The Rapids by Alan Sullivan — Read

The young manager of the local bank through which Clark transacted his affairs sat late one night in his office. He had just returned from dinner at the big house, where he left his host in an unusually genial and communicative mood. It seemed that Clark's mind, tightened with the continued strain of years, had wished to slacken itself in an hour or two of utter candor, and Brewster had listened with full consciousness that this was an occasion which might never be repeated. But in his small cubicle, walled in with opaque glass, Clark's magnetic accents appeared to dwindle before the inexorable character of the statement Brewster now scrutinized. It was the detailed and financial history of each successive company, a history in which birth and bones and articulation were clearly set forth, and what struck the young man most forcibly was the extraordinary way in which each was interlinked with the rest.

The combined capital of all was, he noted, twenty-seven million dollars, and greater than that yet reached by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Brewster had known it before, but the bald and cumulative figures in front of him made the fact the more momentous.