Empire Builders Part 25

He was at no loss to account for North's motive. It was no longer the contemptuous disregard of a general manager for one of his subordinates who had shown signs of outgrowing his job. It was a fight between rivals--equals--and Ford knew that it must go on until one or the other should be driven to the wall. Thus far, his antagonist had scored every point. The MacMorroghs had been helped into the saddle and held there.

Mr. Colbrith had been won over; the authority given Ford by his appointment as a.s.sistant to the president had been annulled by making North the first vice-president with still higher authority. With a firm ally in the president, and a legion of others in the MacMorroghs' camps, North could discredit the best engineering corps that ever took the field; and he was doing it--successfully, as Ford had reason to know.

More than once Ford had been on the point of leaving his plow in the furrow while he should go to New York for one more battle with the directory--a battle which should definitely abolish North and Mr.

Colbrith--or himself. Again and again he had weighed the chances of winning such a battle. With Brewster for a leader it might be done. The time for the annual stock-holders' meeting was approaching, and an election which should put the burly copper magnate into the presidency would be an unmixed blessing, not only for a struggling young chief of construction, but for the Pacific Southwestern stock-holders, who were sure to pay in the end for the present policy of rule or ruin.

Part of the time it seemed to Ford that it was clearly his duty to make this fight against the grafters in the Denver management. North deserved no consideration, and while Mr. Colbrith was honest enough, his blind prejudice and narrow mentality made him North's unwitting accessory.

Three months earlier Ford would not have hesitated; but in the interval a woman had come between to obscure all the points of view. A fight to the death against the Colbrith administration meant the antagonizing of the Adairs--of Alicia, at least. True, she had spoken lightly of her uncle's peculiarities; but Ford made sure she would stand by him in the conflict, if only for kins.h.i.+p's sake.

All this he was turning over in his mind for the hundredth time while the big 1012 hammered up the Plug Mountain grade under the guiding hand of the giant in blue denim. Ford, glooming out upon the lighted stretch ahead, was once more finding the crucial question answerless. Should he draw out of the losing battle with North and his fellow grafters, and thereby save his chance of winning Alicia Adair? Or should he sacrifice his love upon the altar of ambition, abolish Mr. Colbrith and the crew of buccaneers his mistaken policy was sheltering, and win the industrial success and a quieted conscience?

His decision was reached by the time Hector was easing the throttle lever at the summit of Plug Pa.s.s. What must be done should be done quickly.

"Right here is where you begin to run on your nerves," he said to the big engineer, as the heavy engine and car lunged over the summit of the pa.s.s and began to gather gravity momentum on the downward rush.

Hector nodded, and twitched the handle of the air-brake c.o.c.k at shorter intervals. Ford glanced back at the following car framed in the red glow from the opened fire-box door. It was surging and bounding alarmingly over the uneven track, not without threatenings of derailment. Ford was willing to give the president the full benefit of his unreasonable pertinacity; but there were others to be considered--and one above all the others.

"Easy, man; easy!" he cautioned. "If you leave the steel on this goat-track there won't be anybody left to tell the story. It's a thousand feet sheer in some places along here. Suppose you let me take her to the bottom of the hill."

The engineer stood aside with a good-tempered grin. He had seen the chief of construction walking the one young lady of the party to the top of Plug Pa.s.s and back, and it was not difficult to account for his anxiety.

Throughout the ten long miles of the mountain descent Ford crouched on the driver's seat and put his mind into the business of getting down the slides and around the sagging curves without having a wreck. The 1012's brake equipment was modern, and the Nadia's gear was in perfect order.

Now and then on a tangent the big engine would straighten herself for a race or a runaway, but always the steady hand on the air-c.o.c.k brought her down just before the critical moment beyond which neither brakes nor the steadiest nerve could avail. Thrice in the long downward rush Ford checked the speed to a foot-pace. This was in the rock cuttings where the jagged faces of the cliffs thrust themselves out into the white cone of the headlight, scanting the narrow shelf of the right-of-way to a mere groove in the rock. He was afraid of the cuttings. One of the many tricks of the MacMorroghs was to keep barely within the contract limits on clearance widths, and once the Nadia, sagging mountainward on the roughly leveled track at the wrong moment, touched one of the out-hanging rocks in pa.s.sing. Hector heard the touch, and so did Ford; but it was the engineman who made a grim jest upon it, saying: "If she does that more'n once or twice, there'll be a job for the car painters, don't you reckon, Mr. Ford? And for the carpenters."

