Into a carriage starting for the cemetery there stepped a man who was unknown to the mourner already there. As the journey proceeded the mourner questioned his companion. Was he a relative of the corpse? No. An old friend then? No, in fact he didn’t know the corpse. Then he would be a friend of some friends? No, indeed, he was a stranger entirely; but he hadn’t been very well, and the doctor had ordered carriage exercise for his liver.
The general superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company was incessantly up and down the road for three or four years before he had a car that was called his own. He travelled with the other passengers when passengers were present, and in the conductor’s caboose when the train was all freight. A freight conductor has a private car—business couldn’t be carried on without it. He is compelled to ride somewhere. In cold weather he is entitled to as much warmth as a passenger. On long runs he must have something to eat. Nobody begrudges him his caboose. Uninformed resentment is reserved for the magnate, so-called!
When we had extended from Dauphin through Swan River, and were operating the Muskeg Limited between Winnipeg and the cordwood swamps of Marchand I did have a car of my own. It was very much of a used car, for it had housed Mr. Mann during construction of the Calgary and Edmonton. While a contractor is on his job he is compelled to be a good deal of a gipsy. The real difference between his private car and a gipsy caravan is that the gipsy can move anywhere he likes, and the contractor is compelled to stay with the tracks.
Mr. Mann’s car had a romantic name—the Sea Falls. It had stood up nobly under every kind of treatment—and bumping over skeleton track is treatment enough to annoy even a constructor’s equipage. When we gave it such a renovation as pride and revenue permitted, we also extinguished its name for a number—19 was the all-sufficient description of the old Sea Falls, and Number Nineteen came to be regarded femininely.
I don’t think she ever learned to dance the hornpipe, but she certainly danced. The ideal car for construction purposes must not be heavily built. Yesterday a friend was talking about ideal fishing country in the northern recesses of Frontenac county, to which many wealthy Americans come every year. “You can only get into it with a Ford,” he said.
The old Sea Falls, invariably called a she, was the first and chief Henry of the Canadian Northern. Up to a venerable age she was never off the track. She rolled and leaped and ricocheted, when Billy Walker or Joe Beef let his engine get gay over a stretch of gravel ballast. Sometimes, I think, she skipped along like a flat stone thrown almost horizontally at the lake; but, whatever happened to any neighbouring equipment, Number Nineteen sustained the reputation of the Sea Falls, and remained true to steel.
The superintendent, by the way, must also be a thoroughgoing gipsy if he is any good as a superintendent. He has an office, of course, at his chief divisional point, where he can be seen when people have to come to him. But his real office is the table off which he eats his meals. His stenographer is his constant travelling companion. The public seldom sees his car, for it is carried at the tails of freights, as a rule, and is left at all sorts of minor-looking places, where work has to be done.
But what about the cars of which the public sometimes sees and hears? They are of three sorts—the railway cars, the statesmen’s cars, and the absolutely private cars whose owners pay for haulage on as commercial a basis as the passenger who buys his ticket at the counter.
Broadly, the trip which the Saskatchewan farmer saw, in part, can be taken as typical of what may be called the presidential inspection of properties and prospects, during the expansion phase of a railway. The chief executive of an established road that covers a continent is compelled to travel a great deal; and to know that his journeying days are his hardest, however inured he may be to resting on restless wheels.