The Hoodoo
It was while we were eating breakfast the next morning in the Bullard café—the boss and I—that we got our first news of the Petrolite wreck. The story was red-headlined in the Morning Herald—the Hatch-owned paper—and besides being played up good and strong in the news columns, there was an editorial to back the front-page scream.
At two o'clock in the morning a fast westbound freight had left the track in Petrolite Canyon, and before they could get the flagman out, a delayed eastbound passenger had collided with the ruins. There were no lives lost, but a number of people, including the engineman, the postal clerks and the baggageman on the passenger, were injured.
The editorial, commenting on the wire stuff, was sharply critical of the Short Line management. It hinted broadly that there had been no such thing as discipline on the road since Mr. Shaffer had left it; that the rank and file was running things pretty much as it pleased; and with this there was a dig at general managers who let old and time-tried department heads go to make room for their rich and incompetent college friends—which was meant to be a slap at Mr. Van Britt, our own and only millionaire.
Unhappily, this fault-finding had a good bit to build on, in one way. As I have said, we were having operating troubles to beat the band. With the rank and file apparently doing its level best to help out in the new "public-be-pleased" program, it seemed as if we couldn't worry through a single week without smashing something.
Latterly, even the newspapers that were friendly to the Norcross management were beginning to comment on the epidemic of disasters, and nothing in the world but the boss's policy of taking all the editors into his confidence when they wanted to investigate kept the rising storm of criticism somewhere within bounds.
Mr. Norcross had read the paper before he handed it over to me, and afterward he hurried his breakfast a little. When he reached the office, Mr. Van Britt was waiting for the chief.
"We've got it in the neck once more," he gritted, flashing up his own copy of the Herald. "Did you read that editorial?"
The boss nodded and said: "It's inspired, of course; everything you see in that sheet takes its color from the Red Tower offices."
"I know; but it bites, just the same," was the brittle rejoinder.