Empire Builders | Page 9

I'll show you some figures that may help you to stir things up
properly at the New York end. Do you go direct from here?"
"No; I shall have to stop over a few days in Chicago. I know pretty well
where to put my hands on what I need; I have laid the foundations from
the bottom up by correspondence. But I want to go over the situation on
the ground before I make my grand-stand play before Mr. Colbrith and
the board of directors."

"Well, come in and get the figures, anyway: come to the private door of
my office and rap three times. It will be just as well if it isn't generally
known that you are confabbing with me. Our semiannual report will
probably be in New York ahead of you, but it won't hurt if you have the
information to work with." Evans was pushing his chair from the table
when he added: "By the way, you happened upon the exact
psychological moment to make your raid; the report coming out, and
things going to the dogs generally."
Ford's laugh was genially shrewd.
"Perhaps it wasn't so much of a happening as it appears. Didn't I tell
you that I had figured this thing out to the fourth decimal place?
Psychological moments are bigger arguments than dollars and cents,
sometimes."
The auditor had taken his hat from the waiter and was shaking hands
with his dinner companion.
"I'd like to believe you're a winner, Ford; you deserve to be. Come and
see me--and make your call upon Mr. North as brief as possible. He'll
probe you if you don't."
This was how it came about that the next morning, when Ford went to
call upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the
glass door lettered "General Manager, Private,"--this after half an hour
spent in Auditor Evans' private office,--it was only to ask for leave of
absence to go East--on business of a personal nature, he explained,
when Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.

III
LOSS AND DAMAGE
At this period of his existence, Stuart Ford troubled himself as little as
any anchorite of the desert about the eternal feminine.

It was not that he was more or less than a man, or in any sense that
anomalous and impossible thing called a woman-hater. On the contrary,
his attitude toward women in the mass was distinctly and at times
boyishly sentimental. But when a young man is honestly in love with
his calling, and is fully convinced of its importance to himself and to a
restlessly progressive world, single-heartedness becomes his
watchword, and what sentiment there is in him will be apt to lie
comfortably dormant.
For six full working-days Ford had been immersed to the eyes in the
intricacies of his railway problem, acquiring in Chicago a valiseful of
documentary data that demanded to be classified and thoroughly
digested before he reached New York and the battle-field actual. This
was why he was able to ride all day in studious abstraction in his
section of the Chicago-New York Pullman, without so much as a
glance for the young woman in the modest gray traveling coat directly
across the aisle.
She was well worth the glance, as he admitted willingly enough
afterward. She was the dainty type, with fluffy bright brown hair, eyes
the color of wood violets, a nose tilted to the precise angle of
bewitching piquancy, and the adorable mouth and chin familiarized to
two continents by the artistic pen of the Apostle of the American Girl.
How he could have ridden within arm's reach of her through all the
daylight hours of a long summer day remained as one of Ford's
unanswered enigmas; but it required an accident and a most
embarrassing contretemps to make him aware of her existence.
The accident was one of the absurd sort. The call for dinner in the
dining-car had been given, and Ford was just behind the young woman
in the rear of the procession which filed forward out of the Pullman.
The train had at that moment left a way station, and the right-hand
vestibule door was still open and swinging disjointedly across the
narrow passage. Ford reached an arm past the young woman to fold the
two-leaved door out of her way. As he did it, the door-knob hooked
itself mischievously in the loop of her belt chatelaine, snatched it loose,
and flung it out into the backward-rushing night.

Whereupon: "Oh!--my purse!" with a little gasp of sudden bereavement,
and a quick turning to face the would-be helper.
Ford was honestly aghast when the situation fully enveloped him.
"Heavens and earth! Did you ever see such idiotic clumsiness!" he
ejaculated. And then, in deepest contrition: "I won't attempt to
apologize--it's beyond