Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

64 страница из 101

Strange this new ambition which had come to him. Why, he had actually been about to consider his big work finished; and now, all at once, everything he had done seemed trivial. The eager desire of youth to achieve had come to him again, and the blood sang in his veins as he felt of his lusty strength. He was starting to build, with a youth’s enthusiasm but with a man’s experience, and with the momentum of success and the power of capital. Something had crystallised him in the past few days.

At 7:15 Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations

Across the fertile fields and the mighty mountains and the arid deserts of the United States, there angled four black threads, from coast to coast, and everywhere else were shorter main lines and shorter branches, and, last of all, mere fragments of railroads. He began with the long, angling threads, but he ended with the fragments, and these, in turns, he gave minute and careful study. At three o’clock he took a sandwich and ordered his car. He was gone less than an hour, and came back with an armload of books; government reports, volumes of statistics, and a file of more intimate information from the office of his broker. He threw off his coat when he came in this time, and spread, on the big, lion-clawed table at which Napoleon had once planned a campaign, a vari-coloured mass of railroad maps. At seven-fifteen old Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations.