"I'll say what I said a few minutes ago," laughed the young chief of construction—"that I'm only a hired man. You'll have to go a good few rounds higher up on the authority ladder to close a deal like that. I'm not sure it wouldn't require an act of Congress."
"Well, by George, we might get even that if we have to," was the optimistic assertion. "You think about it."
"I guess it isn't my think," said Brouillard, still inclined to take the retired pork packer's suggestion as the mere ravings of a money-mad promoter. "As the government engineer in charge of this work, I couldn't afford to be identified even as a friendly intermediary in any such scheme as the one you are proposing."
"Of course, I suppose not," agreed the would-be promoter, sucking his under lip in a way ominously familiar to his antagonists in the wheat pit. Then he glanced at his watch and changed the subject abruptly. "We'll have to be straggling back to the chug-wagon. Much obliged to you, Mr. Brouillard. Will you come down and see us off?"
Brouillard said "yes," for Miss Cortwright's sake, and took the field-glass she was returning to put it back upon the sheaf of blue-prints. She saw what he did with it and made instant acknowledgments.
"It was good of you to neglect your work for us," she said, smiling level-eyed at him when he straightened up.
He was frank enough to tell the truth—or part of it.
"It was the dynamite that called me off. Doesn't your brother know that it is illegal to shoot a trout stream?"
She waited until her father was out of ear-shot on the gorge trail before she answered:
"He ought to know that it is caddish and unsportsmanlike. I didn't know what he and Rickert were doing or I should have stopped them."