“GANGWAY!”
“Ye-e-e wow!” Dick Maxwell, fighting sleepily to get his arms free from
the tightly rolled blanket, yawned cavernously. Then: “Whoosh!――Larry,
old scout!――wake up!”
The blanket roll in the other bunk stirred like a chrysalis about to
burst and let loose whatever sort of bug it contained. Then a curly red
head appeared, followed by a pair of stretching arms.
Dick sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.
“Say, Larry; what do you know about this!” he exclaimed, staring at the
face of his wrist watch. “By the great horn spoon――it’s five o’clock!
five o’clock _in the afternoon_!”
It was the day after the day of trampings, and old mother Nature had
been taking her toll with a vengeance for the drafts made on her in
the long hike to and through and around and beyond the valley with a
doggish name. Straight through from a little past midnight the two
hikers had slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, and even now they
both felt that they could stand still more of it.
“Ah-yah!” gaped Larry, matching Dick’s yawn. “Say, Dickie; somebody
must have put us to bed last night. I sure don’t recollect doing any of
it myself.”
“If anybody should be interested enough to ask, I’ll say that was some
tramp we had yesterday; s-o-m-e tramp!” Dick put in.
“Uh-huh,” Larry agreed. “You’re talking in mouthfuls. Wonder if the
news we brought did any good?”
“Here’s hoping. But everything seems mighty quiet around here now――if
we’re supposed to be doing any hustling. I don’t even hear the
compressor running.”
After they crawled into their clothes and turned out, the quietness
of the camp was fully explained. First, they saw that the work in the
big rock cutting just above the camp had apparently been abandoned――as
it was, temporarily――and a track passage around the obstacle had been
obtained by means of a hastily built wooden trestle standing, as the
Overland Central trestle did at the point of that road’s entrance into
the canyon, with its bents in the river bed.
Over this trestle the track had already been laid; and while they were
staring at the miracle of accomplishment which had been wrought in less
than a double circuit of the clock-hands, the 717, with Brannigan at
the throttle, came storming up the canyon, pushing two flat-cars loaded
high with cross-ties――pushing them right along, too, for there was time
only for a hand wave from the little Irishman before the two-car train
shrilled around the curving trestle and disappeared to sight and sound.
“Hooray!” cried Dick, swinging his cap; “that means that we’re still in
the ring and going strong! Let’s get a bite to eat and then go on ahead
and report for duty.”
Luckily for them there was a cook left at the nearly deserted
hard-rock camp, and the “bite” to which they presently sat down
transformed itself into a hearty meal, as it had need to be, since
it took the place of the skipped supper of the night before, and the
breakfast and dinner of the day through which they had slept.
This very necessary preliminary attended to, they set out to follow the
lately laid track up the canyon. At every step they marveled. There had
been a great deal of hurry work done during the summer on the race up
the Tourmaline, but nothing to equal this drive which had gone on while
they slept. “Miraculous” was the only word that fitted. In the short
time that had elapsed the track had been carried around the canyon
obstacles and up to and into Yellow Dog Park, and the rush――judging
from the number of material trains that passed them as they hurried
forward――was still on.
Among the sandstone hills in the circular valley they came upon the
building army, augmented now by every available man on the large
construction force. In the thick of the work turmoil the boys found
their chief.
“Glad to see you fellows,” said the driver of men briskly. “Did you
have your sleep out?”
“We sure did,” Dick grinned.
“All right; we’re calling it a battle, and I’ll make you two my
orderlies. Dick, you may run up ahead and see how the supply of
cross-ties is holding out. Report to Goldrick if it’s running short.
Larry, you chase around until you find Smith, the wire chief, and
tell him we’ve got to have those arc-lights in commission within an
hour. Then find Lonergan and see if his carbide flares are ready to be
distributed. Skip for it――both of you!”
That was the introduction to a night’s work that both Dick and Larry
thought they should never live long enough to forget. Almost as if by
magic, it seemed, electric wires were strung, and with the coming of
darkness, arc-lights and carbide flares blazed out all along the line.
