The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Donovan chance
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Donovan chance
Author: Francis Lynde
Illustrator: Thomas Fogarty
Release date: December 7, 2024 [eBook #74848]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DONOVAN CHANCE ***
THE DONOVAN CHANCE
[Illustration: “I reckon you can find your way from here”]
THE
DONOVAN CHANCE
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
ILLUSTRATED BY
THOMAS FOGARTY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1920, by The Sprague Pub. Co.
[Illustration: logo]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE BUG AND THE ELEPHANT 1
II IN TOURMALINE CANYON 25
III A BREACH OF DISCIPLINE 51
IV “THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN” 71
V AT TUNNEL NUMBER TWO 93
VI BULL PEAK AND THE CRAWLING SHALE 110
VII THE UNINVITED SPECIAL 130
VIII A FELLOW NAMED JONES 152
IX “GANGWAY!” 173
X THE WINNING GOAL 195
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“I reckon you can find your way from here” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
“What made you run away and go home?” 22
They had a glimpse of the sleeping sentinel stretched
out before the padlocked door 48
For the first few minutes they could do nothing but stare.
It all seemed like magic 62
The timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging out
into the current 90
A minute later the prisoners were hauled out 108
Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his
way out to one of the depressions 122
With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
upon the masterless Pullman 148
THE DONOVAN CHANCE
CHAPTER I
THE BUG AND THE ELEPHANT
Engine 331, the biggest mountain passenger-train puller on the Nevada
Short Line, was a Pacific-type compound, with a bewildering clutter of
machinery underneath that made a wiper’s job a sort of puzzle problem;
the problem being to get the various gadgets clean without knocking
one’s head off too many times against the down-hanging machinery. Larry
Donovan, mopping the last of the gadgets as the shop quitting-time
whistle blew, called it a day’s work, flung down his handful of oily
waste and crawled out of the concrete pit.
Grigg Dunham, fireman of the 246, which was standing next door to the
331, leaned out of his cab window.
“’Lo, Blackface!” he grinned. “Time to go home and eat a bite o’ pie.”
Larry’s return grin showed a mouthful of well-kept teeth startlingly
white in their facial setting of grime. Normally he was what you might
call a strawberry blonde, with lightish red hair that curled and
crinkled discouragingly in spite of a lot of wetting and brushing, and
a skin, where it wasn’t freckled or sunburned, as healthily clear as
a baby’s; but wiping black oil and gudgeon grease from the under parts
of a locomotive would make a blackamoor out of an angel――for the time
being, at least.
“I’m going after that piece of pie as soon as I can wash up,” he told
Dunham; and a minute later he was stripping off his overalls in the
round-house scrub room.
Thanks to a good bath and a change from his working clothes it was an
altogether different looking Larry who presently left the round-house
to go cater-cornering up the yard toward the crossing watchman’s shanty
at Morrison Avenue. One thing his hard-earned High School course――just
now completed――had taught him was to be really chummy with soap and
water, and another was to leave the shop marks behind him when the
quitting whistle blew――as a good many of his fellow workers on the
railroad did not. Big and well-muscled for his age, it was chiefly his
cheerful grin that stamped him as a boy when he looked in upon his
father at the crossing shanty.
“Ready, Dad?” he asked; and the big, mild-eyed crossing watchman, whose
empty left sleeve showed why he was on the railroad “cripple” list,
nodded, took down his coat from its hook on the wall and joined his son
for the walk home.
“Well, Larry, lad, how goes the new job by this time?” John Donovan
asked, after the pair had tramped in comradely silence for a square or
two.
Larry was looking straight ahead of him when he replied:
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Dad; I’m not stuck on it――not a
little bit.”
The crossing watchman shook his big head in mild disapproval.
“You’ve done fine, Larry; pulling yourself through the school by the
night work in the shops. But it’s sorry I am if it’s made you ashamed
of a bit of black oil.”
“It isn’t that; you know it isn’t, Dad. The black oil doesn’t count.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“It’s――er――oh, shucks! I just can’t tell, when you pin me right down to
it. I don’t mind the work or getting dirty, or anything like that; and
I do like to fool around engines and machinery. I guess it’s just what
there is to look forward to that’s worrying me. I’ll be wiping engines
for a few months, and then maybe I’ll get a job firing a switching
engine in the yard. A year or two of that may get me on a road engine;
and if I make good, a few years more’ll move me over to the right-hand
side of the cab.”
“Good enough,” said John Donovan. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing――except that the last boost will be the end of it; you know
it will, Dad. It’s mighty seldom that a locomotive engineer ever gets
to be anything else, no matter how good an engineer he is. Right there
I’ll stop; and I’ve been sort of asking myself if I’m going to be
satisfied to stop.”
Again John Donovan made the sign of disapproval.
“’Tis too many high notions the school’s been putting into your head,
Larry, boy,” he deprecated. “You’d be forgetting that your father was
an engineer before you――till the old ’69 went into the ditch and gave
me this”――moving the stump in the empty sleeve.
“No, I’m not forgetting, Dad; not for a single minute,” Larry broke in
quickly. “You’ve made the best of your chance――and of everything. And I
want to do the same. Maybe I _am_ doing it in the round-house; I can’t
think it out yet. But I mean to think it out. There are Kathie and
Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack; they’ve got to have their chance at
the schools, too, the same as I’ve had mine.”
“And you’ll give it to them, Larry, if I can’t. With even a fireman’s
pay you could help.”
“I know,” said Larry; and at this point the little heart-to-heart talk
slipped back into the comradely silence and stayed there.
Larry ate supper with the family that evening as usual, but he said so
little, and was so evidently preoccupied, that his mother asked him if
he wasn’t feeling well. The talk with his father on the way home had
been his first attempt to put the vague stirrings inside of him into
spoken words, and the natural consequence was that he was trying to
make the stirrings take some sort of definite and tangible shape. Of
course they refused utterly to do anything so reasonable as that――which
is the way that all ambitious stirrings have in their early stages――and
the result was to make him thoughtful and tongue-tied.
So the table chatter went on through the meal without any help from
him, and he found himself listening with only half an ear when his
father told of a perfectly hair-raising escape an automobile full
of people had had on his crossing during the day. Kathryn, who was
fifteen, was the only one besides the mother to notice Larry’s
preoccupation, and when he came down-stairs after supper to go out, she
was waiting at the front door for him.
“What is it, Larry?” she asked. “Did something go twisty with you
to-day?”
“Not a thing in the wide world, Kathie,” he denied, calling up the
good-natured grin and laying an arm in brotherly fashion across her
shoulders.
“But you’re not going back to work to-night?”
“Not me,” he laughed, cheerfully reckless of his grammar now that his
school-days were over. “I’m just going out to walk around the block and
have a think; that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I don’t know; everything, I guess. Don’t you worry about me. I’m
all right.” And to prove it he went off whistling and with his hands in
his pockets.
The after-supper stroll, which was entirely aimless as to its
direction, led him first through the quiet streets of the “railroad
colony.” In its beginnings Brewster had been strictly a railroad town;
but now it had become the thriving metropolis of Timanyoni Park; a city
in miniature, with electric lights and power furnished by the harnessed
river, with some manufacturing, and with an irrigated wheat and
apple-growing country around it to take the place of the cattle ranges
which had preceded the coming of the railroad.
Now, though Larry’s stroll was aimless, as we have said, that is, in
any conscious sense of having a definite destination, there was just
one direction it was almost bound to take. Born and bred in a railroad
atmosphere, it was second nature for him to drift toward the handsome,
lava-stone building which served the double purpose of the Nevada Short
Line’s passenger station and general office headquarters.
The long concreted approach platform running down from the foot of the
main street offered itself as a cab rank for the station; and as Larry
traversed it, still deep in the brown study, General Manager Maxwell’s
smart green roadster cut a half circle in the turning area, whisked
accurately into its parking space between two other cars, and the
fresh-faced young fellow who had played at first base on the Brewster
High School nine in the winning series with Red Butte, climbed out and
hailed the brown-studier.
“Hullo, Curly!” he called, using the school nickname which Larry had
long since come to accept merely because he had never been able to
think up any way of killing it off. “What are you doing down here at
this time o’ night?”
“‘Time o’ night’ happens to be time of the early evening,” Larry
corrected; adding: “One thing I’m not doing is joy-riding in a green
chug-wagon.”
“Tag,” said the general manager’s son good-naturedly. “Neither am I.
Father has a conference of some sort on with the bosses. I don’t know
what’s up, but I suppose it’s all this anarchist talk that’s been going
around and stirring things up. He ’phoned me up home a little while ago
and told me to drive down and wait for him.”
“Anarchist talk?” said Larry; “I haven’t heard any.”
“Oh, it’s just that little bunch of trouble-makers over on the west
end. You remember reading in the papers how they spoiled a lot of work
in the shops and raised Cain generally. The court over in Uintah County
sent three of them to prison last week for sabotage and the others have
threatened to get square with the company for prosecuting them. That’s
all.”
Larry caught step with the former first baseman as they walked on
toward the station building.
“Is this all you’re going to do this vacation, Dick?” he asked; “drive
down to the offices once in a while to take your father home in the
car?”
“Not on your sweet life!” was the laughing reply. “What I’m going to
do is tied up in a sort of secret, but I guess it’ll be all right to
tell you. The company is going to build a road up the Tourmaline to
the Little Ophir gold field, and――this is the secret part of it――we’re
going to try to beat the Overland Central to it. I’m to go out with
the surveying party, or rather the construction party, as a sort of
roustabout, chain-bearer――anything you like to call it.”
The difference between Dick Maxwell’s prospects and his own gave Larry
Donovan the feeling of having been suddenly wrapped in a wet blanket.
In a flash he saw a panorama picture of Dick’s summer; the free,
adventurous life in the mountain wilds, the long days crammed full of
the most interesting kind of work, the camp fire at night in the heart
of the immensities, and, more than all, the chance to be helping to
do something that was really adding to the sum of the world’s riches.
Wiping grease from tired machinery wasn’t to be spoken of in the same
day with it. Yet Larry was game; he wouldn’t share the wet blanket with
the lucky one.
“That’s simply bully!” he said; “first lessons in engineering, eh?”
“Y-yes; maybe: but it ought to be you, Larry, instead of me. You’ve got
the head for it, and the math., and all the rest of it. Have you gone
to work in the round-house as you said you were going to?”
“Yep,” said Larry, and he tried to say it as a workingman would have
said it. “I had to make up my mind one way or the other. It was either
the round-house or an apprenticeship in the back shop.”
“Wouldn’t the apprenticeship have been better?”
“Nope; nothing at the end of that alley but maybe a foreman’s job.”
“And maybe a master-mechanic’s,” Dick Maxwell put in.
“Not much!” Larry scoffed. “Might have put that sort of stuff over in
our grandfather’s days――they _did_ put it over then. But you can’t do
it now. Look at our own superintendent of Motive Power――Mr. Dawson;
he’s a college man――has to be; and so is every single one of the
division master-mechanics. It’s all very well to talk about climbing up
through the ranks, Dick, and I guess now and then a fellow does do it
by working his head off. But it’s the education that counts.”
“I guess that’s so, too,” was the half reluctant reply. “But how about
the ‘promosh’ from where you are now in the round-house, Larry?”
“From where I am now I can count on getting an engine to run some day,
if I’ll be good――and if I live long enough. That’s a step higher than a
shop foremanship――at least, in wages.”
By this time they had passed through the station archway that ran
through the first story of the railroad building and were out upon the
broad, five-track train platform.
“Let’s tramp a bit,” said Dick. “They’re still drilling over that
conference in the trainmaster’s office and goodness only knows when
they’ll be through.”
The tramping turned itself into a sort of sentry-go up and down the
long platform; and to go with it there was a lot of talk about things
as they are, and things as they ought to be. Since he couldn’t talk
freely at home――at least to anybody but Kathryn, and she, after all was
said, was only a girl――Larry opened his mind to the fellow with whom,
among all his late classmates, he had been most chummy.
“I don’t know; it looks as if a fellow never does know, until it’s
everlastingly too late, Dick; but I shouldn’t wonder if I’m not taking
that ‘line of the least resistance’ that Professor Higgins used to be
always talking about. I guess I could make out to go to college this
fall and grind my way through somehow, even without much money; in fact
I’m sure I could if I should set my head on it. But then there are the
home folks. Dad’s got about all he can carry, and then some; and Kathie
and the others are needing their boost for the schooling――they’ve got
to have it. I’ll leave it to you, Dick: has a fellow in my fix any
right to drop out for four solid years――just when the money he can earn
is needed most?”
It was too deep a question for Dickie Maxwell and he confessed it. What
he didn’t realize was that it was made a lot deeper for him because
he had never known how much brain or brawn, or both, it takes to roll
up the slow, cart-wheel dollars in this world. He hadn’t had to know,
because his father, in addition to being the railroad company’s general
manager, was half-owner in one of the best-paying gold mines in the
near-by Topaz range. True, Mr. Richard Maxwell was democratic enough
to put his son into an engineering party for the summer, but that
didn’t mean that the wages that Dick might earn――or the wages he might
get without specially earning them――would make any real difference to
anybody.
As the two boys tramped up and down the platform and talked, the stir
around them gradually increased. Train gates and grilles were as yet
unknown in Brewster, and intending travelers, with their tickets bought
and their baggage checked, were free to wander out upon the platform to
wait for their train――which they mostly did.
Dick Maxwell held his wrist watch up to the light of one of the
masthead electrics. The “Flying Pigeon” from the west was almost due;
but Number Eleven, the time freight from the east, had not yet pulled
in, as they could see by looking up through the freight yard starred
with its staring red, yellow and green switch lights.
“Eleven is going to miss making her time-card ‘meet’ here with the
‘Pigeon’ if she doesn’t watch out,” said the general manager’s son, who
knew train schedules and movements on the Short Line much better than
he did some other and――for him, at least――more necessary things.
“That will just about break Buck Dickinson’s heart,” Larry predicted.
“Only day before yesterday I heard him bragging that since they gave
him the big new 356 Consolidated he hadn’t missed a ‘meet’ in over two
months.”
Again Dick looked at his watch.
“If the ‘Pigeon’s’ on time he has only thirteen minutes left,” he
announced; and then: “Hullo!――what’s that?”
“That” was a small white spot-light coming down through the freight
yard from the east. It was too little for an engine headlight――and too
near the ground level. Somewhere up among the yard tracks it stopped;
the switch lamp just ahead of it flicked from yellow to red; the little
headlight moved on a few yards; and then the switch signal flicked back
to yellow.
Larry Donovan laughed.
“I ought to know what that thing is, if you don’t,” he offered. “It’s
Mr. Roadmaster Browder’s gasoline inspection car――‘The Bug,’ as they
call it. _I’d_ say he was taking chances; coming in that way just ahead
of a time freight.”
“A miss is as good as a mile,” Dick countered. “He’s in, and
side-tracked and out of the way, and that’s all he needed. There goes
his light――out.”
As he spoke the little spot-light blinked out, and as the two boys
turned to walk in the opposite direction an engine headlight appeared
at the western end of things, coming up the other yard from the
round-house skip. Since Brewster was a locomotive division station, all
trains changed engines, and the boys knew that this upcoming headlight
was carried by the “Flying Pigeon’s” relief; the engine that would take
the fast train up Timanyoni Canyon and on across the Red Desert.
Half a minute later the big passenger flyer trundled up over the
outside passing-track with a single man――the hostler――in the cab. At
the converging switches just west of the station platform the engine’s
course was reversed and it came backing slowly in on the short station
spur or stub-track to come to a stop within a few yards of where Larry
and the general manager’s son were standing.
“The 331,” said Larry, reading the number. “She ought to run pretty
good to-night. I put in most of the afternoon cleaning her up and
packing her axle-boxes.”
Dick Maxwell didn’t reply. Being a practical manager’s son, he was
already beginning to acquire a bit of the managerial point of view.
What he was looking at was the spectacle of Jorkins, the hostler,
hooking the 331’s reversing lever up to the center notch, and then
dropping out of the engine’s gangway to disappear in the darkness.
“That’s a mighty reckless thing to do, and it’s dead against the
rules,” Dick said; “to leave a road engine steamed up and standing that
way with nobody on it!”
“Atkins and his fireman will be here in a minute,” Larry hazarded.
“And, anyway, nothing could happen. She’s hooked up on the center, and
even if the throttle should fly open she couldn’t start.”
“Just the same, a steamed-up engine oughtn’t to be left alone,” Dick
insisted. “There’s always a chance that something might happen.”
Now in the case of the temporarily abandoned 331 something did happen;
several very shocking somethings, in fact; and they came so closely
crowding together that there was scarcely room to catch a breath
between them.
First, a long-drawn-out whistle blast announced the approach of the
“Flying Pigeon” from the west. Next, the waiting passengers began to
bunch themselves along the inbound track. Dickie Maxwell, managerial
again, was growling out something about the crying necessity for
station gates and a fence to keep people from running wild all over the
platform when Larry grabbed him suddenly, exclaiming, “Who is that――on
the ’Thirty-one?”
What they saw was a small, roughly dressed man, a stranger, with a
bullet-shaped head two-thirds covered by a cap drawn down to his ears,
snapping himself up to the driver’s step in the cab of the 331. In a
flash he had thrown the reversing lever into the forward motion and
was tugging at the throttle-lever. A short car-length away down the
platform, fat, round-faced Jerry Atkins and his fireman were coming
up to take their engine for the night’s run to Copah. They were not
hurrying. The “Flying Pigeon” was just then clanking in over the
western switches, and the incoming engine must be cut off and taken
out of the way before they could run the 331 out and back it in to a
coupling with the train. And since the two enginemen were coming up
from behind, the high, coal-filled tender kept them from seeing what
was going on in the 331’s cab.
But the two boys could see, and what they saw paralyzed them, just for
the moment. The bullet-headed stranger was inching the throttle-valve
open, and with a shuddering blast from the short stack the wheels of
331 began to turn. An instant later it was lumbering out around the
curving stub-track and as it lurched ahead, somebody, invisible in the
darkness, set the switch to connect the spur-track with the main line.
Dick Maxwell gasped.
“Who is that man at the throttle?” he demanded; but before there could
be any answer they both saw the man hurl himself out of the right-hand
gangway of the moving machine, to alight running, and to vanish in the
nearest shadows. Then they knew.
“The anarchists!――they’re going to wreck her!” yelled Larry. “Come
on!” and then they both did just what anybody might have done under
the stinging slap of the first impulse, and knowing that a horrifying
collision of the runaway with the over-due fast freight couldn’t be
more than a few short minutes ahead: they started out to chase a
full-grown locomotive, under steam and abandoned, afoot!
It was the fact that the 331 was a “compound” that made it seem at
first as though they might be able to catch her. Compound engines are
the kind designed to take the exhaust steam from one pair of cylinders,
using it over again in the second pair. But to get the maximum power
for starting a heavy train there is a mechanism which can be set to
admit the “live” steam from the boiler into both pairs of cylinders;
and the 331 was set that way when the wrecker opened the throttle. As a
consequence the big passenger puller was choking itself with too much
power, and so was gaining headway rather slowly.
“He’s left her ‘simpled’――we can catch her!” Larry burst out as they
raced over the cross-ties in the wake of the runaway. “We――we’ve _got_
to catch her! _Sh-she’ll hit the time freight!_”
It was all perfectly foolish, of course; but perfectly human. If they
could have taken time to think――only there wasn’t any time――they would
have run in exactly the opposite direction; back to the despatcher’s
office where a quick wire alarm call to the “yard limits” operator out
beyond the eastern end of the freight yard might have set things in
motion to shunt the wild engine into a siding, and to display danger
signals for the incoming freight train.
But nobody ever thinks of everything all at once; and to Larry and his
running mate the one thing bitingly needful seemed to be to overtake
that lumbering Pacific-type before it could get clear away and bring
the world to an end.
They were not more than half-way up through the deserted freight yard
before they both realized that even well-trained, base-running legs and
wind were not good enough. Dick Maxwell was the first to cave in.
“W-we can’t do it!” he gurgled――“she’s gone!”
It was at this crisis that Larry Donovan had his inspiration; found
himself grappling breathlessly with that precious quality which makes
the smashed fighter get up and dash the sweat out of his eyes and
fight again. The inspiration came at the sight of the roadmaster’s
transformed hand-car which had been fitted with a gasoline drive,
standing on the siding where its late users had left it.
“The Bug――Browder’s motor car!” he gasped, leading a swerving dart
aside toward the new hope. “Help me push it out to the switch――quick!”
They flung themselves against the light platform car, heaved, shoved,
got it in motion, and ran it swiftly to the junction of the siding with
the main track. Here, tugging and lifting a corner at a time (they
had no key with which to unlock the switch, of course,) they got it
over upon the proper pair of rails. Another shove started the little
pop-popping motor and they were off, with Larry, who as a night helper
in the shops the winter before had worked on the job of transforming
the hand-car and installing the engine in it, at the controls.
By the time all this was done the runaway had passed the “yard limits”
signal tower and was disappearing around the first curve in the track
beyond. Neither of the boys knew anything about the speed possibilities
in the “Bug,” but they soon found that it could run like a scared
jack rabbit. Recklessly Larry depressed the lever of the accelerator,
trusting to the lightness of the car to keep it from jumping as it
squealed around the curves, and at the first mile-post they could see
that they were gaining upon the wild engine, which was still choking
itself with too much power.
“Another mile and we’ll get there!” Dick Maxwell shouted――he had to
shout to make himself heard above the rattle and scream of the flying
wheels; “another mile, if that freight’ll only――――”
There was a good reason why he didn’t finish whatever it was that he
was going to say. The two racing machines, the beetle and the elephant,
had just flicked around a curve to a long straight-away, and up ahead,
partly hidden by the thick wooding of another curve, they both saw the
reflection from the beam of a westbound headlight. The time freight was
coming.
It was small wonder that Dickie Maxwell lost his nerve for just one
flickering instant.
“Stop her, Larry――stop her!” he yelled. “If we keep on, the smash’ll
catch us, too!”
But Larry Donovan was grimly hanging on to that priceless gift so
lately discovered; namely, the gift which enables a fellow to hang on.
“No!” he yelled back. “We’ve got to stop that runaway. Clamp onto
something――I’m giving her all she’s got!”
It was all over――that is, the racing part of it was――in another
half-minute. As the gap was closing between the big fugitive and its
tiny pursuer, Larry shouted his directions to Dick.
“Listen to me, Dick: there’s no use in two of us taking the chance
of a head-ender with Eleven. When we touch I’m going to climb the
’Thirty-one. As I jump, you shut off and reverse and get back out of
the way, quick! Do you hear?”
The Brewster High School ex-first-baseman heard, but he had a firm grip
on his nerve, now, and had no notion of heeding.
“I won’t!” he shouted back. “Think I’m going to let you hog all the
risk? Not if I know it!”
Circumstances, and the quick wit of one Larry Donovan, cut the
protest――and the double risk――as the poor dog’s tail was cut off;
close up under the ears. As the motorized hand-car surged up under the
“goose-neck” coupling buffer on the rear of the 331’s tender, Larry
did two separate and distinct things at the same instant, so to speak;
snapped the motor car’s magneto spark off and so killed it, and leaped
for a climbing hold on the goose-neck.
With his hold made good he permitted himself a single backward glance.
True to form, the Bug, with its power cut off, was fading rapidly out
of the zone of danger. Larry gathered himself with a grip on the edge
of the tender flare, heaved, scrambled, hurled himself over the heaped
coal and into the big compound’s cab and grabbed for the throttle and
the brake-cock handle.
There wasn’t any too much time. After he had shut off the steam and was
applying the air-brakes with one hand and holding the screaming whistle
open with the other, the headlight of the fast freight swung around the
curve less than a quarter of a mile away. As you would imagine, there
was also some pretty swift work done in the cab of the freight engine
when Engineer Dickinson saw a headlight confronting him on the single
track and heard the shrill scream of the 331’s whistle.
Luckily, the freight happened to be a rather light train that
night――light, that is, as modern, half-mile-long freight trains go――and
the trundling flats, boxes, gondolas and tank-cars, grinding fire
under every clamped wheel, were brought to a stand while there was
yet room enough, say, to swing a cat between the two opposed engines.
Explanations, such as they were, followed hastily; and the freight crew
promptly took charge of the situation. The Bug was brought up, lifted
off the rails, carried around, and coupled in to be towed instead of
pushed; and then Dickinson’s fireman was detailed to run the 331 back
to Brewster, with the freight following at a safe interval.
Larry and Dick Maxwell rode back in the cab of 331, Larry doing what
little coal shoveling was needed on the short run. When the big
Pacific-type, towing the transformed hand-car, backed through the
freight yard and edged its way down to the passenger platform, there
was an excited crowd waiting for it, as there was bound to be. News of
the bold attempt at criminal sabotage had spread like wildfire, and the
two criminals――the one who had started the locomotive, and the other
who had set the outlet switch for it――had both been caught before they
could escape.
Larry Donovan, dropping his shovel, saw the crowd on the station
platform and knew exactly what it meant; or rather, exactly what was
going to happen to him and Dick when they should face it. Like most
normal young fellows he had his own special streak of timidity, and it
came to the fore with a bound when he saw that milling platform throng.
With a sudden conviction that it would be much easier to face loaded
cannon than those people who were waiting to yell themselves hoarse
over him and Dickie Maxwell, he slid quickly out of the left-hand
gangway before the 331 came to a full stop, whisked out of sight around
an empty passenger-car standing on the next track, and was gone.
It was still only in the shank of the evening when he reached home. A
glance through the window showed him the family still grouped around
the lamp in the sitting-room. Making as little noise as possible he
let himself into the hall and stole quietly up-stairs to his room. Now
that the adventure was over there were queer little shakes and thrills
coming on to let him know how fiercely he had been keyed up in the
crisis.
After a bit he concluded he might as well go to bed and sleep some of
the shakiness off; and he already had one shoe untied when somebody
tapped softly on his door.
“It’s only me――Kathie,” said a voice, and he got up to let her in. One
glance at the sort of shocked surprise in his sister’s pretty eyes made
him fear the worst.
“Mr. Maxwell has just sent word for you to come to his office, right
away,” was the message that was handed in; and Larry sat on the edge of
his bed and held his head in his hands, and said, “Oh, _gee_!”
“What have you been doing to have the general manager send for you at
this time of night?” Kathie wanted to know. The question was put gently,
as from one ready either to sympathize or congratulate――whichever might
be needed.
“You’ll probably read all about it in the _Herald_ to-morrow,” said
Larry, gruffly; and with that he tied his shoe string and found his cap
and went to obey the summons.
It is hardly putting it too strongly to say that Larry Donovan found
the six city squares intervening between home and the headquarters
building a rather rocky road to travel as he made his third trip over
the same ground in a single evening. The timidity streak was having
things all its own way now, and he thought, and said, he’d rather be
shot than to have to face what he supposed he was in for――namely, the
plaudits of a lot of people who would insist upon making a fuss over a
thing that was as much a bit of good luck as anything else.
But, as often happens, if you’ve noticed it, the anticipation
proved to be much worse than the reality. Reaching the railroad
headquarters-station building he found that the “Flying Pigeon” had
long since gone on its way eastward, the crowd had dispersed, and there
was nobody at all in the upper corridor of the building when he passed
through it on his way to the general manager’s suite of rooms at the
far end.
Still more happily, after he had rather diffidently let himself
in through the ante-room, he found only the square-shouldered,
grave-faced general manager sitting alone at the great desk between the
windows. There was a curt nod for a greeting; the nod indicating an
empty chair at the desk end. Larry sat on the edge of the chair with
his cap in his hands, and the interview began abruptly.
“You are John Donovan’s son, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“H’m; so you’re the fellow who was with my Dick. What made you run away
and go home after you got back with the 331?”
[Illustration: “What made you run away and go home?”]
Larry grinned because he couldn’t help it, though it was a sort of
_lesé majesté_ to grin in the presence of the general manager.
“I――I guess it was because I was afraid of the crowd,” he confessed.
“Modest?――or just bashful?”
“J-just scared, I guess.”
The barest shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the general
manager’s shrewd gray eyes.
“I don’t know as I blame you so much for that,” he commented. Then:
“Dick tells me that you are wiping engines in the round-house. Did you
pick out that job for yourself?”
“N-not exactly,” Larry managed to stammer. “I was through school and
had to go to work at something. I guess I just took the first thing I
could find.”
“Well, do you like it? Is it what you want to do?”
Larry somehow found his courage returning.
“No, sir; it isn’t,” he said baldly.
“Why isn’t it?”
Stumblingly and most awkwardly, as it seemed to him when he recalled
it afterward, Larry blurted out some of his half-formed ambitions, and
the conditions which were handcuffing them; the desire to get on in the
world without knowing just how it was to be accomplished.
“If Dad hadn’t been crippled,” he finished; “if he could have gone
on getting an engineer’s pay, things would be different. But as it
is――well, I guess you can see how it is, Mr. Maxwell. I’m the oldest.”
The general manager heard him through without breaking in, and at
the end of the story he was looking aside out of one of the darkened
windows.
“You may not realize it,” he said, without looking around, “but you did
a mighty brave thing to-night, boy. Dick has told me all about it; how
it was your idea to take the roadmaster’s gasoline inspection car for
the chase; how you kept on when he would have given up; how you drove
him back at the last and wouldn’t let him share the risk which you took
alone.”
Larry felt that this was too much. He had time for the sober second
thought now, and he saw how all of the danger might have been avoided.
“I’m sort of ashamed of myself, Mr. Maxwell,” he said sheepishly. “The
’Thirty-one wasn’t going very fast; she was ‘simpled’ and was choking
herself. If, instead of chasing her, we had run up to the despatcher’s
office, they could have caught her all right at ‘yard limits’.”
“That doesn’t cut any figure,” was the sober reply. “The main thing
is that you did what you set out to do――stopped that runaway engine.
Results are what count. You didn’t think of the easy thing to do, but
you did think of something that worked. For that the company is
indebted to you. How should you like to have the debt paid?”
“We didn’t do it for pay,” Larry protested.
“I know that,”――curtly. “Just the same, you have earned the pay. What
would you like? Don’t be bashful twice in the same evening.”
Thus adjured, Larry took his courage in both hands and gripped it so
hard that if it had had a voice it must have yelled aloud.
“I――I’d like to have a job this summer where I could earn enough money
to count for something at home, and where I could have a chance to
learn something and get ahead.”
Again the grave-eyed “big boss” was looking out of the darkened window.
“Tell me just what the job would be――if you could have your choice,” he
said quietly.
For one flitting instant Larry thought of the engineering party that
was going to the Tourmaline, and what a perfectly rip-roaring good time
he could have with Dick if he should be along; but so he dismissed that
picture before it should get too strong a hold.
“I guess I’m not picking and choosing much,” he made shift to say.
“I’ll do anything you tell me to, Mr. Maxwell.”
“But that wouldn’t be paying the company’s debt. If you’ve got it
in you to make good, you shall have the kind of job to give you the
opportunity,” said the general manager, adding: “That is, of course, if
your father approves.”
Larry leaned forward anxiously.
“Would it be――would it be to go on wiping engines?” he made bold to
ask, rather breathlessly.
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there was just a hint of a twinkle
in the grave gray eyes to go with Mr. Maxwell’s reply.
“That wouldn’t be much of a reward――to make you foreman of
engine-wipers: you’d probably earn that for yourself in course of
time. I said you might have the kind of job you wanted most. Dick
has been telling me of your talk just before the 331 was stolen.
Next Monday morning you and he will both go out with the Tourmaline
Canyon construction force――to do whatever Mr. Ackerman, the chief
of construction, may want you to do; always providing your father
approves. Your pay will be something better than you are at present
getting in the round-house. That’s all; run along, now, and talk it
over with your father and mother.”
And Larry ran, treading upon air for the space of six city squares.
For now, you see, he had been given his chance――which was all that a
Donovan could ask.
CHAPTER II
IN TOURMALINE CANYON
Timanyoni Park, ringed in all the way around by mountain ranges, is a
valley shaped something like a big oval clothes-basket, with the long
way of the basket running north and south, and a ridge of watershed
hills cutting it in two in the other direction.
The southern half of the Park is about all that the average traveler
ever sees of it, because the main line of the Nevada Short Line runs
through that part of it; and if you should ask Mr. A. Traveler what
about it, he would probably tell you that it is a fine farming country
with big wheat fields and beautiful apple orchards――all irrigated, of
course――and a thriving little city called Brewster lying somewhere in
the middle of it.
That would all be true enough of what the passing tourist sees, but
north of the watershed hills is the West that you read about. With
the exception of one mining-camp――Red Butte――and a single railroad
track――the Red Butte branch of the Short Line――skirting its western
edge, that half of the clothes-basket is a jumbled wilderness of wooded
hills just about as Nature left it. And slicing a half-moon out of
these northern hills, the Tourmaline, a quick-water mountain stream, a
goodish-sized little river in the volume of water it carries, enters
through a rugged canyon, dipping into the valley basket a little to
one side of the northern handle, let us say, and dodging out again a
few miles farther on to find its way to the Colorado River.
The time――our time――for getting a first glimpse of the Tourmaline
Canyon is the middle of a June forenoon; bright sunshine, a sky so blue
that it almost hurts your eyes to look up at it, the air so crisp and
sweet and clean as to make it a keen joy just to be alive and breathing
it.
To right and left, as we look up the canyon, gray granite cliffs,
seamed and weathered into all sorts of curious shapes, shut in a
narrow gorge at the bottom of which the swift mountain torrent roars
and rumbles and thunders among the boulders in its bed. On the left
the canyon wall drops sheer to the water; but on the right there is a
shelving, sliding bank of loose rock at the foot of the cliff. Along
this bank two workmanlike young fellows, wearing the corduroys and high
lace-boots of the engineers, are making their way slowly up-stream,
scanning every foot of the shelving talus ledge as they cover it.
“Gee! Some fierce old place to build a railroad, I’ll tell the world!”
said Dick Maxwell, the lighter-built of the two, clawing for footholds
on the steep bank. “Find anything yet, Larry?”
“Nothing that looks like a location stake,” was the answer. “I guess
we’ll have to back-track a piece and measure the distance up from that
last one we found.”
“Aw’ right,” said Dick, with a little groan for the effort loss; “give
me the end of the tape and I’ll do the back-flip,” and with the ring of
the steel tape-line in hand he crawled back along the shelving slide.
“Got you!” he called out, when the last-discovered stake was reached;
and Larry, holding the tape case, marked the hundred-foot point and
began to search again for the stake which ought to be there and didn’t
show up.
Five years earlier, when gold was first discovered at the headwaters of
the Tourmaline, the railroad company had surveyed a line up the canyon
and some twenty miles of track had been laid eastward from Red Butte.
Later, the gold excitement had died down, and the Tourmaline Extension,
something less than half completed, was abandoned.
