The big boiler finally reached the east portal. A compressor was set up. An air line was run over the mountain so that automatic drills could be used in the west bore, too. Ben Vickers paid a bonus to everybody who worked for him when progress exceeded the necessary daily footage. The work spurted ahead.

There were unforseeable problems and delays, of course. Snow fell to a depth of twenty feet. Snow sheds had to be hurriedly built over the dump trucks. A landslide carried away part of the approach to the east portal. Supply wagons bogged down on the way up from Ellensburg, first in snow, then in mud. Much of the road had to be paved with logs and planks. When enough track was laid so that supplies could be brought in by train, a bridge washed out and freight wagons had to be pressed into service again.

There were more accidents in the tunnel, mostly caused by premature or delayed blasts. A dozen more men lost their lives. Rock was loosened above the line of the cut, and days were lost. Fumes from blasting became unbearable, and there was more delay while the ventilating system was altered. Cloudbursts flooded first the east portal, then the west. A dump train engine jumped the tracks, and its boiler burst. The strata of the basaltic trap rock was unpredictable; in spite of every precaution, there were frequent cave-ins.

But morale was high. The weak and the discontented and the lazy were weeded out; the tough and the determined stayed on. A spirited competition developed between the crews working from opposite sides of the mountain. Slowly, hour by hour, foot by foot, the lost days were made up.

On a May morning eleven days before the deadline, Ben Vickers stood in the hazy saffron glow of the arc lights and watched the drilling crew come toward him from the bench, two hundred yards away. Ben studied his watch. For weeks, both crews had been jarred by blasts in the other bore; so it was necessary to schedule every shot now and alert the drillers on the other side.

The crew reached Ben and lined itself beside him along the timbered wall. The fuse man came jogging along a minute or two later. The charge roared and grumbled. The earth trembled. A cloud of dust and rubble tumbled out of the heading. Much of this was caught by the fans and pulled into vent pipes; but the acrid outer edges of it rolled down the bore to where the men stood. And then, while the area of the explosion was still obscured, the dust cloud began to spew human figures, running, coughing, cheering.

Ben Vickers gaped and blinked and tried to bring up a yell of triumph that came out a kind of tired sob. These were workmen from the west bore. The wall between had crumbled away with the blast. Runaway Mountain had its tunnel.

A few days later, Ben and Tesno stood together in a crowd gathered near the portal to watch the first train pull through. The train crew waved. The workmen and townfolk waved back and cheered. Then, sadly, they watched the cars gather speed on the down-grade toward Ellensburg.

"How do you feel, Ben?" Tesno asked.

"Old," Ben grumbled. "Too old even to go on a drunk. What will it be now for you, Jack? You finally going to get to that ranch?"

Tesno grinned his twisted, one-dimple grin. He pulled an envelope from a pocket. "Got this the other day. An offer from James J. Hill."

Ben was impressed. "The old Empire Builder himself?"

"He doesn't give details, but it seems he's going to be laying track up one side of a river while a rival road lays it up the other. Seems like it will be a race."

Ben twitched his head doubtfully. "Bound to be trouble."

"Bound to be," Tesno said.