"You aren't beginning to worry, too, are
you?"

"Worry?" Allison's frown was barely perceptible. "Why should I? I
never let anything worry me. Who is beginning to fret? You aren't,
are you? You don't look--much disturbed."

"Not a particle!" Steve still smiled. "I never do either, unless that
there is something worth while to make me. I just thought perhaps you
might have contracted it from Mr. Elliott. He's been bothered, you
see, by the way some of the men are acting. We're short a lot of labor
this week."

The big man wheeled and squinted at the droves of men sweating under
the unseasonably hot sun; he peered keenly at each clump of laborers,
some of them scarcely distinguishable knots of humanity in the distance.

"Not very short," he stated comfortably. "I don't claim to be a wholly
competent judge, but it looks to me as though they would be in one
another's way if there were any more of them. What's wrong?"

The chief engineer's answer was drawling in its deliberation.

"I wish I knew," he replied. "I wish I could be positive. And there
aren't too many of them; they are altogether too few. We're going to
need them, and more, too, before we finish, Mr. Allison. Perhaps I'd
better figure on--perhaps if they continue to quit on us, by twos and
threes, as they have in the last week--I'll have to----"

His pause seemed almost an invitation that the other suggest a remedy;
and whether it was or not Dexter Allison was quick to seize the
opening. His suggested solution was heartily bluff.

"Import some more," he said. "When you've employed these men as long
as I have--the type of man who has worked all his life on the
river--you'll know as well as I do just how uncertain and unreliable
they are. What you need is a gang that doesn't want to think for
itself. This crowd has too much imagination for a grind like this."

Steve nodded very thoughtfully.

"If it is all imagination," he wondered. "But they're not merely
discontented, you see, Mr. Allison. They--they are misleading
themselves. They seem to think, from what I've gathered from McLean
and a few with whom I have talked, that they are working themselves out
of a job for good, when they help to build this strip of railroad.
They think so--they have been convinced that such is the truth.
Personally, however, I feel sure that between us, we can correct that
impression."

Even though he was looking in the direction of a heavy smoke-clo