At the first peep of dawn the noises of the work battle began to be audible again; and shortly after that the tie-distributing teams made their appearance. The two boys got up and stretched themselves. It had been quite an hour or more since a train had passed on the other line, and as yet there were no signs of a coming attempt to block the way for the up-coming force.
“Gee!” said Dick, shivering in the morning chill, but more from his excitement, “here we come shoving along—and the way is still clear. Do you reckon those fellows are going to miss the chance of blocking us, after all?”
Before Larry could reply, the answer to the question came lumbering out of the southward hills; and it promptly extinguished the implied hope. A three-car train of steel rails was backing slowly down the Overland Central track and in the half light of the dawn the boys could see that there were men on each of the cars; quite a number of them.
Since it was a loaded train coming in the wrong direction for loaded trains, there was no doubt as to its destination and purpose. Evidently the “enemy” had had scouts out, too, and knew to the exact moment when the time had arrived for the obstacle placing.
Dick and Larry held their post of observation, which was behind a sandstone boulder, until the train rumbled down into position. Instead of stopping on the crossing point, however, it ran a little way past, stopped, reversed, and ran up again repeating this pendulum movement slowly and deliberately in such a fashion as to keep the crossing place covered for a greater part of the time with a moving train.
“I don’t see any particular use in that,” Dick said, after the pendulum swing had been duly established. “Why don’t they stop it squarely in front of us?”
“Fixes us so we can’t do anything at all while they keep moving—can’t hit a lick,” Larry grunted. “Besides, they can cover more ground that way; stops us from trying to build around in either direction. Let’s go find Mr. Ackerman and make our report. There isn’t going to be anything more doing here until we get up with our track.”
Accordingly, they walked down the grade until they found the chief. After they made their report of the number of trains that had passed during their watch they were told to go and get breakfast.
With the morning meal out of the way they hurried back to the front. In the short space of time they had been absent the scene at the crossing had changed decidedly. The Short Line track had been carried up to within a few feet of the opposition right-of-way, and teams were already going around the pendulum-swinging train with loads of cross-ties. But by far the largest part of the building army was halted. Around a dozen camp-fires the track-layers were eating breakfast and drinking hot coffee which the cooks were bringing up in huge tin cans.
“Looks plenty peaceful, so far,” Larry remarked. “Wonder what we’ll try to do?—rush ’em?”