“I like your Larry Donovan much better than I do you, Dickie Maxwell,” she remarked coolly. “He may have been thinking all these things you’ve been saying, but he was at least polite enough not to slap me in the face with them.”
“You bet he was thinking them,” said Dick sourly. “Any fellow would.” Then, as the train slowed around a curve so short that it made the wheel flanges shriek in protest: “Pine Gulch, our headquarters camp, is just ahead. If you’ve got as much good sense as I thought you had last summer, you’ll try to persuade your father not to ask us to take this train any farther up the canyon.”
At the Pine Gulch stop the two boys—Larry had been riding the front platform of the dining-car since he had flagged for the last point of hazard—stood aside and looked on while the inspection party debarked and was met by Mr. Ackerman; met and welcomed, of course, as Large Money, when it happens to own a lot of railroad stock, must be.
“Just the same,” Dick said to Larry, “I’ll bet the chief is saying things to himself.”
“I guess so,” Larry returned. “I wouldn’t blame him. What are they going to do now?”
The “what” explained itself in due course. Preparations were making to place the excursion train upon the only available and already crowded side-track—which meant that it was going to stop at Pine Gulch, for the present, at least.
“That’s good, as far as it goes,” Dick admitted morosely. “If only they won’t ask to be chased up to the working ‘front,’ maybe we’ll have some little chance. Let’s go over to the mess tent and see if Dogsy’s saved us anything to chew on. It’s away past noon.”
While they were eating, the boys saw the excursionists—there were something like a score of them, including the girl and four women—climbing the steps of the dining-car in response to a white-jacketed waiter’s summons. On the high track opposite the little park-like valley in which the headquarters camp lay, a laboring O. C. engine, pushing a couple of flat-cars loaded with men and steel rails, was storming up the grade.
“More steel going to the O. C. front,” Dick commented.
“Yes,” Larry agreed; “and I’ll bet they’re laughing in their sleeves right now over our new handicap. Did you tell that girl some of the things she ought to know?”