IN TOURMALINE CANYON
Timanyoni Park, ringed in all the way around by mountain ranges, is a
valley shaped something like a big oval clothes-basket, with the long
way of the basket running north and south, and a ridge of watershed
hills cutting it in two in the other direction.
The southern half of the Park is about all that the average traveler
ever sees of it, because the main line of the Nevada Short Line runs
through that part of it; and if you should ask Mr. A. Traveler what
about it, he would probably tell you that it is a fine farming country
with big wheat fields and beautiful apple orchards――all irrigated, of
course――and a thriving little city called Brewster lying somewhere in
the middle of it.
That would all be true enough of what the passing tourist sees, but
north of the watershed hills is the West that you read about. With
the exception of one mining-camp――Red Butte――and a single railroad
track――the Red Butte branch of the Short Line――skirting its western
edge, that half of the clothes-basket is a jumbled wilderness of wooded
hills just about as Nature left it. And slicing a half-moon out of
these northern hills, the Tourmaline, a quick-water mountain stream, a
goodish-sized little river in the volume of water it carries, enters
through a rugged canyon, dipping into the valley basket a little to
one side of the northern handle, let us say, and dodging out again a
few miles farther on to find its way to the Colorado River.
The time――our time――for getting a first glimpse of the Tourmaline
Canyon is the middle of a June forenoon; bright sunshine, a sky so blue
that it almost hurts your eyes to look up at it, the air so crisp and
sweet and clean as to make it a keen joy just to be alive and breathing
it.
To right and left, as we look up the canyon, gray granite cliffs,
seamed and weathered into all sorts of curious shapes, shut in a
narrow gorge at the bottom of which the swift mountain torrent roars
and rumbles and thunders among the boulders in its bed. On the left
the canyon wall drops sheer to the water; but on the right there is a
shelving, sliding bank of loose rock at the foot of the cliff. Along
this bank two workmanlike young fellows, wearing the corduroys and high
lace-boots of the engineers, are making their way slowly up-stream,
scanning every foot of the shelving talus ledge as they cover it.
“Gee! Some fierce old place to build a railroad, I’ll tell the world!”
said Dick Maxwell, the lighter-built of the two, clawing for footholds
on the steep bank. “Find anything yet, Larry?”
“Nothing that looks like a location stake,” was the answer. “I guess
we’ll have to back-track a piece and measure the distance up from that
last one we found.”
“Aw’ right,” said Dick, with a little groan for the effort loss; “give
me the end of the tape and I’ll do the back-flip,” and with the ring of
the steel tape-line in hand he crawled back along the shelving slide.
“Got you!” he called out, when the last-discovered stake was reached;
and Larry, holding the tape case, marked the hundred-foot point and
began to search again for the stake which ought to be there and didn’t
show up.
Five years earlier, when gold was first discovered at the headwaters of
the Tourmaline, the railroad company had surveyed a line up the canyon
and some twenty miles of track had been laid eastward from Red Butte.
Later, the gold excitement had died down, and the Tourmaline Extension,
something less than half completed, was abandoned.
But now new gold discoveries had been made and “Little Ophir” had
leaped, overnight, as one might say, into the spot-light――which
is a way that gold discoveries have of doing. A stirring, roaring
mining-camp city had sprung up on the site of the old workings at the
canyon head, and the building of the railroad extension was once more
under way. For Little Ophir was without railroad connections with the
outside world, and the canyon of the Tourmaline afforded the only
practicable route by which a railroad could reach it.
Early in June a big construction force had been mobilized at Red Butte
and the work of refitting and extending the track already laid was
begun. Out ahead of the graders and track-layers an engineering party,
under Mr. Herbert Ackerman, chief of construction, was reëstablishing
the line of the old survey; and it was in this party that the general
manager’s son, Dick, and Larry Donovan, son of the Brewster crossing
watchman, were the “cubs.”
On the morning in question the two boys had been sent up the canyon
ahead of the main party to find and mark the stakes of the former
survey so that they could be readily located by the transitmen who
were following them. For several miles it had been plain sailing. In
the lonely wilderness there had been nothing to disturb the stakes, and
in the high, dry, mountain atmosphere but few of them had rotted away.
But now, in the most difficult part of the gorge, the trail seemed to
be lost.
“Haven’t found it yet?” Dick asked, coming up from the tape-holding.
