This task accomplished, the little group scattered to its afternoon work.  In the necessity of stringing wire without cutting himself to ribbons, Bob forgot everything, even the flight of time.

“I reckon it’s about quittin’ time,” Jack observed to him at last.

Bob looked up in surprise.  The sun was indeed dropping low.

“We must be about half done,” he remarked, measuring the extent of the meadow with his eye.

“Two more wires to string,” Pollock reminded him.

The mountaineer threw the grain sack of staples against the last post, tossed his hammer and the hatchet with them.

“Hold on,” said Bob.  “You aren’t going to leave them there?”

“Shore,” said Pollock.  “We’ll have to begin there to-morrow.”

But Bob’s long training in handling large bodies of men with tools had developed in him an instinct of tool-orderliness.

“Won’t do,” he stated with something of his old-time authority in his tones.  “Suppose for some reason we shouldn’t get back here to-morrow?  That’s the way such things get mislaid; and they’re valuable.”

He picked up the hatchet and the axe.  Grumbling something under his breath, Pollock shouldered the staples and thrust the hammer in his pocket.

“It isn’t as if these things were ours,” said Bob, realizing that he had spoken in an unduly minatory tone.

“That’s right,” agreed Jack more cheerfully.

In addition to the new men, they found Ross Fletcher and Charley Morton at the camp.  The evening meal was prepared cheerfully and roughly, eaten under a rather dim lamp.  Pipes were lit, and they all began leisurely to clean up.  The smoke hung low in the air.  One by one the men dropped back into their rough, homemade chairs, or sprawled out on the floor.  Some one lit the fire in the stone chimney, for the mountain air nipped shrewdly after the sun had set.  A general relaxing after the day’s work, a general cheerfulness, a general dry, chaffing wit took possession of them.  Two played cribbage under the lamp.  One wrote a letter.  The rest gossiped of the affairs of the service.  Only in the corner by himself young Curtis sat.  As at noon, he had had nothing to say to any one, and had not attempted to offer assistance in the communal work.  Bob concluded he must be tired from the unaccustomed labour of the day.  Bob’s own shoulders ached; and he was in pretty good shape, too.

“What makes me mad,” Ross Fletcher’s voice suddenly clove the murmur, “is the things we have to do.  I was breaking rock on a trail all day to-day.  Think of that!  Day labourer’s work!  State prison work!”

Bob looked up in amazement, as did every one else.

“When a man hires out to be a ranger,” Ross went on, “he don’t expect to be a carpenter, or a stone mason; he expects to be a ranger!”

Immediately Charley Morton chimed in to the same purpose.  Bob listened with a rising indignation.  This sort of talk was old, but he had not expected to meet it here; it is the talk of incompetence against authority everywhere, of the sea lawyer, the lumberjack, the soldier, the spoiled subordinate in all walks of life.  He had taken for granted a finer sort of loyalty here; especially from such men as Ross and Charley Morton.  His face flushed, and he leaned forward to say something.  Jack Pollock jogged his elbow fiercely.