“You listen to me, you rust-jointed disgrace to the throttle!” cried McQueen, stung into retort. “You listen to me! What are you paid for? Mileage, ain’t it? How do you get your mileage? Steam! What makes steam? Coal! D’ye hear? Coal! Coal, and don’t you forget it. Well then, poor coal means poor steam, and poor steam means poor mileage, don’t, it, what?”
Noonan burst into a loud and derisive guffaw.
McQueen glared. “You’re a wild, uneducated, hee-hawing ass!” he choked. “What do you know, anyway? Nothing! But I know! A dollar a day I said, and I say so now. I figured it out. It’s the difference between high grade coal and the muck we burn. It’s the difference between the mileage we make and the mileage we could make in the same time. That totes up one dollar a day. Supposing they wouldn’t let us have any more mileage than they do now, well, we’d do it in better time, and the difference would be ours, wouldn’t it? And time’s money. And that totes up one dollar a day just the same. It’s the same either way—time or mileage. Take your choice!”
“There, Johnny, that’s a good boy, run along and fetch me a bucket of steam,” Noonan scoffed.
With a snort of unutterable contempt, McQueen turned to swing himself into his cab.
“Hold on a minute, Mac,” Noonan cried, afraid that he had overstepped himself. “Don’t get whiffy. I swear, I believe you’re right. Let’s see how you figure it.”
And McQueen, mollified, figured it. Figured it with the stub of a pencil in greasy, scrawling characters on the back of a time order. As to the process by which the conclusion was arrived at, that was something of which Noonan was in profound and utter ignorance. Whether it was right or wrong, he did not know. He never knew—and cared less! Certainly the result was there.
McQueen completed the last figure of his calculation with a flourish. “There!” he cried exultingly. “How about it now, eh?”
Noonan took the paper, wrinkled his brows, pursed his lips, and stared at it with the air of a connoisseur of calculus. “H’m,” said he slowly, “are you dead sure it’s right, Mac?”
“Right!” McQueen fairly yelled, touched in another tender spot. “Right! Confound you, it’s there in black and white, ain’t it? Figures don’t lie, do they? Well, what in thunder’s wrong with you, then?”