Page:Ralph Paine--The Steam-Shovel Man.djvu/84

 to one booming shock after another. Dynamite was rending the rock and clay, and Walter realized, with a little thrill of pride, that he had been really helping to build the Panama Canal.

Presently he stood at the brink of this tremendous chasm. It seemed inadequate to call it a "cut." He gazed down with absorbed fascination at the maze of railroad tracks, scores of them abreast, which covered the unfinished bed of the canal. Along the opposite side, clinging to excavated shelves which resembled titanic stairs, ran more tracks. Beside them toiled the steam-shovels loading the processions of waiting trains.

No wonder Jack Devlin, engineer of "Number Twenty-six," had swaggered across the deck of the Saragossa. He knew that he was doing a man's work. To tame and guide one of these panting, hungry monsters was like being the master of a dragon of the fairy stories. There could be no Panama Canal without them. Intelligent, docile, tireless, they could literally remove mountains.

Walter sat upon a rock and watched one of them nudge and nose a huge bowlder this way