wanting to absorb all the dope I could as I went along on the new job, I
knew I would be needed every minute right at Mr. Norcross's elbow, now
that the actual work was beginning.
He and Mr. Chadwick were deep in reports and figures and plans of all
sorts when I got back to the _Alexa_. Luncheon was served in the car,
and they kept the business talk going like a house afire while they were
eating, the hurry being that Mr. Chadwick wanted to start back for
Chicago the minute he could find out if our connecting line east would
run him special.
I could tell by the way the boss's eyes were snapping that he was
soaking up the details at the rate of a mile a minute; not that he could
go much deeper than the totals into anything, of course, in such a
gallop, but these were enough to give him his hand-holds. At two o'clock
a boy came down from the headquarters with a wire saying that the
private car could go east as a special at two-thirty, if Mr. Chadwick
were ready, and he put his O.K. on the message and sent it back.
"Now for a few unofficial things, Graham, and we'll call it a go," he
said, after the boy had gone. "You are to have an absolutely free hand,
not only in the management and the operating, but also in dictating the
policy of the company. What you say goes as it lies, and Dunton has
promised me that there shall be no appeal, not even to him."
"I imagine he didn't say that willingly," the boss put in, which was the
first intimation I had had that he wasn't present at the directors'
meeting in the Bullard.
"No, indeed; nothing was done willingly. I had to swing the big stick
and swing it hard. But I had them where they couldn't wiggle. They had
to swallow you whole or take the consequences--and the consequences were
going to cost them money. Dunton got down when he had to, and he pulled
the others into line. You are to set your own pace, and you are to have
some money for betterments. I offered to float a new loan on short-time
notes with the Chicago banks, and the board authorized it."
The boss pushed that part of it aside abruptly, as he always does when
he has got hold of the gist of a thing.
"Now, about my staff," he said. "It's open gossip all over the West that
the P. S. L. is officered by a lot of dummies and place-hunters and
relatives. I'll have to clean house."
"Go to it; that is a part of your 'free hand.' Have you the material to
draw from?"
"I know a few good men, if I can get them," said the boss thoughtfully.
"There is Upton Van Britt; he was the only millionaire in my college,
and he is simply a born operating chief. If I can persuade him to store
his autos and lay up his yacht and sell off his polo ponies--I'll try
it, anyhow. Then there is Charlie Hornack, who is the best all-around
traffic man this side of the Missouri--only his present employers don't
seem to have discovered it. I can get Hornack. The one man I can't place
at sight is a good corporation counsel. I'm obliged to have a good
lawyer, Uncle John."
"I have the man for you, if you'll take him on my say so; a young
fellow, named Ripley who has done some corking good work for me in
Chicago. I'll wire him, if you like. Now a word or two about this local
graft we touched upon last night. I don't know the ins and outs of it,
but people here will tell you that a sort of holding corporation, called
Red Tower Consolidated, has a strangle grip on this entire region. Its
subsidiary companies control the grain elevators, the fruit packeries,
the coal mines and distributing yards, the timber supply and the lumber
yards, and even have a finger on the so-called independent smelters."
The boss nodded. "I've heard of Red Tower. Also, I have heard that the
railroad stands in with it to pinch the producers and consumers."
A road engine was backing down the spur to take the _Alexa_ in tow for
the eastward run, and what was said had to be said in a hurry.
"Dig it out," barked the wheat king. "If you find that we are in on it,
it's your privilege to cut loose. The two men who will give you the most
trouble are right here in Portal City: Hatch, the president of Red
Tower, and Henckel, its vice-president. They say either of them would
commit murder for a ten-dollar bill, and they stand in with Pete
Clanahan, the city boss, and his gang of political thugs. That's all,
Graham; all but one thing. Write me after you've climbed into the saddle
and have found out just what you're in for. If you say you can make it
go, I'll back you, if it takes half of next year's wheat crop."
A minute or so later the boss and I stood out in the yard and watched
the _Alexa_ roll away toward the sunrise country, and perhaps we both
felt a little bit lonesome, just for a second or two. At least, I know I
did. But when the special had become a black smudge of coal smoke in the
distance, Mr. Norcross turned on me with the grim little smile that
goes with his fighting mood.
"You are private secretary to the new general manager of the Pioneer
Short Line, Jimmie, and your salary begins to-day," he said, briskly.
"Now let's go up to the hotel and get our fighting clothes on."
VII
"Heads Off, Gentlemen!"
Gosh all Friday--say! but the next few days did see a tear-up to beat
the band on the old Short Line! With the printing of his appointment
circular, Mr. Norcross took the offices in the headquarters building
lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way
the heads went into the basket. One by one he called the Duntonites in;
the traffic manager, the general superintendent, the roadmaster, the
master-mechanic--clear on down to the round-house foreman and the
division heads.
