Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/147

 he could at times, which would lay him up for a bad two or three days of it.

"Good man," Spirlaw scribbled across the bottom of a report one day—a day that was about equally divided between barking his knuckles on a Polack's head and feeding cracked ice to Keating in his bunk. Cracked ice? No, it wasn't on the regular camp bill of fare—but the company supplied it for all that. Spirlaw, with supreme contempt for the dispatchers and their schedules and their train sheets, held up Number Twelve and the porter of the Pullman for a goodly share of the commodity possessed by that colored gentleman. That's what Spirlaw thought of Keating.

For the first few weeks after he struck the camp Keating didn't have very much to say about himself, or anything else for that matter; but after he got a little nearer to Spirlaw and the mutual liking grew stronger, he began to open up at nights when he and the road boss sat outside the door of the construction shanty and watched the sun lose itself behind the mighty peaks, creep again with a wondrous golden-tinted glow between a rift in the range, and finally sink with ensuing twilight out of sight. Keating could talk then.

"Don't see what you ever took up engineerin' for," remarked Spirlaw one evening. "It's about the roughest kind of a life I know of, an' you"

"I know, I know," Keating smiled. "You think I'm not strong enough for it. Why, another year out here in the West and I'll be like a horse."

"Sure, you will," agreed Spirlaw, hastily. "I didn't mean just that." Then he sucked his briar hard.