The timber spur did not have the smooth, heavy steel bed of the main line. It was an unpaved, private logging track—two narrow lines of iron strap spiked directly onto raw pine sleepers that groaned and shifted beneath the forty-ton weight of Captain Miller's freight engine.
The air was dense with a thick, bone-chilling mountain fog that rolled off the river basin in wet grey sheets, cutting visibility to less than thirty feet and wrapping the hemlock trees in ghostly, dripping shrouds.
Inside the cab, the heat off the firebox door was intense, but it couldn't stop the draft that whistled through the open iron plating. Every hundred yards, the engine's drive wheels lost their grip on the wet pine needles covering the rails, sending a violent, shuddering tremor through the frame as the iron spun wild before catching stone ballast again.
