“I'm proud to say that it is partly my doing,” Tom admitted, with a smile. “Harry, let's go along to the restaurant. I'm hungry.”
As the two young engineers stepped into the car and were driven away, Ashby dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands.
“So I'm to be beaten out of the hotel game here, am I!” the hotel man asked himself, gritting his teeth. “I'm to be driven out by Reade, the fellow whom I once kicked out of my hotel! Oh--well, all right!”
A railroad man with a flag made several swift moves. Down the track an engineman, in his cab, answered with a short blast of, the whistle. Then he threw over the lever, and a train of ten flat cars started along in the engine's wake.
It was the first test--the “small test,” Tom called it--of the track that now extended across the surface of the Man-killer.
On each flat car were piled ten tons of steel rails, to be used further along in the construction work. With engine, cars and all, the load amounted to one hundred and fifty tons, the pressure of which would be exerted over a comparatively short strip of the new track that now glistened over the Man-killer.
Mounted on his pony, Harry Hazelton had galloped a considerable distance down the track. Now, halted, he had turned his pony's head about, watching eagerly the on-coming train.
For two weeks the laborers had been working on the roadbed now running over the Man-killer. Ties had been laid and rails fastened down. Apparently the Man-killer had done its worst and had been balked, a seemingly secure roadbed now resting on the once treacherous quicksand.
Construction trains, short and lightly laden, had been moving out over the newly filled in soil for many days, but the train now starting at the edge of the terrible Man-killer was heavier than any equipment that had before been run over the ground.
The president of the A., G. & N. M. R. R. was there, flanked by half a dozen of the leading directors of the road. There were other officials there, including General Manager Ellsworth.
“I see Hazelton out yonder,” murmured the president of the road. “But where's that young man Reade, now at the moment when the success of his work is being tested?”
“Goodness knows,” rejoined Mr. Ellsworth. “As likely as not he's back in the office, taking a nap after having given the engineman his signal.”