AT TUNNEL NUMBER TWO
“Zowie!”
A crash like that of a falling house, a burst of grayish green dust
and smoke from the opposite side of the canyon, and a hurtling shower
of stones varying in size from pebbles to pumpkins, made the two young
fellows, one carrying a boxed surveying instrument and the other the
tripod and staff, take hasty shelter behind the nearest boulder.
“Ding-bust those fellows over there――they don’t care a whang who
happens to be in the way of their ding-busted rock-flinging!” Dickie
Maxwell complained plaintively, peering out at his side of the
sheltering boulder to see if there were another crash and a volley due
to come. “Did they give any warning at all? I didn’t hear anybody yell
‘Fire in the rock.’ Did you?”
Larry shook his head.
“You wouldn’t hear ’em, anyway――with the river making such a thundering
racket,” he averred. “Just the same, what you say names ’em right. They
don’t seem to care much what they do to us.”
For a couple of weeks the two boys had been “living easy,” as Dick
phrased it. After the day of flood swampings at Pine Gulch they had
been sent out ahead with Blaisdell, one of the assistant engineers, to
drive stakes and carry chain on a correction of one of the original
surveys in the upper canyon, and for that length of time they had been
out of touch with the construction force and the industrial battle that
was going on from day to day.
During that time the race between the two competing construction armies
had gone on neck and neck, as you might say. The Overland Central
had completed its bridge-trestle in the lower narrows, and while its
track-laying gangs were still half a mile or more behind those of the
Short Line, its graders and rock men were scattered all the way along
in advance; and since the O. C. survey had the higher location on the
north bank of the river, the blasting seriously interfered with the
Short Line work on the opposite and lower bank.
“If they were only decent enough to have some regular hours for firing,
like white folks!” Dick went on. “But the way it is, you never can tell
any hour or minute when they won’t open up and fling rocks at us!”
“Mr. Bob Goldrick claims that it is a part of their plan to hamper
and delay us,” Larry put in soberly. “I suppose they’re calling it
‘business,’ but I’ll say it’s crooked business. Reckon we’re safe now
to make another run for it?”
Dick picked up the instrument box and peeped around the corner of the
boulder.
“Nothing stirring,” he reported. “Are you ready? All right――let’s go!”
They made a dash up the rough track, heading for a shallow cut which
ran through the toe of the next mountain spur, and they had barely
gained the cutting when another crash bellowed upon the opposite slope
and a buckshot shower of sand and pebbles rattled down upon them.
“That’s right, old top; keep it up!” said Dick grittingly,
apostrophizing the unseen O. C. hard-rock men. Then: “I wish Mr.
Ackerman would let us get back at ’em once in a while. But he makes us
run up a red flag when we’re going to shoot.”
“The chief is right, though,” was Larry’s considered reply. “We can’t
afford to put ourselves on a level with those highbinders on the other
side of the canyon.”
“Huh! that doesn’t sound much as if you were spoiling for a fight,
Larry. Where’s your good Donovan nerve gone to?”
“Never you mind about the Donovan nerve; it’s all right. But I’m not
chasing around to find a chance to scrap with somebody. I’m out here
this summer to learn all I can about the engineering game――and so are
you. And fighting a lot of plug-uglies who won’t play the game fair
isn’t any part of our job. Just the same――Gee-_wop_! but that was a
close one!”
It was. Another blast, fired from so far around the curve ahead that
they couldn’t even see the smoke of it, hurled a stone as big as a
water bucket high in air to drop it just in front of them and fairly
between the rails of the track over which they were hastening. Its
alighting place was not more than a dozen feet distant, and it snapped
the cross-tie upon which it fell as easily as if the heavy timber had
been a pine lath.
The two boys dropped their burdens and went to roll the stone from the
track where it lay a menace to the first material train that should
come along. It was so big and weighty that it took their united efforts
to edge it over the rail and start it rolling down the embankment.
“Lucky it didn’t hit a rail,” was Larry’s comment, as they went on. “It
would have broken the steel as easily as it did the tie.”
“Seems as if there ought to be some law to hold those fellows down!”
said Dick wrathfully. “If father would only come up here once and see
what they’re doing to us!”
Larry chuckled quietly.
“You want to forget that you’re the general manager’s son, Dickie; that
doesn’t get you anywhere at all out here in the wild and woolly. But as
for that, you can bet your father knows all about what’s going on up
here; and I’ll bet he isn’t leaving a thing undone to stop this O. C.
pirate business. Our job is just to stick it out and beat ’em fairly.”
“Yes; and get shot with a rock doing it!” Dick grumbled. “Thank
goodness, there’s the tunnel; let’s run for it before they turn loose
on us again.”
