Chapter 15

Her answer was another question, sharp-edged and well thrust home.

"Is it any worse to take a bribe than it is to give one? You have just admitted that you are going to buy the governor's neutrality, you know."

"I don't see it in that light at all."

"The other David Kent would have seen it. He would have said: These men are public criminals. If I can not bring them to justice, I can at least expose them to the scorn of all good men. Therefore I have no right to bargain with them."

Kent was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was to say:

"Why have you done this, Elinor?"

"Because I had to, David. Could I do less?"

"I suppose not. It's in the blood--in your blood and mine. Other folk call it the Puritan virus of over-righteousness, and scoff at it. I don't know: sometimes I think they have the best of the argument."

"I can't believe you are quite sincere when you say that," she asserted.

"Yes, I am. One can not compromise with conscience; that says itself. But I have come to believe latterly that one's conscience may be morbidly acute, or even diseased. I'll admit I've been taking treatment."

"That sounds very dreadful," she rejoined.

"It does, doesn't it? Yet it had to be done. As I intimated a few minutes ago, my life has hitherto been a sort of unostentatious failure. I used to think it was because I was outclassed: I know now it has been because I wouldn't do as other men do. It has been a rather heart-breaking process--to sort out the scruples, admitting the just and overriding the others--but I have been given to see that it is the price of success."

"I want you to succeed," she said.

"Pardon me; I don't think you do. You have reopened the door to doubt, and if I admit the doubt I shall fail."

The sonata Penelope was playing was approaching its finale, and Elinor was suddenly shaken with a trembling fit of fear--the fear of consequences which might involve this man's entire future. She knew Kent was leaning on her, and she saw herself as one who has ruthlessly thrust an iron bar among the wheels of a delicate mechanism. Who was she to be his conscience-keeper--to stand in the way and bid him go back? Were her own motives always so exalted? Had she not once deliberately debated this same question of expediency, to the utter abasement of her own ideals?

Penelope had left the piano, and Loring was looking at his watch. Kent saw them through the open window and got upon his feet.

"Grantham is saying he had no idea it was so late," he hazarded. "If I thank you for what you have said I am afraid it must be as the patient thanks the surgeon for the knife-stroke which leaves him a cripple for life."

It was the one word needed to break her resolution.

"Oh, forget it; please forget it!" she said. "I had no right.... You are doing a man's work in the world, and it must be done in a man's way. If I can not help, you must not let me hinder. If you let anything I have said discourage you, I shall never cease regretting it."

His smile was a mere indrawing of the lips.

"Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you? How like a woman! But I am afraid it can't be done. I had been trying to keep away from that point of view.... There is much to be said on both sides. There was a time when I wouldn't have gone into such a thing as this fight with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of the public welfare--ignoring that side of it. I can't do it now; you have shown me that I can't."

"But I don't want to be a stumbling-block," she insisted. "Won't you believe that I wanted to help?"

"I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes. But the result is the same."

Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at hand.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"I don't know: nothing that I had meant to do. It was a false start and I am back under the wire again."

"But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of going on," she protested.

"Didn't you mean to convince me?"

"No--yes--I don't know. I--it seems very clear to me; but I want it to seem clear to you. Doesn't your conscience tell you that you ought to turn back?"

"No," he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial. "You may be right: I am afraid you are right. But I shall have to fight it out for myself. There are many things to consider. If I hold my hand, these bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent people will suffer loss." Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her eyes: "But you mustn't be sorry for having done what you had to do; you have nothing to reproach yourself for."

"Oh, but I have!" she said; and so they parted.

XXIII

THE INSURRECTIONARIES

When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.

The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism. Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply contested field of competition. To these leaders the rank and file is loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to their successors who inherit and tear down. Add to this the supplanting of competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western service since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order Number One.

At first the fire had burned fitfully, eating its way into the small economies; as when the section hands pelt stray dogs with new spikes from the stock keg, and careless freight crews seed down the right of way with cast-off links and pins; when engineers pour oil where it should be dropped, and firemen feed the stack instead of the steam-dome.

But later, when the incompetence of the new officials became the mocking gibe of the service, and the cut-rate avalanche of traffic had doubled all men's tasks, the flames rose higher, and out of the smoke of them loomed the shape of the dread demon of demoralization.

First it was Hank Brodrick, who misread his orders and piled two freights in a mountain of wreckage in the deep cut between Long Pine and Argenta. Next it was an overworked night man who lost his head and cranked a switch over in front of the west-bound Flyer, laying the 1020 on her side in the ditch, with the postal and the baggage-car neatly telescoped on top to hold her down.

Two days later it was Patsy Callahan; and though he escaped with his life and his job, it was a close call. He was chasing a time freight with the fast mail, and the freight was taking the siding at Delhi to let him pass. One of the red tail-lights of the freight had gone out, and Callahan mistook the other for the target lamp of the second switch. He had time to yell at his fireman, to fling himself upon the throttle-bar and to set the airbrake before he began to turn Irish handsprings down the embankment; but the wrecking crew camped two whole days at Delhi gathering up the debris.

