At the blowing of the warm wind Ford aimed the opening gun in his campaign against fate—­the fate which seemed to be bent upon adding his name to the list of failures on the Plug Mountain branch.  The gun-aiming was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.

“I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay,” wrote Ford, “and the chance has come.  Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place is yours if you will take it.  If you are willing to tie up to the most harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come.”

This letter was written on a Friday.  Frisbie got it out of the carriers’ delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal.  Not that the destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford’s finger.

It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint’s Rest, stretched his legs gratefully on terra firma, had his first deep lungful of the ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him.  Ford would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the little shack “hotel,” and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the boxed-off den in the station building which served as the superintendent’s office.

“I’ve been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing threatened to take shape in my head,” Ford began.  “First, let me ask you:  do you happen to know where you could lay hands on three or four good constructing engineers—­men you could turn loose absolutely and trust implicitly?  I’m putting this up to you because the Plug Mountain exile has taken me a bit out of touch.”

“Why—­yes,” said Frisbie, taking time to call the mental roll.  “There are Major Benson and his son Jack—­you know ’em both—­just in off their job in the Selkirks.  Then there is Roy Brissac; he’d be a pretty good man in the field; and Chauncey Leckhard, of my class,—­he’s got a job in Winnipeg, but he’ll come if I ask him to, and he is the best office man I know.  But what on top of earth are you driving at, Stuart?”

Ford cleared his pipe of the ash and refilled it.

“I’ll go into the details with you a little later.  We shall have plenty of time during the next month or six weeks, and, incidentally, a good bit more privacy.  The thing I’m trying to figure out will burst like a bubble if it gets itself made public too soon, and”—­lowering his voice—­“I can’t trust my office force here. Savez?”