CHAPTER VAT TUNNEL NUMBER TWO
“Zowie!”
A crash like that of a falling house, a burst of grayish green dust and smoke from the opposite side of the canyon, and a hurtling shower of stones varying in size from pebbles to pumpkins, made the two young fellows, one carrying a boxed surveying instrument and the other the tripod and staff, take hasty shelter behind the nearest boulder.
“Ding-bust those fellows over there—they don’t care a whang who happens to be in the way of their ding-busted rock-flinging!” Dickie Maxwell complained plaintively, peering out at his side of the sheltering boulder to see if there were another crash and a volley due to come. “Did they give any warning at all? I didn’t hear anybody yell ‘Fire in the rock.’ Did you?”
Larry shook his head.
“You wouldn’t hear ’em, anyway—with the river making such a thundering racket,” he averred. “Just the same, what you say names ’em right. They don’t seem to care much what they do to us.”
For a couple of weeks the two boys had been “living easy,” as Dick phrased it. After the day of flood swampings at Pine Gulch they had been sent out ahead with Blaisdell, one of the assistant engineers, to drive stakesand carry chain on a correction of one of the original surveys in the upper canyon, and for that length of time they had been out of touch with the construction force and the industrial battle that was going on from day to day.
During that time the race between the two competing construction armies had gone on neck and neck, as you might say. The Overland Central had completed its bridge-trestle in the lower narrows, and while its track-laying gangs were still half a mile or more behind those of the Short Line, its graders and rock men were scattered all the way along in advance; and since the O. C. survey had the higher location on the north bank of the river, the blasting seriously interfered with the Short Line work on the opposite and lower bank.
“If they were only decent enough to have some regular hours for firing, like white folks!” Dick went on. “But the way it is, you never can tell any hour or minute when they won’t open up and fling rocks at us!”
“Mr. Bob Goldrick claims that it is a part of their plan to hamper and delay us,” Larry put in soberly. “I suppose they’re calling it ‘business,’ but I’ll say it’s crooked business. Reckon we’re safe now to make another run for it?”
Dick picked up the instrument box and peeped around the corner of the boulder.
“Nothing stirring,” he reported. “Are you ready? All right—let’s go!”
They made a dash up the rough track, heading for a shallow cut which ran through the toe of the next mountain spur, and they had barely gained the cutting when another crash bellowed upon the opposite slope and abuckshot shower of sand and pebbles rattled down upon them.
“That’s right, old top; keep it up!” said Dick grittingly, apostrophizing the unseen O. C. hard-rock men. Then: “I wish Mr. Ackerman would let us get back at ’em once in a while. But he makes us run up a red flag when we’re going to shoot.”
“The chief is right, though,” was Larry’s considered reply. “We can’t afford to put ourselves on a level with those highbinders on the other side of the canyon.”
“Huh! that doesn’t sound much as if you were spoiling for a fight, Larry. Where’s your good Donovan nerve gone to?”
“Never you mind about the Donovan nerve; it’s all right. But I’m not chasing around to find a chance to scrap with somebody. I’m out here this summer to learn all I can about the engineering game—and so are you. And fighting a lot of plug-uglies who won’t play the game fair isn’t any part of our job. Just the same—Gee-wop! but that was a close one!”
It was. Another blast, fired from so far around the curve ahead that they couldn’t even see the smoke of it, hurled a stone as big as a water bucket high in air to drop it just in front of them and fairly between the rails of the track over which they were hastening. Its alighting place was not more than a dozen feet distant, and it snapped the cross-tie upon which it fell as easily as if the heavy timber had been a pine lath.
The two boys dropped their burdens and went to roll the stone from the track where it lay a menace to the first material train that should come along. It was so big and weighty that it took their united efforts to edgeit over the rail and start it rolling down the embankment.
“Lucky it didn’t hit a rail,” was Larry’s comment, as they went on. “It would have broken the steel as easily as it did the tie.”
“Seems as if there ought to be some law to hold those fellows down!” said Dick wrathfully. “If father would only come up here once and see what they’re doing to us!”
Larry chuckled quietly.
“You want to forget that you’re the general manager’s son, Dickie; that doesn’t get you anywhere at all out here in the wild and woolly. But as for that, you can bet your father knows all about what’s going on up here; and I’ll bet he isn’t leaving a thing undone to stop this O. C. pirate business. Our job is just to stick it out and beat ’em fairly.”
“Yes; and get shot with a rock doing it!” Dick grumbled. “Thank goodness, there’s the tunnel; let’s run for it before they turn loose on us again.”
