In a specialist in the trade, Ford’s genius might have invoked enthusiasm.  Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer’s inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious.  On the leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the cross-ties in position.  On a train of specially constructed flat-cars another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge.  At the word, “Ready!” a hauling chain, passing through an anchored pulley-block far up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties.  With the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army, spike-drivers these, fell upon the newly placed steel, shouting their chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters deftly preparing another section, was slowly pushed to the new front for another advance.

“It is like clockwork,” was Miss Alicia’s enthusiastic comment.  “Did you invent it, Mr. Ford?”

Now the combination of flat-car bolting-table, and the shifting and laying by sections, was Ford’s invention, but he modestly stood from under.

“Frisbie gets the medal,” he said.  “It’s all in the drill—­every man knowing what he has to do, and doing it at the proper moment.  I’d give something if I had Dick’s knack in detail organizing.”

She looked up, laughing.  “You have the funniest way of ducking to cover if you think a bit of honest appreciation is coming your way, Mr. Ford.  You know you told Mr. Frisbie how to do it.”

“Did I?  I suppose it wouldn’t be polite to contradict you.”

“Or any use.  Is Mr. Frisbie here now?—­Oh, yes; there he is.”  And then, in a half-awed whisper:  “Who is that dreadful, Grand-Opera-villain looking man he is talking to?”

Ford’s eyes sought and found Frisbie.  He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian in its repulsiveness.

“That is ‘Mexican George’; the MacMorrogh Brothers’ ’killer’,” said Ford evenly.  “Have you ever heard of a professional man-killer, Miss Adair; a man whose calling is that of a hired assassin?”

She shuddered.  “You are jesting, I know.  But the word fits his face so accurately.  I saw him lounging about the store at the camp yesterday, and it gave me the creeping shivers every time I looked at him.  Do you ever have such instantaneous and unreasoning hatreds at first sight?”

“Now and then; yes.  But I was not jesting about Mexican George.  He is precisely what the word implies; is hired for it and paid for it.  Nominally, he guards the commissary and stores, and is the paymaster’s armed escort.  Really, it is his duty to shoot down any desperate laborer who, in the MacMorroghs’ judgment, needs to be killed out of the way.”