“Mercy!” Miss Alicia was shuddering again.  “What hideously primitive conditions!  What is this terrible man doing out here?”

“Oh, he is a free lance; comes and goes as he pleases.  No, he’s not quarreling with Dick”—­answering her look of anxiety.

“How do you know he isn’t?”

Ford laughed.  “Because Dick wouldn’t let him get that near.  He knows—­Hello; I wonder what your good uncle wants of us.”

Mr. Colbrith was standing up in his place in the leading buckboard and making signals to the rear guard of two.  Ford shook the reins over his broncos and drove around.

The president was fingering his thin beard and waving an arm toward the track-layers.

“Mr.—­ah—­Ford,” he began critically, “is it necessary to have such a vast army of men as that to lay the track?”

“I don’t think we are over-manned,” said Ford good-naturedly.  It was comparatively easy to be patient with Alicia looking on and listening.

But it was against Mr. Colbrith’s principles to let a man off with a single rebuttal.

“I am not at all convinced of the worth of these new-fangled ideas, Mr. Ford; not at all.  We built the Pacific Southwestern main line in the old, approved way—­a rail at a time—­with less than one-quarter of the men you have over there.”

“I don’t question it:  and you were three years building some six hundred miles in a prairie country.  We are to-day just six weeks out of Saint’s Rest with the track gang, and in six more, if the weather holds, we shall be laying the switches in the Green Butte yards.  That is the difference between the old way and the new.”

The president was turned aside but not stopped.

“I understand,” he objected raucously.  “But your expense bills are something tremendous; tre-mendous, Mr. Ford!  You have spent more money in three months than we spent in a full year on the main line.”

“Quite likely,” agreed Ford, losing interest in the pointless discussion.  “But with us, time is an object; and we have the results to show for the expenditure.”

At this, Mr. Colbrith took refuge in innuendo, as seemed to be his lately acquired habit.

“You are very ready with your answers, Mr. Ford; very ready, indeed.  Let us see if you can continue as you have begun.”

It was Miss Alicia who resented this final speech of the president’s when the buckboards were once more in motion, following the unrailed grade around the swelling shoulders of the huge hills.

“I think that last remark of Uncle Sidney’s was rather uncalled for,” she said, after Ford had driven in grim silence at the tail of the procession for a full mile.

“It is one of a good many uncalled for things he has been saying to me since the day before yesterday,” was Ford’s rejoinder.

“Yet you can still assure me that you are not vindictive.”

“I am not—­at the mere actors in the play.  But I confess to an unholy desire to get back at the prompter—­the stage manager of the little comedy.  I am only waiting for your decision.”