But now new gold discoveries had been made and “Little Ophir” had
leaped, overnight, as one might say, into the spot-light――which
is a way that gold discoveries have of doing. A stirring, roaring
mining-camp city had sprung up on the site of the old workings at the
canyon head, and the building of the railroad extension was once more
under way. For Little Ophir was without railroad connections with the
outside world, and the canyon of the Tourmaline afforded the only
practicable route by which a railroad could reach it.
Early in June a big construction force had been mobilized at Red Butte
and the work of refitting and extending the track already laid was
begun. Out ahead of the graders and track-layers an engineering party,
under Mr. Herbert Ackerman, chief of construction, was reëstablishing
the line of the old survey; and it was in this party that the general
manager’s son, Dick, and Larry Donovan, son of the Brewster crossing
watchman, were the “cubs.”
On the morning in question the two boys had been sent up the canyon
ahead of the main party to find and mark the stakes of the former
survey so that they could be readily located by the transitmen who
were following them. For several miles it had been plain sailing. In
the lonely wilderness there had been nothing to disturb the stakes, and
in the high, dry, mountain atmosphere but few of them had rotted away.
But now, in the most difficult part of the gorge, the trail seemed to
be lost.
“Haven’t found it yet?” Dick asked, coming up from the tape-holding.
“Not a single sign of it. Here’s the hundred-foot point,” and Larry dug
his boot heel into the shale.
“Let’s spread out a bit,” Dick suggested. “It must be right around here
somewhere.”
Accordingly, they separated, and in a scattering of boulders a little
farther on, Larry found the stake――or at least, _a_ stake. He was on
his knees before it when Dick came up to say:
“Hullo! got it at last, have you?” And then, as with a sudden shock of
surprise: “Why, say, Larry――that isn’t one of our old stakes! It’s a
brand new one!”
It was; so new that it looked as if it might have been driven that very
forenoon. The stakes they had been finding hitherto were all browned
and weathered, as they were bound to be since they had been driven
five years before. But this one was unmistakably new, with the mark,
“Sta.162-50” in blue chalk plainly to be read. Moreover, it had been
planted between two stones in a place where nobody would be likely to
find it unless he knew exactly where to look for it.
“See here, Dick,” said Larry, scowling down at the discovery, “I don’t
‘savvy’ this. It doesn’t look a little bit good to me.”
“You said a whole earful then, Larry. You don’t suppose any of our men
have been up here ahead of us putting in new stakes, do you?”
Larry shook his head.
“We’d have known about it if they had. We’ve been passing all the
transit crews each morning as we came out.”
Dick stooped and read the blue chalk markings.
“‘Sta.162-50’ means fifty feet beyond Station One Hundred and
Sixty-two. And Station One-sixty-two would be sixteen thousand two
hundred feet beyond some given starting point; that’s a little over
three miles. We haven’t any starting point three miles back. Our
stations are all numbered from Red Butte.”
Again Larry frowned and shook his head.
“Three miles would take it below the mouth of the canyon――just about
down to our present camp. Say, Dick――it’s up to us to get busy on
this thing. I don’t like the look of it. Here; you hold the tape on
this stake and stop me at fifty feet,” and he took the ring end and
scrambled on up the canyon.
“You’ve got it,” Dick announced, when the fifty-foot mark ran out of
the leather case. Then: “What do you find?”
“Nothing, yet,” was the answer; and Dick proceeded to reel in the steel
ribbon, walking on up to Larry as he wound.
“Nothing” seemed to be right. The fifty-foot point was in the heart of
a little thicket of aspens. Carefully they searched the grove, looking
behind every boulder. But there was no stake to be seen.
Though they were both Freshman――new to the engineering game, they had
already learned a few of the first principles. For example, they knew
that staked “stations” in a survey were usually 25, 50 or 100 feet
apart, according to the nature of the ground. Therefore, fifty measured
feet from the point they had just left should have landed them either
at Station 162 or Station 163, according to the direction in which the
survey had been made. But apparently it hadn’t.
It was Dickie Maxwell who presently solved the mystery, or part of
it. Crawling upon his hands and knees among the little aspens, he
was halted by the sight of a bit of fine copper wire twisted about
the trunk of one of the trees. A closer inspection revealed four
knife-blade cuts in the bark; two running crosswise and half-way around
the tree and the other two up and down on opposite sides of the trunk
to complete a semi-cylindrical parallelogram.
“Come here, Larry!” he called; and when Larry had crept into the
thicket: “See that wire and those marks?”
Larry saw and got quick action. Whipping out his pocket knife and
cutting the thread-fine wire, he stuck the point of the blade into one
of the up-and-down cracks. At the touch a section of the bark came off
like the lid of a box, and under it, carved in the clean white surface
of the heart wood, was the legend, “Sta.163.” Dick sat back on his
heels.
“Larry, you old knuckle-duster, it’s rattling around in the back part
of my bean that we’ve found something,” he remarked, with the cherubic
smile that had more than once helped him to dodge a richly deserved
reprimand in his school days. “Can you give it a name to handle it by?”
Larry Donovan, sitting on a rock, propped his square chin in his
cupped hands and lapsed into a brown study. He was a rather slow
thinker, unless the emergency called for swift action, but he usually
battered his way through to a reasonably logical conclusion in the end.
“You remember that rumor we heard before we left Brewster,” he said;
“about the Overland Central planning to get a railroad into Little
Ophir ahead of us?”
Dick nodded, and Larry went on.
“I was just thinking. The only way to reach Little Ophir with a
railroad track is up this canyon; and from what we’ve seen of the
canyon this far, you’d say that there isn’t room for more than one
railroad in it, wouldn’t you?”
“Wow!” said Dick, springing to his feet; “you sure said a whole
mouthful that time, Larry! But see here――we located this canyon line
first, years ago. If this is an O. C. survey that we’ve found, they’re
cutting in on us! Let’s hike back and tell Mr. Ackerman, right away. We
oughtn’t to lose a minute!”
Now haste was all right, and, in the circumstances, was doubtless
a prime factor in whatever problem was going to arise out of the
clash between the two railroad companies. But along with his Irish
blood――which wasn’t Irish until after you’d gone back three or four
generations――Larry Donovan had inherited a few drops of thoughtful
Scotch.
“Hold on, Richard, you old quick-trigger; let’s make sure, first,” he
amended. “Maybe we can trace these markers and find out where they lead
to. When we make our report we want something more than a wild guess to
put in it――not?”
The tracing, which took them back down-canyon, proved to be a regular
detective’s job. Great pains had evidently been taken to hide all
the markings of the strange survey. At each fifty measured feet they
stopped and searched; hunted until they found what they were looking
for. Sometimes it was a stake driven down level with the surface of the
ground and covered with a flat stone. In another place the marks would
be on a boulder, with another stone stood up in front of them to hide
them.
Roughly speaking, the newer survey paralleled the older, fairly
duplicating it in the narrower parts of the gorge, where there was room
for only a single line of track; which meant, as Larry pointed out,
that the first builders to get on the ground would have a monopoly of
all the room there was. As they went on, the chase grew more and more
exciting, and they began to speculate a bit on the probabilities.
“If this is an Overland Central line it must come in from the north,
somewhere,” Dick argued. “To do that, it will have to cross the
Tourmaline to get over to our side of things. We must watch out sharp
for that crossing place.”
So they watched out, making careful book notes of each freshly
discovered set of marks as they went along. Luckily, their chief had
early made them study the abbreviations used by the engineers in stake
marking; “P.I.,” point of intersection of a curve, “C――4.6,” a cutting
of four and six-tenths feet, “F――2,” a fill of two feet, and so on.
These figures Larry was copying into his note-book as they occurred on
the various stakes; and finally, squarely opposite the mouth of what
appeared to be a blind branch gulch coming into the main canyon from
the north side, they found one of the carefully hidden stakes with this
on it: “Tang. W.3-S.,P.I.,N.12-W.”
“Now what under the sun does all that mean?” Dick queried. Then: “Oh, I
know part of it. ‘Tang.’ means ‘tangent.’ But what would you make out
of ‘W.3-S.’?”
Larry made a quick guess.
“Maybe it is a compass bearing; ‘west, three degrees south.’ How would
that fit?”
Dick laid his pocket compass on top of the stake, and after the
swinging needle had come to rest, took a back sight in the direction of
the nearest up-canyon station.
“That’s just about the ticket,” he announced. “Allowing for the compass
variation, it’s a little south of west. The next is ‘P.I.’――that means
that it marks the intersection of a curve. Now for the ‘N.13-W.’ Say!
that’s another compass bearing. Hooray! Got you now, Mr. Right-of-way
thief. Right here’s where you’re going to cross the――――”
He was looking over at the opposite gulch as he spoke, and his jaw
dropped.
“Gee, Larry!” he exclaimed; “they can’t get a railroad in through that
place over there. That’s nothing but a pocket gulch. You can see the
far end of it from here!”
Once more Larry Donovan sat down and propped his chin in his hands.
This time he was trying to recall all he had ever known or heard of the
geography of the region lying to the north.
“Anywhere along about here would do,” he decided at length; adding:
“For a place for them to break in, I mean. Burnt Canyon ought to be
between twenty-five and thirty miles straight north of us, and the O.
C. has a branch already built to the copper mines in Burnt Canyon.
That gulch over across the creek is about where you’d look for them to
come out if they’re building south from the copper mines.”
“But they can’t come out there!” Dick protested. “Can’t you see that
there isn’t any back door to that pocket?”
There certainly didn’t look to be. The opposite gulch was narrow and
quite thickly wooded, and from any point of view they could obtain,
it seemed to end abruptly against forested cliffs at its farther
extremity. On the other hand, there were the stake markings pointing
plainly and directly across at it.
“What’s your notion, Dick?” Larry asked, after another thoughtful
inspection of the surroundings. “What’d we better do next?”
“I’ll say we ought to hurry right back to camp and report to Mr.
Ackerman.”
“Maybe you’re right; but I sort of hate to go in with only half a
report like this. I’d like to explore that gulch over yonder first.”
“Granny! Why, Larry! you can explore it from here――every foot of it!”
“It looks that way, I’ll admit. Yet you can’t be sure at this distance.
Here’s my shy at it: you go on back to camp and tell Mr. Ackerman what
we’ve found, so far, and I’ll hunt me up a place to cross the river and
go dig into that gulch a little. It’s sort of up to me, you know, Dick.
Your father took me out of the round-house wiping job and gave me my
chance to make good on this one. And I shan’t be making good all the
way through if I stop here.”
Whereupon, Dickie Maxwell argued. Besides carrying a cherubic smile
for the staving off of deserved reprimands, he owned a streak of
pertinacious obstinacy that was hard to down. Moreover, with the
evidence of his own two good eyes to back him up, he was fully
persuaded that an exploration of the pocket gulch, either singly or
collectively, would be just so much time and effort thrown away.
Larry didn’t argue; he merely held out. So, at the end of it Dick
grinned and gave in, saying, “Oh, well, you old stick-in-the-mud――if
you’ve got to go dig into that gulch before you can get another good
night’s sleep, let’s mog along and have it over with.”
“But you needn’t go,” Larry put in.
“Sure Mike I will, if you do. Pitch out and find your ferry, or your
ford, or whatever it is that you’re going to cross the river on.”
The crossing of the fierce little river presented somewhat of a
problem. One glance at the torrent slashing itself into spindrift among
the boulders was enough to convince even the tenderest of tenderfoots
that wading the stream was out of the question.
“I’ve got it,” said Larry. “We’ll hike back up-stream to where we saw
those big stones lying in the river. We can make three bites of it
there.”
It was a rough and rugged quarter of a mile up-canyon to the place
of the big stones. Two great boulders, each large enough to fill an
ordinary sitting-room and figuring as prehistoric shatterings from
the cliffs above, lay in an irregular triangle in the stream bed. The
leaps from one to another of these over the split-up torrent were a bit
unnerving to contemplate and Dick shook his head.
“You’re long-legged enough to do it, Larry, but I’m afraid I can’t,” he
said. “If we could make a bridge of some kind――――”
Larry was willing enough to go on the exploring expedition alone, but
he was unwilling to leave Dick behind for a mere physical obstacle.
Releasing the small stake-ax that he carried in his belt, he hacked
down a little pine-tree standing near and trimmed the branches. “It
won’t be much better than a tight-rope,” he grinned, “but we’re neither
of us very high-shy.”
Handling it together, they heaved the trimmed pine across to the first
boulder and Larry tested it.
“Safe as a clock,” he announced. “Come on.”
Dick balanced himself across, and then they pulled the tree over and
bridged the second chasm with it. This crossing made, the third proved
to be nothing more than an easy jump to the northern stream bank, and
a few minutes later they had covered the down-stream distance to the
gulch mouth and were entering the pocket.
They stopped and looked around. Even at this nearer view of it the
blind gorge appeared to be nothing but a blind.
“What do you say now,” Dick laughed. “Are you satisfied?”
“Not yet,” said Larry. “Take a little time off, if you like, and rest
your face and hands while I walk up to the head of this thing.”
“Oh, no; I’m still with you,” was the joshing retort; and together they
began an exploration of the pocket.
Even after they had found the astounding outcome the illusion as seen
from the opposite side of the river was perfect. A hundred yards from
its apparent end they still would have declared that the gulch stopped
abruptly against a solid cliff. But upon taking a few steps to the left
they found that what seemed to be the end of the pocket was merely a
jutting spur of the mountain completely concealing an extension of the
gorge which went winding its way beyond, deep into the heart of things.
And at the turn into this extension they found another of the new,
blue-chalk-marked location stakes; in plain sight, this one, with no
attempt having been made to conceal it like those on the other bank of
the river.
“I’m It,” Dick acknowledged, laughing again, but at himself this time.
“You can put it all over me when it comes down to sheer, unreasonable
thoroughness, old scout, I give you right. But how about it now? Do we
chase back with the news?”
“Still and again, not yet,” Larry demurred. “That report we’re going
to make to Mr. Ackerman oughtn’t to stop short off in the middle of
things. Maybe these stakes don’t mean anything but a preliminary
survey; the O. C. just sort of feeling the ground over to see what they
could do if they wanted to. But taking it the other way round, maybe
it’s the real thing――the working lay-out. What if they’ve already been
building down sneak-fashion from Burnt Canyon? What if they should
happen to be right around the next twist in this crooked gully, ready
to make a swift grab for the river crossing and our right-of-way in the
canyon?”
Dick groaned in mock despair.
“I see,” he lamented. “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve walked me
ten or thirteen miles on the way to Burnt Canyon. All right; let’s go.
I’m the goat.”
At that they pushed on up the crooked gulch and for a time it seemed
as if Dickie Maxwell were going to have the long end of the argument.
True, they were still finding the location stakes at regular intervals,
but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to find anything
else.
It was possibly a mile back from the gulch’s mouth, and in the very
heart of the northern mountain range, that they made the great
discovery. As they tramped around the last of the crooking gulch elbows
the scene ahead changed as if by magic. The crooking elbow proved to be
the gateway to an open valley surrounded by high mountains on all sides
save that to the north.
Over the hills in the northern vista a newly constructed wagon road
wound its way――they could tell that it was new by the freshness of the
red clay in the cuts and fills; and in the middle of the valley ...
here was what made them gasp and duck suddenly to cover in a little
groving of gnarled pines. Spread out on the level were stacks of bridge
timbers, great piles of cross-ties, neat rackings of steel rails,
wagons, scrapers, a portable hoisting engine――all the paraphernalia of
a railroad construction camp!
“Gee-meny Christmas!” Dick ejaculated under his breath, and that
expressed it exactly. Here was the advanced post of the enemy, with
everything in complete readiness for the forward capturing dash into
Nevada Short Line territory.
It seemed to be the exactly fortunate moment for a hurried retreat and
the sounding of a quick alarm in the home camp on the Tourmaline; but
now Larry Donovan’s streak of ultimate thoroughness came again to the
front.
“Nothing like it,” he objected to Dick’s frantic urgings in favor of
the retreat; “let’s make it a knock-out while we’re about it. We want
to be able to tell Mr. Ackerman the whole story when we go back; how
much material they’ve got here, and all that.”
Oddly enough, the little valley, with its wealth of stored material and
tools and machinery, seemed to be utterly deserted as they entered it.
They saw no signs of life anywhere; there was not even a watchman to
stop them when they crept cautiously up to the material piles and took
shelter among them.
“Quick work now, Dick!” Larry directed. “You take the dimensions of
those bridge sticks and count ’em while I’m counting the ties and
rails!” and they went at it, “bald-headed,” as Dick phrased it in
telling of it afterward, like a couple of fellows figuring against
time on a tough problem on examination day. And since there is said to
be nothing so deaf as an adder, neither of them heard a sound until a
gruff voice behind them said:
“Well, how about it? Do they check out to suit you?”
At the gruff demand they jumped and spun around as if the same string
had been tied to both of them; started and faced about to find a big,
bearded giant in a campaign hat and faded corduroys looking on with a
grim smile wrinkling at the corners of a pair of rather fierce eyes.
“Murder!” said Dick in a stifled whisper; and Larry didn’t say even
that much. For now they both saw what they had failed to see from the
down-valley point of view; namely, a collection of roughly built
shacks half hidden in a grove of pines, with a number of men moving
about among them.
“Spies, eh?” remarked the big man who had accosted them; then, with the
smile fading slowly out of the eye-wrinkles: “Who sent you two kids up
here?”
“Nobody,” Larry answered shortly.
“Ump!” grunted the giant. “Just doing a bit of Sherlocking on your own
account, are you? I suppose you belong to Herb Ackerman’s outfit, don’t
you?”
Larry made no reply to this; and Dick, taking his cue promptly, was
also silent.
“No sulking――not with me!” growled the big man harshly. “I can make
you talk if I want to. How many men are there in your outfit, and
whereabouts are they working now?”
Larry’s square jaw set itself like that of a bull-dog that had been
told to let go and wouldn’t.
“You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” he snapped.
The inquisitor held out a hand.
“Give me that note-book!” he commanded.
Now Larry Donovan’s methodical manner of thinking applied only to
crises where there was plenty of time. But at this curt demand thought
and action were simultaneous. With a quick jerk he flipped the
incriminating note-book over the demander’s head. Naturally, the man
dodged; and Larry saw the note-book alight and hide itself――as he had
hoped it might――on top of a high pile of the stacked cross-ties.
“So _that’s_ the way you’re built, is it?” rasped the big man, angered,
doubtless, by the fact that he had dodged something that hadn’t been
thrown at him. “We’ll take care of you two cubs, all right! Get a move
on――up to the shacks!”
Actuated by a common impulse, they both stole a quick glance down the
valley, measuring the chances for a mad dash for freedom. The man saw
the glance and stepped aside to bar the way.
“None of that!” he growled. “Get on up to the shacks!”
There seemed to be nothing for it but an ignominious surrender, so they
tramped away, with their captor keeping even pace with them a step
behind. They were halted before one of the shacks, a long, one-storied
building which they took to be the camp commissary or store-house. It
was; but one end of it was partitioned off for another purpose; and
after the padlocked door at this end had been opened and they were
shoved into the semi-darkness of the interior, they found themselves
stumbling over tools of all descriptions――picks, shovels, crowbars,
screw-jacks, blocks and tackle, coils of rope.
“Huh!” said Dick, “their tool-house.” And then they sat down on a pair
of the rope coils to consider the state of the nation.
“My fault,” was Larry’s first word. “If we had turned back when you
wanted to――――”
“Cut it,” Dick broke in. “We needed the stuff we were after――if we
could only have gotten away with it. What do you reckon they’ll do with
us?”
“Your guess is as good as anybody’s,” Larry said, with a wry smile.
“The one thing they’re not going to do, if they can help it, is to let
us carry the news of this thing back to our camp. And that’s just the
one thing we _must_ do, if it takes a leg.”
They had plenty of time in which to consider ways and means.
Immediately deciding that nothing could be done or attempted in
daylight, they wore out the long afternoon plotting and planning――to
mighty little purpose.
Their prison was a makeshift, to be sure, but it was pretty effective.
There were no windows; what little light they had came through the
unbattened cracks in the walls. There was but the one door, and that
was padlocked on the outside. And while there were plenty of excellent
tools for digging a tunnel, the heavy plank floor securely nailed down
made that expedient impossible.
For hours they were completely ignored. Nobody came near their end of
the building, and apparently there were no camp activities of any kind
going on outside. Larry guessed at the explanation, which proved to be
the right one.
“Those men we saw are only the Overland Central engineering party,”
he hazarded. “They’re waiting for their working force to come in from
somewhere up the line. That is why everything is so quiet.”
In the plotting and planning they soon discovered that their tool-room
prison was partitioned off at the end of the commissary or store.
Through the cracks in the partition they could see into the other part
of the building. It appeared to be locked up and deserted, and was half
filled with canned stuff, sides of salt meat stacked up, a lot of hams
in their canvas covers, a wagon-load or two of flour in sacks, barrels
of potatoes and cabbages――provisions of all sorts.
“If we could only get through this partition some way,” Dick suggested,
“the rest of it would be easy――with half a dozen windows to choose
from.”
They had been gradually working down to this through the afternoon;
like the man, who, after looking in all the likely places for his lost
cattle, began to look in the unlikely ones; and being the mechanical
member of the partnership, Larry set his wits at work. The partition
was built of up-and-down planks spiked to two-by-fours at the bottom,
in the middle and at the top. The two-by-fours were on their side of
the wall, and while daylight remained, Larry made a careful inspection
of the different planks, one by one, to ascertain if they were all
nailed solidly.
His search was finally rewarded. One of the planks was not nailed
quite home, or perhaps it had warped a bit after the nailing was done.
Anyway, there was a little crack between it and the two-by-fours; and
with a pick taken from the tool pile Larry cautiously pried the board
loose at the bottom and in the middle, leaving it hanging by the two
nails at the top. Then――the Donovan thoroughness coming into play
again――he bent the projecting nails flat so that the board could be
pulled back into place until the time should come for it to be pushed
aside.
“Somebody might happen to come into the storeroom and see it bulged
out,” was the explanation he gave Dick while he was twisting and
toiling over the nails. “I don’t mind jamming my fingers a little.
There’s no use sweating your head off making a chain, and then leaving
one link in it so it will pull in two at the first jerk.”
With the way of escape to the larger room thus provided, they waited
to see what would happen at suppertime. Much to their relief, the thing
they were hoping for did happen. A little past sunset the door was
opened and a substantial camp supper was thrust in to them. After that,
there was another wait for darkness; and when they were able to see the
stars through the wall cracks they swung the hanging plank aside and
squeezed through the narrow slit into the store-room.
Here they had to grope and feel their way among the piled-up stores,
and once Dick stumbled and fell over a box of the canned stuff,
falling, luckily, upon a heap of sacked flour and thus saving the crash
that might have betrayed them. Down at the farther end of the building
the ruddy light of a camp fire was shining through the cracks, and
toward this flickering beacon they made their way cautiously.
Through the wall cracks they could both see and hear. The members of
the Overland Central’s advance engineering party were sitting about the
fire, talking and smoking, and the two boys soon heard enough to tell
them that Larry’s guess had been right; the engineers were waiting for
the arrival of the construction crew.
Since it was still too early to make any further move towards an
escape, Larry and Dick settled themselves, each at his spying crack.
For what seemed to them an interminable time the circle around the fire
remained unbroken; and when the men finally began to drop out of it
they went only one or two at a time to the bunk shack on the opposite
side of the camp area.
None the less, since all things mundane must have an end, there did
come a time at last when there were only two of them left; the big
chief and another whom the boys took to be the boss bridge-builder. It
was the bridge-man who said:
“About them two kids you caught this afternoon; what are you goin’ to
do with ’em?”
“Been thinking about that,” said the giant. “It won’t do to let them
go back to Ackerman and spill the beans. What we’ve got to do is to
let Ackerman come on with his transitmen and get past the mouth of the
gulch, going up. Then, before his graders come along, we can cut in
behind him and grab the canyon before he catches on. Besides, we’ll
have the advantage of being between him and his working force.”
“But you can’t very well keep the kids here,” the other man objected.
“They’ll be missed and looked for.”
“No; we won’t keep ’em here; we’ll send ’em up to Burnt Canyon with the
teams going back to-morrow. We can hold ’em on some sort of a trespass
charge until the job is put across. And about their being missed:
that’s up to Ackerman. If there’s any worrying to be done, we’ll let
George do it.”
“Do you know who the boys are?”
“No; but I have a sneaking notion that one of them is General Manager
Maxwell’s son.”
“Sufferin’ Mike!” said the bridge-man; “and you’d take a chance lockin’
_him_ up?”
The big chief chuckled.
“There’ll be a row kicked up about it, I suppose, and Mr. Richard
Maxwell’ll be pretty hot under the collar. But everything’s fair
in love or war――or in business. We’ve got to have that canyon
right-of-way. Finished your pipe? All right; we’ll turn in. This
waiting game makes me as sleepy as a house cat in daytime.”
But the bridge-builder had another word to add and he added it.
“If these boys belong to Ackerman’s party――and I s’pose there’s no
doubt of that――it won’t do to let ’em get loose. Are they safe, in that
tool-house?”
“As safe as a clock. There’s only the one door, and I’ve told Mexican
Miguel to take his blankets and make himself a shake-down for the night
just outside of it. He’ll hear ’em if they make any stir. But they
won’t. Being boys, they’ll sleep like a couple of logs.”
After the two men had gone across to the bunk house the boys still
waited, though now it was with impatience curdling the very blood in
their veins, since they realized that every minute was precious if the
canyon steal was to be prevented. Again and again Dick’s excitement
yelled for action, but each time Larry pulled him down with a “Not
yet,” until at length Dick was sure it must be nearly midnight.
When Larry finally gave the word they crept to a window on the side
of the building opposite that which faced the camp area, pulled out
its single fastening nail, slid the sash, and in a jiffy they were out
under the stars and free. Careful to the last, Larry turned and softly
closed the window after they were out, “Just so the first man up in the
morning won’t know that we’re gone,” he whispered. “It’s pinching me
now that such minutes as we can save even that way are going to count.”
“Which way do we go?” Dick asked, being completely turned around in the
darkness.
“Not any way, until after I’ve got that note-book of mine,” said Larry
the thorough; adding: “I hope the big chief didn’t go back to look for
it after we were locked up.”
Treading as lightly as story-book Indians, they stole around the
commissary building, and at the tool-room end of it they had a glimpse
of the sleeping sentinel stretched out before the padlocked door. A
quick little run took them to the material piles, and Larry climbed
to the top of the cross-tie stack and was overjoyed when he found his
note-book lying just where it had lodged.
[Illustration: They had a glimpse of the sleeping sentinel stretched
out before the padlocked door]
“Now we’re on our way,” he announced, scrambling down; and the
stumbling retreat in the darkness was begun.
It seemed to both of them that they had blundered along for uncounted
miles before they heard the welcome thunder of the Tourmaline growling
among its boulders in the main canyon. Arrived at the gulch mouth,
however, they hardly knew which way to go. Up-stream there were the big
boulders and the pine-tree bridge, but tight-rope work over a boiling
mountain torrent in the dark of the moon didn’t appeal much to either
one of them.
“No,” said Larry; “we can’t risk that, and, besides, it would take us
just that much out of our way. It’s down-stream for us, and we’ll have
to take a chance on finding some way to cross.”
Deciding thus, they turned to the right and clawed their way down the
canyon. It was a stiff job in the darkness, and there were spots where
the canyon cliffs leaned in so far that they had to wade in the edge of
the torrent; but they hurried on and finally came out of the mountain
hazards and into the foot-hills, where the going was easier and they
could make better time.
At that moment the big construction camp, where Chief Engineer Ackerman
had his headquarters, was two good miles below the mouth of Tourmaline
Canyon. Luckily, the railroad grade at this particular point was
closely paralleling the river, so when the two boys came opposite the
camp they had no difficulty in locating it. A few lusty shouts aroused
the camp, and some of the men turned out and backed a wagon into the
stream, and thus the two Marathon runners were ferried across.
Three brief minutes in the tent of the chief sufficed for the giving of
the alarm, and Larry’s heart swelled with――well, not exactly with envy,
perhaps, but at any rate with eager emulation and the hope that he,
too, might some day rise to such heights of efficiency, when he saw how
quickly the chief grasped the situation and how capably he met it.
A few quietly given orders to his assistants and to the foremen
crowding to the tent flap started the checkmating move, which was
simple enough now that the warning had been given. With every man in
the well-disciplined force falling into line, the graders were sent
forward at once to take immediate possession of the threatened point in
the canyon, the obvious counter-move being to have the Short Line grade
established and occupied before the Overland Central could make its
capturing dash across the river.
After the orders had been given and the men were hustling the
preparations for the forward move, Chief Ackerman turned to the pair of
leg-weary scouts.
“You fellows have done well――mighty well――for a couple of first-year
cubs,” he said in hearty commendation. “Now go ahead and tell me all
about it.”
Larry let Dick do the telling, contenting himself with producing the
note-book with its carefully penciled record. As in the chase of the
runaway engine, when there was credit to be given, Dickie Maxwell did
the square thing.
“If you make any report of this to headquarters, Mr. Ackerman,” he
wound up, “I wish you fix it so as to put Larry in where he belongs. He
made me go on when I thought it wasn’t any sort of use. If it hadn’t
been for him we wouldn’t have had anything to report but that survey on
this side of the river, and――――”
“Oh, let up, will you?” Larry growled in sheepish confusion. “You talk
a heap too much, Dick, when you get started.” And then to the chief, in
still more confusion: “I hope you won’t do anything that Dick says, Mr.
Ackerman. He was in it just exactly as much as I was. He knows it, too,
but he’s always throwing off that way on me.”
Mr. Ackerman smiled and didn’t say what he would or would not do. But
a few days later, after the report had gone to the headquarters in
Brewster, General Manager Maxwell tossed the chief’s opened letter
across his office desk to his brother-in-law, Mr. William Starbuck, who
happened to be with him at the moment.
“You see what Ackerman says,” he remarked. “It seems that we have
won the first round in the tussle for the right-of-way in Tourmaline
Canyon, and that we owe the winning chiefly to that Donovan boy――you
remember him; son of John Donovan the crippled locomotive engineer. I
told the boy he’d have to show what was in him if we gave him a chance
on the new work, and he seems to be doing it. There’s good timber in
that Donovan stock.”
CHAPTER III
A BREACH OF DISCIPLINE
“What do you reckon these O. C. people will do, Larry, when they find
that we’ve got ahead of them in the canyon?”
“Huh?” came a yawning grunt from the opposite tent cot. Then: “Good
goodness! can’t you let a fellow sleep for a few minutes?”
“A few minutes? It’s ten o’clock, and I’ll bet we’re the only two
people left in this camp――unless the other one is the mess cookee!”
“Ah-yow!” gaped the sleeper, turning upon his back and stretching
his arms over his head. “I feel as if I’d been up three nights
hand-running, and then some. Ten o’clock, did you say?”
“Yep, and five minutes after. I guess Mr. Ackerman gave orders to let
us sleep――to pay for the hiking we did yesterday and last night. But
you haven’t told me yet what you think the O. C. bunch will do, now
that we’ve pushed our grading force up and got ahead of them at the
place where they were fixing to cross the river.”
Before Larry could answer the tent flap was pulled open and a
well-built young fellow about two years their senior stuck his face in
and grinned good-naturedly at them.
“Now then, lazyheads!” was his greetings; “’bout ready to turn out and
wash your face and hands?”
“We’re thinking about it,” said Dick. “But just why, in particular――if
you don’t mind telling us?”
“Oh, nothing; only the chief said I might persuade you to help me.
We’re running the wires up to connect with the new ‘front,’ and I’m
needing a couple of bell-hops.”
“Bell-hops nothing!” Dick scoffed. “You’re ’way off. We’re the
pulchritudinous――that’s a good word; stick it down in your
note-book――we are the pul-chri-tu-di-nous little do-whichits of this
outfit. Haven’t you heard what we did last night?”
“Heard it?” laughed the young wire boss, whose name was the most
unusual one of Smith. “Great Cæsar! I haven’t been hearing anything
else! Time your story got passed around a few times, you’d think there
was nothing to it in this camp with you two left out. That’s what makes
me want to do something for the good of your souls――help reduce the
chestiness a bit. Turn out and snatch a bite of breakfast. We’re about
ready to get a move with the wire wagon.”
“Listen to that, will you?” Dick groaned in mock distress; “bell-hops
on a wire gang! Oh, well; I suppose there’s no help for it.” Then, with
a quick jerk at the blankets: “Beat you to the creek.”
The Tourmaline, quieted at the camp site from a storming mountain
torrent to a sparkling little river of quick-water swirls and
crystal-clear pools, ran within a few yards of their tent. Whooping and
yelling like a pair of playful Indians they raced for their bath, Larry
stumbling at the edge and falling in with an inglorious splash, and
Dick taking a neat header a second later as the loser in the race. They
didn’t stay in long. Melted mountain snow, even in June, isn’t exactly
what you might call tepid; but so far, they had not once missed the
bracing morning plunge.
In the mess tent the fat Irish cook joshed them unmercifully for their
lateness, but they noticed that he had been keeping the bacon and corn
bread warm for them, and that the hashed-brown potatoes were freshly
fried; also that the coffee seemed just about as good as new. “Barney
wasn’t forgetting us,” Dick mumbled with his mouth full. “I’ll bet he
had his orders, too. It pays to be a do-whichit, Larry.”
The breakfast despatched they found Smith ready to start with his wire
outfit. Later, there would be regular telegraph and telephone lines
installed between Red Butte and Little Ophir, but in the meantime wire
communication had to be kept up between the different camps of the
construction force.
By an hour or so past noon, with the hole-diggers and pole-setters
pushing on ahead, and with a little auto-truck to carry material as
far as a truck could be operated, the wires were up and tested out to
a point just short of the canyon portal. Here the real difficulties
began. In some places iron brackets had to be set in the face of a
cliff, with the setter hanging in a rope sling from the top of things
to drill the holes in the rock.
“A fellow doesn’t need to be high-shy on a job of this kind,” Dick
asserted, looking up at one of the bracket men swinging like an
exploring spider at the end of his rope web from a cliff ninety or a
hundred feet high. Then to the wire boss: “What’ll you take to let me
set the next one, Smithy?”
Smith grunted.
“Nothing doing, son. It would cost me my summer’s job if your general
manager father ever heard of it. But you may take this coil of light
line up there, you two, if you think you’re good for the climb and the
tote.”
Lashing the coil of light rope to a carrying stick so that they could
share the load, Dick and Larry “hit the hill,” making a detour through
a small side gulch to come at the cliff summit from the rear. The
scrambling ascent accomplished, they found themselves at an elevation
commanding an extended view across the canyon to the northward.
A little way back from the cliff edge two men, with a pine-tree for a
snubbing stake, were slowly paying out a rope at the end of which the
spider-like bracket setter was dangling; and, lying on his stomach
at the brink, a third man was watching the descent and calling out
directions to the “anchor” man at the tree.
“Makes a fellow feel sort of creepy, doesn’t it?” said Dick, as they
took a cautious look over the edge into the gorge below, and Larry
grinned at him.
“Going to take back your brag about setting the next one?” he jibed
good-naturedly.
