was a summons to Frisbie, at the moment a draftsman in the engineering
office of the Great Northern at St. Paul, and pining, like the Plug
Mountain superintendent, for something bigger.

"I have been waiting until I could offer you something with a
bread-and-meat attachment in the way of day pay," wrote Ford, "and the
chance has come. Kennedy, my track supervisor, has quit, and the place
is yours if you will take it. If you are willing to tie up to the most
harebrained scheme you ever heard of, with about one chance in a
thousand of coming out on top and of growing up with a brand new country
of unlimited possibilities, just gather up your dunnage and come."

This letter was written on a Friday. Frisbie got it out of the carriers'
delivery on the Sunday morning; and Sunday night saw him racing
westward, with the high mountains of Colorado as his goal. Not that the
destination made any difference, for Frisbie would have gone quite as
willingly to the ends of the earth at the crooking of Ford's finger.

It was the brightest of May days when the new supervisor of track
debarked from the mountain-climbing train at Saint's Rest, stretched his
legs gratefully on _terra firma_, had his first deep lungful of the
ozonic air of the high peaks, and found his welcome awaiting him. Ford
would have no talk of business until he had taken Frisbie across to the
little shack "hotel," and had filled him up on a dinner fresh from the
tin; nor, indeed, afterward, until they were smoking comfortably in the
boxed-off den in the station building which served as the
superintendent's office.

"I've been counting on you, Dick, as you know, ever since this thing
threatened to take shape in my head," Ford began. "First, let me ask