It cannot pay a dividend. It cannot replace ties. And in January, when the stockholders finally meet and the books are read out and the property is worth about a third of what it costs to build, a careful, pleasant, wellspoken general manager with two Omaha men behind him can buy it. Roland closed the safe. He went down to the yard and told them to get an engine and his car hooked on and to run it north as fast as the track would stand.
It took him 3 hours and 10 minutes to come up the line, and Jane Newman spent most of them in the Elm Creek waiting room with Hubert Wade. Rose curled up on the end of a bench with the aers on her chest and a section man's coat over her, and Wade sat with his hat on his knee, and told her about her railroad. He told her the north 20 m had not had a tie changed in two years and he had stopped putting it in his reports because the reports came back with the figures altered. He told her the Ainsworth water tank leaked from May to Frost and they plugged it with oak every spring. He told her he had gone from 11 men on the section to five and that the five were good men and that he could not keep a good man on five men's work forever.
And then he said the thing he had been working himself up to for an hour. Mrs. Newman, we get a letter every quarter says the road is prospering. Jane looked at the floor for a while. Then she said, "Mr.
Wade, what does the printed tariff say a car of steers cost from Ainsworth to the junction?" Wade said, "$31, ma'am. The same as it has been since ' 82." And what does it cost this road to move one? 19 And some sense. What does the fields outfit pay? And Hubert Wade, roadm 61 years old, opened his mouth and found he did not know, and that not knowing it sat him straight up on that bench.
I couldn't tell you, he said slowly. That's the office. No, Jane said. That's the road. She took out the watch then and opened the case and looked at it, and she did not say anything else for a good long while.
Roland Warner arrived at 4 with the sun going red on the water tank. He came up the platform with his hat in his hand and his overcoat open and grief already arranged on his face. For about 11 minutes, he was the most impressive man any of them had ever seen. He took Jane's hand in both of his. He said Clarence's name.
He said he should have come up himself a year ago and that it had been unforgivable of him not to. And it sounded so much like the truth that two people in that waiting room got something in their eyes. Then he sat down on the bench beside her with his hat on his knee and explained gently how it was going to be. He said the road's trouble was that it had one shipper and no margin. He said the fields business was the difference between running and not running.