Ford walked the floor of his office, called by courtesy, “private,” for an anxious hour, balancing the probabilities, and finally determined to take the desperate chance.  There was a vast mountain of preliminary work to be leveled, huge purchasing expenses to be incurred, before the first step could be taken in the actual building of the western extension; and the summer was advancing day by day.  He did not hope to get the extension completed in a single season.  But to get it over into the promising mining field on the lower Pannikin before snow-flying meant work of the keenest, without the loss of a single day.  Could he afford to play the safe game and wait until the building capital should be cannily in Mr. Magnus’ bank vaults?

He decided that he could not; and when he reached a decision, Ford was not the man to hesitate before taking the plunge.  On the morning of the third day he called Truitt, sometime superintendent of the C. P. & D., and now acting manager of the Chicago Extension, and gave him his instructions.

“You say there are three grain trains moving on the line now, Mr. Truitt:  there will be three more before night.  Keep them coming, and give them the right of way over everything but the United States mails.  Can you handle this without help from me?”

“We’ll give it a pretty stiff try,” was the prompt rejoinder.  “But you are not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Ford?”

“No; but for the next forty-eight hours I am going to lock my door, and I don’t want to be disturbed for anything less than a disaster or a wire from New York.  Please give orders accordingly, will you?”

The orders were given; and, left with his force of stenographers, Ford began to walk the floor, dictating right and left.  Letters and telegrams to steel mills, to contractors, to bridge builders, to the owners of grading outfits, and to labor agencies, clicked out of the typewriters in a steady and unbroken stream, and the din was like that of a main-line telegraph office on a hot piece of track.

All day long, and far into the night, the office force wrought unceasingly, digging away at the mountain of preliminary correspondence; and by the next morning the wire replies were beginning to come in.

Then came the crux.  To insure prompt delivery of material, definite orders must be placed immediately.  A delay of a single day might entail a delay of weeks in the shipments.  Yet the risk of plunging the company into debts it might never be able to pay was appalling.  What if the stock should not go up as prefigured?—­if the bonds could not be floated?

It was with the feeling that he might well be signing his own death-warrant that Ford put his name to the first order for two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of steel rails for immediate delivery to the company’s line in Chicago.  But after the first cold submergence it came more easily, and when he left the office an hour before midnight, a cool million would not have covered the obligations he had assumed during the strenuous day.