oducts not qualified to find a market on their own feet were next
to worthless, timber could not be milled, irrigation development was at
a standstill. The people had seen so many survey stakes planted and grow
and rot and produce nothing, and had been fed upon so many railroad
rumors, that there was no faith in them.

* * * * *

"I think it's a railroad!" gasped the telephone operator as she called
me to the booth. Her eyes were bright. It was as if a Frenchman had
said, "Berlin is taken!"

But I, a skeptic hardened by many shattered hopes, smiled incredulously.
Nevertheless, I took the receiver with a tremor born of undying
optimism--the optimism of the railless land.

"It's long distance," whispered the operator, torn between a sense of
duty and a desire to eavesdrop.

"Hello!"

The only answer was a grinding buzz; a mile or two of Shaniko line was
down--it usually was.

Then Prineville cut in and The Dalles said something cross and a faint
inquiry came from Portland, far away. Yes, I was waiting.

"Hello, Putnam?" The speaker was the managing editor of a Portland
newspaper. "Gangs have broken loose in the Deschutes Canyon," said he.
"One of 'em is Harriman, we know, but the others are playing dark. Think
it's Hill starting for California. You go--" then the buzz became too
bad.

Finally The Dalles repeated the instructions. I was to go down the
Canyon of the Deschutes and find out all about it. The head and nearest
end of the Canyon was fifty miles away, and the Canyon itself was one
hundred miles long. Glory be! But it was a railroad, and before I
started the town was in the first throes of apoplectic celebration.

I went to Shaniko by auto, and thence by train to Grass Valley, midway
to the Columbia. From Grass Valley a team took me westward to the rim of
the Canyon of the Deschutes. There were fresh survey stakes and a gang
of engineers working with their instruments on a hillside. Very
obliging, were those engineers; they would tell me anything; they were
building a railroad; it was headed for Mexico City and they themselves
were the owners! Below was a new-made camp, where Austrians labored on
a right of way that had come to life almost over night. This was a
Harriman camp; orders were, apparently, to get a strangle hold on the
best line up the narrow Canyon--to crowd the other fellows out. But the
mystery surrounding those "other fellows" clung close. From water boy t