! An', bedad, ut's mesilf'll
tell 'em so!'"

And he did. He wrote his opinion in concise, forceful, misspelled
English on the back of a requisition slip, and sent it to Regan. Regan
didn't say much--just choked up a little when he read it. McCann
wasn't strong on diagnosis.

It was still early spring when Owsley went to the new loop they were
building around the main line to tap a bit of the country south, and
the chinook, blowing warm, had melted most of the snow, and the creeks,
rivers and sluices were running full--the busiest time in all the year
for the trackmen and section hands. It was a summer's job, the
loop--if luck was with them--and the orders were to push the work, the
steel was to be down before the snow flew again. That was the way it
was put up to McCann when he first moved into construction camp, a
short while before Owsley joined him.

"Then give me the stuff," said McCann. "Shoot the material along, an'
don't lave me bitin' me finger nails for the want av ut--d'ye moind?"

So the Big Cloud yards, too, had orders--standing orders to rush out
all material for the Elk River loop as fast as it came in from the East.

In a way, of course, that was how it happened--from the standing
orders. It was just the kind of work the 1601 was hanging around
waiting to do--the odd jobs--pulling the extras. Ordinarily, perhaps,
somebody would have thought of it, and maybe they wouldn't have sent
her out--maybe they would. You can't operate a railroad wholly on
sentiment--and there were ten cars of steel and as many more of ties
and conglomerate supplies helping to choke up the Big Cloud yards when
they should have been where they were needed a whole lot more--in
McCann's construction camp.

But there had been two days of bad weather in the mountains, two days
of solid rain, track troubles, and troubles generally, and what with
one thing and another, the motive-power department had been taxed to
its limit. The first chance they got in a lull of pressure, not the
storm, they sent the material west with the only spare engine that
happened to be in the roundhouse at the time--the 1601--and never
thought of Owsley. Regan might have, would have, if he had known it;
but Regan didn't know it--then. Regan wasn't handling the operating.

Perhaps, after all, they needn't have been in a belated hurry that
day--McCann and his foreigners had done nothing but hug their shanties
and listen to the rain washing the b