sion crept out that the baby was getting oppressive. They continued to give themselves credit for the feelings proper to the baby and to Jenny, who was doing her best to combine her natural duties with those for which she was paid. The baby was a splendid, great, fair, brown-eyed boy baby; they were the ideal settler's wife and child, the very people for whom the canal was building. All this made it harder to confess that so appropriate a connection was far from comfortable. Dolly, who had entered with girlish enthusiasm into the scheme, had won Jenny's heart at the outset by her sweet, inviting ways with the baby, of whose position in the family the mother was naturally jealous; but Dolly's success was her own undoing — the baby screamed to go to her whenever he saw her in the distance. She had pleased him too well; she had rashly admitted him to her own part of the house, far more attractive than the kitchen, and thereafter, short of downright forcible expulsion, he was not to be denied. He could creep faster than a clock ticks, and as, in the summer weather, doors were left wide, the sound of his scuffling toes and his bubbles and guggles of delight became a comic source of terror. She felt constrained to keep up her character, too ambitiously assumed. She sympathized with Jenny, and tried dishonestly to persuade her that the baby was no trouble to any one; and between specious protestations to the mother, tyrannous exactions on the part of the baby, and her own secret dismay, Dolly's path became daily more complicated and arduous.

Philip despised the baby because it took up precious moments of Dolly's time that he had formerly been able to monopolize. Dunsmuir found all his autocratic habits trampled upon by that terrible, sunny-headed radical, who was always underfoot when he was not in Dolly's arms, or swinging by his mother's skirts, or pulling things off the kitchen table, or mixing himself up in squalid fashion with the sacred ceremonies of dinner, or digging holes in the flower-beds, or strewing the piazza floor with his idols,-bits of coal or chicken-bones or mumbled crusts of bread, and leaving indispensable parts of his clothing about in conspicuous places, to be hastily gotten rid of or futilely ignored. The young settler had a habit of screaming at meal-times, occasions which seemed to excite him and to remind him of his own infringed rights. Jenny would dash in and out with a flushed face and a high-strung manner, the tension of her nerves increasing with the baby's notorious demands. In her brief disappearances she would catch him up violently and remove him farther and farther from his audience in the dining-room, scolding till both his heart and her own were quite broken. When his

cries came forlornly from his place of banishment in the woodshed, Dolly, unable to bear the appearance of heartlessness any longer, would rise to the rescue, and the meal would end distractedly for all. Dolly began secretly to dislike the baby, almost to wish some reasonable fault could be found with Jenny as an excuse for terminating a relation so exposing to all her own unsuspected weaknesses. It was humiliating to think how little Margaret would have made of this pother about a baby. Her hands would never have been too clean, nor her gowns too fresh and fine, to nurse him, the young rascal, when his mother needed relief.

It was helplessly agreed, in the family, that to send away Jenny for no fault but that she was a mother would be too monstrous; but they were ripe for any desperate measure of relief. Jenny had a young sister, a lass of twelve, whom it was now proposed to have up from town, to mind the baby, and betimes to help Jenny with her work. But wages, it proved, were no object to Jenny's parents compared with the loss of a winter's schooling for their youngest daughter. They were a nomadic, tent-and-wagon family, and therefore the more regardful of educational opportunities when they came in their way. In extremity, Dolly offered to remove the difficulty by herself undertaking to teach the lass; and so it was arranged. Two hours each day she gave to the sowing of seed on that wild and stony soil, and very profitable, on the whole, was the exercise-to the teacher. But Philip rebelled against these baffling and separating influences. The atmosphere of the household was changed; it was no longer feudal and concentrated. Other matters besides the work had started up with much intrusive bustle, and Dolly was serving a housekeeper's apprenticeship instead of falling sweetly and securely in love.

On one of the evenings when Philip dined in town chance presented him with an awkward discovery. Alan had gone with a party of young girls to a play given by a traveling company. Philip was not much concerned for the lad's sentimental relations in these days, although the latter confessed to having returned Antonia Vargas her bullet; the confession being incident to his having had to borrow of Philip to pay for mounting the same. He claimed to have sent it partly as a joke; a trifle fervid in the accompanying sentiment, possibly, but a girl accustomed in her own language to the metaphorical kissing of hands and feet could not be supposed to take umbrage at a word, though strong.

