“It’s—it’s Grissby—the O. C. chief!” Dick stammered. “He’ll stop us again!”
“I don’t believe he will,” said Larry, with another out-thrust of the fighting Donovan jaw. “Those other fellows were officers of the law; but he isn’t.”
The O. C. chief’s purpose was made known the moment he came within shouting distance. It was to stampede the supposedly masterless working force.
“Throw down your tools, or every man jack of you will go to jail!” he called out to the workers. “You’re breaking the law!”
It was then that Michael Tregarvon, the big Cornish track-layer, stood forth, and that before either Dick or Larry could interpose.
“Pick-han’les!” he bawled to his men. “Oot wi’ ’em, lads! Oop to the river wi’ ’em and drive ’em in!”
The rush of some two score brawny trackmen, armed with the handles hastily knocked from their picks, was so sudden and overwhelming that the half-dozen intruders who had come to scare the Short Line force into stopping fled in disorder; stood not upon the order of their going, as the time-honored phrase has it. There was a lively foot-race across the level bit of valley, a shout of triumph from the pursuers as the invaders were driven helter-skelter to their own side of the Tourmaline, and the flurry was over.
That day, the last day of terrible toil in the three months’ race between the two railroads, was the shortest that Dick Maxwell and Larry Donovan had ever lived through. With a thousand things to think of and to do, the hours flew by on wings. Rail by rail, with clock-like regularity, the steel went into place on the completed grade, and almost before they knew it the thunder of the blasts in the rock cutting which was holding the “enemy” had withdrawn into a distant background.
Thus the day of a thousand demands fled shrieking, as you might say; and while the sun was still half an hour high over the western mountains the Short Line track was rounding the final curve into the outskirts of the great gold camp, where a delegation of enthusiastic citizens, headed by a brass band, was waiting to welcome the winner in the long race.