hey worked with a will born of desperation.

The wind moaned hoarsely. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees
below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding. Sometimes
they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day
before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again. At
times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the
summit of White Pass without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand
across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.

At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands;
but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were
ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-canons. One day--or
one night, rather, for there were no days then--a camp cook, crazed by
the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die. Hislop and Heney
found him, but he refused to be comforted. He wanted to quit, but Heney
said he could not be spared. He begged to be left alone to sleep in the
warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to
camp.

A premature blast blew a man into eternity. The wind moaned still more
drearily. The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found
that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they
thought they were drilling the rock. Heney and Foy faced each other in
the dim light of a tent lamp that night. "Must we give up?" asked the
contractor.

"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for
it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a
road-bed."

They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted
with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.

They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the
men and on the bank account. The president of the company was almost
constantly travelling between Washington and Ottawa, pausing now and
again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were
melting it up there in the arctic night--literally burning it up, were
these dynamiters of Foy's.

To conceive this great project, to put it into shape, present it in
London, secure the funds and the necessary concessions from two
governments, survey and build, and have a locomotive running in Alaska
a year from the first whoop of the happy Klondiker, had been a mighty
achievement; but it was what Heney would call "de