"I'm taking no chances," he said to Frisbie; and truly it seemed that all the hindrances had been carefully forestalled when he finally boarded the "01" and ordered his flagman to give Olson the signal. Yet before the one-car train was well out of the Denver yards there was a jolting stop, and the flagman came in to report that the engine had dropped from the end of an open switch, blocking the main line.

Ford got out and directed the reenrailment of the 1016, carefully refraining from bullying the big Swede, whose carelessness must have been accountable. It was the simplest of accidents, with nothing broken or disabled. Under ordinary conditions, fifteen minutes should have covered the loss of time. But the very haste with which the men wrought was fatal. Enrailing frogs have a way of turning over at the critical instant when the wheels are climbing, and jack-screws bottomed on the tie-ends do not always hold.

Eight several times were the jack-screws adjusted and the frogs clamped into position; but not until the ninth trial could the perverse wheels be induced to roll workmanlike up the inclined planes and into place on the rails. Ford looked at his watch when his special was free of the switches and Olson was speeding up on the first long tangent. With the chase still in its opening mile, Mr. North's lead had been increased from seven hours to eight.

Leaving Denver on the spur of the moment, Ford had necessarily left many things at a standstill; and his first care, after he had assured himself that the race was fairly begun, was to write out a handful of telegrams designed to keep the battle alive during his enforced absence from the firing line. The superintendent's desk was hospitably unlocked, and for a busy half-hour Ford filled blank after blank, steadying himself against the pounding swing of the heavily ballasted car with a left-handed grip on the desk end. When there remained no one else to remind, he wrote out a message to Adair, forecasting the threatened disaster, and urging the necessity of rallying the reconstructionists on the board of directors.

"That ought to stir him up," he said to himself, bunching Adair's telegram with the others to be sent from the first stop where the Western Union wires could be tapped. Then he whirled around in the swing chair and scowled up at the little dial in the end of the car; scowled at the speed-recorder, and went to the door to summon the flagman.

"What's the matter with Olson?" he demanded. "Has he forgotten how to run since he left the Plug Mountain? Climb up over the coal and tell him that forty miles an hour won't do for me to-night."

The flagman picked up his lantern and went forward; and in a minute or two later the index finger of the speed-recorder began to mount slowly toward the fifties. At fifty-two miles to the hour, Ford, sitting in the observation end of the car where he could see the ghostly lines of the rails reeling backward into the night, smelled smoke—the unmistakable odor of burning oil. In three strides he had reached the rear platform, and a fourth to the right-hand railing showed him one of the car-boxes blazing to heaven.

He pulled the cord of the air-whistle, and after the stop stood by in sour silence while the crew repacked the hot box. Since he had made the car inspectors carefully overhaul the truck gear in the Denver station, there was no one to swear at. Olson bossed the job, did it neatly and in silence, and no one said anything when the fireman, in his haste to be useful, upset the dope-kettle and got its contents well sanded before he had overtaken it in its rolling flight down the embankment.

Ford turned away and climbed into his car at the dope-kettle incident. There are times when retreat is the only recipe for self-restraint; and in imagination he could see the general manager's special ticking off the miles to the eastward while his own men were sweating over the thrice-accursed journal-bearing under the "01."

Now, as every one knows, hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable, are the sworn enemies of high speed. At forty miles to the hour the journal was smoking again. At forty-five it burst into flames. Once more it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine tank; after which necessary preliminary Olson spoke his mind.

"Ay tank ve never get someveres vit dat hal-fer-damn brass, Meester Ford. Ay yust see if Ay can't find 'noder wone." And he rummaged in the car lockers till he did find another.

Unfortunately, however, the spare brass proved to be of the wrong pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard. Olson was a trained mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at the misfit brass until he made it serve. But when he climbed again to the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full hour's run to the rear, came in sight from the observation platform of the laboring special.

These were the inauspicious beginnings of the pursuit; and the middle part and the ending varied only in degree. All the way up to midnight, at which hour a station of a bigness to supply a standard brass was reached, the tinkered journal-bearing gave trouble and killed speed. Set once more in running order upon its full quota of sixteen practicable wheels, the special had fallen so far behind its Denver-planned schedule as not only to be in the way of everything else on the division, but to find everything else in its way. Ford held on stubbornly until the lead of the train he was trying to outrun had increased to twelve hours. Then he gave it up, directing his crew to turn the train on the nearest "Y," and to ask for retracing orders to Denver. After which he went to bed in the state-room of the borrowed car, and for the first time in his experience was a man handsomely beaten by the perversity of insensate things.

The request for the retracing orders was sent from Coquina; and when it came clicking into the despatcher's office at Denver, a sleep-sodden young man with an extinct cigar between his teeth rose up out of his chair, stretched, yawned, and pointed for the door.

"Going to leave us, Mr. Eckstein?" said the trick despatcher who was sitting at the train table.

"Yes. If Mr. Ford has changed his mind, I may as well go home and go to bed."

"Reckon he forgot something, and has to come back after it?" laughed the operator.

"Maybe," said the private secretary, and he went out, shutting the door behind him with the bat-like softness and precision that was his distinguishing characteristic.

The sounders were clicking monotonously when the trick man turned to the relief operator who was checking Darby's transfer sheet.

"What do you suppose Eckstein was up to, sitting here all night, Jim?"

"Give it up," said the relief man. "Ask me something easy."

"I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars I can guess. He didn't want Mr. Ford to make time."

The relief man looked up from his checking.

"Why? He didn't do anything. He was asleep more'n half the time."

"Don't you fool yourself," said the other. "He heard every word that came in about that hot box. And if the hot box hadn't got in the way, I'll bet a cockerel worth seventy-five dollars, to go with that fifty-dollar hen, that he would have tangled me up somehow till I had shuffled a freight train or something in Mr. Ford's way. He's Mr. North's man, body and soul; and Mr. North doesn't love Mr. Ford."

"Oh, rats, Billy!" scoffed the relief man, getting up to fill his corn-cob pipe from the common tobacco bag. "You're always finding a nigger in the wood-pile, when there isn't any. Say; that's 201 asking for orders from Calotte. Why don't you come to life and answer 'em?"

Frisbie, breakfasting early at the Brown Palace on the morning following the night of hinderings, was more than astonished when Ford came in and took the unoccupied seat at the table-for-two.

"Let me eat first," said the beaten one, when Frisbie would have whelmed him with curious questions; and with the passing of the cutlets and the coffee he told the tale of the hindrances.

"I guess it was foreordained not to be," he admitted, in conclusion. "We tried mighty hard to bully it through, but the fates were too many and too busy for us."

"Tricks?" suggested Frisbie, suspecting North of covering his flight with special instructions to delay a possible pursuit.

"Oh, no; nothing of that sort: just the cursed depravity of inanimate things. Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith. It was luck. No one of us happened to have a rabbit's foot in his pocket."

"You don't believe in luck," laughed the assistant.

"Don't I? I know I used to say that I didn't. But after last night I can't be so sure of it."

"Well, what's the cost to us?" inquired Frisbie, coming down out of the high atmosphere of the superstitious to stand upon the solid earth of railway-building fact.

"I don't know: possibly failure. There is no guessing what sort of a scheme North will cook up when he and MacMorrogh get Mr. Colbrith cornered."

"Oh, it can't be as bad as that. Take it at the worst—admitting that we may have to struggle along with the MacMorroghs for our general contractors; they can't addle the egg entirely, can they?"

Ford tabulated it by length and breadth.

"With the MacMorroghs in the forefront of things to steal and cheat and make trouble with the labor, and Mr. North in the rear to back them up and to retard matters generally, we are in for a siege to which purgatory, if we ever go there, will seem restful, Richard my son. Our one weapon is my present ranking authority over the general manager. If he ever succeeds in breaking that, you fellows in the field would better hunt you another railroad to build."

"It's a comfort to know that you are the big boss, Stuart. North can't knock you out of that when it comes to a show-down."

"I don't know," said Ford, whose night ride had made him pessimistic. "I am Mr. Colbrith's appointee, you know—not an elected officer. And what Mr. Colbrith has done, he may be induced to undo. Adair has been my backer in everything; but while he is the best fellow in the world, he is continually warning me that he may lose interest in the game at any minute and drop it. He doesn't care a rap for the money-making part of it—doesn't have to."

"Wouldn't Adair be a good safety-switch to throw in front of Mr. North and MacMorrogh in New York?"

Ford nodded. "I thought of that last night, and sent a wire. We'll hear from it to-day."

Frisbie ate through the remainder of the breakfast in silence. Afterward, at the pipe-lighting, he asked if Ford's wire instructions of the night before still held good.