“I don’t take back anything,” Dick asserted stoutly; adding: “But if I
was only bluffing, it would be safe enough. Jack Smith wouldn’t come
within a thousand miles of letting me try.”
Larry squatted with his back to a tree. There was nothing further to
do until the bracket placers should move on to a new position.
“I’ve been thinking about that question you asked when you woke me up
this morning,” he said; “about what the Overland Central people will do
now that we’ve beaten them to it in the canyon.”
“Strikes me there isn’t much of anything for them to do,” Dick
countered. “_I’d_ say they’re knocked out.”
“Don’t fool yourself that way. Big corporations don’t give up so
easily. They’ve already spent a lot of money building their line down
from Burnt Canyon, and they are not going to throw all that money away,
not by a long shot.”
“But we’ve got our right-of-way in this canyon, and they’ll hardly try
to run us out of it by force.”
“They may not try it with guns, as Dad says the railroads used to do in
these right-of-way fights years ago. But there are other ways.”
“You’ve got something up your sleeve,” Dick remarked. “Suppose you
stick a pinch-bar under it and pry it loose.”
“I was just thinking,” Larry mused thoughtfully. “I guess Mr. Ackerman
and all of our folks would be sort of glad if they could find out just
exactly what the Overland Central crowd means to do. It might help
some, don’t you think?”
“Gee!” said Dick, getting up on his knees. “Say, Larry; you’re always
digging up something new out of the mud. What’s the great idea this
time?”
“I was wondering if it wouldn’t have been better if just one of us had
made that get-away last night, leaving the other to stay and find out
a few more things in the O. C. camp.”
Dick Maxwell looked away across the canyon and over into the mountain
labyrinth where they had had their adventure of the day before.
“I give you right on that, Larry,” he said. “Guess we’ve got an attack
of what Uncle Billy Starbuck would call ‘after-wit’――thinking of the
thing we ought to have done after it’s too late to do it.”
“I’ve just been wondering if it is too late,” was Larry’s reply. “I
wish we could see Mr. Ackerman for a few minutes. Only I suppose he
wouldn’t let us try it if we should ask him.”
“Let us try what? Don’t be a clam!” Dick put in impatiently. “Tell me
what’s eating you, can’t you?”
Larry turned his back upon the men who were holding the rope and in a
few low-toned words outlined the plan that was trying to shape itself
in his mind.
“Ripping――perfectly ripping!” was Dick’s enthusiastic approval. “Not a
bit of ivory there”――rapping with his knuckles upon the curly red head
of his tent-mate. “But say, could we lug all the stuff that we’d need?”
“The two of us could. But what I’m afraid of is that Mr. Ackerman will
say, No.”
“I wonder,” Dick mused. Then he remembered something that had
temporarily slipped his mind. “Hold up a minute; Mr. Ackerman has gone
to Red Butte to hurry up material and supplies, so cookee told me.
Smithy’s our present boss, and if we can swing him into line that’s all
we’ll need. Let’s go down and tackle him, right now!”
Twenty minutes later there was an earnest conference going on at the
foot of the cliff, with the young wire boss sitting in as the third
member.
“I don’t know about holding the bag for you fellows on anything like
that,” he demurred, when the plan had been laid before him. “It’s a
fine stunt, all right, if you could pull it off; but I haven’t any
right to authorize it――with Mr. Ackerman away. It would be a sort of
breach of discipline. If he were here, I doubt very much if he would
let you two kids take the risk.”
“That’s just the point,” Dick argued. “It’s just as Larry says; the
risk will be a lot less for us fellows than it would be for any of our
men――just because we _are_ kids.”
“How about it, Larry?” Smith asked, appealing to the big, fair-skinned
son of the Brewster crossing watchman.
“Oh, sure; there’s a risk, of course,” Larry conceded. “They’d be
pretty hot if they catch us at it. But it ought to be done, and if
we’re caught, we can be spared a lot better than a couple of your men.”
But young Smith was thinking of General Manager Maxwell and what he
might say if his son were permitted to take risks.
“As I get it, it’s your plan, Larry,” he said. “Can’t you pull it off
alone?”
Before Larry could answer, Dick broke in hotly.
“Not in a thousand years, Jack Smith! It’s Larry’s notion, all right,
but you couldn’t drag me out of it with a derrick!”
Smith looked away up the canyon to where some of the graders were
retreating to be out of the way of a blast about to be fired. When the
echoes of the explosion had died away he had made his decision.
“We’ll call it a Donovan chance and take a shot at it,” he announced
crisply. “Hike down to the mouth of the canyon and take the truck for
the drive back to camp. Tell the storekeeper that I sent you, and dig
around in his stock until you find what you need. Where will you strike
in?”
It was Larry who answered.
“Half a mile or so above here there’s a place where there are two big
boulders in the creek bed. We’ll cross on them.”
“Good. I’ll rig up a temporary terminal there while you’re getting the
stuff. Skip out now. Time’s valuable if you are going to accomplish
anything worth while.”
Since time was valuable, the two boys wasted none of it in the race
back to the trail-end where the auto-truck had been left; and with the
truck to facilitate things beyond the canyon portal they were soon at
the headquarters camp.
“Light marching order is the word,” Larry cautioned after the
store-room and its supplies had been thrown open to them. “It will be
at least two miles, the way we’ll have to go, with some pretty stiff
mountain climbing, and every pound of weight we can cut out will count.”
What they took out of the supply stores were a few dry-battery cells, a
coil of light cotton rope, two coils of the lightest insulated copper
wire, and a field set of telephone instruments. Dick was for taking two
sets, in case one should go bad on them, but Larry vetoed that.
“No,” he said; “we’re going to have plenty to lug as it is. That wire
is going to weigh a thousand pounds before we get it where we want it,
and, besides, there’s the grub to come, yet.”
Barney Daugherty, the camp cook, filled their haversacks for them;
hard-tack, sliced ham and some beans cooked in the can. As a final
addition to the outfit, Dick slung over his shoulder the field-glass
his father had given him, and the auto-truck was once more headed for
the canyon portal.
Arrived at the end of the driving possibilities they tumbled out of the
truck and the foot carry began. As soon as they shouldered their loads
they found out what they were in for. The wire, which was the chief
part of the burden, weighed like lead. But at the first turn in the
gorge they were met by one of the linemen whom Smith had sent down to
help them, and they were mighty glad to divide with him.
Reaching the crossing place at the two boulders they found Smith
ready for them. He had had his men cut down a few more trees to make
practicable foot-bridges, and a temporary telephone terminal had been
rigged under the shelter of the northern cliff.
“Quick work,” said the young wire boss approvingly, after the transfer
had been safely made. “How many men do you need to help you climb out
of the canyon with this stuff?”
“None,” said Larry promptly. “This is our job, and if we can’t put it
over without crippling your gang, we’ll cry quits, eh, Dick?”
Dick said, “Sure!” and Smith laughed.
“That’s the proper spirit,” he said. “I’m short-handed, anyway. I’ll
station somebody here to do the ‘listening in,’ but the field job’s
all your own. Go to it, and good luck to you.” And he went back to his
wire-stringing on the opposite side of the gorge.
After coupling the free ends of their wire coils to Smith’s terminal,
the two boys began to search for a place where the canyon wall could be
scaled. That, in itself, was something of a problem. In a toilsome hike
of half a mile up-stream they found nothing like a trail up which they
might hope to be able to carry the coils of wire. Moreover, distance
was a prime factor in their plan. They couldn’t afford to waste wire in
long detours.
“There’s only one thing for it,” said Larry. “I’m going to shin up
through that crevice we passed a few minutes ago, carrying the light
coil of rope. Then I’ll lower the line from the top of the cliff over
the terminal, and you can send the stuff up to me a piece at a time.”
This programme was carried out successfully, and after a half-hour’s
hard labor the first step in the arduous plan was a step accomplished.
From the cliff summit the back-country outlook was not so formidable.
They found themselves standing upon a high plateau, thickly wooded and
hilly, to be sure, but presenting no great difficulties to progress, so
far as they could determine.
“One good thing,” Dick commented, as they were munching a mid-afternoon
lunch on the cliff top; “these blessed wire coils are going to keep
on growing lighter as we go along. Makes me feel sort of Pollyanna
glad――that does. Gee! but that last one was a pull up the cliff! I
don’t see how you ever managed the first alone.”
“It had to be managed; that’s all,” said Larry, who was of those who
can always do what they have to do. “Like to have worn all the skin
off my hands, though, I’ll admit.”
With the hunger clamor quieted they took a compass bearing, shouldered
their burdens, and for a solid hour trudged away through the mountain
solitude, uncoiling the wire as they went and leaving a double trail
of it behind them. Smaller and smaller grew the coils, until at last,
as nearly as they could estimate, there were only a few hundred yards
left. Dick, never very strong on directions and localities, thought
they were lost; but Larry still held on grimly.
“It can’t be very much farther,” he insisted, “and I’m sure we’re
heading right. If the wire will only hold out――――”
They were climbing a little ridge as he said it, and the hollow coils
had dwindled to a mere nucleus in each. Dick was a few steps in the
lead, and as he topped the ridge he dropped his handful of wire and
flung himself flat.
What they saw from the ridge top was instructive, to say the least of
it. Directly below them lay the open valley with the Overland Central
material piles heaped in the center of it. Out of the valley to their
left they saw the gulch through which they had entered the day before,
and through which they had made their escape in the night.
When they had last passed through it the gulch had been merely a part
of the primeval wilderness. But now as much as they could see of it was
alive with an army of laborers fiercely at work laying down a railroad
track. Teams in an endless procession were delivering cross-ties and
rails from the piles in the valley; and off to the north they could
see black smoke rising above the trees betokening the presence of a
locomotive, or a steam shovel――or both.
For the first few minutes they could do nothing but stare open-mouthed.
It all seemed like magic. When they had been in this same valley
twenty-four hours earlier, there had been only the material piles and a
small squad of engineers and their helpers killing time. But now――――
[Illustration: For the first few minutes they could do nothing but
stare. It all seemed like magic]
Larry was the first to speak after they had swept the shut-in valley
with the field-glass, taking in all the details of the furious
activities.
“I told you they wouldn’t quit,” he remarked quietly. “With that rich
gold camp at the head of the Tourmaline yelling for a railroad, they
have too much at stake. They are still meaning to race us for Little
Ophir.”
“Lawzee――but I’m mighty glad we took another Donovan chance!” said
Dickie Maxwell, whispering as if he were afraid that the toiling army a
full half-mile distant might overhear him. “What do we do next?”
Larry was already unlimbering the field telephone set and coupling it
to the wires. For several minutes they got no reply to their signals;
but just as a great fear that their line might be grounded somewhere,
in spite of all the care they had taken, was beginning to grip them,
a faint voice came through the receiver. What it said was: “All
right――Smith talking――shoot.”
Larry tried to pass the ear-piece to his companion――just for the honor
of it; but Dick said, “No; this is your piece of pie. Eat it yourself.”
Larry put his lips to the mouthpiece of the transmitter.
“This is Donovan――can you hear me?――all right. We’re on a ridge
just above the O. C. camp and overlooking it.... Yes, we’re hid in the
woods and perfectly safe; but listen: the O. C. people have brought in
a force twice as big as ours and they are laying track to beat the band
down the gulch that leads to our canyon. Get that?”
“Got you,” came the faint voice; and then: “Hold the wire open a
minute.” Presently the voice began again and went on for some little
time, and when it stopped, Larry took his turn at asking for a hold.
“It’s Smithy talking,” he told Dick hurriedly. “Mr. Ackerman is with
him――just got back from Red Butte. Smith says that Mr. Ackerman says
it’s mighty important to know just what the O. C.’s present plan is;
what they’re going to do when they get to our canyon. He wants us
to find out if we can, but insists that we mustn’t get into danger.
Wait――they’re talking again.”
This time the receiver droned away for a full minute. At the end Larry
said, “All right; maybe we’ll have to wait until after dark. Yes, sir,
we’ll be all kinds of careful. Good-by.”
“More cautions,” he explained. “It was Mr. Ackerman, himself, this
time. He seems awfully anxious for fear we’ll get into trouble. Yet he
says it’s very important that our folks should know as soon as possible
just what the O. C. means to do. You heard what I told him.”
The first thing they did after making this report was to go over the
field again, foot by foot, as you might say, while the daylight lasted
and with the help of the excellent field-glass. Larry jotted down the
findings in his note-book as Dick reported them.
“That _is_ a steam shovel over yonder; I can see the puffs of steam.
But there is a locomotive, too; that means that they’ve got their
connecting track that near. Now down in the valley: I’m counting
the men loading the wagons ... fifty-four of ’em. Yep; more wagons
coming in all the time with ties and rails; I can count eighteen of
’em besides those going and coming in the gulch. Say, Larry, couldn’t
we slip down there where the working gangs are and maybe find out
something that way? I should think we might be able to lose ourselves
in a crowd that big.”
Larry looked at his watch.
“Six o’clock; they’ll be changing shifts before long. It’ll be easier
to do it then.”
They waited, snatching a bite of supper in the meantime. While they
were eating, the whistle of a donkey engine sounded, the working shifts
were changed, and carbide flares began to flame out in the gulch below.
“Time’s up,” said Dick, cramming in the last mouthful. “We’d better be
crawling down the hill before it gets too dark.”
They proceeded to do it. By making a short detour to the left they
found scrub thickets enough to mask their descent, and in the gulch
itself there was also timber cover enough to let them come within easy
listening distance of the track-laying battle. The big, bearded chief
of construction of the Overland Central――the man who had captured
and locked them up the day before――was walking up and down the line,
shouting out orders to his foremen, and they knew what to expect if
they should run afoul of him. So they kept themselves hidden pretty
carefully in the scrub timber growth.
After a bit――after it had grown quite dark――the chief strode away
toward the valley camp and they breathed easier. They could hear the
men talking as they worked, but there was nothing in the talk to tell
them what they wanted to know.
“We’ve got to do something better than this,” Larry whispered in Dick’s
ear. Then: “Say――look at that water boy. He must have bought his outfit
in the same store that we did ours.”
Taking him by and large, the water boy in question might have passed
for Larry’s own brother, a year or so younger. He was an over-sized,
curly-haired chap in corduroys, flannel shirt, and a battered campaign
hat. Also, he was wearing a pair of engineer’s lace-boots――cast-offs,
they guessed they were, since they seemed to be about three sizes too
large for the boy.
When they first saw him he was walking up and down with his bucket of
water and dipper to let the workmen drink as they called to him; and he
had just passed for the third time, going toward camp with the bucket
empty, when Larry again called attention to him.
“If I could only swap jobs with that kid for an hour or so, I’ll bet I
could find out something,” he whispered. Then: “What’s he doing now?”
In the flare of the working torches they could still see the boy with
the big boots. He was stumbling along up the newly laid track as if he
were half asleep.
“Bet you that kid’s just out of bed,” Dick muttered. “Been sleeping all
day and still hasn’t had enough. Now look at that, will you?”
“That” was the spectacle of the boy hiding his bucket behind a track
tool box and shuffling aside under the trees to stretch out upon the
ground and compose himself to take a nap. Larry started. “If I only
had that old hat of his!” he breathed.
“Let me!” Dick hissed; but Larry put him firmly back into the shadows.
“Not much!――this is a homely man’s job, and you’re too pretty. Stay
here and listen to every word that’s said.” And with that he glided
away toward the somnolent water carrier.
Dick Maxwell, watching with all his eyes, presently saw an arm reach
out of the shadows toward the sleeper, and then saw, or thought he
could see, a cap replace the battered hat that lay beside the water
boy. A minute later the hat, with a shuffling figure under it, came in
sight, and the figure was reaching for the empty water bucket.
It was at this climaxing instant that a shout went up――“Water boy!” The
sleeper under the trees never stirred, but the figure with the bucket,
stumbling along so exactly like the real owner of the hat that Dick,
himself, could hardly realize that it was Larry, answered the call.
The shouter was one of the assistant engineers, and he was standing
within a few yards of Dick’s hiding place. As Larry, bucket in hand,
and with the borrowed hat pulled down over his eyes, came up, the
engineer scribbled a line on a leaf of his pocket note-book, tore the
leaf out and thrust it at Larry with a crisp order.
“Here, boy; drop that bucket and run up to the office with this. Bring
the blue-print they’ll give you back to me. Chase your feet now, and
don’t be all night about it!”
Dick held his breath while the transfer of the bit of paper was being
made. It didn’t seem possible that Larry could go unrecognized. But the
flare lights were a bit uncertain, and before the anxious watcher could
do more than gasp, Larry had turned and was running up the track.
Larry, himself, cool, collected, and holding his excitement down with
a firm grip, was none too sure he could carry it off until he had the
piece of paper safely in hand and was hurrying away with it. But with
the one risk left behind, there was a sharper one on ahead. The field
office would be well lighted, and, worse than that, the fierce-eyed
chief might be there. Also, in the interval the real water boy might
wake up and show himself. It was a moment for quick work, and for
nothing else.
Running like a sprinter trying to break a record, Larry soon reached
the camp. A passing teamster directed him and he stumbled into the
engineers’ office and gave the note to the first man he came to; a
draftsman working over a trestle-board table. There were three other
men in the office and the big chief was one of them. They were talking,
and they paid no attention to a mere messenger boy standing aside while
the draftsman hunted for the required blue-print. All ears for the
hoped-for information, this is what Larry heard.
“Well, it’s just as I’ve been sayin’; we’re all handing it to you,
Chief. If you hadn’t made that second survey on the north side of the
canyon, this quick move of Ackerman’s would have blocked us,”――this
from one of the three whom Larry recognized as the boss bridge builder.
“And your scheme of getting around the cliffs with a temporary trestle
in the bed of the river is all right. We can do it, using the timbers
and steel we were going to use in the bridge.”
“That’s all right for you, Sedgwick,” was the growling answer, “but I’m
still sore about letting those kids get away last night. That was a
bonehead trick, and it’s what did us up. The next time I get hold of
any of Ackerman’s spies, kids or no kids, they’ll go to jail!”
Larry didn’t wait to hear any more. He grabbed the blue-print the
draftsman had found for him and ran with it as if all the gray timber
wolves in the Timanyonis were at his heels. Almost by a miracle, as
it seemed, he had got the needed information. The rival railroad was
abandoning its original plan of usurping the Short Line’s right-of-way,
and was preparing to build a paralleling line on the other side of the
canyon!
Two minutes after he had delivered the blue-print to the waiting
assistant on the grade, and had shuffled off with the empty water
bucket, Larry, the battered hat restored to its sleeping owner and his
own cap recovered, was at Dick’s elbow.
“Come, quick!” he whispered; “we haven’t a minute to lose!” and at the
end of a heart-breaking, wind-cutting scramble up the steep ridge they
were once more in touch with their telephone line.
The answer to Larry’s call came quickly, and between gasps he told
the story of their discovery. The reply, which came from Smith, was
an order from headquarters. Larry repeated it for Dick as he was
disconnecting the field set from the wires.
“Our job’s done,” he announced. “We’re to bring this field set in with
us and leave the wire for a couple of the men to reel up to-morrow,
dragging the ends back with us a piece so that our men won’t have to
show themselves to that crowd down below. When we get in, we’re to
report at once to Mr. Ackerman at the new ‘front.’”
Dark as it was, the return over the hills of the plateau was merely
a bit of routine. All they had to do was to follow their wires, like
cave explorers retracing a twine trail, and by a late bed-time they had
reached a little widening in the canyon of the Tourmaline where the
Short Line chief had established his new headquarters.
The sober-faced chief’s eyes were twinkling when the two boys finished
telling the story of the afternoon’s adventures.
“You two fellows are getting altogether too much notoriety,” he said,
with what might have been taken――but for the eye-twinkling――for grave
severity. And then: “Whose idea was it?――this wire-scouting scheme?”
“Larry’s,” said Dick promptly, before Larry could open his mouth.
“I’m charging it up to both of you. As it turns out, it is exactly what
we needed to know; though if I had been here, I shouldn’t have allowed
you two ‘cubs’ to undertake anything so full of risk. And you shouldn’t
have undertaken it without orders. For your breach of discipline I’m
going to send you ahead with the instrumentmen to-morrow. Maybe that
will keep you out of mischief for a while.”
“Did he mean it?” Larry asked, a few minutes later when they were
piling into a couple of bunks at the back of the newly erected
engineers’ shack, “about disciplining us?”
“Never in the world!” Dick chuckled, rolling himself into his blankets.
“He’s tickled pink over what you thought of――and did――and I’ll bet a
chicken worth fifty dollars that you’ll get a boost at headquarters
that’ll make your curly old head swim. Gee! but you’re the lucky kid!”
“Over what _I_ did?” growled Larry drowsily. “I like that! If you don’t
quit cutting yourself out of things, the way you’ve been doing, I’m
going to lick you, one of these days. Good-night.”
And with a yawning “Ah-yow!” that was like the plaint of a hungry
yellow dog he was asleep.
CHAPTER IV
“THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN”
The big “consolidation,” its single pair of pony trucks feeling out the
way for the eight gripping drive-wheels, was storming up the crooked
canyon of the Tourmaline, pushing two flat-car loads of steel rails
ahead of it and waking the echoes with its clamor.
The track, rough and uneven because it had not yet been “surfaced,”
made the big engine rock and surge from side to side, and Dick and
Larry, perched on the fireman’s seat and carefully nursing two mahogany
boxes, had to brace themselves to keep their places. Two days earlier
a pair of surveying instruments had been damaged by the premature
explosion of a blast in a rock cutting, and the boys were returning
from a hurry trip to the valley supply camp with replacements.
As the steel train rounded one of the canyon curves, the elbow where
the branch gulch from the north came in, a scene of strenuous activity
came into view. On the opposite side of the river, workmen, clustering
like bees in swarming time, were building a trestle designed to carry a
railroad track past a hundred-foot stretch where the canyon wall rose
almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge. The legs of the trestle
bents were planted fairly in the stream and the difficulties in the
builders’ way were prodigious. Yet the little army was toiling as if
the very minutes were precious――as, indeed, they were. For, in the race
to reach the gold field at the head of the Tourmaline the Nevada Short
Line was now well in the lead.
“They’re getting in their old scaffolding, all right,” Larry commented,
twisting himself to look out of the 815’s cab window, “and it will do
to run over until they can take time to blast out a notch in the cliff.
When they get their track past that place they’ll be in shape to give
us a lot of trouble.”
“It sure looks that way,” Dick agreed. “If we could only get our rock
cutting in the ‘Narrows’ done before they catch up and go to drilling
and blasting across the creek from us it wouldn’t be so bad. But if we
don’t.... Believe me, I’m calling the situation pretty complicated,
aren’t you?”
“Complicated” was a rather mild word to use in describing the
strugglesome industrial battle going on in the narrow gorge of the
Tourmaline. Like most mountain canyons, this one offered scanty
encouragement to the building of even one railroad line, let alone two.
In many parts it was merely a deep, rock-bound chasm, with usually a
narrow shelving bank on one side of the stream――but rarely on both.
Having been first in the field, the Nevada Short Line engineers had
chosen the easiest route, crossing from one bank of the stream to the
other as the ground was most favorable for their purpose. But the
competing railroad, coming in later, had ignored the Short Line’s
earlier survey, overlapping and even duplicating it in some places,
with no regard whatever for the rights of the pioneer company. Under
such conditions the struggle for the right-of-way had now developed
into a fighting race between the two construction forces, each trying
to forge ahead of the other and to seize and hold every foot of the
favorable ground.
In this race the Short Line was, for the moment, the winner, having
already laid its track some three miles beyond the point where the
Overland Central was entering the canyon through the northern gulch
and building its trestle. But the race was by no means won. In the
ruggedest part of the canyon the Short Line was halted by a rocky
buttress through which it was necessary to cut a shelf for the track.
And rock blasting is slow work.
Two and a half miles above the scene of hurried trestle-building, and
a scant half-mile below their own “end of track,” the two boys on the
storming 815 saw another gang of Overland Central graders at work on
the opposite side of the gorge. They were on a steep slope covered
with great boulders and standing “monuments” of eroded rock in curious
formations. Neither Dick nor Larry could make out what the men were
doing, but they seemed to be actively busy doing something.
“They’re coming right along with the graders without waiting for their
trestle to be finished,” Dick pointed out. Then: “Say, Larry――I didn’t
realize that their grade was so much higher up than ours. If their
track is as high as those fellows are working they must be making
altitude a lot faster than we are.”
“They need to make it,” Larry explained. “They are planning to go into
Little Ophir on a grade much higher than ours; or at least, they’ve
made one survey that way. Mr. Goldrick told me so when I was out
working with him yesterday.”
“Which the same spells a heap more trouble for us,” said Dick gloomily.
“Having the height on us that way, every blast they fire will bombard
our track and our working gangs. Looks to me as if we’ve simply _got_
to keep ahead of them; that’s all there is to it!”
Reaching the temporary “front” camp at Pine Gulch, in a little
park-like widening of the canyon, they left the surveying instruments
in the office tent and walked on up the gorge to report for duty to
Goldrick, the assistant engineer in charge of the rock cutting in the
Narrows.
“Well, you got back all right, did you?” said Goldrick, as they came
up. “How are things looking down along?”
They told him of the O. C. trestle-building, and of the slope-side gang
they had seen just below the Pine Gulch camp. While they were talking a
distant thunder-burst of heavy blasts jarred upon the air.
“That must be that gang we saw a few minutes ago,” said Dick, adding:
“It’s sort of curious. They weren’t drilling when we came by, and we
didn’t see any air compressor or machinery of any kind.”
“All right; let ’em waste their dynamite if they want to,” said the
young engineer. “We’re going to beat ’em, hands down.” Then to the
matter in hand: “If you two cubs want to do a bit of surveying, you may
take an instrument and run a trial level for Bannagher in that rock
cutting. He’s lost his bench marks in the shooting.”
Delighted to get a chance at real instrument work, the two boys hurried
back to camp, got a transit, and were presently hard at it, running
lines for the hard-rock foreman. Absolute accuracy wasn’t necessary, of
course; if it had been, Goldrick would have run the lines himself. Just
the same, the two understudies, working with the instrument, were as
painstaking as they knew how to be, and that was why Dick, taking his
turn at the eye-piece of the telescope, burst out suddenly:
“Say, Larry――gee whiz! what’s the matter with the river?”
Larry, who was holding the target staff, grinned.
“I don’t know; I’ll ask it if you want me to,” he joked. “What do you
think you see?”
“I don’t think――I _know_,” Dick came back. “That rock I was sighting at
a minute ago was out of water. Now it’s gone under.”
“Bugs!” scoffed Larry. “You’re seeing things. There’s something the
matter with your eyes.”
“There isn’t a thing the matter with my eyes,” Dick insisted. “You look
at that rapid; it isn’t shooting half as high as it did. I tell you the
river’s rising!”
A very little additional observation proved the fact definitely and
beyond doubt; the river _was_ rising. Hurrying up to the gash in the
cliff where the men were working, the boys assailed Bannagher, asking
him where Mr. Goldrick had gone.
“’Twas over the hill he wint,” said the big Irishman. “What is ut yez’d
be wanting――with the eyes av yez buggin’ out as if yez’d seen th’
Banshee?”
“The river’s rising like fun!” Dick exclaimed, excitedly.
“Av coorse ut is――with th’ mountain snow meltin’ under th’ June sun.
What wud yez ixpect? Haven’t yez seen ut joompin’ up an’ down ivery day
we’ve been here?”
The two cubs glanced at each other sheepishly. One of the first things
they had remarked in the canyon was the daily fluctuation in the stream
level caused by the more or less rapid melting of the snow on the high
peaks.
“’Tis forgetting yer lesson yez were,” laughed Bannagher. Then:
“We’d be nading more dannymite. Would yez two be taking the key av
th’ powther house, and a couple av the min, and th’ push-car, and be
sinding a box av ut up to us?”
They undertook the errand willingly. The line-running was done, and the
trip with the push-car enabled them to take the transit back to camp
without having to carry it. In a few minutes they were on their way,
all four riding the small platform car as it slid down the grade on the
brake.
The car had made only a couple of turns in the crooking canyon,
however, before the strange behavior of the Tourmaline again drew their
attention. With every hundred yards the change in the river became more
apparent. Great boulders that had stood waist-high in the bed of the
stream were slowly submerging, and the rapids were disappearing one by
one, leaving only oily swirls to mark the places where they had been.
“I can’t believe it’s only the snow melting!” Dick shouted, raising his
voice to make himself heard above the shrilling of the little car’s
wheels. “We’ve never seen it come up like this before!”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before the car shot around the
final curve and raced into the small basin where the Pine Gulch camp
was pitched. With a shock of astoundment they saw that the basin was
rapidly becoming a lake, with the water already lapping at the tie-ends
of the single short side-track. In the camp the men of the night
shift had turned out as if at a fire alarm and were hastily carrying
everything portable to higher ground.
Jackson, the night boss, explained the astonishing thing when the
push-car party of four ran up to add four pairs of hands to the work of
salvaging the company property. “It’s that blithering O. C. outfit!” he
gritted. “They’ve gone and shot half a mountain into the river a little
ways below here, and it’s made a dam. We’re goin’ to be swamped out!”
The prophecy proved true in almost no time at all. With a good-sized
river pouring into the narrow, dammed-up gorge, the water rose
with incredible rapidity. The two boys, with their helpers, hurled
themselves upon the engineers’ office tent, pulled it down and dragged
it and its contents up among the hillside pines, and while they were at
it they saw the two tracks, the main line and the siding, disappear in
the flood.
Martin, the driver of the big 815, was trying to save his engine. But
to get it out on the main track so that it could be run up the canyon,
he had first to back down to the switch, and at that point the water
was by this time deep enough to put the fire out――which it did, killing
the engine and leaving Martin to jump and wade up to his hips in
getting away from it.
When the water stopped rising, which did not happen until the
locomotive, sizzling and sputtering, showed nothing but its stack
and the roof of its cab, there was time to look around and measure
the extent of the disaster. It was discouragingly complete. Thanks
to the hurried salvaging, most of the store-room supplies and other
movables had been carried up out of the flood’s reach; but the shacks
were swamped, all the rails and heavy material were at the bottom
of the lake, and the park-line opening in the canyon was afloat with
cross-ties, boards and timbers of all descriptions.
“Great murder!” Dick gasped, when the breath-taking interval had come,
“wouldn’t that make you weep? I believe they did it on purpose――those
O. C. people. That’s what they were so busy about when we came past a
couple of hours ago. They were placing their dynamite, right then!”
But Larry was a bit more charitable.
“I don’t suppose they cared very much what might happen to us, but I
can’t believe that they deliberately planned any such thing as this,”
he objected. “What say if we climb up somewhere from where we can see
the dam? There isn’t anything more to do here now.”
Making their way around the head of the side gulch from which the camp
had been given its name they climbed to the summit of the great cliff
below the park-like widening. This cliff was a rocky promontory called,
from the likeness of its jagged front to the profile of a human face,
“The Old Man of the Mountain.” From the high viewpoint they could look
down upon the dam which was flooding the camp. As nearly as they could
determine, it seemed that the whole of the opposing cliff face had been
blown out bodily to fall into the stream bed.
Naturally, the huge, loose-rock dam was not nearly watertight. As they
looked down upon it a dozen cataracting jets were spurting through it
under the immense pressure of the backed-up river. But in a little time
the flow wash of the river would fill up many of these outlets, and
then the flood would rise higher.
“Good gracious! they’ve sure got us where the ax got the chicken, this
time!” Dick groaned. “Our wires are gone, and we can’t even get word to
Red Butte for more help――or to tell Mr. Ackerman what’s been done to
us.”
“Mr. Ackerman is in Red Butte?” Larry asked.
“I suppose he is there yet. Mr. Goldrick told me he went down
yesterday.”
Larry had planted himself on a flat rock with his elbows on his knees,
and the “brown-study” frown came to wrinkle between his level, wide-set
eyes.
“I was just thinking, Dick,” he said. “Doesn’t it strike you that these
O. C. people have put a pretty big rod in pickle for themselves?”
Dick shook his head.
“I don’t see it――yet.”
“Think a minute. We’ve just naturally got to get rid of this dam; we
can’t hit another lick until we do. If you were in Mr. Ackerman’s
place, what would you do?”
Dick took his turn at the brown-studying, dived deep and came up with
his decision.
“I guess I’d sink about half a car-load of dynamite down behind that
pile of rock and touch it off. I’ll bet that would move it out in a
hurry.”
“It would,” said Larry quietly. “And after that――what would happen when
that lake’s turned loose?”
“Gee!” Dick breathed, pushed on thus from cause to effect and
after-effect――“their trestle down yonder; it would go out just like so
much matchwood! And it would serve them mighty good and right, too!”
“Yes,” said Larry, still speaking quietly; “I suppose we might send
them word to get their men off of it. You wouldn’t want to drown the
men too, would you?”
“No-o,” Dick admitted, dragging the word as if it came rather
reluctantly. “But they’re making it war, Larry, and they ought to be
willing to take the consequences.”
For a time neither of them spoke again. Within their range of vision,
looking up-stream, the dammed-up lake extended endlessly, as it seemed,
winding away through the mountains like a sheet of molten silver.
Presently they saw a line of men topping the high spur to the westward
and descending, like a string of ants, into the flooded camp basin.
Bannagher and his hard-rock men had been driven from their work in the
Narrows by the rising waters.
“I suppose we may as well climb down,” Dick suggested at last. “Bob
Goldrick may want to send us out with the news, now that we haven’t any
wires left.”
In returning to the lower level they descended the back of the “Old
Man,” zigzagging down until they reached the water’s edge in a finger
of the flood which reached well back into the pine-forested side gulch.
In dropping down the final declivity Larry was a few steps ahead, and
when Dick caught up with him he was standing before a curious, timbered
opening in the mountain side almost at the new water level.
“What is it――a mine?” Dick asked, pausing with a hand on Larry’s
shoulder.
“No; just a prospect hole that somebody has dug some time, I guess,”
was the reply. “These hills are full of ’em, so Bannagher says. After
gold was discovered at the canyon head everybody came here to dig holes
in the ground.”
Dick peered into the dark cavity.
“I wonder how far in it goes?” he queried.
There was no particular reason why they shouldn’t take a few minutes
in which to find out how far in it went, so they ducked in under the
rotting timbers.
The tunnel dipped down sharply from the entrance, as if its excavator
had been following an erratic mineral lead of some sort, and it
presently passed from red clay into rock. Then, suddenly, the man-made
part of it stopped short, and in the dim light filtering down from
the entrance they found themselves in what appeared to be a cavern
of tremendous extent; at least, in the semi-darkness they could not
distinguish its boundaries.
“Great Jehu!” Dick exclaimed, and his voice came back to him in a
hollow echo, “the――the Old Man of the Mountain’s got a hole in his
insides!”
“And some hole, at that,” Larry agreed, and he struck a match.
The tiny flame did next to nothing in the way of dispelling the
darkness in the great chamber, but it did serve to show them how the
unknown prospector’s final round of blasts had broken through into the
cavern.
