earned the ill-will of General Manager North? I have, and it is distinct
from and in addition to his hostility for the unearning branch for which
I am responsible. I'm sorry for it, because I may need his good word for
my inchoate scheme later on. It came up over some maintenance-of-way
charges. He is as shrewd as he is unscrupulous, and he knows well how to
pile the sins of the congregation on the back of the poor scapegoat. To
make a better showing for the main line, and at the same time to show
what a swilling pig the Plug Mountain is, he had the branch charged up
with a lot of material we didn't get. Naturally, I protested--and was
curtly told to mind my own business, which had no ramifications reaching
into the accounting department. Then I threatened to carry it over his
head to President Colbrith; whereupon I gained my point temporarily, and
lost a possible stepping-stone to success.

"None the less, I am going to win out if it costs me the best year of
my life. I'm going to swing to this thing till I make something out of
it, if I have to put in some more winters like the one I have just come
through--which was Sheol, with ice and snow in the place of the
traditional fire and brimstone. If I have one good quality--as I
sometimes doubt--it's the inability to know when I am satisfactorily and
permanently licked."

Stuart Ford was shivering through the second of the winters on the gray,
needle-winded day when he stood on the crusted drift, heartening his men
who were breaking the way for further rammings of the scrap-heap 206 and
her box-plow. During the summer which lay behind the pitiless storms and
the blockading snows he had explored and planned, studied and schemed;
and now a month of good weather would put the finishing touches
preparatory upon the "notion" hinted at in the letter to Frisbie.