The Donovan Chance by Francis Lynde

Timanyoni Park, ringed in all the way around by mountain ranges, is a valley shaped something like a big oval clothes-basket, with the long way of the basket running north and south, and a ridge of watershed hills cutting it in two in the other direction.

The southern half of the Park is about all that the average traveler ever sees of it, because the main line of the Nevada Short Line runs through that part of it; and if you should ask Mr. A. Traveler what about it, he would probably tell you that it is a fine farming country with big wheat fields and beautiful apple orchards――all irrigated, of course――and a thriving little city called Brewster lying somewhere in the middle of it.

That would all be true enough of what the passing tourist sees, but north of the watershed hills is the West that you read about. With the exception of one mining-camp――Red Butte――and a single railroad track――the Red Butte branch of the Short Line――skirting its western edge, that half of the clothes-basket is a jumbled wilderness of wooded hills just about as Nature left it. And slicing a half-moon out of these northern hills, the Tourmaline, a quick-water mountain stream, a goodish-sized little river in the volume of water it carries, enters through a rugged canyon, dipping into the valley basket a little to one side of the northern handle, let us say, and dodging out again a few miles farther on to find its way to the Colorado River.

The time――our time――for getting a first glimpse of the Tourmaline Canyon is the middle of a June forenoon; bright sunshine, a sky so blue that it almost hurts your eyes to look up at it, the air so crisp and sweet and clean as to make it a keen joy just to be alive and breathing it.

To right and left, as we look up the canyon, gray granite cliffs, seamed and weathered into all sorts of curious shapes, shut in a narrow gorge at the bottom of which the swift mountain torrent roars and rumbles and thunders among the boulders in its bed. On the left the canyon wall drops sheer to the water; but on the right there is a shelving, sliding bank of loose rock at the foot of the cliff. Along this bank two workmanlike young fellows, wearing the corduroys and high lace-boots of the engineers, are making their way slowly up-stream, scanning every foot of the shelving talus ledge as they cover it.

"Gee! Some fierce old place to build a railroad, I'll tell the world! " said Dick Maxwell, the lighter-built of the two, clawing for footholds on the steep bank. "Find anything yet, Larry?"

"Nothing that looks like a location stake," was the answer. "I guess we'll have to back-track a piece and measure the distance up from that last one we found."

"Aw' right," said Dick, with a little groan for the effort loss; "give me the end of the tape and I'll do the back-flip," and with the ring of the steel tape-line in hand he crawled back along the shelving slide. "Got you! " he called out, when the last-discovered stake was reached; and Larry, holding the tape case, marked the hundred-foot point and began to search again for the stake which ought to be there and didn't show up.

Five years earlier, when gold was first discovered at the headwaters of the Tourmaline, the railroad company had surveyed a line up the canyon and some twenty miles of track had been laid eastward from Red Butte. Later, the gold excitement had died down, and the Tourmaline Extension, something less than half completed, was abandoned.

But now new gold discoveries had been made and "Little Ophir" had leaped, overnight, as one might say, into the spot-light――which is a way that gold discoveries have of doing. A stirring, roaring mining-camp city had sprung up on the site of the old workings at the canyon head, and the building of the railroad extension was once more under way. For Little Ophir was without railroad connections with the outside world, and the canyon of the Tourmaline afforded the only practicable route by which a railroad could reach it.

Early in June a big construction force had been mobilized at Red Butte and the work of refitting and extending the track already laid was begun. Out ahead of the graders and track-layers an engineering party, under Mr. Herbert Ackerman, chief of construction, was reëstablishing the line of the old survey; and it was in this party that the general manager's son, Dick, and Larry Donovan, son of the Brewster crossing watchman, were the "cubs."

On the morning in question the two boys had been sent up the canyon ahead of the main party to find and mark the stakes of the former survey so that they could be readily located by the transitmen who were following them. For several miles it had been plain sailing. In the lonely wilderness there had been nothing to disturb the stakes, and in the high, dry, mountain atmosphere but few of them had rotted away. But now, in the most difficult part of the gorge, the trail seemed to be lost.

"Haven't found it yet? " Dick asked, coming up from the tape-holding.

"Not a single sign of it. Here's the hundred-foot point," and Larry dug his boot heel into the shale.

"Let's spread out a bit," Dick suggested. "It must be right around here somewhere."

Accordingly, they separated, and in a scattering of boulders a little farther on, Larry found the stake――or at least, _a_ stake. He was on his knees before it when Dick came up to say:

"Hullo! got it at last, have you? " And then, as with a sudden shock of surprise: "Why, say, Larry――that isn't one of our old stakes! It's a brand new one!"

It was; so new that it looked as if it might have been driven that very forenoon. The stakes they had been finding hitherto were all browned and weathered, as they were bound to be since they had been driven five years before. But this one was unmistakably new, with the mark, "Sta.162-50" in blue chalk plainly to be read. Moreover, it had been planted between two stones in a place where nobody would be likely to find it unless he knew exactly where to look for it.