d he examined the small bunch on his arm critically a dozen
times every day.

Meanwhile, his hero and idol was outdoing the human in his exertions. The
effort he put forth would have killed an ordinary man. He fought the
stubborn earth as though it were an enemy. Stripped to the waist, bent
over in the low tunnel, hour after hour Jim plied the pick and shovel
with the regularity and power of a machine. There was at once something
fascinating and heroic in the rippling glide of the muscles over his
broad back, and in the supple swing that sent the pick to join the packed
dirt.

It all looked so easy. It was as if the dirt were very soft, and not the
striker very strong. Nevertheless, fourteen hours a day of this, varied
occasionally by cutting timbers and carrying them by hand to the
tunnel--some of them a weight enough for a horse, others not adequate,
"just as they came" being careless Jim's motto--told even on his engines.

They had a certain mark on the canyon side--a wild-cat's hole it was--and
when the sun threw the shadow of the western wall upon the mark, the
day's work was finished.

Ches used to watch this with attention. "Yer move along all right till
yer gits half way up, den yer jus' crawls, yer ol' beggar!" was his
standing remark on the progress of the shadow. Still, he always gave good
measurement.

Toward the last of the month Jim grew an interest in their clock.

"Where's the blame thing now, Ches?" would come hollowly out of the
tunnel.

"Three more cars away, Jim,--jus' tippin' the white rock."

Then the cheery shout of "All over!" and the worker stepping out into the
fresh air, soft and cool in the twilight, hooking the sweat from his
forehead, and wishing that supper would cook itself. Sometimes the
wild-cat looked down upon them from his eyrie.

"Ches," said weary Jim, "if that lad thinks at all, he must think we're
awful fools."

"He wouldn't be so tur'ble off his guess, neider," replied the equally
weary Ches.

After supper, however, the world seemed different. There was Jones's
Hill--(a man of large ideas, was Jones, to call that mass of rock a
hill)--shining red-hot in the last light against a topaz or turquoise
sky, and the gulch that ran up to it in a mystery of dark green gloom
offering up an evening prayer of indescribable odors--those appeals to a
life in former spheres which no other sense remembers; the ceaseless roar
of the wind in the pines, so steady that it formed a bac