A little, wiry, red-headed man hopped in as Thorne threw open the door.  The moment his eyes fell on Howland he sprang forward with outstretched hand, smiling and bobbing his head.

“Howland, of course!” he cried.  “Glad to see you!  Five minutes late—­awful sorry—­but they’re having the devil’s own time over at a coyote we’re going to blow this morning, and that’s what kept me.”

From Howland he whirled on the senior with the sudden movement of a cricket.

“How’s the arm, Thorne?  And if there’s any mercy in your corpus tell me if Jackpine brought me the cigarettes from Le Pas.  If he forgot them, as the mail did, I’ll have his life as sure—­”

“He brought them,” said Thorne.  “But how about this coyote, Mac?  I thought it was ready to fire.”

“So it is—­now.  The south ridge is scheduled to go up at ten o’clock.  We’ll blow up the big north mountains sometime to-night.  It’ll make a glorious fireworks—­one hundred and twenty-five barrels of powder and four fifty-pound cases of dynamite—­and if you can’t walk that far, Thorne, we’ll take you up on a sledge.  Mustn’t allow you to miss it!”

“Sorry, but I’ll have to, Mac.  I’m going south with the mail.  That’s why I want you with Howland and me this morning.  It will be up to you to get him acquainted with every detail in camp.”

“Bully!” exclaimed the little superintendent, rubbing his hands with brisk enthusiasm.  “Greggy and Thorne have done some remarkable things, Mr. Howland.  You’ll open your eyes when you see ’em!  Talk about building railroads!  We’ve got ’em all beat a thousand ways—­tearing through forests, swamps and those blooming ridge-mountains—­and here we are pretty near up at the end of the earth.  The new Trans-continental isn’t in it with us!  The—­”

“Ring off, Mac!” exclaimed Thorne; and Howland found himself laughing down into the red, freckled face of the superintendent.  He liked this man immensely from the first.

“He’s a bunch of live wires, double-charged all the time,” said Thorne in a low voice as MacDonald went out ahead of them.  “Always like that—­happy as a boy most of the time, loved by the men, but the very devil himself when he’s riled.  Don’t know what this camp would do without him.”

This same thought occurred to Howland a dozen times during the next two hours.  MacDonald seemed to be the life and law of the camp, and he wondered more and more at Thorne’s demeanor.  The camp chiefs and gang foremen whom they met seemed to stand in a certain awe of the senior engineer, but it was at the little red-headed Scotchman’s cheery words that their eyes lighted with enthusiasm.  This was not like the old Thorne, who had been the eye, the ear and the tongue of the company’s greatest engineering works for a decade past, and whose boundless enthusiasm and love of work had been the largest factors in the winning of fame that was more than national.  He began to note that there was a strange nervousness about Thorne when they were among the men, an uneasy alertness in his eyes, as though he were looking for some particular face among those they encountered.  MacDonald’s shrewd eyes observed his perplexity, and once he took an opportunity to whisper: