“Let’s get down to notes,” Neale went on, taking up his pencil.  “You’ve been here three months?”

“Yes.”

“With what force?”

“Two hundred men on and off.”

“Who’s the gang boss?”

“Colohan.  He’s had some of the biggest contracts along the line.”

Neale was about to inquire the name of the contractor, but he refrained, governed by one of his peculiar impulses.

“Anybody working when you got here?” he went on.

“Yes.  Masons had been cutting stone for six weeks.”

“What’s been done?”

Coffee laughed harshly.  “We got the three piers in—­good and solid on dry bottom.  Then along comes the rain—­and our work melts into the quicksand.  Since then we’ve been trying to do it over.”

“But why did this happen in the first place?”

Coffee spread wide his arms.  “Ask me something easy.  Why was the bottom dry and solid?  Why did it rain?  Why did solid earth turn into quicksand?”

Neale slapped the note-book shut and rose to his feet.  “Gentlemen, that is not the talk of engineers,” he said, deliberately.

“The hell you say!  What is it, then?” burst out Coffee, his face flushing redder.

“I’ll inform you later,” replied Neale, turning to the lineman.  “Somers, tell this gang boss, Colohan, I want him.”

Neale left the tent.  He had started to walk away when he heard Blake speak up in a fierce undertone.

“Didn’t I tell you?  We’re up against it!”

And Coffee growled a reply Neale could not understand.  But the tone of it was conclusive.  These men had made a serious blunder and were blaming each other, hating each other for it.  Neale was conscious of anger.  This section of line came under his survey, and he had been proud to be given such important and difficult work.  Incompetent or careless engineers had bungled Number Ten.  Neale strode on among the idle and sleeping laborers, between the tents, and then past the blacksmith’s shop and the feed corrals down to the river.

A shallow stream of muddy water came murmuring down from the hills.  It covered the wide bed that Neale remembered had been a dry, sand-and-gravel waste.  On each side the abutment piers had been undermined and washed out.  Not a stone remained in sight.  The banks were hollowed inward and shafts of heavy boards were sliding down.  In the middle of the stream stood a coffer-dam in course of building, and near it another that had collapsed.  These frameworks almost hid the tip of the middle pier, which had evidently slid over and was sinking on its side.  There was no telling what had been sunk in that hole.  All the surroundings—­the tons of stone, cut and uncut, the piles of muddy lumber, the platforms and rafts, the crevices in the worn shores up and down both sides—­all attested to the long weeks of fruitless labor and to the engulfing mystery of that shallow, murmuring stream.