The engine and caboose faded in the blur of the blizzard as the break was made in the track. “Take those bars and divide your men into batches of ten with foremen that can make signs, if they can’t talk English,” directed McCloud. “Work lively now, and throw this track to the south!”
Pretty much everybody––Japs, Italians, and Greeks––understood the game they were playing. McCloud said afterward he would match his Piedmont 129 hundred in making a movable Y against any two hundred experts Glover could pick; they had had the experience, he added, when the move meant their last counter in the game of mountain life or death. The Piedmont “hundred,” to McCloud’s mind, were after that day past masters in the art of track-shifting. Working in a driving cloud of grit and snow, the ignorant, the dull, and the slow rose to the occasion. Bill Dancing, Pat Mears and his foreman, and Stevens moved about in the driving snow like giants. The howling storm rang with the shouting of the foremen, the guttural cries of the Japs, and the clank of the lining-bars as rail-length after rail-length of the heavy track was slued bodily from the grade alignment and swung around in a short curve to a right angle out on the open ground.
McCloud at last gave the awaited signal, and, with keen-eyed, anxious men watching every revolution of the cautious driving-wheels, the engine, hissing and pausing as the air-brakes went off and on, pushed the light caboose slowly out on the rough spur to its extreme end and stopped with the pilot facing the main track at right angles; but before it had reached its halting-place spike-mauls were ringing at the fish-plates where a moment before it had left the line on the curve. The track at that point was cut again, and under a long line of 130 bars and a renewed shouting it was thrown gradually quite across the long gap in the main line, and the new joints in a very rough curve were made fast just as the engine, running now with its pilot ahead, steamed slowly around the new curve and without accident regained the regular grade. It was greeted by a screeching yell as the men climbed into the caboose, for the engine stood safely headed into the teeth of the storm for Piedmont. The ten miles to cover were now a matter of less than thirty minutes, and the construction train drew into the Piedmont yards just as the telegraph wires were heating from headquarters with orders annulling freights, ordering ploughs on outgoing engines, and battening the division hatches for a grapple with a Christmas blizzard.
No man came back better pleased than Stevens. “That man is all right,” said he to Mears, nodding his head toward McCloud, as they walked up from the caboose. “That’s all I want to say. Some of these fellows have been a little shy about going out with him; they’ve hounded me for months about stepping over his way when Sinclair and his mugs struck. I reckon I played my hand about right.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE QUARREL
Spring found the construction of the valley line well advanced, and the grades nearing the lands of the Dunning ranch. Right-of-way men had been working for months with Lance Dunning, over the line, and McCloud had been called frequently into consultation to adjust the surveys to objections raised by Dicksie’s cousin to the crossing of the ranch lands. Even when the proceedings had been closed, a strong current of discontent set from the managing head of the Stone Ranch. Rumors of Lance Dunning’s dissatisfaction often reached the railroad people. Vague talk of an extensive irrigation scheme planned by Sinclair for the Crawling Stone Valley crept into the newspapers, and it was generally understood that Lance Dunning had expressed himself favorably to the enterprise.