They followed implicitly; and to that general manager has been finally accorded the credit for bringing an operating department, torn by inefficiencies and by jealousies, into one of the first rank among the railroads of the land. But he admits that he is going out upon side-line; and that particular side-line brings a story to the mind of his chief clerk. When he has us quite aside he tells it to us: "The next to the last time the boss went up the Upper River Division, they got his goat. We halted at the depot up at West Lyndonbrook, to fill the tanks. The boss thinks that he will get out and stir his feet for a minute on the right-of-way. Up comes a villager. 'Are you the general manager of this 'ere road?' he says to the boss. Boss thinks he was some gentle bucolic soul, and he says 'yes,' and offers him a real cigar. But the gentle bucolic doesn't smoke anything cleaner than a pipe, and he just up and says, 'Well, General, here's somethin' fer ye,' and shoves a paper with a big red seal into the boss's hand. "It seems that up in that neck o' woods they get grade crossings removed as a last resort by going to the county court and the paper that the constable served was one for the boss to come down there in a fortnight for a hearing on an order to put a flagman and gates at our crossing in West Lyndonbrook. The boss was mighty mad, and almost discharged the agent for letting that constable hang around the depot. There isn't enough traffic over that line to do more than keep the rust off the rails, and we never had an accident in the sixty odd years that crossing has been in use. And at that the boss might have fallen for a flagman. But the way they rubbed it into him riled him. They might have gone at the thing in a decent way--first sent a committee down to the division superintendent to request that flagman. "He went down on the appointed night to the old Town Hall. Before he got there he started a guessing contest in that smart-aleck burg. The crossing was right 'in the heart of the community,' as they put it themselves, and the big citizens' houses were all within an eighth of a mile of our right-of-way. Three days before the big flight of oratory down at the Town Hall, the boss starts something. They hardly get away from their houses in the morning before there is a bunch of those bright tech-school boys with their rods and sextants and steel tapes measuring lines over the front lawns. And the next thing they were planting bright new stakes in all the flower-beds. There hadn't been so much excitement in West Lyndonbrook since the last time Theodore Roosevelt talked there, and the townfolk hustled down to the depot. The agent didn't ease their minds. The boss wasn't working hand in glove with him.