The Wreckers

by Francis Lynde

Notwithstanding the slow run and the near-disaster on Slide Mountain, we had our meeting with the Strathcona mine owners the following morning; and that much of the special train trip served its purpose, anyway. The boss met the miners a good bit more than half-way, and gave them their relief—and the Hatch-owned smelter its knock-out—by promising that our traffic department would make an ore tariff to the independent smelter on the other side of the range low enough to protect the producers.

They tried to give him an ovation for that—the Strathcona men—did give him a banquet luncheon at the Shaft-House Grill, a luxurious club fitted up with rough beams and rafters to make it look like its name. And on account of the banquet it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon before we got away for the return to Portal City.

We had seen nothing of Mr. Van Britt during the day, and until we came to start out I thought maybe he had gone back to Portal City on the regular train. But at the station I saw the pilot engine just ahead of us again, and though I couldn't be quite sure, I thought I caught a glimpse of our athletic little general superintendent on the fireman's box.

The boss was pretty quiet all the way on the run down the mountain to Bauxite, and, for a wonder, he didn't pitch into the work at the desk. Instead, he sat in one of the big wicker chairs facing a rear window, smoking, and apparently absorbed in watching the crooked track of the branch unreel itself and race backward as we slid down the grades.

I could tell pretty well what he was thinking about. For six months he had been working like a horse to pull the Short Line out of the mudhole of contempt and hostility into which a more or less justly aroused public enmity had dumped it; and now, just as he was beginning to get it up over the edge, he had been plainly notified that he was going to be killed if he didn't let go.

On the reverse curves he could see the pilot engine feeling its way down the mountain ahead of us, and I guess that gave him another twinge. It's tough on a man to think that he can't ride over his own railroad without being hedged up and guarded. But the really tough part of it was not so much the mere fact of getting killed. It was the other and sharper fact that, just as the way seemed to be opening out to better things for the Short Line, a mis-set switch or a bullet in the dark would knock the entire hard-built reform experiment into a cocked hat.

There was every reason, now, to hope that the experiment was going to be a success, at least, at our end of it, if it could go on just a little farther. Slowly but surely the new policy was winning its way with the public. Traffic was booming, and almost from the first the Interstate Commerce inspectors had let us alone, just as the police will let a man alone when there is reason to believe that he has taken a brace and is trying his best to walk straight.

Also, for the drastic intrastate regulations—the laws about headlights, and safety devices, and grade crossings, and full crews, and the making of reports to this, that, and the other State official; laws which, if enforced to the letter would have left the railroad management with little to do but to pay the bills; for these something better was to be substituted. We had Governor-elect Burrell's assurance for this. He had met the boss in the lobby of the Bullard the day after the election, and I had heard him say:

"You have kept your promise, Norcross. For the first time in its history, your railroad has let a State campaign take its course without bullying, bribery, or underhanded corruption. You'll get your reward. We are going to have new laws, and a Railroad Commission with authority to act both ways—for the people when it's needed, and for the carriers when they need it. If you can show that the present laws are unjust to your earning powers, you'll get relief and the people of this commonwealth will cheerfully pay the bills."

Past all this, though, and even past the murderous machinations of the disappointed grafters, there was the old sore: the original barrier that no amount of internal reform could break down. There could be no permanent prosperity for the Short Line while its majority stock was controlled by men who cared absolutely nothing for the property as a working factor in the life and activities of the region it served.