nuous man, whose work
was his life; subtle where that work was concerned when force, which
he preferred, was not advisable, but crudely direct and simple as
regards almost everything else.

"I'm going west across the Rockies to-morrow," he said. "We'll have a
private car on the Pacific express. You'd better bring these folk
along and show them the Mountain Province."

Ida was pleased with the idea; and Stirling and his party started west
on the morrow.

In the meanwhile, Construction Foreman Cassidy was spending an anxious
time. He was red-haired and irascible, Canadian by adoption and
Hibernian by descent, a man of no ideas beyond those connected with
railroad building, which was, however, very much what one would have
expected, for the chief attribute of the men who are building up the
western Dominion is their power of concentration. Though there were
greater men above Cassidy who would get the credit, it was due chiefly
to his grim persistency that the branch road had been blasted out of
the mountainside, made secure from sliding snow, and flung on dizzy
trestles over thundering rivers, until at last it reached the swamp
which, in his own simple words, had no bottom.

There are other places like it in the Mountain Province of British
Columbia. Giant ranges, whose peaks glimmer with the cold gleam of
never-melting snow, shut in the valley. Great pine forests clothe
their lower slopes, and a green-stained river leaps roaring out of the
midst of them. The new track wound through their shadow, a double
riband of steel, until it broke off abruptly where a creek that poured
out of the hills had spread itself among the trees. The latter
dwindled and rotted, and black depths of mire lay among their crawling
roots, forming what is known in that country as a muskeg. There was a
deep, blue lake on the one hand, and on the other scarped slopes of
rock that the tract could not surmount; and for a time Cassidy and his
men had floundered knee-deep, and often deeper, among the roots while
they plied the ax and saw. Then they dumped in carload after carload
of rock and gravel; but the muskeg absorbed it and waited for more. It
was apparently insatiable; and, for Cassidy drove them savagely, the
men's tempers grew shorter under the strain, until some, who had drawn
a sufficient proportion of their wages to warrant it, rolled up their
blankets and walked out reviling him. Still, most of them stayed with
the task and toiled on sul