"See that, Frank? Got that from dad. Made me a present of it—at my own suggestion. What is she worth?"
"Don't you want to fish, Harry?"
"Not if you can sell the rod."
Frank took it and looked it over.
"Sure!" he said. "I'll sell that for the company."
There being no guile in either of these young men, the sequel is that Frank sold the trout rod for $5.25 and Harry proudly took the entire $6.50 to the neighbour, paid for the press and had it taken home to his attic, where it must be presumed the two of them spent rainy days printing calling cards for Draytons and Baillies.
Canada took very little interest in Drayton till he came to be Chairman of the Railway Commission. But by that time the said Commission was no longer the grand court it had been in the days of J. Pitt Mabee. It settled more disputes than ever and settled them as well as ever. Drayton had almost twice the mileage to cover that Mabee had in 1903. He did it with tireless exactitude. He was less concerned with the ethical issues at stake in decisions between railways and communities than with the unethical fact of such a prodigal lot of lines having been built at all to give trouble to the nation. We were just getting to the end of the race of the railroads, when thousands of foreigners had been dumped into the country with shovel and pick, and thousands of miles of new railway built that would shortly be a charge on the country.
An able writer a few years ago wrote a series of articles in a Canadian publication headed, "Is there a Railway Muddle?" Being himself a railwayman he seemed to think that the muddle, if any, was chargeable to conditions over which the railways had little or no control.
Mr. Drayton, shrewdly traversing the network of those prodigally built railways, felt no need of asking any such question. He carried on into the slump in business, and on into the war when the Railway War Board, practising a sort of church union by cutting out competition and re-routeing traffic for the sake of getting war haulage done as quickly as possible, left very little for the Drayton court to settle. But there was a bigger settlement to come later, and Drayton was to have a hand in it.
As Chairman of the Commission he never made a statement that was good for a headline, or coined an epigram, or lost his temper, or spluttered into print. But on a certain occasion, before retiring from the Commission, Sir Henry put on record a number of things that the people of this country read with acute and sustained interest. This was the report of the Smith-Drayton-Acworth Commission for the purpose of finding out whether the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific could ever manage to pay their own debts, including interest on multi-millions borrowed from abroad, or whether, debts and all, they should be handed over to the people of Canada?