toil of its centuries spreads beautifully green under
the June skies, and the unsuspecting settler, lulled into security by
many years of the river's repose, settles on its level bench lands and
lays out his long lines of possession; but the Sioux will tell you in
their own talk that this man is but a tenant at will; that in another
time and at another place the stranger will inherit his fields; and
that the Crawling Stone always comes back for its own.

This was the peril that Glover and McCloud essayed when they ran a
three-tenths grade and laid an eighty-pound rail up two hundred and
fifty miles of the valley. It was in local and exclusive territory a
rich prize, and they brought to their undertaking not, perhaps,
greater abilities than other men, but incomparably greater material
resources than earlier American engineers had possessed.

Success such as theirs is cumulative: when the work is done one man
stands for it, but it represents the work of a thousand men in every
walk of American industry. Where the credit must lie with the engineer
who achieves is in the application of these enormous reserves of
industrial triumphs to the particular conditions he faces in the
problem before him; in the application lies the genius called success,
and this is always new. Moreover, men like Glover and McCloud were
fitted for a fight with a mountain river because trained in the
Western school, where poverty or resource had sharpened the wits. The
building of the Crawling Stone Line came with the dawn of a new day in
American capital, when figures that had slept in fairies' dreams woke
into every-day use, and when enlarged calculation among men
controlling hitherto unheard-of sums of money demanded the best and
most permanent methods of construction to insure enduring economies in
operating. Thus the constructing of the Crawling Stone Line opened in
itself new chapters in Rocky Mountain railroad-building. An equipment
of machinery, much of which had never before been applied to such
building, had been assembled by the engineers. Steam-shovels had been
sent in battalions, grading-machines and dump-wagons had gone forward
in trainloads, and an army of men were operating in the valley. A huge
steel bridge three thousand feet long was now being thrown across the
river below the Dunning ranch.

The winter had been an unusual one even in a land of winters. The
season's fall of snow had not been above an average, but it had fallen
i