down" by
wire, and Ford was instructed to report instantly any failure of effort
on the part of the Denver headquarters to set the grain trains in
motion.

Otherwise, and from the New York point of view, the situation remained
most hopeful. The fight in the Street had unified the factions in the
board of directors, and even the timid ones were beginning to clamor for
an advance into the territory of the enemy.

Ford read Adair's letter-length and most unbusiness-like telegram with
the zest of the fine wine of triumph tingling in his blood. With the
Chicago outlet fairly open and in working order, and a huge tributary
grain crop to be moved, it should be only a matter of days until the
depressed Pacific Southwestern stock would begin to climb toward the
bonding figure.

This was the first triumphant conclusion, but afterward came reaction
and a depressive doubt. Would the stock go up? Or would the enemy devise
some assault that would keep it down in spite of the money-earning,