Around the curve ahead lay the present “end-of-track” of the Short
Line. Viewed from a distance it looked more like a snow-break than
a tunnel or the entrance to one. A heavy plank fence guarded it on
the river side, and this was buttressed with piles of loose stone.
This plank bulwark was not a snow fence, however; it was a protection
against flying rocks from the blasting on the other side of the canyon.
To facilitate the removal of spoil――the tunnel diggings――the track had
been laid directly up to the mouth of the black hole in the mountain
side; but this track was now empty. Off at one side, and also sheltered
by the heavy plank bulkhead, was the shed which held the air-compressor
and its steam boiler.
Goldrick, the young engineer who was in charge of the tunnel driving,
was waiting for the boys when they came up with the surveying
instrument. Taking advantage of a lull in the blasting across the
river, a few lines were run; and after the stakes were driven to mark
them, the two boys were at liberty to take shelter in the tunnel――which
they promptly did when the firing recommenced on the slope opposite and
above.
“_Bing!_――Sounds a good bit like a sure-enough battle,” said Dick, as a
hurtling stone missile slammed against the outside of the stout wooden
bulkhead screening the tunnel portal.
But Larry Donovan, looking up at the tunnel roof and its rather light
timbering, was thinking of something else.
“Say, Dick; it’s a pity we lost that car-load of tunnel timbering in
the river,” he broke in, referring to an accident of the day before
in which a supply of braces and planking for shoring the tunnel had
been derailed and the timbers swept away in the swift flood of the
Tourmaline. “I don’t like the looks of this clay overhead. You’d say it
wouldn’t take very much to bring it down on us.”
The dangerous “looks” were apparent enough, even to an untrained eye.
For the first ten or fifteen feet of its plunge into the mountain the
tunnel excavation ran through clay mixed with broken rock. Of course,
it was the intention to timber this part of it solidly; but with the
material still lacking, the tunnel drivers were merely doing the best
they could, propping the shaky roof temporarily with such braces as
could be had, and going on with their work.
“Well, I guess we don’t have to stand squarely under it,” Dick offered;
and with that they moved into the black bore, coming shortly to the
heading where the clamor of the air-driven drills made a din like that
of a boiler shop.
Living over the events of that terrible morning afterward, they both
remembered that it was the ear-splitting noise that drove them back
to the tunnel mouth; the noise and the closeness of the air in the
heading. As yet, the ventilating fan had not been put in operation――as
it would be when the depth grew greater――and the exhaust air from the
drills served only to make the air a half-stupefying mixture for anyone
coming into it from the out-doors.
For the time the blast firing on the opposite slope had ceased, and
above the booming thunder of the river they could hear the chatter and
clink of the air drills on the O. C. grade. Just at this point the
“enemy” railroad was forced to blast out a long rock cutting to make a
shelf for its track, and the firing――with short intervals for drilling
and loading the holes――was fairly continuous.
Standing in the mouth of the tunnel and looking outward there was
little in sight to betoken the activities going on in the depths of the
big bore. Careful for the safety of his men, Mr. Ackerman had billeted
the off-shift in a camp lower down the canyon. Thus, save at the
shift-changing hours, and at such times as the material train or the
spoil train was coming or going, the only outside workers were the man
who ran the air-compressor and his fireman.
From their refuge behind the plank bulkhead Larry was once more looking
up at the inadequately propped clay roof.
“I’m telling you, Dick, that stuff is plenty dangerous, and it’s
getting more so,” he insisted. “If you’ll watch it, you’ll see little
bits of the clay crumbling off every now and then. I wish to goodness
we could get some timbers up here and place them.”
“So do I,” Dick agreed. “If that roof should take a notion to fall
down――――”
The sentence wasn’t finished because the breath was lacking wherewith
to finish it. As if he had suddenly lost his mind, Larry made a
plunging football tackle on his lighter companion, shooting him out
between the rails of the track and falling with him. At the same
instant there was a sort of grunting rumble behind them, and when they
looked back a stifling horror rose up to choke them. In the twinkling
of an eye the tunnel mouth had disappeared and its place was occupied
by a shelving mound of clay.
“Oh, good mercy!” Dick gasped; “the men――they’ll stifle to death in
there! And Mr. Goldrick’s in there with them! What shall we do?”
There was reason enough for the horrified gasp of helplessness. Apart
from the two men in the compressor shed there was nobody to call upon;
no rescue force available. True, there were the O. C. rock quarriers
on the other side of the canyon; but even if they could have been
summoned, they had no means of crossing the torrenting river.