Some few of them were allowed to take the oath of allegiance and stay,
but the place-fillers and pay-roll parasites, the cousins and the
nephews and the brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk
under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van
Burgh, great-great-grandnephew of some Revolutionary big-wig and our
figurehead general superintendent, was the first man called in, and Mr.
Norcross shot him dead in half a minute.
"Mr. Van Burgh, what railroad experience did you have before you came to
the P. S. L.?" was the first bullet.
Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired
eyes, looked at his finger-nails.
"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left
Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.
"And how long have you been here?"
"I came out lawst October."
"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't
learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the
Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be
accepted. Good-day."
Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.
"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was
appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."
"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his
desk. And that was all there was to it.
Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack,
the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery
man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr.
Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.
"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the
house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four
of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a
lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't
all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which
to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."
"That's me," said Kirgan, who knew the boss up one side and down the
other. "You give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And
with that he went across the yard and took hold, before he had even
hunted up a place to sleep in.
Mr. Van Britt was the next man to show up. He was fine; a square-built,
stocky little gentleman who looked as if he's always had the world by
the ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men
went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped,
and while his jaw looked as if he could bite a nail in two, he had a
pair of twinkling, good-natured eyes that sort of took the edge off the
hard jaw.
"Well, I'm here," he said, dropping into a chair and sitting with his
legs wide apart. And then, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there:
"Graham, what the devil have you got against me, that you should drag me
out here on the edge of nowhere and make me go to work for a living?"
The boss just grinned at him and said: "It's for the good of your soul,
Upton. You've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the
corridor and your chair is empty and waiting for you. Your appointment
circular has already been mailed out."
Mr. Hornack was the last of the new office staff to fall in, though he
didn't have nearly as far to come as some of the others. He was
red-headed and wore glasses. They used to say of him on the Overland
Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then
hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that
he had a sort of meat-axe temper to go with his red hair. But they also
used to say that he could make business grow where none ever grew
before, and that's what a traffic man lives for.
When the new staff was made up, Mr. Norcross gathered all the department
heads together in his office and laid down the lines of the new policy.
He put it in just eight words: "Clean house, and make friends for the
company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had
found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed.
It was a large order, and both Mr. Van Britt and Mr. Hornack said as
much, but the boss said it had to go just that way. There would be a
little money for betterments, but it must be spent as if every dollar
were ten.
Naturally, the big turn-over brought all sorts of disturbances at the
send-off. Some of the relieved cousins and nephews stayed in town and
jumped in to stir up trouble for the new management. The _Herald_, which
was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there
wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new
appointees. Then the employees got busy and the grievance committees
began to pour in. Mr. Norcross never denied himself to anybody. The
office-door stood wide open and the kickers were welcomed, as you might
say, with open arms.
"You men are going to get the squarest deal you have ever had, and a
still squarer one a little farther along, if you will only stay on the
job and keep your clothes on," was the way the boss went at the
trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for
service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri
River. I want your loyalty; the loyalty of every man in the service.
I'll go further and say that the new management will stand if you and
the other pay-roll men stand by it in good faith, or it will fall if you
don't."
"You'll meet the grievance committees and talk things over with them
when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McClure, the passenger
conductor who was acting as spokesman.
"Sure I will--every time. More than that, I'll take a leaf out of
Colonel Goethal's book and keep open house here in this office every
Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thinks he has a grievance may
come here and state it, and if he has a case, he'll get justice."
Naturally, a few little talks like this, face to face with the men
themselves, soon began to put new life into the rank and file. Mr.
Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from
Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it began to be used in the sense
that most railroad men use the phrase, "The Old Man," in speaking of a
big boss that they like.
This winning of the service _esprit de corps_--if that's the
word--commenced to show results right away. The first time Mr.
Norcross's special went over the line anybody could see with half an eye
that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better
time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place we
actually found a section foreman going along and picking up the spikes
and bolts and fish-plates that the wasters ahead of him had strewn all
along the right-of-way.
There was so much crowded into these first few weeks that I've forgotten
half of it. The work we did, pulling and hauling things into shape, was
a fright, and my end of the job got so big that the boss had to give me
help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd
had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who
had been so disgusted with his job under Van Burgh. Frederic of
Pittsburgh was all right; a little too tonguey, perhaps, but a worker
from away back, and that was what we were looking for.
Out of this frantic hustle to get things started and moving right,
anybody could have pulled a couple of conclusions that stuck up higher
than any of the rest. The boss and Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning
the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on
the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were paying the
freight a solid unit against us, hating us like blazes and entirely
unwilling to believe that any good thing could come out of the Nazareth
of the Pioneer Short Line.
