THE WINNING GOAL
“Oh, gee!” said Dickie Maxwell, plaintively, sitting on the edge of
his tent bunk and tugging at a water-stiffened lace-boot to get it on,
“only a few more days of the bully old railroad fight and then we’ll be
back again in civilization, wondering if we really lived this big, free
life here in the mountains for three solid months, or only dreamed it.”
Larry Donovan, struggling into his working corduroys, was staring out
through the open tent flap at a scene which was so soon to be a thing
of the past for Dick and himself.
For background there were the high, forested steeps of the Eastern
Timanyonis; in the middle distance the brawling Tourmaline, at
this point in its course little more than a noisy creek, split the
wide valley in halves. Between their sleeping-tent and the river,
and farther down the slope were the shacks and tents of a railroad
construction camp, with great piles of cross-ties and rails strung
beside a newly laid track. And across the river ran the line of another
railroad, over which busy material trains were shifting and pushing
forward to the front.
“I’ve been thinking about the wind-up, too,” Larry said soberly. “It’s
been a great summer for me, and I owe it to you, Dick. If you hadn’t
persuaded your father to let me come along――――”
“Owe nothing!” scoffed Dick; “cut it out, old scout――cut it all out. I
wouldn’t have been one, two, three on this ‘cubbing’ job if you hadn’t
been along. Besides, you’ve paid your way; you’ve been batting a fine,
large average in this game with the O. C., Larry Donovan, and you know
it――you, with your ‘I was just thinking’.”
“The race game, yes; it’s about over now,” Larry put in thoughtfully.
“Only three miles to go to reach the gold camp, and we’re neck and neck
with ’em on the final lap. But we’re going to beat ’em. They’ve got
that big rock-cutting to finish two miles this side of Ophir; and our
grade’s just about ready for the steel.”
“Wait a minute: don’t you be too sure!” Dick warned. “There’s one more
hurdle for us to jump――up yonder at the mouth of Blind Mule Gulch.”
“That mining claim, you mean?”
Dick nodded.
“Yep. I heard Mr. Ackerman and Jones talking about it last night. It
seems that those two men who were here yesterday own a placer claim
right where we’ve got to cross. By mining law every placer claim
has its right to drainage――unobstructed drainage――to the nearest
watercourse; that’s the Tourmaline, in this case. These men say that we
can’t put our railroad across their drainage gulch.”
“Shucks!” said Larry; “a railroad trestle won’t interfere with the
drainage!”
“Of course it won’t. But that doesn’t make any difference; these
men say it will, and they’ve gone into court about it; sued for an
injunction, or something, to stop us.”
Larry looked up suddenly.
“Dick, do you know I don’t believe there’s any real placer claim
there? You remember, when we were up here clearing the timber from our
right-of-way three weeks ago after the crossing fight, there wasn’t
a sign of anything doing in that gulch. I believe it’s another O. C.
trick to delay us. If they could tie us up for just one single day,
they’d stand a chance of beating us yet.”
“That is exactly what Mr. Ackerman said,” Dick threw in. “But we can’t
prove that there isn’t any gold in that dry creek bed. Anybody can
take up a mining claim anywhere in these mountains and go to work on
it. The chief told Jones that our lawyers had looked it up, and there
really is a claim on record, filed in the names of these two men, Shaw
and Bolton. Of course we wouldn’t hurt anything running our track
across it, just as you say. We’re planning to bridge it from bank to
bank with a trestle, and the timbers are already cut and fitted and on
the ground. Besides, Mr. Ackerman says we’ve offered to pay them any
reasonable damages. But they won’t even talk about it.”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Larry asked.
“From what was talked last night I sort of suspect we’ll go right on
building our railroad――and fight it out in the courts afterward. Our
right-of-way was surveyed across that gulch mouth years ago, and if it
comes down to the straight right and wrong of it, those miners are the
real trespassers.”
Larry glanced at his wrist watch. It was eight o’clock; a tardy hour
for them to be turning out. But they had been up late the night before,
helping to hurry material to the front, and the chief had given orders
to let them sleep.
“We’d better be getting breakfast and showing up on the job,” he said;
and together they sought the mess tent.
Over the breakfast of bacon and fried potatoes the talk swung back to
the rapidly nearing end of their summer outing.
