d Mud" had
given to Worthington a passenger service so bad that no community less
enslaved to a _laissez-faire_ policy would have endured it. Through
trains drifted in anywhere from one to four hours late. Local trains,
drawn by wheezy, tin-pot locomotives of outworn pattern, arrived and
departed with such casualness as to render schedules a joke, and not
infrequently "bogged down" between stations until some antediluvian
engine could be resuscitated and sent out to the rescue. The day coaches
were of the old, dangerous, wooden type. The Pullman service was utterly
unreliable, and the station in which the traveling populace of
Worthington spent much of its time, a draft-ridden barn. Yet Worthington
suffered all this because it was accustomed to it and lacked any means
of making protest vocal.

Then the "Clarion" started in publishing its "Yesterday's Time-Table of
the Midland & Big Muddy R.R. Co." to this general effect:

Day Express Due 10 A.M. Arrived 11.43 A.M. Late 1 hour 43 min.
Noon Local Due 12 A.M. Arrived 2.10 P.M. Late 2 hrs. 10 min.
Sunrise Limited Due 3 P.M. Arrived 3.27 P.M. Late 0 hrs. 27 min.

And so on. From time to time there would appear, underneath, a special
item, of which the following is an example:

"The Eastern States Through Express of the Midland & Big Muddy Railroad
arrived and departed on time yesterday. When asked for an explanation of
this phenomenon, the officials declined to be interviewed."

Against this "persecution," the "Mid and Mud" authorities at first
maintained a sullen silence. The "Clarion" then went into statistics. It
gave the number of passengers arriving and departing on each delayed
train, estimated the value of their time, and constructed tables of the
money value of time lost in this way to the city of Worthington, per
day, per month, and per year. The figures were not the less inspiring of
thought, for being highly amusing.

People began to take an interest. They brought or sent in personal
experiences. A commercial traveler, on the 7.50 train (arriving at
10.01, that day), having lost a big order through missing an
appointment, told the "Clarion" about it. A contractor's agent, gazing
from the windows of the stalled "Limited" out upon "fresh woods and
pastures new" twenty miles short of Worthington, what time he should
have been at a committee meeting of the Council, forfeited a $10,000
contract and rushed violently into "Clarion" print,