“Yes.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” said Don with an effort, “I’m a little blue.  I suppose it’s the fall.”

They tramped west in the morning and climbed a winding road.  The quarry lay ahead in the rocky wall of a mountain.

“Lord, what an out-of-the world spot!” exclaimed Brian in dismay.  “Don, you thought we were getting too close to your uncle’s farm but nobody’d find us here.  I suspect they have to build shacks to keep the men contented.  That basin of stone looks as if it had been gouged out of the mountainside by the hand of a giant.”

A drill-runner was shouting to a man with a red flag as Brian climbed into the pit.  The flagman waved him back.  A second later a dull blast shook the quarry, earth and stone crumbled out of a fissure in the cliff ahead, and the suspended labor of men awaiting the Titan aid of inanimate force, turned to noise and bustle.

“Hum!” said Brian, glinting, “mostly dago labor.  Well, that doesn’t need to worry us, does it?  You stay here, Don, while I find the boss.”

Don obeyed.  Derricks hung above the cars upon the spur track.  Farther back a screen revolved and sorted stone.  Men were feeding the crusher and men were busy at the drills but the boy’s eyes, with an instinct for adventure, followed a man who drove a mule-cart along an overhanging ledge above the pit.  The task held for him a fearful fascination.

“Needs men to load cars,” announced Brian coming back, “and feed the crusher.  In quarry caste I imagine that’s about at the bottom.  The shacks are furnished and four of them are empty.  We can take our pick.  What do you say?”

“Whatever you say,” said Don.

“Well,” said Brian, “to tell you the truth, I have the keys.”

The quarry, he fancied as he climbed the path to the cluster of shacks, would solve his problem for him and when the time was ripe he would have his say.

The time ripened with frost in the morning and a harvest moon at night; and Brian had failed to have his say.  A letter came from John Whitaker definite in detail and a shade impatient.  Why was he loitering when God’s green world of spring had turned to autumn?  Was he still stale and thinking wrong?

Brian set his lips to his task and spoke.

“Don,” he said one night when the dishes were washed, the shack swept and the lamp lighted, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you and what you’re going to do this winter.”

The boy, who had been sparring with a kitten that had strayed into the shack the day before, rose abruptly.

“You say you won’t write to your sister until you’ve made good?”

“It isn’t just that,” stammered Donald, changing color.  “I—­I don’t dare.  She’d beg me to come back—­”

Brian nodded.

“Yes,” he said.  “I know the feeling.”

“And I won’t go back!” flung out Donald passionately.  “I won’t go back.  I simply can’t.”