en with foremen that can make signs, if they can't talk
English," directed McCloud. "Work lively now, and throw this track to
the south!"

Pretty much everybody--Japs, Italians, and Greeks--understood the game
they were playing. McCloud said afterward he would match his Piedmont
hundred in making a movable Y against any two hundred experts Glover
could pick; they had had the experience, he added, when the move meant
their last counter in the game of mountain life or death. The Piedmont
"hundred," to McCloud's mind, were after that day past masters in the
art of track-shifting. Working in a driving cloud of grit and snow,
the ignorant, the dull, and the slow rose to the occasion. Bill
Dancing, Pat Mears and his foreman, and Stevens moved about in the
driving snow like giants. The howling storm rang with the shouting of
the foremen, the guttural cries of the Japs, and the clank of the
lining-bars as rail-length after rail-length of the heavy track was
slued bodily from the grade alignment and swung around in a short
curve to a right angle out on the open ground.

McCloud at last gave the awaited signal, and, with keen-eyed, anxious
men watching every revolution of the cautious driving-wheels, the
engine, hissing and pausing as the air-brakes went off and on, pushed
the light caboose slowly out on the rough spur to its extreme end and
stopped with the pilot facing the main track at right angles; but
before it had reached its halting-place spike-mauls were ringing at
the fish-plates where a moment before it had left the line on the
curve. The track at that point was cut again, and under a long line
of bars and a renewed shouting it was thrown gradually quite across
the long gap in the main line, and the new joints in a very rough
curve were made fast just as the engine, running now with its pilot
ahead, steamed slowly around the new curve and without accident
regained the regular grade. It was greeted by a screeching yell as the
men climbed into the caboose, for the engine stood safely headed into
the teeth of the storm for Piedmont. The ten miles to cover were now a
matter of less than thirty minutes, and the construction train drew
into the Piedmont yards just as the telegraph wires were heating from
headquarters with orders annulling freights, ordering ploughs on
outgoing engines, and battening the division hatches for a grapple
with a Christmas blizzard.

No man came back better pleased than Stevens. "That man is all