“Another coupling and plug!” Larry ordered; and with the rear end of the pipe thus protected so that it could be hammered upon, he drove it with a block of wood and a sledge hammer, thus gaining two or three feet more.
“It’s stopped going—you can’t make it!” called Dick, who was supporting the sag of the pipe and steadying it against the blows of the sledge.
“We’ve got to make it!” Larry’s retort was undaunted, but he was pretty nearly at the end of his resources. Nearly, but not quite. Summoning his helpers he found a cross-tie with a square end, and using this as a battering ram the three of them were able to gain another foot.
It was while the rescue pipe was still going in, though now only by half-inches, that a most welcome sound thundered in their ears; namely the storming exhausts of a locomotive laboring up the grade and announcing the upcoming of the material train. They thought this would mean more help; but when they looked back down the track it was only to be disappointed. The train was made up of the construction engine pushing a single flat-car which was loaded with timbers, and there was no crew save the two enginemen. At the same moment, as if by malice aforethought—only of course it was not—the blasting began again on the other side of the canyon.
Under a hail of small stones the train came up, to be flagged to a stop as it was over-running the out-thrust length of pipe. Larry, still in command, was grappling fiercely with a new idea that had come sizzling into his brain. Here was power enough; a mighty ram that would put their puny efforts with the sledge hammer and the butting cross-tie miles out of the race.
“Blow your whistle and see if you can’t make those fellows up yonder understand that we’re in trouble!” he yelled up at the engineer in the cab; and when the whistle signal had been given, and had gone unheeded: “Ease ahead a little until the car straddles the pipe ... that’s right—hold up; that’s far enough,” and down he went on his back under the timber car to try to make some sort of a pushing hitch on the pipe of rescue.
The hitch was made, after a fashion, with a bit of chain ransacked out of the compressor shed scrap heap, and a vise hastily detached from the compressor man’s repair bench to make a clamp-hold on the pipe to push against. But just as Larry was crawling out to give the engineer the word to move ahead slowly, bang! came another blast from the opposite cliff, and a flying fragment of stone, no bigger than a man’s fist, came hurtling across the river.
“Look out!” Dick shouted; and the engineer, glancing out of the cab window and seeing the stone, ducked promptly. But the stone didn’t hit the cab. As if it had been a projectile fired out of a carefully aimed cannon, it struck the locomotive’s whistle and snapped it off short at the dome-head.
In the uproar of escaping steam that followed, nobody could make himself heard, and Larry didn’t try. Racing around to the rear end of the flat-car he uncoupled it from the disabled engine, making frantic signals to the engineer to let his machine drop back down the grade out of harm’s way. Ideas were coming thick and fast now, and though his power plant was smashed, he had one more alternative ready and waiting to be tried out.
“Cut off your air, start the compressor, and fill the storage tank!” he yelped at Beasley, the compressor engineer; then to Dick: “You and Johnnie Shovel help me, quick!—we’ve got to take a chance on these flying rocks!”