deep waters one prays sometimes to be delivered from his friends.

It was a week after this farewell supper in the caboose hotel at Saint's
Rest when Ford went down to Denver to borrow, on his P. S-W. stock, the
ten thousand dollars to be deposited to the credit of the Bank of Copah.
Following him, and only one train behind, came Frisbie, new from a
confirmatory survey of the extension beyond the Copah district.

On his return from the Green Butte end of the proposed line, the little
man with the diabolical fashion of beard trimming had spent a week in
and around Copah, picking up yard rights-of-way, surveying approaches,
and setting grade stakes for the outlying MacMorrogh gangs. During that
week he had made a discovery, and since he believed it to be all his
own, he journeyed eastward to share it quickly with his chief.

Ford was dining alone at the Brown Palace when Frisbie, coming straight
from the Plug Mountain train, found him. There was an entire western
desert to be talked over during the courses, and Frisbie held his
discovery in reserve until they had gone to smoke in a quiet corner of
the great rotunda. Even then he approached it indirectly.

"In taking up the line down the Pannikin we have followed the old S. L &
W. survey pretty closely all the way from start to finish. What were
your reasons, Stuart?" he asked.

"There didn't seem to be any good reason for not following it. Brandreth
made the S. L & W. preliminary, and there isn't a better locating
engineer in this country."

"I know," said Frisbie. "But the best of us make mistakes, now and then.
Brandreth made a pretty sizable one, I think."

"How is that?"

"You know where the big rock-cutting is to be made in the lower canyon,
about ten miles this side of the point where we begin to swing south for
the run to Copah--a mile and a half of heavy work that will cost away
up into the pictures?"

"Yes; I've estimated that rock work at not a cent less than two hundred
thousand dollars."

"You're shy, rather than over, at that. And two hundred thousand would
build a number of miles of ordinary railroad, wouldn't it? But that
isn't all. The cliffs along that canyon are shale-topped and
shale-undermined, the shale alternating with loose rock about fifty feet
above our line of grade in quarter-mile stretches all along. That means
incessant track-walking day and night through the mile and a half of
cutting, and afterward--for all time afterward--a con