Jane Cable | Page 4

the pathway he has traversed. In the end,
perhaps, he wonders if it has been worth while. David Cable was a
General Manager; he had been a fireman. It had required twenty-five
years of hard work on his part to break through the chrysalis. Packed
away in a chest upstairs in his house there was a grimy, greasy,
unwholesome suit of once-blue overalls. The garments were just as old
as his railroad career, for he had worn them on his first trip with the
shovel. When his wife implored him to throw away the "detestable
things," he said, with characteristic humour, that he thought he would
keep them for a rainy day. It was much simpler to go from General
Manager to fireman than vice versa, and it might be that he would need
the suit again. It pleased him to hear his wife sniff contemptuously.
David Cable had been a wayward, venturesome youth. His father and
mother had built their hopes high with him as a foundation, and he had
proved a decidedly insecure basis; for one night, in the winter of 1863,
he stole away from his home in New York; before spring he was
fighting in the far Southland, a boy of sixteen carrying a musket in the
service of his country.
At the close of the Civil War Private Cable, barely eighteen, returned to
his home only to find that death had destroyed its happiness: his father
had died, leaving his widowed mother a dependant upon him. It was
then, philosophically, he realised that labour alone could win for him;
and he stuck to it with rigid integrity. In turn, he became brakeman and
fireman; finally his determination and faithfulness won him a fireman's
place on one of the fast New York Central "runs." If ever he was
dissatisfied with the work, no one was the wiser.
Railroading in those days was not what it is in these advanced times.
Then, it meant that one was possessed of all the evil habits that fall to
the lot of man. David Cable was more or less contaminated by contact

with his rough, ribald companions of the rail, and he glided moderately
into the bad habits of his kind. He drank and "gamboled" with the rest
of the boys; but by nature not being vicious and low, the influences
were not hopelessly deadening to the better qualities of his character.
To his mother, he was always the strong, good-hearted, manly boy,
better than all the other sons in the world. She believed in him; he
worshipped her; and it was not until he was well up in the twenties that
he stopped to think that she was not the only good woman in the world
who deserved respect.
Up in Albany lived the Widow Coleman and her two pretty daughters.
Mrs. Coleman's husband died on the battlefield, and she, like many
women in the North and the South, after years of moderate prosperity,
was compelled to support herself and her family. She had been a pretty
woman, and one readily could see where her daughters got their
personal attractiveness. Not many doors from the boisterous little
eating-house in which the railroad men snatched their meals as they
went through, the widow opened a book and newsstand. Her home was
on the floor above the stand, and it was there she brought her little girls
to womanhood. Good-looking, harum-scarum Dave Cable saw Frances
Coleman one evening as he dropped in to purchase a newspaper. It was
at the end of June, in 1876, and the country was in the throes of
excitement over the first news of the Custer massacre on the Little Big
Horn River.
Cable was deeply interested, for he had seen Custer fighting at the front
in the sixties. Frances Coleman, the prettiest girl he had ever seen, sold
him the newspaper. After that, he seldom went through Albany without
visiting the little book shop.
Tempestuous, even arrogant in love, Cable, once convinced that he
cared for her, lost no time in claiming her, whether or no. In less than
three months after the Custer massacre they were married.
Defeated rivals unanimously and enviously observed that the
handsomest fireman on the road had conquered the mo&t outrageous
little coquette between New York and Buffalo. As a matter of fact, she
had loved him from the start; the others served as thorns with which
she delightedly pricked his heart into subjection.
The young husband settled down, renounced all of his undesirable
habits and became a new man with such surprising suddenness that his

friends marvelled and--derided. A year of happiness followed. He grew
accustomed to her frivolous ways, overlooked her merry whimsicalities
and gave her the "full length of a free rope," as he called it. He was
contented