“I suppose you’ll be getting ready to go to college in a week or so,
now, won’t you?”――thus Larry, with his eyes on his plate.
“Yep; that’s the way it’s doped out for me.”
“Do you know what college you’re going to?”
“Oh, sure; it’ll be father’s college――finest old technical school in
the country. Didn’t lose a single football game last year, and only two
in the baseball series. Some snappy record, that, _I’ll_ say.”
Larry grinned.
“Is that the way you stack up the good points of a college?”
“Why not?” Dick argued. “Fellow has to make high grades in that school
or he can’t make the teams. That’s iron-clad, and, naturally, it means
high stuff all around. No boneheads need apply. But what are you going
to do, Larry?”
“Ump,” said Larry, still with his eyes on his plate, “it’s ‘back to the
farm’ for me. I was wiping engines in the Brewster round-house when
your father gave me this vacation, and in a little while I reckon I’ll
be wiping ’em again.”
“Gee!――I wish you were going to Old Sheddon with me,” said Dick; and he
meant it. “Can’t you make it, some way?”
Larry shook his head.
“No can do, Dickie; not a chance in the world. You know how we’re
fixed at home; there are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little
Jack――they’ve all got to have some sort of a show to get their
schooling. And Dad can’t swing it alone on a crossing watchman’s pay.”
“You’ve been sending them your wages this summer?”
“Sure Mike; otherwise I couldn’t have come.”
“Well, it’s a rotten shame,” Dick protested. “You’ve got more good
engineering stuff in your old bean in a minute than I’ll ever have
in mine, if I live to be a hundred years old.... Through with the
grub?――all right; let’s go.”
It was a mile from the supply camp to the point up the valley where the
track-layers were speeding the race, and from one of the hill-shoulder
curves they could see the approach to Little Ophir, the goal to which
both railroads were racing. At the next turn they came up with the
track force driving the work; many men and teams, a supply train
inching ahead as the cross-ties and rails were needed, the long-drawn
blasts from the engine’s stack playing a deep undertone to a medley of
shouts and cries and the clanging of spike-mauls.
Just before they reached the actual front the two boys saw a man coming
across from the opposite side of the river, where a scene similar to
the Short Line industrial battle was staging itself on the O. C. grade;
a heavy-set man roughly dressed and looking something like a retired
range-rider. Reaching the river he crossed it, leaping from boulder to
boulder in the stream bed and coming straight on to climb the Short
Line embankment just ahead of Dick and Larry.
Keeping pace with this big-bodied stranger the two were close upon his
heels when he strode in among the workmen and asked brusquely for the
boss. A foreman pointed out the chief engineer coming down the track,
and a moment later the rough-looking stranger was confronting the man
he was looking for.
“Your name’s Ackerman?” was the blunt query; and when the Short Line
chief nodded: “Well, mine’s Grimmer, and I’m a deputy sheriff of Butte
County. I’m servin’ papers on yuh in the case of Shaw and Bolton
’g’inst your company; injunction forbiddin’ yuh to trespass on this
here minin’ claim. Here yuh are,” and he thrust a folded paper into the
chief engineer’s hand.
Mr. Ackerman, as the boys heard, made a dignified protest.
“You are probably doing your sworn duty, Mr. Grimmer, and for that
nobody can blame you,” he said. “But――――” it was at this point that
he opened the paper and glanced at it. “Why, this isn’t an injunction
notice at all; it’s merely a trespass warning issued by a justice of
the peace. How is that?”
“It’ll hold all the water you need, just the same!” rasped the
stranger. “You’re trespassin’ right now on that Shaw and Bolton minin’
claim. I’m givin’ yuh peaceable notice to stop work and call your men
off, see?”
Again the mild-mannered chief tried to protest.
“We can’t do that merely upon notice from a justice,” he objected. “We
are entitled to our day in court, and until we have had it, and have
failed to prove our right to build this railroad in this particular
place, only an injunction order from a court of competent jurisdiction
can stop us.”
“I’ll show yuh if we can’t stop yuh!” said the big deputy grittingly.
“You come along with me――you’re under arrest!”
