"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know
about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a
much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."
"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays,"
returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for
us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen
other States this year--east, west, north and south--everything
promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight
against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody
knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds
of the States through which it passes--made them out of whole cloth.
Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a
dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards,
rich mines--development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to
help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it
was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."
"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad
man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can
remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef
cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to
the Overland Central.
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