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This difficulty was brushed aside at once: I judged there was little to fear from this, in view of what Hadley had just said to me. But there was another obstacle; the one which had kept me silent from the day I had first seen Dorgan driving his track-layers. With a crushing sense of degradation I realized the full force of the motive for silence, as I had not up to this time.
Now, in July, less than three months from the time, this camp is forty-nine miles from the terminus of the road at Loadstone, while the constructing engineers and the track-layers are thirty-eight miles behind us. Do you see the problem?" "You can get an extension of time, can't you?" asked Tom. "We can -not! You see, boys, the S.B. & L. is the popular road.
By the time he returns it will be too late for him to hedge. MacMorrogh will see to that." Eckstein nodded. "I made a point of that with Brian," he said. "The minute the word is given he is to throw a little army of graders upon the new roundabout. But Ford won't find out. He'll be too busy on this end of the line with the track-layers. I'm a little nervous about Merriam, though."
The graders followed close upon the heels of the engineers, so that by the time the track-layers met the two grades paralleled each other for a distance of two hundred miles. When the rails actually met, the Government compelled the two roads to couple up. It had been a friendly contest that left no bad blood.
Three hundred sub-contractors were employed on the portion of the line crossing the plains. Bridge-gangs and track-layers followed close on the graders' heels. In 1882 over two and a half miles of track a day were laid. In the following year, for weeks in succession, the average ran three and a half miles a day, and in one record-smashing three days twenty miles were covered.
Still, though the number of the track-layers was largely reduced, the inhabitants of the mining region had waited long enough, and so, in spite of many hardships, slowly, fathom by fathom, we carried the rail-head on. Now and then for several days together we sat in our log-built shelter while a blinding snowstorm raged outside and the pines filled the valley with their roaring.
They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the actual throes of evolution. In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked enthusiasm.
How I should like to live here always! If I were you, Isabelle, I should get your husband to give you a freight-car like those the gangs of track-layers use, with a little stovepipe sticking out of one corner, and just camp down in it here, on the roof of the world." She lifted her thin, delicate face to the sun, reaching out her arms to it hungrily.
At night these tireless story-tellers listened to the strange tales told by the trail-makers, then stole away to their tents and wrote them out for the people at home, while the heroes of the stories slept. The track-layers were now climbing up over the crest of the continent, the locaters were dropping down the Pacific slope, with the prowling pathfinders peeping over into the Utah Valley.
Two years later the thousands of Chinese navvies working on the difficult Kamloops-Port Moody section finished their task, and the government work was done. The only gap remaining lay in the Gold Range, and here in the Eagle Pass, at Craigellachie, on November 7, 1885, the eastward and westward track-layers met.
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