“Anarchist talk?” said Larry; “I haven’t heard any.”
“Oh, it’s just that little bunch of trouble-makers over on the west end. You remember reading in the papers how they spoiled a lot of work in the shops and raised Cain generally. The court over in Uintah County sent three of them to prison last week for sabotage and the others have threatened to get square with the company for prosecuting them. That’s all.”
Larry caught step with the former first baseman as they walked on toward the station building.
“Is this all you’re going to do this vacation, Dick?” he asked; “drive down to the offices once in a while to take your father home in the car?”
“Not on your sweet life!” was the laughing reply. “What I’m going to do is tied up in a sort of secret, but I guess it’ll be all right to tell you. The company is going to build a road up the Tourmaline to the Little Ophir gold field, and—this is the secret part of it—we’re going to try to beat the Overland Central to it. I’m to go out with the surveying party, or rather the construction party, as a sort of roustabout, chain-bearer—anything you like to call it.”
The difference between Dick Maxwell’s prospects and his own gave Larry Donovan the feeling of having been suddenly wrapped in a wet blanket. In a flash he saw a panorama picture of Dick’s summer; the free, adventurous life in the mountain wilds, the long days crammed full of the most interesting kind of work, the camp fire at night in the heart of the immensities, and, more than all, the chance to be helping to do something that was really adding to the sum of the world’s riches. Wiping grease from tired machinery wasn’t to be spoken of in the same day with it. Yet Larry was game; he wouldn’t share the wet blanket with the lucky one.
“That’s simply bully!” he said; “first lessons in engineering, eh?”
“Y-yes; maybe: but it ought to be you, Larry, instead of me. You’ve got the head for it, and the math., and all the rest of it. Have you gone to work in the round-house as you said you were going to?”