Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/329

Rh more noise be accepted. After this we had but little trouble in completing our committee.

The next day at eleven o'clock, we of the committee sat dressed in our best clothes in the anteroom of the president's office, waiting for an answer to our request for an audience. Presently the door of the spacious private office was thrown wide open, and we were requested to enter. Hats in hands, and hearts in mouths, we filed in, I, in virtue of my office as chairman, at the head. Standing in the middle of the room, both hands in his pockets, his feet spread wide apart, and with an extremely fragrant cigar cocked at an angle of forty-five towards his left eye, was a tall, gray, spare man, plainly but expensively dressed, who when we at last got ourselves shuffled into some kind of order before him, ran his eye keenly along our rank and said:

"Well, gentlemen, I understand that you are a committee representing the employees of my road. Which is your chairman?"

I told him that I was the chairman.

"Ah, yes! what is your name, please?"

I told him.

"And your occupation?

"Engineer."

"Yes? very well; now you may introduce your committee, please, giving their names and occupations."

As I called out their names I could see each individual committeeman shrink and shrivel under the keen critical glance of the magnate, who evidently regarded us as imbeciles or freaks, an odd lot to be studied a bit, wheedled into subjection if possible, but under no circumstances to be allowed to interfere with his financial policy.

And the committee! I know that every mother's son of them was cursing the enthusiastic folly that caused him to accept the appointment.

The brief ceremony of introduction over, the president asked, with a cynical smile: "Well, gentlemen, what can I do for you?" I told him our errand, and he asked if we thought we were more competent to manage the property than he was. Remembering that he was the president, I lyingly told him no. I told him that we didn't expect or wish to manage the property, but that we were working harder than we had ever done before, and getting less pay, which we didn't consider just.

He said that circumstances, which we would not be able to understand, had reduced the earning capacity of the road so that it was unable to pay the interest on its bonds and pay the wages we had heretofore received. He said that if the investors didn't get satisfactory returns for