big jim torrance sighed happily. he was thinking of the orders he had issued for the commencement of the fill-in. in the definition thus given to the task he found the most effective silencer of every fear.
supply trains had multiplied of late, but not the heaviest had made so much as a visible tremble in the trestle; and he should know, for he watched with bated breath and expert eye. even the crews were teasing that they hoped once more to see home and mother. torrance accepted their banter with a pleased grin, and hurried to tell it word for word to tressa and adrian.
yet as darkness fell flashes of the old restraint held him silent and wondering. the solitude of the northern evening was making him a bit frightened of his success. removing the old calabash pipe from his lips, he expectorated thoughtfully toward the grade.
just within the door tressa sat as silent as her father. in all her silent moments now she was building, building. conrad--home--a father far from the harsh influences of this rough life where man fought man as well as nature, and quite as brutally. the rapping of her father's pipe against the doorpost interrupted her dreams.
"on thursday!" he said. "i've spoken to murphy. there'll be four ballast trains here on saturday, two working each way. another ten days will see the thing through. the big cutting at mile 135 will have a steam scoop to fill a train in a few minutes; it's a solid gravel bank there, they say. we'll lift the heart out of it and put it to beat in that trestle of mine to the end of time."
he laughed proudly, with a touch of sheepishness at the unaccustomed metaphor.
"then we'll go--home," she murmured.
in his blundering way he understood, and stooped to pat her bent head.
"'home!'" he whispered. "'home!' if your mother could be here! . . . i know what she'd say. 'jim,' she'd say, 'you've done well.' . . . i'd like to hear it, little girl. 'jim.'"
"is it so much nicer than 'daddy'?" she asked jealously; she had had this big loving man so long to herself.
he dropped to the doorsteps and reached back to throw an arm over her shoulders.
"some day, little girl, you'll know what the one voice, the one word, means. . . . if i were dying, 'jim' would call me back--as it seems to call me on---from somewhere now. . . . 'jim.'"
conrad found them thus, the man's great arm laid lightly across the girl's shoulders, her head sunk in his neck; both staring through the dusk to the mazy tangle of timbers that had been their season's care. the foreman silently drew a chair to the other side of the girl and took her hand in his.
presently torrance stirred, diving into his pocket in search of a host's tobacco pouch.
"thursday," he said, handing it to conrad.
conrad nodded.
"and in three weeks we'll be going home," murmured tressa,--"going home--only three weeks!"
a gentle birr, like the distant note of a toneless beetle, insinuated itself into their dreams. they had heard it for seconds without noticing, rising and falling on the night breeze.
almost together the two men jerked their heads up to listen; tressa felt their arms tighten about her. through the darkness they strained down the track to the east, their hearts thudding almost audibly.
the sound swelled--swept toward them out of the night. swiftly it grew to dominate the darkness, echoing through the forest. it became a roar.
"chug--chug--chug--chug!" but in such a swiftly throbbing stream as to be almost a steady torrent of sound.
torrance leaped to the grade and stood, a heroic figure outlined against the dim sky, struggling to pierce the mystery with his eyes.
"speeders!" he jerked, in a breathless whisper. "two of them, and going like hell! the rifle--quick!"
then suddenly, not a mile away, it ceased, dying to silence in a few panting chugs, leaving the void a crash of silence. not a breath now--it was like a nightmare. even the camp was listening.
they heard each other's breathing catch, but that was all. back in the locked stable the two horses snorted with fear; the strain had reached even them.
a short ten minutes of awful waiting. then "chug--chug--chug!" again. with fantastic rapidity the warm engines picked up to racing speed. torrance swung his head incredulously toward conrad.
the speeders were going the other way now.
the contractor stumbled to the shack like a blind man and sank in a chair.
"my god!" he breathed.
three miles down the track, in what remained of a deserted end-of-steel village, sergeant mahon sat in his shirt sleeves, smiling across the corner of a table into the eyes of his wife, the only white woman, except tressa torrance, within a day's hard ride.
of the village that ten months before covered a life as fevered as it was unclean, only the police barracks remained in repair, since life had passed the rest by and forgotten it. the ill-defined streets, incorporated as a part of the plan of the original village only because the helter-skelter builders knew no other plan for a village, were more ill-defined than ever because less used. where nothing but pedestrians passed, where the "mayor" was merely proprietor of the leading dance-hall, where there was no to-morrow, there had never been side-walks. now the space from ruined shack to tumble-down shop was overgrown with weeds. yet down the length of it, meandering drunkenly to avoid butts of stumps as solid as the day they were axed, and steering clear of creeping decay in the buildings themselves, a narrow path felt its way.
the two policemen were not the sole occupants of mile 127, as the village had been known in its day. murphy's train crew, less particular than the mounted police, had satisfied themselves with minor repairs to the most reputable of the shacks. murphy himself, and his foreman friend 'uggins, more exclusive even than the police, had drawn their skirts aside from anything savouring of the swift but gay life of the days of grade construction, and erected for themselves a tent where the only real comfort was the opportunity it gave to sneer at their more lowly companions, and a fond but scarce justified hope that they were immune from the torments of formerly inhabited buildings. murphy openly scored anything "any damned bohunk ever scratched himself in," and, after days of quarreling with 'uggins about a site, during which they struggled miserably along beneath separate ground-sheets, a common tent was decided upon far from the former selection of each and close to the new siding where "mollie," the engine, slept at nights.
helen mahon was smiling back into her husband's eyes, shyly but happily, for she was proud of him--proud, too, of the loving little trick she had played on him by riding up to the barracks only a couple of hours ago, when he thought her still in medicine hat. having been married to him only a few months, she was still a little shy with her happiness.
