"Eventually isn't to-day," said the G. M. stanchly, "and it is on to-day that we are being judged. You gentlemen come here and ask me to place a train in service that is a sure loser; and then you will go down to your office, and when the difference between my net and gross comes to you upon your ticket sheets, you will damn me as being a rank incompetent." "But this one train?" protests the spokesman. "Violates that very principle," replies the general manager. "Not another car that does not pay its way." And as that little group files its way out of the big office, uttering sundry threats about going to the commission, the general manager stretches his leg over his big desk. Under the glass top of that desk is a big map, in colors, of his system--miles and miles and miles of first-class railroad. "They come to me--towns like K---- and tell me of their troubles," he says, "as if I already did not know of them. I've a reconstruction plan for every ten miles of our main-line." His finger traces upon the map to a great division point. "Take Somerset here, and Somerset yard. That is some yard, as the boys say. We have 110 miles of track in it, enough for a good-sized side-line division, and that yardmaster has to be the equal of a superintendent. "You would take a good look at that yard, with its roundhouses and its shops, its gravity-humps and its classification sections, and you would think it big enough to handle every freight car that goes between here and Chicago. It isn't. It isn't really big enough to handle our decent share of that traffic to-day. We're trying to pour the business through it to-day, and are succeeding only by the narrowest measure. It's a weak valve in our biggest artery, and some day it's going to clog. "It won't be five years before Somerset has me throttled again. Five years ago it was as bad. It took us three to four weeks to put a carload of freight through it in winter, and the shippers were howling bloody murder. They got mad enough then to scare our directors and I got separate east-bound and west-bound classifications yards, relief that I'd been fairly down on my knees for, three years at least. I was the goat in that thing. I always am; that's part of the job of general manager.