d as grim and
forbidding at breakfast as a Chinese god of war.

But it was no time to speculate, with a load of lumber grinding into his
sore shoulder, so Bruce hurried on across the slippery foot-log and up a
steep pitch to see the carpenter charging through the brush brandishing
a saw as if it was a sabre.

"I want my 'time,'" he shouted when he saw Bruce. "Him or me has got to
quit. I won't work with that feller--I won't take orders from the likes
o' him! I never saw a man from Oregon yit that was worth the powder to
blow him up! Half-baked, no-account fakirs, the whole lot of 'em--allus
a hirin' for somethin' they cain't do! Middle West renegades! Poor white
trash! Oregon is the New Jersey of the Pacific coast; it's the Missoury
of the West. It ought to be throwed into some other state and its name
wiped off the map. That there Jennings has got the ear-marks of Oregon
printed on him like a governmint stamp. Every time I see that putterin'
web-foot's tracks in the dust it makes me hot. He don't know how to put
up this plant no mor'n I do and you'll find it out. If an Oregonian'd be
offered a job teachin' dead languages in a college he'd make a bluff at
doin' it if he couldn't write his own name. Why them 'web-feet'--"

"Just what in particular is the matter?" Bruce asked, as the carpenter
paused, not for want of verbal ammunition but because he was out of
breath.

"Matter!" panted Woods, "he's got us strainin' our life out puttin' up
them green four-by-eight's when they's no need. They'd carry a ocean
cable, them cross-arms would. Four-by-fives is big enough for all the
wire that'll be strung here. John Johnson jest fell out'n a tree a
liftin' and like to broke a lung."

"Do you feel sure that four-by-five's are strong enough?"

"Try it--that's all I ask."

"You'd better come back to work."

The carpenter hesitated.

"I don't like to quit when you need me, but," he waved the rip-saw in a
significant gesture, "if that Oregonian gives me any more back-talk I
aims to cut him up in chunks."

It was the first time Bruce had countermanded one of Jennings's orders
but now he backed Woods up. He had shared the carpenter's opinion that
four-by-five's were strong enough but he had said nothing, supposing
that Jennings was following precedent and knew what he was about. Woods,
too, had voiced a suspicion which kept rising in his mind as to whether
Jennings _did_ know how to put up the machines. Was it possible that