Ralph on the Midnight Flyer: The Wreck at Shadow Valley
9781465667885
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“What do you think, Ralph? Would any of our Great Northern employees be foolish enough to join this wildcat strike?” “Well, what do you think yourself?” asked Ralph Fairbanks, with some impatience in his tone. “You know these roughnecks as well as I do.” The general manager, in whose office at Rockton they were sitting, threw up both hands and fairly snorted his disgust. “I’ve been a long time at the railroad game,” he declared; “but I never yet understood the psychology of a maintenance of way man. No, sir. In some things they are as loyal to the road as I am myself. And then they suddenly go off at a tangent because of something that, for the life of me, I cannot see is important.” “There lies the difficulty—the germ of the whole trouble,” Ralph Fairbanks said thoughtfully. He was a young fellow of attractive personality—good looking, too. The girls had begun to notice the young railroader, and had he not been so thoroughly devoted to his calling—and to the finest mother a fellow ever had—Ralph might have been somewhat spoiled by the admiration accorded him in certain quarters. Just now, however, having been called in from the train dispatchers’ department where he worked, the young fellow’s attention was deeply engaged in the subject the general manager had brought up. Ralph was an extraordinary employee of the Great Northern. His superiors trusted him thoroughly. And having worked his way up from the roundhouse, switch tower, as fireman and engineer, to the train dispatcher’s grade, he was often called upon by the railroad officials for special duties. The general manager stared at the young fellow after his last remark for fully a minute before asking: “What do you mean by that? What is the germ of the whole trouble?” “The fact that the officials cannot see things just as the men see them.” “Oh!” “No getting away from the fact that the laborer seldom looks at a thing as his superior looks at it,” Ralph pursued earnestly. “A rule promulgated by some officer of the road seems to him the simplest way of getting at a needed result. But after it is spread on the board at the roundhouse, for instance, it creates a riot.” “So it does. And I am hanged if I have been able to understand in some cases why the men go off half-cocked over some simple thing.” “Not simple at all to them. It is often a rule that lops off some cherished privilege. It may be something that looks as though it were aimed at the laborer’s independence.”