Under an illumination that was little short of daylight the gangs of
track-layers, working now at the close of a twenty-four-hour shift
in relays of two hours on and one hour off for rest, sprang to their
task. Like clock-work the material trains came up from the supply camps
below, cross-ties and rails, spikes and fish-plates, bolts and nuts
were distributed, and the incessant clanging of the spike mauls was
like the din of a busy blacksmith shop.
It was during this night of tremendous toil――the second night for the
men who were driving the job――that a track-laying record was broken
for that entire section of the West. Fortunately, the ground between
the sandstone buttes was comparatively level and but little grading
was needed. But for that matter, the “leveling” could be done later
by reworking crews. The need of the moment was for speed; for the
construction of a usable track of some sort――any sort; and under the
combined efforts of a master mind and many tireless and skilful hands
the usable track was materializing by leaps and bounds.
“I’m telling you, Larry, that this is one something to stick down in
your little old note-book!” Dick exclaimed enthusiastically, in one of
the few breathing spells their work of order-carrying permitted. “I
wouldn’t have missed seeing this night’s work, and being a part of it,
for anything under the sun.”
“Here too,” Larry agreed. “It’s great! And doesn’t the chief stand out
like the biggest man you ever saw? My heavens, Dick――if I thought I
could ever grow a brain big enough to handle a job like this――――”
“Of course you can――and will!” Dick asserted, with comradely loyalty.
Then to a grimy-faced lad, one of the spike distributors, who came
running up: “Right-o: what is it now, Jimmie Dowling?”
“The big boss does want to be seeing you both,” was the spike boy’s
message; and Dick and Larry hurried down the line to the temporary
field headquarters where the chief was sitting on a spike keg, with a
couple of planks on trestles for a work table.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you fellows since this drive began,”
was the greeting they got. “Pull up a couple of those empty kegs and
sit down. Now that we have a few minutes I want you to tell me all
about that scouting expedition you made yesterday. Give me the details.”
Dick did the telling, or most of it, boiling the report down into the
fewest possible words to save the chief’s time.
“A thoroughly good, workmanlike job,” was the hearty commendation to
follow Dick’s narrative; and then, with the shadow of a smile lurking
in the sober gray eyes: “We won’t say anything about the fellow named
Jones. There was really no good reason why you should have suspected
him or doubted his story. Now then, a few more particulars about that
O. C. supply camp you found at the head of the valley; about what
amount of material have they on hand at that point?”
It was Larry who answered this question, and he fished out his
note-book and showed the sketch he had made of the camp and the route
of the O. C. across the valley. Much of his work during the summer had
been the checking of material, and he was able to form a reasonably
good estimate of how much track a given quantity of cross-ties and
rails would lay.
“I’d say they have, maybe, two miles of ties and rails piled up in that
camp,” was his venture at the quantities.
“Not more than that?”
“No, sir; I think not.”
“That is good news; better than I expected to hear. If we can make the
crossing and get ahead of them in the upper canyon, we’ll beat them
yet. Now about that rock cutting you say they’re working in above their
camp; how big is it?”
Again it was Larry who answered.
“It’s a heavy cutting; twelve or fourteen feet deep on the high side, I
should say, and considerably over a hundred feet long. We couldn’t get
near enough to make an estimate in cubic yards; but I’d say they have a
week’s work there, at the very least.”
“Better yet,” said the chief. “In a week’s time we ought to be leaving
them well behind.”
“But when we come to their track here in this valley, they’ll block the
crossing for us, won’t they?” Dick asked.
“No doubt they will try to. Whether they will succeed or not is another
matter. Now I want you two to do another little scouting stunt. Follow
our line up the valley and post yourselves somewhere near the O. C.
track. Stay there for the remainder of the night and be prepared to
report on what you’ve seen.”
Reluctant as they were to miss any part of the joyous work battle,
the two “scouts” obeyed the new order cheerfully, trudging out ahead
of the track-layers and soon leaving the most advanced guard of the
workers behind. It was a clear night, or rather early morning, with the
stars shining brightly to show the ghostly shadows of the surrounding
mountains rising like the sides of a great bowl to enclose the shut-in
valley. A few turns among the hills served to efface even the sounds
of the work battle, and the wilderness stillness, after the clamor and
din, was almost deafening.
“What do you reckon the chief wants us to find out, particularly?” Dick
asked as they plodded along.
