“Gee! Some fierce old place to build a railroad, I’ll tell the world!” said Dick Maxwell, the lighter-built of the two, clawing for footholds on the steep bank. “Find anything yet, Larry?”
“Nothing that looks like a location stake,” was the answer. “I guess we’ll have to back-track a piece and measure the distance up from that last one we found.”
“Aw’ right,” said Dick, with a little groan for the effort loss; “give me the end of the tape and I’ll do the back-flip,” and with the ring of the steel tape-line in hand he crawled back along the shelving slide. “Got you!” he called out, when the last-discovered stake was reached; and Larry, holding the tape case, marked the hundred-foot point and began to search again for the stake which ought to be there and didn’t show up.
Five years earlier, when gold was first discovered at the headwaters of the Tourmaline, the railroad company had surveyed a line up the canyon and some twenty miles of track had been laid eastward from Red Butte. Later, the gold excitement had died down, and the Tourmaline Extension, something less than half completed, was abandoned.
But now new gold discoveries had been made and “Little Ophir” had leaped, overnight, as one might say, into the spot-light—which is a way that gold discoveries have of doing. A stirring, roaring mining-camp city had sprung up on the site of the old workings at the canyon head, and the building of the railroad extension was once more under way. For Little Ophir was without railroad connections with the outside world, and the canyon of the Tourmaline afforded the only practicable route by which a railroad could reach it.
Early in June a big construction force had been mobilized at Red Butte and the work of refitting and extending the track already laid was begun. Out ahead of the graders and track-layers an engineering party, under Mr. Herbert Ackerman, chief of construction, was reëstablishing the line of the old survey; and it was in this party that the general manager’s son, Dick, and Larry Donovan, son of the Brewster crossing watchman, were the “cubs.”
On the morning in question the two boys had been sent up the canyon ahead of the main party to find and mark the stakes of the former survey so that they could be readily located by the transitmen who were following them. For several miles it had been plain sailing. In the lonely wilderness there had been nothing to disturb the stakes, and in the high, dry, mountain atmosphere but few of them had rotted away. But now, in the most difficult part of the gorge, the trail seemed to be lost.
“Haven’t found it yet?” Dick asked, coming up from the tape-holding.
“Not a single sign of it. Here’s the hundred-foot point,” and Larry dug his boot heel into the shale.
“Let’s spread out a bit,” Dick suggested. “It must be right around here somewhere.”