“Not without a better warrant than this trespass warning,” was the
quiet but grim refusal. “When you want to arrest me or any member of my
force, you must come prepared with the proper legal papers; otherwise
you don’t get anywhere, Mr. Grimmer.”
“Huh!――you’ll resist an off’cer o’ the law, will yuh?”
“To that extent; yes. Now if you will excuse me: I’m pretty busy this
morning.”
It was a dismissal, polite, but straight to the jaw, as Dick would
have said, and it delighted the hearts of the two boys who stood aside
listening. The one thing that had gone most against the grain with them
during the summer-long struggle with the Overland Central had been the
fact that their chief took the various bullyings of the rival railroad
too good-naturedly.
The deputy sheriff went away swearing, facing about and making for the
river crossing. At that moment Goldrick came up and Dick and Larry
heard him say:
“Pulling the law on us, are they?”
Chief Ackerman shook his head doubtfully.
“I’m not at all certain about the legal part of it; not sure that the
man wasn’t merely acting a part. We’re warned off this mining claim; by
some justice of the peace in Burnt Canyon――which is strictly an O. C.
town. That fellow was trying to arrest me, but he had no warrant and
showed no badge of authority. What about those two placer miners?”
“They haven’t shown up, and there is nobody at the claim shack now,”
Goldrick returned. “I’ve just been up there and the place is deserted.
It’s a ‘frame-up,’ pure and simple; and these fellows, Shaw and Bolton,
are merely men of straw set up for the O. C. pirates to hide behind. I
have told the bridge carpenters to go ahead setting that trestle in.
If those placer fellows were intending to make a real fight, they’d be
here on the ground.”
Dick and Larry moved away. Another material train had just come up,
and they went to check the rails as they were unloaded. From the new
position they had a fair view of the activities on the other side of
the valley. Two locomotives were shifting cars on the O. C. tracks, and
far down the valley they could see the smoke of another train. Dick saw
it first and called Larry’s attention to it.
“More material, I suppose,” said Larry, when he had seen the smoke of
the upcoming train.
Dick shaded his eyes with his hand and looked again.
“Yes, I guess so.... No, by jinks! It’s an engine and a single
passenger car!”
“Huh!” Larry grunted; “running passenger trains already, are they?” and
he went on with his checking.
Having less of the checking responsibility than Larry, Dick turned to
watch the new train as it ran up into the thick of the activities on
the other side of the river. When it stopped he saw a dozen or more men
drop from the steps of the single car, form in a loosely ranked group,
and start toward the river. And, though the distance was nearly half a
mile, he could see, quite distinctly, the glinting of the sunlight upon
gun-barrels.
“Look, Larry!” he called hurriedly; “we’re in for something different
now. That bunch is coming for us, and they’ve all got guns!”
While they stood looking, and the men who were unloading the steel
paused to look, also, the armed group reached the river margin and
began crossing on the stepping-stones that had served as a bridge for
the man Grimmer. Mulcahey, the Irish foreman who was directing the
unloading of the steel, leaped from the flat-car and went stumbling and
running up the track, shouting a warning as he ran.
What followed was accomplished so swiftly that Larry and Dick were
fairly dumfounded; and it is safe to say that it was over and done
before many of the workmen had sensed fully what was going on. First
the armed squad, coming in at a smart run, lost itself momentarily
in the crowded ranks of the Short Line workers. Next, and so quickly
that it seemed as if every move must have been carefully planned
beforehand――as was doubtless the fact――the group formed again in a
circle, and with a goodly number of prisoners in charge, made a hurried
retreat to the river, and across it to the waiting passenger train
on the O. C. track. And among the prisoners the boys saw the big,
square-shouldered figure of their chief.
“Well!――what do you know about that!” Dick gasped, when he could
get his breath. “They’ve got the chief and Goldrick and Jones and
Smalley――why, they’ve got everybody we had!”
“Sure!” said Larry grittingly. “They had this up their sleeve all
along, and they sent that man Grimmer over first to try to take Mr.
Ackerman so there wouldn’t be any ‘big boss’ on the job to head things
if we tried to resist!” Then: “Come on and let’s see what we’re up
against!”
Before they reached the first gang of track-layers they saw that the
work had stopped as suddenly as if the entire Short Line army had had a
stroke of paralysis. Tools had been dropped and the men were standing
or sitting around in idle bunches, some filling and lighting their
pipes, others staring after the rapidly disappearing train on the rival
railroad.
