United States or Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Men rushed to and fro with canteens and grub-sacks or half-filled boxes and sacks. "Is it a railroad?" they yelled as Rimrock appeared and he answered: "You bet your life it is!" That settled it, and soon across the desert there went a procession of horsemen and wagons. Those who could travel no other way filled syrup cans with water and started for the Tecolotes on foot. A railroad!
It was an awe-inspiring spectacle, this invasion of the desert, this sure preparation to open the treasure-house where the Tecolotes had locked up their ore. But Rimrock was missing from it all! There came a time when Mary Fortune acknowledged this to herself; and, without knowing just why, she took the next train to Geronimo.
Red-handed as he was from a former treachery, L. W. did not fail Rimrock in this crisis and his cactus-proof automobile took them swiftly over the trail that led to the high-cliffed Tecolotes. He went under protest as the friend of both parties, but all the same he went.
The whole town jumped to the same conclusion at once and the rush for the Tecolotes was on. The men who had laughed at Rimrock Jones for months were leaders in the wild stampede and Hassayamp roused up Rimrock from where he was brooding and warned him to get to his ground. "They'll jump you," he bellowed, "the whole town is going. They'll stake every claim for miles!"
Then the grading crew came with their mules and scrapers, and car-loads of ties and rails. Great construction trains congested all the sidings as they dumped off tools and supplies. A track-laying machine followed close behind them, and the race for the Tecolotes was on. What a pity it was that poor Rimrock Jones was not there to see the dirt fly! And there were other changes.
As in the frozen East they hibernated in winter to escape the grip of the cold, so in sun-cursed Papagueria, where the Tecolotes lie, they crawled as deep to get away from the heat. But in the Geronimo jail with its dead, fetid air, Rimrock Jones learned to envy the snakes.
"Well," began Rimrock, sitting down on the edge of the sidewalk and looking absently up the street, "take me, for instance. I go out across the desert to the Tecolotes and find a whole mountain of copper. You don't have to chop it out with chisels, like that native copper around the Great Lakes; and you don't have to go underground and do timbering like they do around Bisbee and Cananea.
He smoked fifty-cent cigars, wore an enormous black hat and put up at the Waldorf Hotel. Not only that but he was in all the papers as associating with the kings of finance. So great was his prestige that the engineer, in fact, had been requested to report on his mine. "A report?" shouted L. W., "what, a report on the Tecolotes? Well, I can save you a long, dusty trip.
Word Of The Day