She turned and said, “Is it done—­the belt gallery?”

He nodded.  “All done.”

“Well—­” she smiled; and he nodded again.

“The C. & S. C. man—­the fellow that was around the other day and measured to see if it was high enough—­he’s out there looking up with his mouth open.  He hasn’t got much to say.”

“You didn’t have to touch the tracks at all?”

“Not once.  Ran her out and bolted her together, and there she was.  I’m about ready for my month off.  We’ll have the wheat coming in tomorrow, and then it’s just walking down hill.”

“Tomorrow?” she asked.  “Can you do it?”

“Got to.  Five or six days aren’t any too much.  If it was an old house and the machinery was working well, I’d undertake to do it in two or three, but if we get through without ripping up the gallery, or pounding the leg through the bottom of a steamer, it’ll be the kind of luck I don’t have.”  He paused and looked at the window, where the rain was streaking the glass.  “I’ve been thinking about my vacation.  I’ve about decided to go to the St. Lawrence.  Maybe there are places I’d like better, but when a fellow hasn’t had a month off in five years, he doesn’t feel like experiments.”

It was the personal tone again, coming into their talk in spite of the excitement of the day and the many things that might have been said.

Hilda looked down at the ledger, and fingered the pages.  Bannon smiled.

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d shut that up and fire it under the table.  This light isn’t, good enough to work by, anyway.”

She slowly closed the book, saying:—­

“I never worked before on Christmas.”

“It’s a mistake.  I don’t believe in it, but somehow it’s when my hardest work always comes.  One Christmas, when I was on the Grand Trunk, there was a big wreck at a junction about sixty miles down the road.”

She saw the memory coming into his eyes, and she leaned back against the desk, playing with her pen, and now and then looking up.

“I was chief wrecker, and I had an old Scotch engineer that you couldn’t move with a jack.  We’d rubbed up together three or four times before I’d had him a month, and I was getting tired of it.  We’d got about halfway to the junction that night, and I felt the brakes go on hard, and before I could get through the train and over the tender, we’d stopped dead.  The Scotchman was down by the drivers fussing around with a lantern.  I hollered out:—­

“‘What’s the matter there?’

“’She’s a bit ‘ot,’ said he.

“You’d have thought he was running a huckleberry train from the time he took.  I ordered him into the cab, and he just waved his hand and said:—­

“‘Wait a bit, wait a bit.  She’ll be cool directly.’”

Bannon chuckled at the recollection.

“What did you do?” Hilda asked.

“Jumped for the lever, and hollered for him to get aboard.”