A crash like that of a falling house, a burst of grayish green dust and smoke from the opposite side of the canyon, and a hurtling shower of stones varying in size from pebbles to pumpkins, made the two young fellows, one carrying a boxed surveying instrument and the other the tripod and staff, take hasty shelter behind the nearest boulder.
“Ding-bust those fellows over there—they don’t care a whang who happens to be in the way of their ding-busted rock-flinging!” Dickie Maxwell complained plaintively, peering out at his side of the sheltering boulder to see if there were another crash and a volley due to come. “Did they give any warning at all? I didn’t hear anybody yell ‘Fire in the rock.’ Did you?”
Larry shook his head.
“You wouldn’t hear ’em, anyway—with the river making such a thundering racket,” he averred. “Just the same, what you say names ’em right. They don’t seem to care much what they do to us.”
For a couple of weeks the two boys had been “living easy,” as Dick phrased it. After the day of flood swampings at Pine Gulch they had been sent out ahead with Blaisdell, one of the assistant engineers, to drive stakes and carry chain on a correction of one of the original surveys in the upper canyon, and for that length of time they had been out of touch with the construction force and the industrial battle that was going on from day to day.
During that time the race between the two competing construction armies had gone on neck and neck, as you might say. The Overland Central had completed its bridge-trestle in the lower narrows, and while its track-laying gangs were still half a mile or more behind those of the Short Line, its graders and rock men were scattered all the way along in advance; and since the O. C. survey had the higher location on the north bank of the river, the blasting seriously interfered with the Short Line work on the opposite and lower bank.
“If they were only decent enough to have some regular hours for firing, like white folks!” Dick went on. “But the way it is, you never can tell any hour or minute when they won’t open up and fling rocks at us!”
“Mr. Bob Goldrick claims that it is a part of their plan to hamper and delay us,” Larry put in soberly. “I suppose they’re calling it ‘business,’ but I’ll say it’s crooked business. Reckon we’re safe now to make another run for it?”
Dick picked up the instrument box and peeped around the corner of the boulder.
“Nothing stirring,” he reported. “Are you ready? All right—let’s go!”