At that they pushed on up the crooked gulch and for a time it seemed as if Dickie Maxwell were going to have the long end of the argument. True, they were still finding the location stakes at regular intervals, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to find anything else.
It was possibly a mile back from the gulch’s mouth, and in the very heart of the northern mountain range, that they made the great discovery. As they tramped around the last of the crooking gulch elbows the scene ahead changed as if by magic. The crooking elbow proved to be the gateway to an open valley surrounded by high mountains on all sides save that to the north.
Over the hills in the northern vista a newly constructed wagon road wound its way—they could tell that it was new by the freshness of the red clay in the cuts and fills; and in the middle of the valley ... here was what made them gasp and duck suddenly to cover in a little groving of gnarled pines. Spread out on the level were stacks of bridge timbers, great piles of cross-ties, neat rackings of steel rails, wagons, scrapers, a portable hoisting engine—all the paraphernalia of a railroad construction camp!
“Gee-meny Christmas!” Dick ejaculated under his breath, and that expressed it exactly. Here was the advanced post of the enemy, with everything in complete readiness for the forward capturing dash into Nevada Short Line territory.
It seemed to be the exactly fortunate moment for a hurried retreat and the sounding of a quick alarm in the home camp on the Tourmaline; but now Larry Donovan’s streak of ultimate thoroughness came again to the front.
“Nothing like it,” he objected to Dick’s frantic urgings in favor of the retreat; “let’s make it a knock-out while we’re about it. We want to be able to tell Mr. Ackerman the whole story when we go back; how much material they’ve got here, and all that.”
Oddly enough, the little valley, with its wealth of stored material and tools and machinery, seemed to be utterly deserted as they entered it. They saw no signs of life anywhere; there was not even a watchman to stop them when they crept cautiously up to the material piles and took shelter among them.
“Quick work now, Dick!” Larry directed. “You take the dimensions of those bridge sticks and count ’em while I’m counting the ties and rails!” and they went at it, “bald-headed,” as Dick phrased it in telling of it afterward, like a couple of fellows figuring against time on a tough problem on examination day. And since there is said to be nothing so deaf as an adder, neither of them heard a sound until a gruff voice behind them said:
“Well, how about it? Do they check out to suit you?”
At the gruff demand they jumped and spun around as if the same string had been tied to both of them; started and faced about to find a big, bearded giant in a campaign hat and faded corduroys looking on with a grim smile wrinkling at the corners of a pair of rather fierce eyes.