Empire Builders Part 24

The hope was not denied. Penfield, who was acting as private secretary to Mr. Colbrith, _en route_, appeared in the pa.s.sageway to say that Ford was wanted in the president's state-room.

"Well, Mr. Ford, what are we waiting for?" was the querulous demand which served as Mr. Colbrith's greeting when Ford presented himself at the door of the private compartment.

Ford's reply lacked the deferential note. He had reached a point at which his job was not worth as much as it had been.

"I have just brought Miss Adair back from the top of the pa.s.s, where we met Mr. Frisbie, my chief of construction. I wished to ask him if he thought the track was safe for your car, and he says, most emphatically, that it is not. I can not take the responsibility of sending the Nadia to the end-of-track."

The president's thin face was working irritably. "I haven't asked you to a.s.sume any responsibility, Mr. Ford. If the track is safe for your material trains, it is safe enough for my car. But I didn't send for you to argue the point. I desire to have the Nadia taken to the front. Be good enough to give the necessary orders."

Ford tried again. In addition to the precarious track there were few or no unoccupied sidings, especially near the front. Moreover, there was no telegraph service which might suffice for the safe despatching of the special train. There might be entire sections over which the Nadia would have to be flagged by a man on foot, and--

The president cut him off with almost childish impatience.

"I don't know what your object is in putting so many stumbling-blocks in the way, Mr. Ford," he rasped. "A suspicious person might say that you have been doing something which you do not wish to have found out."

Ford was a fair-skinned man, and the blood burned hotly in his face.

But, as once before under the president's nagging, he found his self-control rising with the provocation.

"My work is open to inspection or investigation, now or at any time, and I think we need not discuss that point," he said, when he could force himself to say it calmly. "We were speaking of the advisability of taking the Nadia and a pleasure party over a piece of raw construction line, and into an environment which, to put it mildly, could hardly be congenial to--to the ladies of the party. You know, or ought to know, the MacMorroghs: their camps are not exactly models of propriety, Mr.

Colbrith."

This was merely waving a red flag at an already exasperated bull. The president got upon his feet, and his shrill falsetto cut the air like a knife.

"Mr. Ford, when I wish to be told what is or is not proper for me to do, I'll ask you for an opinion, sir. But this is quite beside the mark.

Will you order this car out, or shall I?"

Ford looked at his watch imperturbably. Now that the president was thoroughly angry, he could afford to be cool.

"It is now five o'clock; and our end-of-track is fully one hundred and ten miles beyond the summit of the pa.s.s. Do I understand that you wish to take the added risk of a night run, Mr. Colbrith? If so, I'll give the order and we'll pull out."

"I desire to go _now_!" was the irascible reply. "Is that sufficiently explicit?"

"It is," said Ford; and he left the presence to go forward to the cab of the waiting engine.

"You are to take the car over the mountain, Hector," he said briefly, to the beetle-browed giant in blue denim, when he had climbed to the foot-plate. "I'll pilot for you."

"How far?" inquired the engineer.

"Something like a hundred and ten miles."

"Holy smoke! Over a construction track--in the night?"

"It's the president's order--none of mine. Let's get a move."

The big man got down from his box and made room for Ford. "I'll be pilin' 'em in the ditch somewhere, as sure as my name's Bill Hector," he said. "But we'll go, all the same, if he says so. I've pulled Mr.

Colbrith before. Down with you, Jimmy Shovel, and set the switch for us."

The fireman swung off and stood by the switch, and Hector backed his one-car train from the siding. When he had picked up the fireman and was ready to a.s.sault the mountain, Ford thrust a query in between.

"Hold on a minute; how is the water?" he asked.

Jimmy Shovel climbed over the coal to see, and reported less than half a tankful.

"That settles it," said the chief to Hector. "You'll have to back down to Saint's Rest and fill up. You'll get no more this side of Pannikin Upper Canyon. We haven't had time to build tanks yet."

Hector put his valve-motion in the reverse gear and began to drop the train down the grade on the air. A dozen wheel-turns brought a shrill shriek from the air-signal whistle. Mr. Colbrith evidently wished to know why his train was going in the wrong direction. Hector applied the brakes and stopped in obedience to the signal.