Larry was the first to recover from the shock of paralyzing horror. Air
was the first requisite for the imprisoned men ... if only the pipe
which furnished the air for the drills was not broken――――
But it was broken. A rock in the slide had fallen upon it, and it was
snapped off short in the threads of a coupling. The compressor was
still running, but the air was merely wasting through the broken pipe.
Seeing this, Larry made a bolt for the telephone in the compressor
shed, giving the alarm to the two machine tenders as he dashed in. It
was the fireman who killed the telephone hope.
“Wire’s been dead for the last two hours!” he shouted. “Reckon a rock
from the O. C. blasts got it somewhere.”
Larry was dismayed afresh, but not beaten.
“We’ve got to get air in to those men, some way or other!” he raved at
Dick, who had followed him over to the compressor shed. “Four of us
couldn’t begin to dig ’em out before they’ll choke to death!”
“But how?” Dick wailed.
It was then that Larry Donovan had a warming rush of thankfulness for
the necessity which had forced him to earn his way through the Brewster
High School by working nights in the railroad machine shop. He knew
tools and machinery, and how to make use of both.
“Pipe!” he bawled at the compressor man; “got any inch pipe?”
“Plenty of it――pipe and tools,” was the heartening answer.
Taking command merely because there was no one else to take it, Larry
quickly organized his force of three and buckled in with it himself.
A length of pipe was dragged from the rack, and with a coupling and a
plug loosely screwed in to stop the end of it, they ran with it to the
blockading slide. By sheer man-strength they were able to ram it three
or four feet into the clay, but no more.
“Another coupling and plug!” Larry ordered; and with the rear end of
the pipe thus protected so that it could be hammered upon, he drove
it with a block of wood and a sledge hammer, thus gaining two or three
feet more.
“It’s stopped going――you can’t make it!” called Dick, who was
supporting the sag of the pipe and steadying it against the blows of
the sledge.
“We’ve got to make it!” Larry’s retort was undaunted, but he was pretty
nearly at the end of his resources. Nearly, but not quite. Summoning
his helpers he found a cross-tie with a square end, and using this as a
battering ram the three of them were able to gain another foot.
It was while the rescue pipe was still going in, though now only
by half-inches, that a most welcome sound thundered in their ears;
namely the storming exhausts of a locomotive laboring up the grade and
announcing the upcoming of the material train. They thought this would
mean more help; but when they looked back down the track it was only
to be disappointed. The train was made up of the construction engine
pushing a single flat-car which was loaded with timbers, and there was
no crew save the two enginemen. At the same moment, as if by malice
aforethought――only of course it was not――the blasting began again on
the other side of the canyon.
Under a hail of small stones the train came up, to be flagged to a stop
as it was over-running the out-thrust length of pipe. Larry, still in
command, was grappling fiercely with a new idea that had come sizzling
into his brain. Here was power enough; a mighty ram that would put
their puny efforts with the sledge hammer and the butting cross-tie
miles out of the race.
“Blow your whistle and see if you can’t make those fellows up yonder
understand that we’re in trouble!” he yelled up at the engineer in the
cab; and when the whistle signal had been given, and had gone unheeded:
“Ease ahead a little until the car straddles the pipe ... that’s
right――hold up; that’s far enough,” and down he went on his back under
the timber car to try to make some sort of a pushing hitch on the pipe
of rescue.
The hitch was made, after a fashion, with a bit of chain ransacked out
of the compressor shed scrap heap, and a vise hastily detached from the
compressor man’s repair bench to make a clamp-hold on the pipe to push
against. But just as Larry was crawling out to give the engineer the
word to move ahead slowly, bang! came another blast from the opposite
cliff, and a flying fragment of stone, no bigger than a man’s fist,
came hurtling across the river.
“Look out!” Dick shouted; and the engineer, glancing out of the cab
window and seeing the stone, ducked promptly. But the stone didn’t hit
the cab. As if it had been a projectile fired out of a carefully aimed
cannon, it struck the locomotive’s whistle and snapped it off short at
the dome-head.
In the uproar of escaping steam that followed, nobody could make
himself heard, and Larry didn’t try. Racing around to the rear end of
the flat-car he uncoupled it from the disabled engine, making frantic
signals to the engineer to let his machine drop back down the grade out
of harm’s way. Ideas were coming thick and fast now, and though his
power plant was smashed, he had one more alternative ready and waiting
to be tried out.
“Cut off your air, start the compressor, and fill the storage tank!”
he yelped at Beasley, the compressor engineer; then to Dick: “You and
Johnnie Shovel help me, quick!――we’ve got to take a chance on these
flying rocks!”
