"Yes, Mr. Hinckley," said Jim, as Cornish sat down again, "it _is_ as bad as that! This thing amounts to a crisis. For one, I don't propose to adopt the 'stand-from-under' tactics. They make an unnecessary disaster as certain as death; but if we all stand under and lift, we can win more than we've ever thought. In the legislature they hold the cards and can beat us. It's no use fooling with that unless we seek martyrs' deaths in the bankruptcy courts. But there is a way to meet these men, and that is by bringing to our aid their greatest rival."
"I mean Avery Pendleton and the Pendleton system," replied Elkins. "I mean that we've got to meet them on their own ground. Pendleton won't declare war on the Halliday combination by building in here, but there is no reason why we can't build to him, and that's what I propose to do. We'll take the L. & G. W., swing it over to the east from the Elk Fork up, make a junction with Pendleton's Pacific Division, and, in one week after we get trains running, we'll have the freight combine here shot so full of holes that it won't hold corn-stalks! That's what we'll do: we'll do a little rate-making ourselves; and we'll make this danger the best thing that ever happened to us. Do you see?"
Cornish saw, sooner than any one else. As he spoke, Jim had unrolled a map, and pointed out the places as he referred to them, like a general, as he was, outlining the plan of a battle. He began this speech in that quiet, convincing way of his, only a little elevated above the sarcasm of a moment before. As he went on, his voice deepened, his eye gleamed, and in spite of his colloquialisms, which we could not notice, his words began to thrill us like potent oratory. We felt all that ecstasy of buoyant and auspicious rebellion which animated Hotspur the night he could have plucked bright honor from the pale-faced moon. At Jim's final question, Cornish, forgetting his pique, sprang to the map, swept his finger along the line Elkins had described, followed the main ribs of Pendleton's great gridiron, on which the fat of half a dozen states lay frying, on to terminals on lakes and rivers; and as he turned his black eyes upon us, we knew from the fire in them that he saw.