Up ahead they still waited.  Fifteen minutes.  Twenty.  At last a figure appeared in the cab of the big rotary, looking for a last time at that bleak little section house and the bare flagpole.  Then: 

“Start ’er up and give ’er hell!”

Martin was on the job once more, while outside his old section snipes cheered, and reminded him that their hopes and dreams for a division still beloved in spite of a downfall rested upon his shoulders.  The whistles screamed.  The bells clanged.  Smoke poured from the stacks of the double-header, and the freshening sun, a short time later, glinted upon the white-splotched equipment, as the great auger followed by its lesser allies, bored into the mass of snow at Bander Cut.

Hours of backing and filling, of retreats and attacks, hours in which there came, time after time, the opportunity to quit.  But Martin did not give the word.  Out the other side they came, the steam shooting high, and on toward the next obstacle, the first of forty, lesser and greater, which lay between them and Montgomery City.

Afternoon ... night.  Still the crunching, whining roar of the rotary as it struck the icy stretches fought against them in vain, then retreated until pick and bar and dynamite could break the way for its further attack.  Midnight, and one by one the exhausted crew approached the white-faced, grim-lipped man who stood tense and determined in the rotary cab.  One by one they asked the same question: 

“Hadn’t we better tie up for the night?”

“Goon!  D’ye hear me?  Goon!  What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of white-livered cowards that ye can’t work without rest?”

The old, dynamic, bulldozing force, the force that had made men hate Martin Garrity only to love him, had returned into its full power, the force that had built him from a section snipe to the exalted possessor of the blue pennon which once had fluttered from that flagpole, was again on the throne, fighting onward to the conclusion of a purpose, no matter what it might wreck for him personally, no matter what the cost might be to him in the days to come.  He was on his last job—­he knew that.  The mail contract might be won a thousand times over, but there ever would rest the stigma that he had received a telegram which should have been plain to him, and that he had failed to carry out its hidden orders.  But with the thought of it Martin straightened, and he roared anew the message which carried tired, aching men through the night: 

“Go on!  Go on!  What’s stoppin’ ye?  Are ye going to let these milk-an’-water fellys over here say that ye tried and quit?”

Early morning—­and there came Sni-a-bend Hill, with the snow packed against it in a new plane which obliterated the railroad as though it had never been there.  Hot coffee came from the containers, sandwiches from the baskets, and the men ate and drank as they worked—­all but Garrity.  This was the final battle, and with it came his battle cry: