t's as
steady as the mountains--and a blame sight bigger job."

He longed to talk it over with those who had intelligence to size up
the task; he wanted to read its due in the great newspapers of the East.

"Some little jerk-water builder puts up a six-penny cement culvert down
East and gets half a column. There ain't enough newspapers in the East
to do justice to my trestle."

He was as frank in his self-appreciation as in his passions. Now, so
far as Big Jim Torrance was concerned, there was not an obstacle in the
line from Montreal to the Pacific. And he, Big Jim Torrance, had made
the transcontinental possible where others had failed.

It irritated him that his audience was so small. Tressa's confidence
was no new thing; she had always believed in him--no more now than
before. Conrad still clung to his megrims--phantom fears that had all
but faded from Torrance's mind. As for the five hundred brainless
creatures to whom his great victory should be a matter of personal
pride, it meant no more to them than last year's flowers.

And so Torrance, waving a boisterous hand from the low seat of his
speeder to the young pair standing on the steps of the shack, threw
open the gas and throbbed down the track to the end-of-steel village to
add to his audience two Policemen and a train crew who were already
crowing in anticipation of the end.

Adrian Conrad and Tressa saw him go without a worry in the world but
that he would return too soon. Where only the three of them lived it
was almost impossible for the two lovers to creep away by themselves.
Even a sympathetic daddy becomes a burden in the springtime of youth.

As the older man vanished in a whirl of dust from the loose grade,
Conrad puffed a long breath, turned to look deep into the girl's eyes,
and without a word held out his hand. She took it, and they ran like
children across the grade and into the forest.

Not by favour but by a brain to plan and a never-ceasing vigilance did
Ignace Koppowski hold the position of local president of the outlaw
organisation. His spies were everywhere--or everywhere that mattered,
he thought. And spies spied on other spies; that was the vertebrae of
the system on which the I.W.W. thrived.

With his own eyes he saw Torrance mount the speeder and drive away; and
with a scowl he followed the laughing flight of the girl and her lover.

At last the trestle was unguarded!

A few hasty words to Heppel started him at a lum