Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

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“Figure on discontinuing it. The grades are steep, the local traffic is light, and the roadbed is in a rotten condition. It needs rebuilding throughout. I’ll make you another proposition. I’ll build the line from Pines to Nugget City myself, if you’ll give us track connection at Copperville and at Pines, and will give us a traffic contract for our own rolling stock on a reasonable basis.”

Again Wilcox looked at the map. The Silverknob and Nugget City road began nowhere and ran nowhere, so far as the larger transportation world was concerned, and it could never figure as a competitor. The hundred miles through the precious natural pass known as Yando Chasm, was not so busy a stretch of road as it was important, and the revenue from the passage of the Silverknob and Nugget City’s trains would deduct considerably from the expense of maintaining that much-prized key to the golden west.

“I’ll take it up with Priestly and Gorman,” promised Wilcox.

“How soon can you let me know?”

“Monday.”

That afternoon saw Allison headed back for New York, and the next morning he popped into the offices of the Pacific Slope and Puget Sound, where he secured a rental privilege to run the trains of the Orange Valley Road into San Francisco, and down to Los Angeles, over the tracks of the P. S. and P. S. The Orange Valley was a little, blind pocket of a road, which made a juncture with the P. S. and P. S. just a short haul above San Francisco, and it ran up into a rich fruit country, but its terminus was far, far away from any possible connection with a northwestern competitor; and that bargain was easy.