A few years ago, two travelling passenger agents, whose lines supplement one another to make a through route across the continent, went down into an Eastern manufacturing city to land business bound west to a national convention of one of the biggest of the fraternal orders. There were other passenger men heading toward that same territory, and the two men from the connecting lines made an offensive and defensive alliance. When they reached this town, they found that the chief officers of the local lodge were two city detectives and a police justice. All three of the city officers showed little enthusiasm about the coming convention. The passenger men took off their coats--figuratively--and pitched in.
For three days, they ran up an expense account that must have all but paralyzed the auditors of their companies, but they accomplished results. After the first day of entertainment, the police justice said that there would be an even dozen of them for the three-thousand-mile run, which was going some. Most passenger men would have rested content on those laurels, but this combination used that first day only to whet their appetites. They started briskly out on the second, a little fagged, but still in fighting trim, and by that night the two detectives united in promising one or two filled Pullmans. The third day saw the two traffic solicitors nearly dead, and the well-seasoned city officials just in fine trim. The trim must have been fine, for that night they completed arrangements for one of the biggest special train movements of that year: two hundred and fifty enthusiastic brethren went three-quarters of the way across the continent and back as a result of the work of these passenger men.
Once a travelling passenger agent went nearly too far in this entertainment business. He got business, miles and miles and miles of it, but he also got drinking far too heavily. One day, when he came into the general offices very much the worse for entertaining, he bumped into no less a man than the president of the road. That president was a strict old soul. He had church connections, and he used to lecture his Sunday School class on the evils of the liquor habit. He decided to make an example of this young whelp of a passenger agent from off the road.