The Rainy Day Railroad War | Page 5

and myself. It is going to take you away into the big woods. Do you want it--yes or no?"
The engineer hesitated only a moment.
"I'll take it," he said simply.
"That's the boy!" cried Jerrard. His tone was so enthusiastic that Parker's instinct told him that this bluff offer was another test of his readiness in an emergency and had succeeded.
The manager put his hand against his shoulder and gently pushed him out of the office.
"Get ready for a cold winter out of doors and practice your tongue on the names To-quette Carry' and 'Colonel Gideon Ward' until you are not afraid of the sound of them."
With a chuckle he shut the door on the astonished young man, but opened it again before Parker had moved from the mat outside.
"Don't be worried, my boy, because I cannot explain the whole situation today." There was kindly reassurance in his tones. "You'll make out all right, I'm sure of that." A queer little smile puckered the corners of his eyes and his voice again became teasing. "The idea is, you've taken a contract to do up the Gideonites of the Wilderness in a lone-handed job. But I think you're good for the trick." He shut the door again.
CHAPTER TWO--THE
WHIM THAT PROJECTED THE FAMOUS "POQUETTE CARRY RAILROAD"
Weeks passed before Rodney Parker got any more light on the matter in which he had blindly given his word.
He understood this silence better when the situation was set before him at last. There are some projects that captains of industry dilate upon with pride. But big men are cautious about letting the world know their whims. And whims that lead to exasperating complications that no business judgment has provided for, do not form pleasant topics for conversation or publicity.
Many railroad projects have been launched, some of them unique, but never before was enterprise conceived in just the spirit that gave the Poquette Carry Railway to the transportation world. There have been railroads that "began somewhere and ended in a sheep pasture." The Poquette Carry Road, known to the legislature of its state as "The Rainy-Day Railroad," is even more indifferently located, for it twists for six miles, from water to water, through as tangled and lonely a wilderness as ever owl hooted in.
Yet it has two of the country's railroad kings behind it and at its inception some very wrathful lumber kings were ahead of it, and the final and decisive battle that was fought was between the champions of the respective sides--an old man and a young one.
The old man had all the opinionated conservatism of one who despises new methods and modern progress as "hifalutin and new-fangled notions." The young man, fresh from a school of technology and just completing an apprenticeship under the engineers of a big railroad system, had not an old-fashioned idea.
The old man came roaring from the deep woods, choleric, impatient of opposition, and flaming with the rage of a tyrant who is bearded in his own stronghold for the first time. The young man advanced from the city to meet him with the coolness of one who has been taught to restrain his emotions, and armed with determination to win the battle that would make or break him, so far as his employers were concerned.
Jerrard was the avant-courier of this novel railroad. Jerrard had been traffic-manager of the great P. K. & R. system for many years, and when he grew bilious and "blue" and very disagreeable, the doctor told him to go back into the woods so far that he would not think about tariff or rebates or competition for two months.
Jerrard chose Kennegamon Lake. A New England general passenger-agent whom he had met at a convention told him about that wilderness gem, and lauded it with a certain attractiveness of detail that made Jerrard anxious to test the veracity of New England railroad men, whose "fishin'-story" folders he had always doubted with professional scepticism.
The journey by rail was a long one, and it afforded leisure for so much cogitation that when Jerrard napped he dreamed that the ends of his nerves were nailed to his desk back in the P. K. & R. general offices, and that as he proceeded he was unreeling them as a spider spins its thread.
When he left the train at Sunkhaze station he was still worrying as to whether the assistant traffic-manager would be able to beat the O. & O. road on the grain contract. In thinking it over about a month later it occurred to him that he had dropped all outside affairs right there on that station platform.
In the first place the mosquitoes and black flies were waiting. He had never seen or felt black flies before. He would have scouted the idea that there were insects no bigger than pinheads