salmon-laden waters, its rich bottoms, and its virgin forest slopes.
Having seen, he had grasped and never let go. "Land-poor," they had
called him in the mid-settler period. But that had been in the days when
the placers petered out, when there were no wagon roads nor tugs to draw
in sailing vessels across the perilous bar, and when his lonely grist
mill had been run under armed guards to keep the marauding Klamaths off
while wheat was ground. Like father, like son, and what Isaac Travers
had grasped, Frederick Travers had held. It had been the same tenacity
of hold. Both had been far-visioned. Both had foreseen the
transformation of the utter West, the coming of the railroad, and the
building of the new empire on the Pacific shore.

Frederick Travers thrilled, too, at the locomotive whistle, because,
more than any man's, it was his railroad. His father had died still
striving to bring the railroad in across the mountains that averaged a
hundred thousand dollars to the mile. He, Frederick, had brought it in.
He had sat up nights over that railroad; bought newspapers, entered
politics, and subsidised party machines; and he had made pilgrimages,
more than once, at his own expense, to the railroad chiefs of the East.
While all the county knew how many miles of his land were crossed by the
right of way, none of the county guessed nor dreamed the number of his
dollars which had gone into guaranties and railroad bonds. He had done
much for his county, and the railroad was his last and greatest
achievement, the capstone of the Travers' effort, the momentous and
marvellous thing that had been brought about just yesterday. It had
been running two years, and, highest proof of all of his judgment,
dividends were in sight. And farther reaching reward was in sight. It
was written in the books that the next Governor of California was to be
spelled, Frederick A. Travers.