A NEW LINE
WHEN a man sets his heart on a thing he can accomplish a great deal
in a comparatively short time. Thomas McGuire had been a careful,
industrious employee. He had never acquired the habit of wasting all of
his leisure hours and spare dollars in the wild resorts of the thriving
towns that lay at either end of his run. He began now to study the
history of American railways. He devoured everything in print, from the
local weekly paper to the monthly magazines and reviews. He bought,
begged, and borrowed books that would give him more or less of the
financial history of the various railways of the country. He had the
advantage of a fair education, which enabled him to read rapidly and
understandingly. What he longed for and worked for was promotion, but
it seemed to go by the other way. He grew impatient. To be sure, nobody
ran around him, but promotion came slowly. Nobody seemed to want to
quit, or get killed, and so, when the Inter-Mountain Air Line was built,
McGuire got in on the ground floor. He had the first passenger train on
the road, and in a little while was made trainmaster, but there he hung
for a whole year. Another step would put him in a place where he could
send his song to Gloucester, but he was powerless to help himself on.
At last an Assistant Superintendent was appointed and McGuire got the
job.
Another man might have strained a point here and knocked, at once,
at the gate of the handsome woman’s walled-up heart, but McGuire was
severely exact. He must not be the Assistant Superintendent, but
the whole thing, and so he worked and waited until another year had
gone by. Of course, promotion was bound to come to a man who worked
as he worked, he knew that, and it did come one spring morning when
it was least expected. He was asked to take the place of General
Superintendent of a competing line. As might have been expected, one
of the first things he did was to mail a copy of a certain homely song
to Gloucester, as a signal of his success, and then he went to work
with a will. In less than six months he had made a name for himself,
crippled the Air Line, which means success in this country where
competition is the life (or death) of railroading, and they asked him
to come back, and proposed to double his salary. But he would not go
as assistant to a man who was notoriously incompetent, and whose only
excuse for being in the business was that his father had inherited
money and put it into the building of the new line. It happened,
however, as it frequently does, that other people had put money
into the same enterprise; they were losing it, and they objected to
assessments where they had expected dividends. The young man resigned;
McGuire took his place, and in ninety days had pulled the business back
that he had pulled away with him. When a merchant is going to ship a
few cars of goods over somebody’s railroad, he says to McGuire, who
happens to be his personal friend, “You can do this as cheaply as the
other fellows?” “Yes,” says McGuire, “the rate is about the same on
all lines.” So it comes down to a matter of personal popularity, and
McGuire gets the freight, and that’s all there is to railroading, so
far as getting business goes. When it comes to handling men and keeping
up track, that requires a genius with colder blood.
In a little while McGuire was made General Manager, but he was unhappy.
What was the good of all this success? The manuscript of the song had
come back to him from the dead-letter office. He was famous in railway
circles but miserable in mind. It was impossible to pick up a newspaper
that ran “Railroads” without reading of the Inter-Mountain Air Line
and its brilliant young manager. He was dignified enough to command
the respect, and simple and democratic enough to win the love, of his
subordinates. He looked to the heads of the various departments to
manage the business, but watched over it all himself. He was always
accessible. He could awe a manager’s meeting or he could put in a frog.
He never locked his door.