Mr. Van Burgh, a heavy-faced, youngish man with sort of world-tired eyes, looked at his finger-nails.
"I was in the president's office in New York for a time after I left Harvard," he drawled, a good deal as if the question bored him.
"And how long have you been here?"
"I came out lawst October."
"H'm; only six months' actual experience, eh? I'm sorry, but you can't learn operative railroading at the expense of this management on the Pioneer Short Line. Your resignation, to take effect at once, will be accepted. Good-day."
Van Burgh turned red in the face, but he had his nerve.
"You're an entirely new kind of a brute," he remarked calmly. "I was appointed by President Dunton, and I don't resign until he tells me to."
"Then you're fired!" snapped the boss, whirling his chair back to his desk. And that was all there was to it.
Three days later, when the whole town was talking about the new "Jack, the ripper," as they called him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery man on the Midland construction, tumbled in in answer to a wire. Mr. Norcross slammed him into place ten minutes after he hit the town.
"Your office is across the tracks, Kirgan," he told him. "I've begun the house-cleaning over there by firing your predecessor and three or four of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it isn't all their fault, not by a long shot. I'll give you six months in which to make good as a model superintendent of motive power. Get busy."