"They do," was the emphatic reply. "We go on just as if nothing had happened, or was due to happen. You say your man Crapsey will be in this morning: gather up your laborers and turn the Plug Mountain into a standard-gauge railroad while we wait. That's all, Dick; all but one word—hustle."

"Hustle it is. But say: you were going to give me a pointer on that broad-gauging. I've been stewing over it for a day and a night, and I don't think of any scheme that won't stop the traffic."

"Don't you? That is because you haven't mulled over it as long as I have. In the first place, you have no curves to straighten and no cross-ties to relay—our predecessors having set the good example of using standard length ties for their three-foot road. String your men out in gangs as far as they'll go, and swing the three-foot track, as a whole, ten inches out of center to the left. You can do that without stopping trains, can't you?"

"Sure."

"All right. When you swing, spike the right-hand rail lightly. Then string your gangs again and set a line of spikes for the outside of the standard-gauge right-hand rail straight through to Saint's Rest. Got that?"

"Yes; I guess I've got it all. But go on."

"Now you are ready for the grand-stand play. Call in all your narrow-gauge rolling stock, mass your men at this end of the branch, shove the right-hand rail over to the line of gauge spikes in sections as long as your force will cover, and follow up with a standard-gauge construction train to pick up the men and carry them forward as fast as a section is completed. If you work it systematically, a freight train could leave Denver two hours behind your track-gangs and find a practical standard gauge all the way to Saint's Rest."

"Of course!" said Frisbie, in workmanlike disgust for his own obtuseness. "I'm going back to the Tech when your railroad is finished and learn a few things. I couldn't think of anything but the old Erie Railroad scheme, when it was narrowed down from the six-foot gauge. They did it in one night; but they had a man to every second cross-tie over the whole four hundred miles from New York to Buffalo."

Ford nodded, adding:

"And we're not that rich in labor. By the way, how are the men coming?"

"A car-load or two, every little while. Say, Stuart, you must have had a rabbit's foot with you when you touched up the eastern labor agencies. Every other railroad in this neck of woods is skinned, and M'Grath is having the time of his life trying to hold our levies together. There is a small army of them under canvas at Saint's Rest, waiting for the contractors, and another with between two and three hundred hands camped at the mouth of the canyon."

Ford knocked the ashes from his pipe so hard that the pipestem fell in two.

"Yes! all waiting on Mr. Colbrith's leisurely motions! Well, jump in on the Plug Mountain. That will utilize some of the waste for a few days."

Frisbie went down to the Plug Mountain yard office, and to a wire-end, to begin the marshaling of his forces; and Ford, with three picked-up stenographers to madden him, took up the broken threads of his correspondence with a world which seemed to have become suddenly peopled to suffocation with eager sellers of railroad material and supplies.

Late in the afternoon, when he was tired enough to feel the full force of the blow, a New York telegram came. It was from Miss Alicia Adair, and Ford groaned in spirit when he read it.

Brother left here yesterday in the Vanderdecken yacht for Nova Scotia. Can not reach him by telegraph until next Friday or Saturday. Aunt Hester wants to know if there is anything she can do.

One way to save a man's life at a crisis is to appeal to his sense of humor. Miss Alicia's closing sentence did that for Ford, and he was smiling grimly when he put the telegram away, not in the business file, but in his pocket.

Three days later, however, when Frisbie was half-way to Saint's Rest with his preliminary track-swinging, another New York telegram found Ford in his newly established quarters in the Guaranty Building. This was from some one acting as President Colbrith's secretary, and its wording was concisely mandatory.

Contract has been awarded MacMorrogh Brothers. President directs that you afford contractors every facility, and that you confer with Mr. North in all cases of doubt.



XIII

THE BARBARIANS

It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint's Rest over the standardized Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.

The occasion of Kenneth's calling was a right-of-way dispute on the borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining claims having been staked off across the old S. L & W. survey. The owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.

"If I hadn't known you for a pretty good mountaineer, Kenneth, you would have missed this," he said, making his guest free of the limited hospitality of the caboose-hotel. "Are you good for a two-hundred-and-eighty-mile cayuse ride, there and back, on the same trail we tramped over a year ago last spring?"

"I'm good for everything on the bill of fare," was the heartening reply. "How are things going?"

Ford's rejoinder began with a non-committal shrug. "We're building a railroad, after a fashion."

"After a good fashion, I hope?"

Another shrug.

"We're doing as well as we can with the help we have. But about this right-of-way tangle—" and he plunged his guest into a discussion of the Copah situation which ran on unbroken until bedtime.

They took the westward trail together in the morning, mounted upon wiry little mountain-bred ponies furnished by one Pacheco, the half-breed Mexican who had once earned an easy double-eagle by spying upon two men who were out hunting with an engineer's transit. For seven weeks Frisbie had been pushing things, and the grade from Saint's Rest to the summit of the pass was already a practicable wagon road, deserted by the leveling squads and ready for the ties and the steel.

From the summit of the pass westward, down the mountain and through the high-lying upper valley of the Pannikin, the grade work was in full swing. The horse trail, sometimes a rough cart-road, but oftener a mere bridle-path, followed the railroad in its loopings and doublings; and on the mountain sections where the work was heaviest the two riders were never out of sight of the heavily manned grading gangs.

"To a man up a tree you appear to be doing a whole lot, and doing it quickly, Ford," commented the lawyer, when they had passed camp after camp of the workers. Then he added: "You are not having any trouble with the MacMorroghs, are you?"

"Not what the legal department would call trouble," answered Ford evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of the bridle-path discouraged conversation.

Farther down in the valley of the Pannikin the activities were less thickly sown. On many sections the work was light; no more than the throwing up of an embankment in the park-like intervales, with now and then a rock-or earth-cutting through some jutting spur of the inclosing mountains. Here the men were bunched on the rock work and the fills, though the camp sites were commonly in the park-like interspaces where wood and water, the two sole commodities for which the contractors could make no deductions on the pay-roll, lay conveniently at the doors of the rude sleeping shacks.

Since he was not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the contractors' "commissary," fell into the Charybdis of the common table, and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its sad-faced, slouch-hatted, pistol-carrying keeper.

"What is that Bible-saying about the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land?" said Kenneth, as they were passing one of the wilderness bar-rooms buttressing a huge boulder by the trail side. "I should think you'd rule those fellows emphatically and peremptorily out of the game, Ford. They must make a lot of trouble for you, first and last."

"They do," was the sober response. "But how would you go about it to rule them out?"

The lawyer laughed. "My writs don't run this far. But I thought yours did. Why don't you fire 'em bodily; tell 'em their number is 23—skiddoo! Aren't you the Sublime Porte—the court of last resort—the big boss—over here?"

Ford pulled his horse down to a walk.

"Kenneth, let me tell you: behind those barkeepers are the contractors; behind the contractors is Mr. North; behind Mr. North, the president. My little lever isn't long enough to turn the world over."

"Pshaw!" said Kenneth. "Mr. Colbrith wouldn't stand for anything like that! Why, he's a perfect fanatic on the whisky question."

"That's all right," said Ford acidly. "It doesn't go as far as Mr. Colbrith in the matter of the debauching particulars. It stops in Denver; and Mr. Colbrith approves Denver in the lump—signs the vouchers without looking at them, as Evans would say. I tell you what I believe—what I am compelled to believe. These individual saloon-keepers are supposed to be in here on their own hook, on sufferance. They are not; they are merely the employees of a close corporation. Among the profit sharers you'll find the MacMorroghs at the top, and Mr. North's little ring of Denver officials close seconds."

"Do you honestly believe that, Ford?"

"I do. I can't prove it, of course. If I could, I'd go to New York and fight it out. And the whisky isn't all of it, or even the worst: there are women in some of these camps, and there would be more if Leckhard didn't stand guard at Saint's Rest and turn them back."

"Heavens—what a cesspool!" said the attorney. "Does a laboring man ever get out of here with any of his earnings?"

"Not if the MacMorroghs can help it. And you can figure for yourself what the moral atmosphere must be. We are less than two months old on the work, but already the Western Extension is a streak of crime; crime unpunished, and at times tacitly encouraged. You may say that my department isn't responsible—that this is the contractors' day and game. If that is true now—which it isn't—it will no longer be true when we come in with our own employees, the track-layers."

But now Kenneth was shaking his head.

"I can't believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't let it make you color-blind."

Ford said nothing. The day was yet young, and the long journey was still younger. It was at the noon halt, made at a subcontractor's camp near a great earth-cutting and a huge fill, that Kenneth had his object lesson.

