Ford swung off to turn out the shoveling squad; and presently the laborers, muffled to the eyes, were filing past the 206 to break a path for the plow.  Gallagher was on the running-board with his flare torch, thawing out an injector.  He marked the cheerful swing of the men and gave credit where it was due.

“’Tis a full-grown man, that,” he commented, meaning Ford.  “Manny’s the wan would be huggin’ the warm boiler-head these times, and shtickin’ his head out of the windy to holler, ’G’wan, boys; pitch it out lively now, and be dommed to yez!’ But Misther Foord ain’t built the like o’ that.  He’ll be as deep in that freezin’ purgatory up yander in th’ drift as the foremist wan of thim.”

The Irishman’s praise was not unmerited.  Whatever his failings, and he groaned under his fair human share of them, Stuart Ford had the gift of leadership.  Before he had been a month on the branch as its “old man” and autocrat, he had won the good-will and loyalty of the rank and file, from the office men in the headquarters to the pick-and-shovel contingent on the sections.  Even the blockade-breaking laborers—­temporary helpers as they were—­stood by him manfully in the sustained battle with the snow.  Ford spared them when he could, and they knew it.

“Warm it up, boys!” he called cheerily, climbing to the top of the frozen drift to direct the attack.  “It’s been a long fight, but we’re in sight of home now.  Come up here with your shovels, Olsen, and break it down from the top.  It’s the crust that plugs Mike’s wedge.”

He looked the fighting leader, standing at the top of the wind-swept drift and crying on his shovelers.  It was the part he had chosen for himself in the game of life, and he quarreled only when the stake was small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts.  The Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads, and upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders.  It barely paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow blockades in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss account.

This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug Mountain line.  It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble one.  Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the great Granger roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction, transferring an energetic young man with ambitions from the bald plains of the Dakotas to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.

Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction, and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be discovered.