Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/330

 of specie payments. The shares of his companies had followed the general upward tendency and more than led the market. The Northern Pacific preferred stock rose above par and the shares of the Oregon & Transcontinental almost to par in September, 1882, with enormous transactions in both, aggregating some days seventy thousand shares for the one and thirty thousand for the other. Both stocks were believed, even by cautious bankers, to hold out promise of much greater appreciation. They assumed that the gigantic land grant would yield a great deal more in money than the principal of the first-mortgage bonds, that upon the completion of the line the preferred stock would receive a full eight per cent. dividend, and therefore rise far above par and be quickly retired out of the lands especially pledged for its redemption. Assertions that this assured extinction of the prior securities made the common shares more certain of a greater rise than any others on the list, were frequently heard, and the most sanguine prophesied that it would double and triple their nominal value.

While made anxious by the construction deficit and the premonitions of the approach of a period of decline, Mr. Villard kept up his courage, and tried to infuse it into the minds of the doubters beginning to appear among his followers. He strengthened himself and others with the seemingly indisputable proposition that the Northern Pacific could certainly be expected to earn much more as a through transcontinental line than as one operated in disconnected sections, and he looked forward to the completion of the main line as the end of all his present troubles and the dawn of halcyon days. Buoyed up also by the renewed affirmation in the report of the chief engineer that the two ends of the track would be united before the end of September, he overcame the remaining difficulties with his usual resoluteness and fertility of resource.