All of a sudden, when such a man is wanted,
he steps out, and bridges the Gulf of Bothnia; and people
wonder, who forget that for two centuries and a half the
foresighted men and women of this country have been
building up, in the face of the Devil of Selfishness on
the one hand, and of the Pope of Rome on the other, a
system of popular education, improving every hour.
At this moment Bill Todhunter was foreman of Repair
Section No. II on the "Great Alleghanian,"--a position
which needed a man of first-rate promptness, of great
resource, of good education in engineering. Such a man
had the "Great Alleghanian" found in him, by good luck;
and they had promoted him to their hardest-worked and
best-paid section,--the section on which, as it happened,
was this Chamoguin run, and the long bend which I have
described, by which the road "headed" that stream.
The younger Todhunter did meet his brother at Faber's
Mills, where the repair-train had hauled out of the way
of the express, and where the express took wood. The
brothers always looked for each other on such occasions;
and Bill promised to examine the paper which Joslyn had
carefully written out, and which his brother brought to
him.
I have never repeated in detail the mass of
calculations which Bill Todhunter made on the suggestion
thus given to him. If I had, I would not repeat them
here, for a reason which has been suggested already.
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