"You'll have to take a club to these hoboes before you can ever hope to
make railroad men out of them," was Gridley's oft-repeated assertion;
and the fact that the master-mechanic was continually urging the warfare
made Lidgerwood delay it.
Just why Gridley's counsel should have produced such a contrary effect,
Lidgerwood could not have explained. The advice was sound, and the man
who gave it was friendly and apparently ingenuous. But prejudices, like
prepossessions, are sometimes as strong as they are inexplicable, and
while Lidgerwood freely accused himself of injustice toward the
master-mechanic, a certain feeling of distrust and repulsion, dating
back to his first impressions of the man, died hard.
Oddly enough, on the other hand, there was a prepossession, quite as
unreasoning, for Hallock. There was absolutely nothing in the chief
clerk to inspire liking, or even common business confidence; on the
contrary, while Hallock attended to his duties and carried out his
superior's instructions with the exactness of an automaton, his attitude
was distinctly antagonistic.
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