it is--now. The south ridge is scheduled to go up at ten o'clock. We'll blow up the big north mountains sometime to-night. It'll make a glorious fireworks--one hundred and twenty-five barrels of powder and four fifty-pound cases of dynamite--and if you can't walk that far, Thorne, we'll take you up on a sledge. Mustn't allow you to miss it!"
"Sorry, but I'll have to, Mac. I'm going south with the mail. That's why I want you with Howland and me this morning. It will be up to you to get him acquainted with every detail in camp."
"Bully!" exclaimed the little superintendent, rubbing his hands with brisk enthusiasm. "Greggy and Thorne have done some remarkable things, Mr. Howland. You'll open your eyes when you see 'em! Talk about building railroads! We've got 'em all beat a thousand ways--tearing through forests, swamps and those blooming ridge-mountains--and here we are pretty near up at the end of the earth. The new Trans-continental isn't in it with us! The--"
"Ring off, Mac!" exclaimed Thorne; and Howland found himself laughing down into the red, freckled face of the superintendent. He liked this man immensely from the first.
"He's a bunch of live wires, double-charged all the time," said Thorne in a low voice as MacDonald went out ahead of them. "Always like that--happy as a boy most of the time, loved by the men, but the very devil himself when he's riled. Don't know what this camp would do without him."
This same thought occurred to Howland a dozen times during the next two hours. MacDonald seemed to be the life and law of the camp, and he wondered more and more at Thorne's demeanor. The camp chiefs and gang foremen whom they met seemed to stand in a certain awe of the senior engineer, but it was at the little red-headed Scotchman's cheery words that their eyes lighted with enthusiasm. This was not like the old Thorne, who had been the eye, the ear and the tongue of the company's greatest engineering works for a decade past, and whose boundless enthusiasm and love of work had been the largest factors in the winning of fame that was more than national. He began to note that there was a strange nervousness about Thorne when they were among the men, an uneasy alertness in his eyes, as though he were looking for some particular face among those they encountered. MacDonald's shrewd eyes observed his perplexity, and once he took an opportunity to whisper:
"I guess it's about time for Thorne to get back into civilization. There's something bad in his system. Weston told me yesterday that his injuries are coming along finely. I don't understand it."
A little later they returned with Thorne to his room.
"I want Howland to see this south coyote go up," said MacDonald. "Can you spare him? We'll be back before noon."
"Certainly. Come and take dinner with me at twelve. That will give me time to make memoranda of things I may have forgotten."
Howland fancied that there was a certain tone of relief in the senior's voice, but he made no mention of it to the superintendent as they walked swiftly to the scene of the "blow-out." The coyote was ready for firing when they arrived. The coyote itself--a tunnel of fifty feet dug into the solid rock of the mountain and terminating in a chamber packed with explosives--was closed by masses of broken rock, rammed tight, and MacDonald showed his companion where the electric wire passed to the fuse within.
"It's a confounded mystery to me why Thorne doesn't care to see this ridge blown up!" he exclaimed after they had finished the inspection. "We've been at work for three months drilling this coyote, and the bigger one to the north. There are four thousand square yards of rock to come out of there, and six thousand out of the other. You don't see shots like those three times in a lifetime, and there'll not be another for us between here and the bay. What's the matter with Thorne?"
Without waiting for a reply MacDonald walked swiftly in the direction of a ridge to the right. Already guards had been thrown out on all sides of the mountain and their thrilling warnings of "Fire--Fire--Fire," shouted through megaphones of birch-bark, echoed with ominous meaning through the still wilderness, where for the time all work had ceased. On the top of the ridge half a hundred of the workmen had already assembled, and as Howland and the superintendent came among them they fell back from around a big, flat boulder on which was stationed the electric battery. MacDonald's face was flushed and his eyes snapped like dragonflies as he pointed to a tiny button.
"God, but I can't understand why Thorne doesn't care to see this," he said again. "Think of it, man--seven thousand five hundred pounds of powder and two hundred of dynamite! A touch of this button, a flash along the wire, and the fuse is struck. Then, four or five minutes, and up goes a mountain that has stood here since the world began. Isn't it glorious?" He straightened himself and took off his hat. "Mr. Howland, will you press the button?"
With a strange thrill Howland bent over the battery, his eyes turned to the mass of rock looming sullen and black half a mile away, as if bidding defiance in the face of impending fate. Tremblingly his finger pressed on the little white knob, and a silence like that of death fell on those who watched. One minute--two--three--five passed, while in the bowels of the mountain the fuse was sizzling to its end. Then there came a puff, something like a cloud of dust rising skyward, but without sound; and before its upward belching had ceased a tongue of flame spurted out of its crest--and after that, perhaps two seconds later, came the explosion. There was a rumbling and a jarring, as if the earth were convulsed under foot; volumes of dense black smoke shot upward, shutting the mountain in an impenetrable pall of gloom; and in an instant these rolling, twisting volumes of black became lurid, and an explosion like that of a thousand great guns rent the air. As fast as the eye could follow, sheets of flame shot out of the sea of smoke, climbing higher and higher, in lightning flashes, until the lurid tongues licked the air a quarter of a mile above the startled wilderness. Explosion followed explosion, some of them coming in hollow, reverberating booms, others sounding as if in mid-air. The heavens were filled with hurtling rocks; solid masses of granite ten feet square were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing a ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hand of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the basement of a sky-scraper dropped a third and nearly a half a mile away. For three minutes the frightful convulsions continued. Then the lurid lights died out of the pall of smoke, and the pall itself began to settle. Howland felt a grip on his arm. Dumbly he turned and looked into the white, staring face of the superintendent. His ears tingled, every fiber in him seemed unstrung. MacDonald's voice came to him strange and weird.
"What do you think of that, Howland?" The two men gripped hands, and when they looked again they saw dimly through dust and smoke only torn and shattered masses of rock where had been the giant ridge that barred the path of the new road to the bay.
Howland talked but little on their way back to camp. The scene that he had just witnessed affected him strangely; it stirred once more within him all of his old ambition, all of his old enthusiasm, and yet neither found voice in words. He was glad when the dinner was over at Thorne's, and with the going of the mail sledge and the senior engineer there came over him a still deeper sense of joy. Now he was in charge, it was his road from that hour on. He crushed MacDonald's hand in a grip that meant more than words when they parted. In his own cabin he threw off his coat and hat, lighted his pipe, and tried to realize just what this all meant for him. He was in charge--in charge of the greatest railroad building job on earth--he, Jack Howland, who less than twenty years ago was a barefooted, half-starved urchin peddling papers in the streets where he was now famous! And now what was this black thing that had come up to threaten his chances just as he had about won his great fight? He clenched his hands as he thought again of what had already happened--the cowardly attempt on his life, the warnings, and his blood boiled to fever heat. That night--after he had seen Meleese--he would know what to do. But he would not be driven away, as Gregson and Thorne had been driven. He was determined on that.
The gloom of night falls early in the great northern mid-winter, and it was already growing dusk when there came the sound of a voice outside, followed
