“I only wanted to be reassured,” apologised Allison. “I took your word that you could swing it when I made my own gamble, but now I have to drag other people into it.”
“That’s right,” agreed Tim. “I never get offended over straight business.” In other times Tim Corman would have said “get sore,” but, as he neared the end of his years of useful activity, he was making quite a specialty of refinement, and stocking a picture gallery, and becoming a connoisseur collector of rare old jewels. He dressed three times a day.
“Ripe any time,” and Tim Corman flecked the ashes from his cigar with a heavily gemmed hand. “The boosters have been working on it right along, but never too strong.”
“There’s no need for any particular manipulation in that,” decided Allison, who knew the traction situation to the last nickel. “The city needs that outlet, and it needs the new territory which will be opened up. I think we’d better push the subway right on across to the mainland. The extension would have to be made in ten years anyhow.”
“It’s better right now,” immediately assented Corman. In ten years he might be dead.
“I think, too, that we’d better provide for a heavy future expansion,” went on Allison, glancing expectantly into Tim’s old eyes. “We’d probably better provide for a double-deck, eight track tube.”
Tim Corman drew a wheezy breath, and then he grinned the senile shadow of his old-time grin; but it still had the same spirit.
“You got a hen on,” he deduced. In “society,” Tim could manage very nicely to use fashionable language, but, in business, he found it impossible after the third or fourth minute of conversation. He had taken in every detail of the room on his entrance, and his glance had strayed more than once to the red streaks on the big map. Now he approached it, and studied it with absorbed interest. “You’re a smart boy, Ed,” he concluded. “Across Crescent Island is the only leak where you could snake in a railroad. You found the only crack that the big systems haven’t tied up.”
“All you can get me to admit, just now, is that the city needs an eight track tube across Crescent Island, under lease to the Municipal Transportation Company,” stated Allison, smiling with gratification. A compliment of this sort from shrewd old Tim Corman, who was reputed to be the foxiest man in the world, was a tribute highly flattering.