The first half of the new expedient was the extra-hazardous one; it was
to connect the air-pipe line running from the compressor storage tank
to the drills in the tunnel――and which had been broken by the slide――to
the air-brake piping of the loaded timber car which was standing just
as the retreating engine had left it, a-straddle of the half-driven
rescue pipe. This connecting job was not a specially difficult one, but
it took them all out in the open, and the blasts in the high cutting on
the opposite cliff were still thundering at irregular intervals.
“Stand by to hand me what I need,” was Larry’s order, his former
machine-shop experience coming handsomely into play; “that big wrench
first――that’s it――now the first half of the union joint; and you screw
the other half on the car pipe, quick, before they touch off another
shot up yonder! That’s the idea; now hold the pipe up here so that I
can make it on――good; we’ve got her!”
Dick Maxwell was not what you would call mechanically gifted, but
some little inkling of Larry’s new notion was beginning to soak in.
As matters now stood, the air-brake mechanism of the timber car was
connected with the drill compressor so that air pressure turned on
from the storage tank in the compressor shed would actuate the brakes
exactly the same as if the car had been coupled to a locomotive. So
far, it was all clear enough; and Larry quickly demonstrated the manner
in which the new power was to be applied and utilized.
“Get a couple of ties and block the wheels so that the car can’t run
back!” he shouted. Then to Dick: “You bring the tools and crawl under
with me; I may need help.”
Beneath the car, with its stout armoring of timbers, they were safe
from the intermittent showers of rock that were coming over and could
work swiftly and to good purpose. Lying on his back under the car
Larry swiftly transferred his chain hitch from the framework of the
car itself to the lever connecting the air-brake piston with the
brake-beam. Thus, by alternately applying and releasing the brake,
with a corresponding shift of the vise-and-chain hitch each time, the
life-giving pipe could be rammed forward into the slide.
“Good work――bully good work!” Dick cried enthusiastically, when the
full size of the clever expedient dawned upon him. “You’ve got her dead
to rights, now! You do the signal yelling, and let me turn the air on
and off.”
By this time the pressure in the storage tank had been pumped up to its
maximum and the safety-valve was hissing shrilly. Larry, lying under
the car, gave the word, and as the air whistled into the brake cylinder
of the car, the lever moved out, the hitch held bravely, and the pipe
was thrust into the clay bank the full length of the stroke.
Deftly readjusting the hitch, Larry yelled again, and again Dick gave
the needed twitch to the inlet valve. “She’s going――going right along!”
the hitch-shifter called out from his hard bed on the cross-ties. “Now,
then; once more!”
There were quite a number of the “once mores” before a welcome tapping
on the buried pipe coming from the other side of the slide barrier
signaled success.
“We’re through!” Larry announced; “they’re rapping on the other end of
the pipe. Now a bit more quick work and we’ll have it!”
The job this time was to transfer the life-giving air stream from the
brake mechanism of the car to the rescue pipe, and since there was
plenty of air hose available, as there always is on any rock-drilling
job, this was soon accomplished. Next, the question arose as to whether
or not the imprisoned men had removed the plug which Larry had screwed
loosely into the pipe end to keep it from being stopped up with clay in
the ramming process.
For a minute or so they tried to tell the prisoners to unscrew the
plug, tapping on the pipe and using the Morse alphabet――which they knew
Goldrick understood――to spell out the message; but when they failed in
the efforts to read the answering taps they took a chance and turned
the air pressure on slowly. Immediately a shrill hissing told them
that the pipe was open, with the air blowing through into the shut-in
tunnel, and a series of rapid taps came to voice the gratitude of the
men on the other side of the barrier.
Fortunately, about this time there came a lull in the bombardment from
the O. C. rock cutting, and they were able to move about more freely.
“Circulation is the next thing,” Larry snapped out. “You can’t
ventilate an air-tight hole just by pumping air into it. If they’ll
only happen to think of disconnecting the drills, so that the bad air
can come out by the broken pipe――――”
A quick dash to the place where the broken pipe had been pulled
out of the slide showed that, as yet, nobody inside had thought of
disconnecting the drills. So once more they had recourse to the tap-tap
telegraphing. Over and over again, Dick, who knew Morse better
than Larry did, rapped out his message, “d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t t-h-e
d-r-i-l-l-s,” with Larry on his knees before the hole where the broken
pipe had come out, listening for the sounds which would tell him that
wrenches were being used at the other end of things.
The sounds came finally, and with them a shot-like blast of escaping
air that filled the listener to his shoe-tops with earth and sand.
“Hooray for our side!” he shouted, spitting clay with the words. “I’ve
got my mouthful; but they’ve got theirs, too. Now for the picks and
shovels!”