"Do we send back?" he asked.

"No," said Ford sourly. "Let him send forward."

Penfield was the bearer of the president's question. Would it be necessary to discharge somebody in order to have his commands obeyed?

Ford answered the petulant demand as one bears with a spoiled child.

They were returning to Saint's Rest for water. Let the president be a.s.sured that his orders would be obeyed in due course.

"He's a piker, the old man is," said the big engineer, once more giving the 1012 the needful inch of release to send it grinding down the hill.

"I'd ruther pull freight thirty-six hours on end than run his car for a hundred miles."

There was trouble getting at the water-tank in the Saint's Rest yard.

Leckhard, acting as division engineer, telegraph superintendent, material forwarder and yardmaster, found it difficult at limes to bring order out of chaos in the forwarding yard. It was a full hour before the jumble of material trains could be shunted and switched and juggled to permit the 1012 to drop down to the water tank; and four times during the hour Penfield climbed dutifully over the coal to tell Ford and the engineer what the president thought of them.

"Durn me! but you can take punishment like a man, Mr. Ford!" said Hector, on the heels of the fourth sending, sinking rank distinctions in his admiration for a cool fighter. "These here polite cussin's-out are what I can't stand. Reckon we'll get away from here before the old man throws a sure-enough fit?"

"That's entirely with the yard crew," said Ford, calmly making himself comfortable on the fireman's box. "We'll go when we can get water; and we'll get water when the tank track is cleared. That's all there is to it." Whereupon he found his cigar case, pa.s.sed it to Hector, lighted up, and waited patiently for another second-hand wigging from the Nadia.

As it chanced the tank track was cleared a few minutes later; the 1012 was backed down and supplied, and Ford instructed Leckhard to do what he could with the single, poorly manned construction wire toward giving the president's special a clear track.

"That won't be much," said the hard-worked base-of-supplies man. "We've got our own operator at Ten Mile, and Brissac and Frisbie have each a set of instruments which they cut in on the line with wherever they happen to be. I don't know where Brissac is, but Frisbie is down about Riley's to-night, I think. After you pa.s.s him you'll have no help from the wires."

"I'll have what I can get," a.s.serted Ford. "Now tell me what we're likely to meet."

Leckhard laughed. "Anything on top of earth, from Brissac or Jack Benson or Frisbie chasing somewhere on a light engine, to Gallagher or Folsom coming out with a string of empties. Oh, you're not likely to find much dead track anywhere after you get over the mountain."

Ford swung up beside Hector, who had been listening. "You see what we're in for, Hector. Start your headlight dynamo and let's go," he said; and five minutes farther on, just as Penfield was about to make his fifth scramble over the coal in the tender, the 1012 took the upward road with a deafening whistle shriek as its farewell to Saint's Rest.

It was pocket-dark by the time the switch-stand at the basin siding swung into the broad beam of the electric headlight. Ford got down from the fireman's box and crossed over to the engineer's side to pilot Hector.

"How's your track from this on?" inquired the big engineman gruffly.

"It is about as rough as it can be, and not ditch the steel trains.

You'll have to hold her down or we'll have results."

"What in the name o' thunder is the old man's notion of goin' to the front with a picnic party and makin' a night run of it, at that, d'ye reckon?"

"The Lord only knows. Easy around this curve you're coming to; it isn't set up yet." The 1012 was a fast eight-wheeler from the main line, and though the grade was a rising four per cent, the big flyer was making light work of her one-car train.

Ford sat gloomily watching the track ahead as the great engine stormed around the curves and up the grades. The struggle against odds was beginning to tell on him. The building of this new line, the opening of the new country, was the real end for which all the planning and scheming in the financial field had been only the necessary preliminaries. For himself he had craved nothing but the privilege of building the extension; of rejoicing in his own handiwork and in the new triumph of progress and civilization which it would bring to pa.s.s. But little by little the fine fire of workmanlike enthusiasm was burning itself out against the iron barriers of petty spite and malice thrown up at every turn by North and the Denver junta of obstructionists.