and "working" at engineering; and if a crowd of gaping rustics were

looking on all the while it was perfectly satisfactory to him.

"You see," he says to Philip one morning at the hotel when he was thus

engaged, "I want to get the theory of this thing, so that I can have a

check on the engineers."

I thought you were going to be an engineer yourself," queried Philip.

Not many times, if the court knows herself. There's better game. Brown

and Schaick have, or will have, the control for the whole line of the

Salt Lick Pacific Extension, forty thousand dollars a mile over the

prairie, with extra for hard-pan--and it'll be pretty much all hardpan

I can tell you; besides every alternate section of land on this line.

There's millions in the job. I'm to have the sub-contract for the first

fifty miles, and you can bet it's a soft thing."

"I'll tell you what you do, Philip," continued Larry, in a burst of

generosity, "if I don't get you into my contract, you'll be with the

engineers, and you jest stick a stake at the first ground marked for a

depot, buy the land of the farmer before he knows where the depot will

be, and we'll turn a hundred or so on that. I'll advance the money for

the payments, and you can sell the lots. Schaick is going to let me have

ten thousand just for a flyer in such operations."

"But that's a good deal of money."

138

The Gilded Age