At five o’clock that evening, snow was falling at Medicine Bend, but Callahan, as he studied the weather bulletins, found consolation in the fact that it was not raining, and resting his heels on a table littered with train-sheets he forced the draft on a shabby brier and meditated.

There were times when snow had been received with strong words at the Wickiup: but when summer fairly opened Callahan preferred snow to rain as strongly as he preferred genuine Lone Jack to the spurious compounds that flooded the Western market.

The chief element of speculation in his evening reflections was as to what was going on west of the range, for Callahan knew through cloudy experience that what happens on one side of a mountain chain is no evidence as to what is doing on the other and by species of warm weather depravity that night something was happening west of the range.

“It is curious,” mused Callahan, as Morrison, the head operator, handed him some McCloud messages “curious, that we get nothing from Sleepy Cat.”

Sleepy Cat, it should be explained, is a new town on the West End; not only that, but a division town, and though one may know something about the Mountain Division he may yet be puzzled at Callahan’s mention of Sleepy Cat. When gold was found in the Pilot range and camps grew up and down Devil’s Gap like mushrooms, a branch was run from Sleepy Cat through the Pilot country, and the tortoise-like way station became at once a place of importance. It takes its name from the neighboring mountain around the base of which winds the swift Rat River. At Sleepy Cat town the main line leaves the Rat, and if a tenderfoot brakeman ask a reservation buck why the mountain is called Sleepy Cat the Indian will answer, always the same, “It lets the Rat run away.”

“Now it’s possible,” suggested Hughie Morrison, looking vaguely at the stove, “that the wires are down.”

“Nonsense,” objected Callahan.

“It is raining at Soda Sink,” persisted Morrison, mildly.

“What?” demanded the general superintendent, pulling his pipe from his mouth. Hughie Morrison kept cool. His straight, black hair lay boyishly smooth across his brow. There was no guile in his expression even though he had stunned Callahan, which was precisely what he had intended. “It is raining at Soda Sink,” he repeated.

Now there is no day in the mountains that goes back of the awful tradition concerning rain at Soda Sink. Before Tom Porter, first manager; before Brodie, who built the bridges; before Sikes, longest in the cab; before Pat Francis, oldest of conductors, runs that tradition about rain at the Sink which is desert absolute where it never does rain and never should. When it rains at Soda Sink, this say the Medicine men, the Cat will fall on the Rat. It is Indian talk as old as the foothills.

Of course no railroad man ever gave much heed to Indian talk; how, for instance, could a mountain fall on a river? Yet so the legend ran, and there being one superstitious man on the force at Medicine Bend one man remembered it Hughie Morrison.

Callahan studied the bulletin to which the operator called his attention and resumed his pipe sceptically, but he did make a suggestion. “See if you can’t get Sleepy Cat, Hughie, and find out whether that is so.”

Morris Blood was away with the Pittsburgers and Callahan had foolishly consented to look after his desk for a few days. At the moment that Morrison took hold of the key Giddings opened the door from the despatchers’ room. “Mr. Callahan, there’s a message coming from Francis, conductor of Number Two. They’ve had a cloudburst on Dry Dollar Creek,” he said, excitedly; “twenty feet of water came down Rat Canyon at five o’clock. The track’s under four feet in the canyon.”

As a pebble striking an anthill stirs into angry life a thousand startled workers, so a mountain washout startles a division and concentrates upon a single point the very last reserve of its activities and energies.

For thirty minutes the wires sung with Callahan’s messages. When his special for a run to the Rat Canyon was ready all the extra yardmen and both roadmasters were in the caboose; behind them fumed a second section with orders to pick up along the way every section man as they followed. It was hard on eight o’clock when Callahan stepped aboard. They double-headed for the pass, and not till they pulled up with their pony truck facing the water at the mouth of the big canyon did they ease their pace.

In the darkness they could only grope. Smith Young, roadmaster of the Pilot branch, an old mountain boy, had gone down from Sleepy Cat before dark, and crawling over the rocks in the dusk had worked his way along the canyon walls to the scene of the disaster.

