As the two young engineers stepped into the car and were driven away, Ashby dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands.
“So I'm to be beaten out of the hotel game here, am I!” the hotel man asked himself, gritting his teeth. “I'm to be driven out by Reade, the fellow whom I once kicked out of my hotel! Oh—well, all right!”
CHAPTER XVIII. TRAGEDY CAPS THE TEST
“Pass the signal!” directed Tom.
A railroad man with a flag made several swift moves. Down the track an engineman, in his cab, answered with a short blast of, the whistle. Then he threw over the lever, and a train of ten flat cars started along in the engine's wake.
It was the first test—the “small test,” Tom called it—of the track that now extended across the surface of the Man-killer.
On each flat car were piled ten tons of steel rails, to be used further along in the construction work. With engine, cars and all, the load amounted to one hundred and fifty tons, the pressure of which would be exerted over a comparatively short strip of the new track that now glistened over the Man-killer.
Mounted on his pony, Harry Hazelton had galloped a considerable distance down the track. Now, halted, he had turned his pony's head about, watching eagerly the on-coming train.
For two weeks the laborers had been working on the roadbed now running over the Man-killer. Ties had been laid and rails fastened down. Apparently the Man-killer had done its worst and had been balked, a seemingly secure roadbed now resting on the once treacherous quicksand.