There's not enough of you to supply grease for a freight-train's wheels."

"Oh, I don't know," Carter gently murmured.

Ten minutes ago the agent would have hotly proved his point; now he replied, quite mildly: "If you think different, tag on to the deputation. Here it comes, all het-up with wrongs and whiskey."

"There's Bill Cummings!" Carter indicated an elderly man, very white of beard, very red of face, and transparently innocent in expression.

"He's bell-wether," the agent said, grinning. Then, as the approaching locomotive blew two sharp blasts, he added, "Blamed if the old man won't make mutton of the entire flock if they don't clear out of the way!"

A quick scattering averted the catastrophe while increasing the heat of the deputation. Very much disrumpled, it filed into the car, with Carter tagging on behind.

The general manager, who was smoking by an open window, tossed out his cigar as he rose. Not a tall man, power yet expressed itself in every movement of his thick-set body; it lurked in his keen gray glance; was given off like electrical energy in his few crisp words of welcome. From the eyes, placed well apart in the massive head, to the strong jaw his every feature expressed his graduation in the mastership of men; told eloquently of his wonderful record, his triumphs over man and nature. Beginning a section hand, he had filled almost every position in the gift of his road, driving spikes in early days with the same expertness he now evidenced in directing its enormous affairs—the road which had sprung from his own fertile imagination; the road which, from nothing, he had called into being. Where others had only discerned mountains, gulfs, cañons, trackless forest, he had seen a great trunk line with a hundred feeders—mills, mines, factories, farms, and steamships plying to the Orient for trade. And because his was the faith that moves mountains, the magnificent dream had taken form in wood and iron.

Purblind to all but their own interests, the settlers saw only the proximate result of that mighty travail—the palace-car with its luxurious fittings.

"We pay for this," Carter's neighbor growled.

"My, but I'd like his job!" another whispered. "Nothing to do but sit there and dictate a few letters."

A third gave the figures of the manager's salary, while a fourth added that it was screwed out of the farmers. So they muttered their private envy while Cummings voiced their public grievance. When surveys were run for the trunk line, settlers had swarmed in, pre-empting land on either side of the right of way, and when, to avoid certain engineering problems, the surveys were shifted south, they found themselves from fifty to sixty miles from a market. A branch had been promised—

"When settlement and traffic justify it." The manager cut the oration short.

He had listened quietly while Cummings talked of rights, lawsuits, and government intervention; now he launched his ultimatum on the following silence: "Gentlemen, our road is not run for fun, but profit, and though we should very much like to accommodate you, it is impossible under the circumstances. I am pleased to have met you, and"—the corners of the firm mouth twitched ever so slightly—"and I shall be pleased to meet you again when you can advance something more to our advantage than costs and suits. I bid you good-day."

Business-like, terse, devoid of feeling, the laconic answer acted upon the deputation like a blow in the face. Cummings actually recoiled, and his expression of sheep-like surprise, baffled wonder, innocent anger set Carter chuckling. He was still smiling as he shouldered forward.

"A minute, please."

The manager glanced at his watch. "I can't spare you much more."

"I won't need it," Carter answered, and so took up the case.

Humorously allowing that Cummings had stepped off with the wrong foot, that he and his fellows had no case in law, Carter went on, in short, crisp sentences, to give the number of settlers on the old survey, the acreage under cultivation and of newly broken ground, the lumbering outlook in the spruce forests north of the Park Lands, the number of tye-camps already there established, finishing with a brief description of the rich cattle country the proposed line would tap.

Ten minutes had added themselves to the first while he was talking, but the manager's gray glance had evinced no impatience. "Now," he commented, "we have something to go on. The settlements alone would not justify us in building, but with the lumber—and colonization prospects—" He mused a while, then, after expressing regrets for the haste that called him away, he said, "But if you will put all this and other information into writing, Mr. Carter, I'll see what we can do."

"He's big, the old man." Nodding at the black trail of smoke, the agent thus commented on his superior five minutes later. Then, indicating the deputation which was making its jubilant way back to the clapboard hotel, he said, "They ain't giving you all the credit, are they?"

Shrugging at the last remark, Carter answered the first. "He's a big man, shorely. But, bless you"—he flipped a thumb at the delegation—"they don't see it. Any of 'em is willing to allow that the manager has had chances that didn't fly by his particular roost—just as though the same opportunity hadn't been tweaking him by the nose this last twenty years. There it lay, loose, loose enough for people to break their shins on, till this particular man picked it up. He's big. Puts me in mind of them robber barons you read of in history. Big, powerful chaps, who trod down everything that came in their own way while dealing out a rough sort of justice. There's a crowd"—he looked at the agent interrogatively—"that haven't had what's coming to them. In their times moral suasion, as the parsons call it, hadn't been invented and folks were a heap blooded. A little bleeding once in a while kept down the temperature, and I've always allowed that the barons prevented a sight more murder than they did." Then, nailing his point, he finished: "The historians fixed a cold deck for them like the one they'll deal this general manager. But you can't stop the world. She waggles in spite of them, and it's the big men that make her go. But there! I must eat. What does your ticker say of the express?"

"Half an hour late. You'll just have nice time." And as he watched the tall figure swinging across the tracks, the agent gave words to a thought that was even then in the general manager's mind—"There's a division superintendent going to seed on a farm."

Having made up ten minutes, however, the train rolled in while Carter was still at dinner, and as—for some motive too subtle for even his own definition—he had not mentioned her coming, Miss Helen Morrill had become a subject of bashful curiosity to assembled Lone Tree before he came dashing across the tracks. Apart from his size, sunburn, and certain intelligence of expression, there was really nothing to distinguish this particular young man from the people who, at home, were not on her visiting-list, and if polite the girl turned rather a cold ear to a magnificently evolved and smoothly told set of lies as he escorted her over to the hotel. Morrill was busy with the hay, and as he, Carter, had to come to town for a mower casting he had agreed to bring her out. Her brother was well! A bit delicate! He