“And I’ll bet he was just about as much astonished as we were just
now,” was Dick’s comment. Then he said, “’Sh!――listen!”
What they heard was the steady drip-drip-drip of water. And now they
noticed that there was a dank smell in the place, like that of a wet
cellar.
“Say, Larry,” Dick went on, “I’d like to know a little more about this
place. Let’s go back to what there is left of our camp and see if we
can’t find a candle.”
The retreat to the upper air was quickly made. On the hillside to which
the camp salvage had been carried they found the men sitting or lying
around under the trees waiting for some one to come and tell them what
to do. Bannagher had sent one member of his shift over the mountain
to try to find Goldrick; and two more had gone out in the opposite
direction to carry the news of the disaster to the camps below.
Larry and Dick found a candle in their own camp dunnage, and Larry,
searching in the heap of tools and equipment that had been carried up
from the store shack, secured a coil of light rope. As if moved by a
common impulse, neither of them said anything to anybody about their
recent discovery. In a few minutes they were back in the great central
cavern under the “Old Man,” Dick carrying the lighted candle and Larry
the coil of rope.
A survey of the place made possible by the better light was almost
awe-inspiring. The great domed chamber in the heart of the mountain was
fully a hundred feet in diameter, with a height of at least fifty feet
in the center. It was irregularly circular in shape, and there were
half a dozen passages leading out of it in different directions.
But that was not all. Through a multitude of seams and cracks in
one side of the chamber, drops and little rivulets of water were
oozing to form shallow spreading pools on the floor; pools which were
already beginning to drain into the largest of the out-going passages.
Instantly the same conclusion struck both of the boys.
“It’s the backed-up river forcing its way through cracks in the rock!”
said Dick in an awed whisper.
“You’ve said it,” Larry agreed. “It has just begun coming in; you
can see by the way the pools are spreading.” Then: “Say, Dick! it’s
down-hill all the way from that prospect hole in the gulch to this
place――pretty steeply down-hill, at that. Do you know what that means?”
Dick shivered.
“Don’t I know? It means that we’re away below the level of that
flood-pond, right now!”
Larry nodded.
“We are; thirty-five or forty feet, at the very least.”
“For pity’s sake!” Dick gasped. “If that lake should take a running
jump and break through on us――――”
“Wait,” Larry broke in; “I’ve got an idea――and it’s a whaling big
one! Gee!――if it will only work out ... but first we’ve got to find
out where this leakage water is traveling to. Are you game to take a
chance, Dick?”
“Game is the word,” said the general manager’s son; and it was no
particular discredit to him if his voice shook a little.
“All right; come on.”
Larry had the candle now and he led the way to the passage down which
the gathered rivulets were just beginning to trickle to disappear in
some deeper depth.
Recalling the experiences of that nerve-sapping exploration afterward,
they were both glad to remember that there had been no talk of backing
out. There was ample chance for it, and plenty of good excuses, if
either of them had been so minded. The passage, in which they could
walk upright in the beginning, dwindled in places to squeeze holes
through which they had to crawl like a pair of burrowing ground-hogs.
Also, there were many branchings, and at the first of these Larry
began to uncoil his rope to leave it as a guide by means of which they
might find their way back through the maze; though as for this, as he
remarked, the trickling rill underfoot would serve if they shouldn’t
happen to lose it in some bottomless pit on the way.
At the same time it was the rill that gave them the most uneasiness.
Reason as they might about it, they could not rid themselves of the
fear that it was growing larger; and if it were, if it should grow big
enough, with the huge backed-up lake behind it, it might easily make
retreat impossible; worse, still, it might drown them suddenly right
where they were.
“Goodness!” Dick shuddered, after the passage of one of the tightest of
the squeeze holes, “isn’t there any end to this miserable mole burrow?”
It was just a little way beyond this that they found an end; a most
curious one. Away ahead they could see faint glimmerings of daylight,
and it was coming, not through a single outlet, but seemingly through
a dozen. A little farther advance showed them a singular phenomenon.
At its outer end the passage they were following was split into
numberless cracks and crevices, as if the final barrier of rock had
been shattered, but not entirely broken through and carried away, by
some mighty volcanic blast. And no one of the crevices was wide enough
to let them squeeze through to the open air.
“That settles it,” said Larry, not without keen disappointment. “We’ll
have to go back the way we came, and we’d better be doing it, too. This
seepage stream really is getting bigger, all the time.”
When they began to retrace their steps it was hard to keep panic
from getting the upper hand to turn the retreat into a rout. In the
tight places Dickie Maxwell had to shut his eyes and grit his teeth
to hold on to his nerve; and Larry, while he took it coolly and more
methodically as a thing that had to be done and done right, felt the
same naggings of panic in the critical pinches. For now it was plainly
apparent that the leakage stream from above was growing in volume from
minute to minute.
“Don’t let it get your nerve; we’ll make it all right,” he said to
Dick, as he braced himself to pull his lighter companion through one
of the mole burrows. But all Dick permitted himself to say was: “Gee!
Larry――if we ever get out of this trap alive!――”
They made it finally; or at least they reached the big cavern with
the water oozing through its western wall. With an open way of escape
through the old prospect tunnel now presenting itself they stopped to
catch a breath of relief. It was in this breathing spell that Dick said:
“I guess I know now what your big idea is, Larry.”
Larry nodded.
“You see why we had to go on and find out if this place had a real
drain-way to the canyon below the dam. We know it has, now. What I
don’t know about engineering would fill the biggest book you ever saw,
but anybody can see that a few boxes of dynamite buried up at the
head of that prospect tunnel and fired will let the water out of our
lake――and do it through these cave holes slowly enough so that it won’t
flood everything to death down below.”
Dick did not answer at once. There was a rock ledge at one side of the
big chamber and he sat down upon it. When he spoke it was to say:
“Those O. C. people don’t deserve to have us consider them in the
least, Larry. We ought to blow their old dam to bits and let them have
what’s coming to ’em when it goes out――at that place where they’re
building their trestle in the creek bed. It’d fix them good and
plenty, I guess.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Larry admitted. “As you say,
they’ve earned it and it’s coming to ’em. I never will believe that
they didn’t blow that cliff down on purpose to make trouble for us.”
Then, after a little pause: “I――guess――it’s up to us, Dick, to say
whether we get square with them or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this: we’re the only ones who know anything about this cave. If
we keep our mouths shut, Mr. Ackerman will dynamite the dam. There
isn’t anything else he can do, so far as he or anybody else will know.”
“Huh!” said Dick; “so you’ve thought of that notion of keeping still,
too, have you? Let’s fight it out right here. Do we, or don’t we?”
For a full minute there was nothing but the steady drip, drip of the
leaking flood to break the dead silence of the great cavern. At last
Larry said:
“I’ve got a mighty mean temper, Dick, and I can never tell when it’s
hammering me over into something that oughtn’t to be done.”
“A mean temper?――you?” Dick forced a laugh. “That’s a joke. Why, Larry
Donovan! you’re just about the most even-tempered fellow I’ve ever
known!”
“You say that because you don’t really know me, Dick――inside, I mean.
By nature, my temper is like a fulminate of mercury fuse-cap――set to go
off if you so much as drop it on the floor. All the Donovans are that
way. But when I was a little kid I got fighting mad one day――blind,
crazy mad――and nearly killed another little kid; hit him with a brick.
Young as I was, it made an awful dent in me; and away back at that
time I began to learn to sit on my temper, telling myself I’d have to
or else I’d be a murderer some day before I knew it.”
“Well?” said Dick; “you can sit on it all right now; I’ll bear witness
to that.”
“Yes; I can hold it down now――so far as boiling over suddenly is
concerned. But doing it makes me ugly and bitter inside; makes me chew
over a thing until I can’t tell right from wrong in it.... I mean when
things are fair and when they’re not. I guess you can see what I’m
trying to get at?”
“Yep, I guess I do,” Dick acknowledged. “You’ve chewed over all the
things the O. C. folks have been doing or trying to do to us, and it
has made you mad inside. So it has me.” Then he grew thoughtful again,
working his way back to the thing that was waiting to be decided. When
the back-tracking was accomplished he drove a small wedge into the one
little crack that offered itself.
“I’m just wondering what Mr. Ackerman would do if he knew all that we
know,” he threw out.
“You needn’t wonder about that,” Larry interposed quickly. “The chief
stands up so straight that he leans over backward――you know he does.
He’d give those O. C. people the benefit of the doubt, every time. No,
it’s up to us, Dick. If we keep still about this cave he’ll dynamite
the dam, because, so far as he will know, it will be the only thing
that can be done. If we tell him, he’ll dynamite this cave outlet,
instead――naturally.”
Dick brought his teeth together with a little snap and looked away.
“I’m for keeping still, Larry. Those scamps down yonder need a lesson
in fair play.”
Larry got up from his seat on the stone ledge and snuffed the candle
with his fingers.
“All right; I’m with you,” he said shortly. And then they made their
way out to daylight.
Discoveries a-plenty were awaiting them when they reached the outer
air. One was that they had spent a lot more time in the cave than they
thought they had and it was now late in the afternoon. Others were that
both Mr. Ackerman, and Goldrick, the assistant, were on the ground,
and that a telephone connection had been re-established with the camps
below the dam.
But the most exciting discovery was in the activities which were going
forward. A raft had been made out of the floating cross-ties and bridge
timbers, and upon it a gang of men were loading a round iron tank which
both of the boys recognized at once as a spare air-compressor receiver.
Into one of the tank tappings a long rubber air-hose was screwed, and
from the shore end of the hose a length of blasting fuse protruded.
They didn’t have to ask what was going to be done. The chief engineer
had accepted the only alternative that he knew of. The iron tank was an
immense bomb loaded with explosives, and it was to be sunk and fired at
the heel of the dam.
Before either Larry or Dick could say anything――if they had meant to
say anything――the raft was pushed off and two of the men jumped aboard
of it to paddle it out to where the current would catch it. The two
boys were standing immediately behind the chief when he gave Goldrick a
curt order.
“Call up Deverney over your emergency wire and tell him again to pass
the warning to the O. C. construction boss,” he snapped. “Have him
tell Grissby that he has about ten minutes in which to get his men off
that trestle and up to high ground.”
There was an unnerving little wait while the telephone call was going
in and the answer was returning. Dick was winking hard, and Larry was
biting his lip and staring away across the flooded canyon. Then the
reply came from Deverney, ’phoned from his post opposite the trestle,
and Goldrick repeated it to the chief.
“They won’t stop work. Grissby says for us to go ahead and shoot; that
he’s taking a chance that the flood will spend itself before it gets
that far down.”
“It is nothing but cold-blooded murder on Grissby’s part,” was Mr.
Ackerman’s brittle comment. “Tell Deverney to shout the warning across
to the men themselves. Then, if they don’t stampede they’ll have to
take what comes. They’ve given us this flood, and we’ve got to get rid
of it――and this is the only way.”
It was too much, the timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging
out into the current; in another moment it would be too late to stop
it. As if they had both been hurled from the same catapult, the two
“cubs” flung themselves upon the big, square-shouldered chief of
construction, yelling with one voice: “There _is_ another way――we’ve
found it!”
[Illustration: The timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging out
into the current]
“What’s that?” barked the chief; then, sharply: “Bannagher――fling
a line to that raft, quick! You fellows out there――grab that line
and haul the raft ashore!” Then, wheeling short upon the boys: “Now
then――out with it, you two; what have you found?”
Most haltingly and shamefacedly they told of the chance discovery of
the hollow stomach in the Old Man of the Mountain, and of the drainage
possibility it afforded, and a swift investigation followed. Instantly
the plan that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick was put into
effect. The timber raft was towed up to the gulch bank near the old
prospect tunnel, and with team-work celerity the tank bomb was slid
into place in the tunnel mouth and many hands with picks and shovels
filled the hole and tamped it solidly.
When all was ready, everybody retreated to a safe distance on the
hillside and the fuse was lighted. After a breathless interval of what
seemed to Dick and Larry like a full half-hour――though it was really
less than five minutes――there came a low, grumbling roar like the
groan of a buried monster, the solid earth shook as if with a sudden
shivering ague chill, and with the thunder of a hundred cataracts
blended into one the flood lake began to pour into the depths of the
Old Man of the Mountain to find its way to the canyon below through the
crevice passages.
It was quite some time after dark before the park-like valley became
habitable again and the work of restoring the camp was gotten under
way. Mr. Ackerman’s office tent was one of the first to be set up, with
a flooring of planks over the soaked ground, and it was here that Dick
and Larry were, in railroad phrase, “called upon the carpet.”
“There’s just one thing missing now,” the chief said, eyeing them
sharply after they had told the story of the cave discovery in detail:
“I want to know why you didn’t tell us about this cave before we
launched the raft?”
As usual when both were called upon, Dick did the talking. And his
answer was manfully straightforward.
“At first, we didn’t mean to tell you at all. We――we had talked it
over, and we thought that the O. C. people had something coming to them
for what they had done to us.” Then he swallowed once or twice and wet
his lips and added: “I think maybe we wouldn’t have told, if we hadn’t
both been scared stiff for fear some of their trestle builders would be
drowned.”
For a moment or so the chief said nothing. Then a grim little smile, or
at least the shadow of one, began to draw at the corners of his eyes.
“When you two fellows go to college, if you do go, one of the first
things the faculty will tell you will be that they won’t undertake to
build you over morally,” he said. “A railroad construction camp is
a good bit the same way; nobody in it is going to take the trouble
to ride herd on you in the field of good morals, or to decide nice
questions of right and wrong for you. You’ve got to stand upon your own
feet and do those things for yourselves.
“You’ve been learning fast since you came on this job, and I’ve
been proud of both of you. You’ve shown aptness and courage and
resourcefulness; qualities that go a long way toward making a good
engineer; a good man in any walk in life. But there is one thing you
apparently haven’t learned; and that is that good business is never
vindictive――that in the long run, the man who strikes back merely to
‘get square’ with the other fellow is the man who loses out in the end.
Do you get that?”
“I’ve got it,” said Larry, quite meekly; and Dick nodded.
“All right, then; we’ll cross it off the book and call it a ‘has been.’
That’s all for to-night. You may go.”
But Dick hung upon his heel, and after another hard swallow or two:
“Just one thing more, Mr. Ackerman. Does my father have to know all the
ins and outs of this thing? Because, if he does――well, you see, Larry’s
got to make good, and――er――――” the plea tapered off into nothing and he
stopped in some embarrassment.
At this, the chief’s smile was less grim.
“I think, when the proper time comes, you will tell your father,
yourself,” he ventured. “And now you’d better turn in, both of you. The
Old Man of the Mountain has given you a pretty full day, and you’ve
earned your ten hours off. Good-night.”
CHAPTER V
AT TUNNEL NUMBER TWO
“Zowie!”
A crash like that of a falling house, a burst of grayish green dust
and smoke from the opposite side of the canyon, and a hurtling shower
of stones varying in size from pebbles to pumpkins, made the two young
fellows, one carrying a boxed surveying instrument and the other the
tripod and staff, take hasty shelter behind the nearest boulder.
“Ding-bust those fellows over there――they don’t care a whang who
happens to be in the way of their ding-busted rock-flinging!” Dickie
Maxwell complained plaintively, peering out at his side of the
sheltering boulder to see if there were another crash and a volley due
to come. “Did they give any warning at all? I didn’t hear anybody yell
‘Fire in the rock.’ Did you?”
Larry shook his head.
“You wouldn’t hear ’em, anyway――with the river making such a thundering
racket,” he averred. “Just the same, what you say names ’em right. They
don’t seem to care much what they do to us.”
For a couple of weeks the two boys had been “living easy,” as Dick
phrased it. After the day of flood swampings at Pine Gulch they had
been sent out ahead with Blaisdell, one of the assistant engineers, to
drive stakes and carry chain on a correction of one of the original
surveys in the upper canyon, and for that length of time they had been
out of touch with the construction force and the industrial battle that
was going on from day to day.
During that time the race between the two competing construction armies
had gone on neck and neck, as you might say. The Overland Central
had completed its bridge-trestle in the lower narrows, and while its
track-laying gangs were still half a mile or more behind those of the
Short Line, its graders and rock men were scattered all the way along
in advance; and since the O. C. survey had the higher location on the
north bank of the river, the blasting seriously interfered with the
Short Line work on the opposite and lower bank.
“If they were only decent enough to have some regular hours for firing,
like white folks!” Dick went on. “But the way it is, you never can tell
any hour or minute when they won’t open up and fling rocks at us!”
“Mr. Bob Goldrick claims that it is a part of their plan to hamper
and delay us,” Larry put in soberly. “I suppose they’re calling it
‘business,’ but I’ll say it’s crooked business. Reckon we’re safe now
to make another run for it?”
Dick picked up the instrument box and peeped around the corner of the
boulder.
“Nothing stirring,” he reported. “Are you ready? All right――let’s go!”
They made a dash up the rough track, heading for a shallow cut which
ran through the toe of the next mountain spur, and they had barely
gained the cutting when another crash bellowed upon the opposite slope
and a buckshot shower of sand and pebbles rattled down upon them.
“That’s right, old top; keep it up!” said Dick grittingly,
apostrophizing the unseen O. C. hard-rock men. Then: “I wish Mr.
Ackerman would let us get back at ’em once in a while. But he makes us
run up a red flag when we’re going to shoot.”
“The chief is right, though,” was Larry’s considered reply. “We can’t
afford to put ourselves on a level with those highbinders on the other
side of the canyon.”
“Huh! that doesn’t sound much as if you were spoiling for a fight,
Larry. Where’s your good Donovan nerve gone to?”
“Never you mind about the Donovan nerve; it’s all right. But I’m not
chasing around to find a chance to scrap with somebody. I’m out here
this summer to learn all I can about the engineering game――and so are
you. And fighting a lot of plug-uglies who won’t play the game fair
isn’t any part of our job. Just the same――Gee-_wop_! but that was a
close one!”
It was. Another blast, fired from so far around the curve ahead that
they couldn’t even see the smoke of it, hurled a stone as big as a
water bucket high in air to drop it just in front of them and fairly
between the rails of the track over which they were hastening. Its
alighting place was not more than a dozen feet distant, and it snapped
the cross-tie upon which it fell as easily as if the heavy timber had
been a pine lath.
The two boys dropped their burdens and went to roll the stone from the
track where it lay a menace to the first material train that should
come along. It was so big and weighty that it took their united efforts
to edge it over the rail and start it rolling down the embankment.
“Lucky it didn’t hit a rail,” was Larry’s comment, as they went on. “It
would have broken the steel as easily as it did the tie.”
“Seems as if there ought to be some law to hold those fellows down!”
said Dick wrathfully. “If father would only come up here once and see
what they’re doing to us!”
Larry chuckled quietly.
“You want to forget that you’re the general manager’s son, Dickie; that
doesn’t get you anywhere at all out here in the wild and woolly. But as
for that, you can bet your father knows all about what’s going on up
here; and I’ll bet he isn’t leaving a thing undone to stop this O. C.
pirate business. Our job is just to stick it out and beat ’em fairly.”
“Yes; and get shot with a rock doing it!” Dick grumbled. “Thank
goodness, there’s the tunnel; let’s run for it before they turn loose
on us again.”
Around the curve ahead lay the present “end-of-track” of the Short
Line. Viewed from a distance it looked more like a snow-break than
a tunnel or the entrance to one. A heavy plank fence guarded it on
the river side, and this was buttressed with piles of loose stone.
This plank bulwark was not a snow fence, however; it was a protection
against flying rocks from the blasting on the other side of the canyon.
To facilitate the removal of spoil――the tunnel diggings――the track had
been laid directly up to the mouth of the black hole in the mountain
side; but this track was now empty. Off at one side, and also sheltered
by the heavy plank bulkhead, was the shed which held the air-compressor
and its steam boiler.
Goldrick, the young engineer who was in charge of the tunnel driving,
was waiting for the boys when they came up with the surveying
instrument. Taking advantage of a lull in the blasting across the
river, a few lines were run; and after the stakes were driven to mark
them, the two boys were at liberty to take shelter in the tunnel――which
they promptly did when the firing recommenced on the slope opposite and
above.
“_Bing!_――Sounds a good bit like a sure-enough battle,” said Dick, as a
hurtling stone missile slammed against the outside of the stout wooden
bulkhead screening the tunnel portal.
But Larry Donovan, looking up at the tunnel roof and its rather light
timbering, was thinking of something else.
“Say, Dick; it’s a pity we lost that car-load of tunnel timbering in
the river,” he broke in, referring to an accident of the day before
in which a supply of braces and planking for shoring the tunnel had
been derailed and the timbers swept away in the swift flood of the
Tourmaline. “I don’t like the looks of this clay overhead. You’d say it
wouldn’t take very much to bring it down on us.”
The dangerous “looks” were apparent enough, even to an untrained eye.
For the first ten or fifteen feet of its plunge into the mountain the
tunnel excavation ran through clay mixed with broken rock. Of course,
it was the intention to timber this part of it solidly; but with the
material still lacking, the tunnel drivers were merely doing the best
they could, propping the shaky roof temporarily with such braces as
could be had, and going on with their work.
“Well, I guess we don’t have to stand squarely under it,” Dick offered;
and with that they moved into the black bore, coming shortly to the
heading where the clamor of the air-driven drills made a din like that
of a boiler shop.
Living over the events of that terrible morning afterward, they both
remembered that it was the ear-splitting noise that drove them back
to the tunnel mouth; the noise and the closeness of the air in the
heading. As yet, the ventilating fan had not been put in operation――as
it would be when the depth grew greater――and the exhaust air from the
drills served only to make the air a half-stupefying mixture for anyone
coming into it from the out-doors.
For the time the blast firing on the opposite slope had ceased, and
above the booming thunder of the river they could hear the chatter and
clink of the air drills on the O. C. grade. Just at this point the
“enemy” railroad was forced to blast out a long rock cutting to make a
shelf for its track, and the firing――with short intervals for drilling
and loading the holes――was fairly continuous.
Standing in the mouth of the tunnel and looking outward there was
little in sight to betoken the activities going on in the depths of the
big bore. Careful for the safety of his men, Mr. Ackerman had billeted
the off-shift in a camp lower down the canyon. Thus, save at the
shift-changing hours, and at such times as the material train or the
spoil train was coming or going, the only outside workers were the man
who ran the air-compressor and his fireman.
From their refuge behind the plank bulkhead Larry was once more looking
up at the inadequately propped clay roof.
“I’m telling you, Dick, that stuff is plenty dangerous, and it’s
getting more so,” he insisted. “If you’ll watch it, you’ll see little
bits of the clay crumbling off every now and then. I wish to goodness
we could get some timbers up here and place them.”
“So do I,” Dick agreed. “If that roof should take a notion to fall
down――――”
The sentence wasn’t finished because the breath was lacking wherewith
to finish it. As if he had suddenly lost his mind, Larry made a
plunging football tackle on his lighter companion, shooting him out
between the rails of the track and falling with him. At the same
instant there was a sort of grunting rumble behind them, and when they
looked back a stifling horror rose up to choke them. In the twinkling
of an eye the tunnel mouth had disappeared and its place was occupied
by a shelving mound of clay.
“Oh, good mercy!” Dick gasped; “the men――they’ll stifle to death in
there! And Mr. Goldrick’s in there with them! What shall we do?”
There was reason enough for the horrified gasp of helplessness. Apart
from the two men in the compressor shed there was nobody to call upon;
no rescue force available. True, there were the O. C. rock quarriers
on the other side of the canyon; but even if they could have been
summoned, they had no means of crossing the torrenting river.
Larry was the first to recover from the shock of paralyzing horror. Air
was the first requisite for the imprisoned men ... if only the pipe
which furnished the air for the drills was not broken――――
But it was broken. A rock in the slide had fallen upon it, and it was
snapped off short in the threads of a coupling. The compressor was
still running, but the air was merely wasting through the broken pipe.
Seeing this, Larry made a bolt for the telephone in the compressor
shed, giving the alarm to the two machine tenders as he dashed in. It
was the fireman who killed the telephone hope.
“Wire’s been dead for the last two hours!” he shouted. “Reckon a rock
from the O. C. blasts got it somewhere.”
Larry was dismayed afresh, but not beaten.
“We’ve got to get air in to those men, some way or other!” he raved at
Dick, who had followed him over to the compressor shed. “Four of us
couldn’t begin to dig ’em out before they’ll choke to death!”
“But how?” Dick wailed.
It was then that Larry Donovan had a warming rush of thankfulness for
the necessity which had forced him to earn his way through the Brewster
High School by working nights in the railroad machine shop. He knew
tools and machinery, and how to make use of both.
“Pipe!” he bawled at the compressor man; “got any inch pipe?”
“Plenty of it――pipe and tools,” was the heartening answer.
Taking command merely because there was no one else to take it, Larry
quickly organized his force of three and buckled in with it himself.
A length of pipe was dragged from the rack, and with a coupling and a
plug loosely screwed in to stop the end of it, they ran with it to the
blockading slide. By sheer man-strength they were able to ram it three
or four feet into the clay, but no more.
“Another coupling and plug!” Larry ordered; and with the rear end of
the pipe thus protected so that it could be hammered upon, he drove
it with a block of wood and a sledge hammer, thus gaining two or three
feet more.
“It’s stopped going――you can’t make it!” called Dick, who was
supporting the sag of the pipe and steadying it against the blows of
the sledge.
“We’ve got to make it!” Larry’s retort was undaunted, but he was pretty
nearly at the end of his resources. Nearly, but not quite. Summoning
his helpers he found a cross-tie with a square end, and using this as a
battering ram the three of them were able to gain another foot.
It was while the rescue pipe was still going in, though now only
by half-inches, that a most welcome sound thundered in their ears;
namely the storming exhausts of a locomotive laboring up the grade and
announcing the upcoming of the material train. They thought this would
mean more help; but when they looked back down the track it was only
to be disappointed. The train was made up of the construction engine
pushing a single flat-car which was loaded with timbers, and there was
no crew save the two enginemen. At the same moment, as if by malice
aforethought――only of course it was not――the blasting began again on
the other side of the canyon.
Under a hail of small stones the train came up, to be flagged to a stop
as it was over-running the out-thrust length of pipe. Larry, still in
command, was grappling fiercely with a new idea that had come sizzling
into his brain. Here was power enough; a mighty ram that would put
their puny efforts with the sledge hammer and the butting cross-tie
miles out of the race.
“Blow your whistle and see if you can’t make those fellows up yonder
understand that we’re in trouble!” he yelled up at the engineer in the
cab; and when the whistle signal had been given, and had gone unheeded:
“Ease ahead a little until the car straddles the pipe ... that’s
right――hold up; that’s far enough,” and down he went on his back under
the timber car to try to make some sort of a pushing hitch on the pipe
of rescue.
The hitch was made, after a fashion, with a bit of chain ransacked out
of the compressor shed scrap heap, and a vise hastily detached from the
compressor man’s repair bench to make a clamp-hold on the pipe to push
against. But just as Larry was crawling out to give the engineer the
word to move ahead slowly, bang! came another blast from the opposite
cliff, and a flying fragment of stone, no bigger than a man’s fist,
came hurtling across the river.
“Look out!” Dick shouted; and the engineer, glancing out of the cab
window and seeing the stone, ducked promptly. But the stone didn’t hit
the cab. As if it had been a projectile fired out of a carefully aimed
cannon, it struck the locomotive’s whistle and snapped it off short at
the dome-head.
In the uproar of escaping steam that followed, nobody could make
himself heard, and Larry didn’t try. Racing around to the rear end of
the flat-car he uncoupled it from the disabled engine, making frantic
signals to the engineer to let his machine drop back down the grade out
of harm’s way. Ideas were coming thick and fast now, and though his
power plant was smashed, he had one more alternative ready and waiting
to be tried out.
“Cut off your air, start the compressor, and fill the storage tank!”
he yelped at Beasley, the compressor engineer; then to Dick: “You and
Johnnie Shovel help me, quick!――we’ve got to take a chance on these
flying rocks!”
The first half of the new expedient was the extra-hazardous one; it was
to connect the air-pipe line running from the compressor storage tank
to the drills in the tunnel――and which had been broken by the slide――to
the air-brake piping of the loaded timber car which was standing just
as the retreating engine had left it, a-straddle of the half-driven
rescue pipe. This connecting job was not a specially difficult one, but
it took them all out in the open, and the blasts in the high cutting on
the opposite cliff were still thundering at irregular intervals.
“Stand by to hand me what I need,” was Larry’s order, his former
machine-shop experience coming handsomely into play; “that big wrench
first――that’s it――now the first half of the union joint; and you screw
the other half on the car pipe, quick, before they touch off another
shot up yonder! That’s the idea; now hold the pipe up here so that I
can make it on――good; we’ve got her!”
Dick Maxwell was not what you would call mechanically gifted, but
some little inkling of Larry’s new notion was beginning to soak in.
As matters now stood, the air-brake mechanism of the timber car was
connected with the drill compressor so that air pressure turned on
from the storage tank in the compressor shed would actuate the brakes
exactly the same as if the car had been coupled to a locomotive. So
far, it was all clear enough; and Larry quickly demonstrated the manner
in which the new power was to be applied and utilized.
“Get a couple of ties and block the wheels so that the car can’t run
back!” he shouted. Then to Dick: “You bring the tools and crawl under
with me; I may need help.”
Beneath the car, with its stout armoring of timbers, they were safe
from the intermittent showers of rock that were coming over and could
work swiftly and to good purpose. Lying on his back under the car
Larry swiftly transferred his chain hitch from the framework of the
car itself to the lever connecting the air-brake piston with the
brake-beam. Thus, by alternately applying and releasing the brake,
with a corresponding shift of the vise-and-chain hitch each time, the
life-giving pipe could be rammed forward into the slide.
“Good work――bully good work!” Dick cried enthusiastically, when the
full size of the clever expedient dawned upon him. “You’ve got her dead
to rights, now! You do the signal yelling, and let me turn the air on
and off.”
By this time the pressure in the storage tank had been pumped up to its
maximum and the safety-valve was hissing shrilly. Larry, lying under
the car, gave the word, and as the air whistled into the brake cylinder
of the car, the lever moved out, the hitch held bravely, and the pipe
was thrust into the clay bank the full length of the stroke.
Deftly readjusting the hitch, Larry yelled again, and again Dick gave
the needed twitch to the inlet valve. “She’s going――going right along!”
the hitch-shifter called out from his hard bed on the cross-ties. “Now,
then; once more!”
There were quite a number of the “once mores” before a welcome tapping
on the buried pipe coming from the other side of the slide barrier
signaled success.
“We’re through!” Larry announced; “they’re rapping on the other end of
the pipe. Now a bit more quick work and we’ll have it!”
The job this time was to transfer the life-giving air stream from the
brake mechanism of the car to the rescue pipe, and since there was
plenty of air hose available, as there always is on any rock-drilling
job, this was soon accomplished. Next, the question arose as to whether
or not the imprisoned men had removed the plug which Larry had screwed
loosely into the pipe end to keep it from being stopped up with clay in
the ramming process.
For a minute or so they tried to tell the prisoners to unscrew the
plug, tapping on the pipe and using the Morse alphabet――which they knew
Goldrick understood――to spell out the message; but when they failed in
the efforts to read the answering taps they took a chance and turned
the air pressure on slowly. Immediately a shrill hissing told them
that the pipe was open, with the air blowing through into the shut-in
tunnel, and a series of rapid taps came to voice the gratitude of the
men on the other side of the barrier.
Fortunately, about this time there came a lull in the bombardment from
the O. C. rock cutting, and they were able to move about more freely.
“Circulation is the next thing,” Larry snapped out. “You can’t
ventilate an air-tight hole just by pumping air into it. If they’ll
only happen to think of disconnecting the drills, so that the bad air
can come out by the broken pipe――――”
A quick dash to the place where the broken pipe had been pulled
out of the slide showed that, as yet, nobody inside had thought of
disconnecting the drills. So once more they had recourse to the tap-tap
telegraphing. Over and over again, Dick, who knew Morse better
than Larry did, rapped out his message, “d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t t-h-e
d-r-i-l-l-s,” with Larry on his knees before the hole where the broken
pipe had come out, listening for the sounds which would tell him that
wrenches were being used at the other end of things.
The sounds came finally, and with them a shot-like blast of escaping
air that filled the listener to his shoe-tops with earth and sand.
“Hooray for our side!” he shouted, spitting clay with the words. “I’ve
got my mouthful; but they’ve got theirs, too. Now for the picks and
shovels!”
Whether or not the four of them, with two of the four obliged to
attend to the steam-driven air-compressor and its boiler at least
occasionally, could have made much of an impression on the giant
slide was a question that didn’t have to be answered――luckily for the
shovelers. Brannigan, the driver of the disabled construction engine,
had used his own good judgment in letting his machine slide away down
the grade out of danger from the flying rocks. Since it was all a
descending grade to the construction headquarters camp at Pine Gulch,
he had simply kept on going until the camp was reached.
Here the news of the disaster at Tunnel Number Two was quickly acted
upon. Another locomotive was run out, a train of two flat-cars was
coupled on, and with these loaded with the hastily aroused men of the
night shift, a record-breaking dash was made up the canyon.
So it came about that Larry and Dick, and their two willing but weary
helpers, were barely at the beginning of the big digging job when the
train darted around the down-canyon curve, and a few minutes later as
many men as the shallow tunnel cutting could hold were eating their
way into the slide like a hundred-armed steam shovel.
And in some way, nobody seemed to know just how, word had gotten to the
quarriers on the other side of the river; for now the big O. C. rock
cutting was lined with sober-faced onlookers, and never a blast was set
off while the rescuers were at work.
“That’s the first really human thing they’ve been known to do since we
began scrapping with them,” said Dick, standing aside with Larry to be
out of the way of the digging battalion. “I’d like to shake hands with
that foreman up yonder, whoever he is; I’ll be switched if I wouldn’t.
He’s some――――”
The interruption was a great shout, raised when the first of the
shovelers broke through the barrier, his shovel clashing against that
of one of the drilling squad doing his bit on the other side of the
slide. A minute later the prisoners, grimy and sweating, were hauled
out, one by one, Goldrick, the young engineer, being the last man to
come――like a good ship’s captain refusing to leave his post until his
men were all safe.
[Illustration: A minute later the prisoners were hauled out]
“By George!” he gasped, wringing first Larry’s hand and then Dick’s. “I
sure had a bad quarter of an hour in there when that roof dropped down
and shut us in, and I realized that there were only you two and Beasley
and Johnnie Shovel out here to do anything! The air was right bad to
begin with, and inside of half an hour we all had our tongues hanging
out. Who was it who thought of driving that pipe through the dump?――and
how in Sam Hill did you do it?”
Dick was the one who told the story of the pipe-driving expedient, and
neither it, nor Larry’s inventive genius, lost anything in the telling.
“I shouldn’t have known any more than a clam what to do when we found
that the telephone was dead,” he wound up. “But Larry, here, was right
on the job from the jump. All we did was to take orders from him and
rush it through.”
