Hubert Wade said, "I'll say it." He got up off the bench with his hat in his hand. He said the North 20 m had not had a tie in two years and that the reports he wrote came back altered. He said he had gone from 11 men to five. He said he had been told every quarter that the road was prospering and had believed it because it had never once crossed his mind that a man would deliberately starve a thing he was paid to keep alive. Then he turned around and looked at the general manager and said, "Roland, I've known you 9 years.
Tell him he's wrong, Jane. I'd like to hear him do it." Roland Warner picked up his hat and Dwight Hopkins, who was not a wicked man and who had spent 11 months that year writing the word settled under things, walked into the agent's office. He came back out with a black clothbound book. He put it down on the ticket shelf on top of the car diagram and stepped away from it. That was the end of it.
It did not take another word. The rest happened on a platform in the dark with a held train and a ticking stove, and it went in a particular order because Jane Newman had spent a year learning that order matters. He read the complaints book first, all 11 entries, out loud with the room standing. Then she told Dwight Hopkins that he had buried the lot and that she would have his resignation at Grand Island in the morning. And Dwight said, "Yes, Mrs." and that was all either of them ever said about it.
Then Philip Craig dismissed on the spot and told again in front of everybody exactly what for. Not for the rudeness which was his own to live with for the four words he had written on a company record to make it lawful. Then Marvin Riley who got his satchel back and who was told he was going to Grand Island in November to keep the rate book at $60 and who had to go outside for a minute. Roland Warner she did not touch because she could not and she said so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. He held the paper until January.
What she did was name the date out loud, the 11th. She told the room that the books, the fields contract, and the roadm's original reports would all be on the table when it opened and that every man in that waiting room was welcome to come and stand at the back and listen. Roland Warner went south on his special that night alone. Pauline Fields came across the room before she boarded and stood in front of Jane with her chin up because she was not a woman who apologized. She said she would pay the printed tariff on the November shipment and would put it in writing before she got on the train.
Then she said, "I would have paid $31 from the start. Nobody ever asked me to." Jane said she believed her. Both of those things were true, and neither one of them made the afternoon any better, and the two women understood each other perfectly well for about four seconds, and then never spoke again. And last on the boards, with the section gang and the farmers and the woman in the good bonnet standing around her, Jane Newman said the rules. They were printed and nailed up in every depot on the Elhorn in Northern before the end of the month.
No passenger put out of a seat he has paid for for anybody's business for any reason ever. No child separated from a parent. No complaint marked settled unless the reason is written under it and signed by the man who settled it. And every officer of this road herself first rides the line in the daycar twice a year with his own money in the fair box and his name off the list. Then the train finally went north and it went with seat one and seat two empty.