Dick shook his head—rather regretfully, it must be admitted.
“Nope; Mr. Ackerman isn’t built that way. You haven’t been with him all summer without finding that out, have you? But we could do it, hands down, if he’d only give the word. There are only twenty-seven men on that blocking train, counting the engineer and fireman, and we outnumber them at least a dozen to one.”
“What do you mean by rushing them? Take the train away from ’em and run it off to one side?” Larry queried. “That would be as easy as rolling off a log.”
“Oh, yes; easy enough. But you’ll see; Mr. Ackerman won’t do it. Naturally, in a scrap of that kind, somebody’d be bound to get hurt, and the chief won’t stand for that.”
That was all right; but short of the “rushing” there didn’t seem to be anything to be done. So long as the moving train was see-sawing back and forth over the point where the crossing-frog, already made up and bolted together and lying in readiness beside the track, must be put in, nothing but a forcible clearing away of the obstruction seemed to promise any degree of success.
Larry looked across at the moving obstacle and scowled.
“I’d rush it in a minute, if I were in the chief’s place!” he gritted. “They’ve got no right, legal or any other kind, to hold us up this way; they’re just outlaws! Every man we’ve got on the job would jump to get in on the fight, if Mr. Ackerman would only turn his back and shut his eyes for a minute or two.”
That was Larry, mind you; the fellow who usually thought twice before he acted once, and who was, generally speaking, as mild-mannered and peaceable as big-muscled fellows commonly are. Perhaps it was an outburst of that fighting temper he had once spoken of to Dick; the temper that would still, under sufficient provocation, come boiling up out of that pit of bitterness he had tried to describe.
“Would you?” said Dick; then, a bit thoughtfully: “Perhaps I should, too. And yet ... maybe Mr. Ackerman’s right, at that, Larry. When you come right down to it, this whole railroad scramble isn’t worth the life of one single man of ours—or of theirs. Some of those fellows on the steel cars are armed; you can bet on that; and——”
He broke off because just then another act in the drama was getting ready to stage itself. Down the line of the Overland Central a light engine was coursing swiftly, and for a moment it seemed as if it must collide with the blocking train. But it came to a stand a little way short of the pendulum swing, and from the engine step a big man in soiled brown duck and laced leggings swung off and came on foot down the track side.