THE SUPERINTENDENT
HIS HEADSHIP OF THE TRANSPORTATION ORGANISM--HIS MANNER OF DEALING
WITH AN OFFENDED SHIPPER--HIS MANNER WITH COMMUTERS--HIS MANNER WITH A
SPITEFUL "KICKER"--A DISHONEST CONDUCTOR WHO HAD A "PULL"--A SYSTEM OF
DEMERITS FOR EMPLOYEES--DEALING WITH DRUNKARDS--WITH SELFISH AND
COVETOUS MEN.
If the general manager is king in modern railroad operation, the division
superintendent is not less than prince. His principality is no mean state.
It may consist of some 500 miles of what he modestly admits is the "best
sort of railroad in all this land"; or it may be a little stretch of 100
miles, or even less, losing its way back among the hills; but it _is_ a
principality, and his rule is undisputed. If ever it be questioned, it
will then be high time for him to abdicate.
Just as the division is the physical unit of railroad operation, so is its
superintendent the human unit. By him the transportation organism stands
or falls. If it stands, he is able to go forward; the path from his door
leads to the general manager's office. If it falls--Well, there is to-day
in Central Illinois a gray-haired station-agent who once held his own
principality--4,000 men to take his orders.
"We only discharge for disobedience or dishonesty," said the president of
that railroad at the time he signed the order reducing the prince to the
ranks. "When we fail to get the real measure of a man, it is our fault,
not his. We never turn out a man who has done his level best for us."
This man is superintendent of one of the most prosperous of the
trunk-line railroads that reach the metropolis by stretching their rails
across New Jersey. His is a "terminal division," so called, and he has
assumed command of one of the busiest city gates in all America. His
railroad day begins almost as soon as he is awake. There is a telegraph
outfit in the corner of his bedroom, and as he dresses and shaves he
listens mechanically to its scoldings--to the gossip of the division. It
comes as casually to his ear as the prattle of his children; the key began
to be music to him long before he left the little yellow depot where he
first began to be a railroader.
"They're in pretty good shape this morning, John," laughs his wife. She,
too, has been listening half unconsciously to the gossip of the wire.
Years ago she "stood her trick" with her husband back in that little
yellow depot.
"Got a coal train in the ditch up the other side of Greyport," is his
reply. "We'll rip out that nasty cross-over up there some day, when the
big boss wakes up to the cash we've put out in wrecks at GP."
"Going up there?"
"Not this morning, Maggie," he laughs. "I've a committee from the firemen
coming in to see me. They're nagging for a raise." He lowers his voice, as
if he almost thought that the walls had ears. "It's beginning to grind the
boys, too--butter 48 cents, eggs 45, and all their hungry kiddies. But the
big boss--whew!"
He whistles, goes to his key, cuts in, and begins to give orders to the
wrecking-boss up at Greyport.
"Steady, Jim," he says, in a low voice. "You've got all day on that job if
you need it, only watch out for the number two track with your crane. We
can't risk a side-swipe on one of our pretty trains. We're detouring the
east-bound passengers over the Central. How's Hinckley?"
He closes the circuit softly.
"Poor Hinckley," he says gently. "Do you remember, Maggie? He was married
the same summer we were."
Through with his breakfast, he hurries down to the station, and before he
slips aboard the suburban train that is to carry him in to his Jersey City
office, he has had the wire again into Greyport. They are getting things
cleaned up there a bit; a baggage-car has been sent up with a special
engine for Hinckley. The superintendent turns from these. One of the
little trains that come out from town in the dusk of early dawn has
brought a leather bag filled with mail. He runs through it as his train
slips across the meadows. By the time he is in his roomy office it is
ready to be answered, a pencilled memorandum on each is sufficient guide
for his chief clerk.
Throughout the morning his calendar is a crowded thing. There is a
constant line of restless men sitting on the long bench just without the
guarded rail of the outside office. One by one these are called; they
disappear behind swinging baize doors to stand in front of the
superintendent.
For the first of these there is a smile--the caller is a big shipper, big
enough to go to the head of the line and have instant access to the boss.
This shipper is the sort who gives the railroad tonnage in trainload lots.
He is hot. He cannot get cars. He will begin to route over the Triple
B----, even though his siding facilities are wrong for it. _They'll_ dig
him out the cars he needs, they have folks over there who make it their
business to find cars. And while he is on the subject it seems pretty bad
to have stuff coming twelve and fourteen days through from Chicago.
