w out the light, will you, Joe? I'm tired. You'll
have to undress in the dark."

Then Steve buried his face in his pillow. But sundry sounds, escaping,
were unmistakably hysterical. Joe's mouth opened and closed, fishlike.
He stood and stared down at his side, in beautifully eloquent
profanity, if a stare can be both eloquent and profane.

"You need a nurse," he stated sulkily at last. He finished the light
with a vicious blast. "You need a chaperon!"

But once again, just before he slept, Steve heard him mutter to
himself, less injuredly, as he heaved over in his bunk.

"This has been a very busy evening," he opined.

CHAPTER XV

LAW AND LUMBER

Rain fell the following fortnight in a steady downpour that did not
cease, even for an hour. Ragged, smokelike clouds hung over the valley
at Thirty-Mile, dragged so low by their own weight that they not only
hid the upper peaks but shrouded the lower ridges as well. They drove
by in interminable files of grey, making sluiceways of every cut and
drenching continually the men of the construction gang who, in spite of
the chill of that downfall, still sweated at their labor. But both
Steve and Fat Joe, for all that they caught each day a deeper note in
the hoarse complaints of those same men--a note no less ominous than
was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river--nevertheless were
duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining. It
might have snowed.

Each morning now as he stepped outside the shack Joe turned
methodically toward the north, to cock his head and squint and sniff,
questioningly. He was waiting for the first flurry which would herald
those months of bitter whiteness to follow; and each morning his short
nod was a brief of satisfaction at the continued height of the mercury.
They made the most of that open fall, bad as was the weather. Without
pause they toiled forward those wet days, or rather backward, for they
had stopped, there at the edge of the river, in the work on that
section of the rail-bed which, none too even-surfaced but almost
arrow-straight, ran from the upper end of their valley to the very
mouth of the Reserve Company's country.

A month earlier it had been Steve's plan to span that mile or so of
swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in. Nor was his
altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised
the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow