upon the sallow, heavy-faced, big-bodied man who sat behind the glass
door lettered "General Manager, Private,"--this after half an hour spent
in Auditor Evans' private office,--it was only to ask for leave of
absence to go East--on business of a personal nature, he explained, when
Mr. North was curious enough to ask his object.




III

LOSS AND DAMAGE


At this period of his existence, Stuart Ford troubled himself as little
as any anchorite of the desert about the eternal feminine.

It was not that he was more or less than a man, or in any sense that
anomalous and impossible thing called a woman-hater. On the contrary,
his attitude toward women in the mass was distinctly and at times
boyishly sentimental. But when a young man is honestly in love with his
calling, and is fully convinced of its importance to himself and to a
restlessly progressive world, single-heartedness becomes his watchword,
and what sentiment there is in him will be apt to lie comfortably
dormant.

For six full working-days Ford had been immersed to the eyes in the
intricacies of his railway problem, acquiring in Chicago a valiseful of
documentary data that demanded to be classified and thoroughly digested
before he reached New York and the battle-field actual. This was why he