"Thank you, Sis, but I'm afraid you'd find it a Chinese puzzle. I get tangled up in it myself half the time. We must set down every solitary item of cost, no matter how trifling; not only wages and supplies, but breakdowns, time losses, even those of a few minutes; then calculate our average, day by day; then plot a curve for each week's work, showing the cost of the contract for that week, and set it against our yardage record for that week. Then verify it, item by item, and send it in."
"All tied up in beautiful red-tape bow-knots, I suppose," added Marian, with a sniff. She poked gingerly into the mass of papers. "The idea of adding book-keeping to your twelve-hour shift as superintendent! And in this stuffy, noisy little box!" She looked impatiently around the close narrow state-room. The ceiling was not two feet above her head; the hot morning sunlight beat on the flat tin roof of the house-boat and dazzled through the windows. "How can you work here?—or sleep, either?"
Rod rubbed his hand uncertainly across his eyes.
"I don't sleep much, for a fact. Too hot. Sometimes I drop off early, but the men always wake me at midnight when the last shift goes off duty."
"But the laborers are all across on their own quarter-boat. They don't come aboard your house-boat?"
"No, but the quarter-boat is only fifty feet away. The cook has their hot supper ready at twelve, and they lark over it, and laugh and shout and cut up high-jinks, like a pack of school-boys. I wouldn't mind, only I can't get to sleep again. I lie there and mull over the contract, you see. I can't help it."
"Why don't you come up to the Gates farm-house and sleep there?"
"I couldn't think of that. It's too far away. I must stay right here and keep my eye on the work, every minute. You have no idea what a dangerously narrow margin of time we have left; 'specially for those north laterals, you know, Sis." His voice grew sharp and anxious. Marian looked at him keenly. For the first time she saw the dull circles under his eyes, the drawn, tired lines around his steady mouth.
Then she glanced up the ditch. High on its green stilts, Sally Lou's perky little martin-box caught her eye.
"I have it, Rod! Tell some of your laborers to build a cabin for you, like the Burfords'! Then I'll come down and keep house for you."