d 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 t