had the string of empties fairly in retreat, the beam of Gallagher's
headlight was shining full in his face and blinding him. For a
heart-breaking second he feared that the opposing train would follow him
in on the siding; there was but an instant for the flicking of the
switch. But by this time the sleepy flagman was wide awake, and he
jerked the switch lever for his life the moment Graham's engine had
cleared the points. It was the closest possible shave. Gallagher's cab
ticked the forward end of the other engine's running board in passing,
and if Graham had not been still shoving backward with the throttle
wide open, the "01," being wider than its piloting engine, would have
had its side ripped out.
Graham had a glimpse into the cab of the 956 as it passed and saw
Gallagher, sitting erect on his box with wide-staring eyes. He knew the
symptoms, and feared that he had only postponed the catastrophe. The
siding was a short one, and he knew that in backing down he must
inevitably have shoved the rear end of his train out upon the main line
at the lower switch. Once again the level brain righted itself to the
emergency. Four sharp shrieks of the whistle for switches, a jamming of
the whistle lever to set the canyon echoes yelling in the hope of
arousing Gallagher, and Graham slammed his engine into the forward
motion without pausing to close the throttle. There was a grinding of
fire from the wheels, a running jangle of slack-taking down the long
line of empties, and the freight train shot ahead, snatching its rear
end out of harm's way just as Gallagher, dreaming that his boiler had
burst and that all the fiends of the pit were screeching the news of it,
came to life and snapped on the air.
When the stop was made, the little Irishman roused his fireman, got off
and footed it up the line to see what he had done. Graham had stopped
his engine when he was sure his train was clearing the lower switch, and
was on his way back to find out what had happened to Gallagher. The two
men met in the shadow of the halted material empties, and it was the
Irishman who began it.
"Paste me wan, Scotchie," he said. "'Tis owin' to me."
Without a word the Scotchman gave the blow, catching the little man full
in the chest and knocking him half a car-length. That was enough.
Gallagher picked himself up out of the gravel, the lust of battle hot
upon him.
"Wan more like thot, ye divvle, and I cajo lick ye if ye wor
Fin-mac-Coul himself," he panted; and Graham gave it judiciously, this
time on the point of the jaw. For five bloody minutes it went on, give
and take, down and up; methodically on Graham's part, fiery hot on
Gallagher's. And in the end the Irishman had the heavier man backed
against the string of empties and yelling for quarter.
"Are you full awake now, ye red-hot blastoderm?" gasped Graham,
struggling to free himself when Gallagher gave him leave.
"I am thot, thanks to you, Sandy, lad. 'Twas a foine bit av a scrimmage,
an' I'm owin' ye wan. Good night to ye."
"Ye've got a clear track from this," called Graham, swabbing his
battered face with a piece of cotton waste drawn from one of the pockets
of method. "But ye'd better not take any more cat-naps. Go on with ye,
ye wild Irishman; ye're obstructin' the traffic."
For twenty miles below Ten Mile Gallagher sat on his box like a man
refreshed. Then the devil of sleep postponed beset him again. Once more
the fireman was asleep on the coal, and to the little Irishman's
bombardment of wrenches and other missiles he returned only sodden
groans. Gallagher nerved himself to fight it through alone. Mile after
mile of the time-killing track swung slowly to the rear, and there was
not even the flick of speed to help in the grim battle.
Dawn came when the end-of-track camp was still forty miles away, but the
breaking day brought no surcease of strugglings. When it came to the
bitter end, when his eyelids would close involuntarily and he would wake
with a start to wonder dumbly how far the 956 had come masterless,
Gallagher took a chew of tobacco and began to rub the spittle into his
eyes--the last resort of the sleep-tormented engineman. Like all the
other expedients it sufficed for the time; but before long he was
nodding again, and dreaming that a thousand devils were burning his eyes
out with the points of their red-hot pitchforks.
Out of one of these nightmares he came with a yell of pain to see what
figured for the moment as another nightmare. Three hundred feet ahead
the track seemed to vanish for three or four rail-lengths. It was
second nature to jam on the brakes and to make the sudden stop. Then he
sat still and rubbed his smarting eyes and stared again. The curious
hallucination persisted strangely. Fifty feet ahead of the stopped
engine the glistening lines of the steel ended abruptly, beginning again
a car-length or two beyond. Without disturbing the sleeping Jackson,
Gallagher got down and crept cautiously out to the break. It was a
break. He stooped and felt the rail ends with his hands.
