Because it's the third time this season. That got her all the way around. Marvin said it plain, "The way clerks say things with the dates attached, because dates were what he worked in." A woman and two children put back in August for a man who bought cattle. An old fellow from Basset moved out of seat four in September so a land agent could sit by the window. And now this, he said he had gone to the agent both times, and the agent had gone to Dwight Hopkins, and both times word had come back that the matter was settled.
I'll say it out loud if somebody asks me," Marvin said. Jane looked at that boy for a while. 19 Years old, ink on his fingers, a mother in a saudi 2 m up the creek and a place on the road that paid him $40 a month and was the best thing that had ever happened to his family. Don't, she said. Mrs.
Don't, Jane said again. Unless somebody with authority asks you in front of people. Promise me that. Marvin promised. He shifted the satchel when he did it and the flap came open.
For about four seconds, Jay Newman was looking at the top way, bill in the stack, the fields consignment out of Aworth, written out in a clerk's careful hand. Down at the bottom, in the rate column, a number 14. She did not say one word about it. She looked at it the way you look at a thing you already know and have been waiting a long while to see with your own eyes. Then she thanked him for the watch and turned back toward her daughter.
There is something you have to understand about this woman. For a year in a house with nobody in it, Jane Newman had spent her evenings reading her husband's rate book. Not because she meant to run a railroad, because it was his handwriting and it was the only part of him left that was still saying anything. He knew every schedule on that road and every printed tariff in it the way other people know a hymn. Inside the depot office, Dwight Hopkins was at the agent's desk writing a message for the wire.
He was not a wicked man. That is worth saying plainly because wicked men are easy and Dwight was not the easy kind. He was a man who had decided years back that his job was to keep the road running and the big shipper content and the complaints off the general manager's desk, and every year he had gotten a little better at all three. In the second drawer of that desk, there was a black clothbound book with complaints printed on the cover in gold. And in it, in Dwight's hand, there were 11 entries for that year.
Every one of them was mock settled. Unsettled, there was nothing. No interview, no name, no reason, no date of any inquiry because there had not been any inquiry. Dwight had learned that a complaint written down is a complaint that can be asked about later and a complaint marked settled is a complaint that is over. He finished his message.
Passenger disturbance Elm Creek resolved no delay reportable. He handed it to Floyd at the key and went out onto the platform to see about his steers. 5 Minutes. That is all it was. And afterward, people on that platform argued about whether it had even been that long.