"Dear me!" she teased out to him. "And I've been so careful with the meals." A few moments of mirror concentration. "But I know what it really is—that trestle. It's nerves. . . . Till that hole's filled you're just an ordinary sick man. . . . And you know you can't stand the twilight. Come in and light up. . . . Adrian'll be here in a few minutes and read you back to peace. . . . And don't forget, daddy, we're almost out of books. You'll have to send for more by the next supply train. Constable Williams is to lend me his catalogues to make out a new list."
She stopped, conscious of a tense stillness from the room beyond. For a fleeting moment she listened, then hurried out, fastening the last pin in her belt.
Her father, feet braced, was staring tensely over the grade past the camp. And in his hand, half raised, was the rifle that always hung in a rack beside the door.
[1] The term applied to foreign laborers, especially on railway construction.
CHAPTER III
THE MYSTERIOUS RAFT
Tressa Torrance, inured as sensitive girl could be to the turmoil and danger of their life on railway construction, experienced a new sensation of fear. Never had she seen her father use a firearm; his ready fists were more to his liking. With a breathless rush she stood by his side, one hand gripping the wrist of the hand that held the trigger guard.
That precaution first. Then she turned her eyes to where her father was staring.
Far up the ribbon of river, only a few hundred yards below where it emerged from its hidden course through the forest, a clumsy raft was drifting clumsily down. In the gleam of the last sun rays it was but a silhouette of black—a flat base with live creatures on it. In a moment it drifted from the glare and in the clear evening air was visible to the last line.
On it were a man and a woman, and a group of horses. Good cause for excitement there in the shack up by the grade. Along the mile of the Tepee that was known to man there was only one raft—at least only one that had a right to exist—the make-shift affair employed on construction duty down at the base of the trestle. Within sixty miles there was not a living soul but the construction gang and the two Policemen at Mile 127, not a horse but Torrance's and the Police pair. At least that was the limit of Torrance's information, and none other had such claim to know.