Just below the doubling bend in the great loop they came in sight of the first of the MacMorrogh camps. Since the night was frosty a huge bonfire was burning beside the track; and when Hector blew his whistle, some one flagged the train with a brand s.n.a.t.c.hed from the fire. Ford stopped because he dared not do otherwise.

"Well, what's wanted?" he snapped, when the train came to a stand, and the brand-swinger, backed by a dozen others, made as if he would climb to the cab of the 1012.

"Some of us fellies want to go down to Ten Mile--the liquor's out," said the man, trying to get a fair sight of the strange engineman.

"Get off!" said Ford; and Hector made the order effective by shoving the intruder from the step. That was easy; but before the train had measured twice its length, a pistol barked thrice and the gla.s.s in the cab window on Ford's side fell in splinters.

"Holy smoke!" said Hector. "Is them the kind of plug-uglies you've got over here, Mr. Ford?"

Ford nodded. His eyes were on the track again, and he was hoping fervently that the three shots had all been aimed at the engine. A mile farther on, Penfield came sliding over the coal to say that the president wanted to know what the shooting was about.

Ford turned the 1012 over to Hector. The track hazards of the mountain grade were safely pa.s.sed.

"Did any of the shots. .h.i.t the car?" he asked of Penfield.

"No."

"Well, if you have to say anything before the ladies it might be advisable to make a joke of it. Signal torpedoes sound very much like pistol-shots, you know."

Penfield nodded. "But to Mr. Colbrith?"

"To Mr. Colbrith you may say that a gang of drunken MacMorrogh surfacers flagged us down, and when we wouldn't let them have the train, made a little gun play."

"Heavens!" said the clerk, whose curiosity stopped short at the farthest confines of any battle-field. "Is that sort of thing likely to happen again, Mr. Ford?"

"Your guess is as good as anybody's," said Ford curtly. "Better get back to the car as quickly as you can, before Mr. Colbrith whistles us down to find out what has become of you."

Below the camp of the surfacers there were a few miles of better track, and Hector made fair time until the train circled the mountain shoulder at the lower end of the great loop. Beyond this the roughnesses began again, and there were more of the skimped rock cuttings. At Ten Mile, which was a relay station in the upper canyon for the halting of supplies and material for which there was no room at the ever-advancing "front," they stopped to try for track-clearings.

As Leckhard had foretold, the operator could give them little help. Two hours earlier, a train of empties in two sections had left the end-of-track, coming eastward. Whether it was hung up at one of the intervening side-tracks, or was still coming, the operator could not say; and there were no means of finding out. Also, Mr. Frisbie, who had reached Riley's camp late in the afternoon, had left there after supper and was somewhere on the line with his light engine--probably on his way to the front, the operator thought.

Hector removed his great weight from the telegraph counter and the woodwork creaked its relief. What he said was indicative of his frame of mind.

"Humph!" he growled. "If we don't get tangled up with Mr. Frisbie's light engine, it's us for a head-ender with the string of empties. Isn't that about it, Mr. Ford?"

"That's it, precisely."

"Which means that Jimmy Shovel trots ahead of us for a hundred mile 'r so, carryin' a lantern like a blame' Dio-geenes huntin' for an honest man."

"That is the size of it," said Ford; but just then the sounder on the table began to click and the operator held up his hand for silence.

"Hold on a minute," he interrupted, "here's a piece of luck--it's Mr.

Frisbie, cutting in with his field set from Camp Frierson. He is asking Saint's Rest about you."

"Break in and tell him we're here," said Ford; and when it was done: "Ask him about that string of empties."

