chestra was resting.
But snatches of hideous sound came wafting on the evening air as music;
concertina, fiddle, mouth-organ, with here and there a cornet, a
mandolin, a guitar, many breathing individual melody, merged into one
vast harmony. Rasping voices lifted themselves in song. No laughter,
no shouting--only the sounds of men whose memories are more sensitive
than their feelings, who live in the past or the future, never in the
present. Evening was fluttering gently down, mellowing line and tone.

Even to Big Jim Torrance at such an hour came the appeal of dimly
reverent things. Here on the fringe of prairie and forest, in the
vast spaces of Northern Canada where wolf met coyote, Torrance was
waging a big fight. Last year he had brought the grade, a simple
task, east of the mountains. Somewhere far down the list of
sub-sub-contractors--fleas on larger fleas almost ad infinitum--he had
built that gleaming line of yellow sand that held the sleepers and the
rails--almost with his own hands. From far over the horizon to the
east he had crept along westward, urging on his big gang with
relentless but just hand. And out there before his door they had
driven the last spike at the very edge of the valley that cut the
landscape.

There was the end of his contract. Eastward the line awaited only the
final ballasting. Westward--that was different.

The great river chasm that had ended his task was baffling O'Connor,
the bridge contractor. For the irregular, winding gouge in the earth,
reminder of the day when some tremendous torrent teemed there from the
mountains hundreds of miles to the west, was more than a mere cutting
to fill. Eleven hundred yards, one foot, four inches from bank to bank
(Torrance knew every measurement to the last inch), by one hundred and
forty-one feet, eight inches deep, was task enough. Where the railway
was to span the Tepee River, meandering in the midst of the valley, the
water ran only seventy yards wide; nowhere in sight was it more than
one hundred and fifty. And there was solid bottom to it.

But down there, one hundred and fifty feet below Torrance's eyes, was
two hundred yards of quicksands. There lay the real job.

O'Connor had tackled it blithely enough, while Torrance was hustling
grade from the east. But when Big Jim Torrance, his task completed,
had rolled down his sleeves and commenced to pack, O'Connor was more
than worried. Tressa had skipped about the packing