ry fond of him. Indeed, I
think we owe you much, and my mother is anxious to give you her thanks."

"Is he all right now? I lost sight of him when they sent me to another
part of the road. It was my fault--he wrote, but I'm not punctual at
answering letters, and hadn't much time."

"He is in the chief construction office," Helen replied. "In his
last letter he told us about the likelihood of his getting some new
promotion." She paused and resumed with a smile: "I don't suppose you
know you were a hero of his."

"I didn't know. As a rule, the young men we had on the road seemed to
find their bosses amusing and rather patronized them. Of course, they
were fresh from a scientific college or engineer's office, and, for the
most part, we had learned what we knew upon the track."

"But you knew it well. George wrote long letters about the struggle you
had at the canyon. Some fight, he called it."

"Well," said Festing quietly, "we were up against it then. The job was
worth doing."

"I know. George told us how the snowslide came down and filled the head
of the gorge with stones and broken trees, and wash-outs wrecked the
line you built along its side. He said it was a job for giants;
clinging to the face of the precipice while you blew out and built
on--under-pinning, isn't it?--the first construction track. But he
declared the leaders were fine. They were where the danger was, in the
blinding rain and swirling snow--and the boys, as he called them, would
always follow you."

Festing colored, but Helen went on: "We were glad, when the worst was
over, that he had had this training. It was so clean a fight."

"We were dirty enough often," Festing objected with an effort at humor.
"When things were humming we slept in our working clothes, which were
generally stained with mud and engine grease. Then I don't suppose you
know how dissipated a man looks and feels when he has breathed the fumes
of giant-powder."

She stopped him with a half imperious glance. "I know it's the
convention to talk of such things as a joke; but you didn't feel that in
the canyon. Then it was a stubborn fight of the kind that man was meant
to wage. If you win in trade and politics, somebody must lose, but a
victory over Nature is a gain to all. And when your enemies are storms
and floods, cheating and small cunning are not of much use."

"That is so," Festing agreed, smiling. "When you're sent to cut through
an icy rock or re-lay the steel acro