Copyright, 1921, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

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Copyright, 1920, by The Sprague Pub. Co.

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[2] 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.”

[3]

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.

[4]

“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.

[5]

“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[6] 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.”

[7]

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?”

[8]

“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.”

[9]

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[10] 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[11] 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[12] 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[13] 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.

[14]

“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[15] 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[16] 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.[17] 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.

[18]

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[19] 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[20] 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[21] 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?”

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[22] 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[23] 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.

[24]

“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.

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[26] 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[27] 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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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,[32] 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[33] 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[34] 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.”

[35]

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.

[36]

“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[37] 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.”

[38]

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[39] 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[40] 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[41] 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.”

[42]

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[43] 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,[44] 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[45] 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.”

[46]

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[47] 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.

“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.

[48]

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[49] 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[50] 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.”

“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.

[52]

“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[53] 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.[54] 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[55] 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[56] 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[57] 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.

[58]

“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[59] 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[60] ‘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.[61] “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[62] 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——

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.[63] 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[64] 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[65] 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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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[69] 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!”

[70]

“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.

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[72] 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[73] 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.”

[74]

“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[75] 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[76] 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[77] 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[78] 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[79] 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[80] 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.

[81]

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[82] 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?”

[83]

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.

[84]

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.[85] 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[86] 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[87] 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.”

[88]

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[89] 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!”

“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[90] 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.

[91]

“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.”

[92]

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.”

“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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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.

[97]

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[98] 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[99] 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[100] 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[101] 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[102] 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;[103] 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[104] 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[105] 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[106] 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[107] 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.

“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[108] 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[109] 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:

“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.

[111]

“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[112] 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[113] 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;[114] 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.[115] 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[116] 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!”

[117]

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.

[118]

“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.”

[119]

“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[120] 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.

[121]

“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[122] 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.

“Good goodness! I should think you might tell a[123] 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[124] 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[125] 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[126] 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.

[127]

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?”

[128]

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[129] 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!”

“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[131] 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”[132] 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[133] 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[134] 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[135] 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[136] 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.”

[137]

“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,[138] 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[139] 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[140] 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[141] 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,[142] 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[143] 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[144] 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[145] 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,[146] 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,[147] 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[148] 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.

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[149] 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.”

[150]

“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[151] 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.

“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.

[153]

“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[154] 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[155] 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[156] 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,[157] 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.

[158]

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[159] 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[160] 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[161] 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.

[162]

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[163] 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[164] 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.[165] 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.”

[166]

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[167] 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[168] 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[169] 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.

[170]

“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[171] 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[172] 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?”

“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,[174] 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[175] 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[176] 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[177] 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[178] 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[179] 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,[180] 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[181] 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[182] 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!”[183] 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[184] 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.”

[185]

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.

[186]

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——”

[187]

“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[188] 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[189] 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!”

[190]

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.

[191]

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[192] 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[193] 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[194] 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.

“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[196] 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.”

[197]

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[198] 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?”

[199]

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.

[200]

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[201] 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?”

[202]

“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.

[203]

“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[204] 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.”

[205]

“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[206] 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[207] 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[208] 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?”

[209]

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[210] 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[211] 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.

[212]

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.

[213]

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[214] 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[215] 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.”