And by anticipating Roundtree approaches a sort of nth degree of service and receives one of the “fattest” of all the Pullman runs.

George Sylvester is another man of the Roundtree type—­only his run trends to the west from New York instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal.

Sylvester is a porter on the Twentieth Century Limited; and, like Roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character.  He had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man—­a man who was making life hideous for other passengers on Sylvester’s car—­was taken from the train.  The fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter’s job the more difficult.

The Pullman Company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember Sylvester’s force and courage—­and consummate tact—­just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property.

Sylvester prefers to forget that episode.  He likes to think of the nice part of the Century’s runs—­the passengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering.  They are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve.  They are the people who make an excess-fare train a “fat run.”  There are other fat runs, of course:  the Overland, the Olympian, the Congressional—­and of General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional, more in a moment—­fat trains that follow the route of the Century.

It was on one of these, coming east from Cleveland on a snowy night in February last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp Sixth City on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who—­to put the matter lightly—­is a particular traveler.  More than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car.

And the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the Pullman trails.  An unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities.  It was well that every brother in service in the Cleveland district should know the code.  When Mr. X entered his drawing-room—­he never rides elsewhere in the car—­shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill.  X would never ask for these things; but God help the poor porter who forgot them!

So you yourself can imagine the emotions of Whittlesey Warren, porter of the car Thanatopsis, bound east on Number Six on the snowy February night when X came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the Union Depot at Cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake.  Warren recognized his man.  The code took good care as to that.  He followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill.