good at it."

"What had he done?"

"Hammered the inside of the landings down with a gullet you could put
your finger in. Too much energy's your mate's complaint. Nobody could
tell what that man would do when he gets steam up. Understand, we're
boiler-making specialists, sent out on awkward jobs; and he'd put in work
that would disgrace a farmer! For all that, it was Bill's fault for
speaking his mind too free--he got thrown behind the tank."

"I wasn't," contradicted the other. "He jumped at me unexpected when the
spanner hit him, and I fell."

Prescott laughed. Remembering how Jernyngham had driven a truculent
rabble out of Sebastian, he could imagine the scene in the shed; but it
was evident that the boiler-makers bore him no malice.

"After all," said the first one, "when we cooled off and got talking
quiet, he said he'd better go, and we parted friendly."

"Do you know where he went?"

"I don't; we didn't care. We'd had enough of him. First thing was to put
that caulking right, and we spent three or four days driving the landings
down--you can do a lot with good soft steel. Anyhow, when we filled up
the time-sheet showing how far we'd got on with the job, there was a
nasty letter from the engineer. Wanted to know what we'd been playing at
and said he'd have us sent home if we couldn't do better."

While Prescott thanked them for the information a bell began to toll and
there was a rattle of wheels. Hurrying out, he saw a locomotive
approaching the tank and men clambering on to the cars in which he had
traveled. Soon after he joined them, the train rolled out of the
side-track and sped west, clattering and jolting toward the lurid sunset
that burned upon the edge of the plain. Jack-pines and scattered birches
stood out hard and black against the glare, the rails blazed with crimson
fire and faded as the ruddy light changed to cold green, and there was a
sting of frost in the breeze.

They dropped a few men at places where work was going on, stopped for
water, and crawled at slow speed over half-finished bridges and lengths
of roughly graded line. After nightfall it grew bitterly cold and
Prescott, lying on the boards with his blanket over him, shivered, half
asleep. For the most part, darkness shut them in, but every now and then
lights blazed beside the line and voices hailed the engineer as the pace
decreased. Then, while the whistle shrieked, ballast cars on a side-track
and tall iron frameworks slipped