It was still early spring when Owsley went to the new loop they were building around the main line to tap a bit of the country south, and the chinook, blowing warm, had melted most of the snow, and the creeks, rivers and sluices were running full--the busiest time in all the year for the trackmen and section hands. It was a summer's job, the loop--if luck was with them--and the orders were to push the work, the steel was to be down before the snow flew again. That was the way it was put up to McCann when he first moved into construction camp, a short while before Owsley joined him. "Then give me the stuff," said McCann. "Shoot the material along, an' don't lave me bitin' me finger nails for the want av ut--d'ye moind?" So the Big Cloud yards, too, had orders--standing orders to rush out all material for the Elk River loop as fast as it came in from the East. In a way, of course, that was how it happened--from the standing orders. It was just the kind of work the 1601 was hanging around waiting to do--the odd jobs--pulling the extras. Ordinarily, perhaps, somebody would have thought of it, and maybe they wouldn't have sent her out--maybe they would. You can't operate a railroad wholly on sentiment--and there were ten cars of steel and as many more of ties and conglomerate supplies helping to choke up the Big Cloud yards when they should have been where they were needed a whole lot more--in McCann's construction camp. But there had been two days of bad weather in the mountains, two days of solid rain, track troubles, and troubles generally, and what with one thing and another, the motive-power department had been taxed to its limit. The first chance they got in a lull of pressure, not the storm, they sent the material west with the only spare engine that happened to be in the roundhouse at the time--the 1601--and never thought of Owsley. Regan might have, would have, if he had known it; but Regan didn't know it--then. Regan wasn't handling the operating. Perhaps, after all, they needn't have been in a belated hurry that day--McCann and his foreigners had done nothing but hug their shanties and listen to the rain washing the ballast away for two days and a half, until, as it got dark on that particular day, barely a week after Owsley had come to the work, they listened, by way of variation, to the chime whistle of an engine that came ringing down with the wind. McCann and Owsley shared a little shanty by themselves, and McCann was trying to initiate Owsley into the mysteries of that grand old game so dear to the hearts of Irishmen--the game of forty-five. But at the first sound of the whistle, the cards dropped from Owsley's hands, and he jumped to his feet. "D'ye hear that! D'ye hear that!" he cried. "An' fwhat av ut?" inquired McCann. "Ut'll be the material we'd be hung up for, if 'twere not for the storm."