“Humph! The engineer stopped the train, to be exact,” said her father and then turned to haul the pump out from under the car seat.
Ralph tipped his hat to the ladies and walked away.
“In my opinion, Barton Hopkins is a pretty small man,” the train dispatcher thought. “In any case, I may as well make up my mind to one fact: If he can ‘get’ me he will. He is as cold-blooded as a snake. And I guess I would better keep away from Miss Cherry, or she will get into trouble.
“Just the same,” he concluded, “she’s a fine girl. She could not bear to see the little thing I did for them ignored. But, goodness me, how the rank and file of the men hate her father!”
He did not tell his mother this time of the happening. He had learned it was better not to give the widow details of any possible danger that he stepped into. She only worried the more about him when he was out from under her eye.
The newspapers had begun to talk of the wildcat strike extending to this division of the Great Northern, and Mrs. Fairbanks read enough about it in her favorite evening sheet. Ralph might have told her a deal more—and much more to the purpose—had he chosen to.
The feeling in the shops was a matter for grave discussion among the officials. The older employees, and the men in the stronger Brotherhoods, thought of and talked of little else. If the shopmen and maintenance of way men went out there was bound to be trouble.
Most railroad systems keep only one jump ahead of disaster in the busy season. Locomotives and all other rolling stock have to be watched and inspected just as closely and carefully as a good family doctor watches his patients. A turn in the shops for the great moguls and eight-wheelers comes more frequently than the public suspects. This averts accidents more surely than block-signal systems or perfect train dispatching.
Of late the shopmen had been lax in their work, just as the section men had been lax in their department. Disgruntled employees of any corporation are dangerous. In the railroad business they are frightfully so.
Every evening when the shifts changed in the shops and yard, groups of men stood around and talked. Sometimes some “soap-box orator” made a speech just outside the railroad property. The railway police could not disturb these meetings, but they worked with the city police and soon had them stopped.