Around the curve ahead lay the present “end-of-track” of the Short Line. Viewed from a distance it looked more like a snow-break than a tunnel or the entrance to one. A heavy plank fence guarded it on the river side, and this was buttressed with piles of loose stone. This plank bulwark was not a snow fence, however; it was a protection against flying rocks from the blasting on the other side of the canyon.
To facilitate the removal of spoil—the tunnel diggings—the track had been laid directly up to the mouth of the black hole in the mountain side; but this track was now empty. Off at one side, and also sheltered by the heavy plank bulkhead, was the shed which held the air-compressor and its steam boiler.
Goldrick, the young engineer who was in charge of the tunnel driving, was waiting for the boys when they came up with the surveying instrument. Taking advantage of a lull in the blasting across the river, a few lines were run; and after the stakes were driven to mark them, the two boys were at liberty to take shelter in the tunnel—which they promptly did when the firing recommenced on the slope opposite and above.
“Bing!—Sounds a good bit like a sure-enough battle,” said Dick, as a hurtling stone missile slammed against the outside of the stout wooden bulkhead screening the tunnel portal.
But Larry Donovan, looking up at the tunnel roof and its rather light timbering, was thinking of something else.
“Say, Dick; it’s a pity we lost that car-load of tunnel timbering in the river,” he broke in, referring to an accident of the day before in which a supply of braces and planking for shoring the tunnel had been derailed and the timbers swept away in the swift flood of the Tourmaline. “I don’t like the looks of this clay overhead. You’d say it wouldn’t take very much to bring it down on us.”
The dangerous “looks” were apparent enough, even to an untrained eye. For the first ten or fifteen feet of its plunge into the mountain the tunnel excavation ran through clay mixed with broken rock. Of course, it was the intention to timber this part of it solidly; but with the material still lacking, the tunnel drivers were merely doing the best they could, propping the shaky roof temporarily with such braces as could be had, and going on with their work.
“Well, I guess we don’t have to stand squarely under it,” Dick offered; and with that they moved into the blackbore, coming shortly to the heading where the clamor of the air-driven drills made a din like that of a boiler shop.
Living over the events of that terrible morning afterward, they both remembered that it was the ear-splitting noise that drove them back to the tunnel mouth; the noise and the closeness of the air in the heading. As yet, the ventilating fan had not been put in operation—as it would be when the depth grew greater—and the exhaust air from the drills served only to make the air a half-stupefying mixture for anyone coming into it from the out-doors.
For the time the blast firing on the opposite slope had ceased, and above the booming thunder of the river they could hear the chatter and clink of the air drills on the O. C. grade. Just at this point the “enemy” railroad was forced to blast out a long rock cutting to make a shelf for its track, and the firing—with short intervals for drilling and loading the holes—was fairly continuous.
Standing in the mouth of the tunnel and looking outward there was little in sight to betoken the activities going on in the depths of the big bore. Careful for the safety of his men, Mr. Ackerman had billeted the off-shift in a camp lower down the canyon. Thus, save at the shift-changing hours, and at such times as the material train or the spoil train was coming or going, the only outside workers were the man who ran the air-compressor and his fireman.
From their refuge behind the plank bulkhead Larry was once more looking up at the inadequately propped clay roof.
“I’m telling you, Dick, that stuff is plenty dangerous, and it’s getting more so,” he insisted. “If you’ll watchit, you’ll see little bits of the clay crumbling off every now and then. I wish to goodness we could get some timbers up here and place them.”
“So do I,” Dick agreed. “If that roof should take a notion to fall down——”
The sentence wasn’t finished because the breath was lacking wherewith to finish it. As if he had suddenly lost his mind, Larry made a plunging football tackle on his lighter companion, shooting him out between the rails of the track and falling with him. At the same instant there was a sort of grunting rumble behind them, and when they looked back a stifling horror rose up to choke them. In the twinkling of an eye the tunnel mouth had disappeared and its place was occupied by a shelving mound of clay.
“Oh, good mercy!” Dick gasped; “the men—they’ll stifle to death in there! And Mr. Goldrick’s in there with them! What shall we do?”
There was reason enough for the horrified gasp of helplessness. Apart from the two men in the compressor shed there was nobody to call upon; no rescue force available. True, there were the O. C. rock quarriers on the other side of the canyon; but even if they could have been summoned, they had no means of crossing the torrenting river.