The reply was apparently another piece of luck. Frisbie, going westward, had pa.s.sed the first section of the freight train at Siding Number Twelve. It was hung up with a broken draw-head on the engine, and was safe to stay there, Frisbie thought, until somebody came along with a repair kit, which, it might be a.s.sumed, would not be before morning.

At this point Ford went around the counter and took the wire for a little personal talk with the first a.s.sistant. It ignored the stalled freight train, and Ford's rapid clickings spelled out an order. Frisbie was to drop everything else, and const.i.tute himself the president's _avant-courrier_ to the end-of-track camp, which, at the moment, happened to be the MacMorroghs' headquarters at the mouth of Horse Creek. All liquor-selling was to be stopped, the saloons closed, and the strictest order maintained during the president's stay--this if it should take the entire field force of the engineering department to bring it to pa.s.s.

"Don't," clicked Frisbie, from the other end of the long wire. And then at the risk of giving it away to every operator on the line: "You're doing yourself up. Let the president see for himself what he has let us in for."

Ford's reply was short and to the point. "The order stands. There are others besides the president to be considered. Good night."

"Well, we go to this here Siding Number Twelve, do we?" said Hector, when they were clambering once more to the foot-plate of the 1012.

"Safely, I think," said the chief, adding: "You can't run fast enough over this track to get into trouble anyway."

That was the way it appealed to Hector for the succeeding twenty miles.

When the track was not too rough to forbid speed, the cuts were too numerous, and the big flyer had to be bitted and held down until some of Hector's impatience began to get into the machinery. This shall account as it may for what happened. A mile or two below Riley's, where the lights were all out and the turmoil of the day of strikes had apparently subsided, the canyon opened out into a winding valley, and when Ford called across to Hector: "There are no rock cuts on this section, and we are partly surfaced. You can let her out a little for a few miles," the engineer took the permission for all it was worth and sent the eight-wheeler flying down the newly-ballasted stretch.

Two long curves were rounded in safety, and the special was approaching a third, when to Ford, track-watching even more anxiously than Hector, a dull red spot appeared in the exact center of the white field of the electric. For a moment it puzzled him, but the explanation came with a vigorous shock an instant later. It was the oil-lamp headlight of the freight!

Hector was huge enough to be slow, if bigness were a bar to celerity.

But no drill-master of the foot-plates could have brought the flying train to a stand with the loss of fewer seconds. Happily, too, the 1012's electric headlight served as a danger signal seen from afar by the engineer of the freight. So it chanced that the two great engines merely put their noses together; and by the time Penfield came scrambling over the coal with the inevitable query from the president, the jolting stop was a thing of the past, and the train was in motion again, following the freight, which was backing, at Ford's order, to the nearest siding.

"No more hurry for us to-night, Hector," was the boss's dictum, when the obstructing string of empties was safely pa.s.sed. "We take it slow and sure from this on, with your fireman to flag us around the curves and through the cuts. This was only the first section of the train that left Horse Creek at eight o'clock--the section that was broken down at Siding Twelve. We're due to pick up the second section anywhere between here and the end-of-track."

"Slow it is," said Hector. "I'm no hog, if I do take a little swill now and then: I know when I've got enough."

This was at ten-forty, while the night was still young. And for seven other hours the one-car special inched its way cautiously toward the goal, with Ford scanning every mile of the hazardous way as it swung into the beam of the headlight arc, with Hector's left hand stiffening on the brake-c.o.c.k, and with a weary fireman dropping from his gangway at every curve approach to flag for safety.

It was not until three o'clock in the morning that they met and pa.s.sed the second section of empties, and the dawn of a new day was fully come when the shacks and storehouses of the MacMorroghs' headquarters at the mouth of Horse Creek came in sight. Ford got down from his seat on the fireman's side and stretched himself as one relaxing after a mighty strain.

"That's the end of it for a little while, Billy," he said, addressing the big engineer as a man and a brother. "Crawl in on the first siding you come to, and go hunt you a bed. I don't think the president will be perniciously active to-day--after such a night as we've had."