"He's not a reservation Indian. He's a citizen, and—"
"Then you did know," Tesno said.
"He doesn't look Indian," Sam put in. "He'll be all right if he keeps his mouth shut."
"If you know him at all, you know he won't," Tesno said. "And that bottle of lemon pop! Seems to me you went out of your way to pick a man nobody will listen to."
"You wanted a deputy," Sam grumbled. "The town will be better patrolled. Aren't you ever satisfied?"
"Never!" Persia said, laughing. "That's one of the things I like about him." Her eyes sought his, and they were amused and affectionate and possessive. "How about a game of three-handed euchre?" she said.
[VIII]
Tesno was rousted out of bed the next morning by Ben Vickers, who had spent a good part of the night translating his troubles into arithmetic. He was waving a sheaf of papers which recorded exactly how bad things were going in terms of dollars and cents, mean feet, and work days.
Among other things, the figures spelled out what everybody knew already: with every day of hand drilling, the odds against the tunnel being finished on time went up. The huge boiler necessary to the use of compressed air still hadn't arrived at end of track. Even when it did, there would be the slow and tricky problem of dragging it forty miles into the mountains.