Larry was the first to recover from the shock of paralyzing horror. Air was the first requisite for the imprisoned men ... if only the pipe which furnished the air for the drills was not broken——
But it was broken. A rock in the slide had fallen upon it, and it was snapped off short in the threads of a coupling. The compressor was still running, but the air wasmerely wasting through the broken pipe. Seeing this, Larry made a bolt for the telephone in the compressor shed, giving the alarm to the two machine tenders as he dashed in. It was the fireman who killed the telephone hope.
“Wire’s been dead for the last two hours!” he shouted. “Reckon a rock from the O. C. blasts got it somewhere.”
Larry was dismayed afresh, but not beaten.
“We’ve got to get air in to those men, some way or other!” he raved at Dick, who had followed him over to the compressor shed. “Four of us couldn’t begin to dig ’em out before they’ll choke to death!”
“But how?” Dick wailed.
It was then that Larry Donovan had a warming rush of thankfulness for the necessity which had forced him to earn his way through the Brewster High School by working nights in the railroad machine shop. He knew tools and machinery, and how to make use of both.
“Pipe!” he bawled at the compressor man; “got any inch pipe?”
“Plenty of it—pipe and tools,” was the heartening answer.
Taking command merely because there was no one else to take it, Larry quickly organized his force of three and buckled in with it himself. A length of pipe was dragged from the rack, and with a coupling and a plug loosely screwed in to stop the end of it, they ran with it to the blockading slide. By sheer man-strength they were able to ram it three or four feet into the clay, but no more.
“Another coupling and plug!” Larry ordered; and with the rear end of the pipe thus protected so that itcould be hammered upon, he drove it with a block of wood and a sledge hammer, thus gaining two or three feet more.
“It’s stopped going—you can’t make it!” called Dick, who was supporting the sag of the pipe and steadying it against the blows of the sledge.
“We’ve got to make it!” Larry’s retort was undaunted, but he was pretty nearly at the end of his resources. Nearly, but not quite. Summoning his helpers he found a cross-tie with a square end, and using this as a battering ram the three of them were able to gain another foot.
It was while the rescue pipe was still going in, though now only by half-inches, that a most welcome sound thundered in their ears; namely the storming exhausts of a locomotive laboring up the grade and announcing the upcoming of the material train. They thought this would mean more help; but when they looked back down the track it was only to be disappointed. The train was made up of the construction engine pushing a single flat-car which was loaded with timbers, and there was no crew save the two enginemen. At the same moment, as if by malice aforethought—only of course it was not—the blasting began again on the other side of the canyon.
Under a hail of small stones the train came up, to be flagged to a stop as it was over-running the out-thrust length of pipe. Larry, still in command, was grappling fiercely with a new idea that had come sizzling into his brain. Here was power enough; a mighty ram that would put their puny efforts with the sledge hammer and the butting cross-tie miles out of the race.
“Blow your whistle and see if you can’t make those fellows up yonder understand that we’re in trouble!” heyelled up at the engineer in the cab; and when the whistle signal had been given, and had gone unheeded: “Ease ahead a little until the car straddles the pipe ... that’s right—hold up; that’s far enough,” and down he went on his back under the timber car to try to make some sort of a pushing hitch on the pipe of rescue.
The hitch was made, after a fashion, with a bit of chain ransacked out of the compressor shed scrap heap, and a vise hastily detached from the compressor man’s repair bench to make a clamp-hold on the pipe to push against. But just as Larry was crawling out to give the engineer the word to move ahead slowly, bang! came another blast from the opposite cliff, and a flying fragment of stone, no bigger than a man’s fist, came hurtling across the river.
“Look out!” Dick shouted; and the engineer, glancing out of the cab window and seeing the stone, ducked promptly. But the stone didn’t hit the cab. As if it had been a projectile fired out of a carefully aimed cannon, it struck the locomotive’s whistle and snapped it off short at the dome-head.
In the uproar of escaping steam that followed, nobody could make himself heard, and Larry didn’t try. Racing around to the rear end of the flat-car he uncoupled it from the disabled engine, making frantic signals to the engineer to let his machine drop back down the grade out of harm’s way. Ideas were coming thick and fast now, and though his power plant was smashed, he had one more alternative ready and waiting to be tried out.
“Cut off your air, start the compressor, and fill the storage tank!” he yelped at Beasley, the compressor engineer;then to Dick: “You and Johnnie Shovel help me, quick!—we’ve got to take a chance on these flying rocks!”
