The Donovan Chance by Francis Lynde

"Zowie!"

A crash like that of a falling house, a burst of grayish green dust and smoke from the opposite side of the canyon, and a hurtling shower of stones varying in size from pebbles to pumpkins, made the two young fellows, one carrying a boxed surveying instrument and the other the tripod and staff, take hasty shelter behind the nearest boulder.

"Ding-bust those fellows over there――they don't care a whang who happens to be in the way of their ding-busted rock-flinging! " Dickie Maxwell complained plaintively, peering out at his side of the sheltering boulder to see if there were another crash and a volley due to come. "Did they give any warning at all? I didn't hear anybody yell ‘Fire in the rock. ' Did you?"

Larry shook his head.

"You wouldn't hear 'em, anyway――with the river making such a thundering racket," he averred. "Just the same, what you say names 'em right. They don't seem to care much what they do to us."

For a couple of weeks the two boys had been "living easy," as Dick phrased it. After the day of flood swampings at Pine Gulch they had been sent out ahead with Blaisdell, one of the assistant engineers, to drive stakes and carry chain on a correction of one of the original surveys in the upper canyon, and for that length of time they had been out of touch with the construction force and the industrial battle that was going on from day to day.

During that time the race between the two competing construction armies had gone on neck and neck, as you might say. The Overland Central had completed its bridge-trestle in the lower narrows, and while its track-laying gangs were still half a mile or more behind those of the Short Line, its graders and rock men were scattered all the way along in advance; and since the O. C. survey had the higher location on the north bank of the river, the blasting seriously interfered with the Short Line work on the opposite and lower bank.

"If they were only decent enough to have some regular hours for firing, like white folks! " Dick went on. "But the way it is, you never can tell any hour or minute when they won't open up and fling rocks at us!"

"Mr. Bob Goldrick claims that it is a part of their plan to hamper and delay us," Larry put in soberly. "I suppose they're calling it ‘business,' but I'll say it's crooked business. Reckon we're safe now to make another run for it?"

Dick picked up the instrument box and peeped around the corner of the boulder.

"Nothing stirring," he reported. "Are you ready? All right――let's go!"

They made a dash up the rough track, heading for a shallow cut which ran through the toe of the next mountain spur, and they had barely gained the cutting when another crash bellowed upon the opposite slope and a buckshot shower of sand and pebbles rattled down upon them.

"That's right, old top; keep it up! " said Dick grittingly, apostrophizing the unseen O. C. hard-rock men. Then: "I wish Mr. Ackerman would let us get back at 'em once in a while. But he makes us run up a red flag when we're going to shoot."

"The chief is right, though," was Larry's considered reply. "We can't afford to put ourselves on a level with those highbinders on the other side of the canyon."

"Huh! that doesn't sound much as if you were spoiling for a fight, Larry. Where's your good Donovan nerve gone to?"

"Never you mind about the Donovan nerve; it's all right. But I'm not chasing around to find a chance to scrap with somebody. I'm out here this summer to learn all I can about the engineering game――and so are you. And fighting a lot of plug-uglies who won't play the game fair isn't any part of our job. Just the same――Gee-_wop_! but that was a close one!"

It was. Another blast, fired from so far around the curve ahead that they couldn't even see the smoke of it, hurled a stone as big as a water bucket high in air to drop it just in front of them and fairly between the rails of the track over which they were hastening. Its alighting place was not more than a dozen feet distant, and it snapped the cross-tie upon which it fell as easily as if the heavy timber had been a pine lath.

The two boys dropped their burdens and went to roll the stone from the track where it lay a menace to the first material train that should come along. It was so big and weighty that it took their united efforts to edge it over the rail and start it rolling down the embankment.

"Lucky it didn't hit a rail," was Larry's comment, as they went on. "It would have broken the steel as easily as it did the tie."

"Seems as if there ought to be some law to hold those fellows down! " said Dick wrathfully. "If father would only come up here once and see what they're doing to us!"