Alexander's Gift

The Maverick- 4

"Hello, gentlemen." Monty smiled broadly at the board members around the long table, letting the door snicker closed behind him. The hard-eyed gazes followed him as he made his way nonchalantly to the leather chair at the end of the table reserved for the President of the company.

Their eyes seemed to linger on his plain gray suit whose elbows were beginning to fade, and several of the older men instinctively looked back to their own three-button tailor suits and then up to him again with poorly disguised expressions of disdain. If it hadn't been for his picture in the paper, Monty doubted in amusement they'd have recognized him. He didn't care much for the judgement of a few high-class snobs whose only expertise lay in a piece of paper, so he certainly didn't care to change his suit. He had one suit, and it served its purpose just fine.

"Mr. Vallen, we're glad to finally meet you." The man nearest to him said superficially kindly in a faintly adenoidal voice; a confidently intense-gazed man with greased up black hair and full, petulant lips.

"As am I . . . now, as you all know, I'm not exactly as familiar with the business as I should be, so I'd like to start getting to know how things are working- to take over my responsibilities as soon as possible." He glanced around bright-eyed at the men around the table and noticed their discomfort at his words as they shifted in their seats and furtively glanced at each other in silent dismay.

Finally, the man who spoke earlier cleared his throat and said embarrassedly, "Well, you can get to know things if you'd like, and we would be glad to make things as easy as possible for you to do just that, but you needn't . . . hurry to step into your responsibilities here." Although it was obviously along the lines of what the others were thinking, they didn't seem particularly comfortable with his bluntness.

"And why would that be? Oh! I see. So the President is just more of a . . . ceremonial role."

"Effectively. You do have veto power, of course, but I'm glad we understand each other." The man folded his hands on the table with the silently assured composure of one in authority. It struck Monty as odd that almost everyone else in the room were decades older than both him and the man speaking- the man couldn't have been older than twenty-five, and in this business that was awful young.

Despite the pride that threatened to surface within him, it was no skin off Monty's nose. If he could keep the position and not have to spend all his time filling out crummy paperwork, that was all the better for him.

But still, his curiosity was getting the better of him, and so he wanted to see the rest of the railroad firsthand before doing anything else.

###

The yardmaster's office was quaint and brightly lit from a rusty, cone-shaped lamp that hung from the wood-paneled ceiling. The whole room reminded Monty of a Civil War-era log cabin, with a wood-burning furnace in the center of the room stemming from the ceiling to the floor, and made with a metal so corroded that even the bright light wouldn't flicker off of it. An older man with sunken cheeks and donning a tweed wool cap lounged in a rickety chair beside a worn desk connected to the length of the wall, and behind him hung an assortment of bulletins and patriotic posters. The man didn't rise from the seat- from the looks of him it didn't seem like he could get up by himself- and just asked somewhat puzzledly, for he was accustomed to only dealing with workers, "Can I help you with something, sir?"

          "Yeah, I'd like to see this month's report on revenues and expenditures? My name's Montgomery Vallen." He stood there expectantly with the slightest of smiles and watched as confusion crossed the man's face before it was lit up by recognition. The man jumped to his feet surprisingly spryly, and pulled his cap off his head sheepishly. "Mr. Vallen. I didn't know you were stopping by- I would have prepared a tour for you."