Another man might have strained a point here and knocked, at once, at the gate of the handsome woman’s walled-up heart, but McGuire was severely exact. He must not be the Assistant Superintendent, but the whole thing, and so he worked and waited until another year had gone by. Of course, promotion was bound to come to a man who worked as he worked, he knew that, and it did come one spring morning when it was least expected. He was asked to take the place of General Superintendent of a competing line. As might have been expected, one of the first things he did was to mail a copy of a certain homely song to Gloucester, as a signal of his success, and then he went to work with a will. In less than six months he had made a name for himself, crippled the Air Line, which means success in this country where competition is the life (or death) of railroading, and they asked him to come back, and proposed to double his salary. But he would not go as assistant to a man who was notoriously incompetent, and whose only excuse for being in the business was that his father had inherited money and put it into the building of the new line. It happened, however, as it frequently does, that other people had put money into the same enterprise; they were losing it, and they objected to assessments where they had expected dividends. The young man resigned; McGuire took his place, and in ninety days had pulled the business back that he had pulled away with him. When a merchant is going to ship a few cars of goods over somebody’s railroad, he says to McGuire, who happens to be his personal friend, “You can do this as cheaply as the other fellows?” “Yes,” says McGuire, “the rate is about the same on all lines.” So it comes down to a matter of personal popularity, and McGuire gets the freight, and that’s all there is to railroading, so far as getting business goes. When it comes to handling men and keeping up track, that requires a genius with colder blood.
In a little while McGuire was made General Manager, but he was unhappy. What was the good of all this success? The manuscript of the song had come back to him from the dead-letter office. He was famous in railway circles but miserable in mind. It was impossible to pick up a newspaper that ran “Railroads” without reading of the Inter-Mountain Air Line and its brilliant young manager. He was dignified enough to command the respect, and simple and democratic enough to win the love, of his subordinates. He looked to the heads of the various departments to manage the business, but watched over it all himself. He was always accessible. He could awe a manager’s meeting or he could put in a frog.
He never locked his door.
CHAPTER XX
COMING HOME
She gazed on the old things of Egypt and India,
Sighed o’er the ruins of Athens and Rome;
Painted in Paris, fiddled in Leipsic,
Summered at Homburg; and then, came home.
Miss Landon was eighteen when the snow-plough picked her up in the thorough-cut on the Pacific Slope and pitched her into the arms of Conductor McGuire. A year later, when her father retired, he was a rich man. At the suggestion of a widowed sister, the ex-merchant, his daughter, and the widow went abroad. At twenty-two she had been “finished” by travel, and heart-whole, was headed for home. She had seen a great deal of people and things. She had been wooed by an Italian count and had had a brush with a baron at Berlin, but she had never been thrilled as she had been with the touch of the hand and the sound of the voice of McGuire. She was probably the only American heiress who had given any attention to the poorly paid conductors of the European railways; the shabby guards, who run along the platform in soiled uniforms, cry the name of the station, flourish a flag, and open and shut the doors. Her conductor was as well dressed, as handsome, as intelligent, and almost as well paid as the captain of an Atlantic liner. These poor beggars were dirtier than the average second cabin deck-steward.