“That’s right,” approved Tim. “All I know is a guess, and I don’t tell guesses. This is a big job, though, Eddie. A subway to Crescent Island, under proper restrictions, is just an ordinary year’s work for the boys, but this tube pokes its nose into Oakland Bay.”
“I’m quite aware of the size of the job,” chuckled Allison. “However, Tim, there’ll be money enough behind this proposition to fill that tube with greenbacks.”
Between the narrow-slitted and puffy eyelids of Tim Corman there gleamed a trace of the old-time genii.
“Then it’s built.” He rose and leaned on his cane, twinkling down on the man who, years before, he had picked as a “comer.” “I’ve heard people say that money’s wicked, but they never had any. When I die, and go down to the big ferry, if the Old Boy comes along and offers me enough money, I’ll go to Hell.”
Still laughing, Allison telephoned to the offices of the Midcontinent Railroad, and dashed out to his runabout just in time to see Tim Corman driving around the corner in his liveried landau. He found in President Urbank, of the Midcontinent, a spare man who had worn three vertical creases in his brow over one thwarted ambition. His rich but sprawling railroad system ran fairly straight after it was well started for Chicago, and fairly straight from that way-point until it became drunken with the monotony of the western foot-hills, where it gangled and angled its way to the far south and around up the Pacific coast, arriving there dusty and rattling, after a thousand mile detour from its course—but that road had no direct entrance into New York city. It approached from the north, and was compelled to circle completely around, over hired tracks, to gain a ferryboat entrance. Passengers inured to coming in over the Midcontinent, which was a well-equipped road otherwise, counted but half their journey done when they came in sight of New York, no matter from what distance they had come.
“Out marketing for railroads to-day, Gil?” suggested Allison.
“I don’t know,” smiled Urbank. “I might look at a few.”
“Here they are,” and Allison tossed him a memorandum slip.
Urbank glanced at the slip, then he looked up at Allison in perplexity. He had a funny forward angle to his neck when he was interested, and the creases in his brow were deepened until they looked like cuts.