n do the pans and I'll
do the looking. See those hands!" She held them outspread before his
face. "Aren't you ashamed?"

He tried to look as she desired.

"They're the dandiest little hands in the world to me. They're your
mother's over again. You don't need to care who sees them out here."

He saw the slight flush come to her cheeks, and his voice sobered.

"Adrian Conrad looks a pretty big fish where there's nobody but
bohunks."

"Adrian's a 'big fish' anywhere," she flamed, "and you know it.
Besides, there's the Police. Counting you that makes four real nice
people. We've often been where there are fewer. The daughter of James
Torrance, the big railway contractor--"

"Big Jim Torrance, you mean," he interrupted, throwing back his huge
head to laugh. "The crudest boss that ever hammered a lazy bohunk to
his pick. No, no, little girl, not all your airs, not all my big jobs,
can make me more than a half-taught rough-neck--a success, I'll admit.
But the biggest success he ever had was in having a daughter--"

He dived for her, but she held him off by planting the bottom of the
pan on his face.

"Now," she ordered, "you finish your work."

By the time he had obeyed orders--emptied the last pan of water,
taken a look at the two horses in the stable behind the shack,
tossed his mud-caked boots through the back door to await his
pleasure--inter-larding between each chore another glance at the
trestle--Tressa was in her own room.

Torrance returned to the front door. A crash of musical instruments
broke from the ugly clutter of buildings on the river bottom.

"Do cut it short to-night, Tressa. Morani's got the orchestra going
already. Where that Italian devil stows music in that vile body of
his, and where he manages to find more of it in those other brutes,
beats me."

He could hear her moving about her room, sliding drawers, lifting and
dropping the implements of her evening toilet.

"Not another woman in a hundred miles," he grumbled, "at least not one
that matters. And yet I got to go through this waiting every night!"

She laughed, her mouth full of the coil of her hair.

His eye moved upward from the camp and settled on one lone shack that
crowned a promontory overlooking the ugly scene below.

"Koppy's at home," he called.

"Some day you'll find out something about your underforeman," she
teased.

"I wish I could," he returned so viciously that she laughed aloud.

"You've been wis