Gallagher was not past laughing.

“She’ll not lep thot, this day.  But who’d be doin’ this job betune dark an’ mornin’, d’ye think?”

“You will have to ask me something easy, I’m not up in all the little practical jokes of the country.  But if I should venture a guess, I should say it was some one who didn’t want me to answer the first call for breakfast at your end-of-track camp this morning.  What do we do?”

Gallagher was thinking.

“We passed a camp av surfacers tin mile back, and there’d be rails at Arroyo Siding, tin mile back o’ thot,” he said reflectively.

Adair had passed over to the river side of the line and was looking at a fresh plowing of the embankment.

“The rails have been dragged down here and they are probably in the river,” he announced.  “If we had men and tools we might fish them out and repair damages.”

“Come on, thin,” cried the little Irishman, and when he ran back to climb to the footboard of the 956, Adair climbed with him.

Jackson, refreshed by his cat-naps on the coal, was sent to the rear end of the “01” to flag back, and in due time the special picked up the gang of surfacers just turning out to the day’s work.  An Irish foreman was in command, and to him Gallagher appealed, lucidly but not too gently.  The reply was a volley of abuse and a caustic refusal to lend his men to the track-laying department.

Gallagher turned to Adair with his red-apple face wrinkling dismayfully.

“’Tis up to me to push thot felly’s face in, Misther Adair; and what wid two nights and a day, shtandin’, and wan fight wid a bully twice me size, I’m not man enough.”

Adair tossed away the stump of his cigarette.

“You’re quite sure that is what is needed?” he queried.

“To knock a grain av sinse into thot Wicklow man?” queried Gallagher.  “Sure, it is.”  And then whispering:  “But not for you, Misther Adair; he’d ate you in two bites.  L’ave me have a thry wid him.”

But Adair was off and fronting the surly MacMorrogh foreman.

“We need a dozen of your men and some tools,” he said quietly.  “Do we get them?”

“Not by a fistful!” retorted the surly one.  “Maybe you think you’re enough of a ——­ ——­ ——­ to take ’em.”

“I am a better man than you are,” was the even-toned rejoinder.

“Prove it, then.”

Gallagher, leaning from his cab window, fully awake now, and chuckling and rubbing his hands together softly, saw the blow.  It was clean-cut, swift as the lightning’s flash, true to a finger’s breadth, and the sound of it was as bone upon bone.  At its impact the Wicklow man bounded into the air, arched his back like a bow, and pitched on his head in the ditch.  When he rose up, roaring blasphemies and doubling his huge fists for the fray, the quiet voice was assailing him again.  “Do we get the men and tools?”

“Not—­”