"Pretty clean." He relieved her of the remainder of the question. "Mostly translated."
Incredulous, she glanced from him to his men and received grisly confirmation, for one thrust out a grimy finger to show a horseshoe ring. "I picked it up on the track, miss, forty rod from the—obseq'ses. Didn't allow he'd want it again."
Shuddering, she turned back to Carter, but before she could make further comment the car rolled from a cut out on the edge of the Devil's Muskeg.
She thought him cold-blooded until, that evening, she learned from her friend, the cook, that he had been caught on the edge of the blast as he rushed to save the man and had been thrown a hundred feet. A little disappointed by his apparent callousness, she joined her father and lover, who, with the contractor, stood looking out over the muskeg. Sterile, flat, white with alkali save where black slime oozed from the sunken grade, it stretched a long mile on either side of the right of way. Around its edges skeleton trees thrust blanched limbs upward through the mud, and beyond this charnel forest loomed the omnipresent spruce. In spring-time its quaking depths would have opened under a fox's light padding, but the summer's sun had dried the surface until it carried a team—which fact had lured the contractor to his financial doom. A fat, gross man, he stood mopping his brow and wildly gesticulating towards the half-mile of rails that, with their ties, lay like the backbone of some primeval lizard along the mud, calling heaven and the chief engineer to witness that this calamity was beyond the prevision of man.
"'Jedgment of God,' it's termed in government contrac's," he exclaimed to the chief, who, however, shrugged at such blackening of Providence.
"Well, Mr. Buckle," he answered, as Carter came up, "the judgment was delivered against you, not us."
"Yes, yes!" the man grovellingly assented. "I know—mine's the loss. But you gentlemen orter give me a chance to make it up building round this cursed mud-hole?"
"Round what?"
He turned scowlingly upon Carter. "This mud-hole, I said." With a greasy sneer, he added: "But mebbe you kin build across it?"
"I can."