They were standing at the door of the timekeeper's shanty—they had been the timekeeper's guests for the noon meal—and the big gang of Italians, with its inevitable Irish foreman, was already at work. Out at the head of the great fill a dozen men were dumping the carts as they came in an endless stream from the cutting. Suddenly there was a casting down of shovels, a shrill altercation, a clinch, a flash of steel in the August sunlight, and one of the disputants was down, his heels drumming on the soft earth in the death agony.

"Good God!" said Kenneth. "It's a murder!" and he would have rushed in if Ford and the timekeeper had not held him back.

The object lesson was sufficiently shocking, but its sequel was still more revolting. Without one to kneel beside the dying man; indeed, without waiting until the drumming heels were still; the men callously put their shovels under the body, slid it over the lip of the dump and left it to be covered by the tumbling cataract of earth pouring from the tip-carts whose orderly procession had scarcely been interrupted by the tragedy.

Kenneth was silent for many minutes after they had left the camp of the Italians. He was a Western man only by adoption; of Anglo-Saxon blood, and so unable to condone the Latin's disregard for the sacredness of human life.

"That was simply terrible, Ford," he said finally, and his voice was still in sympathy with the shaking hand that held the bridle-reins. "Will nothing be done?"

"Nothing; unless the murdered man chances to have relatives or clansmen in one of the near-by camps—in which case there'll be another killing."

"But the law," said Kenneth.

"There is no law here higher than the caprice of Brian MacMorrogh. Besides, it's too common—a mere episode; one of those which you said you couldn't believe, a little while back."

"But can't you make the MacMorroghs do a little police work, for common decency's sake?"

Ford shook his head. "They are quite on the other side of the fence, as I told you in the beginning. By winking at lawlessness of all kinds, their own particular brands of lawlessness, by which they and their backers make money, go unquestioned. So far from helping, they'd make it exceedingly difficult for any sheriff who should have the temerity to come in here in the discharge of his duty."

"You foresaw all this before the contract was awarded?"

"Not all—though I had been told that the MacMorroghs ran 'open camps' where the work was far enough from civilization to take the curse off. What you've seen, and what I've been telling you, is bad enough, God knows; but it will be worse before it is better. After we've had a few pay-days, and the men begin to realize that they are here to toil and to be robbed ... Kenneth, it will be hell on earth; and the company will pay for it—the company always pays in the end."

"I've got a notion," said the attorney, after another plodding mile of reflection; but what it was he did not say.

Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day out from Saint's Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason. What Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims, Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the obstructors in holding out.

Ford was for starting back the next morning: he had missed Brissac and both of the Bensons on the way over. But Kenneth confessed to being saddle-sore, and begged for another day's respite. Ford agreed without giving the matter a second thought. Upon such unconsidered trifles—an indifferent "yes" or "no"—turn the poised scales of life. For one other day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union, Copah's tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at the moment as a mess of pottage.

It was in this wise. At this period of its existence Copah, the future great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects. Isolated by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation. As a gold camp it was an anomaly. With a single exception its ores were low grade, and the wagon-road and pack-trail freightage made them practically profitless to the miners.

The single exception was the "Little Alicia," and it was the coincidence of the name, rather than the eloquence of its impoverished owner, that first attracted Ford. From first to last he did not know the exact location of the mine. It was somewhere in the hills back of Copah, and Grigsby, the prospector who had discovered and opened it, had an office in the camp.

It was in Grigsby's town office that Ford saw the ore specimens and the certified assays, and listened not too credulously to Grigsby's enthusiastic description of the Little Alicia. To be a half-owner in this mine of mines was to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice—when the railroad should come: if one might take Grigsby's word for it.

It is a curious fever, that which seizes upon the new-comer in an unexploited mining field. Ford was far from being money-mad; but there were times when he could not help contrasting a railroad salary with Miss Adair's millions. True, he had once said to her, in the fulness of confident belief, that the money of the woman he loved would make no difference—to her or to him. But the point of view, wise or foolish, is not always the same. There were moments when the Adair millions loomed large, and the salary of an assistant to the president—who was in fact little more than a glorified chief of construction—shrank in proportion. He was free of obligation and foot-loose. His twenty thousand dollars invested in P. S-W. stock at twenty-nine and a half had grown with the rising market to sixty-odd. What did it matter to any one if he chose to put ten thousand of the sixty-odd on a turn of the Little Alicia card?

While it was gambling, pure and simple, he did not bet with his eyes shut. Inquiry at the Bank of Copah established Grigsby's reputation for truth-telling. The specimens and the assay certificates were beyond doubt genuine. More than this, Grigsby had made a number of ore shipments by freighters' wagon and jack train over the range, and the returns had enabled him to keep a small force of men at work in the mine.

Ford made his bet through the bank. The cashier was willing to take a P. S-W. official's note of hand, to be canceled when Ford could deposit to the bank's credit in Denver, and to give Grigsby an open account for his immediate needs. Grigsby accepted joyfully, and the thing was done. Ford's mess of pottage was a deed of half-ownership in the Little Alicia, executed and recorded in the afternoon of the day of stop-overs, and he was far enough from suspecting that he had exchanged for it all that a man of honor holds dearest. But, as a matter of fact, the birthright had not yet been handed over: that came later.



XIV

THE DRAW-BAR PULL

Attorney Kenneth had many more object-lessons in the study of "open camps" on the three-day return ride to Saint's Rest. The day of stop-over in Copah chanced to be the MacMorrogh Brothers' monthly pay-day, and until the men's money was spent pandemonium reigned along the line of the extension.

Some of it they dodged, riding wide to pass the larger camps, and hearing from afar the noise of carousal, the fierce drinking songs of the Magyars, the fusillades of pistol-shots. So far as they could see, all work appeared to be suspended; and Major Benson, whose camp of engineers they picked up in one of the detours around a gulch head, confirmed that conclusion.

"It was the same way last month," raged the major, twisting his fierce white mustaches and looking as if he would like to blot the name of MacMorrogh from the roster of humanity. "It'll take a full week to get them into the swing again, and MacMorrogh will be up with his estimates just the same as if he had been working full time. I'll cut 'em; by the gods, I'll cut 'em! And you must stand by me, Mr. Ford."

There was the same story to be listened to at Brissac's tie camp; and again at young Benson's headquarters, which were on the mountain section. This last was on the third day, however, when the madness was dying down. Some of the rock men were back on the job, but many of the gangs were still grievously short-handed. Ford said little to Kenneth. The pandemonium spoke for itself. But on the third night, when the long ride was ended, and Pietro, Ford's cook and man-of-all-work, was serving supper in the caboose office-on-wheels, some of the bitterness in Ford's heart slipped into speech.

"Can you see now how it takes the very marrow out of a man's bones, Kenneth? You may think of an engineer as a man of purely bull-headed purposes, merely trying, in a crass, materialistic way, to get a material thing done. I want to do a big thing, and I'd like to do it in a big way. It is a big thing—the building of this extension. If it doesn't add another star to the flag, it will at least make one state twice as populous, twice as prosperous. It will add its quota to the habitable surfaces; and it's a good quota—a land that some future generation will love, and swear by, and fight for, if need be. And to think that for one man's narrow-mindedness and another's greed we've got to christen it in blood and muck and filth and dishonesty—it makes me sore, Kenneth; sore and disheartened."

"I don't blame you," said the lawyer, reveling, though he would never have admitted it, in the comfort of the caboose headquarters journey's end. "But you'll pull through; you'll build your railroad, and the mistakes that are made won't be your mistakes. It's a horrible state of affairs, that in the MacMorrogh camps; a blot on our boasted civilization. But you can't help it. Or rather you will help it if, and when, you can."

Ford was shaking his head dejectedly.

"I don't know, Kenneth. It's getting next to me, even at this early stage of the game. Have you ever stood on the front car platform of a train nearest to the engine and watched the jiggling draw-bar? It is apparently loose; its hold on the engine seems to be no more than that of the touch of clasped hands in a gipsy dance. Yet it never lets go, and the drag of it is always there. By and by, when the coal is all burned, and the fire is out, and the water is drained from the tank, those gentle little multiplied jerks will pull the big engine down—kill it—make it a mere mass of inert metal blocking the way of progress."

"Well?" said the attorney.

"It's an allegory. I'm beginning to feel the draw-bar pull. Sooner or later, North and his clique will drag me down. I can't fight as the under dog—I never learned how; and they've fixed it so that I can't fight any other way."

Kenneth had lighted his cigar and was lying back against the cushion of the car-seat. After a little, he said: "Just after we saw the Italian killed last week I told you I had a notion, Ford. I've got it yet, and I've been turning it over in my mind and wondering if I'd better explode it on you. On the whole, I think I'd better not. It's a case of surgery. If the patient lives, you'll know about it. If the patient dies, you'll be no worse off than you are now. Shall we let it rest at that?"

