Dick and Larry, in much-worn corduroys and lace-boots, and each with a furled red signal flag under his arm, were tramping down the construction track of the Little Ophir Extension. On their right the brawling torrent of the Tourmaline swirled over and among its boulders, and across the canyon, and half-way up its steep acclivity, ran the partly completed grade of the Overland Central.
“Just let it soak in,” Dick went on wrathfully. “Right here in the middle of the fight with the O. C., when every hour may be worth a thousand dollars to our company, we’ve got to stop dead and entertain a bunch of Big Money from New York! It makes me sick!”
“Sick is right,” Larry agreed; and his wrath, if not so teeth-gnashing, as you might say, as that of the general manager’s son, was no less hostile to the intrusions of Big Money—in fact, since he was the son of a workingman, it was rather more hostile than less. But of that, more in its place.
“Somebody ought to have stopped ’em,” Dick went on. “If I’d been in the chief’s place, I’d have dumped a few material cars over the right-of-way down in the valley so they couldn’t get by with their old special.”
“I guess it couldn’t be helped,” Larry grumbled. “I’ll bet your father said and did everything he could to keep this junketing party from butting in on us; and now, as long as they’re coming, we’ve got to make the best of it. I only hope there aren’t any women along. That would be the limit!”
There was reason for all this impatient faultfinding. Early that morning a wire had come notifying the chief of construction that a special train, bearing Vice-President Holcombe, a committee of directors, and a number of guests, was coming over the uncompleted Extension, and immediately the two juniors of the engineering staff, Dick and Larry, had been sent afoot down the canyon to post themselves at the two points where there was the most danger from the Overland Central’s blasting and the flying rocks.
One of these danger points was just at hand, and Larry volunteered to drop out and stand guard over it.
“You’ll have time to make the big rock cutting at the Cascades,” he told his fellow flagman; and accordingly, Dickie Maxwell resumed his tramp alone.
By this time the special train, consisting of a big, heavy “Pacific-type” passenger engine, a dining-car and a Pullman combination sleeping and observation car, was well on its way up the canyon, rolling and lurching around the curves, and behaving itself, on the rough, unsurfaced track, much like a cranky ship in a seaway. On the fireman’s box in the high locomotive cab an audaciously pretty girl of fourteen or fifteen—a girl with resolute brown eyes and lips that could “register” anything from a jolly laugh to the scornful poutings of a spoiled only daughter—clung desperately to the window sill to keep from being dumped into the fireman’s shovel in the bumpings and lurchings.
This girl was the daughter of the vice-president of the Nevada Short Line, and she had insisted upon having a ride on the engine when the train had halted at the canyon-portal water tank. Since the vice-president himself had made the request, Bart Johnson, the grizzled engineer of the 1016, could only grin sourly and say, “Why, sure, Mr. Holcombe!” and wipe his hands on a piece of waste so that he could help Miss Daughter up the high steps.