Sir Ivers Clayborn, gray-haired and grizzled, a man schooled in the practical school of many lands and many years, who was chief consulting engineer when the road was building, advised a double-looped tunnel that, according to his sketch, looked something like the figure 8 canted over sideways. The directors poised their glasses and examined the sketch with interest until they caught sight of the penciled estimate in the corner. That settled it. They did not even take the trouble to vote. They asked for an alternative—and they got it. They got the Devil’s Slide.
First and last, it has euchred more money out of the treasury of the Transcontinental than it would have taken to build things Sir Ivers’ way to begin with; and it has taken some years, a good many of them, for the directors to learn their lesson. The old board never did, for that matter; but, thanks perhaps to younger blood, they’ve begun now to build as they should have built in the first place. It isn’t finished yet, that double-looped tunnel, it won’t be for years, but, no matter, it’s begun, and some day a good many more than a few men will sleep the easier because of it.
From Carleton, the super, to the last section hand and track-walker, the Devil’s Slide was a nightmare. The dispatchers, under their green-shaded lamps, cursed it in the gray hours of dawn; the traffic department cursed it spasmodically, but at such times so whole-heartedly and with such genuine fervor and abandon that its occasional lapses into silence were overlooked; the motive power department in the shape of Regan, the master mechanic, cursed it all the time, and did it breathlessly. It had only one friend—the passenger agent’s department. The passenger agent’s department swore by it—on account of the scenery.
“Scenery!” gulped the dispatchers, and the white showed under their nail tips as their fingers tightened on their keys.
“Scenery!” howled the traffic department, and reached for the claim file.
“Scenery!”—Regan didn’t say it—he choked. Just choked, and spat the exclamation point in a stream of black-strap.
“Scenery!” murmured Mr. General Passenger Agent esthetically, waving a soft and diamond bedecked hand from the platform of Carleton’s private car. “Wonderful! Grand! Magnificent! We’ve got them all beaten into a coma. No other road has anything like it anywhere in the world.”
“They have not,” agreed Carleton, and the bitterness of his soul was in his words.
Everybody was right.
The general passenger agent was right—the scenic grandeur was beyond compare, and he made the most of it in booklets, in leaflets, in pamphlets, and in a score of pages in a score of different magazines.