Young Goldrick’s eyes were suspiciously bright when he turned to the
big, curly-headed fellow and said, “Where do you get all this good
stuff, Larry?”
Larry Donovan, as uncomfortable as possible under the praise that Dick
had been heaping upon him, blushed like a girl, though his face was so
dirty and grimy that the blush couldn’t show much.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he evaded; “I’ve always been messing around with
tools and machinery and things. And it wasn’t anything, anyhow. You
folks inside there had to have air, and have it quick――any baby would
know that; and there was nothing to do but to pile in and give it to
you. So we did it.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” laughed Goldrick; “nothing to it, at all; no
brains needed to try pushing the pipe through with the engine when the
hammer wouldn’t drive it any farther, or to invent the air-brake scheme
when the engine got knocked out! You’re too blooming modest to draw
your own breath, Larry!”
“That’s all right,” said Larry, shifting uneasily from one foot to
the other. “All I’m asking is that you――and you, too, Dick――don’t
paste it on too thick when you report to Mr. Ackerman. I don’t want
him, or Mr. Maxwell, to get the idea that I’m understudying for a
movie-stunt-puller on this job. I’m here to earn a Donovan chance,
if I can, and the spot-light doesn’t agree with me; makes me sort of
sick at my stomach when I get too much of it.”
Quite naturally, since a stunt-puller’s word goes as it lies, as you
might say, both Dick and the young engineer promised to let Larry down
easy in the matter of report-making.
Nevertheless, that same evening, just as the boys were about to roll
themselves in the blankets in their bunk tent at the Pine Gulch camp,
the telegraph operator came over from his shack office with a freshly
written message which he gave to Larry. It was dated at Brewster, and
this is what it said:
“To Lawrence Donovan,
“Care H. Ackerman, Chf. Engr.,
“Pine Gulch.
“Congratulations upon your good work at Tunnel Number Two.
The Short Line Company owes you something and it will pay its
obligation. You have your chance and you are making good.
“R. MAXWELL,
“_General Manager_.”
CHAPTER VI
BULL PEAK AND THE CRAWLING SHALE
“I’m sure calling this stuff just about the limit, aren’t you, Larry?
Look at that stake you drove a few minutes ago――it’s half drowned
already!”
On this particular morning Dick and Larry had been given a new job,
namely, reëstablishing grade stakes ahead of the graders. Ordinarily,
there would have been no need for this duplication of the work of the
locating engineers; but the ground over which they were toilsomely
making their way was anything but ordinary. It was a steep canyon
slope composed of the most unstable material that is ever found in the
Pandora box of the great Continental Divide; a smooth, sharply inclined
plane of crawling shale pouring down like a broad river from the
heights above in bits from the size of a fingernail to that of a silver
half-dollar, and each bit as sleek and slippery as a watermelon seed.
Across this slope the right-of-way of the Nevada Short Line led, and
it was interposing a very considerable barrier to the work. With every
slightest disturbance the shale river would slither and slide, creeping
slowly, to be sure, but with overwhelming persistence, burying the
stakes of the survey, and affording no stable foothold for man or
beast, or for the tripod of the surveying instrument.
“How we are ever going to dig a notch for our track through this stuff
is more than I can tell,” Dick went on, once more trying to find a
place where the transit would stand still long enough to enable him
to get a sight through the telescope. “If anybody should ask, I’d say
we’re up against it for fair, this time.”
It certainly looked that way. The shale slide was peculiar enough to be
remarkable even in a region where singular geological formations were
the rule rather than the exception. For the greater part of its length
the canyon of the Tourmaline, up which the two railroads were racing,
each straining every nerve to be the first to reach the newly opened
gold district at the headwaters of the river, was a water-cut channel
through the mountains with beetling cliffs or steep wooded slopes
for its boundaries. But at this particular point some prehistoric
convulsion of nature had opened a half-mile gap in the south wall, and
through this broad gap, coming down from the high shoulder of Bull
Peak, poured the vast river of disintegrated shale.
As yet, the Short Line grading force was barely at the beginning of
its battle with the shale. The track had been pushed up to the western
edge of the crawling cataract, and from its “take-off” on the final
pair of rails a huge steam shovel was gnawing its way into the creeping
obstruction. Beside the main track a short spur had been laid to
accommodate a string of dump-cars which the great shovel was filling, a
single scoop to the car-load.
“They’re not making an inch of headway down there, so far as I can
see,” said Larry, indicating the busy steam shovel. “For every cubic
yard they take out, another one slides in.”
Dick Maxwell glanced up at the slope on the opposite side of the gorge,
where a high, trail-like line marked the path of the rival railroad.
“Those Overland Central engineers knew what they were about when
they located their line away up there among the rocks,” he asserted.
“They’re going to beat us, Larry. It’ll take us a month of Sundays to
get across this river of snake scales――and then some.” Then, with a
backward glance toward the stake they had just driven: “See there; what
did I tell you!――that stake is buried, plumb out of sight!”
It was plainly apparent that the short surveying stakes they were using
were no good at all in the shale, so they pushed on up-stream to the
nearest river-fringing aspen grove, and with their belt axes cut longer
ones. In driving these they found no bottom to the slippery mass; also,
they remarked that every blow of the driving ax-head started fresh
shale rivulets which wriggled and crept and crawled, and threatened
never to come to rest.
It was early in the July day when they began the job of resetting the
grade stakes across the short half-mile of the slide, and they had
been hard at it all day, when with the sun dipping behind the western
mountain, they came wading back to the temporary camp pitched just
below the scene of the steam shovel digging. And for the day’s work of
the big shovel there was little to show save a slight depression in the
shale within the immediate swing of its steam-driven arm.
After supper there was a council of war held around the camp fire in
front of the engineers’ tent, at which the two boys were interested
listeners. After having made a careful examination of the new obstacle,
the chief of construction had summoned his three assistants to discuss
the best means of attacking it.
“It’s my notion that bulkheading is the only thing,” summed up
Goldrick, who had been directing the steam-shovel operations during
the day. “We’re not going to get anywhere at all unless we put in a
retaining wall of some sort. The stuff slides in faster than we can
take it out, and when it starts there doesn’t seem to be any end to it.
The entire surface of the shale gets in motion as far up the slope as
you can see.”
In this opinion, Jones and Hathaway, the other assistants, concurred,
and after the matter had been thoroughly threshed out, the chief issued
his orders.
“All right, Goldrick; bulkhead it if you have to. Time is the main
object, rather than expense, just now. The O. C. is coming on fast with
its track-laying, and if we’re delayed here very long, it’s a lost race
for us. The pile-driver is at Pine Gulch. Better wire to-night and get
it, and your bulkheading material, on the way. The thing to be done is
to get across this place quickly. Drive it for every man in your gang
and every pound of steam you can carry. I’m going down to Red Butte
in the morning, but I’ll try to be back by Thursday. It’s up to you,
Goldrick, shove it!”
For some time after they had gone to bed the two boys lay awake,
talking about the new obstacle which was handicapping their force in
the great race for the Little Ophir sweepstakes.
“If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” said Dick Maxwell gloomily.
“First the O. C. tries to steal our right-of-way; then it floods us
out and shoots rocks at us. And now, when we’ve earned a little more
room to work in, here comes this avalanche of snake scales that we
can’t cross. If anybody should ask me, _I’d_ say we’re hoodooed!”
“Oh, no; nothing like that,” was the quiet answer from the opposite cot
“That’s just one of the things that makes the engineering fight the
greatest game in the world. You’re always up against something that
yells for the best there is in you to beat it.”
Silence for a few minutes, and then Dick said:
“Haven’t dug up another of your bright ideas――about this shale
business, have you?”
“Not the ghost of one,” Larry laughed. “It’s a lot too big for me.”
“Will Mr. Goldrick’s bulkhead notion work out?”
“I sure hope it will. I don’t see anything else to try.”
“But you don’t believe it will work?”
“I’ve just been thinking,” was the doubtful reply. “You know how the
stuff acted to-day when we were tramping back and forth over it; every
little move made it slide just that much worse. I’ve been wondering if
the jounce of the pile-driver isn’t going to keep it moving all the
time. I wanted to say something about that while the talk was going
on, only it wasn’t exactly a cub’s ‘put-in.’ Besides, I didn’t have
anything better to suggest.”
“Well, you just let the little old think-mill keep on grinding,”
Dick――respecting his chum’s powers of invention but still making a
good-natured joke of them――chuckled mockingly. “If you can wrestle
out the answer to the shale slide, maybe the company will fire Mr.
Ackerman and give you his job.” And with that he turned over and went
to sleep.
For quite some time after Dick’s regular breathing proved that he was
making up for the day’s hard work, Larry lay awake with his hands
clasped under his head, staring up into the darkness and grilling
over the problem that was his to solve only because he was trying to
learn all that he could in this, the most exciting as well as the most
exhilarating summer vacation he had ever spent.
The general manager’s telegram congratulating him upon his success in
helping to extricate the buried tunnel force at Tunnel Number Two――he
was promising himself that in the years to come, after he had really
made a success of himself, he would have that telegram framed and hung
up where he could always see it――was a tremendous honor; but in a way
it carried a lot of responsibility――or rather imposed a lot.
He had had a bit of the same sort of experience in school, where he
had early set a pretty high mark as a “math. shark.” Having the mark,
he had found that he had to live up to it, and he now had a sort of
lurking suspicion that he was in for the same kind of a struggle. Mr.
Maxwell had said he was making good, and he would be expected to go on
making good. But this shale slide, which seemed to be puzzling even the
competent and experienced engineers, was miles beyond any “boy” effort,
and Larry was sensible enough to appreciate that. But yet――and yet
again――――
While he was lying there in the soft summer-night darkness grappling
with the stubborn puzzle the sounds of the work battle driven by the
night shift sorted themselves out for him; the rattle-and-clank and
rapid-fire exhausts of the big steam shovel, the grumble of its swing
aside, the slump and bang of its bucket-bottom as it dumped its burden
into a car of the spoil train, followed by the slow gruntings of the
train locomotive as it pushed another car up to receive the next
shovelful. Punctuating the regular sequence of these near-by noises
came the thunder of blast explosions, distance-softened; these, as
Larry knew, being on the Overland Central grade, either above or below
the camp.
He fell asleep at last, for his day’s work had been no less strenuous
than Dick’s, but even in his dreams he was still figuring on the
problem, which promptly proceeded to tangle itself inextricably with
the shovel clamor and the distant muttering thunder of the blasting,
and to become, in the dream wrestle, a part and parcel of the noises.
Turning out to an early breakfast, the two boys found the day shift
already at work. Hastening up the track to see what the night shift
had accomplished, they had a shock of discouragement. True, the big
shovel hog had rooted its way a few feet farther into the slide, but
apparently the disturbance it had set up in the surface of the shale
had spread far and wide. The row of five-foot grade stakes they had
driven the day before was now showing only a few inches of the top
of the stakes, and another movement of the slide would bury them
completely out of sight.
“Great Peter!” Dick exclaimed, with a little gasp, “if it’s going to
do that every night, we’ll be rooting away at it for the next hundred
years! Why, good goodness! there’s a full yard more of it around those
stakes than there was when we drove them!”
As he spoke, the day men were preparing to haul the shovel out to make
room for the pile-driver which had been brought up from Pine Gulch in
the night. Presently the exchange was made, the guide-frame of the
driver was raised, and the driving of the bulkhead posts was begun.
At once the trouble that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick
developed. Each concussion of the heavy driver hammer falling upon the
pile head brought down more of the shale, and in a very short time the
small excavation so laboriously made by the shovel digging had entirely
disappeared.
By noon a dozen of the piles had been driven, under conditions that
were almost prohibitory, and men with hand shovels were working
carefully to open a trench for the placing of the bulkhead planks
behind the posts; digging cautiously and carefully so as not to bring
down any more of the slippery deluge. By nightfall a creeping advance
of some seventy-five feet or such a matter had been made; and when the
night shift went on, the pile-driver had been moved ahead to begin
another lap in the slow journey.
While they were eating supper in the camp mess tent Larry made a few
figures on a bit of paper torn from his pocket note-book. When he
finished he was shaking his head despairingly.
“That won’t do, Dick,” he said. “At a hundred and fifty feet of
progress for a twenty-four-hour day we can count upon being held up
here for a solid month. That means that the O. C. will beat us into
Little Ophir, hands down.”
“And still you haven’t lassoed your bright idea?” Dick grinned across
the table at him.
“Aw; you make me sort of tired with your everlasting jokes,” returned
the maker of estimates; but, as on the night before, he went to bed
soberly thoughtful.
The next morning there was more disappointment in store. The night
shift, pressing the pile-driving, had had bad luck. Along in the small
hours there had been an earthquake――at least, so the driver foreman
averred――and immediately following it the slide had begun to crawl
as a whole, continuing in motion for the remainder of the night. As
a result, the bulkhead, and the pile-driver itself, had been slowly
buried; and when the two boys got on the ground the steam shovel had
been put in again to dig its companion machine out of the shale grave.
Reporting to Goldrick for duty, Larry and Dick were told that they
might have the day off. There was nothing to be done until the
pile-driver could be dug out, and there was no use in setting up grade
stakes only to have them buried as fast as they were driven.
“Well, what shall we do with our holiday?” Dick asked, after they had
strolled back to camp. “Mr. Bob Goldrick seems a whole lot peeved this
morning――for which you can’t blame him a little bit――and I guess he
doesn’t want us around under foot.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Larry, falling back upon a phrase which was
growing to be a habit with him. “I believe I’d like to see where this
slide starts――where it’s all coming from, I mean.”
“Gee!” Dick interposed; “that would mean climbing Bull Peak!”
“Well, what of it? We’ve got the day for it, if we want to take it.”
“All right,” said Dick with a little sigh which meant that he knew full
well what he was in for on a day’s hike with the stubborn one who never
turned back until he had accomplished his purpose. “Anything you say.
But we’re going to need a balloon or an aeroplane before we ever see
the top of old Bull.”
Limiting themselves to a single haversack in which to carry a noon-day
lunch; to the haversack and Dick’s field-glass; they struck out without
telling anybody where they were going. Since it was impossible to make
the climb on the canyon-facing side of the mountain, they made a long
detour, zigzagging back and forth through the forests on the western
slope of the peak, and stopping now and then as they gained altitude to
catch their breath and to admire the magnificent view which opened out
in wider and still wider spreadings as they ascended.
At noon they had reached the timber line, which, at this point, was as
abruptly marked as if the bald heights above it had been cleared by
human hands. As they had prefigured and planned to do, they came out
of the forest well to the westward of the slide head; but now they had
only to circle the peak, without climbing any higher.
After eating the luncheon which the camp cook had put up for them they
began the circling. A mile or more of it brought them to a narrow
terrace or bench, with the higher heights, in the gulches of which some
of last year’s snow still remained, stretching away above them.
It was in this circumnavigating process that they came upon a thing to
prove that they were not the first climbers to scale the rugged heights
of Bull Peak. The proof was a broken clay tobacco pipe, black from
much use, and it was Dick who saw it and picked it up.
“One of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘footprints’,” he laughed. “Where there is a
pipe, there must have been a man to smoke it. Puzzle picture: find the
man. Who was he, and what was he doing away up here?”
“You tell me that, if you can,” said Larry. Then: “Great minds run in
the same ruts, you know. Maybe he was like us――some fellow who wanted
to see where the shale slide starts from. Which brings on more talk: we
ought to be getting somewhere near the thing by this time. Let’s hike
to the top of that cliff and see if it won’t give us a better lookout.”
Climbing to the summit of a crag a little farther around to the
eastward, they presently found themselves directly above that which
they had come to see. Spreading downward from the foot of the cliff
ran the mile-long slide; and at the bottom of it, so far away that the
big machine looked like a child’s toy, they could make out the steam
shovel, the alternating bursts of steam from its exhaust pipe serving
to identify it.
Further investigation showed them the cause of the slide. The cliff
upon which they were standing had for its underpinning a vast bed of
the shale which had doubtless been disintegrating and shelling off
under the action of the weather for centuries in the past.
“Heavens to Betsy!” Dick exclaimed, peering down at the huge shale
ledge, “there’s enough of it there to keep us digging our right-of-way
for the next hundred years!”
“There sure is, if we don’t come up here and stop it,” Larry put in.
“Stop it? Why, man alive, what are you raving about? How are you going
to stop a snake-scale flood like that?”
Larry did not reply. He had borrowed Dick’s field-glass and was
intently scrutinizing the surface of the slide. Getting no answer from
his companion, Dick broke out impatiently.
“What are you looking at?”
“I was just wondering what made those big dents in the surface down
there: you can see them without the glass――down by that big rock that
makes a sort of island in the slide――over a little to the left of the
rock.”
Dick followed directions and saw.
“Sort of funny,” he remarked. “Looks as if there’d been a slip there;
or rather three or four of them.”
Larry buttoned his coat.
“I’m going to swing down yonder and get a little closer peek at those
places. Want to risk it with me?”
“Surest thing you ever heard of,” was the instant rejoinder; and
together they made a roundabout and rather hazardous descent of the
cliff and so came at its shale-bed foot.
In the momentary halt Larry looked the outcropping mass of shale over
with an appraisive eye.
“Yep,” he said, as if he were letting his thought slip into spoken
words without realizing it, “I believe it can be done.”
“Believe what can be done?” Dick demanded.
“Stopping the sun-dance of the snake-scales,” Larry responded shortly;
but he did not explain what he meant as they eased themselves down to
the big rock which marked the location of the curious dents in the
shale surface.
The “dents” grew in size as they approached them; so much, indeed, as
to become good-sized hollows when they looked down upon them from the
top of the island boulder. Out of one of them a thin rivulet of the
shale was trickling, and they could trace its creeping, crawling course
a long way down the slope. Suddenly Larry said: “Take off your coat,
Dick,” and he set the example by quickly stripping his own. “Now your
belt,” and again he set the example in his own person.
Dickie Maxwell obeyed, but not without question.
“Now what on top of earth is biting you this time?” he queried.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Larry replied.
With workmanlike deftness he hooked the two belts together by their
buckles and then knotted the free end of each to a sleeve of a coat.
The result was a clumsy substitute for a life-line long enough to reach
from the summit of the island rock to a point some distance out in the
shale stream.
“Now, then; hang on and anchor me,” was the next order; and when Dick
had made a snubbing post of himself, Larry went over the edge of the
rock and by keeping hold of the makeshift life-line worked his way
cautiously out to one of the depressions. There he stooped, picked up
something, and then came back as he had gone, edging himself along in
a way to disturb the sliding stuff as little as possible, and taking a
hand from Dick to help him climb back to the top of the boulder-island.
[Illustration: Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his
way out to one of the depressions]
“Good goodness! I should think you might tell a fellow!” Dick fumed.
But all Larry had to show for the little acrobatic stunt was a small
scrap of yellow wrapping paper that looked as if it had been soaked in
grease.
“Shucks!” snorted the anchor-man, “was that all you went down after?”
Larry held out the scrap of paper.
“All?――don’t you see what this is, Dick?”
Dick took the bit of paper and examined it.
“Whew!” he breathed; “I guess I do! It’s――it’s part of the cover of a
dynamite cartridge!”
This admission brought on still more talk, and a lot of it, at that.
“Now we know what brought down Jim Haskins’s ‘earthquake’ last night,”
Dick summed up. “Somebody stuck a few dynamite cartridges into this
stuff up here and fired ’em. _And the dynamite did just what it was
meant to do!_”
Larry made no comment upon the very evident piece of lawless sabotage
or the manner of its accomplishment. His brain was busy with something
more important.
“They say curiosity killed the cat, but this is one time when it is
going to save the cat’s life,” he announced, struggling into his coat.
“If we hadn’t climbed up here out of sheer fool curiosity――――”
“‘We’!” Dick protested; “you, you mean. I’d never have thought of it in
a thousand years!”
“Never mind who thought of it first: we’re here, both of us, and we
know what’s been done, and what will, most likely, be done again. It’s
our job to find out who’s doing it, and to spike his gun for him. That
old clay pipe you found is the clue. Let’s get busy and follow it up.”
Accordingly, they made the long circuit again and went back to the
place where the pipe had been found, where they became trailers,
working about in widening circles until, well along toward evening,
they made the hoped-for discovery.
At the foot of a low cliff, only a few hundred yards from the head of
the shale slide they saw a weather-worn army tent pitched under the
cliff shelter, and a shallow, tunnel-like opening in the cliff itself
which appeared to be either a prospect hole or a mine. In front of the
tent there was a small camp fire, and over the fire two rough-looking
men were cooking their evening meal.
At the sight Larry grabbed Dick and dragged him back behind a
concealing shoulder of the rock.
“We’ve got ’em!” he whispered. “We’ve covered the ground well enough to
be sure that there isn’t anybody else on this whole mountain side.”
“But we can’t be sure that they’re the ones that are doing the
dynamiting,” Dick put in.
“We are going to be sure of it before we quit,” said Larry grimly; “and
it’s going to cost us something, at that.”
The cost was the loss of a supper, and a vigil that tried them both to
the limit. Creeping cautiously away from the vicinity of the tent and
the mine opening, they worked their way back to the top of the cliff
overlooking the slide. There they stretched themselves out on the brink
to begin their vigil. Slowly the darkness crept up from the distant
canyon, rising like a murky tide to the clearer heights, and one by
one the stars came out to blaze in the black bowl of the heavens larger
and nearer than either of the watchers had ever seen them before.
With the coming of night a cold wind swept down from the snow-gulch
heights behind and above them, and they were soon turning up their coat
collars and shivering. At their altitude, which, they estimated, could
not be less than ten thousand feet, the July nights are cold with a
penetrating chill that not even the dry air can temper.
“M-m-my g-gracious!” mumbled Dick, trying to hold his chattering teeth
still long enough to get the words out, “th-this is something f-fierce,
I’ll tell the wo-world! I’d give a d-dollar if I could get up and run
around in ci-circles for a lil-little while. Whoosh! but it’s cold!”
“Shut up!” Larry growled. “If they should be coming they might hear
you. Keep those rattling teeth of yours quiet. They make more noise
than an automobile gear.”
“But I’m cold!” Dick protested.
“So am I, but I’m not beefing about it. It’s all in the day’s work.”
As nearly as they could judge it was about two hours after they began
to freeze solid when the starlight showed them two figures making their
way silently along the foot of the cliff, and, a little later, creeping
down the edge of the slide to the island boulder. What the two figures
did was, of course, invisible from the cliff top; but after a wait of
perhaps fifteen minutes two dull explosions, followed by a hissing
sound as of a thousand suddenly disturbed snakes, told them that
another assisted avalanche of the crawling shale was on its way down
toward the twinkling electrics marking the night shift’s attack on the
stubborn obstacle.
“Quick, now!” Larry gritted. “They’re coming up, and we must make sure
that they’re the same two we saw cooking their supper at that mine
hole!”
The trailing of the pair, since the boys were reasonably certain of the
route they would take, was hazardous only because of the darkness and
the need for doing it noiselessly. None the less, the thing was done,
and done right. Not for a single moment did they lose sight of the
dodging figures until they saw them enter the tent at the mine mouth.
“The job’s done,” was Larry’s comment, when the weathered tent began to
glow with the light of a candle to advertise its occupancy. “Now for
the long down-hill hike in the dark.”
That, in itself, was a stiffish undertaking, eating up time most
voraciously, as all mountain climbers caught out after nightfall in the
Rockies will be willing to testify. The detour they were obliged to
make could not have measured less than four wearisome miles, and what
with feeling their way and having to head gulches and scramble down
precipices in blackness that was almost Egyptian, it was fully midnight
before they reached camp.
As it turned out, the slowly crawling dynamited avalanche had beaten
them only by a half-hour or so; and as they tramped in, hungry
and muscle-sore, the chief engineer, Goldrick, and Jones, the
second assistant, were just returning from the scene of the latest
overwhelming; a shale flood that had once more buried the pile-driver
and the steam shovel.
Most naturally it didn’t take the boys long to tell their story, and at
its close the chief’s comment was brief and to the point.
“It is another O. C. trick to delay us,” he asserted. “I didn’t think
that Orrin Grissby, their chief, would get down to anything as mean and
criminal as that! Those two men are doubtless on his pay-roll, and they
are pretending to be working a mine as a blind, in case anybody should
happen to run across them up yonder.”
“Well,” said Jones, who was a young man with a square jaw and the cold
gray eye of a fighter, “do we take it lying down?”
“Not by any manner of means!” snapped the chief. “You pick out a half
dozen of your huskies that you can depend on and go up after those sham
miners. If these boys found their way down in the dark, you can find
your way up. Bring those fellows in and we’ll swear out a warrant for
them. They’ll go to jail, if there’s any law left in the Timanyoni!”
Being a young man of swift action and few words, Jones quickly
disappeared to put the order into effect. It was then that young
Goldrick spoke up.
“That stops one of the exciting causes; but I suppose we’ll always be
having trouble with this slide, from what the boys say. That shale
cliff up there will keep on shedding from now till doomsday.”
It was just here that Dick Maxwell, tired and sleepy as he was, put in
another word.
“Larry, here, says it can be stopped,” he said, “but he didn’t tell me
how.”
“What is that?” asked the chief quickly. “Another idea of yours,
Donovan?”
Larry flushed a bit under the pallor of his weariness.
“It’s nothing that anybody wouldn’t have thought of, if they had seen
what we did,” he explained modestly. “There is a big ledge of the shale
at the top of the slide, as Dick has told you, and I guess it’s been
weathering and crumbling for hundreds of years. What I thought of was
this: if we could get up there some way with men and material and a
cement-gun, a coating of cement could be shot all over the face of the
ledge and so sort of seal it up and keep it from weathering any more.”
The grave-eyed chief exchanged glances with Goldrick. Then he said:
“I thought you were a machinist’s helper, and the like, Larry,
before you came on this job. What do you know about cement work and
cement-guns?”
Larry flushed again.
“It just happened,” he stammered. “Last summer, when the Brewster
Electric Power and Light Company had trouble with that crumbling rock
above their dam, I went out there one day and saw them shooting a new
surface on it with a cement-gun. And the surface has stood and kept it
from crumbling any more.”
Again there was a little silence in the chief’s tent. At the end of it
Mr. Ackerman said:
“I guess you boys are pretty hungry――going without your supper. Trot
down to the cook shack and get outside of anything you can find
ready-made.”
After they were gone he turned to Goldrick with a slow smile.
“It’s interesting, Goldrick, to notice what odd things jump up in the
woods when you haven’t your gun along,” he remarked. “When Mr. Maxwell
told me he was going to load these two youngsters on me for the
summer――and in this hot fight which I knew well enough was coming――I
came mighty near asking him not to. It is rather lucky for us that I
didn’t, don’t you think?”
“Rather,” said Goldrick; “I’m saying it, and but for that red-headed
boy I might not be here to say it.”
“Yes,” the chief nodded; “that tunnel business was fine. But now
to-day; I grant you that it was nothing but sheer boy-curiosity that
took those two fellows up on Bull Peak; but there you are――none of the
rest of us had the boy-curiosity. And that Donovan lad, with his, ‘it
just happened’: if he doesn’t make good all the way along, it won’t be
because he doesn’t keep his eyes open and his wits on edge. There are
times when he seems years older than he claims to be.”
It was at this precise moment that Larry, out in the cook shack, had
just pried open a can of baked beans for Dick and another for himself.
And what he was saying sufficiently proved his right and title still to
be called a boy.
“Gee-whoosh, Dick!――did you ever taste anything so good as these beans
in all your born days? My land! I believe I could eat until I’m like
the toad-frog that wanted to swell himself up and be as big as an ox!”
CHAPTER VII
THE UNINVITED SPECIAL
“Doesn’t it beat the everlasting band how little sense some folks have?”
Dick and Larry, in much-worn corduroys and lace-boots, and each
with a furled red signal flag under his arm, were tramping down the
construction track of the Little Ophir Extension. On their right the
brawling torrent of the Tourmaline swirled over and among its boulders,
and across the canyon, and half-way up its steep acclivity, ran the
partly completed grade of the Overland Central.
“Just let it soak in,” Dick went on wrathfully. “Right here in the
middle of the fight with the O. C., when every hour may be worth a
thousand dollars to our company, we’ve got to stop dead and entertain a
bunch of Big Money from New York! It makes me sick!”
“Sick is right,” Larry agreed; and his wrath, if not so teeth-gnashing,
as you might say, as that of the general manager’s son, was no less
hostile to the intrusions of Big Money――in fact, since he was the son
of a workingman, it was rather more hostile than less. But of that,
more in its place.
“Somebody ought to have stopped ’em,” Dick went on. “If I’d been in
the chief’s place, I’d have dumped a few material cars over the
right-of-way down in the valley so they couldn’t get by with their old
special.”
“I guess it couldn’t be helped,” Larry grumbled. “I’ll bet your father
said and did everything he could to keep this junketing party from
butting in on us; and now, as long as they’re coming, we’ve got to make
the best of it. I only hope there aren’t any women along. That _would_
be the limit!”
There was reason for all this impatient faultfinding. Early that
morning a wire had come notifying the chief of construction that
a special train, bearing Vice-President Holcombe, a committee of
directors, and a number of guests, was coming over the uncompleted
Extension, and immediately the two juniors of the engineering staff,
Dick and Larry, had been sent afoot down the canyon to post themselves
at the two points where there was the most danger from the Overland
Central’s blasting and the flying rocks.
One of these danger points was just at hand, and Larry volunteered to
drop out and stand guard over it.
“You’ll have time to make the big rock cutting at the Cascades,” he
told his fellow flagman; and accordingly, Dickie Maxwell resumed his
tramp alone.
By this time the special train, consisting of a big, heavy
“Pacific-type” passenger engine, a dining-car and a Pullman combination
sleeping and observation car, was well on its way up the canyon,
rolling and lurching around the curves, and behaving itself, on the
rough, unsurfaced track, much like a cranky ship in a seaway. On the
fireman’s box in the high locomotive cab an audaciously pretty girl
of fourteen or fifteen――a girl with resolute brown eyes and lips that
could “register” anything from a jolly laugh to the scornful poutings
of a spoiled only daughter――clung desperately to the window sill to
keep from being dumped into the fireman’s shovel in the bumpings and
lurchings.
This girl was the daughter of the vice-president of the Nevada Short
Line, and she had insisted upon having a ride on the engine when
the train had halted at the canyon-portal water tank. Since the
vice-president himself had made the request, Bart Johnson, the grizzled
engineer of the 1016, could only grin sourly and say, “Why, sure, Mr.
Holcombe!” and wipe his hands on a piece of waste so that he could help
Miss Daughter up the high steps.
For some miles of the rocketing race up the canyon the pretty passenger
had nothing to do but to hang on and make believe that she was enjoying
the scenery. But as the train was rounding one of the jutting mountain
spurs just below a place where the river tumbled in a series of
cascades from bench to bench in its bed a thing happened; several of
them, in fact.
First, there was a burst of yellowish dust from a point up ahead on the
opposite canyon side, followed by an upspouting of big and little rocks
and a jarring thunder crash. Next, a boy with a red flag bobbed up on
the track; and the girl, being a girl, shrieked and clutched for fresh
handholds when the air-brakes were suddenly clamped on and a stop was
made.
A minute later the flag boy had climbed to the cab. His business was
with Bart Johnson, the grizzled engineer, and he despatched it briefly.
“Better back down a few car-lengths,” he advised. “There’ll be more of
the blasting pretty soon, and you can’t run by until it’s over; likely
to get a rock on top of you if you try it.” Then, as the train began to
move back out of the danger zone, he wheeled upon the girl perched upon
the fireman’s seat. “Now, then,” he said, scowling at her, “I’d like to
know what _you’re_ doing up here on this engine, Bess Holcombe!”
“I guess I’ve got a right to be here, if I want to, Dick Maxwell!” was
the pert reply. “_You_ don’t own this engine.”
“No; if I did, you’d hike back into the train, mighty quick――only you
haven’t any business being there, either.”
“My-oh!” scoffed the pretty one, looking him up and down. “How we
engineers do pile on the nice, large dignities, don’t we? I’m here
because Daddy said I might. Now what have you got to say?”
“Oh, nothing, I suppose. But, just the same, this is no place for a
girl――in this canyon, I mean.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“You’ve just seen one reason. With those O. C. people blasting on
the other side of the river, it’s as much as ever we can do to get a
car-load of material in without having it blown up――to say nothing of a
junketing train of excursionists!”
The girl made a mocking little grimace.
“Your general manager father _did_ try to make us give the trip up,”
she admitted. “But old Mr. Hazzard and some of the others insisted that
there couldn’t be any danger. Is there any danger, Dick?”
“Huh――I should say danger! We’ve had three material trains wrecked――one
of ’em right up there in that next curve ahead――and any amount of
narrow escapes, besides. Those fellows over there don’t care a hoot
what they do to us, so long as they get their track into Little Ophir
ahead of ours. Are there any more women on this train?”
“Lots of ’em.”
Dick made no comment on this additional devastating fact. After the
blasting stopped the special crept on, and at the end of a short mile
a halt was made to pick up another flag boy, namely, big-muscled,
curly-headed Larry Donovan.
“Who is this?” asked the girl as Larry was climbing to the cab.
“My ‘bunkie,’ Larry Donovan,” Dick made answer. “We’re both ‘cubs’ in
the engineering squad. Mr. Ackerman sent us down here to watch for your
train.”
When Larry swung up to the cab it was to tell Johnson that the firing
on the O. C. grade above had stopped, and that it was safe to go on.
After the train got in motion, Dick took Larry by the shoulders and
twisted him forcibly around to face the pretty girl.
“Bess,” he said, “this is my chum, Larry Donovan, and he’s a heap
better fellow than he looks. Larry, this is Bess Holcombe――you needn’t
shake hands, either of you, if you don’t want to.”
Larry’s face turned a dull red under its sunburn. As yet, he had
small use for girls, pretty or otherwise; and if he had had, the
joking introduction, and the fact that Miss Bess Holcombe’s father
was vice-president of the company, would have made him take refuge in
workman gruffness. What he mumbled in reply was a sort of sour “Please’
t’ meet you,” and the way he said it made the “pleased” part of it the
merest figure of speech.
“Donovan?” said the girl sweetly; “that is――er――a German name, isn’t
it?” Miss Bess Holcombe never missed a chance to make an embarrassed
boy still more embarrassed, if she could help it.
“No,” Larry blurted out; “it’s Irish.” And then he turned his back on
her and began to talk to Bart Johnson, telling him where he was to run
slowly, and what he was coming to around the curves ahead.
“Dear me!” said the girl, in an aside to Dick, “what a bear of a boy!
He’s――he’s a workingman, isn’t he?”
Dick bridled at once.
“See here, Bess,” he frowned; “down in Brewster, or back in New York
where you live, you can draw all the little, no-account social lines
you want to. But up here in the mountains a man’s a man, according to
how well he holds up his end in the day’s work. Larry’s father is a
crossing watchman in Brewster, if you want to know――though he was one
of the best locomotive engineers the company had before he lost an arm
sticking to his engine to keep a train-load of passengers from going
into the ditch――and Larry earned his way through High School by working
nights in the company shops. If you think that’s anything against him,
you’ve got to fight it out with me.”
