mp?"

"That's Elbow Canyon," said the engineman; and he shut off steam and
woke the hill echoes with the whistle.

Ballard made out something of the lay of the land at the headquarters
while the engine was slowing through the temporary yard. There was the
orderly disorder of a construction terminal: tracks littered with cars
of material, a range of rough shed shelters for the stone-cutters, a
dotting of sleeping-huts and adobes on a little mesa above, and a huge,
weathered mess-tent, lighted within, and glowing orange-hued in the
twilight. Back of the camp the rounded hills grew suddenly precipitous,
but through the river gap guarded by the sentinel derrick, there was a
vista distantly backgrounded by the mass of the main range rising darkly
under its evergreens, with the lights of a great house starring the
deeper shadow.

V

"FIRE IN THE ROCK!"

Bromley was on hand to meet his new chief when Ballard dropped from the
step of the halted engine. A few years older, and browned to a tender
mahogany by the sun of the altitudes and the winds of the desert, he was
still the Bromley of Ballard's college memories: compact, alert,
boyishly smiling, neat, and well-groomed. With Anglo-Saxon ancestry on
both sides, the meeting could not be demonstrative.

"Same little old 'Beau Bromley,'" was Ballard's greeting to go with the
hearty hand-grip; and Bromley's reply was in keeping. After which they
climbed the slope to the mesa and the headquarters office in comradely
silence, not because there was nothing to be said, but because the
greater part of it would keep.

Having picked up the engine "special" with his field-glass as it came
down the final zigzag in the descent from the pass, Bromley had supper
waiting in the adobe-walled shack which served as the engineers'
quarters; and until the pipes were lighted after the meal there was
little talk save of the golden past. But when the camp cook had cleared
the table, Ballard reluctantly closed the book of reminiscence and gave
the business affair its due.

"How are you coming on with the work, Loudon?" he asked. "Don't need a
chief, do you?"

"Don't you believe it!" said the substitute, with such heartfelt
emphasis that Ballard smiled. "I'm telling you right now, Breckenridge,
I never was so glad to shift a responsibility since I was born. Another
month of it alone would have turned me gray."

"And yet, in my hearing, people are always saying that you are nothing
l