ngs to his liking on the newly opened Chicago line, had taken the
long step westward to Denver to begin the forging of the third link in
the great railway chain.

Frisbie, now first assistant engineer in charge of construction, had
come down from Saint's Rest for a conference with his chief, and the
place of conferrings was a quiet corner in one of the balconies
overlooking the vast rotunda of the Brown Palace Hotel; this because the
carpenters were still busy in the suite of rooms set apart for the
offices of the assistant to the president in the Pacific Southwestern
headquarters down-town.

"You mean that the time is too short?" said Ford, speaking to Frisbie's
emphatic objection.

"Too short at both ends," contended the little man with the devilish
mustaches and chin beard. "The Copah mining district is one hundred and
twenty miles, as the crow flies, from the summit of Plug Pass--say one
hundred and forty by the line of our survey down the Pannikin, through
the canyon and up to the town. Giving you full credit for more
getting-ready than I supposed any man could compass in the three weeks
you've been at it, I still think it is impossible for us to reach Copah
this season."

"You must change your belief, Dick," was the curt rejoinder. "This is to
be a campaign, not only of possibilities, but of things done. We go into
Copah with the steel gangs before snow flies."

"I know; that's what you've been saying all along. But you're looking at
the thing by and large, and I'm figuring on the flinty details. For
example: you'll admit that we can't work to any advantage west of the
mountains until we have made a standard gauge out of the Plug Mountain
branch. How much time have you been allowing for that?"

"No time at all for the delay: about three weeks, maybe, for the actual
changing of the gauge," said Ford coolly.

"All right," laughed Frisbie. "Only you'll show us how. It doesn't lie
in the back of my head--or in Crapsey's, unless he's a better man than I
hired him for."

"Who is Crapsey?"

"He is a Purdue man that I picked up and started out on the branch to
make figures on the change of gauge. The other three parties, under
Major Benson, Jack Benson and Roy Brissac, are setting the grade stakes
down the Pannikin, and Leckhard is wrestling with the construction
material you've been dumping in upon us at Saint's Rest. That left me
short, and I hired Crapsey."

"Good. If he is capable, he may do the broadenin