The girl’s laugh showed a mouthful of pretty teeth.
“You needn’t be so spiteful about it,” she retorted. “I’m not going
to quarrel with your――‘bunkie?’――was that what you called him?” Then:
“What are we stopping here for?”
The answer set itself out in action. As the big engine slowed down,
Larry dropped from the step and ran on to disappear around the next
curve in the canyon. Presently he came in sight again to give the
“come-ahead” signal.
“Another place where the O. C. has been doing a lot of shooting,” Dick
explained, “and Larry went to see if it would be safe for us to try
to pass.” Then he did a bit of the “gruff and workmanlike” on his own
account. “You don’t know what a nuisance it is to have this junketing
train of yours lugged up here in our way when every minute of our time
is worth a million dollars!”
“Why, Dick! you almost make it sound as if we were unwelcome!” was the
girl’s quick protest.
“You are; just about as unwelcome as a Dakota blizzard in the middle
of July. There isn’t anybody on the force, from the chief down, who
has any time to waste on the social dewdabs, or for carting you people
around on a sight-seeing tour. How long are you going to stay?”
“Gracious! I don’t know! If your chief makes it as chilly for us as
you’re trying to make it for me, I shouldn’t suppose we’d stay five
minutes! I’m sure _I_ shouldn’t.”
“Well you might as well know it just as it is, and I wouldn’t shed any
tears if you should tell your father. Nobody else will tell him, of
course; but I’m giving you the raw facts.”
“I should say you are!” said the girl with a toss of her head. “You
don’t seem any more like the Dick Maxwell I knew when we were at Lake
Topaz last summer than――――”
“Maybe I’m not,” Dick broke in. “This is a man’s job up here.”
“Well, supposing it is; is that any reason why we shouldn’t come and
look on, if we want to?”
Dick despaired of ever being able to make a mere girl understand, but
he did his best.
“I should think you’d know without being told. Here we are, in the
hottest part of a hot fight with the O. C., with everything cluttered
up and in the way, and with everybody working twenty-six hours out of
the twenty-four, trying to get somewhere. And right in the thick of it
we’ve got to stop and find room for a train of joy-wagons, and let the
work go to pot while we’re being nice to a lot of Big Money bosses!”
Somewhat to Dick’s disappointment, the girl took this wrathful outburst
with perfect calm.
“I like your Larry Donovan much better than I do you, Dickie Maxwell,”
she remarked coolly. “He may have been thinking all these things you’ve
been saying, but he was at least polite enough not to slap me in the
face with them.”
“You bet he was thinking them,” said Dick sourly. “Any fellow would.”
Then, as the train slowed around a curve so short that it made the
wheel flanges shriek in protest: “Pine Gulch, our headquarters camp, is
just ahead. If you’ve got as much good sense as I thought you had last
summer, you’ll try to persuade your father not to ask us to take this
train any farther up the canyon.”
At the Pine Gulch stop the two boys――Larry had been riding the front
platform of the dining-car since he had flagged for the last point of
hazard――stood aside and looked on while the inspection party debarked
and was met by Mr. Ackerman; met and welcomed, of course, as Large
Money, when it happens to own a lot of railroad stock, must be.
“Just the same,” Dick said to Larry, “I’ll bet the chief is saying
things to himself.”
“I guess so,” Larry returned. “I wouldn’t blame him. What are they
going to do now?”
The “what” explained itself in due course. Preparations were making to
place the excursion train upon the only available and already crowded
side-track――which meant that it was going to stop at Pine Gulch, for
the present, at least.
“That’s good, as far as it goes,” Dick admitted morosely. “If only they
won’t ask to be chased up to the working ‘front,’ maybe we’ll have some
little chance. Let’s go over to the mess tent and see if Dogsy’s saved
us anything to chew on. It’s away past noon.”
While they were eating, the boys saw the excursionists――there
were something like a score of them, including the girl and four
women――climbing the steps of the dining-car in response to a
white-jacketed waiter’s summons. On the high track opposite the little
park-like valley in which the headquarters camp lay, a laboring O. C.
engine, pushing a couple of flat-cars loaded with men and steel rails,
was storming up the grade.
“More steel going to the O. C. front,” Dick commented.
“Yes,” Larry agreed; “and I’ll bet they’re laughing in their sleeves
right now over our new handicap. Did you tell that girl some of the
things she ought to know?”
“I sure did; and I hope I rubbed it in hard enough so that she’ll tell
her father.”
Larry’s grin was handsomely appreciative.
“You’re one great little old diplomat, Dick. Suffering cats! I
wouldn’t have thought of a dodge like that in a hundred years. Here’s
hoping it makes ’em turn around and go back home where they belong.
I’ll say we haven’t any special use for ’em up here in this canyon.”
After dinner the two boys went over to the field office, and upon
approaching it they found that the chief had company. So they waited
at the door. Mr. Ackerman’s caller was a member of the sight-seeing
party; a thin, frock-coated little gentleman with graying “toothbrush”
side-whiskers, sort of angry eyes, and a high, rasping voice.
“That’s Mr. Oliver Hazzard, chairman of the Executive Board in
New York,” said Dick, behind his hand, and Larry nodded complete
understanding.
There wasn’t anything of a private nature about the conversation that
was going on in the field office. The frock-coated gentleman was
insisting that the special train be taken on to the real building
“front,” and the chief engineer was deferentially and respectfully
interposing one objection after another――apparently without the
slightest success.
“Do you mean to say that you are building a railroad that isn’t fit to
be used, Mr.――ah――Ackerman?” came in the high, irritable voice. “This
Extension is costing us a mint of money, and it is――ah――presumably
designed to carry passengers. In view of that fact, I see no reason why
we should not be permitted to――ah――inspect it.”
“I have given you the facts, Mr. Hazzard,” was the sober reply.
“The track, in its present incomplete condition, is not safe for
your Pullman to run over. If you and the men of your party will be
content to go up on a flat-car, with one of the lighter construction
engines――――”
“Nothing of the kind, Mr. Ackerman――nothing of the kind! We can leave
the dining-car here, if you insist upon it; but we shall go in our
own car in comfort, as we expect our patrons to do after the road is
completed.”
Larry, who was watching the big chief out of the corner of his eye, saw
the harassed official’s shoulders lift in a little shrug of impatient
discouragement.
“Of course, if you order it, I have nothing more to say,” he yielded.
Then, stepping to the door, he asked a question of the two boys. “Where
is Goldrick? Have either of you seen him since dinner-time?”
Dick answered for both.
“No, sir; I don’t think he has been here since the special came in.”
“No matter; you two will do as well. Find Brannigan, and tell him to
take the 717 and go out ahead of the special as a pilot. You go along
and flag him past the danger spots. I don’t need to tell you to be
careful. If you see anything at all to make you think it won’t be safe
for the special to follow, one of you must run back and flag us at
once.”
Having their orders thus detailed for them, Larry and Dick hastened to
find Brannigan, the wizened little Irishman who handled the 717 on the
material trains. The engine itself was standing, steamed up, on a short
spur track at the lower end of the little yard, and the engineer and
fireman were in the cab.
Dick climbed to the footboard to pass the chief’s verbal order
along, while Larry set the switch for the engine――which was headed
up-canyon――to back out on the main track. As they were making the
shift they saw Bart Johnson, on his huge passenger-puller, preparing to
cut the dining-car out of the special train; and as the 717, with the
two boys in the cab, passed on up the line to begin the piloting, the
special, reduced now to the big engine and the Pullman, was ready to
follow.
For a few miles nothing exciting happened. Now and again, Larry and
Dick, hanging out of the cab window on the danger side, could hear
above the racket of the engine the niggling chatter of the air-drills
on the Overland Central grade above and opposite; but this was a signal
of safety. So long as the drills were going there would be no blasting.
“I’ve been wondering if that girl and the women are back there in that
Pullman,” Larry said, in one of the safe stretches.
“You can bet to win that Bess Holcombe is there, at least,” Dick
replied. “I knocked around a good bit with her last summer up at Lake
Topaz, and she doesn’t know what it means to be scared of anything.
Right nice girl, most of the time, though she can be awfully mean and
nippy when she wants to.”
“Well, neither she nor the other women have any business in the place
where we’re going,” Larry put in.
“That’s exactly what I told her. But, for that matter, none of these
New York ‘look-sees’ have any business there.”
As it came about, there were no hindrances on the run up the canyon
from Pine Gulch. After a few miles of the turnings and twistings in
the echoing gorge, and past the great shale slide with its bulkheading
of piles and planking, the canyon widened to become a high-pitched,
upland valley; and at the upper end of this valley, where more of the
“narrows” began, lay the actual working front.
Taking it for granted that he would have to pilot the special back to
Pine Gulch after the visitors had made their inspection, Brannigan ran
the 717 in on the lower end of one of the two side-tracks which were
laid about half a mile below the cliff-sentineled upper gorge where the
rockmen were drilling and blasting.
Presently the one-car special came along on the middle or main track,
stopped opposite the side-tracked pilot engine, and the men of the
sight-seeing party got off. There was some little emphatic talk, and
then Mr. Ackerman came over to the 717.
“The gentlemen want to go on up to the rock cutting,” he said to
Brannigan, who was standing in his engine gangway. “I’ve told them that
it isn’t safe to take the Pullman and that heavy passenger machine any
farther over the unballasted track. We’ll take the men of the party on
an empty flat-car, and leave the women here in the Pullman. You know
the track and what it will stand――and the grade――and Johnson doesn’t.
Since you’ll have to push the flat ahead of you, I want you to go up
and take Johnson’s engine and get the flat out of this string of loads.”
The switching problem thus set for Brannigan was not complicated,
though it involved a number of movements. At its beginning the
passenger locomotive and its car stood on the middle or main track.
On the left was an open siding, connecting at both ends with the
main track; and this siding was empty. On the right was the other
side-track, also connecting at both ends with the main line. Upon this
right-hand siding there were, first, at the lower end, Brannigan’s
engine, the 717, and ahead of it a string of four cross-tie cars, the
upper one of which had already been unloaded.
Under these conditions the first thing to be done was to side-track
the Pullman on the left-hand, or empty, siding; next, to pull out the
unloaded flat-car from the upper end of the other siding with the
passenger engine, and to back it down upon the main track between the
two sidings. When this should be done, the heavy passenger machine
could be run ahead and backed down on the left-hand track to be
recoupled to its Pullman; after which, Brannigan could take his own
lighter engine, back it out to the main line over the lower switch,
come up to a coupling behind the placed flat-car, and so be ready to
push it on up to the rock cutting.
For the switching job Brannigan and his fireman crossed over and
climbed upon the passenger engine, taking charge of it temporarily
while Johnson and his fireman stood aside in the cab. Mr. Ackerman
walked on up the track to where the men of the inspection party were
waiting for the shift to be made. This left Dick and Larry alone in the
cab of the 717, and since there was nothing further for them to do at
the moment, they stayed there.
Out of the cab window they could look up ahead and see the various
phases of the shift as they were made. Carefully Brannigan pulled
the sleeping-car over the upper switches and backed it down on the
left-hand side-track. Then he uncoupled and ran up to get the empty
flat-car out of the other siding.
“I don’t much like the looks of that flimsy chock that Johnnie Shovel
stuck under the Pullman’s wheels for a ‘safety’,” said the mechanically
minded Larry, looking across to the sleeping-car where Bess Holcombe
had a window open through which she, also, was watching the switching
operations. “I’ve a good notion to slip over there and stick in a
bigger chunk of wood. That little tree-limb that’s there now wouldn’t
hold anything on this grade.”
“It isn’t much of a ‘scotch’,” Dick admitted. “But I guess it’s all
right; the air-brakes’ll hold her.”
Larry shook his head.
“I don’t like it,” he repeated. “This grade is a lot steeper than it
looks, and there’s nobody on that car with those women but the negro
porter. Ten to one he wouldn’t know enough to pull the cord and reset
the brakes if the car should start to run away.”
“Pshaw! it isn’t going to run away,” said Dick easily; and then, with
another look up ahead: “Say! something’s gone wrong with that big
passenger-puller!”
Something had gone wrong; very wrong, indeed. Brannigan had coupled
to the empty flat-car and was pulling it out as gingerly as if he
were running over eggs instead of a hurriedly placed construction
side-track. But for all his care the light rail had buckled and turned
over beneath the ponderous “Pacific-type,” and the big locomotive was
on the ground.
Both boys saw the small accident from their place at the 717’s cab
window, and, naturally, their first impulse was to swing down and run
up the track to help with the reënrailment. But it was just then that
a much more shocking accident began to stage itself right before their
eyes. As they were in the act of dropping from the 717’s step, Larry
grabbed Dick and pointed to the other siding.
“Look!” he yelled; “_that Pullman’s getting away_!”
There was no doubt about it. By some disastrous mischance the
air-brakes had leaked and loosened their grip on the wheels; the
inconsequent bit of wood that Brannigan’s fireman had thrust under a
wheel had crushed to powder; and the heavy steel car with its human
load was slipping away down the siding, gaining momentum as it went.
Now a runaway car on a crooked track, every mile of which is a
down-grade, is about the deadliest thing that can ever happen on a
mountain railroad. At sight of the moving Pullman the men of the
excursion party, with Mr. Ackerman setting the pace, made a frantic
dash to catch it. But they were too far away. And the two engine crews,
busy with the derailed passenger machine, were still farther away.
“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Dick groaned. “There’s a split switch at the end
of that siding――they’ll get out on the main line and get clear away,
and everybody’ll be killed!”
But Larry, cooler-headed, still had some portion of his wits about him.
He saw at once that there was no hope of trying to catch the runaway
on foot. And it was not for nothing that his boyhood had been spent on
and around locomotives with his engineer father, or that, as a shop
and round-house helper, he had had more or less chance to learn the
handling of engines under steam.
“Take a grip on yourself!” he shouted at Dick. “There’s only one
chance――get over here and be ready to jump off and set the switch
for me! We’re going to chase that car!” And taking Dick’s help for
granted, he snapped the 717’s reversing-lever into the backward motion
and let the air whistle into the relieving pipe of the tender brakes.
The engine responded quickly to the pull of the down-grade. Dick
hung on the right-hand step, ready to drop off and run on ahead to
the switch. Instead of a “three-way” where the two sidings came in
together, there were two separate switches, one for each side-track;
a “split” or safety switch for the left-hand lead, and an ordinary
“cut-rail” for the right-hand. The Pullman had already gone out over
the safety switch, its great weight crowding the split rail over as it
passed. But the air brakes were still retarding it a little.
Larry saw Dick drop from the engine step, run for the switch, and jerk
the lever over to the outlet position for the 717. He had a fleeting
hope that Dick would stay where he was; one life was enough to be
risked in the perilous chase ahead. But as the engine was passing, Dick
swung on.
“Let’s go!” he cried; and Larry, releasing the brake, let the light
engine shoot away in chase of the vanishing Pullman.
As both of the boys well knew, success hung upon the slenderest of
chances. Would the slipping Pullman brakes hold long enough to enable
them to overtake the derelict and couple on? Or would they let go
entirely and so send the big car rocketing to certain destruction at a
speed that the handlers of the pursuing engine would not dare to equal?
That remained to be seen. From much riding back and forth over the
line on the material trains Larry knew pretty well what down-dropping
speed could be taken, and he was giving the 717 every wheel-turn he
dared on the uneven, crooking track. At the second reversed curve
he got a glimpse of the runaway careening around the next curve
ahead. It was enough to show him that the leaking brakes were still
holding――partially.
“We’ll make it yet!” he shouted at Dick. Then: “Crawl out on the tender
and look down at our coupling――see if the knuckle is open!”
This was vitally important. When a coupling is to be made, if either
of the two knuckles of the standard car-coupler is left standing open
the couplings will engage and lock when they come together. But if both
the coupling on the Pullman and that on the 717 were closed, it would
be impossible to make the coupling hitch at a mere touch in mid flight.
And the touch would be all they could count upon in the mad chase.
Dick made his journey over the jumping, lunging tender, got his glimpse
of the coupling drawhead, and came sliding back over the coal.
“It’s all right!” he reported; and Larry once more got a good breath――a
breath of thankful relief that sent the tears to his eyes.
“Listen, Dick,” he gasped. “I’m praying that those brakes will hold
till she gets on the bit of straight track at the big shale slide.
I don’t dare try to catch her on these curves. Yell at me when you
see the slide, and then hold your hair on. It’ll have to be there or
nowhere!”
When Dick’s warning yell came, Larry stuck his head out of the cab
window for one swift glance down the track. The runaway was just
entering the half-mile tangent at the slide, swaying and lurching like
a drunken thing.
“_Now!_” he bellowed, and with a jerk at the throttle lever he added
the pull of a hundred and eighty pounds of steam to the urgings of the
down-grade.
It was all over in a minute――in a second, as it seemed to Dickie
Maxwell clutching for handholds as the 717 leaped backward around the
final curve. With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
the straight line upon the masterless Pullman. At the distance of a
car-length Dick saw Bess Holcombe in the rear vestibule of the sleeper.
She was clinging to the door jamb and trying to make her way out to
the hand-rail. Madly he motioned her back, and as she disappeared the
clashing touch was made.
[Illustration: With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
upon the masterless Pullman]
Larry Donovan thought that if he should live to be a hundred years old
he should never again have such a keen thrill of agonizing suspense as
that which came when he gently applied the engine brakes to put the
coupling touch to the test. And when he found that he really had hold
of the runaway and was checking its speed and his own, he came as near
fainting as a healthy young athlete could and miss it.
“Oh, thank God!” he choked; and then: “Get back into that Pullman,
Dick, and tell those women folks that it’s all right――they’re safe.”
The return run with the rescued car was quickly made, and Larry made it
alone, leaving the driving step only once, to throw a few shovelfuls of
coal into the firebox of the 717. The trial――the kind of trial he most
dreaded――lay just ahead, and he was cudgeling his brain to find some
way of dodging it, telling himself that he’d rather take a whipping
than to face the crowd of crazily grateful people who would probably
pounce upon him when the engine and car reached the valley sidings.
As he was rounding the curve of approach to the valley, Larry
saw Brannigan setting the lower switch to let him in on the open
side-track. Quick as a flash the way of escape was suggested. Larry
flung his cap out of the cab window, and upon reaching the switch he
shut off the steam and brought the 717 to a stand.
“Climb up here, Mike, and take your engine,” he called to the little
Irishman; “I’ve got to go back after my cap.” And in such simple
fashion the dodge was made; for, after the dropped cap was found, Larry
took to the woods, and was seen no more until long after the uninvited
special had gone on its way back to civilization.
Late that evening, weary from a long tramp over the hills, he stole
into camp at Pine Gulch to present himself at the chief’s office and to
get what was coming to him.
“What you did this afternoon was a fine thing――a heroic thing, Larry,”
said the grave-eyed chief, after a hand-grip which meant more than any
words could express, “and I know you did it as a part of the day’s
work, as any young fellow should. It was a man’s job, and you did it
like a man. But what you did afterward.... Why didn’t you come on in
with the car and let those people thank you, Larry?”
Larry’s face hardened.
“I didn’t want any of their thanks,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” interposed the chief soberly. “You want to make a
success in life don’t you?”
“Why, yes, sir; that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Well, being a good engineer, or a good anything, means that you must
be a well-rounded man, Larry; approachable on the side of your human
relations as well as capable on the technical side. You had a bit of
contempt for those people to-day partly because you resented their
coming here at a time when we could ill afford to entertain them, but
partly, also, because you felt that you were not in their class. Isn’t
that so?”
Larry hung his head and said nothing.
“That is where you are making your mistake,” the chief went on. “If
you wish to be a really big man, you must get rid of that class
consciousness that you have brought up with you from the shops and the
train service. Big Money needn’t make its possessors any more or less
human than other people, and it doesn’t, usually. Those people to-day
were really hurt because you denied them the common human privilege of
thanking you for a thing that was far beyond all thanks. Will you try
to remember that?”
“Yes, sir; I’ll try,” said Larry, and he was sincere enough in making
the promise.
But later, after he had escaped and had found Dick Maxwell, the class
consciousness that Mr. Ackerman had spoken of rose up in all its
poverty-pride and once more had its innings. Dick had ridden as far as
Pine Gulch on the special train, out-going, and Bess Holcombe had told
him that the men of the party were making up a purse for the rescuer of
the runaway Pullman.
“They can keep their money,” said Larry sullenly; “I don’t want any of
it,”――this after Dick had told him.
And――such is the perversity of poor human nature――on a night when he
should have gone to bed thankful that the day had afforded him a
chance to save life, he rolled himself in his blankets and turned his
face to wall with a strange bitterness for a bedfellow and a feeling
that perhaps, after all, he had made a mistake in leaving the Brewster
round-house and his job of wiping engines.
CHAPTER VIII
A FELLOW NAMED JONES
“Now then, men――together!” _clang!_
The material train had just pulled up to the present-moment end-of-track
on the Extension with a flat-car load of rails, and the crew, directed
by a big-voiced foreman, was unloading the car.
Standing aside to be out of the way, Larry and Dick were checking the
shipment of steel. The checking being a purely mechanical process,
the two went on with their talk about the thing that had kept every
member of the toiling construction force on edge for weeks; namely, the
exciting question, which was growing more exciting from day to day,
as to whether their railroad or the Overland Central, building at top
speed on the opposite side of the canyon, would win the race to the
Little Ophir gold field, now only twenty miles away.
“You’ll sure have to hand it to those O. C. fellows when it comes to
keeping us guessing,” Dick was saying. “Ten miles back we all thought
they were going into Little Ophir on the high level. But now they are
dropping altitude so fast that they’ll be on an even grade with us in
another five miles or so.”
In the intervals between the rail-clangings Larry had been scanning
the cut-out notch in the opposite canyon slope marking the path of the
Overland Central.
“Dropping is right,” he agreed “Probably Mr. Ackerman’s guess hits
the mark: they’ve made two or three different surveys, and they are
changing from one to another as they go along――anything to make the
work go faster.”
“Yes; and they’re always picking the one that will do the most to hold
us back,” Dick added. “You can trust ’em to do that.”
A few minutes later the unloading was finished and the boys walked on
up the grade to where a big gang of hard-rock men were hewing out a
path for the track-to-be through a jutting shoulder of the right-hand
mountain. Goldrick, who had come to be known on the staff as the
hard-rock specialist, was in charge of the rock blasting, and to him
Dick and Larry reported for further duty.
“I don’t know of anything pressing just now, unless you take a hike up
the line and find Blaisdell, and ask him what he has to report,” the
assistant told them. “Mr. Ackerman is coming up this evening, and he’ll
want to know what the O. C. people are doing up above――or if they’re
doing anything beyond that big rock cutting they’ve been working on for
the past week.”
Blaisdell, as the boys knew, was an instrumentman who, with a helper to
hold staff for him, had been sent ahead two days earlier to reset grade
stakes in the upper reaches of the canyon, and, incidentally, to find
out what advance the Overland Central was making at the back of beyond.
Taking Goldrick’s suggestion as an order, Dick and Larry immediately
outfitted for a tramp which would probably consume the entire day,
getting a haversack lunch put up by the hard-rock camp cook. In light
marching order they took the trail used by Blaisdell and his man two
days before, choosing the steep route over the “Nose,” as the jutting
mountain shoulder was called, both because it would save time, and
because the more roundabout route up the canyon at the river level was
more or less blocked by the cliff through which the rock-men were still
only in the process of drilling and blasting the way.
At their first breathing stop, half-way up the mountain, Larry said: “I
wonder what can be keeping Ned Blaisdell out so long? I saw him when he
started, and they weren’t carrying chuck enough to feed the two of them
for more than a day or so.”
“You can search me,” Dick returned. “Maybe he’s been getting into
trouble with some of the O. C. bullies.”
Larry thought not. “No,” he said; “his work wouldn’t have taken him
very near the O. C. at any point. They’re held up in that big rock
cutting half a mile above us, just the same as we are at the Nose. They
are not over in Yellow Dog Park yet; and that is where Blaisdell was to
do most of his verifying.”
“You can’t tell where those O. C. scrappers are, or what they’re
going to do next,” said Dick soberly. “This fight is getting hotter
every day. Last Wednesday, when I went over to Red Butte after some
blue-prints for the bridge builders, Mr. Briscoe, our right-of-way
agent, was in the Red Butte office. I heard him tell Mr. Ackerman that
the mine owners at Little Ophir had got out a bond issue to help the
railroad that gets there first with its tracks.”
Larry nodded. “I heard about that bond issue. It doesn’t seem just
fair. It was promised to our company early this spring if we’d agree
to build a line in from Red Butte. And now they say they’ll give it to
either company that gets there first.”
“That’s what they’re saying now,” Dick asserted. “And there’s another
kick coming to the under dog, besides. Mr. Briscoe said that the
merchants and big ore shippers were offering, as another hurry punch,
to sign contracts agreeing to give the winner all of their business for
the first six months. So the losing company will have a dead railroad
on its hands for a whole half year.”
The square Donovan jaw set itself firmly.
“We’ve got to win, Dick. It isn’t only the money; it’s partly the way
these O. C. folks have acted. It was our right-of-way in the beginning
and this is Short Line territory. Besides, they haven’t fought fair;
they would have stolen the whole canyon if they’d got into it first, as
they were planning to. I say we’ve _got_ to win.”
“Right you are,” said the general manager’s son. And then: “Got your
wind again?――all right; let’s go.”
From the top of the spur, which they reached after another stiff climb,
there was an extended view to the eastward; a view backgrounded by the
mighty bulk of the farther Timanyonis. Somewhere in one of the many
upland gulches of the great range lay the gold camp toward which the
two railroads were racing. At their feet and far below, the foaming
torrent of the Tourmaline gashed its path through the mountains, its
narrow, crooking canyon opening out a few miles away in a sort of
park-like valley.
“Yellow Dog Park,” said Larry, pointing to the valley. “Queer names
they have up in these mountains. I suppose some prospector had a hound
dog, and it died or got lost, or something, down yonder in that valley.”
“Queer” fitted the break in the mountain labyrinth into which they
were looking down, in the sense that it was singularly unlike any of
the canyon widenings in the lower reaches of the river. In shape it
was roughly circular and of considerable extent, with so many gulches
running down into it that it looked from their height like the center
of a many-pointed star. It seemed to be entirely bare of timber, and
its color, in sharp contrast to the dark greens of the wooded mountain
sides, was a sort of dirty yellow, with here and there a patch of green
that was even darker than that of the forests.
From their high lookout they could not trace the course of the river
through the valley, though they finally concluded that the Tourmaline
must flow along its northern edge, which lay at their left as they
faced eastward. In this case it would be hidden beneath its fringing of
trees.
“What do you suppose makes those square green patches?” Dick asked,
lamenting in the same breath his forgetfulness in failing to bring his
field-glass along.
“I’ve been wondering,” said Larry; then: “I’ll bet I know! They’re
fields of alfalfa. There’s a hay ranch in that valley, taking its
irrigation water from the river.”
“A ranch?” Dick queried――“this far up in the mountains?”
“Sure. With a trig mining-camp that can’t be more than fifteen miles
away there’d be a good market for every pound of hay that could be
raised. Dad says it used to be that way in the little valleys around
Leadville, back in the early days, and some of the hay ranchers made
more money than the miners did.”
Dickie Maxwell, still grumbling because he hadn’t brought the
field-glass, was trying to make a binocular of his curved hands.
“I don’t see any ranch house,” he offered, “but there is a path or
road of some sort winding around across the park. Can’t you see it? It
begins down here at the left and goes across sort of cater-cornering to
the southeast.”
Larry looked closely and saw what appeared in the distance to be the
tiniest of footpaths running in the direction Dick had indicated.
“It’s most likely the ranchman’s wagon road,” he hazarded. “He’d have
to have some way of hauling his hay to Little Ophir.”
“Well,” Dick cut in, “this isn’t finding Blaisdell. Shall we climb down
and begin the hunt?”
Now the task which had been set them, of finding two human atoms in the
maze of forest and mountain which lay at their feet, was not quite so
much of a needle-in-a-haystack search as it might appear to be. Since
Blaisdell and his helper had gone ahead to reset grade stakes, all the
searchers had to do was to find the Short Line survey in the maze and
then to follow the staked trail until they came to the resetters.
At first they tried to hold a straight course down the mountain from
their lookout summit. But here great Nature intervened. Precipices
they could not descend got in the way, and when these had been
circumvented, there were steep gulches to be headed and lower spurs to
be climbed――with more gulches on their farther sides.
Winding and twisting, climbing and descending, and twice crossing small
streams, they came finally into the valley with the curious name――and
were so completely turned around that they had to look at their watches
and the position of the sun to locate their point of approach, which
was far up the southern side of the valley. In other words, they had
made more than a quarter-circuit of their goal in getting down to it.
“Gee!” Dick exclaimed――he was beginning to lag a bit from sheer
leg-weariness――“the long way around may be the shortest way home, as
the old saying goes, but if it is, we didn’t find it. Whereabouts are
we, anyhow?”
It was rather hard to tell just where they were, in relation to their
surroundings. At the near-hand view the valley didn’t look anything
like the yellowish flat they had seen from the heights. For one thing,
the yellow turned out to be the dirty fawn-color of disintegrated
sandstone; and instead of being flat, as it had looked, the park was
thickly “pimpled,” at least in their part of it, with low hills of the
weathering stone.
“The first thing to do is to find the line of our survey,” said Larry.
“We can’t miss running across some of the stakes if we go straight
ahead the way we’re facing now.”
That seemed reasonable. From many former studyings of the maps and
blue-prints they knew the general route of the Extension, though this
was the first time they had been out this far ahead of the actual
working forces. Not having any maps with them, and neither of them
being able to recall from memory the exact route of the new line
through the valley, there was nothing to do but to hunt for the line
of stakes. So they set out northward among the stony hills, keeping a
sharp lookout as they went for the line of the survey.
They had gone but a short distance when they came suddenly upon
a fellow of about their own age, dressed in patched overalls and
a flannel shirt. He had a sharp nose, a rather foolish chin, and
greenish-gray eyes that had a furtive trick of dodging――wouldn’t
meet squarely the look of other eyes. When they came upon him he was
clearing out the sand from a small irrigation ditch. As they approached
he leaned upon his long-handled shovel and hailed them.
“Hello, Corduroys! You travelin’, ’r just a-goin’ somewheres?”
“Both,” Dick returned, matching the ditch-cleaner’s grin. “We belong
to the Short Line outfit, and we’re hunting for our location stakes
through this valley. Do you know where the lines run?”
At the mention of the Short Line, Larry, who was standing a
little behind Dick, thought he saw a sudden change flick into the
ditch-cleaner’s eyes――the eyes that wouldn’t stay still. Then he took
himself to task for being over-suspicious and concluded he was mistaken.
“Do I know where them lines are at? You’re mighty whistlin’ right I do.
Didn’t me an’ Paw cut the stakes f’r ’em when they was first laid out?”
“Then you’re the fellow we’re looking for,” Dick chirped. “I’m
Dick Maxwell, and Larry Donovan, here, is my bunkie. We’re on the
engineering staff under Mr. Ackerman.”
“My name’s Jones――Billy, for short,” was the counter introduction.
“Paw, he owns the hay ranch over on t’other side o’ the park. Want me
to show you them stakes?”
“If you can spare the time,” said Dick; “and we’d sure be much obliged.
But first maybe you can tell us something about a man we’re looking
for; Mr. Blaisdell, one of our instrumentmen, who has been up around
here for the last two days.”
For just a fraction of a second the boy with the shifty eyes seemed to
hesitate. Then, looking steadily down at his own feet as he spoke:
“Why-e-e, yes; mebbe I could. Er――there was a man got hurt yisterday;
fell down an’ twisted his ankle, ’r somethin’. Mebbe that’s the one.
I didn’t hear him speak his name. Had a Swede felluh with him that he
sent to carry the word somewhere――back down canyon to you folks, mebbe.”
Dick and Larry exchanged swift glances. The man who was hurt must be
Blaisdell. They remembered now that it was Olsen, the young Swedish
axman, who had been sent out with him as his helper and target-holder.
“That’s our man,” said Dick. “Where is he now?”
Again the news-giver seemed to be looking for something on the
ground at his feet. After a little pause he said, “He’s――er――he’s up
at the head-gate shack, where we get our irrigatin’ water from. It
was――um――right around there somewheres that he got hurt.” He stumbled
so haltingly over this simple statement that again Larry gathered the
impression that Billy Jones was either awkwardly slow of speech; or
else something was distracting him most curiously. And somehow, Larry
fancied that the distraction came from the effort of listening for
some unwelcome sound; some sound that was both expected and dreaded.
“Mr. Blaisdell is up there alone?” Dick inquired.
“Why-e-e, yes; we couldn’t tote him over to the ranch house, nohow――the
Swede an’ me――an’ he couldn’t walk. So we fixed him up in the――in the
bunk, and the Swede hiked back to wherever it was the hurt felluh was
sendin’ him. There was――er――we allus keep some grub in the shack――me
an’ Paw. Sometimes we have to stay up there over night, when the
water’s high.”
Again the two scouts exchanged glances, and Dick said:
“We must go to Blaisdell, right away, Larry. He may be having a mighty
bad time of it up there all alone.” Then to Jones: “Can you direct us
so that we can find the place?”
The news-breaker threw down his shovel, as one only too willing to
accommodate.
“I’ll do a heap better’n that; I’ll go along an’ show you,” he offered.
“You felluhs pretty good on the hike? All right; le’s get a move on,”
and he immediately set a long-legged pace among the hills that seemed
little less than a dog-trot to the two who had already tramped five or
six miles over prodigiously rough ground.
Before they had gone very far several things began to impress them,
as one might say, with interrogation-points attached. Since a cloud
had slipped down from the high peaks to obscure the sun, they couldn’t
determine the direction in which they were going, but it seemed to both
of them that their guide was taking them back nearly over the route
they had so lately traversed in coming into the valley.
That was one thing; and another was that they saw no grade stakes
anywhere along the way. Again, Dick, who had a quick ear for unusual
sounds, thought he could hear, far away to their left, a tiny,
insect-like clicking that would have been set down at once, in other
circumstances, as a distance-diminished chatter of air-drills burrowing
in solid rock. Dick told himself scoffingly that of course it couldn’t
possibly be air-drills, and he was wondering, as they hurried along,
what high-altitude insect it could be that kept up such an incessant
_chink-a-chink-a-chink_.
It was not until after they had measured an exceedingly crooked course
of perhaps half a mile among the sandstone buttes that they came to a
stream which they took to be Yellow Dog Creek, inasmuch as it wasn’t
nearly big enough to be the Tourmaline. Up the stream the ditch-cleaner
led the way at his space-devouring stride, and in a short time the
boys saw that they were approaching the head of the valley, if a
many-pointed star could be said to have a head.
