“Oh, he goes to lunch about one o’clock, and gets back around half past two, and then he sticks to the job maybe till four.”
“Honest?” says Mark.
“Honest,” says the man.
“Well, I’ll be dinged!” says Mark. “And they pay him a r-r-reg’lar day’s wages for that? Him workin’ maybe five hours a day?”
“If you got his salary, kid, you could buy a railroad for yourself.”
The man went along, and we kept on waiting, but Mark couldn’t get it out of his head how a man with an important job could hang onto it and do such a little mite of work. He said he guessed maybe he’d get him a job like that some day where he just had to work five hours. He said he’d do all that work in a stretch and then go out for dinner, and in the afternoon he would have him another job just like it, and work ten hours a day and make twice as much. I thought that was a pretty good idea myself.
It was all of nine o’clock when that man came, though there was folks working under him that came a little earlier. We kept asking if he was there until a man told us we was a doggone nuisance and that the boss wouldn’t see us, anyhow. And that’s just what happened. When he got there we asked if we could see him, and the man that was near the gate in the office asked what our business was, and we told him, and he said we couldn’t bother the boss with it. Mark said he guessed maybe the boss better be told we was there, anyhow, and after quite a lot of fuss the man went and told him, and then came back to say the boss was busy and couldn’t see us. He told us there wasn’t any use hanging around, because we wouldn’t ever get to see him.
That looked pretty bad, and Mark was as mad as could be. He said we had a right to see that man, and that it wasn’t decent or good business for him to refuse to see us. But that didn’t mend matters. We could git as mad as we wanted to, but that wouldn’t get us a minute’s talk with the freight agent.
“I’ll b-bet there’s somebody kin m-make him see us,” says Mark. “The p-p-president of this railroad’s a bigger man than the freight agent, and we’ll git him to fix it for us.”
I says to myself that if we couldn’t get to see one it was mighty funny if we could get to see the biggest man of all; but Mark was bound to try, so we found out where the president’s office was and went up there. It was half past nine and he wasn’t to work yet.