Early Indian summer burned pleasantly upon Baltimore one morning last week. On the fifth floor of the Standard Oil Building windows were open, street noises drifted into the busy executive offices of Western Maryland Railroad Co. In his private office, President Maxwell Cunningham Byers, 52, leaned back and talked with one of his special representatives, W. Taylor Springer. The railroad was running smoothly. He was satisfied. Western Maryland trains were on schedule over their 875 mi. of track. Engineers, brakemen, switchmen, signalmen were on the job. The road's car-loadings were keeping up at a remarkable rate. During the past dull nine months, gross had dropped only 2%.
Outside the president's office was a large room, filled with clerks, typists. The drone of typewriters was steady. A stenographer stopped and looked at her wristwatch. Noon was less than an hour off.
From the lift stepped Dudley Guy Gray, vice president in charge of traffic. He walked toward the president's office, stopped to say hello to a few clerks. They noticed he was in a good mood, an increasingly rare thing in this slim, purposeful man of 61, who had been in the railroad game since his boyhood, with Western Maryland for 17 years.
Hearing that the vice president had come to see him, President Byers arose. He greeted Mr. Gray at the door, chatted with him for a moment. A few of the clerks looked up and watched. It was well known that there was tension between the vice president and his superior. And everyone knew that neither was a man to give in. President Byers was obviously a fighter. If his appearance did not tell you that at once, his record did. Labor unions had fought him in vain; aggressiveness had marked his long rise from the position of assistant engineer on the Pennsylvania.
As Mr. Gray entered the president's office, Mr. Springer left. The door was closed. The stenographers and clerks did not hear the lock snap shut. But before Mr. Springer reached the lift the sound of angry voices came from the room. Then, in startling succession, came a fusillade of five shots. The outer office froze into silent, motionless attention. Before it was broken there was a round of five more shots, the sound of glass falling.
Charles E. Belt, clerk, was the first man to respond. He leaped to the door. When he couldn't open it, he smashed his fist through the glass. He gasped at what he saw through the tinkling gash. Almost against the door lay the president, bloody, limp, dead. In a corner the vice president was clutching his side, moaning as in an agonizing contortion as he attempted to rise to his feet. The heavy rug was crumpled, a chair was overturned, bullets had ripped the mahogany desk.
Clerk Belt entered the room and bent over the vice president. "Who did the shooting?" he said. Vice President Gray stared at him with pale, fixed eyes. "That is obvious," he said before entering a coma from which he never emerged.
The Case. A prompt verdict that Vice President Gray had shot his superior, then himself, was returned. The road and the two families (both were married, Byers leaves five children, Gray none) stifled further details. And thus was culminated a long, bitter rivalry.