“Everything that goes on, I guess,” Larry answered. “The O. C. people
know that we’re coming; they’ve found it out long before this time; and
they’ll be rushing material out ahead as fast as they can. Because,
you see, if they block the track for us, they’ll have to block it for
themselves, as well.”
That was a good guess, for, even as he made it, they heard the rattle
of a train, and by sprinting a bit they reached the crossing point in
time to see it go thundering past. There were three flat-cars loaded
with ties ahead of the pushing engine, and by the light of Dick’s
pocket flashlamp Larry noted the fact in his memorandum book――the fact
and the time.
Beyond this they had little to do save to record the passing of
an occasional train; loaded ones going to the front, and empties
returning. In the idle intervals they had a chance to study the lay of
the land at the point where the clash, if there should be one, would
occur. The crossing place was in a small level flat surrounded by the
sandstone hills. As nearly as they could determine, the crossing would
be practically at right angles; the O. C. track running nearly north
and south and the Short Line east and west. From studying the lay-out
they began to speculate as to how the crossing would be made; whether
the O. C. rails would have to be sawn in two, or a regular set of
crossing-frogs put in.
“Frogs, I’d say,” asserted Larry, who was the mechanical end of the
partnership. “It would take too long to saw the rails; and the other
way all we’d need to do would be to build the frogs to fit a gap in
their line, take up two of their rails, and drop the made-up crossing
into place. That wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, if we were all
ready for it beforehand.”
At the first peep of dawn the noises of the work battle began to be
audible again; and shortly after that the tie-distributing teams made
their appearance. The two boys got up and stretched themselves. It had
been quite an hour or more since a train had passed on the other line,
and as yet there were no signs of a coming attempt to block the way for
the up-coming force.
“Gee!” said Dick, shivering in the morning chill, but more from his
excitement, “here we come shoving along――and the way is still clear. Do
you reckon those fellows are going to miss the chance of blocking us,
after all?”
Before Larry could reply, the answer to the question came lumbering out
of the southward hills; and it promptly extinguished the implied hope.
A three-car train of steel rails was backing slowly down the Overland
Central track and in the half light of the dawn the boys could see that
there were men on each of the cars; quite a number of them.
Since it was a loaded train coming in the wrong direction for loaded
trains, there was no doubt as to its destination and purpose. Evidently
the “enemy” had had scouts out, too, and knew to the exact moment when
the time had arrived for the obstacle placing.
Dick and Larry held their post of observation, which was behind a
sandstone boulder, until the train rumbled down into position. Instead
of stopping on the crossing point, however, it ran a little way past,
stopped, reversed, and ran up again repeating this pendulum movement
slowly and deliberately in such a fashion as to keep the crossing place
covered for a greater part of the time with a moving train.
“I don’t see any particular use in that,” Dick said, after the pendulum
swing had been duly established. “Why don’t they stop it squarely in
front of us?”
“Fixes us so we can’t do anything at all while they keep moving――can’t
hit a lick,” Larry grunted. “Besides, they can cover more ground that
way; stops us from trying to build around in either direction. Let’s go
find Mr. Ackerman and make our report. There isn’t going to be anything
more doing here until we get up with our track.”
Accordingly, they walked down the grade until they found the chief.
After they made their report of the number of trains that had passed
during their watch they were told to go and get breakfast.
With the morning meal out of the way they hurried back to the front.
In the short space of time they had been absent the scene at the
crossing had changed decidedly. The Short Line track had been carried
up to within a few feet of the opposition right-of-way, and teams
were already going around the pendulum-swinging train with loads
of cross-ties. But by far the largest part of the building army
was halted. Around a dozen camp-fires the track-layers were eating
breakfast and drinking hot coffee which the cooks were bringing up in
huge tin cans.
“Looks plenty peaceful, so far,” Larry remarked. “Wonder what we’ll try
to do?――rush ’em?”
Dick shook his head――rather regretfully, it must be admitted.
“Nope; Mr. Ackerman isn’t built that way. You haven’t been with him
all summer without finding that out, have you? But we could do it,
hands down, if he’d only give the word. There are only twenty-seven
men on that blocking train, counting the engineer and fireman, and we
outnumber them at least a dozen to one.”