This conclusion apparently verified itself when they presently plunged
into a canyon, the gash in the mountain through which the creek entered
the valley. Up this canyon their guide hurried them, slackening his
pace only after two or three twists in the gorge had shut off any view
of the rear.
It was along about this time that Dick began to grow curious.
“Say, Jonesy; what canyon is this?” he asked.
“Echo Canyon,” the guide flung back over his shoulder. Then he halted
abruptly. “Listen,” he commanded.
Distinctly――so clearly that they could have sworn that the source of
it couldn’t possibly be more than a mile away at the farthest, came the
_chooka-chooka-chooka_ of a locomotive laboring with a heavy train.
Their guide’s grin showed a bad set of teeth.
“That’s why it’s called ‘Echo’,” he explained. “You wouldn’t reckon
you could hear them O. C. trains ’way down yonder in the lower canyon,
would you now? It’s six mile in a bee line, if it’s a foot.”
It appeared grossly unbelievable, to be sure, but seemingly the fact
remained. They could hear the laboring engine; and, in the nature of
things, it couldn’t be any nearer than William Jones had declared it to
be.
“What is this creek?――the Yellow Dog?” Dick wanted to know.
The guide nodded.
“I don’t see what our instrumentman was doing up here,” Larry put in
with a puzzled frown. “Our survey goes on up the Tourmaline.”
“Sure it does,” said William Jones. “But this is――er――a sort o’ short
cut to the――to where I’m a-takin’ you. We hike up over the spur a
little furder along.”
It might have been a short cut, but it seemed plentifully long to the
two muscle-weary man-hunters when, after what they were estimating as
fully three additional miles of mountain-scalings and gulch-headings,
their guide halted them on the brink of a broad canyon through which
a stream bigger than any they had yet seen was foaming among its
boulders. At a point directly below the halting place they saw a rude
dam and the beginnings of an irrigation canal; and, half hidden under
the trees at the dam site, there was a roughly built log shelter
looking from above as if it might sometime have been a hunter’s camp.
“Right there you are,” said William Jones, pointing down at the log
hut. “I reckon you can find your way from here, an’ I’ll have to be
gettin’ back, ’r Paw’ll be huntin’ me with a trace-chain.”
They thanked him warmly; they could do no less for a fellow who had
voluntarily come miles out of his way to do them a neighborly kindness;
and afterward they saw him lose himself in the mountain-top forest
through which they had just made their way. Then they descended to the
canyon of the tumbling stream.
Dick was the first to reach the weather-beaten log shelter beside the
rude dam. It was not even a hut; it was merely a shack, with one side
open to the weather, and――it held neither a bunk nor any other sign of
recent occupancy!
“Come here, Larry!” Dick called; and when Larry stood staring blankly
over his shoulder: “If I didn’t hate slang so bad, I’d say that we’re
stung, good and proper! Do you get me?”
“I guess I do,” said Larry. “That long-legged grasshopper in overalls
wasn’t telling a word of truth――about Blaisdell or anything else. What
made him lie to us that way, and then take so much pains to make the
lie stick?”
“You can search me,” Dick said, falling back upon his favorite phrase.
“He must be clear off his bean. I thought he looked pretty much like a
half-wit, anyhow.”
Larry sat down upon a fallen tree and propped his chin in his hands.
After a time he looked up to say:
“Dick, if I wasn’t so dad-beaned tired, I’d trail Mr. Billy Jones and
give him what’s coming to him, if it was the last thing I ever did. But
we don’t get out of this with whole skins, either――you and I, I mean.
We bit just like a couple of raw suckers; swallowed bait, hook and
sinker!”
“Spread it out,” said Dick gloomily.
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face, now,” Larry went on hotly.
“Don’t you remember how anxious he was to get us out of the valley,
quick, before we could see or hear anything he didn’t want us to see or
hear? And that piece of bull about the echoing canyon!――that was an O.
C. material train we heard, all right, but it wasn’t any six miles away
or anything like it. I’ll bet it was right in that valley and less than
half a mile from us when we heard it!”
“But good goodness!” Dick gasped. “That would mean that they are six
miles ahead of us! That can’t be; they’re stopped in that rock cutting
just this side of the Nose. Haven’t we heard them blasting there every
day?”
“It makes no difference. They’ve got around that cutting in some way
and have gone on blasting to fool us and make us think they’re stuck
there. They’re in the Yellow Dog with their track; and that isn’t all:
I’ll bet they’ve arrested Blaisdell and Olsen and are holding them on
some trumped-up charge to keep them from carrying the news!”
“But why should this Jones fellow chip in to help them?”
“That’s easy. I expect they have paid spies out all over the valley,
and he’s one of them. He saw an easy way to bamfoozle us, and he took
it; that’s all.”
It was past the middle of the afternoon, and Dick reached for the
haversack, took out the neglected luncheon and divided it.
“It’s up to us, Larry; harder than it’s ever been before, because we
were foolish enough to let that unwashed sand-shoveler put it all over
us that way. We’ve got to find out what’s going on and carry the news
back to our folks. Nice prospect for this late in the day! I’ve just
about tramped the tramp all out of me, as it stands. We must have
covered something like five or six miles getting here from the valley.”
“Every foot of five, anyway,” Larry agreed, talking around a hungry
mouthful of bacon sandwich. “But here’s hoping that we can find a
shorter way back, and it’s dollars to doughnuts that we shall. We know
now that Jonesy was trying to lose us, which was why he ran us all over
the lot getting here. This must be the upper canyon of the Tourmaline
itself, and I expect, if we hunt around a bit, we’ll find our grade
stakes――and most likely the O. C.’s as well. If we follow the river
down――――”
The interruption was a series of thunderous explosions that shook the
air in the canyon and were bandied back and forth between the cliff
walls in echoing rumblings lasting for a full half-minute.
“That was something that Jonesy didn’t count on――planting us so near
that we could hear the blasting――didn’t think of it, I suppose,” Larry
went on. “That touch-off wasn’t more than a mile away at the farthest,
if I’m any judge.”
Hurriedly despatching the belated midday meal, they took the trail
again, this time following the river. Almost immediately they came
upon a series of grade stakes; two sets of them, in fact, overlapping
each other. Within twenty minutes the familiar clinking of the
air-drills could be heard, and now Dick knew what the mysterious
high-altitude insect was whose chip-chipping he had heard at the
beginning of the long roundabout over which the fellow named Jones had
led them.
Presently the work noises came to them so plainly that they no longer
dared to follow the canyon trail at the river level. If their surmise
that Blaisdell and his man were held as prisoners was correct, they
would doubtless suffer the same fate if they should fall into the hands
of the O. C. force.
Realizing this, they climbed laboriously out of the canyon, and from
the top of the cliffs a little farther on they were able to look down
upon an exceedingly busy scene; a huge rock cutting just fairly begun,
with its battery of chattering air-drills, hustling gangs of laborers,
puffing spoil train, and big steam shovel.
Sorely as time pressed, Larry nevertheless snatched a few minutes in
which to make a rough sketch of the incomplete cutting, knowing that
the information would be valuable in estimating how long the rival
railroad was likely to be delayed at this particular point.
“Hurry!” Dick urged, glancing at his wrist watch. “We don’t want to be
caught by the dark in getting back to camp. We’ll never find our way
out of this mountain tangle if we have to tackle the job in the night.”
By keeping well up on the heights they were able to trace the grade
of the Overland Central back to the point where it entered the upper
canyon, and beyond that, along the southern edge of the valley of the
Yellow Dog to the “enemy’s” newest material and supply camp.
Under cover of the forest on the steep slope just above the camp they
were able to note the great piles of material that had been brought up,
and even while they looked, another laden train was nosing its way into
one of the several side-tracks. Also, from their elevated lookout they
could see the completed track winding among the sandstone buttes all
across the circular valley, disappearing finally under the northward
cliffs.
Dick grunted.
“I ought to have a leather medal,” he said; “for forgetting to bring
my field-glass along this morning. If we’d had it back yonder on top
of the Nose we wouldn’t have mistaken that piece of track for a wagon
road.” Then as a new complication suddenly struck him: “Heavens to
Betsy, Larry! Do you see what we’re in for now? To get to the upper
canyon we’ll have to cross their track――_at grade_! And that means a
crossing fight that may easily hold us back for days and days!”
Once more Larry had been sketching; this time making a rough bird’s-eye
map of the valley, with the O. C. line running across it, and the
location of the big material camp carefully marked.
“That’s all,” he said at last, buttoning the note-book into his pocket.
“Now comes the real tug of war. It’s five o’clock and worse, and we’ve
got at least six or seven miles of mighty hard tramping ahead of us
before we can break in with our news. How are you fixed for it?”
Dick stretched his legs with a groan.
“I don’t believe I’ve got more than half as many joints as I started
out with this morning,” he said with a grin. “But I’m game; the gamest
thing you know.”
To prove it he laid hold of the big round boulder beside which he
had been crouching and drew himself up. To his shocked astonishment
the big rock tilted slowly under his pull, and he had barely time to
spring quickly aside before the boulder turned completely over and went
bounding and crashing down the slope like a small avalanche, gathering
a following of smaller stones as it went, and heading directly for the
busy camp at the slope foot.
“Great Peter!――you’ve done it now!” Larry exploded; then: “Up with you
and run for it――if you don’t want to be nabbed and chucked into some
hole with Blaisdell and Olsen!”
Whatever had been done with Blaisdell and his target-holder, it is
certain that no alarm was ever answered more promptly than that given
by the descending boulder. Instantly the big camp began to buzz like a
nest of disturbed hornets. With a final leap the bounding stone crashed
into a cement shed, sending a gray cloud of the “Portland” skyward much
as if a charge of dynamite had been exploded under it. And now men came
running from all directions, some of them with guns.
Luckily for the two scouts, the foresting on this part of the mountain
side was fairly dense. At the crack of a rifle and the whine of a
bullet from below, they forgot their weariness and ducked and ran
diagonally up the slope. At the first chance they had to look back,
they saw some half-dozen of the armed men coming on in hot pursuit. And
a scant five hundred yards or so was all the start they had.
“Hold your wind, and for pity’s sake don’t stumble!” Larry gasped.
“Here’s where we’ve got to dig for it! Those fellows never will believe
that we didn’t roll that stone on purpose!”
For the first few breath-cutting minutes their capture seemed fairly
inevitable. Their pursuers were fresh, while they, themselves,
were almost in the last ditch of fatigue, so far as a foot-race
was concerned. Once, indeed, they raced upon the raw edge of the
catastrophe. A thinly wooded bit of ground that they were forced to
cross gave one of the pursuers a chance to come within gunshot range
and they both heard his shouted, “Stop, or I’ll fire!” a command which
was quickly followed by the report of a gun. But the man’s aim――if
he had really taken any――was bad, and a last-gasp spurt carried the
fugitives once more into the welcome shelter of the denser wooding.
From that on, with aching muscles protesting agonizingly at every step,
they slowly distanced their pursuers, leading the chase up and on,
higher and farther into the heavy timber on the approach to the bald
heights where no timber grew. Not until the dusk was rising from the
gulches could they be certain that they had shaken off the pursuit; and
it was then that Dickie Maxwell threw himself on his back under the
trees, white, spent and gasping.
“I’m all in, Larry!” he panted. “I couldn’t make another mile if my
life depended on it! Go on, if you can find the way in the dark, and
leave me. The news doesn’t need two mouths to tell it.”
But Larry wasn’t built that way. Stiff and sore as he was himself, he
knelt over the spent one, massaging and kneading the stiffened muscles
and giving Dick a trainer’s manhandling that made him cry out under the
very roughness of it.
“Oh, gee!――let up!” pleaded the squirming sufferer. “I’ll try it
another whirl if you’ll quit. I’d rather ache and go on than to be
beaten to death and take it lying down!”
With the shades of night creeping ghost-like through the solemn forest
they hit the invisible trail again; heading westward and ever westward,
rolling down steep hillsides into deep gulches, and crawling painfully
up the corresponding steep on the other side, stumbling blindly over
fallen trees and rocks; going on and on after their feet and legs were
so numb and stiff that they could hardly be sure they had any, and with
their eyes, for which they had small use in the darkness, leaden heavy
with sleep.
The end came suddenly when it did come. At a moment when even Larry’s
fine endurance was at its last gasp they saw a camp-fire twinkling far
below them. They didn’t run down to it; they merely let go all holds
and tumbled. The camp was that of their own hard-rock men at the foot
of the Nose, and they nearly rolled into the embers of the fire before
they could stop themselves.
It was Mr. Ackerman, their chief, who picked them up and listened to
their stammered-out report of the day’s adventures. This time there
was no word of commendation for what they had done; but that was only
because the time they had fought so hard to save had suddenly become
vitally precious.
Almost as in a dream they heard the chief snapping out his orders;
heard the bustle and clamor of a camp turning out to go into swift
action; heard the camp cook hammering upon his dish-pan to awaken the
laggards.
Dickie Maxwell, smiling beatifically, turned sleepily to his exhausted
running mate.
“Glory be, Larry!” he muttered weakly; “we’re going to make a fight
for it; a crossing fight, at that. Here’s――hoping――we’ll be there――to
see!” And then, still more sleepily: “Huh! if anybody should rise up
to inquire――I’ll say we put one over on a fellow named Jones, after
all――what?”
CHAPTER IX
“GANGWAY!”
“Ye-e-e wow!” Dick Maxwell, fighting sleepily to get his arms free from
the tightly rolled blanket, yawned cavernously. Then: “Whoosh!――Larry,
old scout!――wake up!”
The blanket roll in the other bunk stirred like a chrysalis about to
burst and let loose whatever sort of bug it contained. Then a curly red
head appeared, followed by a pair of stretching arms.
Dick sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.
“Say, Larry; what do you know about this!” he exclaimed, staring at the
face of his wrist watch. “By the great horn spoon――it’s five o’clock!
five o’clock _in the afternoon_!”
It was the day after the day of trampings, and old mother Nature had
been taking her toll with a vengeance for the drafts made on her in
the long hike to and through and around and beyond the valley with a
doggish name. Straight through from a little past midnight the two
hikers had slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, and even now they
both felt that they could stand still more of it.
“Ah-yah!” gaped Larry, matching Dick’s yawn. “Say, Dickie; somebody
must have put us to bed last night. I sure don’t recollect doing any of
it myself.”
“If anybody should be interested enough to ask, I’ll say that was some
tramp we had yesterday; s-o-m-e tramp!” Dick put in.
“Uh-huh,” Larry agreed. “You’re talking in mouthfuls. Wonder if the
news we brought did any good?”
“Here’s hoping. But everything seems mighty quiet around here now――if
we’re supposed to be doing any hustling. I don’t even hear the
compressor running.”
After they crawled into their clothes and turned out, the quietness
of the camp was fully explained. First, they saw that the work in the
big rock cutting just above the camp had apparently been abandoned――as
it was, temporarily――and a track passage around the obstacle had been
obtained by means of a hastily built wooden trestle standing, as the
Overland Central trestle did at the point of that road’s entrance into
the canyon, with its bents in the river bed.
Over this trestle the track had already been laid; and while they were
staring at the miracle of accomplishment which had been wrought in less
than a double circuit of the clock-hands, the 717, with Brannigan at
the throttle, came storming up the canyon, pushing two flat-cars loaded
high with cross-ties――pushing them right along, too, for there was time
only for a hand wave from the little Irishman before the two-car train
shrilled around the curving trestle and disappeared to sight and sound.
“Hooray!” cried Dick, swinging his cap; “that means that we’re still in
the ring and going strong! Let’s get a bite to eat and then go on ahead
and report for duty.”
Luckily for them there was a cook left at the nearly deserted
hard-rock camp, and the “bite” to which they presently sat down
transformed itself into a hearty meal, as it had need to be, since
it took the place of the skipped supper of the night before, and the
breakfast and dinner of the day through which they had slept.
This very necessary preliminary attended to, they set out to follow the
lately laid track up the canyon. At every step they marveled. There had
been a great deal of hurry work done during the summer on the race up
the Tourmaline, but nothing to equal this drive which had gone on while
they slept. “Miraculous” was the only word that fitted. In the short
time that had elapsed the track had been carried around the canyon
obstacles and up to and into Yellow Dog Park, and the rush――judging
from the number of material trains that passed them as they hurried
forward――was still on.
Among the sandstone hills in the circular valley they came upon the
building army, augmented now by every available man on the large
construction force. In the thick of the work turmoil the boys found
their chief.
“Glad to see you fellows,” said the driver of men briskly. “Did you
have your sleep out?”
“We sure did,” Dick grinned.
“All right; we’re calling it a battle, and I’ll make you two my
orderlies. Dick, you may run up ahead and see how the supply of
cross-ties is holding out. Report to Goldrick if it’s running short.
Larry, you chase around until you find Smith, the wire chief, and
tell him we’ve got to have those arc-lights in commission within an
hour. Then find Lonergan and see if his carbide flares are ready to be
distributed. Skip for it――both of you!”
That was the introduction to a night’s work that both Dick and Larry
thought they should never live long enough to forget. Almost as if by
magic, it seemed, electric wires were strung, and with the coming of
darkness, arc-lights and carbide flares blazed out all along the line.
Under an illumination that was little short of daylight the gangs of
track-layers, working now at the close of a twenty-four-hour shift
in relays of two hours on and one hour off for rest, sprang to their
task. Like clock-work the material trains came up from the supply camps
below, cross-ties and rails, spikes and fish-plates, bolts and nuts
were distributed, and the incessant clanging of the spike mauls was
like the din of a busy blacksmith shop.
It was during this night of tremendous toil――the second night for the
men who were driving the job――that a track-laying record was broken
for that entire section of the West. Fortunately, the ground between
the sandstone buttes was comparatively level and but little grading
was needed. But for that matter, the “leveling” could be done later
by reworking crews. The need of the moment was for speed; for the
construction of a usable track of some sort――any sort; and under the
combined efforts of a master mind and many tireless and skilful hands
the usable track was materializing by leaps and bounds.
“I’m telling you, Larry, that this is one something to stick down in
your little old note-book!” Dick exclaimed enthusiastically, in one of
the few breathing spells their work of order-carrying permitted. “I
wouldn’t have missed seeing this night’s work, and being a part of it,
for anything under the sun.”
“Here too,” Larry agreed. “It’s great! And doesn’t the chief stand out
like the biggest man you ever saw? My heavens, Dick――if I thought I
could ever grow a brain big enough to handle a job like this――――”
“Of course you can――and will!” Dick asserted, with comradely loyalty.
Then to a grimy-faced lad, one of the spike distributors, who came
running up: “Right-o: what is it now, Jimmie Dowling?”
“The big boss does want to be seeing you both,” was the spike boy’s
message; and Dick and Larry hurried down the line to the temporary
field headquarters where the chief was sitting on a spike keg, with a
couple of planks on trestles for a work table.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you fellows since this drive began,”
was the greeting they got. “Pull up a couple of those empty kegs and
sit down. Now that we have a few minutes I want you to tell me all
about that scouting expedition you made yesterday. Give me the details.”
Dick did the telling, or most of it, boiling the report down into the
fewest possible words to save the chief’s time.
“A thoroughly good, workmanlike job,” was the hearty commendation to
follow Dick’s narrative; and then, with the shadow of a smile lurking
in the sober gray eyes: “We won’t say anything about the fellow named
Jones. There was really no good reason why you should have suspected
him or doubted his story. Now then, a few more particulars about that
O. C. supply camp you found at the head of the valley; about what
amount of material have they on hand at that point?”
It was Larry who answered this question, and he fished out his
note-book and showed the sketch he had made of the camp and the route
of the O. C. across the valley. Much of his work during the summer had
been the checking of material, and he was able to form a reasonably
good estimate of how much track a given quantity of cross-ties and
rails would lay.
“I’d say they have, maybe, two miles of ties and rails piled up in that
camp,” was his venture at the quantities.
“Not more than that?”
“No, sir; I think not.”
“That is good news; better than I expected to hear. If we can make the
crossing and get ahead of them in the upper canyon, we’ll beat them
yet. Now about that rock cutting you say they’re working in above their
camp; how big is it?”
Again it was Larry who answered.
“It’s a heavy cutting; twelve or fourteen feet deep on the high side, I
should say, and considerably over a hundred feet long. We couldn’t get
near enough to make an estimate in cubic yards; but I’d say they have a
week’s work there, at the very least.”
“Better yet,” said the chief. “In a week’s time we ought to be leaving
them well behind.”
“But when we come to their track here in this valley, they’ll block the
crossing for us, won’t they?” Dick asked.
“No doubt they will try to. Whether they will succeed or not is another
matter. Now I want you two to do another little scouting stunt. Follow
our line up the valley and post yourselves somewhere near the O. C.
track. Stay there for the remainder of the night and be prepared to
report on what you’ve seen.”
Reluctant as they were to miss any part of the joyous work battle,
the two “scouts” obeyed the new order cheerfully, trudging out ahead
of the track-layers and soon leaving the most advanced guard of the
workers behind. It was a clear night, or rather early morning, with the
stars shining brightly to show the ghostly shadows of the surrounding
mountains rising like the sides of a great bowl to enclose the shut-in
valley. A few turns among the hills served to efface even the sounds
of the work battle, and the wilderness stillness, after the clamor and
din, was almost deafening.
“What do you reckon the chief wants us to find out, particularly?” Dick
asked as they plodded along.
“Everything that goes on, I guess,” Larry answered. “The O. C. people
know that we’re coming; they’ve found it out long before this time; and
they’ll be rushing material out ahead as fast as they can. Because,
you see, if they block the track for us, they’ll have to block it for
themselves, as well.”
That was a good guess, for, even as he made it, they heard the rattle
of a train, and by sprinting a bit they reached the crossing point in
time to see it go thundering past. There were three flat-cars loaded
with ties ahead of the pushing engine, and by the light of Dick’s
pocket flashlamp Larry noted the fact in his memorandum book――the fact
and the time.
Beyond this they had little to do save to record the passing of
an occasional train; loaded ones going to the front, and empties
returning. In the idle intervals they had a chance to study the lay of
the land at the point where the clash, if there should be one, would
occur. The crossing place was in a small level flat surrounded by the
sandstone hills. As nearly as they could determine, the crossing would
be practically at right angles; the O. C. track running nearly north
and south and the Short Line east and west. From studying the lay-out
they began to speculate as to how the crossing would be made; whether
the O. C. rails would have to be sawn in two, or a regular set of
crossing-frogs put in.
“Frogs, I’d say,” asserted Larry, who was the mechanical end of the
partnership. “It would take too long to saw the rails; and the other
way all we’d need to do would be to build the frogs to fit a gap in
their line, take up two of their rails, and drop the made-up crossing
into place. That wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, if we were all
ready for it beforehand.”
At the first peep of dawn the noises of the work battle began to be
audible again; and shortly after that the tie-distributing teams made
their appearance. The two boys got up and stretched themselves. It had
been quite an hour or more since a train had passed on the other line,
and as yet there were no signs of a coming attempt to block the way for
the up-coming force.
“Gee!” said Dick, shivering in the morning chill, but more from his
excitement, “here we come shoving along――and the way is still clear. Do
you reckon those fellows are going to miss the chance of blocking us,
after all?”
Before Larry could reply, the answer to the question came lumbering out
of the southward hills; and it promptly extinguished the implied hope.
A three-car train of steel rails was backing slowly down the Overland
Central track and in the half light of the dawn the boys could see that
there were men on each of the cars; quite a number of them.
Since it was a loaded train coming in the wrong direction for loaded
trains, there was no doubt as to its destination and purpose. Evidently
the “enemy” had had scouts out, too, and knew to the exact moment when
the time had arrived for the obstacle placing.
Dick and Larry held their post of observation, which was behind a
sandstone boulder, until the train rumbled down into position. Instead
of stopping on the crossing point, however, it ran a little way past,
stopped, reversed, and ran up again repeating this pendulum movement
slowly and deliberately in such a fashion as to keep the crossing place
covered for a greater part of the time with a moving train.
“I don’t see any particular use in that,” Dick said, after the pendulum
swing had been duly established. “Why don’t they stop it squarely in
front of us?”
“Fixes us so we can’t do anything at all while they keep moving――can’t
hit a lick,” Larry grunted. “Besides, they can cover more ground that
way; stops us from trying to build around in either direction. Let’s go
find Mr. Ackerman and make our report. There isn’t going to be anything
more doing here until we get up with our track.”
Accordingly, they walked down the grade until they found the chief.
After they made their report of the number of trains that had passed
during their watch they were told to go and get breakfast.
With the morning meal out of the way they hurried back to the front.
In the short space of time they had been absent the scene at the
crossing had changed decidedly. The Short Line track had been carried
up to within a few feet of the opposition right-of-way, and teams
were already going around the pendulum-swinging train with loads
of cross-ties. But by far the largest part of the building army
was halted. Around a dozen camp-fires the track-layers were eating
breakfast and drinking hot coffee which the cooks were bringing up in
huge tin cans.
“Looks plenty peaceful, so far,” Larry remarked. “Wonder what we’ll try
to do?――rush ’em?”
Dick shook his head――rather regretfully, it must be admitted.
“Nope; Mr. Ackerman isn’t built that way. You haven’t been with him
all summer without finding that out, have you? But we could do it,
hands down, if he’d only give the word. There are only twenty-seven
men on that blocking train, counting the engineer and fireman, and we
outnumber them at least a dozen to one.”
“What do you mean by rushing them? Take the train away from ’em and run
it off to one side?” Larry queried. “That would be as easy as rolling
off a log.”
“Oh, yes; easy enough. But you’ll see; Mr. Ackerman won’t do it.
Naturally, in a scrap of that kind, somebody’d be bound to get hurt,
and the chief won’t stand for that.”
That was all right; but short of the “rushing” there didn’t seem to be
anything to be done. So long as the moving train was see-sawing back
and forth over the point where the crossing-frog, already made up and
bolted together and lying in readiness beside the track, must be put
in, nothing but a forcible clearing away of the obstruction seemed to
promise any degree of success.
Larry looked across at the moving obstacle and scowled.
“_I’d_ rush it in a minute, if I were in the chief’s place!” he
gritted. “They’ve got no right, legal or any other kind, to hold us up
this way; they’re just outlaws! Every man we’ve got on the job would
jump to get in on the fight, if Mr. Ackerman would only turn his back
and shut his eyes for a minute or two.”
That was Larry, mind you; the fellow who usually thought twice before
he acted once, and who was, generally speaking, as mild-mannered and
peaceable as big-muscled fellows commonly are. Perhaps it was an
outburst of that fighting temper he had once spoken of to Dick; the
temper that would still, under sufficient provocation, come boiling up
out of that pit of bitterness he had tried to describe.
“Would you?” said Dick; then, a bit thoughtfully: “Perhaps I should,
too. And yet ... maybe Mr. Ackerman’s right, at that, Larry. When you
come right down to it, this whole railroad scramble isn’t worth the
life of one single man of ours――or of theirs. Some of those fellows on
the steel cars are armed; you can bet on that; and――――”
He broke off because just then another act in the drama was getting
ready to stage itself. Down the line of the Overland Central a light
engine was coursing swiftly, and for a moment it seemed as if it must
collide with the blocking train. But it came to a stand a little way
short of the pendulum swing, and from the engine step a big man in
soiled brown duck and laced leggings swung off and came on foot down
the track side.
“Look who’s here!” Dick muttered morosely――“Grissby――the O. C. chief.
You’d say he has a nerve, wouldn’t you?――to come walking in here on us
at a time like this!”
“I’ll say so!” growled Larry; and as they were turning away the big,
bearded intruder came up, smiling grimly.
“Hello, boys,” he said, “where’s your boss?”
Before they could reply their own chief came across from one of the
breakfast fires.
“How are you, Ackerman?” was the newcomer’s greeting. “Thought I’d run
down and congratulate you on the fine piece of work you’ve been doing
in these last two days. You’ve broken all the track-laying records in
this neck of woods. But, as you see, it doesn’t do you any good.”
The Short Line chief shook his head, matching the grin of triumph with
a quiet smile.
“You can’t block this crossing indefinitely, Grissby, and you know it,”
he returned, and the two boys stood aside, listening with all their
ears. “This is our right-of-way, located and filed upon long before
your people ever thought of building to Little Ophir, and we can prove
it in court. As you probably know, injunction proceedings have already
been begun. You’ll have to move out when a United States court officer
comes up here with the judge’s order.”
“You are forgetting ‘the law’s inevitable delays’,” the visitor put in,
in genial mockery. “Long before your court order gets here we’ll be
laying track into Little Ophir.”
“Not with the amount of building material you have up ahead of this
blockade of yours――and which you can’t add to so long as you are
obstructing your own track,” was the smiling retort. Then: “I’ll be
obliged to you, Grissby, if you’ll turn Blaisdell, my instrumentman,
and his helper loose. I’m taking it for granted that you’ve got them
locked up somewhere.”
The “enemy” chief laughed.
“It’s already done. Your two men will rejoin you shortly. Sorry to
have inconvenienced you, but we couldn’t well let them go back to you
to carry the news of our bit of strategy. Here’s hoping you’ll have
a pleasant wait for your court officer. So long.” And he walked back
along the track, mounted his engine and was trundled away.
A short time after this visit of Grissby’s there was a warm little
conference held in Mr. Ackerman’s office tent. Every member of the
engineering staff, including Larry and Dick, was present, and the
younger men, led by the first assistant, Goldrick, were unanimously
and enthusiastically in favor of “rushing” the blockading train;
overwhelming its crew by sheer force of numbers and ditching the train
to get it out of the way.
“They are simply trading upon your well-known objections to the use of
the strong arm, Chief,” was the way Goldrick put it. “There are only
twenty-seven men, all told, on that blocking train, and we can put them
out of business in just about as many seconds, if you’ll say the word.
Those buckies on our track force are ripe for a scrap and they’ll go in
with a laugh.”
“No,” the chief objected soberly. “As I’ve said many times before,
we can’t afford to take the law into our own hands in a resort to
violence. If we can outwit them in any way that won’t involve a
hand-to-hand battle, we’ll do it. But I haven’t yet heard any of you
suggest the means.”
It was at this point in the argument that Dick nudged Larry.
“Speak up and tell him!” he urged.
The ex-machine-shop apprentice turned red in the face, swallowed hard
once or twice, and spoke in a sort of husky whisper that sounded to him
like the loudest possible shout.
“You mean if we could get that train out of the way without a fight, it
would――it would be all right, Mr. Ackerman?” he stammered.
“What’s that, Larry?” said the chief.
Larry repeated his question; adding: “I was just thinking――――”
“All right; go on. We’re listening.”
“It’s――it’s just something Dick and I were talking about after Mr.
Grissby went away. We were looking at that blocking engine as it came
along, and the engineer leaned out of his cab window and asked us if
we didn’t want to climb up and take a ride on a real railroad――just
joshing us, I guess.”
“Well?”
“If you’d let us――or me ... it’s this way, you see. Part of the time he
stops on the crossing, but mostly he lets the train drift on a little
way past it before he reverses. If we could do something to make him
run a little farther out of the way each time, and then something
should happen to his engine so he couldn’t reverse――――”
“We’re still listening,” said Chief Ackerman; and they were, all of
them, by this time.
Naturally, this urging to go on made the inventor of schemes more
embarrassed than ever. But he had gone too far now to back out.
“I was just thinking: if Dick and I should loaf around out here by
the crossing, and that engineer should josh us again and ask us to
ride――――”
“You’d accept the invitation,” Goldrick cut in. “What then?”
“Then, after a little while――so it wouldn’t look too much like a put-up
job, you know――if our track-layers should sort of suddenly get busy and
make out as if they were going to change our line and make the crossing
a few hundred yards farther down the O. C. track....”
“By George!” exclaimed Jones, Goldrick’s alternate on the rock-bossing;
“that’s an idea, Mr. Ackerman!――to keep that blocking train dodging
between two possible crossings.”
The chief nodded.
“Yes; one of the Donovan brand of ideas,” he said half musingly. “The
principal question is, Larry, will your part of it work? Can you do
what you have in mind without getting a broken head for yourself or
Dick?”
“Yes, sir; I think so: I’m almost sure it can be done.”
The sober-eyed man who had to carry all the responsibility considered
for a moment. Then he said:
“All right; go to it. I’m not asking you what you mean to do; I
don’t care particularly to know――officially. But hold up a minute; I
shouldn’t think it would need two of you on that engine. You’d better
stay here with us, Dick.”
Dick looked up quickly.
“Is that an order, Mr. Ackerman?”
“N-no; not exactly. It is merely a bit of good advice.”
“If it isn’t an order, I’ll go with Larry. The job may need somebody to
do the talking act, and that’s a long ways my best hold.”
When the conference adjourned some few things were done to lull
suspicion on the part of the blockading force――if there were any
suspicions to be lulled. Three of the Short Line gangs were set at work
straightening and leveling the track so hastily put down in the night;
but most of the men were told to take it easy, which they did, sitting
around the dying breakfast fires and idling as though they had been
given orders to rest until the messenger from the Brewster court should
come on the scene with the majesty of the law in his pocket.
Meanwhile Larry and Dick strolled up to the crossing as a couple
of fellows with less than nothing to do and sat down on a pile of
cross-ties within a few feet of the O. C. track. Every time the
blocking train jingled past in its slow, back-and-forth sentry beat
the O. C. engineer, a big, stubbly-bearded man who looked, as Dick
said, like a twinkly-eyed bandit, leaned out of his cab window and had
something to say to them. Each time Dick grinned up at him and handed
back joke for joke; but at such moments Larry appeared to be studying
the under parts of the locomotive――especially those directly under the
cab floor, or foot-plate.
“It’s exactly as I hoped it would be,” he said in low tones to Dick,
after the train had passed for the third time; “just a plain, ordinary
stop-cock, the same as we have on our engines. Opens with a rod running
up through the foot-plate, like one of the water hydrants on your
lawn――you know; you pull on the rod and she opens. If it’s opened with
a quick, hard jerk, the crank handle will most likely pull past the
center, and if it does, it can’t be shut off unless somebody crawls
down under her. And nobody’s going to do that while she’s in action,
believe me!”
“Um,” Dick grunted; “strikes me it’s sort of lucky that you had to
earn your way through school by working nights on engines in the
Brewster shops――lucky for the Short Line, I mean. _I_ wouldn’t have
found out all that if I’d sat here studying her for a week.”
“Say; you two kids look mighty lonesome――hangin’ ’round here with
nothin’ stirrin’,” joked the burly engineer at his next time of
passing. “Why don’t you swing up and be sociable and tell us what
you-all’re aimin’ to do?”
“You’d better be careful about taking us on,” laughed Dick, as they
climbed to the cab in response to the repeated invitation. “We’ll do
you up if we can, you know.”
“Ho! ho!” chuckled the giant on the driver’s seat. “I reckon we can
take a li’l’ chance on that. What are you, anyway?――water boys for that
big gang of yours?”
“Well, you might call us that,” said Dick pleasantly. “In some ways you
might almost call us water specialists: we use a lot of it, anyhow;
some hot and some cold.”
