* * * * *
Outside on the terrace Steve Johnston was saying, stuttering in his endeavor to get hastily all the words he needed to express his feelings:—
"It's no use, Jack! I tell you I am sick of the whole business. I know it's big pay,—more than I ever expected to earn in my life. But Alice and I have been poor before, and I guess we can be poor again if it comes to that."
"A man with your obligations has no right to give up such an opportunity."
"Alice is with me; we have talked the thing all through…. No, I may be a jackass, but I can't see it any different. I don't like the business of loading the dice,—that is all. I have stood behind the counter, so to speak, and seen the dice loaded, fifteen years. But I wasn't responsible myself. Now in this new place you offer me I should be IT,—the man who loads…. I have been watching this thing for fifteen years. When I was a rate clerk on the Canada Southern, I could guess how it was,—the little fellows paid the rate as published and the big fellows didn't. Then when I went into the A. and P. I came a step nearer, could watch how it was done—didn't have to guess. Then I went with the Texas and Northern as assistant to the traffic manager, and I loaded the dice—under orders. Now—"
"Now," interrupted Lane, "you'll take your orders from my office."
"I know it,—that's part of the trouble, Jack!" the heavy man blurted out. "You want a safe man out there, you say. I know what that means! I don't want to talk good to you, Jack. But you see things differently from me."…
"All this newspaper gossip and scandal has got on your nerves," Lane said irritably.
"No, it hasn't. And it isn't any fear of being pulled up before the Commission. That doesn't mean anything to me…. No, I have seen it coming ever since I was a clerk at sixty a month. And somehow I felt if it ever got near enough me so that I should have to fix the game—for that's all it amounts to, Jack, and you know it—why, I should have to get out. At last it's got up to me, and so I am getting out!"
The stolid man puffed with the exertion of expressing himself so fully, inadequate as his confused sentences were to describe all that fermenting mass of observation, impression, revulsion, disgust that his experience in the rate-making side of his employment had stored up within him the last fifteen years. Out of it had come a result—a resolve. And it was this that Lane was combating heatedly. It was not merely that he liked Johnston personally and did not want him "to make a fool of himself," as he had expressed it, not altogether because he had made up his mind that the heavy man's qualities were exactly what he needed for this position he had offered him; rather, because the unexpected opposition, Johnston's scruples, irritated him personally. It was a part of the sentimental newspaper clamor, half ignorance, half envy, that he despised. When he had used the words, "womanish hysteria," descriptive of the agitation against the railroads, Steve had protested in the only humorous remark he was ever known to make:—