“What’s the matter? What are you all quitting for?” Larry snapped at
the first group of idlers they came to.
A big Italian spike-driver answered for himself and the others:
“Can’t work-a widout da boss: dey take-a da ’ole push――arrest-a
dem――say dey will arrest-a us if we don’t t’row down da hammer.”
Breathlessly the two boys hastened from gang to gang, finding the
same conditions everywhere. Not only every member of the engineering
staff――excepting only themselves――had been taken, but all the foremen
as well. It was a clean sweep of every man in authority. Burkett, one
of the carpenters on the bridge-building gang, told them the brief
story of the wholesale arrest.
“It was a sheriff’s posse,” he said; “they had a warrant big enough
to cover the whole world――made out against John Doe and Richard Roe
and others――you know how they make ’em read when they don’t put in the
real names. Near as I could get at it from listenin’ in, the charge
was contempt o’ court, and they was all cited to appear before Judge
Somebody ’r other way up yonder at Burnt Canyon. There ain’t a boss of
any kind left on the job; nary a single one.”
“It’s a trick!” Dick raved; “a low-down, dirty trick to stop our work!
They can kill all the time they want to with that train of theirs
between here and Burnt Canyon, and goodness only knows when our folks
can give bail and get loose and come back!”
It was then that Larry Donovan’s eighteen years took on at least ten
more.
“We’re only ‘cubs,’ Dick, but it looks as if we rank everybody else
on this job right now,” he said slowly. “We’ve got to buck up and do
something. Will you stand by me?”
“Will I?” cried Dick. “It’s the surest little old thing you know or
ever heard of! But land of goodness! we can’t handle two hundred and
fifty men!”
“Well,” said Larry, his square jaw setting itself grimly, “we’re not
going to take it lying down, anyway. Come along up to the chief’s tent.”
In the field headquarters tent there was a wire connecting with the
supply camps down the line, and through them to the Short Line general
offices in Brewster. They found the tent deserted and the operator
gone; he, too, had been taken under the “John Doe” warrant of such
magnificent scope.
At Larry’s suggestion, Dick sat at the telegraph instrument and tried
to call some of the offices down the line. The wire proved to be dead;
had doubtless been cut somewhere to make it dead. Thereupon they held
a brief council of war, feeling very much like a couple of middies
left in command of a super-dreadnaught, with the officers all gone and
a storm raging. There were two locomotives at the front, the one used
in the track-laying, and the one which had lately come up with the
two car-loads of rails. While they were talking, the engineer of the
latter stuck his face in at the tent opening.
Larry shouldered some part of the new responsibility promptly.
“Barney,” he began, “we’re the only bosses left on this job. Will you
take your orders from us?”
The Irishman grinned down at them.
“Sure thing,” he responded heartily. “I’m shtill workin’ f’r the Short
Line. More’n that, I was yer daddy’s fireman on th’ old main line whin
you was runnin’ ’round in knee-pants, Larry Donovan――I was that same.
What’s doin’?”
“I want you to back down to Pine Gulch and find the telegraph operator,
Wellby,――you know him――and tell him what has happened to us up here.
Ask him to wire Brewster and spread the news. Tell him to wire Mr.
Maxwell that we’ll try to keep things moving some way until we can
get some more bosses. That’s all. Make the best time you can down the
canyon. Every single minute is going to count.”
After Barney had gone, Larry took a scratch-pad and scribbled a number
of names, among them, that of Burkett, the bridge carpenter. Then he
called one of the water boys and gave him the slip of paper.
“Round these men up as quickly as you can, Jimmie, and bring them
here,” he ordered. “Run for it!”
The boy ran, and in a few minutes the listed men began to drift in,
some half-dozen of them altogether. Once more Larry climbed into the
breach.
“You men know what has been done to us, and why it was done,” was the
way he started out. “We don’t know much about this law business, but we
do know that the chief and all our people believe we have a right to
cross this mining claim. The whole thing is meant to stop us; to delay
us so that the O. C. can get its track into Little Ophir ahead of ours.
The question is, are we going to let the O. C. put it all over us this
way, or not?”