Whether or not the four of them, with two of the four obliged to
attend to the steam-driven air-compressor and its boiler at least
occasionally, could have made much of an impression on the giant
slide was a question that didn’t have to be answered――luckily for the
shovelers. Brannigan, the driver of the disabled construction engine,
had used his own good judgment in letting his machine slide away down
the grade out of danger from the flying rocks. Since it was all a
descending grade to the construction headquarters camp at Pine Gulch,
he had simply kept on going until the camp was reached.
Here the news of the disaster at Tunnel Number Two was quickly acted
upon. Another locomotive was run out, a train of two flat-cars was
coupled on, and with these loaded with the hastily aroused men of the
night shift, a record-breaking dash was made up the canyon.
So it came about that Larry and Dick, and their two willing but weary
helpers, were barely at the beginning of the big digging job when the
train darted around the down-canyon curve, and a few minutes later as
many men as the shallow tunnel cutting could hold were eating their
way into the slide like a hundred-armed steam shovel.
And in some way, nobody seemed to know just how, word had gotten to the
quarriers on the other side of the river; for now the big O. C. rock
cutting was lined with sober-faced onlookers, and never a blast was set
off while the rescuers were at work.
“That’s the first really human thing they’ve been known to do since we
began scrapping with them,” said Dick, standing aside with Larry to be
out of the way of the digging battalion. “I’d like to shake hands with
that foreman up yonder, whoever he is; I’ll be switched if I wouldn’t.
He’s some――――”
The interruption was a great shout, raised when the first of the
shovelers broke through the barrier, his shovel clashing against that
of one of the drilling squad doing his bit on the other side of the
slide. A minute later the prisoners, grimy and sweating, were hauled
out, one by one, Goldrick, the young engineer, being the last man to
come――like a good ship’s captain refusing to leave his post until his
men were all safe.
[Illustration: A minute later the prisoners were hauled out]
“By George!” he gasped, wringing first Larry’s hand and then Dick’s. “I
sure had a bad quarter of an hour in there when that roof dropped down
and shut us in, and I realized that there were only you two and Beasley
and Johnnie Shovel out here to do anything! The air was right bad to
begin with, and inside of half an hour we all had our tongues hanging
out. Who was it who thought of driving that pipe through the dump?――and
how in Sam Hill did you do it?”
Dick was the one who told the story of the pipe-driving expedient, and
neither it, nor Larry’s inventive genius, lost anything in the telling.
“I shouldn’t have known any more than a clam what to do when we found
that the telephone was dead,” he wound up. “But Larry, here, was right
on the job from the jump. All we did was to take orders from him and
rush it through.”
Young Goldrick’s eyes were suspiciously bright when he turned to the
big, curly-headed fellow and said, “Where do you get all this good
stuff, Larry?”
Larry Donovan, as uncomfortable as possible under the praise that Dick
had been heaping upon him, blushed like a girl, though his face was so
dirty and grimy that the blush couldn’t show much.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he evaded; “I’ve always been messing around with
tools and machinery and things. And it wasn’t anything, anyhow. You
folks inside there had to have air, and have it quick――any baby would
know that; and there was nothing to do but to pile in and give it to
you. So we did it.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” laughed Goldrick; “nothing to it, at all; no
brains needed to try pushing the pipe through with the engine when the
hammer wouldn’t drive it any farther, or to invent the air-brake scheme
when the engine got knocked out! You’re too blooming modest to draw
your own breath, Larry!”
“That’s all right,” said Larry, shifting uneasily from one foot to
the other. “All I’m asking is that you――and you, too, Dick――don’t
paste it on too thick when you report to Mr. Ackerman. I don’t want
him, or Mr. Maxwell, to get the idea that I’m understudying for a
movie-stunt-puller on this job. I’m here to earn a Donovan chance,
if I can, and the spot-light doesn’t agree with me; makes me sort of
sick at my stomach when I get too much of it.”
Quite naturally, since a stunt-puller’s word goes as it lies, as you
might say, both Dick and the young engineer promised to let Larry down
easy in the matter of report-making.
Nevertheless, that same evening, just as the boys were about to roll
themselves in the blankets in their bunk tent at the Pine Gulch camp,
the telegraph operator came over from his shack office with a freshly
written message which he gave to Larry. It was dated at Brewster, and
this is what it said:
“To Lawrence Donovan,
“Care H. Ackerman, Chf. Engr.,
“Pine Gulch.
“Congratulations upon your good work at Tunnel Number Two.
The Short Line Company owes you something and it will pay its
obligation. You have your chance and you are making good.
“R. MAXWELL,
“_General Manager_.”