"There was no compromise with Pilot even after we got in on it. Snowslides, washouts, bowlders, forest-fires—and yet the richest quartz mines in the world lie behind it. This little branch, Mr. Brock, forty-eight miles, pays the operating expenses of the whole mountain division, and has done so almost since the day it was opened. But I'd rather lose the revenue ten times every year than to lose Morris Blood." The second vice-president was talking to Mr. Brock. Their car was just rounding the curve into the gap in front of Mount Pilot.
"What do you think of Blood's chances?" asked Mr. Brock.
"I don't know. A mountain man has nine lives."
"What does Glover think?"
"He doesn't say."
"Who built this line?"
"Two pretty good men ran the first thirty miles, but neither of them could give me a practicable line south of the gap; this last eighteen miles up and down and around Pilot was Glover's first work in the mountains. It's engineering. Every trick ever played in the Rockies, and one or two of Brodie's old combinations in the Andes, they tell me, are crowded into these eighteen miles. There, there's old Sitting Bull in all his clouds and his glory."
Glover had left the car at Sleepy Cat, going ahead with the relief train. Picked men from every district on the division had been assembling all the afternoon to take up the search for the missing superintendent. Section men from the Sweetgrass wastes, and bridgemen from the foothills, roadmasters from the Heart Mountains—home of the storm and the snow—and Rat Cañon trackwalkers that could spot a break in the dark under twelve inches of ballast; Morgan, the wrecker, and his men, and the mountain linemen with their foreman, old Bill Dancing—fiend drunk and giant sober—were scattered on Mount Pilot, while a rotary ahead of a battery of big engines was shoved again and again up the snow-covered hill.
Anxious to get the track open in the belief that Blood could best be got at from beyond the S bridge, Glover, standing with the branch roadmaster, Smith Young, on the ledge above the engines directed the fight for the hill. He had promised Gertrude he would keep out of the cab, and far across the curve below he could see the Brock car, where Bucks was directing the search on the eastern side of the gulch.
Callahan and the linemen were spreading both ways through the timber on the plateau opposite, but the snow made the work extremely difficult, and the short day allowed hardly more than a start. On the hill Glover's men advanced barely a hundred feet in three hours: darkness spread over the range with no sign of the missing man, and with the forebodings that none could shake off of what the night's exposure, even if he were uninjured, might mean.