§ 234 The Retort Courteous
There was once a boy who grew up in the village of Weeping Willow, Nebraska, with the persisting idea in his head that railroading offered the best career for an ambitious and energetic youth. When he was eighteen his opportunity came. He got a job as helper to the local station agent at forty dollars a month.
Years passed. The youth was a youth no longer; he was nearing his fortieth birthday but still he served the railroad at Weeping Willow. So well and so truly had he served it that, step by step, the management had widened the scope of his duties until now he was the entire resident staff of the great transcontinental system which passed through Weeping Willow. He was station agent, dispatcher, ticket-seller, train-caller, express-agent, baggage-handler, janitor and porter, all rolled into one. As a further mark of the esteem in which it held him and of the confidence it reposed in him, the railroad had never seen fit to reduce his wages by a single penny. He still drew down his forty a month just as regularly as pay-day came around.
Yet there were people in Weeping Willow who could not understand why it was that, holding so many responsible positions and receiving so steady an income, the man sometimes should show signs of broodiness and irritation verging upon outright melancholy. But such was the case. At times his peevishness was most marked.
On a broiling July day he sat in his small cubby-hole of an inner sanctum manipulating the key of his telegraph instrument. It was one of his gloomy days. As he sat with the perspiration coursing down his nose and his black calico sleeve protectors growing damp and soggy upon his wrists, the local Baptist minister, whom he disliked excessively, poked his head through the ticket window and in his best pulpit voice said:
“Brother, what tidings of the noon train?”
Without lifting his head the dripping misanthrope made answer:
“Not a gol darn tiding!” he said.