Excerpt from El Paso by Winston Groom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Worse, tremendous winds blew up out of the Midwest, bringing clouds of choking dust to the Great Plains. Plagues of grasshoppers appeared, devouring every growing thing and in many cases halting the trains because their wheels could not make traction over the hordes of squashed grasshoppers. Soon, a few people began leaving; giving up, turning back. At first it was a trickle, but recently there were more uprooted settlers returning eastward on the company's trains than meat and produce, and many of the little towns the NE&P had spawned, nurtured, and depended upon began to wither and die.

How maddening, to watch all this and not really know what to do. Arthur faced a task of almost heroic proportions. As operations manager he was responsible for everything that went on at NE&P: right-of-way disputes, building track, repairing washed-out track, maintenance of rolling stock and locomotives, acquisitions of new equipment, planning and strategy, the hiring and maintaining of thousands of men, theft from freight cars parked on sidings, loading and unloading, scheduling, payrolls, lawsuits, train wrecks, and, yes, even grasshoppers on the tracks.

And now: SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT.

Arthur snapped the pencil in two. they needed an infusion of cash, and quickly. Sure, the Old Man had assets, but these were now in great part reduced to his playthings—the yacht, the damned cattle ranch in Mexico where he'd go to get away from Arthur's mother and everybody else, the "cottage" in Newport with its thirty-six rooms.

the times Arthur had tried to talk to his father about taking the company public, the Old Man invariably changed the subject. In fact, NE&P was one of the last privately owned railroads in the country. But the Colonel was vehement: "the moment we begin selling shares in this company," he'd railed, "buzzards like Morgan and Harriman and Stanford and Gould will be all over us, secretly buying up our stock until they add us to their private collections, and we'd both be out on our ears. they'd pack the board of directors with their own people and squeeze us out. then they'd issue more and more stock shares until the value was worthless. I've seen them do it! No, sir! My word! No, sir!"

"But I thought those people were your friends," Arthur had reminded him.

"they are, Arthur, they are. But you know the saying: 'All's fair in love in war.' And business, my boy, is warfi Besides," he added, "I'd do it to them, if I could."

In this, at least, Arthur conceded that his father was correct. And if the Old Man considered the men he had just mentioned "friends," he truly needed no enemies. Since they had not been able to buy the company out from under him publicly, those great tycoons seemed determined to ruin the NE&P in every way possible. In the great war that was exploding across Europe, the British and French needed all the munitions and supplies they could get from the United States. Obviously these would be transported to the Atlantic ports by rail—but did the NE&P have a single contract? No. they had been deliberately underbid across the board by such as the New York Central, Union Pacific, Great Northern, Illinois Central, Central Pacific, Southern Pacific, Lackawanna, B&O, and even the lowly Wabash and Rock Island. A single contract was all Arthur needed at the moment to put his company back on track. But no— thanks to the very same people his father had just included as his "friends"! And now he was going to have to go and kiss somebody's ass at the National Bank of Boston because his Old Man didn't want to sully what he considered his reputation by doing it himself.

SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT. Yes, Arthur concluded, I suppose I can; at least for now, but you're not going to like it.

Arthur went to the trash basket and retrieved the telegram. He smoothed it out on his desk and studied it again. It did say, exactly: SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT. And so it in fact gave him the authority. He placed the telegram in his top desk drawer and locked it and rang for his secretary, whom he told to book

Excerpted from El Paso by Winston Groom. Copyright © 2016 by Winston Groom. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.