Jane Cable

The General Manager of the Pacific, Lakes & Atlantic Railroad System had had a hard struggle of it. He who begins his career with a shovel in a locomotive cab usually has something of that sort to look back upon. There are no roses along the pathway he has traversed. In the end, perhaps, he wonders if it has been worth while. David Cable was a General Manager; he had been a fireman. It had required twenty-five years of hard work on his part to break through the chrysalis. Packed away in a chest upstairs in his house there was a grimy, greasy, unwholesome suit of once-blue overalls. The garments were just as old as his railroad career, for he had worn them on his first trip with the shovel. When his wife implored him to throw away the "detestable things," he said, with characteristic humour, that he thought he would keep them for a rainy day. It was much simpler to go from General Manager to fireman than vice versa, and it might be that he would need the suit again. It pleased him to hear his wife sniff contemptuously.

David Cable had been a wayward, venturesome youth. His father and mother had built their hopes high with him as a foundation, and he had proved a decidedly insecure basis; for one night, in the winter of 1863, he stole away from his home in New York; before spring he was fighting in the far Southland, a boy of sixteen carrying a musket in the service of his country.

At the close of the Civil War Private Cable, barely eighteen, returned to his home only to find that death had destroyed its happiness: his father had died, leaving his widowed mother a dependant upon him. It was then, philosophically, he realised that labour alone could win for him; and he stuck to it with rigid integrity. In turn, he became brakeman and fireman; finally his determination and faithfulness won him a fireman's place on one of the fast New York Central "runs." If ever he was dissatisfied with the work, no one was the wiser.

Railroading in those days was not what it is in these advanced times. Then, it meant that one was possessed of all the evil habits that fall to the lot of man. David Cable was more or less contaminated by contact with his rough, ribald companions of the rail, and he glided moderately into the bad habits of his kind. He drank and "gamboled" with the rest of the boys; but by nature not being vicious and low, the influences were not hopelessly deadening to the better qualities of his character. To his mother, he was always the strong, good-hearted, manly boy, better than all the other sons in the world. She believed in him; he worshipped her; and it was not until he was well up in the twenties that he stopped to think that she was not the only good woman in the world who deserved respect.