Burkett, the carpenter, acted as spokesman for the little group of
picked men.
“We’re with you chaps, and the company, of course. I can boss that
trestle into shape if you say the word. But I don’t know how the men
will be taking it. You know how they are when the bosses are gone.”
Larry swallowed hard and played his last card.
“We’re only ‘cubs’, Dick Maxwell and I, and what we don’t know about
building a railroad would fill the biggest book that was ever printed.
But it’ll go mighty hard with us if we can’t manage to keep this job
going for just one day. Chase out and round the men up into one big
bunch, and let me――I――er――let me talk to them.”
“Whoop!” shouted Dick joyously, as the delegation filed out of the
tent. “Can you do it, Larry?”
Larry’s breath was coming in gulps.
“I’d rather be shot than try it, Dick, and that’s the fact!” he gasped.
“You know how I was in the school debates――never could get a thing
right end foremost when I got on my feet. Most likely I’ll make a
ghastly muddle of it. Suppose you take that part of it.”
Dick made a motion as if he were pushing hard against a wall that was
threatening to cave in upon him.
“Woof――not me!” he protested. “I might rattle away and tell ’em jokes
and things of that sort, but gee!――somebody’s got to do more than
that!――put the real old pep into ’em. I couldn’t do that any more than
I could fly!”
“All right,” said Larry between his shut teeth. “It’s got to be done
and I’ll try it. Here they come.”
The round-up part of it was a success at all events. Crowding into the
open space before the tent came the men, two hundred and fifty strong,
track-layers, tie-setters, bolters, teamsters, maul-men, carpenters,
laborers. Larry, pale to the lips and with his knees knocking together,
turned an empty spike keg bottom side up and stood on it. At the first
go-off his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he merely made
faces at the upturned sea of faces. Then, suddenly, he found his lost
voice.
“I’m not going to make a speech to you men, because I don’t know how,”
he exploded. “I――I just want to know if you fellows will stand with us
if we try to keep this job going until the bosses get back? I’ve been
thinking, and I’ve got a sort of plan――――”
“Oot wi’ it, laddie!” shouted a giant Cornishman in the crowd. “If
ye’ll be wantin’ us to tak’ a boonch o’ pickhan’les an’ go over an’
clean oop that gang on t’other side o’ the river, we’ll do it right
hearty!”
“No, no; nothing like that,” Larry shouted back. “There’s a better way
to do them up. They think they’ve got us stopped, so they can beat
us into Little Ophir. Let’s show ’em they haven’t! Here’s what I was
thinking: you men get together by your different trades――and elect your
own foremen for the day. We――we’ll leave it to you to pick out the best
men you can find. We――Dick Maxwell and I――can give you the blue-print
stuff as you need it. What do you say, men? Is it a go?”
The shout that was raised might easily have been heard by the “enemy”
army on the other side of the valley. Cries of “Bully for the lads!”
“Chips off the old block!” “There’s the right stuff for ye!” “Burkett
for our foreman!”――from the carpenters; “Tregarvon for ours!”――from the
track-layers.
Larry waved his arms like a college yell leader.
“Go to it!” he shouted. “Let’s make this the biggest day we’ve ever
had! In with that trestle, Burkett. If you can’t read the blue-prints,
we’ll help you. _Let’s go!_”
Then and there began the most strenuous, as well as the most
successful, day of track-laying the summer of furious railroad building
had yet seen, not excepting the rush to the valley of the Yellow Dog.
Fortunately for the two “cub” engineers, the over-bossing speedily
proved to be a good bit of a sinecure. In any large gathering of even
semi-skilled workmen there are always a few with leadership material
in them, and the rank and file, put upon its mettle, can usually be
trusted to choose its leaders safely and well.
Though Larry Donovan was far from suspecting it, his idea of putting
the men upon their honor and having them elect their own foremen for
the day was little short of an inspiration. In carrying it out he had
unconsciously struck exactly the right chord, and had thereby relieved
himself and Dick of just about nine-tenths of the huge responsibility.
Fifteen minutes beyond the “round-up” in front of the field headquarters
the work was in full swing again; rails clanking into place, spikes
sinking into the cross-ties under the ringing blows of the mauls, tie
gangs rushing to keep ahead of the rail layers, and both rushing to
crowd the carpenters who were throwing the trestle across the dry creek
bed of the disputed mining claim.
