The Rainy Day Railroad War | Page 5

it."
The young engineer was looking at him with puzzled gaze.
"You don't understand a bit of it, do you?" laughed the traffic manager.
"Well, I can't explain the thing just yet. I'll simply leave it this way
today: Do you want to take a pole-cat and skin it for us? I don't mean
by that that it's a job that any enterprising young man should be
ashamed or afraid of. It's a job in your line. It's something of close
personal interest to the president of this system 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,