THE SUNKEN GRADE
The "Ragged Lands!" Seamed, rugged, broken, gloomy with dark spruce, sterile as a barren woman, they cumber the earth from Lake Nipissing a thousand miles westward to the edge of the prairies, and in all their weary length no stretch of meadow-land occurs. Pock-marked with sloughs, muskegs, black morasses, peppered with sand-hills that rise suddenly like eruptive boils in the sparse beard of its dwarf-growths, it is a wicked country, and was held accursed by trappers and Jesuit fathers who, of old, portaged or paddled upon its borders. Yet in construction days men poured into its dark environs; one may still see Carter's camps, moss-grown, roofless, rotting by the right of way, for his line split a fifty-mile breadth from the western verge of that mighty forest.
On the day after Carter's return from Winnipeg the westering sun gilded a long scar, brown with the sere of felled trees, that shore thirty miles of forest. Ten more miles and this, his right of way, would debouch on the Park Lands, a day's drive southward from Silver Creek; at its other end fifty miles of prairie grading would carry it down to the American border. Northerly, the cut was masked in rolling smoke of burning brush; but where, farther south, the spruce mantle had been torn from the bosom of mother earth, it gaped yellow as a gangrened wound. Over this earth-sore men and teams swarmed with the buzz and movement of flies, coming and going about a steam-digger that bit hungry mouthfuls from the bowels of a sand-hill and spat them, with hoarse coughing, upon a train of flat-cars. Beyond them a pile-driver sputtered nervously upon a lean trestle; and still farther south a track gang laid and spiked rails with furious energy, adding their quota of noise to the roar that combined with heat and dust to produce a miniature inferno.
Dipping still lower, the sun poked a golden finger down a thin survey-line that slit the forest at the head of the right of way, and touched into flame the yellow head of a young man who sat on a log near Carter. There slim poplar-brake enclosed a mossy dell, into which the frenzy of work and noise came faintly as the hum of a passing bee. It was, indeed, so cool and pleasant that the surveyor shrugged unwillingly when the advancing shadows emphasized Carter's remark that it was "time to be moving."
"What a demon of unrest!" he laughed. "Can't keep still for five minutes."
His mock disgust drew Carter's smile. "That's all very well—for you. When your transit is cased, you're done. I have a few hundred men to look after."
"Oh, confound them!" the other said. "I'll never make a philosopher of you." And as, shouldering his transit, he followed, he commented humorously on Carter's tiresome energy, affirming that he was reminded of a steam-engine that had slipped its governors. "Couldn't be more grovellingly industrious if you were qualifying for a headline on a child's copy-book. Early to bed, early to rise, makes your boss healthy, wealthy, and wise," he misquoted. And as, a few minutes later, they came out upon wood-choppers who were driving the right of way into the forest, he grimaced, "More misguided zeal."
For all his sarcasm, his eyes betrayed his appreciation, and as, pausing, they looked on, his face lit up with professional pride. Following the choppers, sawyers were cutting sizable timber into logs, piling small trees with the brush; behind them a stumping outfit practised rough dentistry upon the road-bed. All were putting in the last "licks" of a good day's work; the air whistled of falling trees, hummed to the ringing saws; the woods echoed laughter, shouts, cheery curses.
"Good boys," Carter murmured. "Regular whales. Jest eat it up, don't they?"
"Peculiar idiosyncrasy." The surveyor resumed his chaffing. "They ought to have eased up while you were away. Can't account for it, unless—yes, it's beans! Beans, sir! You feed them beans and they work or—die. Query: What effect would a bean diet have on a philosopher? Ugh! I must avoid them."