But if the boys were relieved of much of the actual bossing they
still found plenty to do. There were center lines to be run with the
surveying instruments, blue-prints to be explained to Burkett’s gang,
the distribution of material to be planned for and the supplies kept
moving so that the different gangs wouldn’t be thrown into confusion by
having some other gangs overtaking them.
In the thick of things the locomotive sent down the line to carry the
news of the raid returned, and Barney came up to report. An earth slide
had tumbled down upon the track a few miles below, and they were thus
cut off from all communication with their base at Pine Gulch. They made
no doubt that the blocking slide had been caused, or at least helped,
by the unscrupulous enemy.
“Never mind, Barney,” said Larry. “If we can’t get help from the
outside we’ll try and get along without it. Bring your train crew up
here and jump it on the tie-stringing. We can use every man in it.
We’re going into Little Ophir――_to-day_!”
The Irishman was hurrying back to his train to obey the order when Dick
grabbed Larry’s arm.
“Look!” he gurgled, pointing toward the river, “they’re coming for us
again!”
Larry looked and saw another group of men crossing the river on the
boulder stepping-stones. Its leader was a tall, well-set-up man in the
brown duck of the engineers.
“It’s――it’s Grissby――the O. C. chief!” Dick stammered. “He’ll stop us
again!”
“I don’t believe he will,” said Larry, with another out-thrust of the
fighting Donovan jaw. “Those other fellows were officers of the law;
but he isn’t.”
The O. C. chief’s purpose was made known the moment he came within
shouting distance. It was to stampede the supposedly masterless working
force.
“Throw down your tools, or every man jack of you will go to jail!” he
called out to the workers. “You’re breaking the law!”
It was then that Michael Tregarvon, the big Cornish track-layer, stood
forth, and that before either Dick or Larry could interpose.
“Pick-han’les!” he bawled to his men. “Oot wi’ ’em, lads! Oop to the
river wi’ ’em and drive ’em in!”
The rush of some two score brawny trackmen, armed with the handles
hastily knocked from their picks, was so sudden and overwhelming that
the half-dozen intruders who had come to scare the Short Line force
into stopping fled in disorder; stood not upon the order of their
going, as the time-honored phrase has it. There was a lively foot-race
across the level bit of valley, a shout of triumph from the pursuers
as the invaders were driven helter-skelter to their own side of the
Tourmaline, and the flurry was over.
That day, the last day of terrible toil in the three months’ race
between the two railroads, was the shortest that Dick Maxwell and Larry
Donovan had ever lived through. With a thousand things to think of
and to do, the hours flew by on wings. Rail by rail, with clock-like
regularity, the steel went into place on the completed grade, and
almost before they knew it the thunder of the blasts in the rock
cutting which was holding the “enemy” had withdrawn into a distant
background.
Thus the day of a thousand demands fled shrieking, as you might
say; and while the sun was still half an hour high over the western
mountains the Short Line track was rounding the final curve into the
outskirts of the great gold camp, where a delegation of enthusiastic
citizens, headed by a brass band, was waiting to welcome the winner in
the long race.
Larry Donovan, begrimed and sweaty, retreated suddenly into his shell
of embarrassment when the mayor of Little Ophir bustled up and asked
for Mr. Ackerman. So it was Dick who had to do the explaining, and he
told why there were no officials on hand to receive the welcome.
“Arrested your chief and all your bosses?” exclaimed the mayor.
“And, in spite of that, you’ve laid three miles of track since this
morning――just you two boys?”
“Oh, no, indeed!” said Dick hastily; “it was the men themselves. Larry,
here, just got ’em together and told ’em what the O. C. was trying to
do to us, and――――”
The interruption was the swift upcoming of a one-car train over the
newly laid track; a train which edged its way gingerly through the
cheering throng up to the very end of the last pair of rails. Down
from the steps of the car swung the Short Line chief of construction,
followed by the members of his staff and all the “John Does” and
“Richard Roes” that had been gathered in by the blanket warrant of
arrest. Then the band began to blare out “Hail to the Chief”; and on
the march up to the City Hall, Larry and Dick were able to drop into a
less conspicuous――and much more comfortable――background. Their job was
done.