The first half of the new expedient was the extra-hazardous one; it was to connect the air-pipe line running from the compressor storage tank to the drills in the tunnel—and which had been broken by the slide—to the air-brake piping of the loaded timber car which was standing just as the retreating engine had left it, a-straddle of the half-driven rescue pipe. This connecting job was not a specially difficult one, but it took them all out in the open, and the blasts in the high cutting on the opposite cliff were still thundering at irregular intervals.
“Stand by to hand me what I need,” was Larry’s order, his former machine-shop experience coming handsomely into play; “that big wrench first—that’s it—now the first half of the union joint; and you screw the other half on the car pipe, quick, before they touch off another shot up yonder! That’s the idea; now hold the pipe up here so that I can make it on—good; we’ve got her!”
Dick Maxwell was not what you would call mechanically gifted, but some little inkling of Larry’s new notion was beginning to soak in. As matters now stood, the air-brake mechanism of the timber car was connected with the drill compressor so that air pressure turned on from the storage tank in the compressor shed would actuate the brakes exactly the same as if the car had been coupled to a locomotive. So far, it was all clear enough; and Larry quickly demonstrated the manner in which the new power was to be applied and utilized.
“Get a couple of ties and block the wheels so that the car can’t run back!” he shouted. Then to Dick: “Youbring the tools and crawl under with me; I may need help.”
Beneath the car, with its stout armoring of timbers, they were safe from the intermittent showers of rock that were coming over and could work swiftly and to good purpose. Lying on his back under the car Larry swiftly transferred his chain hitch from the framework of the car itself to the lever connecting the air-brake piston with the brake-beam. Thus, by alternately applying and releasing the brake, with a corresponding shift of the vise-and-chain hitch each time, the life-giving pipe could be rammed forward into the slide.
“Good work—bully good work!” Dick cried enthusiastically, when the full size of the clever expedient dawned upon him. “You’ve got her dead to rights, now! You do the signal yelling, and let me turn the air on and off.”
By this time the pressure in the storage tank had been pumped up to its maximum and the safety-valve was hissing shrilly. Larry, lying under the car, gave the word, and as the air whistled into the brake cylinder of the car, the lever moved out, the hitch held bravely, and the pipe was thrust into the clay bank the full length of the stroke.
Deftly readjusting the hitch, Larry yelled again, and again Dick gave the needed twitch to the inlet valve. “She’s going—going right along!” the hitch-shifter called out from his hard bed on the cross-ties. “Now, then; once more!”
There were quite a number of the “once mores” before a welcome tapping on the buried pipe coming from the other side of the slide barrier signaled success.
“We’re through!” Larry announced; “they’re rappingon the other end of the pipe. Now a bit more quick work and we’ll have it!”
The job this time was to transfer the life-giving air stream from the brake mechanism of the car to the rescue pipe, and since there was plenty of air hose available, as there always is on any rock-drilling job, this was soon accomplished. Next, the question arose as to whether or not the imprisoned men had removed the plug which Larry had screwed loosely into the pipe end to keep it from being stopped up with clay in the ramming process.
For a minute or so they tried to tell the prisoners to unscrew the plug, tapping on the pipe and using the Morse alphabet—which they knew Goldrick understood—to spell out the message; but when they failed in the efforts to read the answering taps they took a chance and turned the air pressure on slowly. Immediately a shrill hissing told them that the pipe was open, with the air blowing through into the shut-in tunnel, and a series of rapid taps came to voice the gratitude of the men on the other side of the barrier.
Fortunately, about this time there came a lull in the bombardment from the O. C. rock cutting, and they were able to move about more freely.
“Circulation is the next thing,” Larry snapped out. “You can’t ventilate an air-tight hole just by pumping air into it. If they’ll only happen to think of disconnecting the drills, so that the bad air can come out by the broken pipe——”
A quick dash to the place where the broken pipe had been pulled out of the slide showed that, as yet, nobody inside had thought of disconnecting the drills. So once more they had recourse to the tap-tap telegraphing. Overand over again, Dick, who knew Morse better than Larry did, rapped out his message, “d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t t-h-e d-r-i-l-l-s,” with Larry on his knees before the hole where the broken pipe had come out, listening for the sounds which would tell him that wrenches were being used at the other end of things.
The sounds came finally, and with them a shot-like blast of escaping air that filled the listener to his shoe-tops with earth and sand.
“Hooray for our side!” he shouted, spitting clay with the words. “I’ve got my mouthful; but they’ve got theirs, too. Now for the picks and shovels!”