Just below where Dry Dollar Creek breaks into the Rat the canyon is choked on one side by a granite wall two hundred feet high. On the other, a sheer spur of Sleepy Cat Mountain is thrust out like a paw against the river. It was there that the wall of water out of Dry Dollar had struck the track and scoured it to the bedrock. Ties, steel, ballast, riprap, roadbed, were gone, and where the heavy construction had run below the paw of Sleepy Cat the river was churning in a channel ten feet deep.

The best news Young had was that Agnew, the division engineer who happened to be at Sleepy Cat, had made the inspection with him and had already returned to order in men and material for daybreak.

Leaving the roadmasters to care for their incoming forces, Callahan, with Smith Young’s men for guides, took the footpath on the south side to the head of the canyon, where, above the break, an engine was waiting to run him to Sleepy Cat. When he reached the station Agnew was up at the material yard, and Callahan sat down in his shirt sleeves to take reports on train movements. The despatchers were annulling, holding the freights and distributing passenger trains at eating stations. But an hour’s work at the head-breaking problem left the division, Callahan thought, in worse shape than when the planning began, and he got up from the keg in a mental whirl when Duffy at Medicine Bend sent a body blow in a long message supplementary to his first report.

“Bear Dance reports the fruit extras making a very fast run. First train of eighteen cars has just pulled in: there are seven more of these fruit extras following close, should arrive at Sleepy Cat at four A.M.”

Callahan turned from the message with his hand in his hair. Of all bad luck this was the worst. The California fruit trains, not due for twenty-four hours, coming in a day ahead of time with the Mountain Division tied up by the worst washout it had ever seen. In a heat he walked out of the operators’ office to find Agnew; the two men met near the water tank.

“Hello, Agnew. This puts us against it, doesn’t it? How soon can you give us a track?” asked Callahan, feverishly.

Agnew was the only man on the division that was always calm. He was thorough, practical, and after he had cut his mountain teeth in the Peace River disaster, a hardheaded man at his work.

“It will take forty-eight hours after I get my material here

“Forty-eight hours!” echoed Callahan. “Why, man, we shall have eight trains of California fruit here by four o’clock.”

“I’m on my way to order in the filling, now,” said Agnew, “and I shall push things to the limit, Mr. Callahan.”

“Limit, yes, your limit but what about my limit? Forty-eight hours’ delay will put every car of that fruit into market rotten. I’ve got to have some kind of a track through there any kind on earth will do but I’ve got to have it by to-morrow night.”

“To-morrow night?”

“To-morrow night.”

Agnew looked at him as a sympathizing man looks at a lunatic, and calmly shook his head. “I can’t get rock here till to-morrow morning. What is the use talking impossibilities?”

Callahan ground his heel in the ballast. Agnew only asked him if he realized what a hole there was to fill. “It’s no use dumping gravel in there,” he explained patiently, “the river will carry it out faster than flat cars can carry it in.”

Callahan waved his hand. “I’ve got to have track there by to-morrow night.”

“I’ve got to dump a hundred cars of rock in there before we shall have anything to lay track on; and I’ve got to pick the rock up all the way from here to Goose River.”

They walked together to the station.

When the night grew too dark for Callahan he had but one higher thought Bucks. Bucks was five hundred miles away at McCloud, but he already had the particulars and was waiting at a key ready to take up the trouble of his favorite division. Callahan at the wire in Sleepy Cat told his story, and Bucks at the other end listened and asked questions. He listened to every detail of the disaster, to the cold hard figures of Agnew’s estimates which nothing could alter, jot or tittle and to Callahan’s despairing question as to how he could possibly save the unlooked-for avalanche of fruit.

For some time after the returns were in, Bucks was silent; silent so long that the copper-haired man twisted in his chair, looked vacantly around the office and chewed a cigar into strings. Then the sounder at his hand clicked. He recognized Bucks sending in the three words lightly spelled on his ear and jumped from his seat. Just three words Bucks had sent and signed off. What galvanized Callahan was that the words were so simple, so all-covering, and so easy. “Why didn’t I think of that?” groaned Callahan, mentally.

Then he reflected that he was nothing but a redheaded Irishman, anyway, while Bucks was a genius. It never showed more clearly, Callahan thought, than when he received the three words, “Send for Glover.”