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The curve which was the beginning of this U-shaped loop was the morning's scene of action, and the Utah track-layers, two hundred strong, moved to the front in orderly array, with armed guards as flankers for the handcar load of rails which the men were pushing up the grade.
A handcar breezed past the station, the four section-men pumping like demons because of the slight down grade and their haste for their dinner. Huckleberry gave one snort and one tug backward upon the tie rope and then a coltish kick into the air when he discovered that he was free.
At the East Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the Delaware, almost doubling its volume. Here I struck the railroad, the forlorn Midland, and here another set of men and manners cropped out, what may be called the railroad conglomerate overlying this mountain freestone. "Where did you steal that boat?" and "What you running away for?" greeted me from a handcar that went by.
Instead, she asked for Thorlakson and cried out in dismay to learn that he was not there that he had taken the handcar and had gone off with the two Norwegians to visit Bilodeau, the foreman on the section below. Cristy poured out her story, at least as much of it as she thought would convey the urgency of the situation; but it was rather difficult to make the woman grasp it, Mrs.
The rest of the place consisted of a long siding, a short wooden platform, a tall new standard enclosed water-tank and a little whitewashed shed where the handcar and tools were stored. A creek here slipped out of the woods to find fault with a stone culvert ere it flowed beneath the track and resought silence among the encircling spruce trees.
The first night we had a casualty, a painful wound in a doughboy's leg from the rifle of a sentry who cried halt and fired at the same time. An officer and party on a handcar had been rattling in from a visit to the front outguard. All the surrounding roads and trails were patrolled.
She demanded a special train; she ordered a handcar with which to overtake the recreant train; she called for a taxi to chase across to Williams with her, a mere eighty miles of ten-foot snowdrifts. Only shortage of breath occasioned by altitude and outraged sensibilities prevented her commandeering an airplane!
As the men were going by the station, having put their handcar away, Phil motioned to the foreman of the gang, a bright faced Irishman. "How are you?" greeted Phil smilingly. The foreman waved a hand, at which Phil beckoned the man to come to him. "Are there any more trains over this division tonight?" "Only number forty-two going west." "She is due shortly after midnight, is she not?" "Yes."
"I suppose I deserve a good scolding for jumping off the train so far from this Thorlakson place; but the sleeping-car conductor told me the train would not stop on any account, short of a damaged track, until it reached Indian Creek, I think he said it was. My best plan, he said, was to get off there and ride back to Thorlakson on a handcar.
For the wily fisherman to slip from the car on the other side of the track and get behind a tool shanty, was the work of but a moment, and as the train pulled out, and puffed on its way, the detective, peering around the corner of the shed, which housed a handcar and other tools of the section hands, had a glimpse of his "fish," as he facetiously termed him, standing rather irresolutely on the station platform.
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