Michael Malone - Weebly

engineers, who, with the same impressive speed,
discovered, at least to their satisfaction, that the route
already under construction was far from sound. In fact,
so dismal were geological and soil conditions found to
be, by this second report, that it expressed frank
astonishment that the first report should ever have
proposed pouring the state's concrete, unloading the
state's gravel, into a substructure so highly acidic and
upon soil of such poor drainage that, as a Republican
friend of Mr. Palter's exclaimed on the floor of the State
House, in his quotable way, a mere ten years would
suffice to sink that connector into a bog of treachery
where misguided motorists might, for all the Democrats
cared, drive in their swimsuits with snorkels clenched
between their teeth, since that would be the only way of
getting across the damn thing. And what kind of a
"social club" had that been, anyhow?
Privately, Ransom was surprised. Business dealings
in the state over a number of profitable years had
occasionally brought him in contact with the president of
the original engineering firm, and nothing in the man's
past seemed to prefigure so gross a miscalculation, and