"Row, d'ye ask? Listen to that now," he demanded of the grinning brakesman. "Huh!" He bent to examine his sand-filled boots. "I'll be later still some o' these nights, that I will, ye big bully, if ye don't take the throuble to lay a footpath down that gr-rade for dacent citizens to use. Me legs are only that long, and I wasn't born on the seashore. Some day I'll stay up with me cab, I will, and then who'll brighten up yeer dull and unintheresting lives? How'd ye kape in touch with civilisation then, I'd ask ye?"
As the extent of Murphy's connection with civilisation was never more than fifteen miles down the line, Torrance and Tressa could laugh without offending his choleric feelings.
Murphy became aware of the few inches of flatcar that overhung the trestle.
"Ye mooney-face!" he roared at the brakesman who, his day's work done, was lolling on the grass. "Don't ye know that straw-pile's apt to blow over if ye disturb the air about it. Ye just saved yeer skin by about four inches. If ye'd let me run out on that toy I'd have t'rown ye over it, that I would."
The brakesman continued to grin.
"Ye can slit yeer face all up and think ye're laughing, ye can, but be the time ye'd struck a few t'ousand o' these bean-poles and clothes-line props that Torrance here calls a threstle, ye'd be looking like a pin-cushion dress-making day. It's dangerous, I call it, to lave splinters like thim with their ends up. Some day a thoughtless brakesman like yeerself will take a careless breath in the vicinity—and there ain't an undertaker this side o' Saskatoon."
Torrance, half nettled, laughed carelessly.
"If you'd sharpen up your wits more, Murphy, hustling along here in reasonable hours, instead of insulting a work you're not big enough to understand, you'd get away sooner to a softer job."
"Softer, is it? Sure I nade something softer soon or I'll get as tough as a railway contractor. I suppose ye'd call it a soft job running a train where a herd of—no, ye didn't hear what I called them, Miss Tressa—where a filthy, low-down gang of craters dressed up like men and walking on their hind legs, is running loose. Lifted about four miles of rail, they did. This locomotive engineer's been doing railway building for half a day; and if ye could do my job as well as I can do yours, Torrance, there'd be no nade o' the two of us. If I had a rowdy, dyed-in-the-wool mob like them under me I'd shoot the lot and have a better stand in with St. Peter than I'm going to have as an engineer. I'd die happy if I could catch one of thim in the act and he wasn't too big for the fire-door."
Torrance looked grave. "Another? That's the second this week. If this—"