The Manager of the B. & A.: A Novel

CONSTANCE EMORY and her mother, waiting quietly in their own home, heard the cheers when the noise from Dan's shrieking engine reached the crowd of desperate men on the square....

PERHAPS it showed lack of proper feeling, but Oakley managed to sleep off a good deal of his emotional stress, and when he left his hotel the next morning he was quite himself a...

OAKLEY drew down the top of his desk and left the office. Before locking the door, on which some predecessor had caused the words, “Department of Transportation and Maintenance....

He was on the smooth, round top of a hill-side. At his back were woods and fields, while down in the hollow below him, beyond a middle space that was neither town nor country, h...

THE hot days dragged on. Dan and his father moved down to the shops. Two cots were placed in the pattern-room, where they slept, and where Roger Oakley spent most of his time re...

DAN OAKLEY went to Chicago, intending to see Holloway and resign, but he found that the Huckleberry's vice-president was in New York on business, and no one in his office seemed...

THE first weeks of the strike slipped by without excitement. Harvest time came and went. A rainless August browned the earth and seared the woods with its heat, but nothing happ...

WHEN Roger Oakley appeared on the platform at Buckhom Junction, Durks started violently, while Dan took a quick step forward and placed a warning hand on the old convict's arm....

By four o'clock a long procession of carriages and wagons was rumbling out of town. Those who had come from a distance were going home, but many lingered in the hope that the ex...

LATE one afternoon, as Oakley sat at his desk in the broad streak of yellow light that the sun sent in through the west windows, he heard a step on the narrow board-walk that ra...

THEY were standing on the street corner before the hotel. Oakley had just come up-town from the office. He was full of awkward excuses and apologies, but Mr. Emory cut them short.

“No, it ain't. The men had a meeting last night. It was in the room over Jack Britt's saloon. I've just been talking with a fellow who was there; he told me.”

As he passed up the street he was conscious of an impudent curiosity in the covert glances the idlers on the corners shot at him. With hardly an exception they turned to gaze af...

ROGER OAKLEY carried out his threat to find work for Jeffy. As soon as the outcast was able to leave his bed, he took him down to the car-shops, which were destined to be the sc...

IN the course of the next few days Dan decided that there was no danger of trouble from the hands. Things settled back into their accustomed rut. He was only a little less popul...

He was a portly man of sixty, with a large head and heavy face. His father had been a Vermont farmer, a man of position and means, according to the easy standard of his times. W...

AT Buckhorn Junction, Joe Durks, who combined the duties of telegraph operator with those of baggage-master and ticket-agent, was at his table receiving a message when Dan Oakle...

ANTIOCH had grown indifferent to forest fires, They were of almost annual recurrence, and the town had come to expect them each fall. As the Hon. Jeb Barrows remarked, with chee...

ROGER OAKLEY had gone to work in the car-shops the day following his arrival in Antioch. Dan had sought to dissuade him, but he was stubbornness itself, and the latter realized...

Dippy Ellsworth remembered that when he drove up in his cart on the night of the tragedy to light the street lamp which stood on the corner by the _Herald_ office his horse had...

OAKLEY was alone in the bare general offices of the Huckleberry line-as the Buckhom and Antioch Railroad was commonly called by the public, which it betrayed in the matter of me...

THERE were three people in the kitchen, the principal living room of the Joyce home--Christopher Berry, the undertaker; Jeffy, the local outcast, a wretched ruin of a man; and T...

KERR and Holt were at Buckhom Junction with the pay-car, a decrepit caboose that complained in every wheel as the engine jerked it over the rails. Holt said that its motion was...

THE next morning Oakley saw General Cornish off on the 7.15 train, and then went back to his hotel for breakfast Afterwards, on his way to the office he mailed a check to Ezra H...

ON Thursday the _Herald_ published its report of the trouble at the shops. Oakley had looked forward to the paper's appearance with considerable eagerness. He hoped to glean fro...

He was Ryder's guest for a week, and the _Herald_ recorded his movements with painstaking accuracy and with what its editor secretly considered metropolitan enterprise. The grea...