at every Pole and Russian and Hungarian
there carries a knife or a slug--he has to in self-protection--and uses
it as we do slang. Every foreign workman on a railway construction
gang is a potential murderer. . . . I'd rather give evidence for you
on a murder charge than strew flowers on your grave."

He reached for his tunic.

"You'll have a chance to do credit to Blue Pete's memory. . . . About
Helen--wait till we see what size the cloud is."

He thrust his arms into the tunic and buttoned it tight to his chin.

"You leave on Saturday," he growled.

CHAPTER II

EVENING AT MILE 130

"Daddy!"

Big Jim Torrance, framed in the doorway of the shack, was deaf to
everything but the scene before him.

"Daddy!" There was a note of impatience in the girl's voice. "I know
what you're doing--" She appeared in the doorway between kitchen and
living room, enamel pan in one hand and a dish towel in the other. "Of
course! That horrid trestle--always that trestle! And you might have
been helping with the pans. You know how they stain my hands."

But the noise of the distant camp, lounging out now from the night
meal, crowded what small interstices of his attention remained from the
beloved trestle.

Out before him, painted in the vivid mesmeric colours of evening, lay a
vista dear to him--a new railway built in silent places. Across the
yellow grade the bush of Northern Canada stretched on and on, not thick
just here, but prophetic of the untracked forests beyond. On his left
a great cleft cut the earth, an eleven hundred yard valley, in the
middle of which ran a river, sweeping into sight up there round the
bend from the deep green of the bush--running placidly enough until it
struck the foaming rapids above the trestle--then smoothing into quiet
current and swinging back through the chasm to disappear into the
unknown behind the shack.

Five hundred yards up the wide bottom of the valley the construction
camp sprawled its ugly mass. From where he stood in the doorway he
looked down on it over the grade--its straggling unformed planning; the
flimsy shacks, half unhewn logs, half canvas, without respect for
streets or angles or lines; its half-hearted struggle to lift itself up
the slope to the sheltered forest above.

A disreputable, careless, disgusting picture of hardened man catering
only to his simplest needs. In large part the survival of previous
grade and bridge camps which had merely picke