Of course no railroad man ever gave much heed to Indian talk; how, for
instance, could a mountain fall on a river? Yet so the legend ran, and
there being one superstitious man on the force at Medicine Bend one man
remembered it--Hughie Morrison.
Callahan studied the bulletin to which the operator called his
attention and resumed his pipe sceptically, but he did make a
suggestion. "See if you can't get Sleepy Cat, Hughie, and find out
whether that is so."
Morris Blood was away with the Pittsburgers and Callahan had foolishly
consented to look after his desk for a few days. At the moment that
Morrison took hold of the key Giddings opened the door from the
despatchers' room. "Mr. Callahan, there's a message coming from
Francis, conductor of Number Two. They've had a cloudburst on Dry
Dollar Creek," he said, excitedly; "twenty feet of water came down Rat
Cañon at five o'clock. The track's under four feet in the cañon."
As a pebble striking an anthill stirs into angry life a thousand
startled workers, so a mountain washout startles a division and
concentrates upon a single point the very last reserve of its
activities and energies.
For thirty minutes the wires sung with Callahan's messages. When his
special for a run to the Rat Cañon was ready all the extra yardmen and
both roadmasters were in the caboose; behind them fumed a second
section with orders to pick up along the way every section man as they
followed. It was hard on eight o'clock when Callahan stepped aboard.
They double-headed for the pass, and not till they pulled up with their
pony truck facing the water at the mouth of the big cañon did they ease
their pace.
In the darkness they could only grope. Smith Young, roadmaster of the
Pilot branch, an old mountain boy, had gone down from Sleepy Cat before
dark, and crawling over the rocks in the dusk had worked his way along
the cañon walls to the scene of the disaster.
Just below where Dry Dollar Creek breaks into the Rat the cañon is
choked on one side by a granite wall two hundred feet high. On the
other, a sheer spur of Sleepy Cat Mountain is thrust out like a paw
against the river. It was there that the wall of water out of Dry
Dollar had struck the track and scoured it to the bedrock. Ties,
steel, ballast, riprap, roadbed, were gone, and where the heavy
construction had run below the paw of Sleepy Cat the river was churning
in a channel ten feet deep.
The best news Young had was that Agnew, the division engineer who
happened to be at Sleepy Cat, had made the inspection with him and had
already returned to order in men and material for daybreak.