The daughter saw all of it. Pauline Fields lowered herself into seat one, arranged her skirt, and laid her gloved hand flat on the armrest over Jane's folded tickets without once reading the name printed inside. They went back down the aisle toward the day car with the whole parlor watching. At the end of the car, where the vestibule door let in the cold and the smell of coal, Jane's coat pocket caught on the door handle. Something heavy slid out of it and hit the iron floor plate with a sound like a dropped coin.
A young man crouched and had it before she could bend. He was 19, thin with ink on two fingers, and he wore a leather satchel of way. Bill strapped across his chest because he was the station clerk at Elm Creek and had ridden down to the junction that morning with the freight papers. His name was Marvin Riley. He turned the thing over once on the way up the way anybody would, and what he had in his hand was a man's silver watch worn smooth with an engraving cut into the case.
Elorn and Northern and under that a name. Marvin's thumb lay across the name. He got as far as the first letter of it. Then Jane's hand closed over the watch and took it out of his fingers, not roughly but fast, and she said, "Thank you." and put it away, and something in the way she did it told him not to ask. He said, "Mrs." and touched his cap and went on into the daycar ahead of her.
He thought about it twice more that hour. He was 19. He let it go. Back in the parlor car, Pauline Fields had already forgotten what the woman looked like. She turned a little in seat one so she could speak to Philillip without raising her voice.
And she said the thing she had come up the aisle to say in the first place. We move head over this road before the 15th. She said, "My husband has been asked twice this year whether we would not do better to trail south and load on the Burlington. I have told him no because I have always found this road obliging. She let that sit where he could look at it.
I would like to go on finding it obliging. Philip Craig said yes, Mrs. Fields, and he meant it all the way down. Every man working that line had been told the same thing by somebody above him in one form or another since spring. Keep the fields people happy.
Nobody had ever written it down. It did not need writing. A road with one great shipper on it knows exactly where its bread is. Every breakman and agent and clerk from Grand Island to Aworth understood the arithmetic. If the fields cattle went to the Burlington, the section gangs went home and the shops went dark and 96 miles of the Elhorn and Northern turned into two streaks of rust across the sand hills.
That was the understanding on that road. It had been the understanding for 2 years. Not one man on that train knew it was a lie, including the man who was about to enforce it. At Elm Creek, the train stopped for water and to take on three cars of stock, and Dwight Hopkins came down out of the second car with his coat unbuttoned. Dwight was the division superintendent.