During the three days of the Warsaw fire, Dien Bat never once crossed Bud’s mind – he was much too busy or much too tired for reminiscing. As he reflected on it afterward, he realized Dien Bat had played a part in the whole episode, if for no more reason than he’d learned one lesson there – when the chips are down, you have to do the best you can with what you have.

Without a second thought, Bud had spent money he didn’t have and torn up equipment he didn’t know how he would be able to replace to support the firemen and the stricken town. Among other things, he’d made a whirlwind purchase of the old rail grade down to Kremmling so his own insurance could cover the D&O relief train that came in that way. Although he bought it for a song at a sweetheart price, it was with money he didn’t have, but the engines the D&O brought with them proved to be critical in the closing stages of the fire. Desperate times called for desperate measures, but it had been worth it. Fred Linder, the Warsaw Fire Chief, summed it up when he told Mike McMahon, “We lost a lot, but we’d have lost everything without the support the railroad gave us.”

It was enough to make it worthwhile, although once Bud got a few hours of real sleep and a meal that wasn’t eaten with a throttle in one hand, he sat down and assessed the results to the railroad. Things didn’t look bright. His biggest source of traffic had just blown away as smoke in the storm; Bud knew damn well Clark Plywood was going to be stopping plywood production and converting the line to chipboard as soon as they used up the stocks of logs they’d already bought. That would take care of a big chunk of his second biggest revenue producer. There would be odds and ends left, but they wouldn’t be enough to meet the bills, pay the loan debt, and keep the track fixed up, let alone upgrade it.

For a few hours there, Bud was as close as that to throwing in the towel. Things looked bleak. But as he sat there, wondering how he could manage to maybe salvage enough to avoid bankruptcy, things began to happen.

Ryan Clark and Steve Augsberg had watched Bud’s battle to support the firemen in Warsaw with real feelings of helplessness. There wasn’t anything they could do to help their friend, and they knew it, and once the paper plant caught on fire, they knew the railroad was going to be in trouble, but there was something they could do about that.

The first intimation Bud had that things weren’t quite as bad as they appeared that morning came when Ryan and Steve drove up in Steve’s Jeep Wagoneer. “I know you’ve been busy,” Ryan said. “We’d been meaning to get to you before, as we’ve been wanting to tell you we’ve made a decision on the plywood production.”

“And?” Bud said, expecting the worst.

“We’ve decided to continue plywood production until July 1, 1983,” Augsberg told him. They still weren’t making any money on the plywood line, but they weren’t losing anything to speak of, either, and they knew the traffic meant a lot to Bud just then, although he didn’t tell him that.

It was a two-year reprieve, but Bud saw through it. “You guys didn’t have to do that,” he told them.

“We came up with a good contract we weren’t expecting,” Clark lied. “Look, we know things are tough for you right now, but we’ll help where we can. I told the transportation super this morning to maximize outgoing shipments by rail. We’re still going to have to truck quite a bit, but maybe that will help.”

“It will, guys. It’ll help a lot,” Bud said as the phone went off.

The phone call proved to be from Frank Matson, Garth’s son and Bud’s old classmate, who was now president of the bank. Frank was one of the partners in the Camden and Spearfish Lake, and the bank held a lot of the financing. In addition, Frank had gone through the worst of the fire as an emergency brakeman on a train Bud had left in Warsaw to try and evacuate the rest of the town if the emergency arose – and there were a couple times it had gotten close. “That deal to buy the Kremmling branch,” Matson asked, “Was that just a smokescreen for the insurance company, or was that a real deal?”

“It was a real deal,” Bud said sourly. “I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a way to get out of it. That’s a few thousand that could be better spent elsewhere.”

“Don’t think that just yet,” Matson told him. “I just had a talk with C.J. Green. He’s the fire chief from Kremmling.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So he’s also the transportation superintendent for Kremmling Limestone. They’ve been getting crappy service from the D&O and he’s wondering if he can get any better service over the line you just bought.”

“Son of a bitch,” Bud breathed, shaking his head.

“That’s not all,” Matson told him. “I just had a call from Jerusalem Paper down in North Carolina. They want to know if we’d be willing to participate in the financing of a new plant up in Warsaw. I told them we’d kick in, but we’re not big enough to carry the whole load. They said that was fine.”

“I thought they were going to close it,” Bud said, scarcely able to believe this conversation was happening. “That old barn, everybody knew it was just going to be a matter of time.”

“That was before they had insurance money to work with,” Matson said.

They talked for a few more minutes, and finally Bud hung up the phone, shaking as much as he’d shaken when he’d laid up against the sandbags of the strongpoint at Dien Bat and watched the first dragonship fly off into the night. Once again, fire had touched his life, but brought with it opportunity. In a period of not more than five minutes, the little short-line railroad had gone from hopelessness to the prospect of prosperity. Rather than sell off what he could of the rubble, he was going to have to make the railroad even bigger. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed again.

“You OK, Bud?” Clark asked with genuine concern.

“I will be, now,” Bud said, catching his breath and calming down. “I will be, now.”

It didn’t come easily. It was eighteen months of as hard a work as Bud ever had to do in his life before things were running smoothly again. But at the end of that eighteen months, Bud stood on a speaker’s platform at the dedication of the new plant in Warsaw, and while Mike McMahon took his photo, he told the crowd, “There’s been a lot of talk here today about the heroism of the railroad people. I don’t think of it as heroism. We were just doing our jobs, and we tried to do them the best we could with what we had.”