“It will do for me, but there is no need of your tramping when you can just as well ride.”
But now that side of Mr. Peter Biggin which endears him and his kind to every man who has ever shared his lonely round-ups, or broken bread with him in his comfortless shack, came uppermost.
“What do you take me fer?” was the way it vocalized itself; but there was more than a formal oath of loyal allegiance in the curt question.
“For a man and a brother,” said Winton heartily; and they set out together to waylay the outgoing train at some point beyond the danger limit.
It was accomplished without further mishap, and the short winter day was darkening to twilight when the train came in sight and the engineer slowed to their signal. They climbed aboard, and when they had found a seat in the smoker the chief of construction spoke to the ex-cowboy as to a friend.
“I hope Adams has knocked out a good day's work for us,” he said.
“Your pardner with the store hat and the stinkin' cigaroots?—he's all right,” said Biggin; and it so chanced that at the precise moment of the saying the subject of it was standing with the foreman of track-layers at a gap in the new line just beyond and above the Rosemary's siding at Argentine, his day's work ended, and his men loaded on the flats for the run down to camp over the lately-laid rails of the lateral loop.
“Not such a bad day, considering the newness of us and the bridge at the head of the gulch,” he said, half to himself. And then more pointedly to the foreman: “Bridge-builders to the front at the first crack of dawn, Mike. Why wasn't this break filled in the grading?”
“Sure, sorr, 'tis a dhrain it is,” said the Irishman; “from the placer up beyant,” he added, pointing to a washed-out excoriation on the steep upper slope of the mountain. “Major Evarts did be tellin' us we'd have the lawyers afther us hot-fut again if we didn't be lavin' ut open the full width.”
“Mmph!” said Adams, looking the ground over with a critical eye. “It's a bad bit. It wouldn't take much to bring that whole slide down on us if it wasn't frozen solid. Who owns the placer?”