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Updated: June 28, 2025
Adair laughed with imperturbable good-humor. "The factions were there, just the same. You see, it's like this: Brewster and Magnus and two or three more are pretty well-to-do, and their holdings in P. S-W. don't cut much of a figure with them, one way or another. The others have more stock in the company, and fewer millions.
It was a measure of the sincerity of Ford's liking for his host when he said: "That little shot of mine at your colleagues was merely a long bluff. If my scheme can't be worked with the P. S-W., it can't well be worked without it. We are lacking the two end-links in the chain which I could forge. But my two end-links without the middle one wouldn't attract anybody."
It was a week after this farewell supper in the caboose hotel at Saint's Rest when Ford went down to Denver to borrow, on his P. S-W. stock, the ten thousand dollars to be deposited to the credit of the Bank of Copah. Following him, and only one train behind, came Frisbie, new from a confirmatory survey of the extension beyond the Copah district.
At the top of the pile was an official circular appointing one George Z. Merriam, a man whom Ford remembered, or seemed vaguely to remember, as one of the MacMorrogh bookkeepers, general agent of the P. S-W., with headquarters at Portland, Oregon.
Our pool got its fifty-one per cent. all right, but in the nature of things the enemy stood as the next largest stock-holder in P. S-W., since they'd been buying right and left against us. Now, since we don't need any more, and nobody else wants it, all the Transcontinental people have to do is to unload on the market, and down she goes." Ford looked incredulous, and then wrathful.
"What's that?" demanded Ford, dry-lipped, adding: "I haven't seen a paper since morning." Kenneth wagged his head gloomily. "It's pretty bad. P. S-W. closed at thirty-three five points off yesterday's market." "Good Lord!" Ford's groan was that of a man smitten down in the heat of the fight.
Howard, I'm telling you right now that it will require a higher brand of courage to go over to Angels and manhandle the Red Butte Western as a division of the P. S-W. than it would to face a dozen highwaymen, if every individual one of the dozen had the drop on you!" Lidgerwood left his chair and began to pace the narrow limits of the private office, five steps and a turn.
"Only I'm not going to get out unless you folks freeze me out." "Then it isn't a long bluff on your part?" "It is, and it isn't. We still stand to win if we have the nerve to hold on in which event P. S-W. at twenty-nine and a fraction is a gold mine. That's one view of it, and the other is this: we've simply got to corner our own stock if we expect to sell thirty millions additional bonds."
So he borrowed this one out of the P. S-W. yards, used it, liked it, and kept it, sending our 60-ton machine on to the South Americans in its place." "What rank piracy!" Lidgerwood exclaimed. "I don't wonder they call us buccaneers over here. How could he do it without being found out?" "That puzzled more than two or three of us; but one of the men told me some time afterward how it was done.
It was ordered for one of the South American railroads, and was on its way to the Coast over the P. S-W. About the time it got as far as Copah, we happened to have a mix-up in our Copah yards, with a ditched engine that Gridley couldn't pick up with the 60-ton crane we had on the ground.
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