“What do you mean by rushing them? Take the train away from ’em and run
it off to one side?” Larry queried. “That would be as easy as rolling
off a log.”
“Oh, yes; easy enough. But you’ll see; Mr. Ackerman won’t do it.
Naturally, in a scrap of that kind, somebody’d be bound to get hurt,
and the chief won’t stand for that.”
That was all right; but short of the “rushing” there didn’t seem to be
anything to be done. So long as the moving train was see-sawing back
and forth over the point where the crossing-frog, already made up and
bolted together and lying in readiness beside the track, must be put
in, nothing but a forcible clearing away of the obstruction seemed to
promise any degree of success.
Larry looked across at the moving obstacle and scowled.
“_I’d_ rush it in a minute, if I were in the chief’s place!” he
gritted. “They’ve got no right, legal or any other kind, to hold us up
this way; they’re just outlaws! Every man we’ve got on the job would
jump to get in on the fight, if Mr. Ackerman would only turn his back
and shut his eyes for a minute or two.”
That was Larry, mind you; the fellow who usually thought twice before
he acted once, and who was, generally speaking, as mild-mannered and
peaceable as big-muscled fellows commonly are. Perhaps it was an
outburst of that fighting temper he had once spoken of to Dick; the
temper that would still, under sufficient provocation, come boiling up
out of that pit of bitterness he had tried to describe.
“Would you?” said Dick; then, a bit thoughtfully: “Perhaps I should,
too. And yet ... maybe Mr. Ackerman’s right, at that, Larry. When you
come right down to it, this whole railroad scramble isn’t worth the
life of one single man of ours――or of theirs. Some of those fellows on
the steel cars are armed; you can bet on that; and――――”
He broke off because just then another act in the drama was getting
ready to stage itself. Down the line of the Overland Central a light
engine was coursing swiftly, and for a moment it seemed as if it must
collide with the blocking train. But it came to a stand a little way
short of the pendulum swing, and from the engine step a big man in
soiled brown duck and laced leggings swung off and came on foot down
the track side.
“Look who’s here!” Dick muttered morosely――“Grissby――the O. C. chief.
You’d say he has a nerve, wouldn’t you?――to come walking in here on us
at a time like this!”
“I’ll say so!” growled Larry; and as they were turning away the big,
bearded intruder came up, smiling grimly.
“Hello, boys,” he said, “where’s your boss?”
Before they could reply their own chief came across from one of the
breakfast fires.
“How are you, Ackerman?” was the newcomer’s greeting. “Thought I’d run
down and congratulate you on the fine piece of work you’ve been doing
in these last two days. You’ve broken all the track-laying records in
this neck of woods. But, as you see, it doesn’t do you any good.”
The Short Line chief shook his head, matching the grin of triumph with
a quiet smile.
“You can’t block this crossing indefinitely, Grissby, and you know it,”
he returned, and the two boys stood aside, listening with all their
ears. “This is our right-of-way, located and filed upon long before
your people ever thought of building to Little Ophir, and we can prove
it in court. As you probably know, injunction proceedings have already
been begun. You’ll have to move out when a United States court officer
comes up here with the judge’s order.”
“You are forgetting ‘the law’s inevitable delays’,” the visitor put in,
in genial mockery. “Long before your court order gets here we’ll be
laying track into Little Ophir.”
“Not with the amount of building material you have up ahead of this
blockade of yours――and which you can’t add to so long as you are
obstructing your own track,” was the smiling retort. Then: “I’ll be
obliged to you, Grissby, if you’ll turn Blaisdell, my instrumentman,
and his helper loose. I’m taking it for granted that you’ve got them
locked up somewhere.”
The “enemy” chief laughed.
“It’s already done. Your two men will rejoin you shortly. Sorry to
have inconvenienced you, but we couldn’t well let them go back to you
to carry the news of our bit of strategy. Here’s hoping you’ll have
a pleasant wait for your court officer. So long.” And he walked back
along the track, mounted his engine and was trundled away.
A short time after this visit of Grissby’s there was a warm little
conference held in Mr. Ackerman’s office tent. Every member of the
engineering staff, including Larry and Dick, was present, and the
younger men, led by the first assistant, Goldrick, were unanimously
and enthusiastically in favor of “rushing” the blockading train;
overwhelming its crew by sheer force of numbers and ditching the train
to get it out of the way.
