went within and the crew waited for a high-ball order that did
not come. In his private car, alone, Martin Garrity was pacing the
floor. The call of the old division, which he had loved and built, was
upon him, swaying him with all the force of memory.

"I guess we could sell the flivver----" he was repeating. "Then I've
got me diamond ... and Jewel ... she's got a bit, besides what we've
saved bechune us. And he'll win the test, anyhow ... they'll never
beat him over this division ... if I give him back what I've earned
... and if he wins anyhow------"

Up ahead they still waited. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. At last a figure
appeared in the cab of the big rotary, looking for a last time at that
bleak little section house and the bare flagpole. Then:

"Start 'er up and give 'er hell!"

Martin was on the job once more, while outside his old section snipes
cheered, and reminded him that their hopes and dreams for a division
still beloved in spite of a downfall rested upon his shoulders. The
whistles screamed. The bells clanged. Smoke poured from the stacks of
the double-header, and the freshening sun, a short time later, glinted
upon the white-splotched equipment, as the great auger followed by its
lesser allies, bored into the mass of snow at Bander Cut.

Hours of backing and filling, of retreats and attacks, hours in which
there came, time after time, the opportunity to quit. But Martin did
not give the word. Out the other side they came, the steam shooting
high, and on toward the next obstacle, the first of forty, lesser and
greater, which lay between them and Montgomery City.

Afternoon ... night. Still the crunching, whining roar of the rotary
as it struck the icy stretches fought against them in vain, then
retreated until pick and bar and dynamite could break the way for its
further attack. Midnight, and one by one the exhausted crew approached
the white-faced, grim-lipped man who stood tense and determined in the
rotary cab. One by one they asked the same question:

"Hadn't we better tie up for the night?"

"Goon! D'ye hear me? Goon! What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of
white-livered cowards that ye can't work without rest?"

The old, dynamic, bulldozing force, the force that had made men hate
Martin Garrity only to love him, had returned into its full power, the
force that had built him from a section snipe to the exalted possessor
of the blue pennon which once had fluttered from that flagpole, was
again