“Just like him,” mused Silent. “The slimmest margins, the biggest chances, that’s Tom Hardin.” The touch on the shoulder had dispelled his grouch.
“Just like Hardin to insist on carrying the dynamite to Fassett’s.” Spectacular, maybe, like all of his impulses, but splendid and fearless as the man himself. “He never knows when he is beaten,” glowed the engineer. “If this valley ever comes into its own, it will be because of Tom Hardin.”
“Who is in charge here?” a woman’s voice was piercing the racket of wind and wave.
The dawn was breaking. Down the New River he could see the wind whipping the water into white-capped fury. “Vicious,” he muttered. “Those heavy waves play the Old Harry with the levee.”
“Where is my brother?”
“Miss Hardin!” cried Silent.
“Where is he?” demanded Innes. Her hair streamed away from her face. Her cheeks were blanched. Her yellow eyes, peering into the dusk, looked owlish. Her wind-spanked skirts clung to her limbs. To Silent she looked boyish, as though clipped and trousered. “Where is my brother?” she repeated.
Silent told her without reservations where he had gone and why. There was no feminine foolishness about that sister of Hardin’s. A chip of the old block. Funny, the men all thought of her as Hardin’s daughter on account of the difference of age. As to a comrade, proudly, he bragged of the taking of the dynamite over that roadless waste.
“Whom did he leave in his place?” She did not see him shake his head. “I want George Whitaker to be sent home. He is coughing his head off down the levee, he is wet to the skin; he was being doctored for pneumonia a week ago.”
Silent knew, only, that he himself was not in charge! Hardin had ordered him to bed.