Blank tells me he wants a cigar it's my job to remember what he smokes
and to put it before him. I don't ask him what he wants. I anticipate."

And by anticipating Roundtree approaches a sort of _n_th 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