“Will I?” cried Dick. “It’s the surest little old thing you know or ever heard of! But land of goodness! we can’t handle two hundred and fifty men!”
“Well,” said Larry, his square jaw setting itself grimly, “we’re not going to take it lying down, anyway. Come along up to the chief’s tent.”
In the field headquarters tent there was a wire connecting with the supply camps down the line, and through them to the Short Line general offices in Brewster. They found the tent deserted and the operator gone; he, too, had been taken under the “John Doe” warrant of such magnificent scope.
At Larry’s suggestion, Dick sat at the telegraph instrument and tried to call some of the offices down the line. The wire proved to be dead; had doubtless been cut somewhere to make it dead. Thereupon they held a brief council of war, feeling very much like a couple of middies left in command of a super-dreadnaught, with the officers all gone and a storm raging. There were two locomotives at the front, the one used in the track-laying, and the one which had lately come up with the two car-loads of rails. While they were talking, the engineer of the latter stuck his face in at the tent opening.
Larry shouldered some part of the new responsibility promptly.
“Barney,” he began, “we’re the only bosses left on this job. Will you take your orders from us?”
The Irishman grinned down at them.
“Sure thing,” he responded heartily. “I’m shtill workin’ f’r the Short Line. More’n that, I was yer daddy’s fireman on th’ old main line whin you was runnin’ ’round in knee-pants, Larry Donovan—I was that same. What’s doin’?”
“I want you to back down to Pine Gulch and find the telegraph operator, Wellby,—you know him—and tell him what has happened to us up here. Ask him to wire Brewster and spread the news. Tell him to wire Mr. Maxwell that we’ll try to keep things moving some way until we can get some more bosses. That’s all. Make the best time you can down the canyon. Every single minute is going to count.”
After Barney had gone, Larry took a scratch-pad and scribbled a number of names, among them, that of Burkett, the bridge carpenter. Then he called one of the water boys and gave him the slip of paper.