Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1883 — THE STATION AGENT. [ARTICLE]

THE STATION AGENT.

His Ways and Manner*—Peculiarities «f the Man at the Junction. Peck’s San, Men who travel a great deal never cease to wonder how it is that the Grossest depot agents that can be found are nearly always located at the junctions, where there is nothing but a depot and a store and a saloon, but such is the ease. A traveler gets to a junction and goes into the depot to find when the next train goes and the ticket-window is dosed. He looks around and finds that the agent is helping io unload freight, or is upon a side-track coupling cars, or is over across the track helping a farmer kill hogs, or has gone to the adjoining town with a team to carry some passengers. Or, if the agent is in the office, he has got more business than the general manager of the road. You speak to him, and ask a question, and his brow corru gates, andhe goes on counting a pile of one-doller bills,and acts as though he thought he had a dim idea that he had been spoken to, but he waits until he gets the money in the safe, and turns the knob, and then he answers you so short that you almost condude to walk to the next station, and then he bustles ent of office and locks the door, and you think he has gone to attend, to some important business upon which depends the fate of the road, and you go out and walk on the platform, and pretty soon you see him helping his wife to ring out clothes, or you see him out in the back yard hanging clothes on the line, or splitting railroad ties for wood. You may be a millionaire, and you may pay your hostler more than the junction agent as a salary, but he looks upon you as a three-card monte man, and locks the stove door for fear you will put in a stick of wood or steal the lining out of the stove. The agent is in his element when a train is a few hours behind, and he sits at the telegraph instrument working as if the work rested on his shoulders. You listen to the constant click of the instrument, and you would give a $lO note to know what is going on over the wires. Oocassionally he will laugh at something the instrument says, and when you think the news of the woYld is coming over the wires and is stored in that massive brain, j the agent turns to a country galoot, who has on n blue drilling roundabout, and his pants in his boots, and who wipes his nose on his mitten and says: “There is going to be a dance at the hop-yard at Johnston Siding to-night, and they want us to come up on No. 4.” Then you realize that the agent all these long hours that you have been watching the varied expressions of his calm mysterious face has been chaffing with the female operator at the next station, and as the country galoot takes a chew of plug tobacco and says he will go and brush up a little and put on a clean shirt before No. 4 comes, and the operator says they will have a daisy time at the dance, you go out on the platform and try to get acquainted with the fellow Who runs the horse-power wood-sawing machine. There is no man who knows more than the junction agent about every thing if you can draw him ou*. Though only four trains a day stop at his station, and they only stop for a minute to let off some poor devil who has got to get off there, the agent is in his element for a brief moment. He addresses the conductor as “Jim,” or “George,” or “Billv,” and asks, with a show of interest as deep as a division superintendent would have, where he passed “No 1,” and if “No. 6” is going to be on time. He may ask something about the railroad stocks, and you imagine that he is bulling the market when the chances are that he hasn’t got sll left from his last month’s salary. If he was polite,and did not seem to own the road, you would like him, but when he snubs you, and treats you as though information was worth more than your ticket, you hate him, and if you should hear there was’talk of promoting him to a station where there were six houses, you would want to prevent it There may be some rule by which the erossest man on the line is given an isolated junction.