Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/61

 most of them do it, and that's the high sign that what I say is right. No, I'm not moralizing, I'm telling a story, you'll see what I mean before I get through. I say Breen wasn't popular. He got the reputation of thinking himself a little above the rank and file of those around him, stuck-up, to put it in cold English, and that's where they did him an injustice. It was the man's nature, unobtrusive, retiring—different from theirs, if you get my point, and they couldn't understand just because it was different. The limitations weren't all up to Breen.

If they had known, or taken the trouble to know, as much about him as they could have known before passing judgment on him, perhaps things might have been a little different; perhaps not, I won't say, for it's pretty generally accepted in railroad law that a dispatcher's slip is a capital offense, and there's no court of appeal, no stay of execution, no anything, and to all intents and purposes he's dead from the moment that slip is made. There have been lots of cases like that, lots of them, and there's no class of men I pity more—a slip, and damned for the rest of their lives! I don't say that because I'm a dispatcher myself. We're only human, aren't we? Mistakes like that, God knows, aren't made intentionally. Sometimes a man is overworked, sometimes queer brain kinks happen to him just as they do to every other man. We're ranked as human in everything but our work. I'm not saying it's not right. In the last analysis I suppose it has to be that way. It's part of the game, and we know the rules when we "sit in." We've no reason to complain,