When he straightened up his passenger was standing beside him.
"What is it?" asked Adair. "Have we lost something?"
Gallagher waved a grimy hand at the gap.
"The thrack," he said. "'Twas there whin I pulled me sthring av empties
out over ut lasht night. 'Tis gone now, else I'm thot near dead for
sleep I can nayther see nor feel sthraight."
Adair was calmly lighting a cigarette.
"Your senses are still in commission," he said; "there is a good-sized
piece of track missing. Who sniped it, do you suppose?"
The engineer was shaking his fiery head.
"'Tis beyond me, Misther Adair."
"That's the deuce of it," smiled the young man. "It's beyond the train.
How is your engine--pretty good on the broad jump?"
Gallagher was not past laughing.
"She'll not lep thot, this day. But who'd be doin' this job betune dark
an' mornin', d'ye think?"
"You will have to ask me something easy, I'm not up in all the little
practical jokes of the country. But if I should venture a guess, I
should say it was some one who didn't want me to answer the first call
for breakfast at your end-of-track camp this morning. What do we do?"
Gallagher was thinking.
"We passed a camp av surfacers tin mile back, and there'd be rails at
Arroyo Siding, tin mile back o' thot," he said reflectively.
Adair had passed over to the river side of the line and was looking at a
fresh plowing of the embankment.
"The rails have been dragged down here and they are probably in the
river," he announced. "If we had men and tools we might fish them out
and repair damages."
"Come on, thin," cried the little Irishman, and when he ran back to
climb to the footboard of the 956, Adair climbed with him.
Jackson, refreshed by his cat-naps on the coal, was sent to the rear end
of the "01" to flag back, and in due time the special picked up the gang
of surfacers just turning out to the day's work. An Irish foreman was in
command, and to him Gallagher appealed, lucidly but not too gently. The
reply was a volley of abuse and a caustic refusal to lend his men to
the track-laying department.
Gallagher turned to Adair with his red-apple face wrinkling dismayfully.
"'Tis up to me to push thot felly's face in, Misther Adair; and what wid
two nights and a day, shtandin', and wan fight wid a bully twice me
size, I'm not man enough."
Adair tossed away the stump of his cigarette.
"You're quite sure that is what is needed?" he queried.
"To knock a grain av sinse into thot Wicklow man?" queried Gallagher.
"Sure, it is." And then whispering: "But not for you, Misther Adair;
he'd ate you in two bites. L'ave me have a thry wid him."
But Adair was off and fronting the surly MacMorrogh foreman.
"We need a dozen of your men and some tools," he said quietly. "Do we
get them?"
"Not by a fistful!" retorted the surly one. "Maybe you think you're
enough of a ---- ---- ---- to take 'em."
"I am a better man than you are," was the even-toned rejoinder.
"Prove it, then."
Gallagher, leaning from his cab window, fully awake now, and chuckling
and rubbing his hands together softly, saw the blow. It was clean-cut,
swift as the lightning's flash, true to a finger's breadth, and the
sound of it was as bone upon bone. At its impact the Wicklow man bounded
into the air, arched his back like a bow, and pitched on his head in the
ditch. When he rose up, roaring blasphemies and doubling his huge fists
for the fray, the quiet voice was assailing him again. "Do we get the
men and tools?"
"Not--"
Again the lightning-like passes of the hands, and the Wicklow man sat
down forcibly and gasped. The Italian surfacers threw aside their picks
and shovels and made a ring, dancing excitedly and jeering. The big
foreman, whose scepter of authority was commonly a pick-handle for the
belaboring of offenders, was not loved.
"Kick-a da shin--kick-a da shin--he like-a da nigger-mans," suggested
one of the Italians, but there was no need. Being safely out of range of
the catapult fists, the foreman stayed there.
"Take your track gang and be damned to you!" he snarled.
Adair made a forward step and stood over him.
"Are you quite convinced that I am the better man?" he asked very
gently.
"It's a trick!" growled the Wicklow man savagely. "I could get onto it
in another whirl or two."
"Get up," said the gentle voice. "You'll never have a better chance to
learn the trick." But the foreman had the saving grace to shun
anti-climaxes.
