Cle Elum consisted of a sawmill, a pond full of logs, and one of the temporary camps Ben Vickers had set up here and there along his supply line. Tesno passed without stopping and rode on to the scene of the wreck. Here he found the guard sitting against a tree sound asleep—a sixteen-year-old kid armed with an ancient revolver with two shells in it. He jerked the boy to his feet and shoved him toward the boiler.
"You keep your eye on that thing every minute," he snapped.
After questioning the kid about what had happened, he made a quick scout through the pines and found where the vandal had tied his horse. Following the hoofprints upgrade, he soon came to a place where they were joined by another set. The two riders had headed straight into the timbered hills without so much as a deer trail to guide them. Apparently, they were men who knew the country well.
He rode back to Cle Elum then, where he found the boiler crew lounging around the mess tent, sipping coffee and playing poker.
"Holiday's over," he announced. "We'll go down there and get the boiler ready to load when the wagon arrives. We'll need about twenty horses to drag it out of the creek."
"Morning will be time enough," a bull-necked, bullet-headed freighter growled, clutching his poker hand close to his stomach. "You were sent down here to guard that damn teakettle, not to give orders. Rejack left me in charge, and I say you can go hang yourself. Where in the black damnation were you when those rascals surprised us, anyhow?"
Tesno remarked that he was in no mood to quibble. Placing the sole of his boot against the edge of the table, he kicked it into the man's stomach, got an armlock on him, and pitched him out of the tent on his face. The crew laughed uneasily and drifted off toward the corral to get harness on the horses.
After several hours of preparatory work, they maneuvered the boiler out of the creek on logs that had been peeled and greased. When they had skidded it onto two logs set along the bank like rails, they dug a cut under one end of these for the wagon to back into when it arrived. It was dark when they finished.
In the meantime, Tesno borrowed a Winchester from the camp 'general' at Cle Elum and another from the mill owner. He also found a Klickitat mill hand who knew the country and whom he set off on horseback to trail the saboteurs.
When the digging was finished and the boiler ready to load, Tesno announced that they would camp on the spot. He divided the men into pairs and assigned them to watches.