care heavier than dandelion down.  ‘Twas sleep like a deep drink, an’ up an’ away in the mornin’, chasin’ a young man’s hopes to the end o’ the Trail!  A suppose th’ Almighty meant t’ anchor men, or He wouldna’ permit the buildin’ of toons!  Once A was in New York!  A did na’ see but one patch o’ sunlight twenty stories overhead!  Th’ car things screeched an’ rulled an’ the folks—­the wimmen wi’ awfu’ stern wheeler hats, an’ the men—­hurryin’—­hurryin’!—­Wayland, d’ they get it?  There’s only twenty-four hours in a day—­they can’t catch any more by hurryin’—­what are they hurryin’ for?  Do they get it—­what they’re hurryin’ for?  Do they get anywhere?  D’ they sit down joyous at night?  A heard some laugh—­It was not joyous!  Do they get anything down there in the awfu’ heat?”

Wayland laughed.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “Care isn’t light as dandelion fluff!  I’ll bet on that.”

The roar of waters below the moraine softened and quieted.  There was a chorus of little waves lipping and whispering among the reeds.  A whole aeon of resinous sunbeams breathed their essence through the dark from the spicy evergreens.  One need not attempt to guess of what Wayland was thinking.  He had forgotten his companion’s presence till the old man spoke.

“A suppose, Wayland, you are only one of an army of kiddie boys on the job out here?”

Wayland absently roused himself.

“Land Service and Reclamation men have tougher jobs and less glory.  All we have to do is sit tight and it’s a pretty good place to sit tight in—­this out-door world.  Different with the other fellows!  They’re hamstrung by the red tape of office, or blackguarded by some peanut politician who is scoring an opponent!  There was Walker down at Durango, shot examining a coal fraud.  He was a Land Office man; and his murderers have not even been punished.  Then, there were the two chaps, who ran the rapids before the Gunnison Tunnel could be built; though that’s been exaggerated with a lot of magazine hog-wash to make a fellow sick!  Biggest job there was the engineer’s work.  Do you know he drove that six mile tunnel from both ends and, when the two ends met, they were not two inches off?  Hog-wash and dish-water hacks spread themselves in the magazines all over those chaps running the rapids!  You’ve run ten times worse rapids, yourself, on Saskatchewan and MacKenzie hundreds of times.  Yet those chaps—­not one of them—­noted the wonder of a tunnel driven from both ends coming out exactly even.  Why, the poor ignorant foreign workmen cried when they met from both ends, got hold of one fellow’s wrist through the mud wall and pulled him through bodily, cried like kids at the victory of it!  Your town hack didn’t know what it meant to be a sand hog under ground for years and come through to daylight like that.  The ignorant foreigner knew.  I guess a good dozen of ’em had sacrificed their lives to the work.  They knew the quiet engineer fellow had conquered the earth; and that fellow doesn’t get the salary of a Wall Street stenographer—­a way Uncle Sam has.  They’d give such a man a title and a fifty thousand a year pension in England or Germany.