"Warm it up, boys!" he called cheerily, climbing to the top of the
frozen drift to direct the attack. "It's been a long fight, but we're in
sight of home now. Come up here with your shovels, Olsen, and break it
down from the top. It's the crust that plugs Mike's wedge."

He looked the fighting leader, standing at the top of the wind-swept
drift and crying on his shovelers. It was the part he had chosen for
himself in the game of life, and he quarreled only when the stake was
small, as in this present man-killing struggle with the snowdrifts. The
Plug Mountain branch was the sore spot in the Pacific Southwestern
system; the bad investment at which the directors shook their heads, and
upon which the management turned the coldest of shoulders. It barely
paid its own operating expenses in summer, and the costly snow blockades
in winter went to the wrong side of the profit and loss account.

This was why Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to
find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug
Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble
one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and
he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific
Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain
line when he dictated the letter which had cost one of the great Granger
roads its assistant engineer in charge of construction, transferring an
energetic young man with ambitions from the bald plains of the Dakotas
to the snow-capped shoulders of the Rockies.

Originally the narrow gauge had been projected and partly built by a
syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then
prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction,
and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at