"I want it to go into the record," said Smith. "The opportunity might not come again."
He turned immediately to the work in hand. There was plenty of it to be done. The great city around about the terminal was on the edge of panic. There was a fuel famine and no promise of relief. New York at last was paying the penalty of her medieval, not to say archaic, system of distribution. At last the war was very real and very close at hand. They were saying that many of the schools would have to close, that there was a possibility the theaters would have to shut down each Monday night. Poor New York! She did not then know that the worst was yet to come!
All this occurred with 300,000 tons of coal upon the Jersey side of the Hudson River opposite the city, while in the midst of a winter of almost unprecedented bitterness an ancient lighterage system struggled with ice hardly less thick than that which once sufficed for a footpath for Henry Ward Beecher from New York to Brooklyn, and could bring less than 30,000 tons of coal a day across the river. Nor was this all--no, not even a reference now to the freight upon the Jersey meadows. Know now that the greater part of that accumulated 300,000 tons of coal was in cars and that production at the mines actually was being slowed down by the delay in the return of these cars.
"Open the Pennsylvania tubes to the coal trains!" shrieked the radicals of Manhattan. "Give us fuel trains and food trains instead of Florida Limiteds! Put them through at the rate of fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty a day, if needful!"
Some of these lost their heads. Smith did not lose his. Neither did he impose any more humiliation upon the head of his great competitor. He does not do business that way. Instead he gave careful heed to the terminal possibilities of the Pennsylvania, the traditional and very real rival of the road he himself headed.
"We may possibly make a freight use of the tubes," he said quietly, "but it will be a moderate use. I shall limit the length of the trains to thirty-six or thirty-seven cars, which really is no train at all. For I do not want to see one of those fifty-ton battle-ship coal gondolas jumping the track in a tube which was not designed for it, and so completely blocking the line. I am going to be in a position to hand the terminal back to the Pennsylvania in quite as good condition as I found it."