While he was lying there in the soft summer-night darkness grappling with the stubborn puzzle the sounds of the work battle driven by the night shift sorted themselves out for him; the rattle-and-clank and rapid-fire exhausts of the big steam shovel, the grumble of its swing aside, the slump and bang of its bucket-bottom as it dumped its burden into a car of the spoil train, followed by the slow gruntings of the train locomotive as it pushed another car up to receive the next shovelful. Punctuating the regular sequence of these near-by noises came the thunder of blast explosions, distance-softened; these, as Larry knew, being on the Overland Central grade, either above or below the camp.
He fell asleep at last, for his day’s work had been no less strenuous than Dick’s, but even in his dreams he was still figuring on the problem, which promptly proceeded to tangle itself inextricably with the shovel clamor and the distant muttering thunder of the blasting, and to become, in the dream wrestle, a part and parcel of the noises.
Turning out to an early breakfast, the two boys found the day shift already at work. Hastening up the track to see what the night shift had accomplished, they had a shock of discouragement. True, the big shovel hog had rooted its way a few feet farther into the slide, but apparently the disturbance it had set up in the surface of the shale had spread far and wide. The row of five-foot grade stakes they had driven the day before was now showing only a few inches of the top of the stakes, and another movement of the slide would bury them completely out of sight.
“Great Peter!” Dick exclaimed, with a little gasp, “if it’s going to do that every night, we’ll be rooting away at it for the next hundred years! Why, good goodness! there’s a full yard more of it around those stakes than there was when we drove them!”
As he spoke, the day men were preparing to haul the shovel out to make room for the pile-driver which had been brought up from Pine Gulch in the night. Presently the exchange was made, the guide-frame of the driver was raised, and the driving of the bulkhead posts was begun. At once the trouble that Larry had suggested in the talk with Dick developed. Each concussion of the heavy driver hammer falling upon the pile head brought down more of the shale, and in a very short time the small excavation so laboriously made by the shovel digging had entirely disappeared.
By noon a dozen of the piles had been driven, under conditions that were almost prohibitory, and men with hand shovels were working carefully to open a trench for the placing of the bulkhead planks behind the posts; digging cautiously and carefully so as not to bring down any more of the slippery deluge. By nightfall a creeping advance of some seventy-five feet or such a matter had been made; and when the night shift went on, the pile-driver had been moved ahead to begin another lap in the slow journey.
While they were eating supper in the camp mess tent Larry made a few figures on a bit of paper torn from his pocket note-book. When he finished he was shaking his head despairingly.
“That won’t do, Dick,” he said. “At a hundred and fifty feet of progress for a twenty-four-hour day we can count upon being held up here for a solid month. That means that the O. C. will beat us into Little Ophir, hands down.”
“And still you haven’t lassoed your bright idea?” Dick grinned across the table at him.