once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or to be
discovered.

Failing to tap their bonanza freight-producer on the route up Blue
Canyon, the projectors--small fish in the great money-pool--had talked
vaguely of future extensions to Salt Lake, to San Francisco, to Puget
Sound, or to some other of the far-beyonds, and had even gone the length
of surveying a line over Plug Pass and down the valley of the Pannikin,
on the Pacific slope of the range. But they had prudently stopped
building; and the pause continued until the day of the great silver
strike at Saint's Rest.

The new carbonate beds chanced to lie within easy rifle-shot of the
summit of Plug Pass; in other words, they were precisely on the line of
the extension survey of the narrow gauge. The discovery was a piece of
sheer luck for the amateur railroad builders. For a time, as all the
world knows, Saint's Rest headed the mining news column in all the
dailies, and the rush for the new camp fairly swamped the meager
carrying facilities of the incomplete line and the stages connecting its
track-end with the high-mountain Mecca of the treasure-seekers.

Then, indeed, the Denver syndicate saw its long deferred opportunity and
grasped it. Long purses might be lacking, but not shrewd heads. The
unfinished Plug Mountain was immediately bonded for more than it ever
promised to be worth, and in the hottest heat of the forwarding strife
it was extended at the rate of a mile a day until the welcome screech of
its locomotive whistles was added to the perfervid clamor of the new
camp in the Plug Pass basin.

The goal reached, the Denver folk took a fresh leaf out of the book of