“Not a single sign of it. Here’s the hundred-foot point,” and Larry dug
his boot heel into the shale.
“Let’s spread out a bit,” Dick suggested. “It must be right around here
somewhere.”
Accordingly, they separated, and in a scattering of boulders a little
farther on, Larry found the stake――or at least, _a_ stake. He was on
his knees before it when Dick came up to say:
“Hullo! got it at last, have you?” And then, as with a sudden shock of
surprise: “Why, say, Larry――that isn’t one of our old stakes! It’s a
brand new one!”
It was; so new that it looked as if it might have been driven that very
forenoon. The stakes they had been finding hitherto were all browned
and weathered, as they were bound to be since they had been driven
five years before. But this one was unmistakably new, with the mark,
“Sta.162-50” in blue chalk plainly to be read. Moreover, it had been
planted between two stones in a place where nobody would be likely to
find it unless he knew exactly where to look for it.
“See here, Dick,” said Larry, scowling down at the discovery, “I don’t
‘savvy’ this. It doesn’t look a little bit good to me.”
“You said a whole earful then, Larry. You don’t suppose any of our men
have been up here ahead of us putting in new stakes, do you?”
Larry shook his head.
“We’d have known about it if they had. We’ve been passing all the
transit crews each morning as we came out.”
Dick stooped and read the blue chalk markings.
“‘Sta.162-50’ means fifty feet beyond Station One Hundred and
Sixty-two. And Station One-sixty-two would be sixteen thousand two
hundred feet beyond some given starting point; that’s a little over
three miles. We haven’t any starting point three miles back. Our
stations are all numbered from Red Butte.”
Again Larry frowned and shook his head.
“Three miles would take it below the mouth of the canyon――just about
down to our present camp. Say, Dick――it’s up to us to get busy on
this thing. I don’t like the look of it. Here; you hold the tape on
this stake and stop me at fifty feet,” and he took the ring end and
scrambled on up the canyon.
“You’ve got it,” Dick announced, when the fifty-foot mark ran out of
the leather case. Then: “What do you find?”
“Nothing, yet,” was the answer; and Dick proceeded to reel in the steel
ribbon, walking on up to Larry as he wound.
“Nothing” seemed to be right. The fifty-foot point was in the heart of
a little thicket of aspens. Carefully they searched the grove, looking
behind every boulder. But there was no stake to be seen.
Though they were both Freshman――new to the engineering game, they had
already learned a few of the first principles. For example, they knew
that staked “stations” in a survey were usually 25, 50 or 100 feet
apart, according to the nature of the ground. Therefore, fifty measured
feet from the point they had just left should have landed them either
at Station 162 or Station 163, according to the direction in which the
survey had been made. But apparently it hadn’t.
It was Dickie Maxwell who presently solved the mystery, or part of
it. Crawling upon his hands and knees among the little aspens, he
was halted by the sight of a bit of fine copper wire twisted about
the trunk of one of the trees. A closer inspection revealed four
knife-blade cuts in the bark; two running crosswise and half-way around
the tree and the other two up and down on opposite sides of the trunk
to complete a semi-cylindrical parallelogram.
“Come here, Larry!” he called; and when Larry had crept into the
thicket: “See that wire and those marks?”
Larry saw and got quick action. Whipping out his pocket knife and
cutting the thread-fine wire, he stuck the point of the blade into one
of the up-and-down cracks. At the touch a section of the bark came off
like the lid of a box, and under it, carved in the clean white surface
of the heart wood, was the legend, “Sta.163.” Dick sat back on his
heels.
“Larry, you old knuckle-duster, it’s rattling around in the back part
of my bean that we’ve found something,” he remarked, with the cherubic
smile that had more than once helped him to dodge a richly deserved
reprimand in his school days. “Can you give it a name to handle it by?”
Larry Donovan, sitting on a rock, propped his square chin in his
cupped hands and lapsed into a brown study. He was a rather slow
thinker, unless the emergency called for swift action, but he usually
battered his way through to a reasonably logical conclusion in the end.
“You remember that rumor we heard before we left Brewster,” he said;
“about the Overland Central planning to get a railroad into Little
Ophir ahead of us?”
Dick nodded, and Larry went on.
