The Daughter of a Magnate

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.