"helen," he exclaimed for the tenth time, "i don't believe it's true. williams is going to dig his heel into me and tell me i'm snoring. i always do when i dream."
"and you don't like dreaming?" she asked slyly.
"as a dream," he corrected, "it's a ripper. at the same time i'd like to have some help to realise it. how did you manage it? of course every one knows you have inspector barker in the hollow of your hand, but there were others to win over."
she gurgled joyously and seized his hand to press it against her cheek and nibble lovingly at the finger tips.
"inspector barker did it all. he's got a way with him, and i just made him pull the wires right up to the commissioner, i guess. anyway, here i am, and there's nobody defied by it. i suppose they reckoned that any wife who thinks enough of her husband to travel two days by train, then two more on horseback, is worth encouraging for the salvation of his soul. to sum up: i'm here for a month, if you'll let me stay."
the laugh with which he greeted it was not so free and spontaneous as she hoped to hear. "in less than that," he said fervently, "i hope we'll be back in medicine hat. torrance is giving orders to start the fill-in, and there won't be more than two or three weeks after that. truth to tell, there are lots of other reasons than home that make me want to get out of it in a hurry. it isn't that we have much to do--too little, indeed; i'd grow rusty and evil-tempered with another season of this--but i confess to a great mental blank in considering the bohunk . . . and i've no ambition to understand him better. the more i know him, the more i think providence was experimenting without encouragement when he created a few of those continental countries that send their scum over here to build railways. really there hasn't been a thing happen since i came worth writing about. of course there are strange little incidents--"
he broke off abruptly and his head went up. from the east drifted a purring sound that swelled with startling speed. faster than their thoughts, it grew to a roar. helen was alarmed.
"only gasoline speeders," he explained. "you must ride on one. torrance has a rather grubby specimen. they're the wildest form of slimpsy-skimpsy flight you ever saw. about forty miles an hour, with just a board and a tremendous sputter between you and the flying rails. it makes your hair curl, yet you look forward to the next time."
lightly as he spoke, he had risen to his feet and gone to the doorway.
"some of the big moguls of construction, i suppose," he shouted back above the echoing din. "perhaps to pass on torrance's trestle before the fill-in commences. holy mackinaw! they're scorching. i ought to arrest them for exceeding the speed limit. . . . they're without lights, too!" he exclaimed suddenly.
two dim objects flew past in the darkness like shadows, not forty yards away, a space of less than fifty yards between them.
"they must be drunk!" he muttered. "they're taking awful chances to run as close as that at such a speed. look as if they're loaded. rush stuff, i suppose, for the line further west. . . . i hope they don't try to take torrance's trestle at that gait; it would be an awful plunge." he returned thoughtfully to the table. "first time i've seen a speeder along here, except torrance's and the contractor's at mile 190. . . . i don't understand it."
helen closed the door firmly. the roar dimmed into the trees.
"this is my night," she declared. "what you don't understand about railway construction doesn't need to be worried about. anyway they're gone. it isn't often a man's wife drops in on him from four days of wandering, when he thinks her two hundred miles away as the crow flies."
he looked about the room with an apologetic smile. "it isn't the place i'd choose to bring you to, helen, though williams has done a lot in the couple of hours since you arrived. it doesn't seem the same old room. if you'd believe me, he wants four days off to scare up some luxuries worthy of the event down at saskatoon . . . and i can't convince myself it's part of our duties. he got quite huffy when i refused. that's the worst of marrying a woman every man falls in love with. the only redeeming feature is that we've lots of room; there's bedroom space enough for half medicine hat--though i wouldn't recommend it to my friends. . . . i believe bohunks do bathe--they must have a human trait or two--but i've never happened to see it. the nearest approach was two semi-civilised fellows down at the river one evening sheepishly dipping their hands in the water and wiping them on a discarded shirt. and shirts aren't discarded here until they're past wearing. it wasn't promising for results, but it showed good will."
he pushed across a plate of abnormal raspberries. "try another sample. our mutual friend, 'uggins, hand-selected them from a thousand miles of laden bushes. i believe he and murphy almost came to blows over them because, after finding fault with the china in which they were to be presented, murphy contended that he knew a spot where larger ones grew. 'uggins was undecided whether to look for the spot and give murphy a chance to forestall him, or to insult you by offering you something not reputed to be the best."
she nibbled at the berries that, ever since the seed had been borne hither on the winds, had been reserved for birds and bears. but her husband was not at ease. twice in the next ten minutes he went to the door and listened up the track.
"they must be stopping at torrance's," he said, throwing wide the door and leaning against the side as he talked. "it'll make some excitement, at any rate, for a nice little girl who's going a bit to seed. no . . . they're coming back!" he paused to listen, his brow wrinkling. "that's quick work, whatever they did."
the roaring putter was rushing back toward them at a speed that sounded foolishly desperate.
"there's no sense in going like that," he said irritably. "i wonder what they were doing. i'll find out."
he ran into the darkness and stood on the track between the rails, flashing an electric torch toward the approaching speeders. but they came on without a sign that they saw. he shouted. fifty yards away the noise of the engines burst into a louder torrent of sound, and he had but time to leap out of their way as they whizzed past, the second speeder so close to the first that he could do nothing to stop it.
before mahon, thoroughly angry, could think of anything worth doing, helen stood beside him, thrusting into his hand his police revolver. almost with the touch he fired above the retreating speeders.
two spurts of flame jabbed at him through the darkness in reply, and mahon jerked his wife to the ground.
"i think, dear," he said, as he gravely lifted her to her feet, "that you shouldn't have come."