“I was just thinking. The only way to reach Little Ophir with a
railroad track is up this canyon; and from what we’ve seen of the
canyon this far, you’d say that there isn’t room for more than one
railroad in it, wouldn’t you?”
“Wow!” said Dick, springing to his feet; “you sure said a whole
mouthful that time, Larry! But see here――we located this canyon line
first, years ago. If this is an O. C. survey that we’ve found, they’re
cutting in on us! Let’s hike back and tell Mr. Ackerman, right away. We
oughtn’t to lose a minute!”
Now haste was all right, and, in the circumstances, was doubtless
a prime factor in whatever problem was going to arise out of the
clash between the two railroad companies. But along with his Irish
blood――which wasn’t Irish until after you’d gone back three or four
generations――Larry Donovan had inherited a few drops of thoughtful
Scotch.
“Hold on, Richard, you old quick-trigger; let’s make sure, first,” he
amended. “Maybe we can trace these markers and find out where they lead
to. When we make our report we want something more than a wild guess to
put in it――not?”
The tracing, which took them back down-canyon, proved to be a regular
detective’s job. Great pains had evidently been taken to hide all
the markings of the strange survey. At each fifty measured feet they
stopped and searched; hunted until they found what they were looking
for. Sometimes it was a stake driven down level with the surface of the
ground and covered with a flat stone. In another place the marks would
be on a boulder, with another stone stood up in front of them to hide
them.
Roughly speaking, the newer survey paralleled the older, fairly
duplicating it in the narrower parts of the gorge, where there was room
for only a single line of track; which meant, as Larry pointed out,
that the first builders to get on the ground would have a monopoly of
all the room there was. As they went on, the chase grew more and more
exciting, and they began to speculate a bit on the probabilities.
“If this is an Overland Central line it must come in from the north,
somewhere,” Dick argued. “To do that, it will have to cross the
Tourmaline to get over to our side of things. We must watch out sharp
for that crossing place.”
So they watched out, making careful book notes of each freshly
discovered set of marks as they went along. Luckily, their chief had
early made them study the abbreviations used by the engineers in stake
marking; “P.I.,” point of intersection of a curve, “C――4.6,” a cutting
of four and six-tenths feet, “F――2,” a fill of two feet, and so on.
These figures Larry was copying into his note-book as they occurred on
the various stakes; and finally, squarely opposite the mouth of what
appeared to be a blind branch gulch coming into the main canyon from
the north side, they found one of the carefully hidden stakes with this
on it: “Tang. W.3-S.,P.I.,N.12-W.”
“Now what under the sun does all that mean?” Dick queried. Then: “Oh, I
know part of it. ‘Tang.’ means ‘tangent.’ But what would you make out
of ‘W.3-S.’?”
Larry made a quick guess.
“Maybe it is a compass bearing; ‘west, three degrees south.’ How would
that fit?”
Dick laid his pocket compass on top of the stake, and after the
swinging needle had come to rest, took a back sight in the direction of
the nearest up-canyon station.
“That’s just about the ticket,” he announced. “Allowing for the compass
variation, it’s a little south of west. The next is ‘P.I.’――that means
that it marks the intersection of a curve. Now for the ‘N.13-W.’ Say!
that’s another compass bearing. Hooray! Got you now, Mr. Right-of-way
thief. Right here’s where you’re going to cross the――――”
He was looking over at the opposite gulch as he spoke, and his jaw
dropped.
“Gee, Larry!” he exclaimed; “they can’t get a railroad in through that
place over there. That’s nothing but a pocket gulch. You can see the
far end of it from here!”
Once more Larry Donovan sat down and propped his chin in his hands.
This time he was trying to recall all he had ever known or heard of the
geography of the region lying to the north.
“Anywhere along about here would do,” he decided at length; adding:
“For a place for them to break in, I mean. Burnt Canyon ought to be
between twenty-five and thirty miles straight north of us, and the O.
C. has a branch already built to the copper mines in Burnt Canyon.
That gulch over across the creek is about where you’d look for them to
come out if they’re building south from the copper mines.”
“But they can’t come out there!” Dick protested. “Can’t you see that
there isn’t any back door to that pocket?”
There certainly didn’t look to be. The opposite gulch was narrow and
quite thickly wooded, and from any point of view they could obtain,
it seemed to end abruptly against forested cliffs at its farther
extremity. On the other hand, there were the stake markings pointing
plainly and directly across at it.