Ford acquiesced. He was too utterly disheartened to be curious. But if he could have foreseen the results of Kenneth's notion it is conceivable that he would have been aroused to some effort of protest, as even in deep waters one prays sometimes to be delivered from his friends.

It was a week after this farewell supper in the caboose hotel at Saint's Rest when Ford went down to Denver to borrow, on his P. S-W. stock, the ten thousand dollars to be deposited to the credit of the Bank of Copah. Following him, and only one train behind, came Frisbie, new from a confirmatory survey of the extension beyond the Copah district.

On his return from the Green Butte end of the proposed line, the little man with the diabolical fashion of beard trimming had spent a week in and around Copah, picking up yard rights-of-way, surveying approaches, and setting grade stakes for the outlying MacMorrogh gangs. During that week he had made a discovery, and since he believed it to be all his own, he journeyed eastward to share it quickly with his chief.

Ford was dining alone at the Brown Palace when Frisbie, coming straight from the Plug Mountain train, found him. There was an entire western desert to be talked over during the courses, and Frisbie held his discovery in reserve until they had gone to smoke in a quiet corner of the great rotunda. Even then he approached it indirectly.

"In taking up the line down the Pannikin we have followed the old S. L & W. survey pretty closely all the way from start to finish. What were your reasons, Stuart?" he asked.

"There didn't seem to be any good reason for not following it. Brandreth made the S. L & W. preliminary, and there isn't a better locating engineer in this country."

"I know," said Frisbie. "But the best of us make mistakes, now and then. Brandreth made a pretty sizable one, I think."

"How is that?"

"You know where the big rock-cutting is to be made in the lower canyon, about ten miles this side of the point where we begin to swing south for the run to Copah—a mile and a half of heavy work that will cost away up into the pictures?"

"Yes; I've estimated that rock work at not a cent less than two hundred thousand dollars."

"You're shy, rather than over, at that. And two hundred thousand would build a number of miles of ordinary railroad, wouldn't it? But that isn't all. The cliffs along that canyon are shale-topped and shale-undermined, the shale alternating with loose rock about fifty feet above our line of grade in quarter-mile stretches all along. That means incessant track-walking day and night through the mile and a half of cutting, and afterward—for all time afterward—a construction train kept handy under steam to clear away debris that will never quit sliding down on the embankment."

"I'm afraid you are right," said Ford. "It's the worst bit on the entire extension; the most costly to build, as it will be the most expensive to maintain. But I guess Brandreth knew what he was about when he surveyed it."

"Brandreth is a short-line man. He wouldn't lengthen his line ten miles to dodge an earthquake. Ford, we can save a hundred thousand dollars on that piece of track in first cost—to say nothing of the future."

"How? I'm always open to conviction."

"By leaving the S. L & W. survey at Horse Creek, following up to the low divide at Emory's Mine, and crossing to enter Copah from the southeast instead of from the northeast. I came out that way from Copah five days ago. It's perfectly feasible; straight-away, easy earth work for the greater part, and the only objection is that it adds about twelve running miles to the length of the extension. It's for you to say whether or not the added distance will be warranted by the lessened cost and the assurance of safety in operating. If we cut through that lower canyon cliff it will be only a question of time until we bury somebody, no matter how closely it is watched."

Ford took time to consider the proposal. There were objections, and he named one of them.

"The MacMorroghs have based their bid on the present survey: they will not want to let that piece of rock work drop out of sight."

"They'll have to, if you say so. And you can afford to be pretty liberal with them on the substituted twelve miles."

"I'll have to think about it over night," was Ford's final answer. "Arrange to give me an hour to-morrow morning and we'll go over the maps and your notes together."

Frisbie slept soundly on the gained inch, hoping to make it the coveted ell in the morning. He knew the chief objection, which was that Ford, too, was a "short-line" engineer; a man who would lay down his railroad as the Czar of Russia did the St. Petersburg-Moscow line—by placing a ruler on the map and drawing a straight mark beside it between the two cities—if that were an American possibility. But he knew, too, that the safety clause would weigh heavily with Ford, and there was no minimizing the danger to future traffic if the canyon route should be retained.

It turned out finally as the first assistant had hoped and believed it would. Ford spent a thoughtful hour at his office in the Guaranty Building before Frisbie came down—the little man being trail-weary enough to sleep late in the comfortable room at the Brown Palace. The slight change of route was hardly a matter to be carried up to the executive committee, and Ford's decision turned upon quite another pivot—the addition of twelve miles of distance. As against this, safety and economy won the day; and when Frisbie came in the talk was merely of ways and means.

"Fix up the change with the MacMorroghs the best way you can," was Ford's concluding instruction to his lieutenant. "They will kick, of course; merely to be kicking at anything I suggest. But you can bring them to terms, I guess."

"By my lonesome?" said Frisbie. "Aren't you going over to see the new route with your own eyes?"

"No. I'm perfectly willing to trust your judgment, Dick. Besides, I've got other fish to fry. I'm going east to-night to have one more tussle with the steel mills. We must have quicker deliveries and more of them. When I get back, we'll organize the track-layers and begin to make us a railroad."

"Good," said Frisbie, gathering up his maps and sketches of the detour country; and so, in the wording of a brief sentence or two it came to pass that Ford delivered himself bound and unarmed into the hands of his enemies.

A little light was thrown upon this dark passage that night in the office of the general manager, after Ford's train had gone eastward, and Frisbie was on his way back to the MacMorrogh headquarters on the lower Pannikin. North was waiting when Eckstein came in, flushed as from a rapid walk.

"It's all settled?" asked the general manager, with a slow lift of the eyebrow to betray his anxiety.

"To the queen's taste, I should say," was the secretary's not too deferential reply. "Ford's out of the way, to be gone ten days or a fortnight, and Frisbie has gone back to dicker with MacMorrogh, and to survey the new route up Horse Creek. Ford doesn't know; I doubt if he will ever know until we spring the trap on him. The one thing I was most afraid of was that he would insist upon going over the new line himself. Then, of course, he would have found out—he couldn't help finding out."

The general manager squared his huge shoulders against the back of the chair.

"You think he would call it off if he knew?" he queried. "You give him credit for too much virtue, Eckstein. But I think we have him now. By the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge. MacMorrogh will see to that."

Eckstein nodded. "I made a point of that with Brian," he said. "The minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon the new roundabout. But Ford won't find out. He'll be too busy on this end of the line with the track-layers. I'm a little nervous about Merriam, though."

"He's the man who talked Frisbie into championing the new route?"

"Yes. He did it pretty skilfully: made Frisbie think he was finding it out himself, and never let the little man out of his sight while they were in Copah. But I am afraid Merriam himself knows too much."

"Get him out of the country—before Ford gets back," was the crisp order. "If he isn't here when the gun goes off, he can't tell anybody how it was loaded."

"An appointment—" Eckstein began.

"That is what I mean," said the general manager, turning back to his desk. "We need a traffic agency up in the Oregon country. See Merriam—to-night. Find out if he'd like to have the general agency at, say, twenty-five hundred a year; and if he agrees, get out the circular appointing him."

"He'll agree, fast enough," laughed the secretary. "But I'll nail him—to-night."

Ford spent rather more than two weeks in his round-up of the eastern steel mills, and there was a terrific accumulation of correspondence awaiting him when he reached Denver. At the top of the pile was an official circular appointing one George Z. Merriam, a man whom Ford remembered, or seemed vaguely to remember, as one of the MacMorrogh bookkeepers, general agent of the P. S-W., with headquarters at Portland, Oregon. And at the bottom of the accumulation was a second official printing, bearing the approval of the president, this; and Ford's eyes gloomed angrily when he read it.

PACIFIC SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY CO.

Office of the President.

NEW YORK, August 24.

To All Officials and Employees:

At a called meeting of the stock-holders of this company, held in New York, August 23, Mr. John C. North was elected First Vice-President and General Manager of all lines of this company, operative and under construction. All officers and employees will govern themselves accordingly.

By Order of the Executive Committee.

Approved:

SIDNEY J. COLBRITH, President.



XV

AN UNWILLING HOST

Standing in the Pacific portal of Plug Pass, on the old snow-crust which, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and other miles nearer the sunset.

It was an outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing eye-plunge from the lofty view-point.

"Yes; quite so," Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who says what he must, rather than what he would like to say. "It is all the things you have been saying, and more—when one has the time and the mind to be enthusiastic about it."

Miss Adair stood up very straight, and her chin was a protest in Praxitelean harmonies. She knew very well how reluctantly her companion was doing the honors of the mountain vastnesses; how full of wrath he was because President Colbrith had seen fit to precipitate the Nadia and a private-car party into the midst of the strenuous building battle on the western extension. But she argued that this was no reason why he should be crustily impossible with her. Wherefore she said, merely to see him boil over:

"I should think you would come up here often for this glorious view, Mr. Ford. You do, don't you?"