It was well on in the summer, when the two divisions, east and west, were strewn with wreckage and the pit tracks in the shops and shop yard were filled to overflowing with crippled engines, that the insurrectionaries began to gather in their respective labor groups to discuss the growing hazards of railroading on the Trans-Western.

The outcome was a protest from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, addressed to the receiver in the name of the organization, setting forth in plain terms the grievance of the members, and charging it bluntly to bad management. This was followed immediately by similar complaints from the trainmen, the telegraphers, and the firemen; all praying for relief from the incubus of incompetent leadership. Not to be behind these, came the Amalgamated Machinists, demanding an increase of pay for night work and overtime; and last, but not least, an intimation went forth from the Federative Council of all these labor unions hinting at possible political consequences and the alienation of the labor vote if the abuses were not corrected.

"What d'ye calc'late the major will do about it?" said Brodrick, in the roundhouse conclave held daily by the trainmen who were hung up or off duty. "Will he listen to reason and give us a sure-enough railroad man or two at the top?"

"Not in _ein_ t'ousand year," quoth "Dutch" Tischer, Callahan's alternate on the fast mail. "Haf you not de _Arkoos_ been reading? It is bolotics from der beginning to der ent; mit der governor _vorwärts_."

"Then I am tellin' you-all right now there's goin' to be a heap o' trouble," drawled "Pike County" Griggs, the oldest engineer on the line. "The shopmen are b'ilin'; and if the major puts on that blanket cut in wages he's talkin' about----"

"'If'," broke in Callahan, with fine scorn. "'Tis slaping on yer injuries ye are, Misther Griggs. The notice is out; 'twas posted in the shops this day."

"Then that settles it," said Griggs, gloomily. "When does it take hold?"

"The first day av the month to come. An' they're telling me it catches everybody, down to the missinger b'ys in the of'ces."

Griggs got upon his feet, yawning and stretching before he dropped back into his corner of the wooden settle.

"You lissen at me: if that's the fact, I'm tellin' you-all that every wheel on this blame', hoodooed railroad is goin' to stop turnin' at twelve o'clock on the night before that notice takes hold."

An oil-begrimed wiper crawled from under the 1031, spat at the dope-bucket and flung his bunch of waste therein.

"Gur-r-r! Let 'em stop," he rasped. "The dope's bad, and the waste's bad; and the old man has cut out the 'lectrics and put us back on _them_," kicking a small jacket lamp to the bottom of an empty stall. "Give 's a chaw o' yer smokin' plug, Mr. Callahan," and he held out his hand.

Callahan emptied the hot ashes from his black pipe into the open palm.

"'Tis what ye get f'r yer impidunce, an' f'r layin' tongue to ould man Durgan, ye scut. 'Tis none av his doin's--the dhirty oil an' the chape waste an' the jacket lamps. It's ay-conomy, me son; an' the other name f'r that is a rayceiver."

"Is Durgan with us?" asked Brodrick.

"He's wit' himself, as a master-mechanic shu'd be," said Callahan. "So's M'Tosh. But nayther wan n'r t'other av thim'll take a thrain out whin the strike's on. They're both Loring min."

At the mention of Loring's name Griggs looked up from the stick he was whittling.

"No prospects o' the Boston folks getting the road back again, I reckon," he remarked tentatively.

"You should read dose _Arkoos_ newsbapers: den you should know somet'ings alretty, ain'd it?" said Tischer.

Brodrick laughed.

"If you see it in the papers, it's so," he quoted. "What the _Argus_ doesn't say would make a 'nough sight bigger book than what it does. But I've been kind o' watchin' that man Kent. He's been hot after the major, right from the jump. You rec'lect what he said in them Civic League talks o' his: said these politicians had stole the road, hide, hair an' horns."

"I'm onto him," said Callahan. "'Tis a bird he is. Oleson was telling me. The Scandehoovian was thryin' to get him down to Gaston the day they ray-ceivered us. Jarl says he wint a mile a minut', an' the little man never turned a hair."

"Is he here yet; or did he go back to God's country?" asked Engineer Scott, leaning from the cab window of the 1031.

"He's here; and so is Mr. Loring. They're stopping at the Clarendon," said Brodrick.

"Then they haven't quit," drawled Griggs; adding: "I wonder if they have a ghost of a show against the politicals?"

"Has annybody been to see 'em?" asked Callahan.

"There's a notion for you, Scott," said Brodrick. Scott was the presiding officer in the B. of L.E. local. "Get up a committee from the Federative to go and ask Mr. Loring if there's any use in our tryin' to hold on."

The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile vista. Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb, where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the one to the eastward and the other to the west.

"Holy smut!" said the wiper. "See Dicky Dixon comin' out with the Flyer! How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"

It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces. Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.

The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.

"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him----"

There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the "yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city. When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask of grime.

"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."

Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic, waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon at the Camelot Club.

"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.

"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."

"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room to rummage for the smoke offering. "And they give us the major in the place of such a man as that!" with a jerk of his thumb toward the door of the bedroom.

"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 hell, 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 pass 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 assured 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 restitution, 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-pricks 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 space, during which interval he was invisible to his friends and innocuous to his enemies.