“Lord, what a place!” he said, for the hundredth time.

He sat brooding in the darkness, discouraged and homesick.  So he had sat for all his nights at Kirkwood.

The men at the cook-house were playing cards, silently, intently.  The cook, serene and cool, was smoking in the doorway of his cabin.  Above the dull roar of the river Paul could hear Min Tolley’s cackle of laughter from the cottages a hundred yards away, and Mrs. Hopps crooning over her baby.

Presently the night shift went down to the powerhouse, the men taking great boyish leaps on the steep trail.  Some of the lighted windows were blotted out—­the Hopps’, the cook-house light.  The singing pole line above Paul’s head ceased abruptly, and with a little rising whine the opposite pole line took up the buzzing currant.  That meant that the copper line had been cut in, and the aluminum one would be “cold” for the night.

Minutes went by, eventless.  Half an hour, an hour—­still Paul sat staring into the velvet dark and wrestling with bitter discouragement and homesickness.

“Lord, what a place!” he said once or twice under his breath.

Finally, feeling cramped and chilly, he went stiffly indoors, through the hot, bright halls, that smelled of varnish and matting, to his room.

The next day was exactly like the five preceding days—­hot, restless, aimless; and the next night Paul sat on the porch again, and listened to the rush of the river, and Min Tolley’s laugh at the “five hundred” table, and the Hopps’ baby’s lullaby.  And again he composed his resignation, and calculated that it would take three days for it to reach San Francisco, and another three for him to receive their acceptance of it—­another week at least of Kirkwood!

On the seventh day the Chisholms rode down the trail that followed the pole line, and arrived in a hospitable uproar.  Alan Chisholm, some five years older than Paul, was a fine-looking, serious, dark youth, a fellow of not many words, being given rather to silent appreciation of his sister’s chatter than to speech of his own.  Miss Chisholm was very tall, very easy in manner, and powdered just now to her eyelashes with fine yellow dust.  Paul thought her too tall and too large for beauty, but he liked her voice, and the fashion she had of crinkling up her eyes when she smiled.  He sat on the porch while the Chisholms went upstairs to brush and change, and thought that the wholesome noise of their splashing and calling, opening drawers, and banging doors was a pleasant change from the usual quiet of the house.

Miss Chisholm was the first to reappear.  She was followed by Min and Mrs. Tolley, and was asking questions at a rate that kept both answering at once.  Had her kodak films come?  Was Minnie going to have some little sense and be married in a dress she could get some use out of?  How were the guinea-pigs, the ducks, the vegetables, the caged fox, the “boys” generally, Roosy’s ear, Consuelo Vorse’s lame foot?  Did Mrs. Tolley know that she had made a deep impression on the old fellow who drove the stage?  “Oh, look at her blush, Min!  Well, really!”