Just once had Haggerty seen the superintendent. Hale was pointed out to him on the platform at Big Cloud, and Haggerty had ducked hastily back inside his train. Hale was the inoffensive little fellow he had treated with such scant courtesy at the lunch-counter, the insignificant, squint-eye-glassed individual he had hauled from the car platform by the coat collar! When Haggerty’s mingled feelings of perturbation and amazement permitted him any speech at all, it was rather incoherent.
“That—the runt!” he gasped, and subsided into an empty seat.
And in this inelegant, but pithy, summing up of the capacity and dimensions of the new official the division was with him to the last section hand. Him—a railroad man! The Hill Division remembered “Royal” Carleton and was ashamed, and it rankled for the shame that it considered had been put upon it. Out of it all, Haggerty was the only thing of saving grace! So upon Haggerty they loosened, behind the humor, some of their bitterness. Haggerty became the safety valve of the division.
A month had gone by and Hale had lived well up to what his appearance had led them to expect. He might have been an automaton for all the signs of life that emanated from his office. Just routine, the routine business, routine, that was all. The disquiet and unrest that brooded over the division became contempt—the kind of contempt that made the car-tinks put on airs, and in their heart of hearts figure themselves better railroad men than he who sat over them in supreme authority.
Even Haggerty no longer ducked out of sight when circumstances required that he should breathe the same air as his superior. Haggerty had acquired a swagger; also, he now voiced his opinion, his cordially poor opinion, of Mr. Hale without restraint and with no check upon his tongue.
And then Haggerty got a shock. It was imparted by Spence.
“Got it from Hale’s clerk last night,” said the dispatcher. “He’s going to run an inspection special over the division, and he’s picked out the fag end of all things for the crew. He picked you first, Haggerty.”
“Aw, forget it!” growled Haggerty, with a scowl.
“I think there’s something behind it, though,” Spence went on, his voice modulated confidentially. “Between you and me, Haggerty, the inspection trip is a bluff.”
Haggerty pricked up his ears. “How’s that?” he demanded.