a tripod, rod, and a six-foot brass-edged measure specked with clay; and piled in a heap beyond the stove were a saddle, a pair of boots, chunks of pinon pine, and a discarded flannel shirt on which lay a gray cat nursing a kitten.  Through the inner door, standing open, she had a glimpse of two cots with tumbled blankets.  The place was the office and temporary home of a busy man, a rough board-and-tar-paper habitation that went forward on skids as the camp went forward, the workshop and living-quarters of a director who was stripped down to the hard essentials of toil and whose brain was the nerve centre of a desperate effort by a host of horses and men.

“You have companions, I see,” Louise remarked, indicating the mother cat and kitten.

“Dave’s,” was his reply, as he finished at the stove.  “He found them somewhere.  There were four kittens to begin with, but only one is left.  It’s a hard game for cats to survive in a camp like this.”

“Poor little things!”

“Dave says he’ll save this kitten, or know why.”

“What about Dave himself with all these rough men?”

“It leaves him untouched,” Lee said.  “Doesn’t hurt a boy when he’s made of the right stuff.  He’ll be better for it, in fact.  Many a grown man would be more competent with the knowledge Dave’s picking up here, young as he is.  He’s learning what work means and what men are and what’s what generally.  When this job is done, I’m going to send him off to school; and he’ll eat up his studies.  Just watch and see.”  Bryant laughed.  “He’s aching to become an engineer.  He has his mark already fixed, which not one boy in a thousand at his age has.  And all this is priming him to go to his mark like a shot.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she stated.

“Actually he’s soaking up more arithmetic, geology, physics, veterinary knowledge, and so on, by pumping Pat Carrigan, the engineers, and the men, than I supposed his head could hold,” Lee continued.  “When he gets at his books, they won’t be meaningless things to him.  Not much!  He’ll understand what prompted them and what they open up.  Well, now, are you feeling better?”

“Yes, I think so.”  Then she said, “But I’m keeping you away from your work.  You go, and when I’m—­”

“Wouldn’t think of it.  Nothing pressing.”  And Bryant began to move about thoughtfully, now going to gaze out a window and now returning to stand and fix his eyes upon her intently.

“That was a distressing experience for you,” he went on, presently.  “I feel all upset at your being in there.  Higginson was desperate, I suppose, and grasped at you because you happened to be there and he could not wait.”

She put out a hand toward Lee.

“Don’t scold him please,” she said.

“Little good it would do now,” he replied.  “He’ll be so cocky that he’ll dare me to fire him if I say a word, and grin in my face, for he knows now that he’s a good man and that I know it and will never let him go.”