Larry took no part in the joking talk. His gaze was fixed upon a ring
in the iron floor of the cab; a loose ring that was threaded through an
eye in the end of an iron rod that came up through a hole in the floor;
rod and ring jingling musically as the engine went bumping over the
rail joints.
Twice the slow back-and-forth journey had been made, and still Dick was
industriously exchanging mild chaffings with the “twinkly-eyed bandit”
on the driver’s box. Then suddenly the fireman broke in.
“Lookout, Bill!” he shouted to the engineer, “they’re gettin’ ready to
rush us!”
The alarm was not entirely unwarranted. Between two minutes there had
been a swift remobilization of the Short Line track-laying forces,
followed by a quick resumption of the strenuous activities of the night.
Instantly the big engineman’s free hand shot out to grab Dick’s collar
and he dropped the joking mood like a cast-off garment.
“Now you know why I tolled you up here with us!” he growled menacingly.
“I happen to know who you are, kid; you’re the Short Line general
manager’s son, and if that gang over there tries to pull any of the
rough stuff on us, you’ll get it in the neck, and get it first――savvy?”
Being totally unexpected, it was the sharpest trial that had ever come
to Dickie Maxwell; but he met it like a man――and with a laugh.
“I’m not hiding behind my father――not so that you could notice it,” he
retorted cheerfully. “And, if you like, I can tell you what our men are
getting ready to do. They are going to give you two crossings to watch
instead of one.”
That was what developed in almost less than no time at all. As if every
move had been planned in advance――as it actually had――the Short Line
army began to throw down a track in a wide curve to come at a crossing
some four or five hundred yards below the original survey. When this
object made itself understandable, someone in authority on one of the
steel cars of the blockading train yelled out an order, and the big
engineer promptly lengthened his pendulum swing run to make it include
the new location as well as the old, at the same time quickening the
speed a bit.
On the second run down the line toward the new point of hazard, Larry
shot a quick side glance at Dick, giving the eye signal that they had
agreed upon. The engineer was now busy with his throttle and brake, and
since he could hardly do three things at once, he apparently failed to
notice that Dick was edging his way slowly toward the right-hand engine
gangway.
The climax came as the locomotive was lumbering past the busy army of
workmen laying its double line of steel down to the ostensible new
crossing; the fortunate moment when the engineer, who had given his
train a trifle too much headway, was jamming the throttle shut and
twitching at the brake-handle to make a stop.
Quietly, and so quickly that he could hardly be missed, Dick swung
out of the gangway and dropped to the ground; and at the same instant
Larry stooped, thrust two fingers through the jingling ring on the cab
floor and gave a mighty upward jerk. A second later, under cover of the
thunder-bellowing, deafening roar that the jerk had set off under the
engine, he leaped from the gangway and was immediately swallowed up and
lost in the thronging crowd of Short Line workmen who surrounded him
and rushed him to the rear with yells of triumph.
For a few tumultuous moments confusion worse confounded wrought its
own sweet will in the ranks of the “enemy.” Larry’s simple plan, so
successfully carried out, had been to “kill” the blockading engine at
the point farthest removed from the real crossing, and his careful
study of the under parts of the locomotive had been to determine the
all-important fact that the blow-off cock of the boiler, situated
directly under the cab, could not be closed from the cab if it were
once opened wide.
This was the clever expedient for a bloodless getting rid of the
lawless obstruction, and it worked like a charm. With the engine boiler
losing its water as fast as a hundred-and-sixty-pound steam pressure
could blow it out, it was only a matter of seconds before the engine
was completely out of commission. Inside of a minute the twinkly-eyed
bandit and his fireman were frantically dumping the fire to save the
boiler from burning its crown-sheet; the blocking train was safely and
permanently “stalled” out of the way; and the Short Line track-layers,
abandoning the new crossing site as one man, were hurling themselves
with a mighty shout of “Gangway!” upon the job of installing the
already prepared crossing-frogs before the crew of the stalled train,
now hot-footing it up the track, could reach the O. C. camp and bring
reënforcements.
* * * * *
It was in the evening of this same day, a day in which another goodly
stride ahead had been marked down to the credit of the Short Line
extension, that one of the material trains forging to the newest
front carried a freight caboose as a trailer. In the caboose, which
was serving for the moment as the private car of General Manager
Maxwell, the chief of construction, riding the new line with his
ranking officer, told the story of the brief but brilliant crossing
fight――which was no fight at all.
“Blew the water out of their engine, did he?” laughed the general
manager, when the story was told. “Being Dick’s father, I suppose I
shouldn’t have let him go with young Donovan on any such hare-brained
adventure if I had been on the ground; but it is all right: I should be
sorry if he had taken your offer to stay behind. And perhaps, as you
say, his loose tongue was needed to keep those enginemen from thinking
too pointedly about other things. Dick could talk himself out of jail
if he were given a fair chance: it’s the thing he does best. Where are
the boys now?”
“I’ve sent them ahead with a small gang of axmen to clear the
right-of-way. We’re in timber for a couple of miles up there.”
“You mean they’ve gone along to help?”
The chief of construction smiled.
“Not exactly as helpers. Those two boys have been doing fine work up
here all summer, Mr. Maxwell, as you know. Being boys, they’ve had time
to think up a number of schemes that have helped us out wonderfully in
this race against time; and this notion of the way in which the O. C.
blockade could be broken this morning rather capped the climax. When
I asked the boys what sort of a reward they’d like to have, they both
begged for the same thing: to be put in charge of a small gang to do
something on their own initiative.”
“Humph! So you’ve made them bosses, have you? You’re not spoiling them,
are you? They’re only children, as you might say, both of them, as yet.”
“I know; in some ways they are just boys; fine, straightforward,
American boys, equally ready for a fight or a frolic. But in other ways
they have matured wonderfully in this summer of hard work. And this
bit of bossing ambition is perfectly natural. They both know that if
they are to grow, they must learn how to handle workmen. I thought you
wouldn’t care if I should give them a little chance along that line.
They’ve earned it.”
“All right,” said the general manager crisply; “but don’t push them too
fast for their own good; that’s all. Dick is a bit rattle-brained; but
I don’t know so much about young Donovan.”
“Donovan is making good,” said the chief engineer warmly; “all kinds of
good. The only fault I can find with him at all is the fact that he has
brought over a good lump of class consciousness with him from his shop
experience. But there is some hope that he may outgrow that.”
But just how much Larry had improved the chance given him at the
beginning of the summer by the stocky little gentleman sitting in the
ill-lighted caboose with his chief engineer no one was to know until a
day two weeks later――
But of that, again, more in its proper place.
CHAPTER X
THE WINNING GOAL
“Oh, gee!” said Dickie Maxwell, plaintively, sitting on the edge of
his tent bunk and tugging at a water-stiffened lace-boot to get it on,
“only a few more days of the bully old railroad fight and then we’ll be
back again in civilization, wondering if we really lived this big, free
life here in the mountains for three solid months, or only dreamed it.”
Larry Donovan, struggling into his working corduroys, was staring out
through the open tent flap at a scene which was so soon to be a thing
of the past for Dick and himself.
For background there were the high, forested steeps of the Eastern
Timanyonis; in the middle distance the brawling Tourmaline, at
this point in its course little more than a noisy creek, split the
wide valley in halves. Between their sleeping-tent and the river,
and farther down the slope were the shacks and tents of a railroad
construction camp, with great piles of cross-ties and rails strung
beside a newly laid track. And across the river ran the line of another
railroad, over which busy material trains were shifting and pushing
forward to the front.
“I’ve been thinking about the wind-up, too,” Larry said soberly. “It’s
been a great summer for me, and I owe it to you, Dick. If you hadn’t
persuaded your father to let me come along――――”
“Owe nothing!” scoffed Dick; “cut it out, old scout――cut it all out. I
wouldn’t have been one, two, three on this ‘cubbing’ job if you hadn’t
been along. Besides, you’ve paid your way; you’ve been batting a fine,
large average in this game with the O. C., Larry Donovan, and you know
it――you, with your ‘I was just thinking’.”
“The race game, yes; it’s about over now,” Larry put in thoughtfully.
“Only three miles to go to reach the gold camp, and we’re neck and neck
with ’em on the final lap. But we’re going to beat ’em. They’ve got
that big rock-cutting to finish two miles this side of Ophir; and our
grade’s just about ready for the steel.”
“Wait a minute: don’t you be too sure!” Dick warned. “There’s one more
hurdle for us to jump――up yonder at the mouth of Blind Mule Gulch.”
“That mining claim, you mean?”
Dick nodded.
“Yep. I heard Mr. Ackerman and Jones talking about it last night. It
seems that those two men who were here yesterday own a placer claim
right where we’ve got to cross. By mining law every placer claim
has its right to drainage――unobstructed drainage――to the nearest
watercourse; that’s the Tourmaline, in this case. These men say that we
can’t put our railroad across their drainage gulch.”
“Shucks!” said Larry; “a railroad trestle won’t interfere with the
drainage!”
“Of course it won’t. But that doesn’t make any difference; these
men say it will, and they’ve gone into court about it; sued for an
injunction, or something, to stop us.”
Larry looked up suddenly.
“Dick, do you know I don’t believe there’s any real placer claim
there? You remember, when we were up here clearing the timber from our
right-of-way three weeks ago after the crossing fight, there wasn’t
a sign of anything doing in that gulch. I believe it’s another O. C.
trick to delay us. If they could tie us up for just one single day,
they’d stand a chance of beating us yet.”
“That is exactly what Mr. Ackerman said,” Dick threw in. “But we can’t
prove that there isn’t any gold in that dry creek bed. Anybody can
take up a mining claim anywhere in these mountains and go to work on
it. The chief told Jones that our lawyers had looked it up, and there
really is a claim on record, filed in the names of these two men, Shaw
and Bolton. Of course we wouldn’t hurt anything running our track
across it, just as you say. We’re planning to bridge it from bank to
bank with a trestle, and the timbers are already cut and fitted and on
the ground. Besides, Mr. Ackerman says we’ve offered to pay them any
reasonable damages. But they won’t even talk about it.”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Larry asked.
“From what was talked last night I sort of suspect we’ll go right on
building our railroad――and fight it out in the courts afterward. Our
right-of-way was surveyed across that gulch mouth years ago, and if it
comes down to the straight right and wrong of it, those miners are the
real trespassers.”
Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was eight o’clock; a tardy hour
for them to be turning out. But they had been up late the night before,
helping to hurry material to the front, and the chief had given orders
to let them sleep.
“We’d better be getting breakfast and showing up on the job,” he said;
and together they sought the mess tent.
Over the breakfast of bacon and fried potatoes the talk swung back to
the rapidly nearing end of their summer outing.
“I suppose you’ll be getting ready to go to college in a week or so,
now, won’t you?”――thus Larry, with his eyes on his plate.
“Yep; that’s the way it’s doped out for me.”
“Do you know what college you’re going to?”
“Oh, sure; it’ll be father’s college――finest old technical school in
the country. Didn’t lose a single football game last year, and only two
in the baseball series. Some snappy record, that, _I’ll_ say.”
Larry grinned.
“Is that the way you stack up the good points of a college?”
“Why not?” Dick argued. “Fellow has to make high grades in that school
or he can’t make the teams. That’s iron-clad, and, naturally, it means
high stuff all around. No boneheads need apply. But what are you going
to do, Larry?”
“Ump,” said Larry, still with his eyes on his plate, “it’s ‘back to the
farm’ for me. I was wiping engines in the Brewster round-house when
your father gave me this vacation, and in a little while I reckon I’ll
be wiping ’em again.”
“Gee!――I wish you were going to Old Sheddon with me,” said Dick; and he
meant it. “Can’t you make it, some way?”
Larry shook his head.
“No can do, Dickie; not a chance in the world. You know how we’re
fixed at home; there are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little
Jack――they’ve all got to have some sort of a show to get their
schooling. And Dad can’t swing it alone on a crossing watchman’s pay.”
“You’ve been sending them your wages this summer?”
“Sure Mike; otherwise I couldn’t have come.”
“Well, it’s a rotten shame,” Dick protested. “You’ve got more good
engineering stuff in your old bean in a minute than I’ll ever have
in mine, if I live to be a hundred years old.... Through with the
grub?――all right; let’s go.”
It was a mile from the supply camp to the point up the valley where the
track-layers were speeding the race, and from one of the hill-shoulder
curves they could see the approach to Little Ophir, the goal to which
both railroads were racing. At the next turn they came up with the
track force driving the work; many men and teams, a supply train
inching ahead as the cross-ties and rails were needed, the long-drawn
blasts from the engine’s stack playing a deep undertone to a medley of
shouts and cries and the clanging of spike-mauls.
Just before they reached the actual front the two boys saw a man coming
across from the opposite side of the river, where a scene similar to
the Short Line industrial battle was staging itself on the O. C. grade;
a heavy-set man roughly dressed and looking something like a retired
range-rider. Reaching the river he crossed it, leaping from boulder to
boulder in the stream bed and coming straight on to climb the Short
Line embankment just ahead of Dick and Larry.
Keeping pace with this big-bodied stranger the two were close upon his
heels when he strode in among the workmen and asked brusquely for the
boss. A foreman pointed out the chief engineer coming down the track,
and a moment later the rough-looking stranger was confronting the man
he was looking for.
“Your name’s Ackerman?” was the blunt query; and when the Short Line
chief nodded: “Well, mine’s Grimmer, and I’m a deputy sheriff of Butte
County. I’m servin’ papers on yuh in the case of Shaw and Bolton
’g’inst your company; injunction forbiddin’ yuh to trespass on this
here minin’ claim. Here yuh are,” and he thrust a folded paper into the
chief engineer’s hand.
Mr. Ackerman, as the boys heard, made a dignified protest.
“You are probably doing your sworn duty, Mr. Grimmer, and for that
nobody can blame you,” he said. “But――――” it was at this point that
he opened the paper and glanced at it. “Why, this isn’t an injunction
notice at all; it’s merely a trespass warning issued by a justice of
the peace. How is that?”
“It’ll hold all the water you need, just the same!” rasped the
stranger. “You’re trespassin’ right now on that Shaw and Bolton minin’
claim. I’m givin’ yuh peaceable notice to stop work and call your men
off, see?”
Again the mild-mannered chief tried to protest.
“We can’t do that merely upon notice from a justice,” he objected. “We
are entitled to our day in court, and until we have had it, and have
failed to prove our right to build this railroad in this particular
place, only an injunction order from a court of competent jurisdiction
can stop us.”
“I’ll show yuh if we can’t stop yuh!” said the big deputy grittingly.
“You come along with me――you’re under arrest!”
“Not without a better warrant than this trespass warning,” was the
quiet but grim refusal. “When you want to arrest me or any member of my
force, you must come prepared with the proper legal papers; otherwise
you don’t get anywhere, Mr. Grimmer.”
“Huh!――you’ll resist an off’cer o’ the law, will yuh?”
“To that extent; yes. Now if you will excuse me: I’m pretty busy this
morning.”
It was a dismissal, polite, but straight to the jaw, as Dick would
have said, and it delighted the hearts of the two boys who stood aside
listening. The one thing that had gone most against the grain with them
during the summer-long struggle with the Overland Central had been the
fact that their chief took the various bullyings of the rival railroad
too good-naturedly.
The deputy sheriff went away swearing, facing about and making for the
river crossing. At that moment Goldrick came up and Dick and Larry
heard him say:
“Pulling the law on us, are they?”
Chief Ackerman shook his head doubtfully.
“I’m not at all certain about the legal part of it; not sure that the
man wasn’t merely acting a part. We’re warned off this mining claim; by
some justice of the peace in Burnt Canyon――which is strictly an O. C.
town. That fellow was trying to arrest me, but he had no warrant and
showed no badge of authority. What about those two placer miners?”
“They haven’t shown up, and there is nobody at the claim shack now,”
Goldrick returned. “I’ve just been up there and the place is deserted.
It’s a ‘frame-up,’ pure and simple; and these fellows, Shaw and Bolton,
are merely men of straw set up for the O. C. pirates to hide behind. I
have told the bridge carpenters to go ahead setting that trestle in.
If those placer fellows were intending to make a real fight, they’d be
here on the ground.”
Dick and Larry moved away. Another material train had just come up,
and they went to check the rails as they were unloaded. From the new
position they had a fair view of the activities on the other side of
the valley. Two locomotives were shifting cars on the O. C. tracks, and
far down the valley they could see the smoke of another train. Dick saw
it first and called Larry’s attention to it.
“More material, I suppose,” said Larry, when he had seen the smoke of
the upcoming train.
Dick shaded his eyes with his hand and looked again.
“Yes, I guess so.... No, by jinks! It’s an engine and a single
passenger car!”
“Huh!” Larry grunted; “running passenger trains already, are they?” and
he went on with his checking.
Having less of the checking responsibility than Larry, Dick turned to
watch the new train as it ran up into the thick of the activities on
the other side of the river. When it stopped he saw a dozen or more men
drop from the steps of the single car, form in a loosely ranked group,
and start toward the river. And, though the distance was nearly half a
mile, he could see, quite distinctly, the glinting of the sunlight upon
gun-barrels.
“Look, Larry!” he called hurriedly; “we’re in for something different
now. That bunch is coming for us, and they’ve all got guns!”
While they stood looking, and the men who were unloading the steel
paused to look, also, the armed group reached the river margin and
began crossing on the stepping-stones that had served as a bridge for
the man Grimmer. Mulcahey, the Irish foreman who was directing the
unloading of the steel, leaped from the flat-car and went stumbling and
running up the track, shouting a warning as he ran.
What followed was accomplished so swiftly that Larry and Dick were
fairly dumfounded; and it is safe to say that it was over and done
before many of the workmen had sensed fully what was going on. First
the armed squad, coming in at a smart run, lost itself momentarily
in the crowded ranks of the Short Line workers. Next, and so quickly
that it seemed as if every move must have been carefully planned
beforehand――as was doubtless the fact――the group formed again in a
circle, and with a goodly number of prisoners in charge, made a hurried
retreat to the river, and across it to the waiting passenger train
on the O. C. track. And among the prisoners the boys saw the big,
square-shouldered figure of their chief.
“Well!――what do you know about that!” Dick gasped, when he could
get his breath. “They’ve got the chief and Goldrick and Jones and
Smalley――why, they’ve got everybody we had!”
“Sure!” said Larry grittingly. “They had this up their sleeve all
along, and they sent that man Grimmer over first to try to take Mr.
Ackerman so there wouldn’t be any ‘big boss’ on the job to head things
if we tried to resist!” Then: “Come on and let’s see what we’re up
against!”
Before they reached the first gang of track-layers they saw that the
work had stopped as suddenly as if the entire Short Line army had had a
stroke of paralysis. Tools had been dropped and the men were standing
or sitting around in idle bunches, some filling and lighting their
pipes, others staring after the rapidly disappearing train on the rival
railroad.
“What’s the matter? What are you all quitting for?” Larry snapped at
the first group of idlers they came to.
A big Italian spike-driver answered for himself and the others:
“Can’t work-a widout da boss: dey take-a da ’ole push――arrest-a
dem――say dey will arrest-a us if we don’t t’row down da hammer.”
Breathlessly the two boys hastened from gang to gang, finding the
same conditions everywhere. Not only every member of the engineering
staff――excepting only themselves――had been taken, but all the foremen
as well. It was a clean sweep of every man in authority. Burkett, one
of the carpenters on the bridge-building gang, told them the brief
story of the wholesale arrest.
“It was a sheriff’s posse,” he said; “they had a warrant big enough
to cover the whole world――made out against John Doe and Richard Roe
and others――you know how they make ’em read when they don’t put in the
real names. Near as I could get at it from listenin’ in, the charge
was contempt o’ court, and they was all cited to appear before Judge
Somebody ’r other way up yonder at Burnt Canyon. There ain’t a boss of
any kind left on the job; nary a single one.”
“It’s a trick!” Dick raved; “a low-down, dirty trick to stop our work!
They can kill all the time they want to with that train of theirs
between here and Burnt Canyon, and goodness only knows when our folks
can give bail and get loose and come back!”
It was then that Larry Donovan’s eighteen years took on at least ten
more.
“We’re only ‘cubs,’ Dick, but it looks as if we rank everybody else
on this job right now,” he said slowly. “We’ve got to buck up and do
something. Will you stand by me?”
“Will I?” cried Dick. “It’s the surest little old thing you know or
ever heard of! But land of goodness! we can’t handle two hundred and
fifty men!”
“Well,” said Larry, his square jaw setting itself grimly, “we’re not
going to take it lying down, anyway. Come along up to the chief’s tent.”
In the field headquarters tent there was a wire connecting with the
supply camps down the line, and through them to the Short Line general
offices in Brewster. They found the tent deserted and the operator
gone; he, too, had been taken under the “John Doe” warrant of such
magnificent scope.
At Larry’s suggestion, Dick sat at the telegraph instrument and tried
to call some of the offices down the line. The wire proved to be dead;
had doubtless been cut somewhere to make it dead. Thereupon they held
a brief council of war, feeling very much like a couple of middies
left in command of a super-dreadnaught, with the officers all gone and
a storm raging. There were two locomotives at the front, the one used
in the track-laying, and the one which had lately come up with the
two car-loads of rails. While they were talking, the engineer of the
latter stuck his face in at the tent opening.
Larry shouldered some part of the new responsibility promptly.
“Barney,” he began, “we’re the only bosses left on this job. Will you
take your orders from us?”
The Irishman grinned down at them.
“Sure thing,” he responded heartily. “I’m shtill workin’ f’r the Short
Line. More’n that, I was yer daddy’s fireman on th’ old main line whin
you was runnin’ ’round in knee-pants, Larry Donovan――I was that same.
What’s doin’?”
“I want you to back down to Pine Gulch and find the telegraph operator,
Wellby,――you know him――and tell him what has happened to us up here.
Ask him to wire Brewster and spread the news. Tell him to wire Mr.
Maxwell that we’ll try to keep things moving some way until we can
get some more bosses. That’s all. Make the best time you can down the
canyon. Every single minute is going to count.”
After Barney had gone, Larry took a scratch-pad and scribbled a number
of names, among them, that of Burkett, the bridge carpenter. Then he
called one of the water boys and gave him the slip of paper.
“Round these men up as quickly as you can, Jimmie, and bring them
here,” he ordered. “Run for it!”
The boy ran, and in a few minutes the listed men began to drift in,
some half-dozen of them altogether. Once more Larry climbed into the
breach.
“You men know what has been done to us, and why it was done,” was the
way he started out. “We don’t know much about this law business, but we
do know that the chief and all our people believe we have a right to
cross this mining claim. The whole thing is meant to stop us; to delay
us so that the O. C. can get its track into Little Ophir ahead of ours.
The question is, are we going to let the O. C. put it all over us this
way, or not?”
Burkett, the carpenter, acted as spokesman for the little group of
picked men.
“We’re with you chaps, and the company, of course. I can boss that
trestle into shape if you say the word. But I don’t know how the men
will be taking it. You know how they are when the bosses are gone.”
Larry swallowed hard and played his last card.
“We’re only ‘cubs’, Dick Maxwell and I, and what we don’t know about
building a railroad would fill the biggest book that was ever printed.
But it’ll go mighty hard with us if we can’t manage to keep this job
going for just one day. Chase out and round the men up into one big
bunch, and let me――I――er――let me talk to them.”
“Whoop!” shouted Dick joyously, as the delegation filed out of the
tent. “Can you do it, Larry?”
Larry’s breath was coming in gulps.
“I’d rather be shot than try it, Dick, and that’s the fact!” he gasped.
“You know how I was in the school debates――never could get a thing
right end foremost when I got on my feet. Most likely I’ll make a
ghastly muddle of it. Suppose you take that part of it.”
Dick made a motion as if he were pushing hard against a wall that was
threatening to cave in upon him.
“Woof――not me!” he protested. “I might rattle away and tell ’em jokes
and things of that sort, but gee!――somebody’s got to do more than
that!――put the real old pep into ’em. I couldn’t do that any more than
I could fly!”
“All right,” said Larry between his shut teeth. “It’s got to be done
and I’ll try it. Here they come.”
The round-up part of it was a success at all events. Crowding into the
open space before the tent came the men, two hundred and fifty strong,
track-layers, tie-setters, bolters, teamsters, maul-men, carpenters,
laborers. Larry, pale to the lips and with his knees knocking together,
turned an empty spike keg bottom side up and stood on it. At the first
go-off his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he merely made
faces at the upturned sea of faces. Then, suddenly, he found his lost
voice.
“I’m not going to make a speech to you men, because I don’t know how,”
he exploded. “I――I just want to know if you fellows will stand with us
if we try to keep this job going until the bosses get back? I’ve been
thinking, and I’ve got a sort of plan――――”
“Oot wi’ it, laddie!” shouted a giant Cornishman in the crowd. “If
ye’ll be wantin’ us to tak’ a boonch o’ pickhan’les an’ go over an’
clean oop that gang on t’other side o’ the river, we’ll do it right
hearty!”
“No, no; nothing like that,” Larry shouted back. “There’s a better way
to do them up. They think they’ve got us stopped, so they can beat
us into Little Ophir. Let’s show ’em they haven’t! Here’s what I was
thinking: you men get together by your different trades――and elect your
own foremen for the day. We――we’ll leave it to you to pick out the best
men you can find. We――Dick Maxwell and I――can give you the blue-print
stuff as you need it. What do you say, men? Is it a go?”
The shout that was raised might easily have been heard by the “enemy”
army on the other side of the valley. Cries of “Bully for the lads!”
“Chips off the old block!” “There’s the right stuff for ye!” “Burkett
for our foreman!”――from the carpenters; “Tregarvon for ours!”――from the
track-layers.
Larry waved his arms like a college yell leader.
“Go to it!” he shouted. “Let’s make this the biggest day we’ve ever
had! In with that trestle, Burkett. If you can’t read the blue-prints,
we’ll help you. _Let’s go!_”
Then and there began the most strenuous, as well as the most
successful, day of track-laying the summer of furious railroad building
had yet seen, not excepting the rush to the valley of the Yellow Dog.
Fortunately for the two “cub” engineers, the over-bossing speedily
proved to be a good bit of a sinecure. In any large gathering of even
semi-skilled workmen there are always a few with leadership material
in them, and the rank and file, put upon its mettle, can usually be
trusted to choose its leaders safely and well.
Though Larry Donovan was far from suspecting it, his idea of putting
the men upon their honor and having them elect their own foremen for
the day was little short of an inspiration. In carrying it out he had
unconsciously struck exactly the right chord, and had thereby relieved
himself and Dick of just about nine-tenths of the huge responsibility.
Fifteen minutes beyond the “round-up” in front of the field headquarters
the work was in full swing again; rails clanking into place, spikes
sinking into the cross-ties under the ringing blows of the mauls, tie
gangs rushing to keep ahead of the rail layers, and both rushing to
crowd the carpenters who were throwing the trestle across the dry creek
bed of the disputed mining claim.
But if the boys were relieved of much of the actual bossing they
still found plenty to do. There were center lines to be run with the
surveying instruments, blue-prints to be explained to Burkett’s gang,
the distribution of material to be planned for and the supplies kept
moving so that the different gangs wouldn’t be thrown into confusion by
having some other gangs overtaking them.
In the thick of things the locomotive sent down the line to carry the
news of the raid returned, and Barney came up to report. An earth slide
had tumbled down upon the track a few miles below, and they were thus
cut off from all communication with their base at Pine Gulch. They made
no doubt that the blocking slide had been caused, or at least helped,
by the unscrupulous enemy.
“Never mind, Barney,” said Larry. “If we can’t get help from the
outside we’ll try and get along without it. Bring your train crew up
here and jump it on the tie-stringing. We can use every man in it.
We’re going into Little Ophir――_to-day_!”
The Irishman was hurrying back to his train to obey the order when Dick
grabbed Larry’s arm.
“Look!” he gurgled, pointing toward the river, “they’re coming for us
again!”
Larry looked and saw another group of men crossing the river on the
boulder stepping-stones. Its leader was a tall, well-set-up man in the
brown duck of the engineers.
“It’s――it’s Grissby――the O. C. chief!” Dick stammered. “He’ll stop us
again!”
“I don’t believe he will,” said Larry, with another out-thrust of the
fighting Donovan jaw. “Those other fellows were officers of the law;
but he isn’t.”
The O. C. chief’s purpose was made known the moment he came within
shouting distance. It was to stampede the supposedly masterless working
force.
“Throw down your tools, or every man jack of you will go to jail!” he
called out to the workers. “You’re breaking the law!”
It was then that Michael Tregarvon, the big Cornish track-layer, stood
forth, and that before either Dick or Larry could interpose.
“Pick-han’les!” he bawled to his men. “Oot wi’ ’em, lads! Oop to the
river wi’ ’em and drive ’em in!”
The rush of some two score brawny trackmen, armed with the handles
hastily knocked from their picks, was so sudden and overwhelming that
the half-dozen intruders who had come to scare the Short Line force
into stopping fled in disorder; stood not upon the order of their
going, as the time-honored phrase has it. There was a lively foot-race
across the level bit of valley, a shout of triumph from the pursuers
as the invaders were driven helter-skelter to their own side of the
Tourmaline, and the flurry was over.
That day, the last day of terrible toil in the three months’ race
between the two railroads, was the shortest that Dick Maxwell and Larry
Donovan had ever lived through. With a thousand things to think of
and to do, the hours flew by on wings. Rail by rail, with clock-like
regularity, the steel went into place on the completed grade, and
almost before they knew it the thunder of the blasts in the rock
cutting which was holding the “enemy” had withdrawn into a distant
background.
Thus the day of a thousand demands fled shrieking, as you might
say; and while the sun was still half an hour high over the western
mountains the Short Line track was rounding the final curve into the
outskirts of the great gold camp, where a delegation of enthusiastic
citizens, headed by a brass band, was waiting to welcome the winner in
the long race.
Larry Donovan, begrimed and sweaty, retreated suddenly into his shell
of embarrassment when the mayor of Little Ophir bustled up and asked
for Mr. Ackerman. So it was Dick who had to do the explaining, and he
told why there were no officials on hand to receive the welcome.
“Arrested your chief and all your bosses?” exclaimed the mayor.
“And, in spite of that, you’ve laid three miles of track since this
morning――just you two boys?”
“Oh, no, indeed!” said Dick hastily; “it was the men themselves. Larry,
here, just got ’em together and told ’em what the O. C. was trying to
do to us, and――――”
The interruption was the swift upcoming of a one-car train over the
newly laid track; a train which edged its way gingerly through the
cheering throng up to the very end of the last pair of rails. Down
from the steps of the car swung the Short Line chief of construction,
followed by the members of his staff and all the “John Does” and
“Richard Roes” that had been gathered in by the blanket warrant of
arrest. Then the band began to blare out “Hail to the Chief”; and on
the march up to the City Hall, Larry and Dick were able to drop into a
less conspicuous――and much more comfortable――background. Their job was
done.
Three days after the triumphal entry of the Nevada Short Line into
Little Ophir, and, incidentally, at a moment when the defeated Overland
Central was still wrestling with the rocky barrier two miles below the
town, Larry Donovan found himself sitting on the edge of a chair in the
private office of the general manager in the Brewster headquarters,
waiting while the stocky, gray-mustached “Big Boss” at the desk went
thoughtfully over the pages of a typewritten report.
“Well,” said the stocky gentleman, finally laying the report aside,
“Dick tells me you’ve both had a fine summer up yonder on the
Tourmaline, and Mr. Ackerman tells me here”――tapping the report――“what
you did on the last day of the track-laying. That was a fine thing,
Larry; a mighty fine thing for the company. How did you come to think
of it?”
“Going on with the job, you mean? Why――er――there didn’t seem to be
anything else to do.”
“Yes; but the method of it; getting the men to elect their own foremen.
What put that into your head?”
“Why, I don’t know, sir. I was just thinking――――”
The general manager nodded.
“That’s it; that’s just it,” he said approvingly. “All through the
summer, it seems, you’ve been ‘just thinking.’ It’s a good habit; a
capital habit; and I hope you’ll go on cultivating it. Have you seen
your father or any of your family yet?”
“No, sir; I’m just in on the accommodation from Red Butte. The
conductor gave me your wire ordering me to report to you as soon as I
reached Brewster, and I came right up here from the train.”
“Good; that was what I wanted you to do. Dick came home yesterday, as
you know. He has to hurry to get ready for his trip East to college.
The particular reason why I wired you to report here without delay was
to ask you if you’d like to go along with him.”
Larry had a firm grip with both hands on the seat of his chair――which
was lucky. Otherwise he might have fallen out of it.
“Go with Dick?” he gasped, jarred for once out of his embarrassed,
rank-and-file speechlessness. “I’d――why, I’d give _anything_ if I
could! But I can’t, Mr. Maxwell; I――I haven’t the money.”
There was a sly twinkle in the stocky gentleman’s left eye when he said:
“I went through Old Sheddon myself on borrowed money, Larry. Supposing
some friend of yours――say some stockholder in the Short Line company
who has been keeping an eye on you this summer――should offer to advance
the money for your expenses, giving you all the time you might need
after your graduation in which to pay it back? How about that?”
It was a huge temptation; the fiercest that had ever assailed Lawrence
Donovan in all his eighteen years. But he grappled with it――and
conquered it.
“I couldn’t――even then,” he said in low tones. “There――there are five
of us children at home, and――and the others have got to have their
chance. I’ve got to help. Dad can’t keep all of them in school on his
watchman’s pay.”
At this the twinkle in the shrewd left eye spread to the right eye, as
well, and then expanded into a smile.
“You haven’t been home yet, so I suppose you haven’t heard the news.
Yesterday your father was promoted――put in charge of the Brewster
round-house as foreman――and I think his pay will enable him to get
along for a time without your help. He is anxious to have you go with
Dick, and so am I. Shall we consider it settled?”
Larry covered his face with his hands, and for a long minute he was
afraid he was going to make a spectacle of himself, right there in
front of the general manager;――you know how it is when a fellow has
been wanting some wholly impossible thing so hard that he can taste it,
and then has it shoved at him, _bing!_ with no chance to brace.
This college course was a thing that Larry would have been willing to
work his fingers to the bone to compass; and there hadn’t been even the
ghost of a possibility of compassing it. Finally, the big lump in his
throat got small enough to let him stammer out, “I――I don’t deserve it,
Mr. Maxwell; honestly, I don’t.”
“I think you do,” was the even-toned reply. “I sent you out with Dick
three months ago and told you you should have your chance. You took it
and made good. You’ll find it that way all through life, Larry, my boy;
the chances will be waiting for you all along the road, and all you’ll
be asked to do will be to make good.
“Now run home and tell your folks. I know they’ll be glad to hear that
you’re to have another Donovan Chance. Good-by and good luck to you.
Dick will tell you what you’ll need for your college outfit.”
And then, out of the kindness of his heart for a young fellow who was
much too full for utterance: “Run along, now; I’m busy.”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to
follow the text that they illustrate.
――Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DONOVAN CHANCE ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