“They are simply trading upon your well-known objections to the use of
the strong arm, Chief,” was the way Goldrick put it. “There are only
twenty-seven men, all told, on that blocking train, and we can put them
out of business in just about as many seconds, if you’ll say the word.
Those buckies on our track force are ripe for a scrap and they’ll go in
with a laugh.”
“No,” the chief objected soberly. “As I’ve said many times before,
we can’t afford to take the law into our own hands in a resort to
violence. If we can outwit them in any way that won’t involve a
hand-to-hand battle, we’ll do it. But I haven’t yet heard any of you
suggest the means.”
It was at this point in the argument that Dick nudged Larry.
“Speak up and tell him!” he urged.
The ex-machine-shop apprentice turned red in the face, swallowed hard
once or twice, and spoke in a sort of husky whisper that sounded to him
like the loudest possible shout.
“You mean if we could get that train out of the way without a fight, it
would――it would be all right, Mr. Ackerman?” he stammered.
“What’s that, Larry?” said the chief.
Larry repeated his question; adding: “I was just thinking――――”
“All right; go on. We’re listening.”
“It’s――it’s just something Dick and I were talking about after Mr.
Grissby went away. We were looking at that blocking engine as it came
along, and the engineer leaned out of his cab window and asked us if
we didn’t want to climb up and take a ride on a real railroad――just
joshing us, I guess.”
“Well?”
“If you’d let us――or me ... it’s this way, you see. Part of the time he
stops on the crossing, but mostly he lets the train drift on a little
way past it before he reverses. If we could do something to make him
run a little farther out of the way each time, and then something
should happen to his engine so he couldn’t reverse――――”
“We’re still listening,” said Chief Ackerman; and they were, all of
them, by this time.
Naturally, this urging to go on made the inventor of schemes more
embarrassed than ever. But he had gone too far now to back out.
“I was just thinking: if Dick and I should loaf around out here by
the crossing, and that engineer should josh us again and ask us to
ride――――”
“You’d accept the invitation,” Goldrick cut in. “What then?”
“Then, after a little while――so it wouldn’t look too much like a put-up
job, you know――if our track-layers should sort of suddenly get busy and
make out as if they were going to change our line and make the crossing
a few hundred yards farther down the O. C. track....”
“By George!” exclaimed Jones, Goldrick’s alternate on the rock-bossing;
“that’s an idea, Mr. Ackerman!――to keep that blocking train dodging
between two possible crossings.”
The chief nodded.
“Yes; one of the Donovan brand of ideas,” he said half musingly. “The
principal question is, Larry, will your part of it work? Can you do
what you have in mind without getting a broken head for yourself or
Dick?”
“Yes, sir; I think so: I’m almost sure it can be done.”
The sober-eyed man who had to carry all the responsibility considered
for a moment. Then he said:
“All right; go to it. I’m not asking you what you mean to do; I
don’t care particularly to know――officially. But hold up a minute; I
shouldn’t think it would need two of you on that engine. You’d better
stay here with us, Dick.”
Dick looked up quickly.
“Is that an order, Mr. Ackerman?”
“N-no; not exactly. It is merely a bit of good advice.”
“If it isn’t an order, I’ll go with Larry. The job may need somebody to
do the talking act, and that’s a long ways my best hold.”
When the conference adjourned some few things were done to lull
suspicion on the part of the blockading force――if there were any
suspicions to be lulled. Three of the Short Line gangs were set at work
straightening and leveling the track so hastily put down in the night;
but most of the men were told to take it easy, which they did, sitting
around the dying breakfast fires and idling as though they had been
given orders to rest until the messenger from the Brewster court should
come on the scene with the majesty of the law in his pocket.
Meanwhile Larry and Dick strolled up to the crossing as a couple
of fellows with less than nothing to do and sat down on a pile of
cross-ties within a few feet of the O. C. track. Every time the
blocking train jingled past in its slow, back-and-forth sentry beat
the O. C. engineer, a big, stubbly-bearded man who looked, as Dick
said, like a twinkly-eyed bandit, leaned out of his cab window and had
something to say to them. Each time Dick grinned up at him and handed
back joke for joke; but at such moments Larry appeared to be studying
the under parts of the locomotive――especially those directly under the
cab floor, or foot-plate.
