ke was
small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts. The
Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern
system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads, and
upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders. It barely
paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow blockades
in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss account.

This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to
find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug
Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble
one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and
he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific
Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain
line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the great Granger
roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction, transferring an
energetic young man with ambitions from the bald plains of the Dakotas
to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.

Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a
syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then
prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction,
and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at
once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be
discovered.

Failing to tap their bonanza freight-producer on the route up Blue
Canyon, the projectors--small fish in the great money-pool--had talked
vaguely of future extensions to Salt Lake, to San Francisco, to Puget
Sound, or to some other of the far-beyonds, and had even gone the length
of surveying a line over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin,
on the Pacific slope of the range. But they had prudently stopped
building; and the pause continued until the day of the great silver
strike at Saint's Rest.

The new carbonate beds chanced to lie within easy rifle-shot of the
summit of Plug Pass; in other words, they were precisely on the line of
the extension survey of the narrow gauge. The discovery was a piece of
sheer luck for the amateur railroad builders. For a time, as all the
world knows, Saint's Rest headed the mining news column in all the
dailies, and the rush for the new camp fairly swamped the meager
carrying facilities of the incomplete line and the stages conne