Perhaps he'd better be getting after the Commission. The shipper is very
hot. He expatiates upon his wrongs, hammers upon the superintendent's
desk, grows scarlet in his heavy face.
The superintendent's smile never wavers. He gives close attention, does
not grow excited. A few orders over the telephone, a word of explanation,
the shipper smiles now. Down in his heart he begins to be sorry that he
made these threats about the Triple B----.
That is getting traffic, you say, and the superintendent is an operating
man. You are a bit wrong there. The superintendent is a _railroad_ man and
that means that any part of the railroad business is his business. There
is a man, by name A. H. Smith, who is to-day operating vice-president of
the New York Central system, who held to that idea from the beginning. In
the beginning, Smith was the superintendent of a little side-tracked
division of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern which centred in at
Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a strong competitive territory, and Smith
found that the traffic that came to his road was so slight that it did not
take a great deal of his time to move it. The superintendents before him
had had a lot of time to speed their fast horses and fuss around their
gardens. Not so with Smith. He went into the business of making traffic.
It was a decade that took keen delight in singing societies, and Smith's
robust voice allied itself to every choir of importance in three counties.
He sang himself into personal popularity, he sang traffic into coming over
the Michigan Southern. After a while, the folks over in the general
offices at Cleveland began to take notice. The traffic folks were the
first to notice, after that--well, a long story's short when you know that
Smith found himself on a short cut to his present job.
The superintendent's smile remains while a solemn-faced delegation of
commuters files into his room. These grave folk have been coming into town
on the 8:52 almost since the road first laid its rails. It is part of
their lives, and they fondly imagine that it is a big part of the
road's--that the twenty-hour train over the mountains to Chicago is a
matter of considerably less importance than the 8:52. The superintendent
broadens his bland smile and rings for his train sheets. There are other
trains than the 8:52 coming into that terminal--almost a train a minute
from a little before eight o'clock until half-past nine. The
superintendent's finger runs for corroboration over the train sheets.
Twenty-five days this month when 94 per cent of his suburban trains come
under the protection of the big shed of the terminal right on the
scheduled moment--how was that for consistency of operation?
The commuters' committee seem a little dazed. Individually, the men are
expert on a good many things--printing, indictments, breakfast foods,
patents, wholesale feathers; but consistency of train operation and train
sheets are a bit confusing.
"The 8:52 has been late a whole lot recently," doggedly affirms the
chairman. "Last Thursday we were pretty near fifteen minutes late."
A gleam of triumph comes into the superintendent's eye. He fumbles anew
among the flimsy train sheets. His forefinger alights upon a line of the
typewritten copy.
"Last Thursday," he comments, "you can see that we were all laid out by
the Hackensack River draw. A schooner filled with brick got caught by the
ebb tide and laid down on us in the open draw. What you want to see,
gentlemen, is the Treasury departments down at Washington. It is
outrageous that the antiquated navigation laws should be allowed to hold
up business in that way."
The committee confer among themselves and decide to make the life of the
Secretary of the Treasury uncomfortable for a while.
"You cannot hope for anything better with that Hackensack Bridge," urges
the superintendent almost malevolently.
He does not tell them, but the boys out on the line know his own
experience with the Hackensack River bridge. Last December and just in the
evening rush-hours they found that the cabin that stands perched at the
top of the trussed draw was afire. The trains bringing home the tired
suburbanites were beginning to line up back of the fire for solid miles.
The tired suburbanites were saying things about this particular railroad.
It chanced that this superintendent was a passenger on one of the trains.
He went forward to the blaze. The towerman had beat a retreat. The
superintendent started to climb up the ice-covered ladder tower toward the
burning cabin. The towerman halted him. The wiry superintendent turned
upon him with a look of infinite scorn:
"We've got to hand signal those trains across here--there's thousands of
folks out here in the meadows that we can't let miss their supper--"
"I've got a family--" began the towerman.
"That's all right. I'll signal these across."
"That ain't it, boss. Back o' th' cabin's the gasolene tanks, the stuff
for openin' th' draw."
The superintendent gave a low whistle.
"That settles it," he said. "We've _got_ to put this fire out. I can't
risk cutting this draw out of service."
