l together in the morning, mounted upon wiry
little mountain-bred ponies furnished by one Pacheco, the half-breed
Mexican who had once earned an easy double-eagle by spying upon two men
who were out hunting with an engineer's transit. For seven weeks Frisbie
had been pushing things, and the grade from Saint's Rest to the summit
of the pass was already a practicable wagon road, deserted by the
leveling squads and ready for the ties and the steel.

From the summit of the pass westward, down the mountain and through the
high-lying upper valley of the Pannikin, the grade work was in full
swing. The horse trail, sometimes a rough cart-road, but oftener a mere
bridle-path, followed the railroad in its loopings and doublings; and on
the mountain sections where the work was heaviest the two riders were
never out of sight of the heavily manned grading gangs.

"To a man up a tree you appear to be doing a whole lot, and doing it
quickly, Ford," commented the lawyer, when they had passed camp after
camp of the workers. Then he added: "You are not having any trouble with
the MacMorroghs, are you?"

"Not what the legal department would call trouble," answered Ford
evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of the bridle-path
discouraged conversation.

Farther down in the valley of the Pannikin the activities were less
thickly sown. On many sections the work was light; no more than the
throwing up of an embankment in the park-like intervales, with now and
then a rock-or earth-cutting through some jutting spur of the inclosing
mountains. Here the men were bunched on the rock work and the fills,
though the camp sites were commonly in the park-like interspaces where
wood and water, the two sole commodities for which the contractors could
make no deductions on the pay-roll, lay conveniently at the doors of the
rude sleeping shacks.

Since he was not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously
observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its
neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess
tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the
contractors' "commissary," fell into the Charybdis of the common table,
and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built
bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its sad-faced,
slouch-hatted, pistol-carrying keeper.

"What is that Bible-saying about the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty
land?" said Ken