“It sure looks that way,” Dick agreed. “If we could only get our rock cutting in the ‘Narrows’ done before they catch up and go to drilling and blasting across the creek from us it wouldn’t be so bad. But if we don’t.... Believe me, I’m calling the situation pretty complicated, aren’t you?”
“Complicated” was a rather mild word to use in describing the strugglesome industrial battle going on in the narrow gorge of the Tourmaline. Like most mountain canyons, this one offered scanty encouragement to the building of even one railroad line, let alone two. In many parts it was merely a deep, rock-bound chasm, with usually a narrow shelving bank on one side of the stream—but rarely on both.
Having been first in the field, the Nevada Short Line engineers had chosen the easiest route, crossing from one bank of the stream to the other as the ground was most favorable for their purpose. But the competing railroad, coming in later, had ignored the Short Line’s earlier survey, overlapping and even duplicating it in some places, with no regard whatever for the rights of the pioneer company. Under such conditions the struggle for the right-of-way had now developed into a fighting race between the two construction forces, each trying to forge ahead of the other and to seize and hold every foot of the favorable ground.
In this race the Short Line was, for the moment, the winner, having already laid its track some three miles beyond the point where the Overland Central was entering the canyon through the northern gulch and building its trestle. But the race was by no means won. In the ruggedest part of the canyon the Short Line was halted by a rocky buttress through which it was necessary to cut a shelf for the track. And rock blasting is slow work.
Two and a half miles above the scene of hurried trestle-building, and a scant half-mile below their own “end of track,” the two boys on the storming 815 saw another gang of Overland Central graders at work on the opposite side of the gorge. They were on a steep slope covered with great boulders and standing “monuments” of eroded rock in curious formations. Neither Dick nor Larry could make out what the men were doing, but they seemed to be actively busy doing something.
“They’re coming right along with the graders without waiting for their trestle to be finished,” Dick pointed out. Then: “Say, Larry—I didn’t realize that their grade was so much higher up than ours. If their track is as high as those fellows are working they must be making altitude a lot faster than we are.”
“They need to make it,” Larry explained. “They are planning to go into Little Ophir on a grade much higher than ours; or at least, they’ve made one survey that way. Mr. Goldrick told me so when I was out working with him yesterday.”
“Which the same spells a heap more trouble for us,” said Dick gloomily. “Having the height on us that way, every blast they fire will bombard our track and our working gangs. Looks to me as if we’ve simply got to keep ahead of them; that’s all there is to it!”
Reaching the temporary “front” camp at Pine Gulch, in a little park-like widening of the canyon, they left the surveying instruments in the office tent and walked on up the gorge to report for duty to Goldrick, the assistant engineer in charge of the rock cutting in the Narrows.