The Donovan Chance by Francis Lynde

The big "consolidation," its single pair of pony trucks feeling out the way for the eight gripping drive-wheels, was storming up the crooked canyon of the Tourmaline, pushing two flat-car loads of steel rails ahead of it and waking the echoes with its clamor.

The track, rough and uneven because it had not yet been "surfaced," made the big engine rock and surge from side to side, and Dick and Larry, perched on the fireman's seat and carefully nursing two mahogany boxes, had to brace themselves to keep their places. Two days earlier a pair of surveying instruments had been damaged by the premature explosion of a blast in a rock cutting, and the boys were returning from a hurry trip to the valley supply camp with replacements.

As the steel train rounded one of the canyon curves, the elbow where the branch gulch from the north came in, a scene of strenuous activity came into view. On the opposite side of the river, workmen, clustering like bees in swarming time, were building a trestle designed to carry a railroad track past a hundred-foot stretch where the canyon wall rose almost perpendicularly from the water's edge. The legs of the trestle bents were planted fairly in the stream and the difficulties in the builders' way were prodigious. Yet the little army was toiling as if the very minutes were precious――as, indeed, they were. For, in the race to reach the gold field at the head of the Tourmaline the Nevada Short Line was now well in the lead.

"They're getting in their old scaffolding, all right," Larry commented, twisting himself to look out of the 815's cab window, "and it will do to run over until they can take time to blast out a notch in the cliff. When they get their track past that place they'll be in shape to give us a lot of trouble."

"It sure looks that way," Dick agreed. "If we could only get our rock cutting in the ‘Narrows' done before they catch up and go to drilling and blasting across the creek from us it wouldn't be so bad. But if we don't. Believe me, I'm calling the situation pretty complicated, aren't you?"

"Complicated" was a rather mild word to use in describing the strugglesome industrial battle going on in the narrow gorge of the Tourmaline. Like most mountain canyons, this one offered scanty encouragement to the building of even one railroad line, let alone two. In many parts it was merely a deep, rock-bound chasm, with usually a narrow shelving bank on one side of the stream――but rarely on both.

Having been first in the field, the Nevada Short Line engineers had chosen the easiest route, crossing from one bank of the stream to the other as the ground was most favorable for their purpose. But the competing railroad, coming in later, had ignored the Short Line's earlier survey, overlapping and even duplicating it in some places, with no regard whatever for the rights of the pioneer company. Under such conditions the struggle for the right-of-way had now developed into a fighting race between the two construction forces, each trying to forge ahead of the other and to seize and hold every foot of the favorable ground.

In this race the Short Line was, for the moment, the winner, having already laid its track some three miles beyond the point where the Overland Central was entering the canyon through the northern gulch and building its trestle. But the race was by no means won. In the ruggedest part of the canyon the Short Line was halted by a rocky buttress through which it was necessary to cut a shelf for the track. And rock blasting is slow work.

Two and a half miles above the scene of hurried trestle-building, and a scant half-mile below their own "end of track," the two boys on the storming 815 saw another gang of Overland Central graders at work on the opposite side of the gorge. They were on a steep slope covered with great boulders and standing "monuments" of eroded rock in curious formations. Neither Dick nor Larry could make out what the men were doing, but they seemed to be actively busy doing something.

"They're coming right along with the graders without waiting for their trestle to be finished," Dick pointed out. Then: "Say, Larry――I didn't realize that their grade was so much higher up than ours. If their track is as high as those fellows are working they must be making altitude a lot faster than we are."

"They need to make it," Larry explained. "They are planning to go into Little Ophir on a grade much higher than ours; or at least, they've made one survey that way. Mr. Goldrick told me so when I was out working with him yesterday."

"Which the same spells a heap more trouble for us," said Dick gloomily. "Having the height on us that way, every blast they fire will bombard our track and our working gangs. Looks to me as if we've simply _got_ to keep ahead of them; that's all there is to it!"

Reaching the temporary "front" camp at Pine Gulch, in a little park-like widening of the canyon, they left the surveying instruments in the office tent and walked on up the gorge to report for duty to Goldrick, the assistant engineer in charge of the rock cutting in the Narrows.

"Well, you got back all right, did you? " said Goldrick, as they came up. "How are things looking down along?"

They told him of the O. C. trestle-building, and of the slope-side gang they had seen just below the Pine Gulch camp. While they were talking a distant thunder-burst of heavy blasts jarred upon the air.

"That must be that gang we saw a few minutes ago," said Dick, adding: "It's sort of curious. They weren't drilling when we came by, and we didn't see any air compressor or machinery of any kind."

"All right; let 'em waste their dynamite if they want to," said the young engineer. "We're going to beat 'em, hands down. " Then to the matter in hand: "If you two cubs want to do a bit of surveying, you may take an instrument and run a trial level for Bannagher in that rock cutting. He's lost his bench marks in the shooting."