CHAPTER XVIII
NEW PLANS
Callahan crushed the tobacco under his thumb in the palm of his righthand. "So I am sorry to add," he concluded, speaking to McCloud, "thatyou are now out of a job." The two men were facing each other acrossthe table in McCloud's office. "Personally, I am not sorry to say it,either," added Callahan, slowly filling the bowl of his pipe.
McCloud said nothing to the point, as there seemed to be nothing tosay until he had heard more. "I never knew before that you wereleft-handed," he returned evasively.
"It's a lucky thing, because it won't do for a freight-trafficman, nowadays, to let his right hand know what his left handdoes," observed Callahan, feeling for a match. "I am the onlyleft-handed man in the traffic department, but the man that handlesthe rebates, Jimmie Black, is cross-eyed. Bucks offered to send himto Chicago to have Bryson straighten his eyes, but Jimmie thinksit is better to have them as they are for the present, so he can lookat a thing in two different ways--one for the Interstate CommerceCommission and one for himself. You haven't heard, then?" continuedCallahan, returning to his riddle about McCloud's job. "Why, LanceDunning has gone into the United States Court and got an injunctionagainst us on the Crawling Stone Line--tied us up tighter thanzero. No more construction there for a year at least. Dunning comesin for himself and for a cousin who is his ward, and three or fourlittle ranchers have filed bills--so it's up to the lawyers foreighty per cent. of the gate receipts and peace. Personally, I'mglad of it. It gives you a chance to look after this operating for ayear yourself. We are going to be swamped with freight traffic thisyear, and I want it moved through the mountains like checkers for thenext six months. You know what I mean, George."
To McCloud the news came, in spite of himself, as a blow. The resultshe had attained in building through the lower valley had given hima name among the engineers of the whole line. The splendid showing ofthe winter construction, on which he had depended to enable him tofinish the whole work within the year, was by this news brought tonaught. Those of the railroad men who said he could not deliver acompleted line within the year could never be answered now. Andthere was some slight bitterness in the reflection that the verystumbling-block to hold him back, to rob him of his chance for areputation with men like Glover and Bucks, should be the lands ofDicksie Dunning.
He made no complaint. On the division he took hold with new energyand bent his faculties on the operating problems. At Marion's he sawDicksie at intervals, and only to fall more hopelessly under herspell each time. She could be serious and she could be volatile andshe could be something between which he could never quite make out.She could be serious with him when he was serious, and totallyirresponsible the next minute with Marion. On the other hand, whenMcCloud attempted to be flippant, Dicksie could be confusinglygrave. Once when he was bantering with her at Marion's she tried tosay something about her regret that complications over the right ofway should have arisen; but McCloud made light of it, and waved thematter aside as if he were a cavalier. Dicksie did not like it, but itwas only that he was afraid she would realize he was a mere railroadsuperintendent with hopes of a record for promotion quite blasted.And as if this obstacle to a greater reputation were not enough, awilier enemy threatened in the spring to leave only shreds andpatches of what he had already earned.
The Crawling Stone River is said to embody, historically, all of thedeceits known to mountain streams. Below the Box Canyon it ploughsthrough a great bed of yielding silt, its own deposit between the twoimposing lines of bluffs that resist its wanderings from side to sideof the wide valley. This fertile soil makes up the rich lands that arethe envy of less fortunate regions in the Great Basin; but theCrawling Stone is not a river to give quiet title to one acre of itsown making. The toil of its centuries spreads beautifully green underthe June skies, and the unsuspecting settler, lulled into security bymany years of the river's repose, settles on its level bench lands andlays out his long lines of possession; but the Sioux will tell you intheir own talk that this man is but a tenant at will; that in anothertime and at another place the stranger will inherit his fields; andthat the Crawling Stone always comes back for its own.
This was the peril that Glover and McCloud essayed when they ran athree-tenths grade and laid an eighty-pound rail up two hundred andfifty miles of the valley. It was in local and exclusive territory arich prize, and they brought to their undertaking not, perhaps,greater abilities than other men, but incomparably greater materialresources than earlier American engineers had possessed.
Success such as theirs is cumulative: when the work is done one manstands for it, but it represents the work of a thousand men in everywalk of American industry. Where the credit must lie with the engineerwho achieves is in the application of these enormous reserves ofindustrial triumphs to the particular conditions he faces in theproblem before him; in the application lies the genius called success,and this is always new. Moreover, men like Glover and McCloud werefitted for a fight with a mountain river because trained in theWestern school, where poverty or resource had sharpened the wits. Thebuilding of the Crawling Stone Line came with the dawn of a new day inAmerican capital, when figures that had slept in fairies' dreams wokeinto every-day use, and when enlarged calculation among mencontrolling hitherto unheard-of sums of money demanded the best andmost permanent methods of construction to insure enduring economies inoperating. Thus the constructing of the Crawling Stone Line opened initself new chapters in Rocky Mountain railroad-building. An equipmentof machinery, much of which had never before been applied to suchbuilding, had been assembled by the engineers. Steam-shovels had beensent in battalions, grading-machines and dump-wagons had gone forwardin trainloads, and an army of men were operating in the valley. A hugesteel bridge three thousand feet long was now being thrown across theriver below the Dunning ranch.
The winter had been an unusual one even in a land of winters. Theseason's fall of snow had not been above an average, but it had fallenin the spring and had been followed by excessively low temperaturesthroughout the mountains. June came again, but a strange June. Thefirst rise of the Crawling Stone had not moved out the winter frost,and the stream lay bound from bank to bank, and for hundreds of miles,under three feet of ice. When June opened, backward and cold, therehad been no spring. Heavy frosts lasting until the middle of the monthgave sudden way to summer heat, and the Indians on the upper-valleyreservation began moving back into the hills. Then came the rise.Creek after creek in the higher mountains, ice-bound for six months,burst without warning into flood. Soft winds struck with the sun andstripped the mountain walls of their snow. Rains set in on the desert,and far in the high northwest the Crawling Stone lifting its four-footcap of ice like a bed of feathers began rolling it end over end downthe valley. In the Box, forty feet of water struck the canyon wallsand ice-floes were hurled like torpedoes against the granite spurs:the Crawling Stone was starting after its own.
When the river rose, the earlier talk of Dunning's men had been thatthe Crawling Stone would put an end to the railroad pretensions bywashing the two hundred and fifty miles of track back to the PeaceRiver, where it had started. This much in the beginning was easy topredict; but the railroad men had turned out in force to fight fortheir holdings, and while the ranchers were laughing, the river wasflowing over the bench lands in the upper valley.
At the Dunning ranch the confidence of the men in their own securitygave way to confusion as the river, spreading behind the ice-jams intobroad lakes and bursting in torrents through its barriers, continuedto rise. Treacherous in its broad and yellow quiet, lifting its muddyhead in the stillness of the night, moving unheard over broad sandybottoms, backing noiselessly into forgotten channels, stealing throughheavy alfalfa pastures, eating a channel down a slender furrow--then,with the soil melting from the root, the plant has toppled at thehead, the rivulet has grown a stream; night falls, and in the morningwhere yesterday smiling miles of green fields looked up to the sunrolls a mad flood of waters: this is the Crawling Stone.
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Whispering Smith Page 19
