Simeon Tetlow's Shadow

CONTENTS


IT was turning dusk in the office, though it was scarcely three o’clock and outside the sun was still shining, beyond the busy streets. The two men sitting on opposite sides of the small room bent closer to their desks. The younger glanced up and got up to turn on the electric light. The little scowl that had begun to form itself on the face of the older man changed to a look of relief. His pen moved faster over the paper.
The older man was Simeon Tetlow, President of the “R. and Q.” Railroad. It might almost be said that he was the road. Its minute ramifications and its great divisions were hardly more than the nerves and arteries that threaded Simeon Tetlow’s thin frame. And the orders that went out from the tiny office, high up in the big block, were the play of his flitting finger-tips upon the keyboard of the whole clanking system. The tiny, shriveled figure gave no hint of the power that ticked carloads of live stock and human beings to their destination and laid its hand upon roads half dead, or dying, or alive and kicking, sweeping them gently into the system, with hardly a gulp.
Simeon Tetlow was an iron man, wiry and keen—an intellect without heart or soul or conscience, his co-workers would have told you. Each new road absorbed, each influx of power, seemed only to tighten a spring somewhere inside that shot the bolt. He conld work day and night without tiring; and that was the reason, in part, why at forty-two he was president of the “R. and Q.” road; and the reason why at forty-two his hand, when it reached out for its abstemious glass of water, trembled so that it was quickly withdrawn. No one knew the man. No one guessed the nervous horror that often racked the small frame driven relentlessly by its big brain.
He reached out for a slip of paper that lay at hand and ran his eye over it, jotting down a few figures. Then he pushed it to one side and went on writing. The younger man came across the office and laid another slip of paper on the desk. He took the one that had been pushed aside, made a memorandum on it, and filed it in a pigeon-hole at the right. He was a short, young man, with broad shoulders and a round face. The face as it bent above the slip of paper had a dull look. There was a kind of patience in it not usual in so young a man, and when he turned his eyes to his employer they glowed with a clear light, as if something were shining behind them.