“What’s your notion, Dick?” Larry asked, after another thoughtful
inspection of the surroundings. “What’d we better do next?”
“I’ll say we ought to hurry right back to camp and report to Mr.
Ackerman.”
“Maybe you’re right; but I sort of hate to go in with only half a
report like this. I’d like to explore that gulch over yonder first.”
“Granny! Why, Larry! you can explore it from here――every foot of it!”
“It looks that way, I’ll admit. Yet you can’t be sure at this distance.
Here’s my shy at it: you go on back to camp and tell Mr. Ackerman what
we’ve found, so far, and I’ll hunt me up a place to cross the river and
go dig into that gulch a little. It’s sort of up to me, you know, Dick.
Your father took me out of the round-house wiping job and gave me my
chance to make good on this one. And I shan’t be making good all the
way through if I stop here.”
Whereupon, Dickie Maxwell argued. Besides carrying a cherubic smile
for the staving off of deserved reprimands, he owned a streak of
pertinacious obstinacy that was hard to down. Moreover, with the
evidence of his own two good eyes to back him up, he was fully
persuaded that an exploration of the pocket gulch, either singly or
collectively, would be just so much time and effort thrown away.
Larry didn’t argue; he merely held out. So, at the end of it Dick
grinned and gave in, saying, “Oh, well, you old stick-in-the-mud――if
you’ve got to go dig into that gulch before you can get another good
night’s sleep, let’s mog along and have it over with.”
“But you needn’t go,” Larry put in.
“Sure Mike I will, if you do. Pitch out and find your ferry, or your
ford, or whatever it is that you’re going to cross the river on.”
The crossing of the fierce little river presented somewhat of a
problem. One glance at the torrent slashing itself into spindrift among
the boulders was enough to convince even the tenderest of tenderfoots
that wading the stream was out of the question.
“I’ve got it,” said Larry. “We’ll hike back up-stream to where we saw
those big stones lying in the river. We can make three bites of it
there.”
It was a rough and rugged quarter of a mile up-canyon to the place
of the big stones. Two great boulders, each large enough to fill an
ordinary sitting-room and figuring as prehistoric shatterings from
the cliffs above, lay in an irregular triangle in the stream bed. The
leaps from one to another of these over the split-up torrent were a bit
unnerving to contemplate and Dick shook his head.
“You’re long-legged enough to do it, Larry, but I’m afraid I can’t,” he
said. “If we could make a bridge of some kind――――”
Larry was willing enough to go on the exploring expedition alone, but
he was unwilling to leave Dick behind for a mere physical obstacle.
Releasing the small stake-ax that he carried in his belt, he hacked
down a little pine-tree standing near and trimmed the branches. “It
won’t be much better than a tight-rope,” he grinned, “but we’re neither
of us very high-shy.”
Handling it together, they heaved the trimmed pine across to the first
boulder and Larry tested it.
“Safe as a clock,” he announced. “Come on.”
Dick balanced himself across, and then they pulled the tree over and
bridged the second chasm with it. This crossing made, the third proved
to be nothing more than an easy jump to the northern stream bank, and
a few minutes later they had covered the down-stream distance to the
gulch mouth and were entering the pocket.
They stopped and looked around. Even at this nearer view of it the
blind gorge appeared to be nothing but a blind.
“What do you say now,” Dick laughed. “Are you satisfied?”
“Not yet,” said Larry. “Take a little time off, if you like, and rest
your face and hands while I walk up to the head of this thing.”
“Oh, no; I’m still with you,” was the joshing retort; and together they
began an exploration of the pocket.
Even after they had found the astounding outcome the illusion as seen
from the opposite side of the river was perfect. A hundred yards from
its apparent end they still would have declared that the gulch stopped
abruptly against a solid cliff. But upon taking a few steps to the left
they found that what seemed to be the end of the pocket was merely a
jutting spur of the mountain completely concealing an extension of the
gorge which went winding its way beyond, deep into the heart of things.
And at the turn into this extension they found another of the new,
blue-chalk-marked location stakes; in plain sight, this one, with no
attempt having been made to conceal it like those on the other bank of
the river.
“I’m It,” Dick acknowledged, laughing again, but at himself this time.
“You can put it all over me when it comes down to sheer, unreasonable
thoroughness, old scout, I give you right. But how about it now? Do we
chase back with the news?”
