“What about the road you are with?”
“Oh, the road! We are putting it in shape.”
Oakley smiled a trifle skeptically. He recalled that even as a very young man filling a very subordinate position, Curtice had clung to the “we.” Curtice saw the smile and remembered too.
“Now, see here, I'm giving it to you straight. I really am the whole thing. I've got a greenhorn for a boss, whose ignorance of the business is only equalled by his confidence in me. If you want to be nasty you can say his ignorance is responsible for much of his confidence. I've been told that before.”
“Then I'll wait. I may be able to think of something better.”
“There are times when I wonder if he really knows the difference between an engine's head-light and a coupling-pin. He's giving me all the rope I want, and we'll have a great passenger service when I get done. That's what I am working on now.”
“But where are you going to get the funds for it? A good service costs money,” said Dan.
“Oh, the road's always made money. That was the trouble.” Oakley looked dense. He had heard of such things, but they had been outside of his own experience.
“The directors were a superstitious lot; they didn't believe in paying dividends, and as they had to get rid of the money somehow, they put it all out in salaries. The president's idea of the value of his own services would have been exorbitant if the road had been operating five thousand miles of track instead of five hundred. I am told a directors' meeting looked like a family reunion, and they had a most ungodly lot of nephews—nephews were everywhere. The purchasing agent was a nephew, so were two of the division superintendents. Why, the president even had a third cousin of his wife's braking on a way freight. We've kept him as a sort of curiosity, and because he was the only one in the bunch who was earning his pay.”
“No wonder the stockholders went to law,” said Oakley, laughing.