At intervals, gusts of hot parching winds bent the rank grass, which gave forth a dry, almost rasping sound, very different from its usual musical rustle.

“In ten minutes more it will be noon, and we can get out of this into the shade for an hour,” said Joe Swan, a huge muscular laborer, as he pushed the nose of the steel scraper into the earth.

The words were addressed to a pale-faced young man who was driving the pair of mules hitched to the scraper.  The only reply was a tired tug on the reins, and the next moment the scraper had torn up half a yard of the tenacious prairie sod and cast it to one side.  As he turned the mules around to get them into position again, Joe glanced covertly at the weary face, shook his head in a troubled manner, and muttered, “It ain’t the work that’s breaking him up like this; it’s her, and it’s going to end in trouble long before we reach the Rockies.”

It was a strange, almost fantastic life these two men, with hundreds of others, were leading away out here on the vast prairie, whose long solitude was now being broken by the babel that attends track-laying, and whose vast bosom, for the first time, was being girded with a band of steel which was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bring home most forcibly to the Mother Country the value of her great Canadian colony.

Stretching away in front of and behind the two men were hundreds of other scrapers, tearing up the sod, while closely following them came gangs of track-layers, who laid the ties and fastened the rails to them as quickly as the sod was removed.  It was easy work track-laying on the flat expanse, where grading for hundreds of miles at a stretch was practically unnecessary.  Such, indeed, was the rapidity with which the rails were laid that camp had to be moved from two to three miles westward every day, so that the men never knew what it was to sleep twice in the same place.

As Joe was about to scoop up another load, a gunshot echoed and re-echoed across the prairie.  “Dinner time; just what we have been waiting for!” shouted Joe, as he let go the handles of the scraper, unhitched the mules, sprang on the back of one of them, and stooping, swung Harry Langdon, his delicate-looking driver, laughingly across the back of the other.  The next moment they were dashing towards the camp half a mile away.  Other laborers, similarly mounted, were straining every muscle to reach the same place, for they knew that the rule of “first come, first served,” would be religiously adhered to.

A fast friendship had sprung up between the huge scraper-handler and his young driver.  The very day the little fellow had wandered into camp, two months before, with his hands and face swollen with mosquito bites, and asked for a job, big-hearted Joe took a liking to him.  It was owing to Joe’s influence with the foremen that he was at last, grudgingly, given work, as his slim, girlish figure told strongly against him among such a crowd of sinewy, hardy men.