“Still and again, not yet,” Larry demurred. “That report we’re going
to make to Mr. Ackerman oughtn’t to stop short off in the middle of
things. Maybe these stakes don’t mean anything but a preliminary
survey; the O. C. just sort of feeling the ground over to see what they
could do if they wanted to. But taking it the other way round, maybe
it’s the real thing――the working lay-out. What if they’ve already been
building down sneak-fashion from Burnt Canyon? What if they should
happen to be right around the next twist in this crooked gully, ready
to make a swift grab for the river crossing and our right-of-way in the
canyon?”
Dick groaned in mock despair.
“I see,” he lamented. “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve walked me
ten or thirteen miles on the way to Burnt Canyon. All right; let’s go.
I’m the goat.”
At that they pushed on up the crooked gulch and for a time it seemed
as if Dickie Maxwell were going to have the long end of the argument.
True, they were still finding the location stakes at regular intervals,
but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to find anything
else.
It was possibly a mile back from the gulch’s mouth, and in the very
heart of the northern mountain range, that they made the great
discovery. As they tramped around the last of the crooking gulch elbows
the scene ahead changed as if by magic. The crooking elbow proved to be
the gateway to an open valley surrounded by high mountains on all sides
save that to the north.
Over the hills in the northern vista a newly constructed wagon road
wound its way――they could tell that it was new by the freshness of the
red clay in the cuts and fills; and in the middle of the valley ...
here was what made them gasp and duck suddenly to cover in a little
groving of gnarled pines. Spread out on the level were stacks of bridge
timbers, great piles of cross-ties, neat rackings of steel rails,
wagons, scrapers, a portable hoisting engine――all the paraphernalia of
a railroad construction camp!
“Gee-meny Christmas!” Dick ejaculated under his breath, and that
expressed it exactly. Here was the advanced post of the enemy, with
everything in complete readiness for the forward capturing dash into
Nevada Short Line territory.
It seemed to be the exactly fortunate moment for a hurried retreat and
the sounding of a quick alarm in the home camp on the Tourmaline; but
now Larry Donovan’s streak of ultimate thoroughness came again to the
front.
“Nothing like it,” he objected to Dick’s frantic urgings in favor of
the retreat; “let’s make it a knock-out while we’re about it. We want
to be able to tell Mr. Ackerman the whole story when we go back; how
much material they’ve got here, and all that.”
Oddly enough, the little valley, with its wealth of stored material and
tools and machinery, seemed to be utterly deserted as they entered it.
They saw no signs of life anywhere; there was not even a watchman to
stop them when they crept cautiously up to the material piles and took
shelter among them.
“Quick work now, Dick!” Larry directed. “You take the dimensions of
those bridge sticks and count ’em while I’m counting the ties and
rails!” and they went at it, “bald-headed,” as Dick phrased it in
telling of it afterward, like a couple of fellows figuring against
time on a tough problem on examination day. And since there is said to
be nothing so deaf as an adder, neither of them heard a sound until a
gruff voice behind them said:
“Well, how about it? Do they check out to suit you?”
At the gruff demand they jumped and spun around as if the same string
had been tied to both of them; started and faced about to find a big,
bearded giant in a campaign hat and faded corduroys looking on with a
grim smile wrinkling at the corners of a pair of rather fierce eyes.
“Murder!” said Dick in a stifled whisper; and Larry didn’t say even
that much. For now they both saw what they had failed to see from the
down-valley point of view; namely, a collection of roughly built
shacks half hidden in a grove of pines, with a number of men moving
about among them.
“Spies, eh?” remarked the big man who had accosted them; then, with the
smile fading slowly out of the eye-wrinkles: “Who sent you two kids up
here?”
“Nobody,” Larry answered shortly.
“Ump!” grunted the giant. “Just doing a bit of Sherlocking on your own
account, are you? I suppose you belong to Herb Ackerman’s outfit, don’t
you?”
Larry made no reply to this; and Dick, taking his cue promptly, was
also silent.
“No sulking――not with me!” growled the big man harshly. “I can make
you talk if I want to. How many men are there in your outfit, and
whereabouts are they working now?”
Larry’s square jaw set itself like that of a bull-dog that had been
told to let go and wouldn’t.
“You’ll have to find that out for yourself,” he snapped.
