NEW PLANS
Callahan crushed the tobacco under his thumb in the palm of his right
hand. "So I am sorry to add," he concluded, speaking to McCloud, "that
you are now out of a job." The two men were facing each other across
the table in McCloud's office. "Personally, I am not sorry to say it,
either," added Callahan, slowly filling the bowl of his pipe.
McCloud said nothing to the point, as there seemed to be nothing to
say until he had heard more. "I never knew before that you were
left-handed," he returned evasively.
"It's a lucky thing, because it won't do for a freight-traffic
man, nowadays, to let his right hand know what his left hand
does," observed Callahan, feeling for a match. "I am the only
left-handed man in the traffic department, but the man that handles
the rebates, Jimmie Black, is cross-eyed. Bucks offered to send him
to Chicago to have Bryson straighten his eyes, but Jimmie thinks
it is better to have them as they are for the present, so he can look
at a thing in two different ways--one for the Interstate Commerce
Commission and one for himself. You haven't heard, then?" continued
Callahan, returning to his riddle about McCloud's job. "Why, Lance
Dunning has gone into the United States Court and got an injunction
against us on the Crawling Stone Line--tied us up tighter than
zero. No more construction there for a year at least. Dunning comes
in for himself and for a cousin who is his ward, and three or four
little ranchers have filed bills--so it's up to the lawyers for
eighty per cent. of the gate receipts and peace. Personally, I'm
glad of it. It gives you a chance to look after this operating for a
year yourself. We are going to be swamped with freight traffic this
year, and I want it moved through the mountains like checkers for the
next six months. You know what I mean, George."
To McCloud the news came, in spite of himself, as a blow. The results
he had attained in building through the lower valley had given him
a name among the engineers of the whole line. The splendid showing of
the winter construction, on which he had depended to enable him to
finish the whole work within the year, was by this news brought to
naught. Those of the railroad men who said he could not deliver a
completed line within the year could never be answered now. And
there was some slight bitterness in the reflection that the very
stumbling-block to hold him back, to rob him of his chance for a
reputation with men like Glover and Bucks, should be the lands of
Dicksie Dunning.
He made no complaint. On the division he took hold with new energy
and bent his faculties on the operating problems. At Marion's he saw
Dicksie at intervals, and only to fall more hopelessly under her
spell each time. She could be serious and she could be volatile and
she could be something between which he could never quite make out.
She could be serious with him when he was serious, and totally
irresponsible the next minute with Marion. On the other hand, when
McCloud attempted to be flippant, Dicksie could be confusingly
grave. Once when he was bantering with her at Marion's she tried to
say something about her regret that complications over the right of
way should have arisen; but McCloud made light of it, and waved the
matter aside as if he were a cavalier. Dicksie did not like it, but it
was only that he was afraid she would realize he was a mere railroad
superintendent with hopes of a record for promotion quite blasted.
And as if this obstacle to a greater reputation were not enough, a
wilier enemy threatened in the spring to leave only shreds and
patches of what he had already earned.
The Crawling Stone River is said to embody, historically, all of the
deceits known to mountain streams. Below the Box Canyon it ploughs
through a great bed of yielding silt, its own deposit between the two
imposing lines of bluffs that resist its wanderings from side to side
of the wide valley. This fertile soil makes up the rich lands that are
the envy of less fortunate regions in the Great Basin; but the
Crawling Stone is not a river to give quiet title to one acre of its
own making. The toil of its centuries spreads beautifully green under
the June skies, and the unsuspecting settler, lulled into security by
many years of the river's repose, settles on its level bench lands and
lays out his long lines of possession; but the Sioux will tell you in
their own talk that this man is but a tenant at will; that in another
time and at another place the stranger will inherit his fields; and
that the Crawling Stone always comes back for its own.
This was the peril that Glover and McCloud essayed when they ran a
three-tenths grade and laid an eighty-pound rail up two hundred and
fifty miles of the valley. It was in local and exclusive territory a
rich prize, and they brought to their undertaking not, perhaps,
greater abilities than other men, but incomparably greater material
resources than earlier American engineers had possessed.
Success such as theirs is cumulative: when the work is done one man
stands for it, but it represents the work of a thousand men in every
walk of American industry. Where the credit must lie with the engineer
who achieves is in the application of these enormous reserves of
industrial triumphs to the particular conditions he faces in the
problem before him; in the application lies the genius called success,
and this is always new. Moreover, men like Glover and McCloud were
fitted for a fight with a mountain river because trained in the
Western school, where poverty or resource had sharpened the wits. The
building of the Crawling Stone Line came with the dawn of a new day in
American capital, when figures that had slept in fairies' dreams woke
into every-day use, and when enlarged calculation among men
controlling hitherto unheard-of sums of money demanded the best and
most permanent methods of construction to insure enduring economies in
operating. Thus the constructing of the Crawling Stone Line opened in
itself new chapters in Rocky Mountain railroad-building. An equipment
of machinery, much of which had never before been applied to such
building, had been assembled by the engineers. Steam-shovels had been
sent in battalions, grading-machines and dump-wagons had gone forward
in trainloads, and an army of men were operating in the valley. A huge
steel bridge three thousand feet long was now being thrown across the
river below the Dunning ranch.
The winter had been an unusual one even in a land of winters. The
season's fall of snow had not been above an average, but it had fallen
in the spring and had been followed by excessively low temperatures
throughout the mountains. June came again, but a strange June. The
first rise of the Crawling Stone had not moved out the winter frost,
and the stream lay bound from bank to bank, and for hundreds of miles,
under three feet of ice. When June opened, backward and cold, there
had been no spring. Heavy frosts lasting until the middle of the month
gave sudden way to summer heat, and the Indians on the upper-valley
reservation began moving back into the hills. Then came the rise.
Creek after creek in the higher mountains, ice-bound for six months,
burst without warning into flood. Soft winds struck with the sun and
stripped the mountain walls of their snow. Rains set in on the desert,
and far in the high northwest the Crawling Stone lifting its four-foot
cap of ice like a bed of feathers began rolling it end over end down
the valley. In the Box, forty feet of water struck the canyon walls
and ice-floes were hurled like torpedoes against the granite spurs:
the Crawling Stone was starting after its own.
When the river rose, the earlier talk of Dunning's men had been that
the Crawling Stone would put an end to the railroad pretensions by
washing the two hundred and fifty miles of track back to the Peace
River, where it had started. This much in the beginning was easy to
predict; but the railroad men had turned out in force to fight for
their holdings, and while the ranchers were laughing, the river was
flowing over the bench lands in the upper valley.
At the Dunning ranch the confidence of the men in their own security
gave way to confusion as the river, spreading behind the ice-jams into
broad lakes and bursting in torrents through its barriers, continued
to rise. Treacherous in its broad and yellow quiet, lifting its muddy
head in the stillness of the night, moving unheard over broad sandy
bottoms, backing noiselessly into forgotten channels, stealing through
heavy alfalfa pastures, eating a channel down a slender furrow--then,
with the soil melting from the root, the plant has toppled at the
head, the rivulet has grown a stream; night falls, and in the morning
where yesterday smiling miles of green fields looked up to the sun
rolls a mad flood of waters: this is the Crawling Stone.