although still dimly, what it was he had
taken into his two hands to do.

He glanced down at his hands. The middle finger of the right one, with
which he had struck Brayley's heavy cheek-bone, was swollen to twice
its natural size, stiff and sore. The nails were broken and blackened.
There were a dozen scratches and little cuts. The palms were hard and
calloused, with bits of loose skin along the base of the fingers where
blisters had formed and broken and healed over.

He lifted his head, and his speculative eyes ran back along the ditch.
The work was again running smoothly, quietly, save for the clanking of
the scrapers and the men's voices calling to their horses and mules,
each man intent upon his own duty, the face of the desert as peaceful
as the hot, clear arch of the sky above.

CHAPTER XIV

Three days passed, four, a week, and still no word came of the men for
whom the "Old Man" had wired to Denver. Conniston had nearly forgotten
them. His day was from daylight until dark, often until long after
dark. Upon more than one evening, after the men had had their suppers
and crawled into their blankets, he and Truxton had sat in the tent at
the cook's rude table, a lantern between them, figuring and planning
upon the next day.

He began to notice a vague change in the older engineer as the days
went by. At first he was hardly conscious of it, at a loss to
catalogue it. But before the middle of the week he realized that each
evening found Truxton more irritable, more prone to explode into quick
rage over some trifle. The man's eyes began to show the restless fever
within him, and some sort of an unsleeping, nervous anxiety.
Throughout the days the men stood clear of him. His flaming wrath
burst out at a blundering mistake or at a man's failure to follow to
the last letter some short-spoken instructions. It was only one night
when Conniston made careless mention of Oliver Swinnerton, and Truxton
flew into a towering, cursing rage, that he began to believe that he
saw the real reason for Truxton's growing ill temper.

"The thievin', mangy, pot-bellied porcupine!" Truxton had shouted,
banging his fist down upon the cook's table so hard that the lantern
jumped two inches in the air. "I'll just naturally rid the earth of
him one of these days. Those men ought to have arrived from Denver
three days ago. How am I ever goin' to get anything done, an' no men
to work for me? With Colton Gray gone an' the rest of