"I'll have to hurry," Tesno said. "Maybe...."
"Nonsense. Sam has work to do, and I refuse to be left alone. Not tonight, Jack."
[XII]
The first dozen miles lay in relatively flat sagebrush country. The twelve-man, thirty-horse boiler-hauling outfit covered them the first day, reaching the first real grade at dusk and halting there to spend the night and give the boss time to figure out what he was going to do in the morning.
He was a glary-eyed man named Rejack, who treated his horses with a kindness rare among teamsters and was consequently considered a simpleton by his crew. His problem was to get his huge wagon over a bridge almost exactly as wide as its wheel spread and then up a road with hairpins in it so sharp and steep that the top-heavy load was almost sure to overturn. He finally decided that it couldn't be done. The only chance was to ford the creek and pull the wagon straight up the hillside with block and tackle.
Shortly after sun-up, the crew dragged it across the creek without too much trouble. Rejack then anchored his pulley block on a big cedar, put six men on the wagon tongue to steer, and had ten span of horses hitched to pull down-grade as the wagon moved up. He inspected the teams, the rope, the lashings on the boiler and finally gave the order to start. The wagon moved along nicely for the first hundred feet. Then a man walked out of a clump of trees with a shotgun, aimed at the rope from four feet away, and fired both barrels.
The wagon reversed its direction so suddenly that the man walking near the rear of it with a wheel block had time only to toss it and jump. The wheel missed it. The wagon hurtled down the hillside, skidded sideways, made one complete roll, stopped abruptly in the creek, and collapsed under its load like a berry box.
In the confusion, the man with the shotgun had disappeared into the pines. Some of the crew considered going after him but were promptly discouraged when a rifle cut loose from somewhere above, its bullets ricocheting through the brush between them and the trees. It was plain to everybody that the saboteur had a partner up there covering him.
Rejack took off his hat, scratched his head, and reacted to catastrophe with casual acceptance that the crew later recounted with hilarity.