"Let her rip, Bill," said the fireman. And she proceeded to rip. Jim held his hat between his knees and clung to the bench with both hands. The dinky whipped around curves and across viaducts, the grade rising steadily until just as Jim had made up his mind that his moments were numbered, they reached the first steep grade into the mountain. From this point the ride was a slow and steady climb up a pine-covered mountain. Just before sunset the engine stopped at a freight shed.
"Go on up the trail," said the fireman. "We'll send your stuff up to the officers' camp."
Jim saw a wide macadam road leading up through the pines. The unmistakable sounds of great construction work dropped faintly down to him. His pulse quickened and he started up the road which wound for a quarter of a mile through trees the trunks of which were silhouetted against the setting sun. Then the road swept into the open. Jim stopped.
First he saw ranges, stretching away and away to the evening glory of the sky. Then, nearer, he saw solitary peaks, etched black against the heavens, and groups of peaks whose mighty flanks merged as if in a final struggle for supremacy.
The boy saw a country of mighty distances, of indescribable cruelty and hostility, a country of unthinkable heights and impassable depths. And, standing so, struggling to resist the sense of the region's terrifying bigness, he saw that all the valleys and canyons and mountain slopes seemed to focus toward one point. It was as if they had concentrated at one spot against a common enemy.
This point, he saw, was a huge black canyon that carried the waters from all the hundred hills around. It was the point where the war of waters must be keenest, where the stand of the wilderness was most savage and where lay the one touch of man in all that area of contending mountains.
A vast wall of masonry had been built to block the outlet of the ranges. A curving wall of gray stone, so huge, so naked of conscious adornment that the hills might well have disbelieved it to be an enemy and have accepted it as part and parcel of their own silent grandeur.
Jim lifted his hat slowly and moistened his lips. This, then, was the labor to which he had so patronizingly offered his puny hands.