“It’s exactly as I hoped it would be,” he said in low tones to Dick,
after the train had passed for the third time; “just a plain, ordinary
stop-cock, the same as we have on our engines. Opens with a rod running
up through the foot-plate, like one of the water hydrants on your
lawn――you know; you pull on the rod and she opens. If it’s opened with
a quick, hard jerk, the crank handle will most likely pull past the
center, and if it does, it can’t be shut off unless somebody crawls
down under her. And nobody’s going to do that while she’s in action,
believe me!”
“Um,” Dick grunted; “strikes me it’s sort of lucky that you had to
earn your way through school by working nights on engines in the
Brewster shops――lucky for the Short Line, I mean. _I_ wouldn’t have
found out all that if I’d sat here studying her for a week.”
“Say; you two kids look mighty lonesome――hangin’ ’round here with
nothin’ stirrin’,” joked the burly engineer at his next time of
passing. “Why don’t you swing up and be sociable and tell us what
you-all’re aimin’ to do?”
“You’d better be careful about taking us on,” laughed Dick, as they
climbed to the cab in response to the repeated invitation. “We’ll do
you up if we can, you know.”
“Ho! ho!” chuckled the giant on the driver’s seat. “I reckon we can
take a li’l’ chance on that. What are you, anyway?――water boys for that
big gang of yours?”
“Well, you might call us that,” said Dick pleasantly. “In some ways you
might almost call us water specialists: we use a lot of it, anyhow;
some hot and some cold.”
Larry took no part in the joking talk. His gaze was fixed upon a ring
in the iron floor of the cab; a loose ring that was threaded through an
eye in the end of an iron rod that came up through a hole in the floor;
rod and ring jingling musically as the engine went bumping over the
rail joints.
Twice the slow back-and-forth journey had been made, and still Dick was
industriously exchanging mild chaffings with the “twinkly-eyed bandit”
on the driver’s box. Then suddenly the fireman broke in.
“Lookout, Bill!” he shouted to the engineer, “they’re gettin’ ready to
rush us!”
The alarm was not entirely unwarranted. Between two minutes there had
been a swift remobilization of the Short Line track-laying forces,
followed by a quick resumption of the strenuous activities of the night.
Instantly the big engineman’s free hand shot out to grab Dick’s collar
and he dropped the joking mood like a cast-off garment.
“Now you know why I tolled you up here with us!” he growled menacingly.
“I happen to know who you are, kid; you’re the Short Line general
manager’s son, and if that gang over there tries to pull any of the
rough stuff on us, you’ll get it in the neck, and get it first――savvy?”
Being totally unexpected, it was the sharpest trial that had ever come
to Dickie Maxwell; but he met it like a man――and with a laugh.
“I’m not hiding behind my father――not so that you could notice it,” he
retorted cheerfully. “And, if you like, I can tell you what our men are
getting ready to do. They are going to give you two crossings to watch
instead of one.”
That was what developed in almost less than no time at all. As if every
move had been planned in advance――as it actually had――the Short Line
army began to throw down a track in a wide curve to come at a crossing
some four or five hundred yards below the original survey. When this
object made itself understandable, someone in authority on one of the
steel cars of the blockading train yelled out an order, and the big
engineer promptly lengthened his pendulum swing run to make it include
the new location as well as the old, at the same time quickening the
speed a bit.
On the second run down the line toward the new point of hazard, Larry
shot a quick side glance at Dick, giving the eye signal that they had
agreed upon. The engineer was now busy with his throttle and brake, and
since he could hardly do three things at once, he apparently failed to
notice that Dick was edging his way slowly toward the right-hand engine
gangway.
The climax came as the locomotive was lumbering past the busy army of
workmen laying its double line of steel down to the ostensible new
crossing; the fortunate moment when the engineer, who had given his
train a trifle too much headway, was jamming the throttle shut and
twitching at the brake-handle to make a stop.
