"No. Don't let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them. I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear Dance--yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains." "Go ahead." "Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him--Callahan, Blood and the rest of us--are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily," Glover bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, "he isn't; but he might have been----" "I see." "We were prepared for that." "How?" "I shouldn't speak of this if I did not know you were Mr. Bucks' closest friend. Even he doesn't know it, but six months of my own time--not the company's--I put in on a matter that concerned my friends and myself, and I have the notes for a new line to parallel this if it were needed--and Blood and I have the only pass within three hundred miles north or south to run it over. These were some of the reasons, Mr. Brock, why I came to the mountains." "I understand. I understand perfectly. Mr. Glover, what is your age, sir?" The time seemed ripe to put Gertrude's second hint into play. "That is a subject I never discuss with anyone, Mr. Brock." He waited just a moment to let the magnate get his breath, and continued, "May I tell you why? When the road went into the receivership, I was named as one of the receivers on behalf of the Government. The President, when I first met him during my term, asked for my father, thinking he was the man that had been recommended to him. He wouldn't believe me when I assured him I was his appointee. 'If I had known how young you were, Glover,' said he to me, afterward, 'I never should have dared appoint you.' The position paid me twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; but the incident paid me better than that, for it taught me never to discuss my age." "I see. I see. A fine point. You have taught _me_ something. By the way, about the pass you spoke of--I suppose you understand the importance of getting hold of a strategic point like that to--a--forestall--competition?" "I have hold of it."