“Is Mr. Hegan in?” he asked.

“Do you call by appointment?” was the response.

“Not precisely,” said Montague, producing a card.  “Will you kindly send this to Mr. Hegan?”

“Do you know Mr. Hegan personally?” the man demanded.

“I do,” Montague answered.

The other had made no sign, as far as Montague could make out, but at this moment a dapper young secretary made his appearance from the doors behind the gate.  “Would you kindly state the business upon which you wish to see Mr. Hegan?” he said.

“I wish to see Mr. Hegan personally,” Montague answered, with just a trifle of asperity, “If you will kindly take in this card, it will be sufficient.”

He submitted with what grace he could to a swift inspection at the secretary’s hands, wondering, in the meantime, if his new spring overcoat was sufficiently up-to-date to entitle him, in the secretary’s judgment, to be a friend of the great man within.  Finally the man disappeared with the card, and half a minute later came back, smiling effusively.  He ushered Montague into a huge office with leather-cushioned chairs large enough to hold several people each, and too large for any one person to be comfortable in.  There was a map of the continent upon the wall, across which Jim Hegan’s railroads stretched like scarlet ribbons.  There were also heads of bison and reindeer, which Hegan had shot himself.

Montague had to wait only a minute or two, and then he was escorted through a chain of rooms, and came at last to the magnate’s inner sanctum.  This was plain, with an elaborate and studied plainness, and Jim Hegan sat in front of a flat mahogany desk which had not a scrap of paper anywhere upon it.

He rose as the other came in, stretching out his huge form.  “How do you do, Mr. Montague?” he said, and shook hands.  Then he sat down in his chair, and settled back until his head rested on the back, and bent his great beetling brows, and gazed at his visitor.

The last time that Montague had met Hegan they had talked about horses, and about old days in Texas; but Montague was wise enough to realise that this had been in the evening.  “I have come on a matter of business, Mr. Hegan,” he said.  “So I will be as brief as possible.”

“A course of action which I do my best to pardon,” was the smiling reply.

“I want to propose to you to interest yourself in the affairs of the Northern Mississippi Railroad,” said the other.

“The Northern Mississippi?” said Hegan, knitting his brows.  “I have never heard of it.”

“I don’t imagine that many people have,” the other answered, and went on to tell the story of the line.

“I have five hundred shares of the stock myself,” he said, “but it has been in my family for a long time, and I am perfectly satisfied to let it stay there.  I am not making this proposition on my own account, but for a client who has a block of five thousand shares.  I have here the annual reports of the road for several years, and some other information about its condition.  My idea was that you might care to take the road, and make the proposed extension to the works of the Mississippi Steel Company.”