good eye. He doesn't seem to have been very particular
about how he went to work to get hold of it himself."

"What are you going to do about it, Mac?"

"What I should do," the other replied, frowning thoughtfully, "is to
make a dicker with Braden to take over the land at a reasonable profit,
after he had bid it in for the amount of his dinky mortgage. That's my
plain duty to my employers, the Northern Airline, Mountain Section, for
which they pay me a salary, large it is true, but small in comparison
with my talents."

Floyd grinned. "Yes, I know you _should_ do that. But what _are_ you
going to do?"

"Well," the man called Mac admitted, "I do hate to see a shark get away
with anything but the hook. Besides, it looks to me as if Braden, if he
got hold of the property would try to double-cross us. I'll bet he'd
hold us up for some fancy price. So it's my duty to see he doesn't get a
chance. The property is just about what we want. There's room for a
good, little town. With that creek, a natural gravity water system could
be put in. No trouble about drainage. You can get power, too. A
subsidiary company formed to handle that end would pay well in a few
years when the place got going. Ah, it's a bird of a proposition--too
good to take any chances on."

"That's your end," Floyd nodded. "We go ahead and find the grades and
put 'em in, and you fat office guys come along and clean up. Well,
Healey's notes are all right so far. Easy construction through here.
I'll send young Davis in right away and let him run a trial line east,
for Broderick to tie into."

"Don't be in a hurry," the other responded. "Trouble with you roughneck
engineers, you think all there is to a railroad is building it. You wait
till I pick up what I want. I could fix it with Braden, but he'd get the
profit, and that young fellow back there would go broke, as he said. I
think I'll try to fix it so _he_ gets the profit. I'll just bid the
place in over Braden, and the young fellow will get any surplus over the
mortgage claim. It will be just as cheap for us."

"And the trouble with you," said the chief of Northern Airline
construction to its chief right-of-way and natural resources man, "is
that you're mushy about men in hard luck. I know some corporations you
wouldn't last with as long as a pint of red-eye in a Swede rock gang."

"You're such a hard-hearted guy yourself!" sneered Mac, his round face
reddening perceptibly. "No bowels of compassion.