"Come up here for the view? Oh, yes; I presume I have climbed up here a hundred times, first and last, and always for the sake of the view. I began it the first winter I spent in Saint's Rest, when the snow-shoeing was at its best. Really to appreciate the scenery, you should take three hours for the approach from the basin down yonder, dragging a pair of Canadian raquettes by the toe-straps."

The young woman laughed inwardly at the broadsword slash of his sarcasm. It was so like the man; big and vigorous and energetic, and quite without regard for consequences or for the insignificance of the thing to be obliterated. But she would not spare him.

"How enthusiastic you are!" she commented. "I don't believe I should be equal to 'a hundred times, first and last,' or to the snow-shoes. But I can admire such zeal in other people immensely."

"Do you really think so small of a man's work in the world, Miss Adair?" he demanded, not very coherently. "I'm not saying that the scenery doesn't move me. It does; and the first time I stood here on this summit, I presume I felt just as you do now. But my comings and goings have been chiefly concerned with this"—kicking the rail of the new track which threaded the shallow valley of the pass. "I am trying to build a railroad; to build it quickly, and as well as I can. When I get it finished, I may have time to admire the scenery."

It was a little appeal for sympathy, apparent enough in spite of its indirectness; but Miss Adair was still mindful of Ford's too evident willingness to leave her behind at the deserted grading-camp half-way down to Saint's Rest where the Nadia was temporarily side-tracked.

"Another ideal gone," she lamented, in mock despair. "All those trampings and toilings up this magnificent mountain merely to prepare for the laying of some logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together!"

He smiled at her definition of his railroad, and the keen edge of his annoyance was a little blunted. He had been telling himself that she might be twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five; but evidently she was only a child, with a child's appreciation of a very considerable industrial triumph. Old engineers, one of them an assistant on his own staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a standard gauge railroad over Plug Pass was a sheer impossibility. Yet he had done it.

"I suspect I owe you an apology," he said, yielding a little to the love which was fighting with discouragement and righteous anger for the first place in his heart. "I'm afraid I have been taking you too seriously, all along."

Her laugh was a delicious little ripple of exultation. She had succeeded in avenging herself.

"I can forgive you now," she said, and the blue eyes were dancing. "But you must admit that you were the aggressor. I have never been made so pointedly unwelcome in all my life. I believe you were going to refuse to let me walk up here with you if Uncle Sidney had not commanded you to."

This time his smile was a grin, but it was not ill-natured.

"I should, indeed," he confessed quite frankly. "To be brutally candid, I had a decided attack of the 'unwelcomes' when I received Mr. Colbrith's wire announcing his intention of bringing his picnic party out here into the midst of things. We have little time, and none of the civilized conveniences, for entertaining company."

"I think we all understand that," she made haste to say. "Aunt Hetty tried to dissuade Uncle Sidney, but he was bent on showing us how modern railroad building is rushed at the 'front'—is that the right word?—and so here we are."

A small frown gathered between Ford's eyes. He was far enough from suspecting that this was the outworking of Kenneth's "notion"; that Mr. Colbrith's annual inspection tour over the Pacific Southwestern had been extended to cover the new line at Kenneth's suggestion—a suggestion arising out of purely reformatory motives. Nor would it have helped matters much if he had known Kenneth's genuine distress when it transpired that the suggestion bade fair to result in precipitating a private car-load of pleasurers into the pandemonium of the grading-camps.

But the pleasurers were as yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium, and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong enough to turn back the threatened invasion. There were reasons enough why a party with women among its members should not be projected into the grading and track-laying field. It was no place for women, Ford was telling himself wrathfully; especially for the women of the president's own household.

In the little interval of silence Miss Adair was focusing her field-glass and trying to trace the line of the descending grade into the headwater valley of the Pannikin. Ford did not mean to be ungracious to her—what lover ever means to be curt to the one woman in all the world? But it is not easy to be angry in nine parts and loving-kind in the tenth—anger being one of the inclusive emotions. Nevertheless, he made the effort, for her sake. However inconsiderate Mr. Colbrith was, she was blameless.

"Let me show you," he said, taking the field-glass and adjusting it for her. "Now hold it steadily and pick up the line in the great loop.... Have you found it?... Now follow it slowly until you come to the point where it turns into the valley, and you can trace it for miles by the cuts and fills."

She followed his directions until the line of the extension became a vanishing thread in the distance, and then was content to let the glass sweep the vastnesses beyond. When she spoke it was of the topographic immensities.

"I heard you telling brother at the dinner-table in Chicago that you were able to see more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to make any one else see. Can I see it with the glass?"

"Hardly," he smiled. "I was trying to tell your brother of the magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up. It was a gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them believed—not even your uncle."

"I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs," she said, adding: "and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a molecule—whichever is the smaller."

"Yet it is a new empire in the rough," he rejoined, with a touch of the old enthusiasm, "waiting only for the coming of this"—putting his foot again upon the steel of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at has been called a part of the Great American Desert—the most forbidding part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together' will bring it to pass."

There was a flash of the enthusiast's fire in the cool gray eyes to go with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it. He had stood for her as an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a dreamer of dreams. Some part of her thought slipped into speech.

"No, I am not an enthusiast," he denied, in reply to her charge. "At bottom, I'm only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads. But I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn't tell where it would be profitable to build them."

"Never mind: you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors finally," she commented.

"No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders—meaning to be," he objected. "They are after the present visible dollar in a western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern. If we reach Green Butte before our competitors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast."

"I understand," she said. "But yours is the higher ideal—the true American ideal."

"It's business," he asserted.

"Well, isn't business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?" she laughed.

This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment.

"I guess it is, in the last analysis," he said. And then: "I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia. But I warned you beforehand. I must keep my appointment with Frisbie. Do you see anything of him?" This because she was again sweeping the western wilderness with the field-glass.

"What am I to look for?"

"The smoke of an engine."

She focused the glass on the gorge at the foot of the pass. "I see it!" she cried. "A little black beetle of a thing just barely crawling. Now it is turning into the first curve of the great loop."

"Then we shan't have very much longer to wait. Do you find the ten-thousand-foot breeze chilly? Turn up the collar of your coat and we'll walk a bit."

It was his first appreciable concern for her comfort, and she gave him full credit. Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia's equipment, but no woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car on the night of purse-snatchings.



XVI

THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES

A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit. A moment later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on the engineer's side.

The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach. The big engine came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its cylinder-cocks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.

Ford glanced aside at his companion; her expressive face was a study in delighted animation and he decided that he had again misjudged the president's niece. She was beating time softly with her gloved hands and singing the song of the locomotive:

"'With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah! Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah! She climb upon der shteeple, Und she frighten all der people, Singin' michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!'"

she quoted; and Ford's heart went out to her in new and comradely outreachings.

"You read Naught-naught-seven?" he said: "you are one woman in a thousand."

"Merci!" she countered. "Small favors thankfully received. Brother thinks there is only one person writing, nowadays, and the name of that person is Kipling. I get a little of it by mere attrition."

The brakes of the big engine were still gripping the wheels when a small man with wicked mustaches and goatee dropped from the gangway. His khaki suit was weather-faded to a dirty green, and he was grimy and perspiring and altogether unpresentable; but he pulled himself together and tried to look pleasant when he saw that his chief had a companion, and that the companion was a lady.

"I'm sorry if I have kept you waiting," he began. "Gallagher was shifting steel for the track-layers when your wire found me, and the engine couldn't be spared,"—this, of course, to Ford. Then, with an apologetic side glance for the lady: "Riley's in hot water again—up to his chin."

"What's the matter now?" gritted Ford; and Alicia marked the instant change to masterful command.

"Same old score. The Italians are kicking again at the MacMorrogh Brothers' commissary—because they have to pay two prices and get chuck that a self-respecting dog wouldn't eat; and, besides, they say they are quarrying rock—which is true—and getting paid by the MacMorroghs for moving earth. They struck at noon to-day."

The chief frowned gloomily, and the president's niece felt intuitively that her presence was a bar to free speech.

"It's straight enough about the rotten commissary and the graft on the pay-rolls," said Ford wrathfully. "Is the trouble likely to spread to the camps farther down?"

"I hope not; I don't think it will—without whisky to help it along," said Frisbie, with another apologetic side glance for Miss Adair.

"Yes; but the whisky isn't lacking—there's Pete Garcia and his stock of battle, murder and sudden death at Paint Rock, a short half-mile from Riley's," Ford broke in.