It is a matter of record on that railroad that he climbed alone to the top
of the draw and began to put out the fire with his own stout endeavors. He
was not alone for long. Inspired by him, the men that gathered
there--engineers, firemen, trainmen, and conductors, crawled up upon that
freezing cold draw and lent him their efforts. In a half-hour the fire was
out, and the stalled trains were moving again.
This, then, is the measure of the man who sits across the wide office
table from you. The mollified commuters are marching out.
"You don't encourage kicking?" you ask.
"We don't discourage it," he replied. He is reminded of a story and tells
it to you.
"When they made Blank superintendent over there at Broad Street, in
Philadelphia, he went in to make a clean record. He called his chief
clerk to him. 'Mind you, if you hear kicks, don't let them get in one ear
and out the other. You bring them in here and we'll investigate.' In three
days the chief clerk was busy. 'Lots of trouble with the suburban traffic
to-day,' he would say. 'Wilmington train laid out at Grey's Ferry; third
day that's happened.' 'Ugly trainman on the main line wouldn't close the
rear doors. That fellow's unpopular.' 'Not enough equipment on the Central
division.' 'No fire in the stove at Lenden Road,'--a long string of
commuter troubles. After Blank had heard this for a week he began to get
nervous. He called his chief clerk to him. 'See here,' he demanded,
'what's the matter with our service? Where are all these kicks coming in
from?' The chief clerk looked at him--never a snicker. 'You said you
wanted the kicks,' he replied. 'Well, I've been letting the head barber
downstairs shave me after he was done with the commuters. He gets every
one of the howls.'"
Sometimes the kicks represent a serious side of the superintendent's
problem. A while ago a man came to a railroad superintendent in Boston and
demanded that a certain ticket-examiner in the passenger terminal be
dismissed. There had been some sort of dispute and the man insisted that
the ticket-examiner be discharged, nothing less. The ticket-examiner, on
his part, told a pretty fair sort of story. Moreover, he said that if in
the heat of the dispute he had transgressed on good manners he was frankly
sorry and that it would not happen again. Back of all that he had a good
record: no complaints had ever before been registered against him. The
superintendent then wrote a letter to the man who had complained and
stated that the offending ticket-examiner had been reprimanded and that
the offence would probably not be repeated.
[Illustration: THE CONDUCTOR IS A HIGH TYPE OF RAILROAD EMPLOYEE]
[Illustration: THE ENGINEER--OIL-CAN IN HAND--IS FOREVER FUSSING AT HIS
MACHINE]
[Illustration: RAILROAD RESPONSIBILITY DOES NOT END EVEN WITH THE TRACK
WALKER]
[Illustration: THE FIREMAN HAS A HARD JOB AND A STEADY ONE]
That did not satisfy the man who complained. He was of the sort that are
supposed to have a "pull," and he threatened to use his pull if the
ticket-examiner were not discharged. He refused to accept apologies or
explanations. He said he was hot. So was the superintendent. He keenly
resented anything that approached interference with his discipline, and he
refused to discharge his employee. Pressure was exerted, the pull was
doing its fine work. The superintendent was--like every other railroad
superintendent in this land--a fine diplomat. He took the man from the
train gate in the terminal and gave him an equally good job in a city a
hundred miles distant from Boston. He flattered himself that he had seen
the last of the man with the pull.
Not a bit of it. That brisk soul chanced to pass through the distant town,
and gasped at sight of the former ticket-examiner still drawing pay from
the railroad. He hastened into the superintendent's office in Boston and
demanded that the subterfuge end--that the man be actually discharged from
the road's employ. The superintendent looked at him coolly, not speaking.
The man again threatened his pull. The railroad boss looked at him through
slitted eyes. It was a real crisis for him. His diplomatic smile was
ready. He pointed with his lean forefinger toward the door.
"The case is closed. Good-morning," was all he said.
After that he began wondering what road would have him after that pull was
exerted. He wondered for a day, for a week, then a month. Then he forgot
the occurrence. The pull, like many other sorts of threats, was thin air.
Of a different sort was the problem that confronted a superintendent in
Chicago. On a certain suburban train for many years the conductor had
remained with an unchanged run. Gossip had come into the super's office
that this conductor was systematically stealing from the company. The boss
started a quiet investigation. The conductor with apparently no other
income than his $3 a day, had purchased a neat home in the suburbs, had
sent his boy to Yale, his girl to Vassar. That was Thrift, with a capital
T. The superintendent took the case sharply in hand and summoned the
conductor before him. He was one of the older sort, gray-haired,
kind-faced.
