Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of the country that he had changed for seven miles around.  Looked back on the humming village of five thousand work-men; up stream and down, along the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers, lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers—­and only he knew how strong those were—­and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work was good.  There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers—­his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka—­permanent—­to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, has perished.  Practically, the thing was done.

Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted securely over trestle, and nodded to his chief.

“All but,” said he, with a smile.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” the senior answered.  “Not half a bad job for two men, is it?”

“One—­and a half.  ’Gad, what a Cooper’s Hill cub I was when I came on the works!” Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.

“You were rather a colt,” said Findlayson.  “I wonder how you’ll like going back to office-work when this job’s over.”

“I shall hate it!” said the young man, and as he went on his eye followed Findlayson’s, and he muttered, “Isn’t it damned good?”

“I think we’ll go up the service together,” Findlayson said to himself.  “You’re too good a youngster to waste on another man.  Cub thou wast; assistant thou art.  Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if any credit comes to me out of the business!”

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness to break to his own needs.  There were labour contractors by the half-hundred—­fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen—­but none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to be trusted.  They had been tried many times in sudden crises—­by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of the river—­but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked them-selves.  Findlayson thought it over from the beginning:  the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations—­and Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head