get up pretty early to beat Charlie Bannon.

They were silent for a time--silences were not so hard as they had been, a
few weeks before--both looking out at the storm, and both thinking that
this was Christmas night. On the afternoon before he had asked her to take
a holiday, and she had shaken her head. "I couldn't--I'd be here before
noon," was what she had said; and she had laughed a little at her own
confession, and hurried away with Max.

She turned and said, "Is it done--the belt gallery?"

He nodded. "All done."

"Well--" she smiled; and he nodded again.

"The C. & S. C. man--the fellow that was around the other day and measured
to see if it was high enough--he's out there looking up with his mouth
open. He hasn't got much to say."

"You didn't have to touch the tracks at all?"

"Not once. Ran her out and bolted her together, and there she was. I'm
about ready for my month off. We'll have the wheat coming in tomorrow, and
then it's just walking down hill."

"Tomorrow?" she asked. "Can you do it?"

"Got to. Five or six days aren't any too much. If it was an old house and
the machinery was working well, I'd undertake to do it in two or three,
but if we get through without ripping up the gallery, or pounding the leg
through the bottom of a steamer, it'll be the kind of luck I don't have."
He paused and looked at the window, where the rain was streaking the
glass. "I've been thinking about my vacation. I've about decided to go to
the St. Lawrence. Maybe there are places I'd like better, but when a
fellow hasn't had a month off in five years, he doesn't feel like
experiments."

It was the personal tone again, coming into their talk in spite of the
excitement of the day and the many things that might have been said.

Hilda looked down at the ledger, and fingered the pages. Bannon smiled.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd shut that up and fire it under the table.
This light isn't, good enough to work by, anyway."

She slowly closed the book, saying:--

"I never worked before on Christmas."

"It's a mistake. I don't believe in it, but somehow it's when my hardest
work always comes. One Christmas, when I was on the Grand Trunk, there was
a big wreck at a junction about sixty miles down the road."

She saw the memory coming into his eyes, and she leaned back against the
desk, playing with her pen, and now and then looking up.

"I was chief wrecker, and I had an old Scotch engineer that you couldn't
move