“What’s the trouble, Dan?” he asked.
“It’s just a little more of the same,” breathed the fat one vindictively. “I don’t know what in the devil has got into the trainmen lately; this dog-blasted railroad’s getting so it runs itself! Here’s Seventeen overrunning her orders and trying to make the west end of Tunnel Number Three against the Fast Mail. Nophi says he argued with ’em, but they said they had plenty of time and went on. By grabs! if I was Mr. Maxwell I’d make a sizzlin’ red-hot example of some of these crazy chance-takers!”
Johnson was running his eye down the columns of figures in the time-table.
“I wouldn’t worry till I had to,” he put in. “The Mail’s twenty minutes off her schedule, and that gives Seventeen thirty minutes to make the six miles from Nophi to the tunnel and the mile and a quarter more to take her through to the west end siding. She’ll make it all right.”
“I know. But by Jasher! that ain’t railroading,” insisted Connolly. “Two months ago you wouldn’t find a single train crew on the Short Line that’d take chances stealing sidings this way, and now they’re all doing it. Besides, the tunnel’s all tore up, with that electric-wiring gang working in it, and every crew on the west end knows it.”
As he fumed, the despatcher rattled his key in the call for Junico, the only night station west of the tunnel at which there would be any chance of communicating with the off time eastbound Fast Mail. He knew it was only a chance. If the Mail had made up no more than five of the twenty minutes, it would already have passed Junico.
At the close of the impatient call the circuit broke and Junico “signed in.” Connolly asked his question in clipped abbreviations, and got his answer shot-like. “Number Six passing now.” “Hold Six,” snapped the despatcher hurriedly. For a full minute the sounder was silent. Then it began again. “Chased out quick as I could, but couldn’t catch ’em,” was Junico’s incident-closing reply.
Connolly pounded with a fat fist upon the plate-glass top of his table in impotent wrath.
“There it is!” he gritted. “Now if anything happens to get in the way of them cussed chance-takers on Seventeen, there you are!”
Apparently there was nothing to be done but to await the event and to hope for an auspicious outcome. As Connolly had said, it wasn’t railroading; and yet he knew well enough that on many railroads the stealing of sidings, the crawling up upon meeting-points by train crews hard pressed to make their schedules, is a violation of rules which is constantly winked at, and punished only when trouble ensues.