When the first rumors about the proposed Yellow Mail reached the mountains Jimmie was running a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a freight "for some fellow without a lick o' sense to use on a limited passenger run," as Jimmie observed bitterly. The rumors about the mail came at first like stray mallards, opening signs of winter, and as the season advanced flew thicker and faster. Washington never was very progressive in the matter of improving the transcontinental service, but once by mistake they put in a postmaster-general down there, who wouldn't take the old song. When the bureau fellows that put their brains up in curl papers told him it couldn't be done he smiled softly, and sent for the managers of the crack lines across the continent, without suspecting how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw's grievance against his master mechanic.
The postmaster-general called the managers of the big lines, and they had a dinner at Chamberlain's, and _they_ told him the same thing. "It has been tried," they said in the old, tired way; "really it can't be done."
"California has been getting the worst of it for years on the mail service," persisted the postmaster-general moderately. "But Californians ought to have the best of it. We don't think anything about putting New York mail in Chicago in twenty hours. It ought to be simple to cut half a day across the continent and give San Francisco her mail a day earlier. Where's the fall down?" he asked, like one refusing no for an answer.
The general managers looked at our representative sympathetically, and coughed cigar smoke his way to hide him.
"West of the Missouri," murmured a Pennsylvania swell, who pulled indifferently at a fifty-cent cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink on the _exposé_, except the general manager who sat at that time for the Rocky Mountains.
The West End representative was unhappily accustomed to facing the finger of scorn on such occasions. It had become with our managers a tradition. There was never a conference of transcontinental lines in which we were not scoffed at as the weak link in the chain of everything--mail, passenger, specials, what not--the trouble was invariably laid at our door.