Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1908-11-12
BY FRANCIS LYNDE


Foord amt built the like O. that. He'll
be as deep in that freezin' purgatory
up yander in tn drift as the foremist
wan of thim.''
The Irishmans praise was not I'M
merited. Whatever his failings. and he
groaned under his fair human share
of them, Stuart Ford had the gift of
leadership. Before he had been a
month on the branch as its 'sold man
and autocrat, he had won the goodwill
and loyalty of the rank and file, from
the office men in the headquarters to
the plcE-and-shovel contingent on the
sections. Even the blockade-breaking
laborers = temporary helpers they
were stood by him manfully in the
sustained hattle with the snow. Ford
spared them when he could, and they
knew 1t.
Warm it up, boys!" he called
cheerily, climbing to the top of the
frozen drift to direct the attack. cts
been 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 Mikes wedge"
He looked the fighting leader,
standing at the top of the wind swept
drift and crying on his shovelers. 1t
was the part he had chosen for him
self in the game of life, and he quar-
relied only when the stake was small,
as in this present man-killing strug-
gle with the snow-drifts The Plug
Mountain branch was the sore spot in
the Pacific Southwestern system: the
ha in OF whit Oh
shook their heads, and upon which the
management turned the coolest of
shoulders. It barely paid it's own oper-
ating 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 year and
more to find way Of escape; not for
himself, but for the discredited Plug
Mountain line. 1t was proving 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 suspicion that Pres
ldent Colbrith, of the Pacific South
western, 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 con.
struction, 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
syndicate Of Denver capitalists who
were under the hallucination then pre-
valent, that any railroad penetrating
the mountains in any direction, and
having Denver for its starting point,
must necessarily become at once a
dividend-paying carrier for the mines.
actual or to be discovered
Failing to tap their bonanza freight
producer Oh 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
Fran cisco. 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 CON
tinued until the day Of the great sill
yer strike at Saints Rest.
| The new carbonate beds CHANGED to
lie within easy rifleshot Of the summit
| of Plug Pass; i'll other words, they
were precisely on the line of the ex-
tension survey of the narrow gauge.
The discovery was piece of sheer
luck for the amateur railroad builders.
For a time, as all the world knows,
Saints Rest headed the mining news
column in ell the dailies, and the rush
for the new camp fairly swamped the
meager carrying facilities of the in
complete line and the stages connect