“Gee!—I wish you were going to Old Sheddon with me,” said Dick; and he meant it. “Can’t you make it, some way?”
Larry shook his head.
“No can do, Dickie; not a chance in the world. You know how we’re fixed at home; there are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack—they’ve all got to have some sort of a show to get their schooling. And Dad can’t swing it alone on a crossing watchman’s pay.”
“You’ve been sending them your wages this summer?”
“Sure Mike; otherwise I couldn’t have come.”
“Well, it’s a rotten shame,” Dick protested. “You’ve got more good engineering stuff in your old bean in a minute than I’ll ever have in mine, if I live to be a hundred years old.... Through with the grub?—all right; let’s go.”
It was a mile from the supply camp to the point up the valley where the track-layers were speeding the race, and from one of the hill-shoulder curves they could see the approach to Little Ophir, the goal to which both railroads were racing. At the next turn they came up with the track force driving the work; many men and teams, a supply train inching ahead as the cross-ties and rails were needed, the long-drawn blasts from the engine’s stack playing a deep undertone to a medley of shouts and cries and the clanging of spike-mauls.
Just before they reached the actual front the two boys saw a man coming across from the opposite side of the river, where a scene similar to the Short Line industrial battle was staging itself on the O. C. grade; a heavy-set man roughly dressed and looking something like a retired range-rider. Reaching the river he crossed it, leaping from boulder to boulder in the stream bed and coming straight on to climb the Short Line embankment just ahead of Dick and Larry.