Supply trains had multiplied of late, but not the heaviest had made so much as a visible tremble in the trestle; and he should know, for he watched with bated breath and expert eye. Even the crews were teasing that they hoped once more to see home and mother. Torrance accepted their banter with a pleased grin, and hurried to tell it word for word to Tressa and Adrian.

 

Yet as darkness fell flashes of the old 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 together the two men jerked their heads up to listen; Tressa felt their arms tighten about her. Through the darkness they strained down the track to the east, their hearts thudding almost audibly.

 

The sound swelled--swept toward them out of the night. Swiftly it grew to dominate the darkness, echoing through the forest. It became a roar.

 

"Chug--chug--chug--chug!" but in such a swiftly throbbing stream as to be almost a steady torrent of sound.

 

Torrance leaped to the grade and stood, a heroic figure outlined against the dim sky, struggling to pierce the mystery with his eyes.

 

"Speeders!" he jerked, in a breathless whisper. "Two of them, and going like hell! The rifle--quick!"

 

Then suddenly, not a mile away, it ceased, dying to silence in a few panting chugs, leaving the void a crash of silence. Not a breath now--it was like a nightmare. Even the camp was listening.

 

They heard each other's breathing catch, but that was all. Back in the locked stable the two horses snorted with fear; the strain had reached even them.

 

A short ten minutes of awful waiting. Then "chug--chug--chug!" again. With fantastic rapidity the warm engines picked up to racing speed. Torrance swung his head incredulously toward Conrad.

 

The speeders were going the other way now.

 

The contractor stumbled to the shack like a blind man and sank in a chair.

 

"My God!" he breathed.

 

 

Three miles down the track, in what remained of a deserted end-of-steel village, Sergeant Mahon sat in his shirt sleeves, smiling across the corner of a table into the eyes of his wife, the only white woman, except Tressa Torrance, within a day's hard ride.

 

Of the village that ten months before covered a life as fevered as it was unclean, only the Police barracks remained in repair, since life had passed the rest by and forgotten it. The ill-defined streets, incorporated as a part of the plan of the original village only because the helter-skelter builders knew no other plan for a village, were more ill-defined than ever because less used. Where nothing but pedestrians passed, where the "Mayor" was merely proprietor of the leading dance-hall, where there was no to-morrow, there had never been side-walks. Now the space from ruined shack to tumble-down shop was overgrown with weeds. Yet down the length of it, meandering drunkenly to avoid butts of stumps as solid as the day they were axed, and steering clear of creeping decay in the buildings themselves, a narrow path felt its way.

 

The two Policemen were not the sole occupants of Mile 127, as the village had been known in its day. Murphy's train crew, less particular than the Mounted Police, had satisfied themselves with minor repairs to the most reputable of the shacks. Murphy himself, and his foreman friend 'Uggins, more exclusive even than the Police, had drawn their skirts aside from anything savouring of the swift but gay life of the days of grade construction, and erected for themselves a tent where the only real comfort was the opportunity it gave to sneer at their more lowly companions, and a fond but scarce justified hope that they were immune from the torments of formerly inhabited buildings. Murphy openly scored anything "any damned bohunk ever scratched himself in," and, after days of quarreling with 'Uggins about a site, during which they struggled miserably along beneath separate ground-sheets, a common tent was decided upon far from the former selection of each and close to the new siding where "Mollie," the engine, slept at nights.

 

Helen Mahon was smiling back into her husband's eyes, shyly but happily, for she was proud of him--proud, too, of the loving little trick she had played on him by riding up to the barracks only a couple of hours ago, when he thought her still in Med............