Number Four is almost near enough to hear the hissing of her valves but he tells his patrons not to worry—she has a deal of express matter to handle this morning and will tarry two or three minutes at the station. He finds the right ticket forms, clips and pastes them, stamps and punches them, until he has two long green and yellow contracts each calling for the passage of a person from his town to Muskogee. Incidentally he finds time to sell a little sheaf of travelers’ checks and an accident insurance policy in addition to promising to telegraph down to the junction to reserve Pullman space. In six or seven minutes he has completed an important passenger transaction, with rare accuracy. Rare accuracy, did we say? We were mistaken. That sort of accuracy is common among the station agents of America.
When the nervous, hurried, accurate transaction is done you might expect Blinks to rail against the judgment of travelers who wait until the last minute to buy tickets involving a trip over a group of railroads. But that is not the way of Blinks.
“I could have sent them down to the junction on a local ticket and let them get their through tickets there. But I like those tickets on my receipt totals and I’m rather proud of the fact that they’ve made this a coupon station. My rival here on the R—— road has to send down to headquarters for blank tickets and a punch whenever he hears in advance of a party that’s going to make a trip and a clerk down there figures out the rate. We make our own rates and folks know they can get through tickets at short notice.”
That means business and Blinks knows that it means business.
“But he almost had me stumped on that alternative route via Jefferson City,” he laughs. “They catch us up mighty quickly these days if we make mistakes of that sort.”
The Interstate Commerce Law, as we have already seen, is a pretty rigid thing and lest a perfectly virtuous railroad should be accused of making purposeful “mistakes” in quoting the wrong rate, it insists that the agent himself shall pay the difference when he fails to charge the patron the fully established rate for either passenger or freight transportation. In fact it does more. It demands that the agent shall seek out the patron and make him pay the dollars and cents of the error, which is rather nice in theory but difficult in execution. The average citizen does not live in any great fear of the Interstate Commerce Law.
Blinks, being a practical sort of railroader, is willing to tell you of the line as it works today—of the problems and the perplexities that constantly confront him. And occasionally he gives thought to his rival, whose little depot is on the far side of the village.
“Now Fremont is up against it,” he tells you confidentially. “His road is different from ours. We have built up a pretty good reputation for our service. My job is a man’s job but at least I don’t have to apologize for our road. Fremont does. His road is rotten and he knows it. He knows when he sells a man a ticket through to California or even down to New York that the train is going to be a poor one, made up of old equipment, probably late, and certainly overcrowded. And if it’s a shipper Fremont knows that there is a good chance that his car is going to get caught in some one of their inadequate yards and perhaps be held a week on a back siding.
“It keeps Fremont guessing. His business is not more than half of mine and he has to work three times as hard to get it. He catches it from every corner and starves along on a bare eighty dollars a month. And they are not even decent enough to give him anything like this.”
He delves into an inner pocket and pulls out a leather pass wallet. It is a “system annual”—a magic card which permits his wife or himself to travel over all the main lines and side lines of the big road, at their will. He gives it a genuine look of affection before he replaces it.