“I'd go myself if I thought I could get the horses,” said Parker.
“I'd advise you to save yourself a fifty-mile ride up the tote-road,” the agent counseled. “Even if Ward didn't catch you, you'd find that no man would da'st to leave there. Furthermore, you've only got a little, short job here, scarcely worth while.”
The logic of the reply impressed Parker.
He could not spare the time anyway, to travel far up into the woods in quest of horses. His material must be conveyed across Spinnaker Lake in some other way.
“How far is it up the lake to Poquette?” he asked the agent.
“Sixteen miles.”
An hour later Parker, after a tour of inspection, had settled his problem of transportation in his own mind. His plan was ingenious.
There were half a dozen men available in Sunkhaze, and more were arriving daily, straggling down from the woods or roaring in fresh from the city, hurrying on the way up.
The postmaster owned a hardwood tract, and Parker set his little crew at work chopping birch saplings and fashioning from them huge sleds, strongly bolted. As for himself, he entered into a contract with the local blacksmith, threw his coat off and went to work on some contrivances, round which the settlement's loungers congregated from dawn till dark the next day, watching the progress and wondering audibly “what such a blamed contraption was goin' to turn out to be.”
Parker kept his own counsel. At the end of two days, with the assistance of the blacksmith, he had remodeled four ox-cart tires. Each tire was spurred with bristling steel spikes, bolted firmly. In reply to his telegram, “Rush loco, all equipments and coal,” the little narrow-gage engine arrived, at the tail of the procession of flat cars, loaded with materials of construction.