Mrs. Whitney wondered why, if Mr. Glover were really a competent man,
he could not have held his position as chief engineer of the system,
but Doctor Lanning explained that frequently Western men of real talent
were wholly lacking in ambition and preferred a free-and-easy life to
one of constant responsibility; others, again, drank--and this
suggestion opened a discussion as to whether Western men could possibly
do more drinking than Eastern men, and transact business at all.
While the discussion proceeded there came a telegram from Glover
telling Doctor Lanning that the blast would be made about seven
o'clock. Preparations to start were completed as the company rose from
the table, and Gertrude Brock and Marie were urged to join the party.
Marie consented, but Gertrude had a new book and would not leave it,
and when the others started she joined her father and Judge Saltzer,
her father's counsellor, now with them, who were dining more leisurely
at their own table.
Bucks met the doctor and his party at the head of the cañon and took
them to the high ledge across the river, where they had been brought by
Glover in the morning. In the cañon it was already dark. Men were
eating around campfires, and in the narrow strip of eastern sky between
the walls the moon was rising. Work-trains with signal lanterns were
moving above and below the break, dumping ballast behind the track
layers. At a safe distance from the coming blast a dozen headlights
from the roundhouse were being prepared, and the car-tinks from Sleepy
Cat were rigging torches for the night.
The blasting powder in twenty-pound cans was being passed from hand to
hand to the chargers. Score after score of the compact cans of high
explosive had been packed into the scattered holes, and as if alive to
what was coming the chill air of the cañon took on the uneasiness of an
atmosphere laden with electricity. Men of the operating department
paced the bench impatiently, and trackmen working below in the flare of
scattered torches looked up oftener from their shovels to where a chain
of active figures moved on the face of the cliff. Word passed again
and again that the charging was done, but the orders came steadily from
the gloom on the ledge for more powder until the last pound the
engineer called for had been buried beneath his feet in the sleeping
rock.
After a long delay a red light swung slowly to and fro on the ledge.
From the extreme end of the cañon below the Cat's Paw came the crash of
a track-torpedo, answered almost instantly by a second, above the
break. It was the warning signal to get into the clear. There was a
buzz of rapid movement among the laborers. In twos and threes and
dozens, a ragged procession of lanterns and torches, they retreated,
foremen urging the laggards, until only a single man at each end of the
broken track kept within sight of the tiny red lantern on the ledge.
Again it swung in a circle and again the torpedoes replied, this time
all clear. The hush of a hundred voices, the silence of the bars and
shovels and picks gave back to the chill cañon its loneliness, and the
roar of the river rose undisturbed to the brooding night.