"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the General Freight Agent, as he turned away.
Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek face behind his books and snickered. John shot a scowl at Burman and then for a few minutes hunched his shoulders over the documents in the case.
The California Consolidated was being consolidated some more. Two more roads in the big system had just been pitchforked into the jurisdiction of Robert Mitchell, adding twelve hundred additional miles to his responsibility and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder of promotion.
These additions made the California Consolidated competitive with the San Francisco and El Paso lines at hundreds of new stations. John's job was to consolidate the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure that they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing stations. It was an enormous task, and the General Freight Agent had breezily commanded it to be done in ten weeks. That was why Burman snickered. It was also why Hampstead scowled.
Now a freight tariff starts youthfully out to be the most scientific thing in the world, but it ends by being the most utterly unscientific document that ever was put together. The longer a tariff lives, the more depraved it becomes. The S.F. & E.P. tariffs were very old, but not, therefore, honorable.
John turned to the shelf that contained them and scowled again, a double scowl, as black as his blond Viking brows could manage. These were to be his models. They were yellow—a disagreeable color to begin with,—each a half inch thick and larger than a letter page,—abortions, every one of them! They were pea-vine growths like the monster system which issued them, cumbered with the adjustments and easements of the years.
The flour tariff! The hay tariff! The grain tariff! John took these in his hands one by one and glowered at them. The mistakes, the inconsistencies, the clumsiness of thirty sprawling years were in them. And he was asked to duplicate these confusions on his own system.
Should he do it? No; be hanged if he would! He felt big and self-important as he slammed the first of them face down upon his desk and each thereafter in succession upon its fellow, until the pile toppled over, after which, leaving the reckless heap behind him, while Burman snickered again, John stamped out of the room.
"These S.F. & E.P. tariffs are so old they've got whiskers on 'em," he began to say to Mr. Mitchell, "and hairs! And the hair has never been cut nor even combed. They have been tagged and fattened and trimmed and sliced and slewed round till the tariff is issued just to keep up the basis and the tradition, and then you look in something else,—an amendment, or a special, or a 'private special', or sometimes the carbon copy of a letter,—to find out what the rate actually is. Sometimes when I call their office up on the 'phone to get a rate, it takes 'em twenty-four hours to answer, and maybe a week later they notify me the answer was wrong. Our slate is clean; why not simmer the figures down to what is the actual basis instead of the assumed one, and publish the rates as we intend to charge 'em, and as we know they do charge 'em?"
Mitchell had listened with surprise at first to this rash proposal. It sounded youthful and impetuous. But it also sounded sensible. Mitchell hated red tape, and he knew that John's idea was the right one; but tradition was god on the S.F. & E.P. They would fight the innovation and fight it hard; they might win, too, and Mr. Mitchell had no stomach for tilting at windmills. However, it might be a good thing for John, this fight; might make him forget that foolish stage ambition of his; and if he won, might crown him so lustrously that of itself it would save him to a future already assuredly brilliant in the railroad business.