"Two weeks? I'll be head over heels in work by then, and there is something I want to do first. I'll be out of here in one." And, albeit a trifle chalky as to complexion and wobbly of knee, he was. On the last day—
But first the record of that week; and as Bender's bulk overshadows all else, behold him, mid-week, hobbling into the ward with Jenny trailing behind like a kitten in the wake of the family house dog.
"Mrs. Bender, if you please," he corrected Carter, chuckling; and for once he permitted some one else to do the blushing. Wherein he showed great taste, as she did it right prettily, exhibiting, moreover, a much superior article.
Next day, Dorothy, becomingly mortified because the good news had come to her through her father out of Smythe. "To hear of it in such a roundabout way!" she declared. "You little traitor! and when I think of your speculations about his wife! Positively I had resolved never to forgive you, but—" Kisses, of course.
Thereafter, Brady, Big Hans, Carrots Smith—all more or less singed and nursing various breakages—ostensibly to see the boss, really to take a look at his pretty wife, whom, they decided, shamed the specifications.
Then, to everybody's astonishment—indeed, the Head shadowed the man along the corridor as though he were an anarchist with a bomb in his pocket—the General Manager! brisk, steel-like, yet twinkling. "Trounced us, didn't you?" he laughed. "Well, one never can tell when one has made an end. Competition? Perhaps, for a while; but wait till Jem Ball and I get a bellyful of fighting. However, by that time you'll be well cured of your desires for the public weal and be ready to listen to reason. Oh yes, you will! We all take 'em like chicken-pox or measles, but they are not fatal—unless you get 'em late in life. I feel so sure of your eventual recovery that I just dropped in to bury the hatchet. Fifty years won't see the finish of our plans, and whenever you feel a yearning for fresh enterprises, just look me up."
Therewith the gray cynic hurried away to plan and scheme, upbuild, tear down, without slack or satiety of enormous constructive appetite; to live in travail greater than the labor of woman, and give birth ceaselessly to innumerable works; to inundate the plains with seas of wheat and carry bread to Europe's teeming millions; to sow towns, villages, cities broadcast over the north, make farms for countless thousands; to join Occident and Orient with gleaming rails, clipper ships, to do evil consciously all his days and work unconscious good, crushing the individual for the weal of the race, and caring nothing for either; to live feared and die respected, leaving the world bigger and better than he found it.
Lastly, the cook, just down from the camp with news of Michigan Red. Flying in front of the fire, the black stallion had come in with the rat-tailed mare to be shot as a murderer after the Cree had tracked down the Thing that had been his master; and so, if there be aught in Cree mythology, the soul of the fierce brute would fight it out once more with the fiercer man in the place of the teamsters.
While beguiling the tedium, these tales and conversations failed to exclude from Carter's ear a distant hammering that attended the building of his station and freight-sheds. Also he could hear the hoarse coughing of locomotives going up and down his line. And as the materia medica contains no tonics like happiness and success, small wonder that, as aforesaid, he demanded his clothes at the end of the week.
"Once you get hold of a fellow you are never satisfied till you have gone all through his clock-work," he replied to the Head's objections. "But though I sympathize with your industry, you'll have to wait for another go at mine. They are needed in my business."