The Wreckers

Off, Ge

he offices in the headquarters building lately vacated by Mr. Shaffer, and it was something awful to see the way the heads went into the basket. One by one he called t

e brothers-in-law, every last man of them had to walk under the axe. One instance will be enough to show how it went. Van Burgh, great-great-grandnephe

ence did you have before you came to

ngish man with sort of world-tire

for a time after I left Harvard," he drawle

ng have you

ut lawst

operative railroading at the expense of this management on the Pioneer Shor

ed in the face, bu

marked calmly. "I was appointed by President Du

s, whirling his chair back to his de

alled him, Kirgan, who had been our head machinery man on the Midland construction, tumbled i

ur of his pet foremen. Get in the hole and dig to the bottom. You have a lot of soreheads to handle, here and at the division shops, and it i

give me the engines, and I'll keep 'em out of the shop." And with that he went

e ear and never meant to let go. Though it was a time when most men went clean-shaven, he wore a stubby little mustache, closely clipped, and wh

hen, ignoring me as if I hadn't been there: "Graham, what the devil have you got against me,

've too much money. Your office is up at the end of the corridor and your chair is

say of him on the Overland Central that he fired his chief clerk regularly twice a week, and then hired him over again, which was merely a roundabout way of saying that he had a

nd make friends for the company." Then he gave them a little talk on the conditions as he had found them, and told them that he wanted all these conditions reversed. It was a large order, and

The Herald, which was the other morning paper, took up for the down-and-outs, and there wasn't anything too mean for it to say about the boss and his new appointees. Then the employees got bu

oss went at the trainmen's committee. "We are out to make the P. S. L. the best line for service, and the best company to work for, this side of the Missouri River. I want your loyalty; th

r with them when there's a kick coming?" said old Tom McC

d keep open house here in this office every Sunday morning. Any man in the service who thi

file. Mr. Norcross's old pet name of "Hell-and-repeat" had followed him down from Oregon, as it was bound to, but now it b

could see with half an eye that the pay-roll men were taking a brace. Trains were running on better time, there was less slamming and more civility, and at one place

big that the boss had to give me help. Following out his own policy, he let me pick my man, and after I'd had a little talk with Mr. Van Britt, I picked May, the young fellow who had

Mr. Van Britt were steadily winning the rank and file over to something like loyalty on the one hand, and on the other, wherever we went, we found the people who were payi

p over the line I heard a Lesterburg banker tell the boss, flat-footed, that the country at large would n

this region has suffered too long and too bitterly under Wall Street methods to be won over now by a little shoulder-patting in th

is, and offered the banker

oing to show you that I can dig as deep

our New York people won't let you. There is the real nib of the thing, Mr. Norcross. What we need is a railroad line that will stick to its own proper business

the past; we won't try to go behind the returns. But it is not what you have now. From this time on,

e from Hatch and Henckel and their thousand-and-on

nd looked the big banker ge

its policy, as it stands to-day. I can assure you emphatically that the railroad manage

ve broken

asn't been anything to brea

dropped into th

atch crowd," he exclaimed; and then: "Somebody ought to have tipp

anker say: "You don't know what you are up against, Mr. Norcross. That outfit will get you, one way or another, as sure as the dev

ly and saying that he was raised in a gun country, and that the f