Three days after the triumphal entry of the Nevada Short Line into
Little Ophir, and, incidentally, at a moment when the defeated Overland
Central was still wrestling with the rocky barrier two miles below the
town, Larry Donovan found himself sitting on the edge of a chair in the
private office of the general manager in the Brewster headquarters,
waiting while the stocky, gray-mustached “Big Boss” at the desk went
thoughtfully over the pages of a typewritten report.
“Well,” said the stocky gentleman, finally laying the report aside,
“Dick tells me you’ve both had a fine summer up yonder on the
Tourmaline, and Mr. Ackerman tells me here”――tapping the report――“what
you did on the last day of the track-laying. That was a fine thing,
Larry; a mighty fine thing for the company. How did you come to think
of it?”
“Going on with the job, you mean? Why――er――there didn’t seem to be
anything else to do.”
“Yes; but the method of it; getting the men to elect their own foremen.
What put that into your head?”
“Why, I don’t know, sir. I was just thinking――――”
The general manager nodded.
“That’s it; that’s just it,” he said approvingly. “All through the
summer, it seems, you’ve been ‘just thinking.’ It’s a good habit; a
capital habit; and I hope you’ll go on cultivating it. Have you seen
your father or any of your family yet?”
“No, sir; I’m just in on the accommodation from Red Butte. The
conductor gave me your wire ordering me to report to you as soon as I
reached Brewster, and I came right up here from the train.”
“Good; that was what I wanted you to do. Dick came home yesterday, as
you know. He has to hurry to get ready for his trip East to college.
The particular reason why I wired you to report here without delay was
to ask you if you’d like to go along with him.”
Larry had a firm grip with both hands on the seat of his chair――which
was lucky. Otherwise he might have fallen out of it.
“Go with Dick?” he gasped, jarred for once out of his embarrassed,
rank-and-file speechlessness. “I’d――why, I’d give _anything_ if I
could! But I can’t, Mr. Maxwell; I――I haven’t the money.”
There was a sly twinkle in the stocky gentleman’s left eye when he said:
“I went through Old Sheddon myself on borrowed money, Larry. Supposing
some friend of yours――say some stockholder in the Short Line company
who has been keeping an eye on you this summer――should offer to advance
the money for your expenses, giving you all the time you might need
after your graduation in which to pay it back? How about that?”
It was a huge temptation; the fiercest that had ever assailed Lawrence
Donovan in all his eighteen years. But he grappled with it――and
conquered it.
“I couldn’t――even then,” he said in low tones. “There――there are five
of us children at home, and――and the others have got to have their
chance. I’ve got to help. Dad can’t keep all of them in school on his
watchman’s pay.”
At this the twinkle in the shrewd left eye spread to the right eye, as
well, and then expanded into a smile.
“You haven’t been home yet, so I suppose you haven’t heard the news.
Yesterday your father was promoted――put in charge of the Brewster
round-house as foreman――and I think his pay will enable him to get
along for a time without your help. He is anxious to have you go with
Dick, and so am I. Shall we consider it settled?”
Larry covered his face with his hands, and for a long minute he was
afraid he was going to make a spectacle of himself, right there in
front of the general manager;――you know how it is when a fellow has
been wanting some wholly impossible thing so hard that he can taste it,
and then has it shoved at him, _bing!_ with no chance to brace.
This college course was a thing that Larry would have been willing to
work his fingers to the bone to compass; and there hadn’t been even the
ghost of a possibility of compassing it. Finally, the big lump in his
throat got small enough to let him stammer out, “I――I don’t deserve it,
Mr. Maxwell; honestly, I don’t.”
“I think you do,” was the even-toned reply. “I sent you out with Dick
three months ago and told you you should have your chance. You took it
and made good. You’ll find it that way all through life, Larry, my boy;
the chances will be waiting for you all along the road, and all you’ll
be asked to do will be to make good.
“Now run home and tell your folks. I know they’ll be glad to hear that
you’re to have another Donovan Chance. Good-by and good luck to you.
Dick will tell you what you’ll need for your college outfit.”
And then, out of the kindness of his heart for a young fellow who was
much too full for utterance: “Run along, now; I’m busy.”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to
follow the text that they illustrate.
――Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.