Again the lightning-like passes of the hands, and the Wicklow man sat down forcibly and gasped.  The Italian surfacers threw aside their picks and shovels and made a ring, dancing excitedly and jeering.  The big foreman, whose scepter of authority was commonly a pick-handle for the belaboring of offenders, was not loved.

“Kick-a da shin—­kick-a da shin—­he like-a da nigger-mans,” suggested one of the Italians, but there was no need.  Being safely out of range of the catapult fists, the foreman stayed there.

“Take your track gang and be damned to you!” he snarled.

Adair made a forward step and stood over him.

“Are you quite convinced that I am the better man?” he asked very gently.

“It’s a trick!” growled the Wicklow man savagely.  “I could get onto it in another whirl or two.”

“Get up,” said the gentle voice.  “You’ll never have a better chance to learn the trick.”  But the foreman had the saving grace to shun anti-climaxes.

“G’wan!  Take the men, I say; all of ’em, if you like.”

“Thanks,” said Adair pleasantly.  “We’ll do it, and we’ll take you, as well—­to answer for their good behavior.  Let me help you up,” and he stooped and snapped the big one to his feet as a man would collar a reluctant boy.

“Great judgment!” gasped the foreman.  “Say, Mister Cock-o’-the-walk—­where do you hide all that muscle?” And without waiting for an answer he piled a dozen of his men upon the engine and followed them, still muttering.

It was a partly surfaced ten miles over which the special train thundered for the third time since dawn-breaking, and Gallagher took the last wheel-turn out of the 956.  None the less, the sun was reddening the western mountains when the Italians took ground at the mysterious gap.  The rails were found in the stream, as Adair had predicted, and it was a work of minutes only to snake them up the embankment and to spike them lightly into place.  But when Adair, for the healing of wounds, had thrust a bank-note into the hand of the Wicklow man, and the special was once more on its unhindered way westward, the sun had fairly topped the eastern range, and Johnson, the porter of the “01,” was shouting across the rocketing tender that breakfast was served.

The young man in the London-cut clothes might have climbed back to the car over the coal; or Gallagher would have stopped for him.  But he elected to stay in the cab, and he was still there, hanging from the open window on Jackson’s side, when the one-car special woke the echoes with its whistle, clattered in over the switches at Horse Creek, and came to a stand opposite the MacMorroghs’ commissary.

It was Brian MacMorrogh who came across the tracks to greet Adair, and, since this was their first meeting, he made the mistake of his life in calling the young director by name.

“The top of the morning to you, Misther Adair.  Is it Misther Colbrith you’d be looking for?”