Whether or not the four of them, with two of the four obliged to attend to the steam-driven air-compressor and its boiler at least occasionally, could have made much of an impression on the giant slide was a question that didn’t have to be answered—luckily for the shovelers. Brannigan, the driver of the disabled construction engine, had used his own good judgment in letting his machine slide away down the grade out of danger from the flying rocks. Since it was all a descending grade to the construction headquarters camp at Pine Gulch, he had simply kept on going until the camp was reached.
Here the news of the disaster at Tunnel Number Two was quickly acted upon. Another locomotive was run out, a train of two flat-cars was coupled on, and with these loaded with the hastily aroused men of the night shift, a record-breaking dash was made up the canyon.
So it came about that Larry and Dick, and their two willing but weary helpers, were barely at the beginning of the big digging job when the train darted around the down-canyon curve, and a few minutes later as manymen as the shallow tunnel cutting could hold were eating their way into the slide like a hundred-armed steam shovel.
And in some way, nobody seemed to know just how, word had gotten to the quarriers on the other side of the river; for now the big O. C. rock cutting was lined with sober-faced onlookers, and never a blast was set off while the rescuers were at work.
“That’s the first really human thing they’ve been known to do since we began scrapping with them,” said Dick, standing aside with Larry to be out of the way of the digging battalion. “I’d like to shake hands with that foreman up yonder, whoever he is; I’ll be switched if I wouldn’t. He’s some——”
The interruption was a great shout, raised when the first of the shovelers broke through the barrier, his shovel clashing against that of one of the drilling squad doing his bit on the other side of the slide.A minute later the prisoners, grimy and sweating,were hauled out, one by one, Goldrick, the young engineer, being the last man to come—like a good ship’s captain refusing to leave his post until his men were all safe.
A minute later the prisoners were hauled out
A minute later the prisoners were hauled out
A minute later the prisoners were hauled out
“By George!” he gasped, wringing first Larry’s hand and then Dick’s. “I sure had a bad quarter of an hour in there when that roof dropped down and shut us in, and I realized that there were only you two and Beasley and Johnnie Shovel out here to do anything! The air was right bad to begin with, and inside of half an hour we all had our tongues hanging out. Who was it who thought of driving that pipe through the dump?—and how in Sam Hill did you do it?”
Dick was the one who told the story of the pipe-drivingexpedient, and neither it, nor Larry’s inventive genius, lost anything in the telling.
“I shouldn’t have known any more than a clam what to do when we found that the telephone was dead,” he wound up. “But Larry, here, was right on the job from the jump. All we did was to take orders from him and rush it through.”
Young Goldrick’s eyes were suspiciously bright when he turned to the big, curly-headed fellow and said, “Where do you get all this good stuff, Larry?”
Larry Donovan, as uncomfortable as possible under the praise that Dick had been heaping upon him, blushed like a girl, though his face was so dirty and grimy that the blush couldn’t show much.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he evaded; “I’ve always been messing around with tools and machinery and things. And it wasn’t anything, anyhow. You folks inside there had to have air, and have it quick—any baby would know that; and there was nothing to do but to pile in and give it to you. So we did it.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” laughed Goldrick; “nothing to it, at all; no brains needed to try pushing the pipe through with the engine when the hammer wouldn’t drive it any farther, or to invent the air-brake scheme when the engine got knocked out! You’re too blooming modest to draw your own breath, Larry!”
“That’s all right,” said Larry, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. “All I’m asking is that you—and you, too, Dick—don’t paste it on too thick when you report to Mr. Ackerman. I don’t want him, or Mr. Maxwell, to get the idea that I’m understudying for a movie-stunt-puller on this job. I’m here to earn a Donovanchance, if I can, and the spot-light doesn’t agree with me; makes me sort of sick at my stomach when I get too much of it.”
Quite naturally, since a stunt-puller’s word goes as it lies, as you might say, both Dick and the young engineer promised to let Larry down easy in the matter of report-making.
Nevertheless, that same evening, just as the boys were about to roll themselves in the blankets in their bunk tent at the Pine Gulch camp, the telegraph operator came over from his shack office with a freshly written message which he gave to Larry. It was dated at Brewster, and this is what it said:
“To Lawrence Donovan,“Care H. Ackerman, Chf. Engr.,“Pine Gulch.“Congratulations upon your good work at Tunnel Number Two. The Short Line Company owes you something and it will pay its obligation. You have your chance and you are making good.“R. Maxwell,“General Manager.”
“To Lawrence Donovan,“Care H. Ackerman, Chf. Engr.,“Pine Gulch.
“Congratulations upon your good work at Tunnel Number Two. The Short Line Company owes you something and it will pay its obligation. You have your chance and you are making good.
“R. Maxwell,“General Manager.”