"Johnson," said the boss, "you've been with the road a long time and never
had a vacation. I want you to lay off a month and run over to either
coast. I'll get the transportation for you."
Johnson protested. He belonged to a generation of railroaders that was not
educated to vacations. The superintendent insisted and had his way, as
superintendents generally do. Johnson started on his vacation, and a
substitute, knowing nothing of the real situation, replaced him. The
returns from that daily run doubled, and the superintendent knew that he
was right.
Nowadays when a railroad finds that a conductor is stealing, it invokes
the majesty of the Interstate Commerce Law and prepares to hurry him off
toward a Federal prison. In that day they were content to fire Johnson;
that was sufficient disgrace to the old man. The railroad could not begin
to get back the money that had been trickling out throughout the long
years.
But Johnson showed fight. His was an important train in the Chicago
suburban service, and his passengers were important merchants and
manufacturers--big shippers. They got together, under Johnson's
supervision, and made the hair on the heads of the traffic men turn gray.
Those fellows were Johnson's friends, and they were not going to see the
N---- turn out a faithful employee. Johnson said that he had not stolen,
and Johnson was not the sort to lie. It might do the N---- good to send
some tonnage over to the M----. The traffic department and the operating
locked horns, as ofttimes they do on roads, both big and little. Traffic
won. The superintendent lost, Johnson went back to his job, and the road
put on a checking system that made its conductors wonder if they had held
convict records.
That case was an exception. There are not many superintendents who are
compelled to back water, mighty few Johnsons among the thousands of
conductors across the land.
We are still in that superintendent's office in Jersey City. The boss's
smile is gone. A big railroader just in from the line, his jeans covered
with engine grease, shuffles into the place and stands before the super,
hat in hand, like a naughty boy ready to be whipped. The superintendent
speaks in a few low sentences to him, makes a notation on an envelope. The
big man trembles in front of the little. A bit of a smile comes to the
lips of the boss.
"You think of the wife and the kiddies first next time," he says.
"Good-bye and good luck to you. I'm not much for lecturings," he adds,
after the man has gone. A little later he begins to explain. "That big
fellow had to be disciplined. There was no two ways about it for either of
us. He's an engine-man, got a good train, too; but he's been running
signals. We've caught him twice on test. We can't stand for that. Suppose
we have a nasty smash and the coroner's jury begins to ask nosey
questions? I had to put black on his envelope."
He goes into further detail. In other days he would have been forced, in
order to uphold his discipline, to suspend the engineer for from five days
to two weeks--the punishment preceding discharge. There was a
possibility--disagreeable to the superintendent--that the engineer's
family might have been crowded for sufficient food for a fortnight. Some
of those fellows live pretty close to the proposition all the while.
Nowadays the offender is demerited--once again like the schoolboy. That is
what the superintendent meant by that reference to the envelope, the
road's record of the man's service with it.
Sixty demerits--dismissed. That's the rule of one big road. But the record
does not always continue to be negative. Its positive side rests in the
fact that for every month a man keeps his envelope clear five demerits are
taken from the black side of his envelope. A trainman might have
forty-five demerits against him, be on the narrow edge of discharge, and
in eleven months, after turning the new leaf, have as clean a sheet as the
best man on the division. This is as it should be. The demerit plan--often
called the "Brown system"--represents the triumph of modern railroad
operation over the old.
The superintendent may have all the advantages of a time-tried disciple
and a modern record system; have the prestige and the reputation that come
from the operation of 500 miles of railroad, and still have a hard row to
hoe. Out in the Middle West there was, until recently, a stretch of what
was known as "booze railroad." It was a division where reputations and
records alike counted for naught, where discipline was a mockery.
Train-crews went from their runs direct to saloons and, what was a deal
worse, began their day's work within them. The wreck record of that
division that went forward to the State Commission was appalling--and half
the wrecks were not reported. Yardmasters were busy day after day stowing
away damaged equipment far from the curious eyes of passengers--the
wrecking crews were hammering for big over-time pay. It was a thoroughly
demoralized stretch of railroad.
