PILOT
"There are mountains a man can do business with," muttered Bucks in the
private car, his mustache drooping broadly above his reflecting words.
"Mountains that will give and take once in a while, play fair
occasionally. But Pilot has fought us every inch of the way since the
day we first struck a pick into it. It is savage and unrelenting. I'd
rather negotiate with Sitting Bull for a right of way through his
private bathroom than to ask an easement from Pilot for a tamarack tie.
I don't know why it was ever called Pilot: if I named it, it should be
Sitting Bull. What the Sioux were to the white men, what the Spider
Water is to the bridgemen, that, and more, Pilot has been to the
mountain men.
"There was no compromise with Pilot even after we got in on it.
Snowslides, washouts, bowlders, forest-fires--and yet the richest
quartz mines in the world lie behind it. This little branch, Mr.
Brock, forty-eight miles, pays the operating expenses of the whole
mountain division, and has done so almost since the day it was opened.
But I'd rather lose the revenue ten times every year than to lose
Morris Blood." The second vice-president was talking to Mr. Brock.
Their car was just rounding the curve into the gap in front of Mount
Pilot.
"What do you think of Blood's chances?" asked Mr. Brock.
"I don't know. A mountain man has nine lives."
"What does Glover think?"
"He doesn't say."
"Who built this line?"
"Two pretty good men ran the first thirty miles, but neither of them
could give me a practicable line south of the gap; this last eighteen
miles up and down and around Pilot was Glover's first work in the
mountains. It's engineering. Every trick ever played in the Rockies,
and one or two of Brodie's old combinations in the Andes, they tell me,
are crowded into these eighteen miles. There, there's old Sitting Bull
in all his clouds and his glory."
Glover had left the car at Sleepy Cat, going ahead with the relief
train. Picked men from every district on the division had been
assembling all the afternoon to take up the search for the missing
superintendent. Section men from the Sweetgrass wastes, and bridgemen
from the foothills, roadmasters from the Heart Mountains--home of the
storm and the snow--and Rat Cañon trackwalkers that could spot a break
in the dark under twelve inches of ballast; Morgan, the wrecker, and
his men, and the mountain linemen with their foreman, old Bill
Dancing--fiend drunk and giant sober--were scattered on Mount Pilot,
while a rotary ahead of a battery of big engines was shoved again and
again up the snow-covered hill.
Anxious to get the track open in the belief that Blood could best be
got at from beyond the S bridge, Glover, standing with the branch
roadmaster, Smith Young, on the ledge above the engines directed the
fight for the hill. He had promised Gertrude he would keep out of the
cab, and far across the curve below he could see the Brock car, where
Bucks was directing the search on the eastern side of the gulch.
Callahan and the linemen were spreading both ways through the timber on
the plateau opposite, but the snow made the work extremely difficult,
and the short day allowed hardly more than a start. On the hill
Glover's men advanced barely a hundred feet in three hours: darkness
spread over the range with no sign of the missing man, and with the
forebodings that none could shake off of what the night's exposure,
even if he were uninjured, might mean.
Supper was served to the men in the relief trains, and outside fires
were forbidden by Glover, who asked that every foot of the track as far
as the gap be patrolled all night.
It was nearly ten o'clock when Glover, supperless, reached the car with
his dispositions made for the night. While he talked with the men,
Clem, the star cook of the Brock family, under special orders grilled a
big porterhouse steak and presently asked him back to the dining-table,
where, behind the shaded candles, Gertrude waited.
They sat down opposite each other; but not until Glover saw there were
two plates instead of one, and learned that Gertrude had eaten no
dinner because she was waiting for him, did he mutter something about
all that an American girl is capable of in the way of making a man
grateful and happy. There was nothing to hurry them back to the other
end of the car, and they did not rejoin Mr. Brock and Bucks, who were
smoking forward, until eleven o'clock. Callahan came in afterward, and
sitting together Mr. Brock and Gertrude listened while the three
railroad men planned the campaign for the next day.
Parting late, Glover said good-night and left with Callahan to inspect
the rotary. The fearful punishment of the day's work on the knives had
shown itself, and since dark, relays of mechanics from the Sleepy Cat
shops had been busy with the cutting gear, and the companion plough had
already been ordered in from the eighth district.
Glover returned to the car at one o'clock. The lights were low, and
Clem, a night-owl, fixed him in a chair near the door. For an hour
everything was very still, then Gertrude, sleeping lightly, heard
voices. Glover walked back past the compartments; she heard him asking
Clem for brandy--Bill Dancing, the lineman, had come with news.
The negro brought forward a decanter and Glover poured a gobletful for
the old man, who shook from the chill of the night air.
"The boys claim it's imagination," Dancing, steadied by the alcohol,
continued, "but it's a fire way over below the second bridge. I've
watched it for an hour; now you come."
They went away and were gone a long time. Glover returned alone--Clem
had disappeared; a girlish figure glided out of the gloom to meet him.
"I couldn't sleep," she whispered. "I heard you leave and dressed to
wait." She looked in the dim light as slight as a child, and with his
hand at her waist he sunk on his knee to look up into her face. "How
can I deserve it all?"
She blinded his upturned eyes in her hands, and not until she found her
fingers were wet did she understand all he had tried to put into his
words.
"Have you any news?" she murmured, as he rose.
"I believe they have found him."
She clasped her hands. "Heaven be praised. Oh, is it sure?"
"I mean, Dancing, the old lineman, has seen his fire. At least, we are
certain of it. We have been watching it two hours. It's a speck of a
blaze away across toward the mines. It never grows nor lessens, just a
careful little campfire where fuel is scarce--as it is now with all the
snow. We've lighted a big beacon on the hill for an answer, and at
daybreak we shall go after him. The planning is all done and I am free
now till we're ready to start."
She tried to make him lie down for a nap on the couch. He tried to
persuade her to retire until morning, and in sweet contention they sat
talking low of their love and their happiness--and of the hills a
reckless girl romped over in old Allegheny, and of the shingle gunboats
a sleepy-eyed boy launched in dauntless fleets upon the yellow eddies
of the Mississippi; and of the chance that should one day bring boy and
girl together, lovers, on the crest of the far Rockies.
Lights were moving up and down the hill when they rose from Clem's
astonishing breakfast.
"You will be careful," she said. He had taken her in his arms at the
door, and promising he kissed her and whispered good-by.