The Donovan Chance by Francis Lynde

"I'm sure calling this stuff just about the limit, aren't you, Larry? Look at that stake you drove a few minutes ago――it's half drowned already!"

On this particular morning Dick and Larry had been given a new job, namely, reëstablishing grade stakes ahead of the graders. Ordinarily, there would have been no need for this duplication of the work of the locating engineers; but the ground over which they were toilsomely making their way was anything but ordinary. It was a steep canyon slope composed of the most unstable material that is ever found in the Pandora box of the great Continental Divide; a smooth, sharply inclined plane of crawling shale pouring down like a broad river from the heights above in bits from the size of a fingernail to that of a silver half-dollar, and each bit as sleek and slippery as a watermelon seed.

Across this slope the right-of-way of the Nevada Short Line led, and it was interposing a very considerable barrier to the work. With every slightest disturbance the shale river would slither and slide, creeping slowly, to be sure, but with overwhelming persistence, burying the stakes of the survey, and affording no stable foothold for man or beast, or for the tripod of the surveying instrument.

"How we are ever going to dig a notch for our track through this stuff is more than I can tell," Dick went on, once more trying to find a place where the transit would stand still long enough to enable him to get a sight through the telescope. "If anybody should ask, I'd say we're up against it for fair, this time."

It certainly looked that way. The shale slide was peculiar enough to be remarkable even in a region where singular geological formations were the rule rather than the exception. For the greater part of its length the canyon of the Tourmaline, up which the two railroads were racing, each straining every nerve to be the first to reach the newly opened gold district at the headwaters of the river, was a water-cut channel through the mountains with beetling cliffs or steep wooded slopes for its boundaries. But at this particular point some prehistoric convulsion of nature had opened a half-mile gap in the south wall, and through this broad gap, coming down from the high shoulder of Bull Peak, poured the vast river of disintegrated shale.

As yet, the Short Line grading force was barely at the beginning of its battle with the shale. The track had been pushed up to the western edge of the crawling cataract, and from its "take-off" on the final pair of rails a huge steam shovel was gnawing its way into the creeping obstruction. Beside the main track a short spur had been laid to accommodate a string of dump-cars which the great shovel was filling, a single scoop to the car-load.

"They're not making an inch of headway down there, so far as I can see," said Larry, indicating the busy steam shovel. "For every cubic yard they take out, another one slides in."

Dick Maxwell glanced up at the slope on the opposite side of the gorge, where a high, trail-like line marked the path of the rival railroad.

"Those Overland Central engineers knew what they were about when they located their line away up there among the rocks," he asserted. "They're going to beat us, Larry. It'll take us a month of Sundays to get across this river of snake scales――and then some. " Then, with a backward glance toward the stake they had just driven: "See there; what did I tell you! ――that stake is buried, plumb out of sight!"

It was plainly apparent that the short surveying stakes they were using were no good at all in the shale, so they pushed on up-stream to the nearest river-fringing aspen grove, and with their belt axes cut longer ones. In driving these they found no bottom to the slippery mass; also, they remarked that every blow of the driving ax-head started fresh shale rivulets which wriggled and crept and crawled, and threatened never to come to rest.

It was early in the July day when they began the job of resetting the grade stakes across the short half-mile of the slide, and they had been hard at it all day, when with the sun dipping behind the western mountain, they came wading back to the temporary camp pitched just below the scene of the steam shovel digging. And for the day's work of the big shovel there was little to show save a slight depression in the shale within the immediate swing of its steam-driven arm.

After supper there was a council of war held around the camp fire in front of the engineers' tent, at which the two boys were interested listeners. After having made a careful examination of the new obstacle, the chief of construction had summoned his three assistants to discuss the best means of attacking it.

"It's my notion that bulkheading is the only thing," summed up Goldrick, who had been directing the steam-shovel operations during the day. "We're not going to get anywhere at all unless we put in a retaining wall of some sort. The stuff slides in faster than we can take it out, and when it starts there doesn't seem to be any end to it. The entire surface of the shale gets in motion as far up the slope as you can see."

In this opinion, Jones and Hathaway, the other assistants, concurred, and after the matter had been thoroughly threshed out, the chief issued his orders.

"All right, Goldrick; bulkhead it if you have to. Time is the main object, rather than expense, just now. The O. C. is coming on fast with its track-laying, and if we're delayed here very long, it's a lost race for us. The pile-driver is at Pine Gulch. Better wire to-night and get it, and your bulkheading material, on the way. The thing to be done is to get across this place quickly. Drive it for every man in your gang and every pound of steam you can carry. I'm going down to Red Butte in the morning, but I'll try to be back by Thursday. It's up to you, Goldrick, shove it!"