Frisbie's smile, helped out by the grime and the coal dust, was triumphantly demoniacal.

"Not now there isn't," he amended; adding: "Any fire-water at Paint Rock, I mean. When Riley told me what was doing, I made a bee line for Garcia's wickiup and notified him officially that he'd have to go out of business for the present."

"Oh, you did?" said Ford. "Of course he was quite willing to oblige you? How much time did he give you to get out of pistol range?"



Frisbie actually blushed—in deference to the lady.

"Why—er—it was the other way round. He double-quicked a little side-trip down the gulch while I knocked in the heads of his whisky barrels and wrecked his bar with a striking hammer I had brought along."

For the first time in the interview the chief's frown melted and he laughed approvingly.

"Miss Adair, you must let me introduce my friend and first assistant, Mr. Richard Frisbie. He is vastly more picturesque than anything else we have to show you at this end of the Pacific Southwestern. Dick—Miss Alicia Adair, President Colbrith's niece."

Frisbie took off his hat, and Miss Alicia gave him her most gracious smile.

"Please go on," she said. "I'm immensely interested. What became of Mr. Garcia afterward?"

"I don't know that," said Frisbie ingenuously. "Only, I guess I shall find out when I go back. He is likely to be a little irritated, I'm afraid. But there are compensations, even in Pete: like most Mexicans, he can neither tell the truth nor shoot straight." Then again to Ford: "What is to be done about the Riley mix-up?"

"Oh, the same old thing. Go down and tell the Italians that the company will stand between them and the MacMorroghs, and they shall have justice—provided always that every man of them is back on the job again to-morrow morning. Who is Riley's interpreter now?"

"Lanciotto."

"Well, look out for him: he is getting a side-cut from the MacMorroghs and is likely to translate you crooked, if it suits his purposes. Check him by having our man Luigi present when he does the talking act. Any word from Major Benson?"

"He was at the tie-camp on Ute Creek, yesterday. Jack Benson and Brissac are lining the grade for the steel on M'Grath's section, and the bridge men are well up to the last crossing of Horse Creek."

"That's encouraging. How about the grade work on the detour—your new line into Copah?"

It was the assistant's turn to frown, but the brow-wrinkling was of puzzlement.

"There's something a bit curious about that—you don't mind our talking shop like a pair of floor-walkers, do you, Miss Adair? You know we expected the MacMorroghs would kick on the change of route and the loss of the big rock-cut in the canyon. There wasn't a word of protest. If I hadn't known better, I should have said that old Brian MacMorrogh knew all about it in advance. All he said was: 'Sure, 'tis your railroad, and we'll be buildin' it anywheres you say, Misther Frisbie.' And the very next day he had a little army of men on that detour, throwing dirt to beat the band. It'll be ready for the steel by the time we can get to it with the track-layers."

Ford nodded approvingly. "Speed is what we are paying for, and we're thankful to get it whenever, and wherever, we can. Is the bridge timber coming down all right now?"

"Yes; and we are getting plenty of ties since the major put on his war-paint and went after the MacMorrogh subs in the tie-camps. It is the rock work that is holding us back."

Ford nodded again. Then he tried a little shot in the dark.

"The president's car is just below—at the basin switch. He wants to have it taken to the front, and I have been trying to dissuade him. Is the track safe for it?"

Frisbie guessed what kind of answer was desired, and stretched the truth a little.

"I should say not. It's something fierce, even for the construction trains."

Miss Alicia's smile was seraphic.

"You two gentlemen needn't tell fibs for the possible effect on me," she said, with charming frankness. "Nothing I could say would carry any weight with Uncle Sidney."

"Stung!" said Frisbie, half to himself; and the two men laughed shamefacedly.

"Will it disarrange things so very much if the Nadia is taken to the 'front'?" asked Miss Adair.

"Well, rather," said Frisbie bluntly. Then he tried to excuse himself and made a mess of it.

"Just why?" she persisted. "Forget the conventions, Mr. Frisbie, and talk to me as you have been talking to Mr. Ford. Is there any good reason, apart from the inconvenience, why our little pleasure party shouldn't see your new railroad? I am appealing to you because Mr. Ford won't tell me the truth."

Ford stood aloof and let Frisbie worry with it alone.

"There are a dozen reasons, Miss Adair; the track is fearfully rough—really, you know, it isn't safe for a big car like the Nadia. There are only a few sidings, and what there are, are filled up with construction stuff and camp cars, and—"

She was shaking her head and laughing at his strivings.

"Never mind," she said; "you can't tell the truth, either, with Mr. Ford looking on. But I shall find it out."

Frisbie looked horrified.

"You—you certainly will, Miss Adair; if Mr. Colbrith insists upon having his car dragged over the range." Then, being quite willing to make his escape, he turned to his chief. "Is there anything else? If not, I'll be getting back to the Riley mix-up before the trouble has time to grow any bigger."

Ford shook his head, and Frisbie lifted his hat to Miss Adair and turned to climb to his engine cab. But at the moment of brake-releasings Ford halted him.

"One minute," he said; and turning to his charge: "I'll borrow Dick's engine and take you down to the Nadia's siding, if you'd rather ride than walk."

"Oh, will you? That would be fine! But oughtn't Mr. Frisbie to get back to his work?"

"Y-yes," Ford admitted. "Time is rather important, just now."

"Then we'll walk," she said with great decision.

"That's all, Dick," Ford called. "Keep an eye open for Garcia. He might make a fluke and shoot straight, for once in a way."

They stood in silence on the wind-swept summit until the curving down-rush of the western grade had swallowed the retreating engine. Miss Alicia was the first to speak when the iron clamor was distance-drowned.

"I like your Mr. Frisbie," she said reflectively. "Isn't he the kind of man who would have taken the message to the other Garcia?"

"He is the kind of man who would stop a bullet for his friend, and think nothing of it—if the bullet should happen to leave him anything to think with," he returned warmly. And then he added, half absently: "He saved my life four years ago last summer."

There was genuine human interest in her voice when she said gently:

"Would you mind telling me about it?"

"It was up in the Minnesota pineries, where we were building a branch railroad through the corner of an Indian reservation. A half-breed pot-hunter for the game companies had a right-of-way quarrel with the railroad people, and he pitched upon me as the proper person to kill. It was a knife rush in the moonlight; and Dick might have shot him, only he was too tender-hearted. So he got between us."

"Well?" she prompted, when it became evident that Ford thought he had finished.

"That was all; except that it was touch and go with poor Dick for the next six weeks, with no surgeon worthy of the name nearer than St. Paul."

Miss Alicia was more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared to have her companion suspect. Her world was a world of the commonplace conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.

"Shall we go back now?" she asked; and they were half-way down to the siding and the private car before she spoke again. It took some little time to compass sufficient humility to make amends, and even then the admission came to no more than four words.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Ford."

"What for?" he asked, knowing only that he was coming to love her more blindly with every added minute of their companionship.

"For—for trying to be hateful." It was a humbler thing than any she had ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and association was beginning to get into her blood.

"If it comes to that, there were two of us," he rejoined, matching her frankness. "And, as you remarked a while back, I was certainly the aggressor. Shall we call it a truce for the present?"

"If you will be generous enough."

"Oh, I am generosity itself, under ordinary conditions; but just now I'll admit that I am fearfully and wonderfully inhospitable. I can't help wishing most fervently that something had happened to prevent your uncle's coming."

"Is it uncle who is in the way?—or the pleasure party?"

"Both."

"We are negligible," she said, meaning the pleasurers.

"No, you are not; and neither is your Uncle Sidney."

"Is he still formidable to you?" she laughed.

"He is, indeed. But, worse than that, he is likely to prove a very considerable disturbing element if I can't keep him from plunging in upon us."

She let half of the remaining distance to the end of the steep grade go underfoot before she said: "I like to help people, sometimes; but I don't like to do it in the dark."

He would have explained instantly to a man for the sake of gaining an ally. But he could not bring himself to the point of telling her the story of graft and misrule in which the MacMorroghs were the principals, and North—and her uncle, by implication—the backers.

So he said: "It is rather a long story, and you would scarcely understand it. We have been having constant trouble with the MacMorroghs, the contractors, and there is a bad state of affairs in the grading camps. It has come to a point where I shall have to fight the MacMorroghs to some sort of a finish, and—well, to put it very baldly, I don't want to have to fight the MacMorroghs and the president in the same round."

"Why should Uncle Sidney take the part of these men, if they are bad men, Mr. Ford?"

"Because he has always distrusted my judgment, and because he is loyal to Mr. North, whom he has made my superior. Mr. North tells him that I am to blame."

"But it must be a very dreadful condition of things, if what Mr. Frisbie said is all true."

