Empire Builders | Page 2

and the bucking outfit
screeched coldly down over the snowy rails to the "let-up," where the
shovelers' box-car had been uncoupled.
Ford swung off to turn out the shoveling squad; and presently the
laborers, muffled to the eyes, were filing past the 206 to break a path
for the plow. Gallagher was on the running-board with his flare torch,
thawing out an injector. He marked the cheerful swing of the men and
gave credit where it was due.
"'Tis a full-grown man, that," he commented, meaning Ford. "Manny's
the wan would be huggin' the warm boiler-head these times, and
shtickin' his head out of the windy to holler, 'G'wan, boys; pitch it out
lively now, and be dommed to yez!' But Misther Foord ain't built the
like o' that. He'll be as deep in that freezin' purgatory up yander in th'

drift as the foremist wan of thim."
The Irishman's praise was not unmerited. Whatever his failings, and he
groaned under his fair human share of them, Stuart Ford had the gift of
leadership. Before he had been a month on the branch as its "old man"
and autocrat, he had won the good-will and loyalty of the rank and file,
from the office men in the headquarters to the pick-and-shovel
contingent on the sections. Even the blockade-breaking
laborers--temporary helpers as they were--stood by him manfully in the
sustained battle with the snow. Ford spared them when he could, and
they knew it.
"Warm it up, boys!" he called cheerily, climbing to the top of the
frozen drift to direct the attack. "It's been a long fight, but we're in sight
of home now. Come up here with your shovels, Olsen, and break it
down from the top. It's the crust that plugs Mike's wedge."
He looked the fighting leader, standing at the top of the wind-swept
drift and crying on his shovelers. It was the part he had chosen for
himself in the game of life, and he quarreled only when the stake was
small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts. The
Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern
system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads,
and upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders. It
barely paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow
blockades in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss
account.
This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and
more to find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited
Plug Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an
insoluble one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most
things; and he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of
the Pacific Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the
mountain line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the
great Granger roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction,
transferring an energetic young man with ambitions from the bald
plains of the Dakotas to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.

Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a
syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then
prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction,
and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at
once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be discovered.
Failing to tap their bonanza freight-producer on the route up Blue
Canyon, the projectors--small fish in the great money-pool--had talked
vaguely of future extensions to Salt Lake, to San Francisco, to Puget
Sound, or to some other of the far-beyonds, and had even gone the
length of surveying a line over Plug Pass and down the valley of the
Pannikin, on the Pacific slope of the range. But they had prudently
stopped building; and the pause continued until the day of the great
silver strike at Saint's Rest.
The new carbonate beds chanced to lie within easy rifle-shot of the
summit of Plug Pass; in other words, they were precisely on the line of
the extension survey of the narrow gauge. The discovery was a piece of
sheer luck for the amateur railroad builders. For a time, as all the world
knows, Saint's Rest headed the mining news column in all the dailies,
and the rush for the new camp fairly swamped the meager carrying
facilities of the incomplete line and the stages connecting its track-end
with the high-mountain Mecca of the treasure-seekers.
Then, indeed, the Denver syndicate saw its long deferred opportunity
and grasped it. Long purses might be lacking, but not shrewd heads.
The unfinished Plug Mountain was immediately bonded for more than
it ever promised to be