The inquisitor held out a hand.
“Give me that note-book!” he commanded.
Now Larry Donovan’s methodical manner of thinking applied only to
crises where there was plenty of time. But at this curt demand thought
and action were simultaneous. With a quick jerk he flipped the
incriminating note-book over the demander’s head. Naturally, the man
dodged; and Larry saw the note-book alight and hide itself――as he had
hoped it might――on top of a high pile of the stacked cross-ties.
“So _that’s_ the way you’re built, is it?” rasped the big man, angered,
doubtless, by the fact that he had dodged something that hadn’t been
thrown at him. “We’ll take care of you two cubs, all right! Get a move
on――up to the shacks!”
Actuated by a common impulse, they both stole a quick glance down the
valley, measuring the chances for a mad dash for freedom. The man saw
the glance and stepped aside to bar the way.
“None of that!” he growled. “Get on up to the shacks!”
There seemed to be nothing for it but an ignominious surrender, so they
tramped away, with their captor keeping even pace with them a step
behind. They were halted before one of the shacks, a long, one-storied
building which they took to be the camp commissary or store-house. It
was; but one end of it was partitioned off for another purpose; and
after the padlocked door at this end had been opened and they were
shoved into the semi-darkness of the interior, they found themselves
stumbling over tools of all descriptions――picks, shovels, crowbars,
screw-jacks, blocks and tackle, coils of rope.
“Huh!” said Dick, “their tool-house.” And then they sat down on a pair
of the rope coils to consider the state of the nation.
“My fault,” was Larry’s first word. “If we had turned back when you
wanted to――――”
“Cut it,” Dick broke in. “We needed the stuff we were after――if we
could only have gotten away with it. What do you reckon they’ll do with
us?”
“Your guess is as good as anybody’s,” Larry said, with a wry smile.
“The one thing they’re not going to do, if they can help it, is to let
us carry the news of this thing back to our camp. And that’s just the
one thing we _must_ do, if it takes a leg.”
They had plenty of time in which to consider ways and means.
Immediately deciding that nothing could be done or attempted in
daylight, they wore out the long afternoon plotting and planning――to
mighty little purpose.
Their prison was a makeshift, to be sure, but it was pretty effective.
There were no windows; what little light they had came through the
unbattened cracks in the walls. There was but the one door, and that
was padlocked on the outside. And while there were plenty of excellent
tools for digging a tunnel, the heavy plank floor securely nailed down
made that expedient impossible.
For hours they were completely ignored. Nobody came near their end of
the building, and apparently there were no camp activities of any kind
going on outside. Larry guessed at the explanation, which proved to be
the right one.
“Those men we saw are only the Overland Central engineering party,”
he hazarded. “They’re waiting for their working force to come in from
somewhere up the line. That is why everything is so quiet.”
In the plotting and planning they soon discovered that their tool-room
prison was partitioned off at the end of the commissary or store.
Through the cracks in the partition they could see into the other part
of the building. It appeared to be locked up and deserted, and was half
filled with canned stuff, sides of salt meat stacked up, a lot of hams
in their canvas covers, a wagon-load or two of flour in sacks, barrels
of potatoes and cabbages――provisions of all sorts.
“If we could only get through this partition some way,” Dick suggested,
“the rest of it would be easy――with half a dozen windows to choose
from.”
They had been gradually working down to this through the afternoon;
like the man, who, after looking in all the likely places for his lost
cattle, began to look in the unlikely ones; and being the mechanical
member of the partnership, Larry set his wits at work. The partition
was built of up-and-down planks spiked to two-by-fours at the bottom,
in the middle and at the top. The two-by-fours were on their side of
the wall, and while daylight remained, Larry made a careful inspection
of the different planks, one by one, to ascertain if they were all
nailed solidly.
His search was finally rewarded. One of the planks was not nailed
quite home, or perhaps it had warped a bit after the nailing was done.
Anyway, there was a little crack between it and the two-by-fours; and
with a pick taken from the tool pile Larry cautiously pried the board
loose at the bottom and in the middle, leaving it hanging by the two
nails at the top. Then――the Donovan thoroughness coming into play
again――he bent the projecting nails flat so that the board could be
pulled back into place until the time should come for it to be pushed
aside.
“Somebody might happen to come into the storeroom and see it bulged
out,” was the explanation he gave Dick while he was twisting and
toiling over the nails. “I don’t mind jamming my fingers a little.
