A Model of Devotion by Mary Connealy

Author:Mary Connealy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Romance;LCGFT: Novels;FIC042110;FIC042030;FIC027100
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Eighteen

When Barritt had sent his crew, Jilly made swift changes in her strategy.

She’d been working from the lumberyard. Building the railbed, then using handcarts, pulled by the sturdy mules and massive Belgian draft horses, to haul the rails and railroad ties as they laid the track in front of the horses.

These horses normally did much of the heavy work hauling logs. The Stiles family had a few of them, but mostly they used mule teams, as the big draft horses were expensive and rare. They had a few Belgians, and thanks to Mr. Barritt, they had added four Clydesdales to their stables. Jilly’s horsemen were thrilled with the beautiful critters.

She’d planned to build the whole railroad track that way, working from the top of the mountain down, and every night all the men could go back to their cabins to sleep.

Now, with Barritt’s men gone but with the beginning of the work coming out from the nearest train track and heading up, Jilly decided to go down there and build the bridges and trestles ahead of the track-laying crew.

Too far from home to make the trip every day.

So Jilly, Nick, and her building crew from Stiles Lumber camped at the bottom of the mountain. She divided her men into two crews. One to lay the track, and one to work with her. They’d be building the most complex structure of this whole project.

Her bridge across the river.

The river she and her sisters had landed in after their wild ride of escape down the flume. The first step was rerouting the river, and that was a big job because it was a big river.

Jilly didn’t like changing her plans, but she considered herself a reasonable woman. It was inconvenient but more efficient, since Barritt’s men had left behind their locomotive and train cars to haul logs. The train came out from the station and was always at the end of the line. The California Ironworks crew was gone, but they’d made a good start, and with what her own men had learned from them, they were making excellent time on the track.

Jilly had to get busy building that bridge.

She and Nick and a dozen other men set up a tent encampment. They worked just slightly upstream from the flume so the logging could continue, and logs came rushing down constantly. She’d carefully chosen the spot to divert the river. They were days working on that before they could begin building.

As they labored, Jilly’s mathematical calculations were challenged by the difficulty on the actual building site. She’d known it would take longer and cost more than she’d planned, but she hadn’t thought things would go quite this slowly.

Her blueprints and maps were constantly with her, though she remembered every detail of both. But to make the men see what she wanted, she needed her surveying equipment, her sketches, and lots of time.

Still, one step at a time. And there were no serious delays, no maliciousness leading to injuries, no evil men and their sabotage.

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