He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there was just a hint of a twinkle in the grave gray eyes to go with Mr. Maxwell’s reply.
“That wouldn’t be much of a reward—to make you foreman of engine-wipers: you’d probably earn that for yourself in course of time. I said you might have the kind of job you wanted most. Dick has been telling me of your talk just before the 331 was stolen. Next Monday morning you and he will both go out with the Tourmaline Canyon construction force—to do whatever Mr. Ackerman, the chief of construction, may want you to do; always providing your father approves. Your pay will be something better than you are at present getting in the round-house. That’s all; run along, now, and talk it over with your father and mother.”
And Larry ran, treading upon air for the space of six city squares. For now, you see, he had been given his chance—which was all that a Donovan could ask.
CHAPTER II
IN TOURMALINE CANYON
Timanyoni Park, ringed in all the way around by mountain ranges, is a valley shaped something like a big oval clothes-basket, with the long way of the basket running north and south, and a ridge of watershed hills cutting it in two in the other direction.
The southern half of the Park is about all that the average traveler ever sees of it, because the main line of the Nevada Short Line runs through that part of it; and if you should ask Mr. A. Traveler what about it, he would probably tell you that it is a fine farming country with big wheat fields and beautiful apple orchards—all irrigated, of course—and a thriving little city called Brewster lying somewhere in the middle of it.
That would all be true enough of what the passing tourist sees, but north of the watershed hills is the West that you read about. With the exception of one mining-camp—Red Butte—and a single railroad track—the Red Butte branch of the Short Line—skirting its western edge, that half of the clothes-basket is a jumbled wilderness of wooded hills just about as Nature left it. And slicing a half-moon out of these northern hills, the Tourmaline, a quick-water mountain stream, a goodish-sized little river in the volume of water it carries, enters through a rugged canyon, dipping into the valley basket a little to one side of the northern handle, let us say, and dodging out again a few miles farther on to find its way to the Colorado River.
The time—our time—for getting a first glimpse of the Tourmaline Canyon is the middle of a June forenoon; bright sunshine, a sky so blue that it almost hurts your eyes to look up at it, the air so crisp and sweet and clean as to make it a keen joy just to be alive and breathing it.
To right and left, as we look up the canyon, gray granite cliffs, seamed and weathered into all sorts of curious shapes, shut in a narrow gorge at the bottom of which the swift mountain torrent roars and rumbles and thunders among the boulders in its bed. On the left the canyon wall drops sheer to the water; but on the right there is a shelving, sliding bank of loose rock at the foot of the cliff. Along this bank two workmanlike young fellows, wearing the corduroys and high lace-boots of the engineers, are making their way slowly up-stream, scanning every foot of the shelving talus ledge as they cover it.