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Updated: May 5, 2025
It looked as if the city man had engaged a gang of track-layers, who are used to pioneering and sometimes carry surveyors' stores through the wilds. "Well," he said, "we'll follow their trail." The party had obviously left the water for a time, because their track led away from the creek in the valley and the bush was too thick to permit the portaging of canoes.
"Gallagher was shifting steel for the track-layers when your wire found me, and the engine couldn't be spared," this, of course, to Ford. Then, with an apologetic side glance for the lady: "Riley's in hot water again up to his chin." "What's the matter now?" gritted Ford; and Alicia marked the instant change to masterful command. "Same old score.
Within a Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen, and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could be heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylight Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of the track-layers.
"Then I got out my horse and rode up the creek and through some of the camps on the Copah detour. The star-eyed goddess of reform had evidently landed on that coast, too. Donahue's Hungarians were singing war-songs around their camp-fire, as usual, and Contadini's Tuscans were out in full force, guying the night-shift track-layers. But there was no bad blood, and no whisky to breed it.
Stretching away in front of and behind the two men were hundreds of other scrapers, tearing up the sod, while closely following them came gangs of track-layers, who laid the ties and fastened the rails to them as quickly as the sod was removed. It was easy work track-laying on the flat expanse, where grading for hundreds of miles at a stretch was practically unnecessary.
When it did not come, Ford crept to the hole in the car floor and listened long and intently. Half an hour he had given Frisbie to get his track-layers together, and to cover the eight miles of rough-laid rails with the construction train. What was delaying him? "You said Gallagher ditched your car: did it block the track?" he asked of Adair.
But now the wrestling fireman had thrown the switch, and at the Rajah's command the Rosemary shot out on the spur to be thrust with locked brakes fairly into the breach left defenseless by the ditched engine. With a mob-roar of wrath the infuriated track-layers made a rush for the new obstruction. But Winton was before them. "Hold on!" he shouted, bearing them back with outflung arms.
From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outlets in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.
"Your pardner with the store hat and the stinkin' cigaroots? he's all right," said Biggin; and it so chanced that at the precise moment of the saying the subject of it was standing with the foreman of track-layers at a gap in the new line just beyond and above the Rosemary's siding at Argentine, his day's work ended, and his men loaded on the flats for the run down to camp over the lately-laid rails of the lateral loop.
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.
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