e overbold, some thought, overconfident, even
visionary, but, in the main, sound in his calculations, as results had
shown when his plans were adopted. On the other hand, some projectors,
whose enterprises he had discouraged as unsound or premature, complained
that so far from being a visionary, he was in fact a pessimist, a
discouraging force that stood in the way of that "development of the
country" from which they hoped for personal gain of one kind or another.
There were little towns that aspired to become larger towns, and
stretches of undeveloped country in which Guilford Duncan was regarded
as an arch enemy of progress--almost as a public enemy. The reason for
this was the fact that he had advised against the construction of
railroads, from which the little towns concerned, and the stretches of
thinly peopled country between, had hoped to benefit, and his advice had
been accepted as sound by the financiers to whom the projectors looked
for the means of securing what they wanted.

Napper Tandy was Guilford Duncan's enemy from the hour in which Duncan
had forced that little branch railroad in the coal regions to haul
Hallam's coal on equal terms with his own. But Tandy had said nothing
whatever about that. He never published his enmities till the time came.
About the time of Duncan's return to Cairo, he added another to his
offenses against Tandy, in a way to intensify that malignant person's
hostility.

Tandy was scheming to secure a costly extension of this branch railroad
through a sparsely settled and thin-soiled region, in a way that would
greatly enrich himself, because of his vast property holdings there. He
had well-nigh persuaded a group of capitalists to undertake the
extension when, acting cautiously as financiers must, they decided to
ask Duncan to study the situation and make a report upon the project. He
had already studied the question thoroughly during his stay at the
mines, and was convinced that nothing but loss could come of the
attempt. The region through which the line must run was too poor in
agricultural and other resources to afford even a hope of a paying
traffic. The line itself must be a costly one because of certain
topographical features, and finally another and shorter line, closely
paralleling this proposed extension, but running through a much richer
country, was already in course of construction.

Tandy knew all these things quite as well as Guilford Duncan did. But
Tandy also kn