re is anything she can
do.

One way to save a man's life at a crisis is to appeal to his sense of
humor. Miss Alicia's closing sentence did that for Ford, and he was
smiling grimly when he put the telegram away, not in the business file,
but in his pocket.

Three days later, however, when Frisbie was half-way to Saint's Rest
with his preliminary track-swinging, another New York telegram found
Ford in his newly established quarters in the Guaranty Building. This
was from some one acting as President Colbrith's secretary, and its
wording was concisely mandatory.

Contract has been awarded MacMorrogh Brothers. President directs
that you afford contractors every facility, and that you confer
with Mr. North in all cases of doubt.

XIII

THE BARBARIANS

It was some little time after the rock had begun to fly from the
cuttings on the western slopes of the mountains that Kenneth, summoned
by Ford, made the run from Denver to Saint's Rest over the standardized
Plug Mountain branch and found the engineer-manager living in a
twenty-foot caboose car fitted as a hotel and an office-on-wheels.

The occasion of Kenneth's calling was a right-of-way dispute on the
borders of the distant Copah mining district; some half-dozen mining
claims having been staked off across the old S. L & W. survey. The
owners, keen to make a killing out of the railroad company, threatened
injunctions if the P. S-W. persisted in trespassing upon private
property; and Ford, suspecting shrewdly that the mine men were set on by
the Transcontinental people to delay the work on the new line, made
haste to shift his responsibility to the legal shoulders.

"If I hadn't known you for a pretty good mountaineer, Kenneth,
you would have missed this," he said, making his guest free of the
limited hospitality of the caboose-hotel. "Are you good for a
two-hundred-and-eighty-mile cayuse ride, there and back, on the same
trail we tramped over a year ago last spring?"

"I'm good for everything on the bill of fare," was the heartening reply.
"How are things going?"

Ford's rejoinder began with a non-committal shrug. "We're building a
railroad, after a fashion."

"After a good fashion, I hope?"

Another shrug.

"We're doing as well as we can with the help we have. But about this
right-of-way tangle--" and he plunged his guest into a discussion of the
Copah situation which ran on unbroken until bedtime.

They took the westward trai