"By Jove, Barbara!" Duncan exclaimed, as he bent over the map, "you've solved the riddle. What a splendid combination it is! And how we must hustle to defeat it!" "You must be calm, then, and let us work it all out, and be sure of everything before you tell Captain Will about it. I want you to have full credit for the timely discovery." "Me? Why, it is all yours, Barbara, and you are to have all the credit of it." "Oh, no. You told me the things that enabled me to guess it out, and I've only been trying to help _you_. I'm glad if I have helped, but positively my name mustn't be mentioned. I'm _only a woman_!" "Only a woman!" Duncan echoed. "_Only_ a woman! Barbara, God's wisdom was never so wise as when he created 'only a woman' to be a 'helpmeet for man.'" XXXII THE RIDDLE EXPLAINED The next half hour was spent, as Barbara expressed it, in "perfecting the guess" she had made. "Tandy has gone into that Memphis and Ohio River enterprise up to his eyes," said Duncan. "Naturally, he has got his controlling interest in it at an extremely low price, as compared with the face value of the stock and bonds, for the reason that the road ends at Paducah, which is much the same thing as ending nowhere. "But if he can succeed in diverting our line to Paducah instead of Cairo, thus securing an entirely satisfactory connection north and east, his Memphis and Ohio road will become part of one of the greatest trunk lines in this part of the country, and the advance in his stock and bond holdings will make him one of the richest men in the West." "That is what I was thinking, Guilford, but I hardly dared suggest it--I know so little. I didn't know that it would be possible to change our line. I thought that maybe its charter compelled it to run to Cairo." "No, unfortunately, it doesn't. Tandy secured the charter in the first place, before Hallam and Stafford went into the project. I wonder," he added with a puzzled look, "I wonder if the old schemer was looking this far ahead. At any rate, the charter, as Tandy had it drawn, requires only that the line shall be so located and constructed as to connect the railroads running east from its eastern terminus with the Mississippi River--it doesn't say at what point. That requirement would be fully met, of course, if the road should be diverted to Paducah, connecting there with the line to Memphis." "But why did Tandy want that county line provision put into the bond subscription?" "Look at the map again. Those two counties lie west of the point at which the road must be turned south if it is to be diverted to Paducah. If we fail to build across that county line by noon of the fifteenth of next March, the subscriptions of both those counties will be forfeited. Then Tandy will step in and offer the company that is building the line a much larger subscription of some sort from Paducah and from his Memphis road, as an inducement to shorten the line by taking it to Paducah instead of Cairo."