ng."

"No; but next winter you'll be doing one of two things, Michael. You
will be pulling your train through steel snow-sheds on Plug Mountain--or
you'll be working for another boss. Break her loose, and let's get to
camp as soon as we can. Those poor devils back in the box-car are about
dead for sleep and a square meal."

II

A SPIKED SWITCH

Ford's hopeful prophecy that the snow battles were over for the season
proved true. A few weeks later a warm wind blew up from the west, the
mountain foot-trails became first packed ice-paths and then slippery
ridges to trap the unwary; the great drifts began to settle and melt,
and the spring music of the swollen mountain torrents was abroad in the
land.

At the blowing of the warm wind Ford aimed the opening gun in his
campaign against fate--the fate which seemed to be bent upon adding his
name to the list of failures on the Plug Mountain branch. The gun-aiming
was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering
office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug
Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.

"I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a
bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay," wrote Ford, "and the
chance has come. Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place
is yours if you will take it. If you are willing to tie up to the most
harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a
thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country
of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come."

This letter was written on a Friday. Frisbie got it out of the carriers'
delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing
westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal. Not that the
destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as
willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford's finger.

It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track
debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint's Rest, stretched his
legs gratefully on _terra firma_, had his first deep lungful of the
ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him. Ford
would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the
little shack "hotel," and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the
tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the
boxed-off den in t