To Opr.:
Tell Massacree [that was the word that stuck them all, and I could perceive Neighbor was talking emphatically; he had apparently forgotten Bartholomew's last name and was trying to connect with the one he had disremembered the night before]—tell Massacree [repeated Neighbor] that he is al-l-l right. Tell hi-m I give 'im double mileage for to-day all the way through. And to-morrow he gets the 109 to keep.
Neighb-b-or.
Bucks
"I see a good deal of stuff in print about the engineer," said Callahan, dejectedly. "What's the matter with the dispatcher? What's the matter with the man who tells the engineer what to do—and just what to do? How to do it—and exactly how to do it? With the man who sits shut in brick walls and hung in Chinese puzzles, his ear glued to a receiver, and his finger fast to a key, and his eye riveted on a train chart? The man who orders and annuls and stops and starts everything within five hundred miles of him, and holds under his thumb more lives every minute than a brigadier does in a lifetime? For instance," asked Callahan, in his tired way, "what's the matter with Bucks?"
Now, I myself never knew Bucks. He left the West End before I went on. Bucks is second vice-president—which means the boss—of a transcontinental line now, and a very great swell. But no man from the West End who calls on Bucks has to wait for an audience, though bigger men do. They talk of him out there yet. Not of General Superintendent Bucks, which he came to be, nor of General Manager Bucks. On the West End he is just plain Bucks; but Bucks on the West End means a whole lot.
"He saved the company $300,000 that night the Ogalalla train ran away," mused Callahan. Callahan himself is assistant superintendent now.
"Three hundred thousand dollars is a good deal of money, Callahan," I objected.
"Figure it out yourself. To begin with, fifty passengers' lives—that's $5000 apiece, isn't it?" Callahan had a cold-blooded way of figuring a passenger's life from the company standpoint. "It would have killed over fifty passengers if the runaway had ever struck 59. There wouldn't have been enough left of 59 to make a decent funeral. Then the equipment, at least $50,000. But there was a whole lot more than $300,000 in it for Bucks."
"How so?"