“I’ll never run her an inch with you on board.”
“All right. But your chances of running her any more is mighty small if you stick to that.”
“You talk as if you owned the road.”
Frank was silent, for he did not care to waste his breath on the man unnecessarily, and he felt that he had said quite enough. Old Joe snarled at him, and threatened him, but Frank remained unruffled.
“You don’t know how to fire, anyway,” declared the man. “Why, you’ve been at work less than a month. I need a good man on my engine, and I’ll have one.”
“Anyone would think you were running a passenger engine to hear you talk,” said Frank.
“It’s harder runnin’ a freight engine, as you’d know, if you knew anything. You have to dodge all the passenger trains on the line, and you get the devil if you don’t make time. I’m blowed if I’ll keep you on this engine.”
Frank decided that the time had come for him to assert himself, so he straightened up and faced the engineer, looking him straight in the eye as he said:
“Look here, Mr. Hicks, I can fire this engine as well as anybody, and I am going to fire her. You can’t frighten me with a lot of talk, and, as far as you are concerned, I have heard enough from you. I have stood too much from you in times past, and now I tell you what I’ll do. If you work against me and get me dropped off this engine, I’ll thrash you as I did Old Slugs every day for a year!”
This talk was “square from the shoulder,” and it set the engineer to gasping.