"G'wan! Take the men, I say; all of 'em, if you like."
"Thanks," said Adair pleasantly. "We'll do it, and we'll take you, as
well--to answer for their good behavior. Let me help you up," and he
stooped and snapped the big one to his feet as a man would collar a
reluctant boy.
"Great judgment!" gasped the foreman. "Say, Mister
Cock-o'-the-walk--where do you hide all that muscle?" And without
waiting for an answer he piled a dozen of his men upon the engine and
followed them, still muttering.
It was a partly surfaced ten miles over which the special train
thundered for the third time since dawn-breaking, and Gallagher took the
last wheel-turn out of the 956. None the less, the sun was reddening the
western mountains when the Italians took ground at the mysterious gap.
The rails were found in the stream, as Adair had predicted, and it was a
work of minutes only to snake them up the embankment and to spike them
lightly into place. But when Adair, for the healing of wounds, had
thrust a bank-note into the hand of the Wicklow man, and the special was
once more on its unhindered way westward, the sun had fairly topped the
eastern range, and Johnson, the porter of the "01," was shouting across
the rocketing tender that breakfast was served.
The young man in the London-cut clothes might have climbed back to the
car over the coal; or Gallagher would have stopped for him. But he
elected to stay in the cab, and he was still there, hanging from the
open window on Jackson's side, when the one-car special woke the echoes
with its whistle, clattered in over the switches at Horse Creek, and
came to a stand opposite the MacMorroghs' commissary.
It was Brian MacMorrogh who came across the tracks to greet Adair, and,
since this was their first meeting, he made the mistake of his life in
calling the young director by name.
"The top of the morning to you, Misther Adair. Is it Misther Colbrith
you'd be looking for?"
"It is," said Adair shortly, not failing to remark that the
barrel-bodied, black-bearded man seemed to recognize and to be expecting
him.
"'Tis two hours gone they all are," was the oily-voiced explanation. "Up
the grade and over to Copah. But they'll be back to-morrow, Heaven
savin' thim, and we'll make you comfortable here--as comfortable as we
can."
"That will be quickly done," said Adair, swinging down from the engine
step. "Just give me a horse and tell me which way they have gone, and
I'll overtake them."
But here the barrel-bodied one spread his hands helplessly.
"'Tis just our luck!" he protested, in the keenest self-reproach. "There
isn't a horse or a mule in camp that you could get a mile an hour out
of. In fact, I'm thinking there isn't anny horses at all!"
XXII
THE MAN ON HORSEBACK
Since the weather was rather threatening, and the promise of October in
the inter-mountain region is not to be lightly trifled with, Mr.
Colbrith pressed for an early start on the seventeen-mile buckboard
jaunt to Copah over the detour survey.
It was by his express command that the private-car party was called at
daybreak, and that breakfast was served in the Nadia at six o'clock. And
at seven sharp, which chanced to be the precise time of day when Adair's
commandeered Italians were spiking the last of the displaced rails into
position at the gap in the track thirty-three miles away, the buckboards
were drawn up at the steps of the president's car.
For reasons charitable, as well as practical, Ford had planned to leave
Frisbie out of this second dance of attendance upon the president. The
track-layers were well up toward the head of Horse Creek gulch, with
Brissac to drive; but during the night the Louisianian had reported in
with a touch of mountain fever, and Ford had asked Frisbie to go up and
take his place.
This was one of Ford's peg-drivings for the day; and another was timed
for the moment of outsetting. For conveyances for the party there were
the two double-seated buckboards used on the canyon trip the previous
day, and one other with a single seat; but there were only two drivers,
the third man, who had brought the single-seated rig from Copah, having
been prevailed upon by Ford to disappear.
Ford directed the distribution of the trippers arbitrarily, and was
amazed when the president acquiesced without protest. Mr. Colbrith, the
doctor's wife, and Penfield, were to go in the leading vehicle; Aunt
Hester Adair, Miss Van Bruce, and the doctor, in the second; and Ford
drove the single-seated third, with Miss Alicia for his companion.
"I think you must have taken Uncle Sidney unawares," said Alicia, when
the caravan was toiling at a slow footpace along the rough wagon road
paralleling the Horse Creek grade.
"You mean that he might have objected to your driver? You are a whole
lot safer with me than you would be with one of those livery-stable
helpers up ahead."