There’s no use sweating your head off making a chain, and then leaving
one link in it so it will pull in two at the first jerk.”
With the way of escape to the larger room thus provided, they waited
to see what would happen at suppertime. Much to their relief, the thing
they were hoping for did happen. A little past sunset the door was
opened and a substantial camp supper was thrust in to them. After that,
there was another wait for darkness; and when they were able to see the
stars through the wall cracks they swung the hanging plank aside and
squeezed through the narrow slit into the store-room.
Here they had to grope and feel their way among the piled-up stores,
and once Dick stumbled and fell over a box of the canned stuff,
falling, luckily, upon a heap of sacked flour and thus saving the crash
that might have betrayed them. Down at the farther end of the building
the ruddy light of a camp fire was shining through the cracks, and
toward this flickering beacon they made their way cautiously.
Through the wall cracks they could both see and hear. The members of
the Overland Central’s advance engineering party were sitting about the
fire, talking and smoking, and the two boys soon heard enough to tell
them that Larry’s guess had been right; the engineers were waiting for
the arrival of the construction crew.
Since it was still too early to make any further move towards an
escape, Larry and Dick settled themselves, each at his spying crack.
For what seemed to them an interminable time the circle around the fire
remained unbroken; and when the men finally began to drop out of it
they went only one or two at a time to the bunk shack on the opposite
side of the camp area.
None the less, since all things mundane must have an end, there did
come a time at last when there were only two of them left; the big
chief and another whom the boys took to be the boss bridge-builder. It
was the bridge-man who said:
“About them two kids you caught this afternoon; what are you goin’ to
do with ’em?”
“Been thinking about that,” said the giant. “It won’t do to let them
go back to Ackerman and spill the beans. What we’ve got to do is to
let Ackerman come on with his transitmen and get past the mouth of the
gulch, going up. Then, before his graders come along, we can cut in
behind him and grab the canyon before he catches on. Besides, we’ll
have the advantage of being between him and his working force.”
“But you can’t very well keep the kids here,” the other man objected.
“They’ll be missed and looked for.”
“No; we won’t keep ’em here; we’ll send ’em up to Burnt Canyon with the
teams going back to-morrow. We can hold ’em on some sort of a trespass
charge until the job is put across. And about their being missed:
that’s up to Ackerman. If there’s any worrying to be done, we’ll let
George do it.”
“Do you know who the boys are?”
“No; but I have a sneaking notion that one of them is General Manager
Maxwell’s son.”
“Sufferin’ Mike!” said the bridge-man; “and you’d take a chance lockin’
_him_ up?”
The big chief chuckled.
“There’ll be a row kicked up about it, I suppose, and Mr. Richard
Maxwell’ll be pretty hot under the collar. But everything’s fair
in love or war――or in business. We’ve got to have that canyon
right-of-way. Finished your pipe? All right; we’ll turn in. This
waiting game makes me as sleepy as a house cat in daytime.”
But the bridge-builder had another word to add and he added it.
“If these boys belong to Ackerman’s party――and I s’pose there’s no
doubt of that――it won’t do to let ’em get loose. Are they safe, in that
tool-house?”
“As safe as a clock. There’s only the one door, and I’ve told Mexican
Miguel to take his blankets and make himself a shake-down for the night
just outside of it. He’ll hear ’em if they make any stir. But they
won’t. Being boys, they’ll sleep like a couple of logs.”
After the two men had gone across to the bunk house the boys still
waited, though now it was with impatience curdling the very blood in
their veins, since they realized that every minute was precious if the
canyon steal was to be prevented. Again and again Dick’s excitement
yelled for action, but each time Larry pulled him down with a “Not
yet,” until at length Dick was sure it must be nearly midnight.
When Larry finally gave the word they crept to a window on the side
of the building opposite that which faced the camp area, pulled out
its single fastening nail, slid the sash, and in a jiffy they were out
under the stars and free. Careful to the last, Larry turned and softly
closed the window after they were out, “Just so the first man up in the
morning won’t know that we’re gone,” he whispered. “It’s pinching me
now that such minutes as we can save even that way are going to count.”
“Which way do we go?” Dick asked, being completely turned around in the
darkness.
