division forge to summon the machinist.

Annixter had disappeared. He had ridden farther on to the other
divisions of his ranch, to watch the work in progress there. At twelve
o'clock, according to his orders, all the division superintendents put
themselves in communication with him by means of the telephone wires
that connected each of the division houses, reporting the condition
of the work, the number of acres covered, the prospects of each plough
traversing its daily average of twenty miles.

At half-past twelve, Vanamee and the rest of the drivers ate their
lunch in the field, the tin buckets having been distributed to them that
morning after breakfast. But in the evening, the routine of the previous
day was repeated, and Vanamee, unharnessing his team, riding one horse
and leading the others, returned to the division barns and bunk-house.

It was between six and seven o'clock. The half hundred men of the gang
threw themselves upon the supper the Chinese cooks had set out in the
shed of the eating-house, long as a bowling alley, unpainted, crude, the
seats benches, the table covered with oil cloth. Overhead a half-dozen
kerosene lamps flared and smoked.

The table was taken as if by assault; the clatter of iron knives upon
the tin plates was as the reverberation of hail upon a metal roof. The
ploughmen rinsed their throats with great draughts of wine, and, their
elbows wide, their foreheads flushed, resumed the attack upon the beef
and bread, eating as though they would never have enough. All up and
down the long table, where the kerosene lamps reflected themselves deep
in the oil-cloth cover, one heard the incessant sounds of mastication,
and saw the uninterrupted movement of great jaws. At every moment one
or another of the men demanded a fresh portion of beef, another pint of
wine, another half-loaf of bread. For upwards of an hour the gang ate.
It was no longer a supper. It was a veritable barbecue, a crude and
primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric.

But in all this scene Vanamee saw nothing repulsive. Presley would
have abhorred it--this feeding of the People, this gorging of the human
animal, eager for its meat. Vanamee, simple, uncomplicated, living so
close to nature and the rudimentary life, understood its significance.
He knew very well that within a short half-hour after this meal the
men would throw themselves down in their bunks to sleep without moving,
inert and stupefied with fatigue, till the m