The distressed president of the system sent East for a superintendent who
had a reputation. He thought he had his man. The new broom was a
book-of-rules man. He had a quarter of his operating force laid off all
the time, to go before him. He was a man fond of words, and he lectured
those old fellows as if they had been school children. He might have done
quite as well with his division if he had been operating it from
Kamchatka. The men began to call their rule-books the "Joe Millers."
The superintendent got mad and was lost--hopelessly. He began discharging
right and left, and the wrath of the gods and of the brotherhoods (the
great labor unions of the railroads), was upon him. The road was
threatened with a big strike at the very time that it could least afford
it. He avoided that strike only by acceding to the demand of the
brotherhood chiefs that the superintendent's head be given to them on a
silver platter. After that the "Man Without a Country" was in a more
enviable position. There was not a railroad in the country that dared
employ him, despite his excellent technical training. He drifted up into
Canada, got a job running a state-operated line. He held that job less
than a year. He was murdered of a winter's night in a shadowy railroad
yard, shot down by a discharged train hand.
The grim situation on the "booze division" grew much worse. The president
of that system gave the matter his keen personal attention; he began
scouring the entire width of the land for material, without much success.
When he was thoroughly discouraged, a raw-boned trainmaster from a far
corner of the demoralized division applied for the job of superintendent;
he reckoned he could handle the situation. He had caught the president
unawares standing outside of his private car. The president told him that
he was superintendent.
"There was something in Matt's eye that took me," he confessed afterwards.
"You do see something in a man's eye now and then that beats a whole
barrel of references."
So Matt Jones (that is nothing like his real name), took up the nastiest
operating proposition in the country. He did not lecture nor discharge,
not he; but the men knew that there was a boss behind the super's desk.
The fellows who began trifling with the new broom were down in his office
the next morning. Jones selected the leading spirit; he had the advantage
of knowing him.
"Pete," he said in a quiet way, "you've been drinking. It doesn't go. I'm
not going to discharge you,"--he gave grim thought to the fate of his
predecessor--"but in thirty days you are going to send in your resignation
voluntarily and leave our service."
The man protested. He had not been drinking; and Matt Jones had better not
try that game anyway. The superintendent wished him a pleasant
good-morning and bowed him out of the office.
In five days the engineer was back, uncalled. The superintendent saw him,
even though he had no more to say than he had not been drinking; that is,
he had quit drinking long ago. In ten days he was back again. This time he
admitted that he had been drinking up to the day that Matt Jones took
office. The superintendent said nothing. He bowed the engineer out again.
A month is a short thing at the best. At the end of the twenty-second day,
the engineer again found his way to the superintendent's office. He seemed
like a man who had been through a sickness. Big human that he was, he
began crying at the sight of the man who was a real boss.
"For God's sake, Matt, don't forget the old days up on the branch. I can't
get out from the old road," he said.
"I gave you thirty days' chance to get on another road," was all the
satisfaction that he got.
But on the thirtieth day the engineer went to work with a clean envelope
and the new superintendent had an ally of no mean strength. The patient
grinding won; complete victory was only a question of time; the president
five hundred miles away began to notice. You may say what you want,
railroad executives are born, not made. This reads like romance, but it is
truth. Matt Jones is to-day general manager of that system, and a little
while ago a New York paper said he was going to take charge of one of the
big transcontinental that needs a firm hand at its reins.
This superintendent has his division 400 miles away from New York, a clean
stretch of busy railroad, making a link in one of the stoutest of the
transcontinental chains, 300 miles of line, making traffic and handling
it. The superintendent is a personage in the little inland city where
headquarters are located; his opinion is eagerly sought by the local
reporters each time a new civic problem is tackled. If he were in the
metropolitan district he would be unknown except to a little coterie of
railroaders; up here he is the voice of the railroad. He is far more real
to the folk of half a dozen populous counties than is the president of the
road, a stuffy gentleman who comes up in a private car once in a dozen
years to the dinner of the local Chamber of Commerce and tells the
townspeople to thank God that they have the main line of the K. & M.
running through their "lovely little city."
You may listen for the clatter of the telegraph key in his house and be
entirely disappointed.
"I would have poor system if I had to listen to all the gossip of the
wire," he tells you quietly. "We've organization on this stretch of line."