"Frisbie spoke of only one little incident. Trouble like this we're having to-day is constantly arising. No money-making graft is too petty or too immoral for the MacMorroghs to connive at. They rob and starve their laborers, and cheat the company with bad work. I've got to have a free hand in dealing with them, or—"

He stopped abruptly, realizing that he was talking to her as he might have talked to a specialist in his own profession. Hence he was not disappointed when she said:

"You go too fast for me. But I think I understand now why our coming is inopportune. And it's comforting to know that the reason is a business reason."

He put shame to the wall and blurted out suddenly: "It is only one of the reasons, Miss Adair. The—the camps are no fit place for a party with women. You—you'll have to be blind and deaf if your uncle persists in taking you with him."

It was said, and he was glad of it, though he was wiping the perspiration from his face when the thing was done. She was silent until they were standing at the steps of the side-tracked private car.

"Thank you," she said simply. "Of course, I'll do what I can to keep Uncle Sidney from going—and taking us. What shall you say to him?"

"I am going to tell him that our track isn't safe for the Nadia—which is true enough."

"Very well. I'll tell Aunt Hetty and Mrs. Van Bruce—which may be more to the point. But don't be encouraged by that. I have reason to believe that Uncle Sidney will have his way in spite of any or all of us."



XVII

A NIGHT OF ALARMS

Ford put Miss Alicia up the steps of the Nadia and followed her into the vestibule, meaning to fight it out with Mr. Colbrith on the spot, and hoping he might have a private audience with the president for the doing of it.

The hope was not denied. Penfield, who was acting as private secretary to Mr. Colbrith, en route, appeared in the passageway to say that Ford was wanted in the president's state-room.

"Well, Mr. Ford, what are we waiting for?" was the querulous demand which served as Mr. Colbrith's greeting when Ford presented himself at the door of the private compartment.

Ford's reply lacked the deferential note. He had reached a point at which his job was not worth as much as it had been.

"I have just brought Miss Adair back from the top of the pass, where we met Mr. Frisbie, my chief of construction. I wished to ask him if he thought the track was safe for your car, and he says, most emphatically, that it is not. I can not take the responsibility of sending the Nadia to the end-of-track."

The president's thin face was working irritably. "I haven't asked you to assume any responsibility, Mr. Ford. If the track is safe for your material trains, it is safe enough for my car. But I didn't send for you to argue the point. I desire to have the Nadia taken to the front. Be good enough to give the necessary orders."

Ford tried again. In addition to the precarious track there were few or no unoccupied sidings, especially near the front. Moreover, there was no telegraph service which might suffice for the safe despatching of the special train. There might be entire sections over which the Nadia would have to be flagged by a man on foot, and—

The president cut him off with almost childish impatience.

"I don't know what your object is in putting so many stumbling-blocks in the way, Mr. Ford," he rasped. "A suspicious person might say that you have been doing something which you do not wish to have found out."

Ford was a fair-skinned man, and the blood burned hotly in his face. But, as once before under the president's nagging, he found his self-control rising with the provocation.

"My work is open to inspection or investigation, now or at any time, and I think we need not discuss that point," he said, when he could force himself to say it calmly. "We were speaking of the advisability of taking the Nadia and a pleasure party over a piece of raw construction line, and into an environment which, to put it mildly, could hardly be congenial to—to the ladies of the party. You know, or ought to know, the MacMorroghs: their camps are not exactly models of propriety, Mr. Colbrith."

This was merely waving a red flag at an already exasperated bull. The president got upon his feet, and his shrill falsetto cut the air like a knife.

"Mr. Ford, when I wish to be told what is or is not proper for me to do, I'll ask you for an opinion, sir. But this is quite beside the mark. Will you order this car out, or shall I?"

Ford looked at his watch imperturbably. Now that the president was thoroughly angry, he could afford to be cool.

"It is now five o'clock; and our end-of-track is fully one hundred and ten miles beyond the summit of the pass. Do I understand that you wish to take the added risk of a night run, Mr. Colbrith? If so, I'll give the order and we'll pull out."

"I desire to go now!" was the irascible reply. "Is that sufficiently explicit?"

"It is," said Ford; and he left the presence to go forward to the cab of the waiting engine.

"You are to take the car over the mountain, Hector," he said briefly, to the beetle-browed giant in blue denim, when he had climbed to the foot-plate. "I'll pilot for you."

"How far?" inquired the engineer.

"Something like a hundred and ten miles."

"Holy smoke! Over a construction track—in the night?"

"It's the president's order—none of mine. Let's get a move."

The big man got down from his box and made room for Ford. "I'll be pilin' 'em in the ditch somewhere, as sure as my name's Bill Hector," he said. "But we'll go, all the same, if he says so. I've pulled Mr. Colbrith before. Down with you, Jimmy Shovel, and set the switch for us."

The fireman swung off and stood by the switch, and Hector backed his one-car train from the siding. When he had picked up the fireman and was ready to assault the mountain, Ford thrust a query in between.

"Hold on a minute; how is the water?" he asked.

Jimmy Shovel climbed over the coal to see, and reported less than half a tankful.

"That settles it," said the chief to Hector. "You'll have to back down to Saint's Rest and fill up. You'll get no more this side of Pannikin Upper Canyon. We haven't had time to build tanks yet."

Hector put his valve-motion in the reverse gear and began to drop the train down the grade on the air. A dozen wheel-turns brought a shrill shriek from the air-signal whistle. Mr. Colbrith evidently wished to know why his train was going in the wrong direction. Hector applied the brakes and stopped in obedience to the signal.

"Do we send back?" he asked.

"No," said Ford sourly. "Let him send forward."

Penfield was the bearer of the president's question. Would it be necessary to discharge somebody in order to have his commands obeyed?

Ford answered the petulant demand as one bears with a spoiled child. They were returning to Saint's Rest for water. Let the president be assured that his orders would be obeyed in due course.

"He's a piker, the old man is," said the big engineer, once more giving the 1012 the needful inch of release to send it grinding down the hill. "I'd ruther pull freight thirty-six hours on end than run his car for a hundred miles."

There was trouble getting at the water-tank in the Saint's Rest yard. Leckhard, acting as division engineer, telegraph superintendent, material forwarder and yardmaster, found it difficult at limes to bring order out of chaos in the forwarding yard. It was a full hour before the jumble of material trains could be shunted and switched and juggled to permit the 1012 to drop down to the water tank; and four times during the hour Penfield climbed dutifully over the coal to tell Ford and the engineer what the president thought of them.

"Durn me! but you can take punishment like a man, Mr. Ford!" said Hector, on the heels of the fourth sending, sinking rank distinctions in his admiration for a cool fighter. "These here polite cussin's-out are what I can't stand. Reckon we'll get away from here before the old man throws a sure-enough fit?"

"That's entirely with the yard crew," said Ford, calmly making himself comfortable on the fireman's box. "We'll go when we can get water; and we'll get water when the tank track is cleared. That's all there is to it." Whereupon he found his cigar case, passed it to Hector, lighted up, and waited patiently for another second-hand wigging from the Nadia.

As it chanced the tank track was cleared a few minutes later; the 1012 was backed down and supplied, and Ford instructed Leckhard to do what he could with the single, poorly manned construction wire toward giving the president's special a clear track.

"That won't be much," said the hard-worked base-of-supplies man. "We've got our own operator at Ten Mile, and Brissac and Frisbie have each a set of instruments which they cut in on the line with wherever they happen to be. I don't know where Brissac is, but Frisbie is down about Riley's to-night, I think. After you pass him you'll have no help from the wires."

"I'll have what I can get," asserted Ford. "Now tell me what we're likely to meet."

Leckhard laughed. "Anything on top of earth, from Brissac or Jack Benson or Frisbie chasing somewhere on a light engine, to Gallagher or Folsom coming out with a string of empties. Oh, you're not likely to find much dead track anywhere after you get over the mountain."

Ford swung up beside Hector, who had been listening. "You see what we're in for, Hector. Start your headlight dynamo and let's go," he said; and five minutes farther on, just as Penfield was about to make his fifth scramble over the coal in the tender, the 1012 took the upward road with a deafening whistle shriek as its farewell to Saint's Rest.

It was pocket-dark by the time the switch-stand at the basin siding swung into the broad beam of the electric headlight. Ford got down from the fireman's box and crossed over to the engineer's side to pilot Hector.

"How's your track from this on?" inquired the big engineman gruffly.

"It is about as rough as it can be, and not ditch the steel trains. You'll have to hold her down or we'll have results."

"What in the name o' thunder is the old man's notion of goin' to the front with a picnic party and makin' a night run of it, at that, d'ye reckon?"

