On that October morning Terry, the track-layers and ballasters had romped out from the boarding-train into a foot of snow and an air thick with the whirling flakes.
“Merry Christmas!”
“Sure, an’ snow-birds we are!”
“Yes, an’ snow-shoes we’ll nade, for this kind o’ work.”
The men were lively, but the march was slowed. For two days the storm had raged, before the weather settled to clear and stinging cold. The construction-train, No. 119 switched to the pulling end, bucked the drifts with two engines; and as many men wielding shovels, scraping the grade, as wielded sledges and picks and crow-bars. There was plenty of wood, so that the boarding-train and camps were kept warm.
Terry rode his horse breast-high in the white mantle, to get the time from the gang bosses.
Storm had succeeded storm. It was to be a hard winter and an early winter; and of the 500 miles only some 375 had been finished. Now fairly out of their mountains and into the Nevada desert, the C. P. crews were coming fast—they had to haul fuel and ties and water as well as their rails, from far behind, but they had laid 250 miles and graded 300.
“They’ve got 350 miles yet to go, ’fore they reach Ogden, ag’in our 100,” quoth Pat. “But if we’re snowed in atop these mountains wid the passes behind an’ ahid blocked, whilst they have only a few ridges to cross, faith they’re like to bate us in the spring.”
Mile by mile, at snail’s pace instead of giant’s strides, the U. P. track crept onward and upward, piercing the snow.
“Well, if we can’t foller the stakes we can foller the tiligraph poles,” Pat encouraged. “They’re stickin’ into sight.”