So Ralph was pulling out of the Rockton terminal every night with a sort of sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. He said nothing to anybody about this nervous apprehension—not even to his mother. It seemed unmanly, he thought. He never knew before that he was a coward!
That is what he called it, cowardice. But it was not. It was the effect of increased responsibility on his mind. The threat of some terrible accident to the train he pulled was always hanging over him.
Strikers and their sympathizers now gathered about the crossings at midnight when the Flyer pulled out and booed and threatened the train crew. It was spread broadcast in the labor journals that something was likely to happen to the crippled engines pulling the division trains.
Passengers were warned by big posters to refrain from traveling by this division of the Great Northern in particular, because the strike of shopmen and maintenance of way men made it impossible for the trains to be run safely and on time.
But Barton Hopkins was by no means a fool. He gave an interview to the reporters of the fair-minded journals in which he showed by schedule that the passenger trains, at least, over the division, were ordinarily on time. He even took advantage of Ralph Fairbanks’ governing the engine pulling the Midnight Flyer to prove that that important train had kept closer to the schedule since the beginning of the strike than ever before.
This statement to the press angered the strikers more than anything that Hopkins had done. Its truth hurt their cause. When Ralph pulled the Flyer out of the yards that night, at Hammerby Street the cab was assailed with stones and rotten vegetables from a gang of hoodlums, of course egged on my McCarrey.
“Scab! Scab!” these fellows yelled as the broken glass tinkled about the ears of the engineer and his two firemen.
“Jim Perkins ought to be big enough to stop that,” urged one of the firemen. “They say he still holds his job in the old union but has spoken at the meetings in Beeman Hall.”
“There is a bunch of fellows helping him stir up trouble, too,” observed his mate. “Billy Lyons and Sam Peters and some others. But they all keep their cards in the old union. Something rotten—something rotten, boy, believe me!”
This suspicion that the small unions were playing an underhanded game—or that officers of those unions were doing so—kept many of the wiser employees of the Great Northern in line.