After that, some of the younger engineers felt like throwing themselves into the wicked river, but the biggest engineer of all never lost his faith. He sent upstream and brought down a whole Spanish Armada of clumsy scows, each heaped high with sticky clay. That clay--in thousands of cubic yards--made a new river-bottom and the tunnel shields went forward. There were other obstacles and discouragements, almost an infinite array of them, to be surmounted, but this railroad president had steeled his mind to the accomplishment of that terminal. In the making of it he gave his life. When the day came for the drafts upon the railroad's treasury, mounting higher and higher, he was cheer; when bad news came from the burrowing engineers, he was courage; when timid stockholders and directors began to worry, he was comfort. He gave of his vitality to the organization, to the making of the terminal, until the day came when he gave too much--and his life went out while he was still like a mighty king in battle. He did not live to see the classic lines of the great station building. As he stands in the waiting-room, he stands in bronze. Those bronze eyes are powerless to see the splendid fruition of his endeavors. That sort of thing--heroic courage and death-bringing devotion to an enterprise--repeats itself now and then among the executives of the railroads. When the panic of 1907 reached high tide, there was a certain railroad president who, like his fellows, viewed it with no little alarm. He had lunched with a big steel man, the kind the newspapers like to call a magnate, and the steel man had scared him. The company for which the former labored was going to close half a dozen of its plants--was going to throw some thousands of poorly provided men out of work. The railroad president took that bad news back to his comfortable office; at night it travelled with him in his automobile to his big and showy house. It would hit his company hard in its heavy tonnage district, but that was only a single phase of the situation. He thought of things becoming more disjointed when the news became public--before that week had run its course. That night the president made up his mind to take a big step. It was risky business, but he thought it worth the risk. He sent for the steel man in the morning and asked him what was the best price he could make for his product. The steel man cut his regular profit in half, but the president was not satisfied. "You'll have to show me a better margin than that," he said. "We'll eliminate profits," said the steel man, "and give you the stuff at cost, to save shutting down our plant." "Is that the best you can do?" persisted the president.