The canyon haul-road was not a highway. It was a scar carved into the flank of the mountain by forty years of gravel wagons and winter mudslides.
To move fifty tons of dead iron up two miles of fourteen-percent grade without draft beasts needed a clockwork nervous system that could translate the physical strength of three hundred men into nonstop, unbroken forward driving force.
Tomas stood at the apex of the first switchback, forty feet above the dry-dock floor. The rain was steady now, washing the gray shale dust into dark gutters along the inner ditch. Before him sat the first relay station. A massive three-sided timber gallows anchored into the dark rock cliff face by three two-inch steel rock-pins.
Master Hal was tightening the nuts on the upper rock-pin with a four-foot iron wrench, his boots braced against the rock face. With every heave of his shoulders, the four-pound steel wrench made a sharp, metal click as the lock-washer bit into the granite collar plate.
“The pin is seated twenty-four inches into sound dark rock, judge,” Hal called out. He tapped the cold steel with his knuckles. “You could hang a locomotive from this rock-bolt and sleep soundly. But the bronze metal sleeves in that snatch block are forty years old. They’ll run hot under twenty tons of cable tension.”
