"There are mountains a man can do business with," muttered Bucks in the
private car, his mustache drooping broadly above his reflecting words.
"Mountains that will give and take once in a while, play fair
occasionally. But Pilot has fought us every inch of the way since the
day we first struck a pick into it. It is savage and unrelenting. I'd
rather negotiate with Sitting Bull for a right of way through his
private bathroom than to ask an easement from Pilot for a tamarack tie.
I don't know why it was ever called Pilot: if I named it, it should be
Sitting Bull. What the Sioux were to the white men, what the Spider
Water is to the bridgemen, that, and more, Pilot has been to the
mountain men.
"There was no compromise with Pilot even after we got in on it.
Snowslides, washouts, bowlders, forest-fires--and yet the richest
quartz mines in the world lie behind it. This little branch, Mr.
Brock, forty-eight miles, pays the operating expenses of the whole
mountain division, and has done so almost since the day it was opened.
But I'd rather lose the revenue ten times every year than to lose
Morris Blood." The second vice-president was talking to Mr. Brock.
Their car was just rounding the curve into the gap in front of Mount
Pilot.
"What do you think of Blood's chances?" asked Mr. Brock.
"I don't know. A mountain man has nine lives."
"What does Glover think?"
"He doesn't say."
"Who built this line?"
"Two pretty good men ran the first thirty miles, but neither of them
could give me a practicable line south of the gap; this last eighteen
miles up and down and around Pilot was Glover's first work in the
mountains. It's engineering. Every trick ever played in the Rockies,
and one or two of Brodie's old combinations in the Andes, they tell me,
are crowded into these eighteen miles. There, there's old Sitting Bull
in all his clouds and his glory."
Glover had left the car at Sleepy Cat, going ahead with the relief
train. Picked men from every district on the division had been
assembling all the afternoon to take up the search for the missing
superintendent. Section men from the Sweetgrass wastes, and bridgemen
from the foothills, roadmasters from the Heart Mountains--home of the
storm and the snow--and Rat Cañon trackwalkers that could spot a break
in the dark under twelve inches of ballast; Morgan, the wrecker, and
his men, and the mountain linemen with their foreman, old Bill
Dancing--fiend drunk and giant sober--were scattered on Mount Pilot,
while a rotary ahead of a battery of big engines was shoved again and
again up the snow-covered hill.
Anxious to get the track open in the belief that Blood could best be
got at from beyond the S bridge, Glover, standing with the branch
roadmaster, Smith Young, on the ledge above the engines directed the
fight for the hill. He had promised Gertrude he would keep out of the
cab, and far across the curve below he could see the Brock car, where
Bucks was directing the search on the eastern side of the gulch.