"Oh, no; I didn't mean just that. But you know he usually plans all the
little details himself, and--"
"And the fact that somebody else plans them is sufficient excuse for a
rearrangement. That is one of the penalties he pays for being the big
boss," laughed Ford. Since the yesterday was now safely yesterday, and
to-day was his own, there was no room for anything but pure joy.
"You are a 'big boss,' too, aren't you?" she said, matching his
light-hearted mood.
"I was, in a way, until your uncle came over and eclipsed me."
"And you will be again when Uncle Sidney moves a little farther along in
his orbit."
"That remains to be seen. There is yet plenty of time for him to abolish
me, permanently, before he goes on his way rejoicing."
"But you are not going to resign, you know," she reminded him.
"Am I not?" Then he took his courage by the proper grip and went on with
sudden gravity: "That rests entirely with you."
"Mr. Ford! Aren't you a little unfair?" She did not pretend to
misunderstand him.
"I am open to convincement," he affirmed.
"It is making me Uncle Sidney's executioner, on one hand; or yours, on
the other."
He pressed the point relentlessly.
"There are only two horns to the dilemma: either Mr. Colbrith, or a man
named Stuart Ford, will have to walk the official plank. Because Mr.
Colbrith is your relative, I'm willing to be the victim. But you must
say that it is what you wish. That is my price."
"I say it is unfair," she repeated. "Why should you put the burden of
the decision upon poor me?"
"Because, if you were not concerned, there would be, to put it in good
Hibernian, only one horn to the dilemma--and your uncle would be impaled
upon that one."
"Mercy!" she shuddered, in mock dismay. "That sounds almost vindictive.
Are you vindictive, Mr. Ford?"
"Terribly," he laughed. "The black-hearted villain of melodrama isn't a
patch on me when I'm stirred." And then, more seriously: "But it isn't
altogether a joke. There is another side to the thing--what you might
call the ethical, I suppose. There are a score or so of men in the
company's service--Frisbie and his subordinates--whose jobs hang upon
mine. A worse man than I ever aspired to be might be loyal to his
friends."
"I wouldn't think of questioning your loyalty to your friends," she
admitted.
"Also," he went on determinately, "there is the larger question of right
and wrong involved. Is it right for me to step aside and let an
organized system of graft and thievery go on unchecked? I know it
exists; I have evidence enough to go before a grand jury. I'm not posing
as a saint, or even as a muck-raker; but isn't something due to the
people who are paying the bills?"
"Now you are involving Uncle Sidney again; and I can't listen to that."
"He is innocent; as innocent as some hundreds of other narrow-minded,
short-sighted old men whom chance, or the duplicity of the real rascals,
puts at the head of corporations."
"Yet you would make him suffer with the guilty."
"Not willingly, you may be sure. Not at all, if he would listen to
reason. But he won't. He'll stand by North till the last gun is fired;
and while North stays, there'll be graft, big or little, as the
opportunities warrant."
Alicia held her peace while the caravan was measuring another half-mile
of the boulder-strewn road. Then she said: "I feel so wretchedly
inadequate to help you, Mr. Ford. I wish you could wait until you have
talked it over with brother."
"So do I. But I am afraid postponement doesn't lie with me, now. From
your uncle's manner and from what he said to me yesterday, I can't help
feeling that the crisis is right here. For two days Mr. Colbrith has
been very plainly leading up to some sort of dramatic climax. I can't
remotely guess what it is going to be; though I can guess that the plot
isn't his."
Again she took time to consider, and when she spoke they were nearing
the scene of strenuous activities at the moving track-end.
"You don't think you could postpone it?" she asked, almost wistfully, he
thought. "I think--I hope--my brother will become interested again. It
is your fault that he lost interest, Mr. Ford."
"My fault?" reproachfully.
"Certainly. You didn't give him enough to do. He was happy and contented
while you kept him hard at work. But after the bonds were placed and the
money raised--"
"I'm a miserable sinner!" Ford confessed. "And I had promised you, too!
But the battle has been so fierce at this end of the line; and I
couldn't be in two places at one time. Your brother should have been
made first vice-president, instead of North. Perhaps we can bring it
about yet--if you don't call it all off."
"There it is again," she retorted. "You are dragging me in--and trying
to bribe me, too!"