Quietly, and so quickly that he could hardly be missed, Dick swung
out of the gangway and dropped to the ground; and at the same instant
Larry stooped, thrust two fingers through the jingling ring on the cab
floor and gave a mighty upward jerk. A second later, under cover of the
thunder-bellowing, deafening roar that the jerk had set off under the
engine, he leaped from the gangway and was immediately swallowed up and
lost in the thronging crowd of Short Line workmen who surrounded him
and rushed him to the rear with yells of triumph.
For a few tumultuous moments confusion worse confounded wrought its
own sweet will in the ranks of the “enemy.” Larry’s simple plan, so
successfully carried out, had been to “kill” the blockading engine at
the point farthest removed from the real crossing, and his careful
study of the under parts of the locomotive had been to determine the
all-important fact that the blow-off cock of the boiler, situated
directly under the cab, could not be closed from the cab if it were
once opened wide.
This was the clever expedient for a bloodless getting rid of the
lawless obstruction, and it worked like a charm. With the engine boiler
losing its water as fast as a hundred-and-sixty-pound steam pressure
could blow it out, it was only a matter of seconds before the engine
was completely out of commission. Inside of a minute the twinkly-eyed
bandit and his fireman were frantically dumping the fire to save the
boiler from burning its crown-sheet; the blocking train was safely and
permanently “stalled” out of the way; and the Short Line track-layers,
abandoning the new crossing site as one man, were hurling themselves
with a mighty shout of “Gangway!” upon the job of installing the
already prepared crossing-frogs before the crew of the stalled train,
now hot-footing it up the track, could reach the O. C. camp and bring
reënforcements.
* * * * *
It was in the evening of this same day, a day in which another goodly
stride ahead had been marked down to the credit of the Short Line
extension, that one of the material trains forging to the newest
front carried a freight caboose as a trailer. In the caboose, which
was serving for the moment as the private car of General Manager
Maxwell, the chief of construction, riding the new line with his
ranking officer, told the story of the brief but brilliant crossing
fight――which was no fight at all.
“Blew the water out of their engine, did he?” laughed the general
manager, when the story was told. “Being Dick’s father, I suppose I
shouldn’t have let him go with young Donovan on any such hare-brained
adventure if I had been on the ground; but it is all right: I should be
sorry if he had taken your offer to stay behind. And perhaps, as you
say, his loose tongue was needed to keep those enginemen from thinking
too pointedly about other things. Dick could talk himself out of jail
if he were given a fair chance: it’s the thing he does best. Where are
the boys now?”
“I’ve sent them ahead with a small gang of axmen to clear the
right-of-way. We’re in timber for a couple of miles up there.”
“You mean they’ve gone along to help?”
The chief of construction smiled.
“Not exactly as helpers. Those two boys have been doing fine work up
here all summer, Mr. Maxwell, as you know. Being boys, they’ve had time
to think up a number of schemes that have helped us out wonderfully in
this race against time; and this notion of the way in which the O. C.
blockade could be broken this morning rather capped the climax. When
I asked the boys what sort of a reward they’d like to have, they both
begged for the same thing: to be put in charge of a small gang to do
something on their own initiative.”
“Humph! So you’ve made them bosses, have you? You’re not spoiling them,
are you? They’re only children, as you might say, both of them, as yet.”
“I know; in some ways they are just boys; fine, straightforward,
American boys, equally ready for a fight or a frolic. But in other ways
they have matured wonderfully in this summer of hard work. And this
bit of bossing ambition is perfectly natural. They both know that if
they are to grow, they must learn how to handle workmen. I thought you
wouldn’t care if I should give them a little chance along that line.
They’ve earned it.”
“All right,” said the general manager crisply; “but don’t push them too
fast for their own good; that’s all. Dick is a bit rattle-brained; but
I don’t know so much about young Donovan.”
“Donovan is making good,” said the chief engineer warmly; “all kinds of
good. The only fault I can find with him at all is the fact that he has
brought over a good lump of class consciousness with him from his shop
experience. But there is some hope that he may outgrow that.”
But just how much Larry had improved the chance given him at the
beginning of the summer by the stocky little gentleman sitting in the
ill-lighted caboose with his chief engineer no one was to know until a
day two weeks later――
But of that, again, more in its proper place.