“Yes,” the chief nodded; “that tunnel business was fine. But now to-day; I grant you that it was nothing but sheer boy-curiosity that took those two fellows up on Bull Peak; but there you are――none of the rest of us had the boy-curiosity. And that Donovan lad, with his, ‘it just happened’: if he doesn’t make good all the way along, it won’t be because he doesn’t keep his eyes open and his wits on edge. There are times when he seems years older than he claims to be.” It was at this precise moment that Larry, out in the cook shack, had just pried open a can of baked beans for Dick and another for himself. And what he was saying sufficiently proved his right and title still to be called a boy. “Gee-whoosh, Dick!――did you ever taste anything so good as these beans in all your born days? My land! I believe I could eat until I’m like the toad-frog that wanted to swell himself up and be as big as an ox!” CHAPTER VII THE UNINVITED SPECIAL “Doesn’t it beat the everlasting band how little sense some folks have?” Dick and Larry, in much-worn corduroys and lace-boots, and each with a furled red signal flag under his arm, were tramping down the construction track of the Little Ophir Extension. On their right the brawling torrent of the Tourmaline swirled over and among its boulders, and across the canyon, and half-way up its steep acclivity, ran the partly completed grade of the Overland Central. “Just let it soak in,” Dick went on wrathfully. “Right here in the middle of the fight with the O. C., when every hour may be worth a thousand dollars to our company, we’ve got to stop dead and entertain a bunch of Big Money from New York! It makes me sick!” “Sick is right,” Larry agreed; and his wrath, if not so teeth-gnashing, as you might say, as that of the general manager’s son, was no less hostile to the intrusions of Big Money――in fact, since he was the son of a workingman, it was rather more hostile than less. But of that, more in its place. “Somebody ought to have stopped ’em,” Dick went on. “If I’d been in the chief’s place, I’d have dumped a few material cars over the right-of-way down in the valley so they couldn’t get by with their old special.” “I guess it couldn’t be helped,” Larry grumbled. “I’ll bet your father said and did everything he could to keep this junketing party from butting in on us; and now, as long as they’re coming, we’ve got to make the best of it. I only hope there aren’t any women along. That _would_ be the limit!”