"The Lord only knows. Easy around this curve you're coming to; it isn't set up yet." The 1012 was a fast eight-wheeler from the main line, and though the grade was a rising four per cent, the big flyer was making light work of her one-car train.

Ford sat gloomily watching the track ahead as the great engine stormed around the curves and up the grades. The struggle against odds was beginning to tell on him. The building of this new line, the opening of the new country, was the real end for which all the planning and scheming in the financial field had been only the necessary preliminaries. For himself he had craved nothing but the privilege of building the extension; of rejoicing in his own handiwork and in the new triumph of progress and civilization which it would bring to pass. But little by little the fine fire of workmanlike enthusiasm was burning itself out against the iron barriers of petty spite and malice thrown up at every turn by North and the Denver junta of obstructionists.

He was at no loss to account for North's motive. It was no longer the contemptuous disregard of a general manager for one of his subordinates who had shown signs of outgrowing his job. It was a fight between rivals—equals—and Ford knew that it must go on until one or the other should be driven to the wall. Thus far, his antagonist had scored every point. The MacMorroghs had been helped into the saddle and held there. Mr. Colbrith had been won over; the authority given Ford by his appointment as assistant to the president had been annulled by making North the first vice-president with still higher authority. With a firm ally in the president, and a legion of others in the MacMorroghs' camps, North could discredit the best engineering corps that ever took the field; and he was doing it—successfully, as Ford had reason to know.

More than once Ford had been on the point of leaving his plow in the furrow while he should go to New York for one more battle with the directory—a battle which should definitely abolish North and Mr. Colbrith—or himself. Again and again he had weighed the chances of winning such a battle. With Brewster for a leader it might be done. The time for the annual stock-holders' meeting was approaching, and an election which should put the burly copper magnate into the presidency would be an unmixed blessing, not only for a struggling young chief of construction, but for the Pacific Southwestern stock-holders, who were sure to pay in the end for the present policy of rule or ruin.

Part of the time it seemed to Ford that it was clearly his duty to make this fight against the grafters in the Denver management. North deserved no consideration, and while Mr. Colbrith was honest enough, his blind prejudice and narrow mentality made him North's unwitting accessory. Three months earlier Ford would not have hesitated; but in the interval a woman had come between to obscure all the points of view. A fight to the death against the Colbrith administration meant the antagonizing of the Adairs—of Alicia, at least. True, she had spoken lightly of her uncle's peculiarities; but Ford made sure she would stand by him in the conflict, if only for kinship's sake.

All this he was turning over in his mind for the hundredth time while the big 1012 hammered up the Plug Mountain grade under the guiding hand of the giant in blue denim. Ford, glooming out upon the lighted stretch ahead, was once more finding the crucial question answerless. Should he draw out of the losing battle with North and his fellow grafters, and thereby save his chance of winning Alicia Adair? Or should he sacrifice his love upon the altar of ambition, abolish Mr. Colbrith and the crew of buccaneers his mistaken policy was sheltering, and win the industrial success and a quieted conscience?

His decision was reached by the time Hector was easing the throttle lever at the summit of Plug Pass. What must be done should be done quickly.

"Right here is where you begin to run on your nerves," he said to the big engineer, as the heavy engine and car lunged over the summit of the pass and began to gather gravity momentum on the downward rush.

Hector nodded, and twitched the handle of the air-brake cock at shorter intervals. Ford glanced back at the following car framed in the red glow from the opened fire-box door. It was surging and bounding alarmingly over the uneven track, not without threatenings of derailment. Ford was willing to give the president the full benefit of his unreasonable pertinacity; but there were others to be considered—and one above all the others.

"Easy, man; easy!" he cautioned. "If you leave the steel on this goat-track there won't be anybody left to tell the story. It's a thousand feet sheer in some places along here. Suppose you let me take her to the bottom of the hill."

The engineer stood aside with a good-tempered grin. He had seen the chief of construction walking the one young lady of the party to the top of Plug Pass and back, and it was not difficult to account for his anxiety.

Throughout the ten long miles of the mountain descent Ford crouched on the driver's seat and put his mind into the business of getting down the slides and around the sagging curves without having a wreck. The 1012's brake equipment was modern, and the Nadia's gear was in perfect order. Now and then on a tangent the big engine would straighten herself for a race or a runaway, but always the steady hand on the air-cock brought her down just before the critical moment beyond which neither brakes nor the steadiest nerve could avail. Thrice in the long downward rush Ford checked the speed to a foot-pace. This was in the rock cuttings where the jagged faces of the cliffs thrust themselves out into the white cone of the headlight, scanting the narrow shelf of the right-of-way to a mere groove in the rock. He was afraid of the cuttings. One of the many tricks of the MacMorroghs was to keep barely within the contract limits on clearance widths, and once the Nadia, sagging mountainward on the roughly leveled track at the wrong moment, touched one of the out-hanging rocks in passing. Hector heard the touch, and so did Ford; but it was the engineman who made a grim jest upon it, saying: "If she does that more'n once or twice, there'll be a job for the car painters, don't you reckon, Mr. Ford? And for the carpenters."

Just below the doubling bend in the great loop they came in sight of the first of the MacMorrogh camps. Since the night was frosty a huge bonfire was burning beside the track; and when Hector blew his whistle, some one flagged the train with a brand snatched from the fire. Ford stopped because he dared not do otherwise.

"Well, what's wanted?" he snapped, when the train came to a stand, and the brand-swinger, backed by a dozen others, made as if he would climb to the cab of the 1012.

"Some of us fellies want to go down to Ten Mile—the liquor's out," said the man, trying to get a fair sight of the strange engineman.

"Get off!" said Ford; and Hector made the order effective by shoving the intruder from the step. That was easy; but before the train had measured twice its length, a pistol barked thrice and the glass in the cab window on Ford's side fell in splinters.

"Holy smoke!" said Hector. "Is them the kind of plug-uglies you've got over here, Mr. Ford?"

Ford nodded. His eyes were on the track again, and he was hoping fervently that the three shots had all been aimed at the engine. A mile farther on, Penfield came sliding over the coal to say that the president wanted to know what the shooting was about.

Ford turned the 1012 over to Hector. The track hazards of the mountain grade were safely passed.

"Did any of the shots hit the car?" he asked of Penfield.

"No."

"Well, if you have to say anything before the ladies it might be advisable to make a joke of it. Signal torpedoes sound very much like pistol-shots, you know."

Penfield nodded. "But to Mr. Colbrith?"

"To Mr. Colbrith you may say that a gang of drunken MacMorrogh surfacers flagged us down, and when we wouldn't let them have the train, made a little gun play."

"Heavens!" said the clerk, whose curiosity stopped short at the farthest confines of any battle-field. "Is that sort of thing likely to happen again, Mr. Ford?"

"Your guess is as good as anybody's," said Ford curtly. "Better get back to the car as quickly as you can, before Mr. Colbrith whistles us down to find out what has become of you."

Below the camp of the surfacers there were a few miles of better track, and Hector made fair time until the train circled the mountain shoulder at the lower end of the great loop. Beyond this the roughnesses began again, and there were more of the skimped rock cuttings. At Ten Mile, which was a relay station in the upper canyon for the halting of supplies and material for which there was no room at the ever-advancing "front," they stopped to try for track-clearings.

As Leckhard had foretold, the operator could give them little help. Two hours earlier, a train of empties in two sections had left the end-of-track, coming eastward. Whether it was hung up at one of the intervening side-tracks, or was still coming, the operator could not say; and there were no means of finding out. Also, Mr. Frisbie, who had reached Riley's camp late in the afternoon, had left there after supper and was somewhere on the line with his light engine—probably on his way to the front, the operator thought.

Hector removed his great weight from the telegraph counter and the woodwork creaked its relief. What he said was indicative of his frame of mind.

"Humph!" he growled. "If we don't get tangled up with Mr. Frisbie's light engine, it's us for a head-ender with the string of empties. Isn't that about it, Mr. Ford?"

"That's it, precisely."

"Which means that Jimmy Shovel trots ahead of us for a hundred mile 'r so, carryin' a lantern like a blame' Dio-geenes huntin' for an honest man."

"That is the size of it," said Ford; but just then the sounder on the table began to click and the operator held up his hand for silence.

"Hold on a minute," he interrupted, "here's a piece of luck—it's Mr. Frisbie, cutting in with his field set from Camp Frierson. He is asking Saint's Rest about you."

"Break in and tell him we're here," said Ford; and when it was done: "Ask him about that string of empties."

The reply was apparently another piece of luck. Frisbie, going westward, had passed the first section of the freight train at Siding Number Twelve. It was hung up with a broken draw-head on the engine, and was safe to stay there, Frisbie thought, until somebody came along with a repair kit, which, it might be assumed, would not be before morning.