By noon time Stephen was limp and exhausted. The hour’s respite seemed to him to go by like a flash, and he started upon the afternoon’s work in a hopeless frame of mind, his muscles stiffened instead of rested by the short relaxation.
After an hour’s labor, he moved to a place where the ground was soft, and for a while his delight in this supported him. It is little things such as this which make the epochs in a day of manual labor. As he toiled on grimly, in a few short hours, he had reversed his views on Socialism.
“Of course the laborer is the chief factor in production,” he murmured wearily to himself, as he grew more and more dizzy.
At three o’clock, McKay, with a surveying party, reached the section of the grade where Loring was working. Stephen watched him, as he stooped over the level and waved his hand up and down. He heard him shout “O. K. back sight! Ready fore sight!” Then “O. K. fore sight! ’Sta ’ueno!” and somehow the cheery tones braced Loring for his work.
McKay, as he came up, nodded cheerfully: “I left that hat for you in the cook tent,” he said; “it will make you look like a real man!” Then noticing the agonized swings of the pick, he looked at Loring quizzically.
“Say, I reckon you ain’t done this sort of thing for some time, have you? I guess a short spell at flagging wouldn’t discourage you. Go up to the tool-house, and get a white flag that you’ll find there. Then go up to that point back there, where the wagon road crosses the grade. I’ll put another flagman on the point below, and when he waves, you stop anything that comes along. In a few minutes we are going to “shoot” all along here, and I don’t want to blow up any teams or people that are going up to the copper camp.”
Loring dropped his pick with alacrity, and started for the tool-shed. As he walked back along the grade, he looked with curious interest at the men who were still working. Somehow their labors seemed a part of himself. His back ached sympathetically as they stooped to their work. At the shed he found the dirty white rag and stick which served for flagging. Then he hurried to his place. He passed Sullivan, who waved joyously to him.
“The boss has set me flagging, too. Gee, what a graft! Me for a nap, as soon as they start to shoot. There won’t any teams go by, when they hear the shots, and I can get a good sleep.”
“You had better not,” answered Loring. Then, feeling that it was none of his business, he went on to the place which McKay had assigned to him. He seated himself on a large rock, from which he could see far in all directions. He was at the end of the grade nearest to the copper camp, and he could see the great iron chimneys of the smelter, protruding above the hills to the north, belching forth black smoke against the brilliant blue of the sky. “The whole country looks as if it had been made with a hack-saw,” he mused, as he looked at the jagged rocks and irregular mountains about him. “I would give a great deal to see something green besides this accursed cactus; but I suppose that grass and civilization go together.”