This hatred manifested itself in a million different ways, and all of
them saw-toothed. On that first trip over the line I heard a Lesterburg
banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would never
believe that any measure of reform undertaken by the Dunton management
would be accepted as sincere.
"You talk like an honest man, Mr. Norcross," he said, and he was saying
it right in the boss's own private car, too, mind you, "but this region
has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be
won over now by a little shoulder-patting in the way of better train
schedules and things of that sort. You'll have to dig a good bit deeper,
and that you won't be allowed to do."
The boss just smiled at this, and offered the banker man a cigar--which
he took.
"When the time comes, Mr. Bigelow, I'm going to show you that I can dig
as deep as the next fellow. Where shall I begin?"
The banker laughed. "If you had a spade with a handle a mile long you
might begin on the Red Tower people," he suggested. "But, of course, you
can't do that: your New York people won't let you. There is the real nib
of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will
stick to its own proper business--the carrying of freight and
passengers. What we have is a gigantic holding corporation which fathers
every extortionate side-issue that can pay it a royalty!"
"Excuse me," said the boss, still as pleasant as a basket of chips,
"that may be what you have had in the past; we won't try to go behind
the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on, the
Short Line proposes to be just what you said it should be--a carrier
corporation, pure and simple."
"Do you mean to say that you are going to cut loose from Hatch and
Henckel and their thousand-and-one robber subsidiary companies?"
demanded the banker.
At this the boss stood up and looked the big banker gentleman squarely
in the eye.
"Mr. Bigelow, at the present moment I represent Pioneer Short Line, in
management and in its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you
emphatically that the railroad management has nothing whatever to do
with Red Tower Consolidated or any of its subsidiaries."
"Then you've broken with Hatch?"
"No; simply because there hasn't been anything to break, so far as I am
concerned."
The banker man dropped into the nearest chair.
"But, man alive! you can't stay here if you don't pull with the Hatch
crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipped you off
beforehand and not let you come here to commit suicide!"
After that they went out together; up-town to Mr. Bigelow's bank, I
guess, and as they pushed the corridor door open I heard the banker
say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit
will get you, one way or another, as sure as the devil's a hog. If it
can't break you, it will hire a gang of gunmen--I wouldn't put it an
inch beyond Rufus Hatch; not a single inch."
There it was again; but as he went out the boss was laughing easily and
saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the fear of a fight
was the least of his troubles at the present moment.
VIII
With the Strings Off
As soon as we returned from the inspection trip, the boss pulled off his
coat--figuratively speaking--and rolled up his sleeves. It wasn't his
way to talk much about what he was going to do: he'd jump in and do it
first, and then talk about it afterward--if anybody insisted on knowing
the reason why.
Mr. Van Britt was given swift orders to fill up his engineering staff
and get busy laying new steel, building new bridges and modernizing the
permanent way generally. Mr. Hornack was told to put on an extra office
force to ransack the traffic records and make reports showing the
fairness or unfairness of existing tariffs and rates, and a widespread
invitation was given to shippers to come in and air their
grievances--which you bet they did!
Sandwiched in between, there were long private conferences with Mr.
Ripley, the bright young lawyer Mr. Chadwick had sent us from Chicago,
and with a young fellow named Juneman, an ex-newspaper man who was on
the pay-rolls as "Advertising Manager," but whose real business seemed
to be to keep the Short Line public fully and accurately informed of
everything that most railroad companies try to keep to themselves.
The next innovation that came along was another young Chicago man named
Billoughby, and _his_ title on the pay-roll was "Special Agent." What he
did to earn his salary was the one thing that Juneman didn't publish
broadcast in the newspapers; it was kept so dark that not a line of it
got into the office records, and even I, who was as close to the boss as
anybody in our outfit, never once suspected the true nature of
Billoughby's job until the day he came in to make his final report--and
Mr. Norcross let him make it without sending me out on an errand.
"Well, I think I'm ready to talk Johnson, now," was the way Billoughby
began. "I've been into all the deals and side deals, and I've had it out
with Ripley on the legal points involved. Red Tower is the one outfit
we'll have to kill off and put out of business. Under one name or
another, it is engineering every graft in this country; it is even
backing the fake mining boom at Saw Horse--to which, by the way, this
railroad company is now building a branch line."
Mr. Norcross turned to me:
"Jimmie, make a note to tell Mr. Van Britt to have the work stopped at
once on the Saw Horse branch, and all the equipment brought in." And
then to Billoughby: "Go on."