He says this with a bit of pride. "We have men and we have system. My
train-masters are in effect assistant superintendents: they are expected
to organize beneath them."
Watch this sort of man. He is the kind that American railroading is hungry
for to-day. Of him the big executives are being made each year. He enters
his office in the morning and gets a few brief reports of the situation on
the line: first weather, then congestion conditions in the big yards.
After that he talks over the long-distance 'phone with the G. M., four
hundred miles away. He gives a summary of the situation to headquarters,
just as the summaries came in to him from his train-masters at junctions
and at terminals. He holds the telephone receiver for a minute: the 'phone
is rapidly coming into general railroad use since the telegraphers made
Congress pass a bill limiting their working hours to eight each day. That
bill promises to make trouble yet for the men who were supposed to benefit
by it.
The telephone speaks to him a moment. He hangs up the receiver and speaks
to his chief clerk.
"W. H. T. is coming up the line this afternoon. Tell the boys not to get
rattled," he says.
That is all. The passage of the President of the United States over his
three hundred miles of well-ordered track makes no flutter in this
superintendent's heart. If it were Europe--the troops would be drawn out,
all other trains brought to a standstill, pilot engines run in advance of
the royal train, in infinite pow-wow over the railroading of nobility. But
it is not Europe, it is this blessed United States, partly blessed because
it so excessively differs from Europe.
Only the military aides of the President lament upon the informality of
his travel. Some time since a great executive was making the familiar loop
throughout the West. The superintendent of a division of line the far side
of the Missouri was a worrier, and was personally watching the progress.
In order to facilitate rear platform oratory the President's cars were
placed at the rear of a train that hardly ranked as express. Between towns
the delays grew frequent and a stuffy little aide in uniform protested to
the superintendent.
"Look a' here, sir," he said stiffly, "why don't you let these other
trains up the line wait?" The division was single-track. "You know this is
the President's train."
A twinkle came into the super's eye.
"You're wrong," he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. "This
is _not_ the President's special. This is train number 67 of the B----main
line, and she hasn't many more rights on the time-card than a gravel
limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon
Limited--there's some train, sir. They wouldn't lay her out. She's
double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast."
The point of that was not lost.
An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr.
Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The
superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch
of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection
engine.
"Dee-lighted," said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the
big cab. The superintendent wondered what he'd think of that nifty stretch
of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as
he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle's
"French Revolution" out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way
from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along
thereafter without that superintendent's vote.
* * * * *
All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad
presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of
the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince
grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King.
When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee--the
men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster's office--to talk
in whispers.
Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world--it is near kingdom
in itself--miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight
yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes
eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For
years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a
great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word
to be called superintendent. They called him "the lion" and did not misuse
that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a
stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.
But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer
office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder
who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable--one
an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other
holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to
assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion's great desk.
That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the
whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of
them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone
there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents
gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At
other times they locked horns.
They locked horns over one great question. It was not operation that set
them at odds, not a vexing practical question of how some congested yard
might be lanced so that traffic should flow the more freely, or a main
line section be aided to give a greater daily tonnage. Nothing of that
sort for the two ambitious assistants.
A new pony inspection engine, with an observation room built forward over
the boiler--just the sort that Col. Roosevelt had once used as a
reading-room--was to be built for the division, and each assistant thought
that he needed that engine for the dignity of his job. Each in turn went
before the lion and stated his claims for the possession of the pretty
toy. The old man listened with grave dignity. A week later he sent down to
the master mechanic at the big Depew shops and had him deliver a brand new
hand-car, with his compliments, to each.
The pony-engine went into the roundhouse until the real Prince should
come. Then he sat long hours alone at his desk once more.
Finally they brought a man to him, a fine, upstanding man. The lion rose
from his comfy old chair and gave greeting to the newcomer.
"I'm glad to see you," was all he said; but to the general manager, who
had come up from New York, his eyes seemed to ask: "You've brought the
right man here at last?" He turned to the stranger.
"Would you like a pony engine to get over the division?" was his question.
"I'm willing to go to hell, and go in a caboose," laughed the stranger.
The old superintendent grasped him by the hand.
"Thank God, they've sent a real man to be superintendent at Buffalo," was
all he said. That was the only recognition that he gave to one who since
has become one of the master railroaders of America, but in that moment
the act of succession had been consummated.