The Grafters Part 38

"Come off!" warned M'Tosh; "he'll hear you." And when Loring came back with the cigars there was dry humor in his eye.

"You mustn't let your loyalty to the old guard get you into trouble with the receiver," he cautioned; and they both smiled.

"The trouble hasn't waited for our bringing," said M'Tosh. "That is why we are here. Durgan has soured on his job, and I'm more than sick of mine.

It's h.e.l.l, Mr. Loring. I have been at it twenty years, and I never saw such crazy railroading in any one of them."

"Bad management, you mean?"

"Bad management at the top, and rotten demoralization at the bottom as a natural consequence. We can't be sure of getting a train out of the yards without accident. Dixon is as careful a man as ever stepped on an engine, and he smashed a farmer's wagon and killed the farmer this morning within two train-lengths of the shop junction."

"Drunk?" inquired the ex-manager.

"Never a drop; Dixon's a Prohibitionist, dyed in the wool. But just before he took his train, Halkett had him in the sweat-box, jacking him up for not making his time. He came out red in the face, jumped on his engine, and yanked the Flyer down the yards forty miles an hour."

"And what is your trouble, Durgan?" asked Loring.

"Another side of the same thing. I wrote Major Guilford yesterday, telling him that six pit gangs, all the roundhouse 'emergencies' and two outdoor repair squads couldn't begin to keep the cripples moving; and within a week every one of the labor unions has kicked through its grievance committee. His reply is an order announcing a blanket cut in wages, to go into effect the first of the month. That means a strike and a general tie-up."

Loring shook his head regretfully.

"It hurts me," he admitted. "We had the best-handled piece of railroad in the West, and I give the credit to the men that did the handling. And to have it wrecked by a gang of incompetent salary-grabbers----"

The two left-overs nodded.

"That's just it, Mr. Loring," said M'Tosh. "And we're here to ask you if it's worth while for us to stick to the wreck any longer. Are you folks doing anything?"

"We have been trying all legal means to break the grip of the combination--yes."

"And what are the prospects?" It was the master-mechanic who wanted to know.

"They are not very bright at present, I must confess. We have the entire political ring to fight, and the odds are overwhelming."

"You say you've been trying legal means'," M'Tosh put in. "Can't we down them some other way? I believe you could safely count on the help of every man in the service, barring the politicals."

Loring smiled.

"I don't say we should scruple to use force if there were any way to apply it. But the way doesn't offer."

"I didn't know," said the train-master, rising to close the interview.

"But if the time ever comes, all you or Mr. Kent will have to do will be to pa.s.s the word. Maybe you can think of some way to use the strike. It hasn't been declared yet, but you can bet on it to a dead moral certainty."

It was late in the afternoon of the same day that the Federative Council sent its committee, chairmaned by Engineer Scott, to interview the ex-general manager at his rooms in the Clarendon. Scott acted as spokesman, stating the case with admirable brevity and conciseness, and asking the same question as that propounded by the train-master, to wit, if there were any prospect of a return of the road to its former management.

Loring spoke more hopefully to the committee than he had to Durgan and M'Tosh. There had been a little more time for reflection, and there was the heartening which comes upon the heels of unsolicited help-tenderings, however futile. So he told the men that the stockholders were moving heaven and earth in the effort to recover their property; that until the road should be actually sold under an order from the court, there was always room for hope. The committee might rest a.s.sured that no stone would be left unturned; also that the good will of the rank and file would not be forgotten in the day of rest.i.tution, if that day should ever dawn.

When Loring was through, Engineer Scott did a thing no union man had ever done before: he asked an ex-general manager's advice touching the advisability of a strike.

"I can't say as to that," was the prompt reply. "You know your own business best--what it will cost, and what it may accomplish. But I've been on the other side often enough to be able to tell you why most strikes fail, if you care to know."

A broad grin ran the gamut of the committee.

"Tell us what to do, and we'll do it; Mr. Loring," said Scott, briefly.

"First, then, have a definite object and one that will stand the test of public opinion; in this case we'll say it is the maintenance of the present wage-scale and the removal of incompetent officers and men.

Secondly, make your protest absolutely unanimous to a man. Thirdly, don't give the major time to fortify: keep your own counsels, and don't send in your ultimatum until the final moment. And, lastly, shun violence as you would a temptation of the devil."

"Yon's a man," said Angus Duncan, the member from the Amalgamated Machinists, when the committee was filing out through the hotel corridor.

"Now you're shouting!" said Engineer Scott. "And you might say a man and a brother."

XXIV

INTO THE PRIMITIVE

Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper was little less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only in guarded pin-p.r.i.c.ks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetings of repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornful disappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moral right to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.

He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring; and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the sudden change in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited her gift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowest terms.

"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and she has done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent did not deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you sway too easily."

"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either get down to the dirty level of these highbinders--fight the devil with a brand taken out of his own fire; or----"

"Or what?" she asked.

"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."

"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out and ready to drop into place?"

"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.

"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"

"No."

She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp claws in the kitten-buffetings.

"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this railroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and political friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire to. Have you known this?"

"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.

"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--and climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"

There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful; all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable twirlings of the earth in s.p.a.ce, during which interval he was invisible to his friends and innocuous to his enemies.

On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to some despairing conclusion.