"The main graft, of course, is in the grain elevators, the fruit
packeries, the coal and lumber yards and the stock yards and handling
corrals. In these public, or _quasi_-public, utilities Red Tower has
everybody else shut out, because the railroad has given them--in fee
simple, it seems--all the yard room, switches, track facilities, and the
like. Wherever local competition has tried to break in, the railroad
company has given it the cold shoulder and it has been either forced out
or frozen out."
"Exactly," said the boss. "Now tell me how far you have gone in the
other field."
"We are pretty well shaped up and are about ready to begin business.
Juneman has done splendid work, and so has Ripley. Public sentiment is
still incredulous, of course. It's mighty hard to make people believe
that we are in earnest; that we have actually gone over to their side in
the fight. They're all from Missouri, and they want to be shown."
"Naturally," said Mr. Norcross.
"We have succeeded, in a measure, though the opposition has been keeping
up a steady bombardment. Hatch and his people haven't been idle. They
have a strong commercial organization and a stout pull with the machine
element, or rather the gang element, in politics. They own or control a
dozen or more prominent newspapers in the State, and, as you know, they
are making an open fight on you and your management through these
papers. The net result so far has been merely to keep the people stirred
up and doubtful. They know they can't trust Hatch and his crowd, and
they're afraid they can't trust you. They say that the railroad has
never played fair--and I guess it hasn't, in the past."
"Not within a thousand miles," was the boss's curt comment. "But go on
with your story."
"We pulled the new deal off yesterday, simultaneously in eleven of the
principal towns along the line. Meetings of the bankers and local
capitalists were held, and we had a man at each one of them to explain
our plan and to pledge the backing of the railroad. Notwithstanding all
the doubt and dust that's been kicked up by the Hatch people, it went
like wild-fire."
"With money?" queried the boss.
"Yes; with real money. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse was launched, as
you might say, on the spot, and enough capital was subscribed to make it
a going concern. Of course, there were some doubters, and some few
greedy ones. The doubters wanted to know how much of the stock was going
to be held by officials of the railroad company, and it was pretty hard
to convince them that no Short Line official would be allowed to
participate, directly or indirectly."
"And the greedy ones?"
"They kicked on that part of the plan which provides for the local
apportionment of the stock to cover the local needs of each town only;
they wanted more than their share. Also, they protested against the
fixed dividend scheme; they didn't see why the new company shouldn't be
allowed to cut a melon now and then if it should be fortunate enough to
grow one."
Mr. Norcross smiled. "That is precisely what the Hatch people have been
doing, all along, and it is the chief grievance of these same people who
now want a chance to outbid their neighbors. The lease condition was
fully explained to them, wasn't it?"
"Oh, yes; Ripley saw to that, and copies of the lease were in the
exhibits. The new company is to have railroad ground to build on, and
ample track facilities in perpetuity, conditioned strictly upon the
limited dividend. If the dividend is increased, the leases terminate
automatically."
The boss drew a long breath.
"You've done well, and better than well, Billoughby," he said. "Now we
are ready to fire the blast. How was the proposal to take over the Red
Tower properties at a fair valuation received?"
"There was some opposition. Lesterburg, and three of the other larger
towns, want to build their own plants. They are bitter enough to want to
smash the big monopoly, root and branch. But they agreed to abide by a
majority vote of the stock on that point, and my wire reports this
morning say that a lump-sum offer will be made for the Red Tower plants
to-day."
Mr. Norcross sat back in his chair and blew a cloud of cigar smoke
toward the ceiling.
"Hatch won't sell," he predicted. "He'll be up here before night with
blood in his eye. I'm rather glad it has come down to the actual give
and take. I don't play the waiting game very successfully, Billoughby.
Keep in touch, and keep me in touch. And tell Ripley to keep on pushing
on the reins. The sooner we get at it, the sooner it will be over."
After Billoughby had gone, Mr. Norcross dictated a swift bunch of
letters and telegrams and had me turn my shorthand notes over to Fred
May for transcription. With the desk cleaned up he came at me on a
little matter that had been allowed to sleep ever since the day, now
some time back, when I had given him Mrs. Sheila's hint about the
identity of the two men who had sat and smoked in the auto that Sunday
night at Sand Creek Siding, and about the talk between the same two that
I had overheard the following morning.
"We are going to have sharp trouble with a gentleman by the name of
Hatch before very long, Jimmie," was the way he began. "I don't want to
hit him below the belt, if I can help it; but on the other hand, it's
just as well to be able to give the punch if it is needed. You remember
what you told me about that Monday morning talk between Hatch and
Henckel in the Bullard lobby. Would you be willing to go into court as a
witness and swear to what you heard?"
"Sure I would," I said.