Whispering Smith
caught here we may stay till they carry us home, and the success of this little game depends on having everything ready and working quick.”
Stevens, who stayed close to McCloud, pulled the cord within five minutes, and before the caboose had stopped the men were tumbling out of it. McCloud led Mears and his foreman up the track. They tramped a hundred yards back and forth, and, with steel tapes for safety lines, swung a hundred feet out on each side of the track to make sure of the ground. “This will do,” announced McCloud; “you waited here half a day for steel a week ago; I know the ground. Break that joint, Pat.” He pointed to the rail under his foot. “Pass ahead with the engine and car about a thousand feet,” he said to the conductor, “and when I give you a signal back up slow and look out for a thirty-degree curve—without any elevation, either. Get out all your men with lining-bars.”
The engine and caboose faded in the blur of the blizzard as the break was made in the track. “Take those bars and divide your men into batches of ten with foremen that can make signs, if they can’t talk English,” directed McCloud. “Work lively now, and throw this track to the south!”
Pretty much everybody—Japs, Italians, and Greeks—understood the game they were playing. McCloud said afterward he would match his Pied-
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