“Not any way, until after I’ve got that note-book of mine,” said Larry
the thorough; adding: “I hope the big chief didn’t go back to look for
it after we were locked up.”
Treading as lightly as story-book Indians, they stole around the
commissary building, and at the tool-room end of it they had a glimpse
of the sleeping sentinel stretched out before the padlocked door. A
quick little run took them to the material piles, and Larry climbed
to the top of the cross-tie stack and was overjoyed when he found his
note-book lying just where it had lodged.
[Illustration: They had a glimpse of the sleeping sentinel stretched
out before the padlocked door]
“Now we’re on our way,” he announced, scrambling down; and the
stumbling retreat in the darkness was begun.
It seemed to both of them that they had blundered along for uncounted
miles before they heard the welcome thunder of the Tourmaline growling
among its boulders in the main canyon. Arrived at the gulch mouth,
however, they hardly knew which way to go. Up-stream there were the big
boulders and the pine-tree bridge, but tight-rope work over a boiling
mountain torrent in the dark of the moon didn’t appeal much to either
one of them.
“No,” said Larry; “we can’t risk that, and, besides, it would take us
just that much out of our way. It’s down-stream for us, and we’ll have
to take a chance on finding some way to cross.”
Deciding thus, they turned to the right and clawed their way down the
canyon. It was a stiff job in the darkness, and there were spots where
the canyon cliffs leaned in so far that they had to wade in the edge of
the torrent; but they hurried on and finally came out of the mountain
hazards and into the foot-hills, where the going was easier and they
could make better time.
At that moment the big construction camp, where Chief Engineer Ackerman
had his headquarters, was two good miles below the mouth of Tourmaline
Canyon. Luckily, the railroad grade at this particular point was
closely paralleling the river, so when the two boys came opposite the
camp they had no difficulty in locating it. A few lusty shouts aroused
the camp, and some of the men turned out and backed a wagon into the
stream, and thus the two Marathon runners were ferried across.
Three brief minutes in the tent of the chief sufficed for the giving of
the alarm, and Larry’s heart swelled with――well, not exactly with envy,
perhaps, but at any rate with eager emulation and the hope that he,
too, might some day rise to such heights of efficiency, when he saw how
quickly the chief grasped the situation and how capably he met it.
A few quietly given orders to his assistants and to the foremen
crowding to the tent flap started the checkmating move, which was
simple enough now that the warning had been given. With every man in
the well-disciplined force falling into line, the graders were sent
forward at once to take immediate possession of the threatened point in
the canyon, the obvious counter-move being to have the Short Line grade
established and occupied before the Overland Central could make its
capturing dash across the river.
After the orders had been given and the men were hustling the
preparations for the forward move, Chief Ackerman turned to the pair of
leg-weary scouts.
“You fellows have done well――mighty well――for a couple of first-year
cubs,” he said in hearty commendation. “Now go ahead and tell me all
about it.”
Larry let Dick do the telling, contenting himself with producing the
note-book with its carefully penciled record. As in the chase of the
runaway engine, when there was credit to be given, Dickie Maxwell did
the square thing.
“If you make any report of this to headquarters, Mr. Ackerman,” he
wound up, “I wish you fix it so as to put Larry in where he belongs. He
made me go on when I thought it wasn’t any sort of use. If it hadn’t
been for him we wouldn’t have had anything to report but that survey on
this side of the river, and――――”
“Oh, let up, will you?” Larry growled in sheepish confusion. “You talk
a heap too much, Dick, when you get started.” And then to the chief, in
still more confusion: “I hope you won’t do anything that Dick says, Mr.
Ackerman. He was in it just exactly as much as I was. He knows it, too,
but he’s always throwing off that way on me.”
Mr. Ackerman smiled and didn’t say what he would or would not do. But
a few days later, after the report had gone to the headquarters in
Brewster, General Manager Maxwell tossed the chief’s opened letter
across his office desk to his brother-in-law, Mr. William Starbuck, who
happened to be with him at the moment.
“You see what Ackerman says,” he remarked. “It seems that we have
won the first round in the tussle for the right-of-way in Tourmaline
Canyon, and that we owe the winning chiefly to that Donovan boy――you
remember him; son of John Donovan the crippled locomotive engineer. I
told the boy he’d have to show what was in him if we gave him a chance
on the new work, and he seems to be doing it. There’s good timber in
that Donovan stock.”