“Never in the world!” Dick chuckled, rolling himself into his blankets. “He’s tickled pink over what you thought of—and did—and I’ll bet a chicken worth fifty dollars that you’ll get a boost at headquarters that’ll make your curly old head swim. Gee! but you’re the lucky kid!”
“Over what I did?” growled Larry drowsily. “I like that! If you don’t quit cutting yourself out of things, the way you’ve been doing, I’m going to lick you, one of these days. Good-night.”
And with a yawning “Ah-yow!” that was like the plaint of a hungry yellow dog he was asleep.
CHAPTER IV
“THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN”
The big “consolidation,” its single pair of pony trucks feeling out the way for the eight gripping drive-wheels, was storming up the crooked canyon of the Tourmaline, pushing two flat-car loads of steel rails ahead of it and waking the echoes with its clamor.
The track, rough and uneven because it had not yet been “surfaced,” made the big engine rock and surge from side to side, and Dick and Larry, perched on the fireman’s seat and carefully nursing two mahogany boxes, had to brace themselves to keep their places. Two days earlier a pair of surveying instruments had been damaged by the premature explosion of a blast in a rock cutting, and the boys were returning from a hurry trip to the valley supply camp with replacements.
As the steel train rounded one of the canyon curves, the elbow where the branch gulch from the north came in, a scene of strenuous activity came into view. On the opposite side of the river, workmen, clustering like bees in swarming time, were building a trestle designed to carry a railroad track past a hundred-foot stretch where the canyon wall rose almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge. The legs of the trestle bents were planted fairly in the stream and the difficulties in the builders’ way were prodigious. Yet the little army was toiling as if the very minutes were precious—as, indeed, they were. For, in the race to reach the gold field at the head of the Tourmaline the Nevada Short Line was now well in the lead.
“They’re getting in their old scaffolding, all right,” Larry commented, twisting himself to look out of the 815’s cab window, “and it will do to run over until they can take time to blast out a notch in the cliff. When they get their track past that place they’ll be in shape to give us a lot of trouble.”