A twinkle came into the super’s eye.
“You’re wrong,” he said, in the positive tones of a real executive. “This is not the President’s special. This is train number 67 of the B—— main line, and she hasn’t many more rights on the time-card than a gravel limited. Now if you were snitching along on our cracker-jack Nippon Limited—there’s some train, sir. They wouldn’t lay her out. She’s double-extra first-class all the way through to the coast.”
The point of that was not lost.
An instance of a different sort occurred some years ago, when Mr. Roosevelt went up into Northern New York to make a speech. The superintendent of the old Black River road was pretty proud of his stretch of line, and invited the then Governor to ride in his neat inspection engine.
“Dee-lighted,” said he of the gleaming teeth, and he climbed up into the big cab. The superintendent wondered what he’d think of that nifty stretch of track just north of Lewville. Col. Roosevelt never thought. As soon as he was settled in the cab he picked a well-thumbed copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution” out of his pocket and read it every inch of the way from Utica to Watertown. The Republican party had to worry along thereafter without that superintendent’s vote.
All the superintendents cannot become general managers or railroad presidents; there is not room at the top for even a decent proportion of the best of them. The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in whispers.
Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. For years there reigned in Buffalo, in calm command of the situation for a great railroad system, a man who was entitled by every virtue of the word to be called superintendent. They called him “the lion” and did not misuse that word either. He was a lion, guardian of a great railroad gate, a stern old lion whose word and whose law were unquestioned.
But time aged the man, and the day came when the clerks in his outer office began to talk in whispers; they were having the audacity to wonder who the new Prince would be. Two men thought that they were capable—one an assistant superintendent in the great yard at East Buffalo, the other holding similar rank over at Rochester. Each of these men was prepared to assume greater honor, to sit in command at the lion’s great desk.
That old fellow sat aloof. His ears were not too deaf to hear the whisperings of his clerks in the outer office, and sometimes when one of them would creep in upon him unawares they would find him sitting alone there, head in hands, holding the fort. The two assistant superintendents gained courage; they went to the picayune business of pulling wires. At other times they locked horns.