their junction, make a mighty stream which has
burst through a mountain range. Across this narrow gorge which it has
rent for itself in time immemorial, the insect, Man, industrious and
persevering, has cast a great pile of rock and concrete, a hundred feet
high, for that good folk some hundreds of miles away one day may bless
the Company for electric lighting. In this labor toiled many
man-insects of divers breeds and races, many of them returned soldiers,
much as did the slaves of Pharaoh in earlier times. The work was on
one of the new government projects revived after the war, in large part
to offer employment to the returning men of the late Army.

But Pharaoh had not dynamite or rack-rock or TNT; so that in the total
it were safer for an insect to have labored in Pharaoh's time. The
Company doctor--himself a returned major--stationed there by reason of
the eccentricities of dynamite, rack-rock and other high explosives,
was much given to the sport of the angle, and disposed to be irritable
when called from the allurements of the stream to attend some laboring
man who had undertaken to attach a fuse by means of his teeth, or some
such simple process. That is to say, Doctor Allen Barnes was irritable
until he had reeled up his line and climbed the bank below the dam
site, and betaken himself to the side of the last hospital cot where
lay the last victim of dynamic and dynamitical industry. After that he
was apt to forget angling and become an absorbed surgeon, and a very
able one.

But on this particular day, when word came to him at the stream side
that a stranger not of the force had arrived in town with a "bum
leg"--so reported the messenger, Foreman Flaherty--Doctor Barnes was
wroth exceedingly, for at that moment he was fast in a noble trout that
was far out in the white water, and giving him, as he himself would
have phrased it, the time of his life.

"Tell him I can't come, Flaherty!" he called over his shoulder. "I'm
busy."

"I reckon that's so, Doc," said the foreman. "Why don't you haul him
in? That pole of yours ain't no good, it's too limber. If I had him
on mine I'd show you how to get him in."

"Oh, you would, would you, dad burn you," remarked Doctor Barnes, who
had small love for the human race at many times, and less at this
moment. "I wouldn't put it past you. Well, this is my affair and not
yours. Who is the fellow, anyhow, and where did he come from, and what
does he want? Has