"God forbid!" he said, so earnestly that she forgave him. And then: "I
wish your brother were here--now."
"So do I," she admitted. Then she told him of the wire summons sent from
Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.
"Where was your brother then?" he asked.
"I don't know, positively. I hope he was in New York. He was to come
over in the _Campania_, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan."
"You've had no word from him?"
"None."
They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills
and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the
caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the
actual throes of evolution.
In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked
enthusiasm. Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer's
inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious. On the
leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating
laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the
cross-ties in position. On a train of specially constructed flat-cars
another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the
double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge. At the word,
"Ready!" a hauling chain, passing through an anchored pulley-block far
up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was
made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of
command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section
off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties. With
the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army,
spike-drivers these, fell upon the newly placed steel, shouting their
chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of
this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters deftly
preparing another section, was slowly pushed to the new front for
another advance.
"It is like clockwork," was Miss Alicia's enthusiastic comment. "Did you
invent it, Mr. Ford?"
Now the combination of flat-car bolting-table, and the shifting and
laying by sections, was Ford's invention, but he modestly stood from
under.
"Frisbie gets the medal," he said. "It's all in the drill--every man
knowing what he has to do, and doing it at the proper moment. I'd give
something if I had Dick's knack in detail organizing."
She looked up, laughing. "You have the funniest way of ducking to cover
if you think a bit of honest appreciation is coming your way, Mr. Ford.
You know you told Mr. Frisbie how to do it."
"Did I? I suppose it wouldn't be polite to contradict you."
"Or any use. Is Mr. Frisbie here now?--Oh, yes; there he is." And then,
in a half-awed whisper: "Who is that dreadful, Grand-Opera-villain
looking man he is talking to?"
Ford's eyes sought and found Frisbie. He was standing a little apart
from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed,
beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian in its
repulsiveness.
"That is 'Mexican George'; the MacMorrogh Brothers' 'killer'," said Ford
evenly. "Have you ever heard of a professional man-killer, Miss Adair; a
man whose calling is that of a hired assassin?"
She shuddered. "You are jesting, I know. But the word fits his face so
accurately. I saw him lounging about the store at the camp yesterday,
and it gave me the creeping shivers every time I looked at him. Do you
ever have such instantaneous and unreasoning hatreds at first sight?"
"Now and then; yes. But I was not jesting about Mexican George. He is
precisely what the word implies; is hired for it and paid for it.
Nominally, he guards the commissary and stores, and is the paymaster's
armed escort. Really, it is his duty to shoot down any desperate laborer
who, in the MacMorroghs' judgment, needs to be killed out of the way."
"Mercy!" Miss Alicia was shuddering again. "What hideously primitive
conditions! What is this terrible man doing out here?"
"Oh, he is a free lance; comes and goes as he pleases. No, he's not
quarreling with Dick"--answering her look of anxiety.
"How do you know he isn't?"
Ford laughed. "Because Dick wouldn't let him get that near. He
knows--Hello; I wonder what your good uncle wants of us."
Mr. Colbrith was standing up in his place in the leading buckboard and
making signals to the rear guard of two. Ford shook the reins over his
broncos and drove around.
The president was fingering his thin beard and waving an arm toward the
track-layers.
"Mr.--ah--Ford," he began critically, "is it necessary to have such a
vast army of men as that to lay the track?"
"I don't think we are over-manned," said Ford good-naturedly. It was
comparatively easy to be patient with Alicia looking on and listening.
But it was against Mr. Colbrith's principles to let a man off with a
single rebuttal.
"I am not at all convinced of the worth of these new-fangled ideas, Mr.
Ford; not at all. We built the Pacific Southwestern main line in the
old, approved way--a rail at a time--with less than one-quarter of the
men you have over there."
"I don't question it: and you were three years building some six hundred
miles in a prairie country. We are to-day just six weeks out of Saint's
Rest with the track gang, and in six more, if the weather holds, we
shall be laying the switches in the Green Butte yards. That is the
difference between the old way and the new."
The president was turned aside but not stopped.
"I understand," he objected raucously. "But your expense bills are
something tremendous; tre-_men_dous, Mr. Ford! You have spent more money
in three months than we spent in a full year on the main line."
"Quite likely," agreed Ford, losing interest in the pointless
discussion. "But with us, time is an object; and we have the results to
show for the expenditure."