Ford nodded, adding: 

“And we’re not that rich in labor.  By the way, how are the men coming?”

“A car-load or two, every little while.  Say, Stuart, you must have had a rabbit’s foot with you when you touched up the eastern labor agencies.  Every other railroad in this neck of woods is skinned, and M’Grath is having the time of his life trying to hold our levies together.  There is a small army of them under canvas at Saint’s Rest, waiting for the contractors, and another with between two and three hundred hands camped at the mouth of the canyon.”

Ford knocked the ashes from his pipe so hard that the pipestem fell in two.

“Yes! all waiting on Mr. Colbrith’s leisurely motions!  Well, jump in on the Plug Mountain.  That will utilize some of the waste for a few days.”

Frisbie went down to the Plug Mountain yard office, and to a wire-end, to begin the marshaling of his forces; and Ford, with three picked-up stenographers to madden him, took up the broken threads of his correspondence with a world which seemed to have become suddenly peopled to suffocation with eager sellers of railroad material and supplies.

Late in the afternoon, when he was tired enough to feel the full force of the blow, a New York telegram came.  It was from Miss Alicia Adair, and Ford groaned in spirit when he read it.

Brother left here yesterday in the Vanderdecken yacht for Nova Scotia.  Can not reach him by telegraph until next Friday or Saturday.  Aunt Hester wants to know if there is anything she can do.

One way to save a man’s life at a crisis is to appeal to his sense of humor.  Miss Alicia’s closing sentence did that for Ford, and he was smiling grimly when he put the telegram away, not in the business file, but in his pocket.

Three days later, however, when Frisbie was half-way to Saint’s Rest with his preliminary track-swinging, another New York telegram found Ford in his newly established quarters in the Guaranty Building.  This was from some one acting as President Colbrith’s secretary, and its wording was concisely mandatory.

     Contract has been awarded MacMorrogh Brothers.  President directs
     that you afford contractors every facility, and that you confer
     with Mr. North in all cases of doubt.

XIII

THE BARBARIANS

It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint’s Rest over the standardized Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.

The occasion of Kenneth’s calling was a right-of-way dispute on the borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining claims having been staked off across the old S. L & W. survey.  The owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.