"
"Oh, dear, it's an awful strain on us . . . on him," she
corrected. "He simply can't be everywhere to see that everything
is right and everybody careful. And besides, there's the
finances of the road to keep in shape. He had to go to Montreal
to-day to see about that."
She leaned over toward me in her eager interest.
"I don't see how he can sleep with the thing on him. The big
trains must go through on time, and every workman and every piece
of machinery must be right as a clock. I get in a panic. I
asked him to-day if he thought he could run a railroad like that,
like a machine, everything in place on the second, and he said,
`Sure, Mike!'"
I laughed.
"`Sure, Mike,"' I said, "is the spirit in which the world is
conquered."
And then the strange attraction of these two persons for one
another arose before me; this big, crude, virile, direct son of
the hustling West, and this delicate, refined, intellectual
daughter of New England. The ancestors of the man had been the
fighting and the building pioneer. And those of the girl,
reflective people, ministers of the gospel and counselors at law.
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