I'm feeling better now," Louise protested.

"You're not yet fit to start home. Over there it's warm and quiet." He
rose to help her remove the great apron.

In the shack at the head of the street where he led her, he made her
comfortable in an old arm-chair from his ranch house with a Navajo rug
over her lap. As he stirred up the fire, she gazed about at the room.
In one corner was a desk knocked together of boards, littered with
papers; near it on the floor were boxes stuffed with rolls of
blue-prints; the wall spaces between windows were filled with
statements and reports; bulging card-board files rested on a shelf;
from nails hung an old coat and a camera; in another corner leaned a
tripod, rod, and a six-foot brass-edged measure specked with clay; and
piled in a heap beyond the stove were a saddle, a pair of boots,
chunks of pinon pine, and a discarded flannel shirt on which lay a
gray cat nursing a kitten. Through the inner door, standing open, she
had a glimpse of two cots with tumbled blankets. The place was the
office and temporary home of a busy man, a rough board-and-tar-paper
habitation that went forward on skids as the camp went forward, the
workshop and living-quarters of a director who was stripped down to
the hard essentials of toil and whose brain was the nerve centre of a
desperate effort by a host of horses and men.

"You have companions, I see," Louise remarked, indicating the mother
cat and kitten.

"Dave's," was his reply, as he finished at the stove. "He found them
somewhere. There were four kittens to begin with, but only one is
left. It's a hard game for cats to survive in a camp like this."

"Poor little things!"

"Dave says he'll save this kitten, or know why."

"What about Dave himself with all these rough men?"

"It leaves him untouched," Lee said. "Doesn't hurt a boy when he's
made of the right stuff. He'll be better for it, in fact. Many a grown
man would be more competent with the knowledge Dave's picking up here,
young as he is. He's learning what work means and what men are and
what's what generally. When this job is done, I'm going to send him
off to school; and he'll eat up his studies. Just watch and see."
Bryant laughed. "He's aching to become an engineer. He has his mark
already fixed, which not one boy in a thousand at his age has. And all
this is priming him to go to his mark like a shot."

"I hadn't thought of that," she stated.

"Actually he's soaking up more arithme