He threw the clip of papers into the air, and it went hurtling over the nearest line of boxcars. His cap he snatched from his head and flung it yards away in the other direction. The man was for the moment mad!
“I’m on strike! I’m on strike meself!” he bawled. “Me, that’s never gone out with the boys no matter what happened, for the last thutty years. I’m on strike!”
“You are mistaken, Dooley,” cut in the icy voice of the supervisor. “You have not struck. You are discharged. Hand in your time and go. You are discharged for insubordination and inefficiency. I’ll take your keys.”
“Well,” said Ralph, talking it over later with his assistant operator as they were trying to untangle the trains in the yard and those waiting on the near-by blocks, “we must hand it to supervisor Barton Hopkins. He is personally efficient. He found a day man to take poor Dooley’s place, he got a man for the switcher, and he dressed down the whole yard crew and set them to work again in an hour.”
“But how long are they going to work?” grumbled the operator. “They all act like whipped dogs. That isn’t the way to run a division.”
“It is his way of running it. And the G.M. says he is suiting the stockholders and directors right down to the ground. Oh, the railroad business is on the toboggan!”
“Ha ha!” croaked the operator. “You sound like these other old stagers. I haven’t been in the game so long as you have, Fairbanks, although I am older than you. The pay is good and the hours not bad. Believe me! I’ve had worse jobs than train dispatching.”
“Oh, so have I. But I feel at a time like this that I’d like to be into the game right, instead of sitting up here overlooking a railroad yard and making pin-pricks on a road map.”
“Going back to the locomotive lever?”
“Do you know,” said Ralph earnestly and softly, “while I was fiddling down there on that little old yard engine, I felt right. I wouldn’t want my mother to know it, for she always worried when I had a run, but I believe I was born for the throttle. I’m an engineer, and I always will be.”