"Hello, Agnew. This puts us against it, doesn't it? How soon can you give us a track?" asked Callahan, feverishly.
Agnew was the only man on the division that was always calm. He was thorough, practical, and after he had cut his mountain teeth in the Peace River disaster, a hardheaded man at his work.
"It will take forty-eight hours after I get my material here----"
"Forty-eight hours!" echoed Callahan. "Why, man, we shall have eight trains of California fruit here by four o'clock."
"I'm on my way to order in the filling, now," said Agnew, "and I shall push things to the limit, Mr. Callahan."
"Limit, yes, your limit--but what about my limit? Forty-eight hours' delay will put every car of that fruit into market rotten. I've got to have some kind of a track through there--any kind on earth will do--but I've got to have it by to-morrow night."
Agnew looked at him as a sympathizing man looks at a lunatic, and calmly shook his head. "I can't get rock here till to-morrow morning. What is the use talking impossibilities?"
Callahan ground his heel in the ballast. Agnew only asked him if he realized what a hole there was to fill. "It's no use dumping gravel in there," he explained patiently, "the river will carry it out faster than flat cars can carry it in."
Callahan waved his hand. "I've got to have track there by to-morrow night."
"I've got to dump a hundred cars of rock in there before we shall have anything to lay track on; and I've got to pick the rock up all the way from here to Goose River."
When the night grew too dark for Callahan he had but one higher thought--Bucks. Bucks was five hundred miles away at McCloud, but he already had the particulars and was waiting at a key ready to take up the trouble of his favorite division. Callahan at the wire in Sleepy Cat told his story, and Bucks at the other end listened and asked questions. He listened to every detail of the disaster, to the cold hard figures of Agnew's estimates--which nothing could alter, jot or tittle--and to Callahan's despairing question as to how he could possibly save the unlooked-for avalanche of fruit.
For some time after the returns were in, Bucks was silent; silent so long that the copper-haired man twisted in his chair, looked vacantly around the office and chewed a cigar into strings. Then the sounder at his hand clicked. He recognized Bucks sending in the three words lightly spelled on his ear and jumped from his seat. Just three words Bucks had sent and signed off. What galvanized Callahan was that the words were so simple, so all-covering, and so easy. "Why didn't _I_ think of that?" groaned Callahan, mentally.