He had cudgeled his wits for days, he said, and looked through stacks of books for a text not exceeding in space one inch of en

known on the streets of the town as a peddler of tomales. She was a bent old woman with a brown face, which she kept well hidden under the peaked hood of her invariable black shawl. Twice a week she brought tomales and enchillalas to the house, and gossiped with Enrique. Without paying much attention, he caught the monotonous cadence of their voices, until a sentence distinguished itself, remarkable enough, coming from the vender of tomales. Enrique had asked her a question, and this was her answer:

"The Father says that I am still in sin; he cannot give me absolution. I think it is merely an excuse to put off my marriage with Antonia. I am not worse than others that he should distinguish against me."

"You are wrong to say that of the Father, Pacheco. He knows that confession such as yours comes but from the lips, not from the

him? Set him free, and he would prattle of what he had seen, and they would hunt me like a badger. Keep him with me? There was not food enough for two. There was scant for one till Antonia should arrive, at the time appointed. The pity was that I had bowels and left him the key to the well, or that I did not crack his skull a little harder when I threw him in the cave."

"A pity to spoil a better case than your own. He has the face of the blessed St. Michael."

The tomale-woman shook in her bundled rags like a sheaf of withered corn. Her words were a choking growl.

"Bah! the boy is not a madman like you. He is not bitten to the soul." Enrique spoke. "Antonia may never have looked at him but in compassion, as the angels might, seeing the state she found him in. The keys of thy cave were a candle to the blind. Had she been

a day later he had not been worth loading a pony with."

"You have fatted him till he could carry the pony himself, now."

"All I ever said was"-Enrique spoke again -"he has looked at her. Very good; so has many another long-legged coxcomb about the town."

"And I am forbidden the house till her father's return."

"Yes, but you art her novio, wolf in sheep's clothing."

"If I am a wolf, what is he ?"

"A very white little lamb beside you. If he sees her, it is in the American fashion, which means anything or nothing." Enrique's shoulders went up; his hands said the rest. "Extraordinary people! He has gone with three of them to-night, his little countrywomen; not a gray hair nor a wedding ring in the company. You might hear their parrot voices screaming the length of the street. With him it is not Antonia; it is any girl."

"I am in hell with thinking on them." "You will get there fast enough without so much thinking."

PHILIP reported this conversation to Dunsmuir. It was agreed now that Alan should be sent away; but where?

The family wound still rankled. The family itself on the other side had greatly changed in fifteen years. The present members had their own burdens sufficient to their incomes; correspondence had nearly ceased.

"Chuck him into a big school, and let him strike out for himself and learn his insignificance," said Philip.

"Send him to heaven if you happen to know the way!" was Dunsmuir's answer. The American schools were all alike in his estimation, skin-deep in scholarship, vulgar in tone, inordinately expensive.

Then Philip somewhat diffidently proposed the Continent as a compromise, with his mother's assistance in placing Alan at Zurich or Vevay. She would dote on another boy to "run" in vacations; and Alan would find it not so disagreeable to be preached to by an adorable woman old enough to be his mother, who, as she was not his mother, would know when to "let up."

To his surprise, Dunsmuir fell in with the proposition at once. Philip cabled his mother, and wrote, sending Alan's picture; the lad's good looks, he well knew, would be a great point in his favor. Meantime Philip talked to him like an elder brother. He could have wished to see him more touched in temper, and less placidly flattered by the attention his pastimes excited. Dunsmuir raved over the cost; VOL. XLIV.-92.

a cool thousand it meant at the first go off, and he had promised his next surplus to Job, who needed the money at once on his land. No matter; the old people must wait. From those that have not shall be taken even that which they have. Dunsmuir felt the want of money all the more, now that he had begun to straighten his affairs and to handle a salary again. He was impatient to be free.

Pacheco had been arrested. Vargas had returned with his mules from Sheep Mountain, and was looking after his daughter. Alan was on parole. Dolly was cold, and would not talk of her brother. Her shame for him went hard with her; it was like a bilious sickness. She was for abjuring sentiment henceforth in any and every form. Away with it all! The lights were out in her own secret place of worship; cold daylight showed the images to be mere tawdry dolls; her flowers of passion were turned to rags and shreds of tinsel. Not one kind word could Philip get from her in her revolt; not a single acknowledgment of all that had so nearly come to pass between them.

XVI.

THE river was now at its lowest. Cofferdams were in place, which were to cramp it and turn it aside, and at night, when the pile-drivers, and the steam-hoists, and the dump-carts were silent, the harassed stream made loud its complaint. Dunsmuir's orders were to "go ahead" and put in his dam on a pile foundation where the rock gave out, that water might be turned into the ditch by May 1, in time to reap the next season's crop of contracts. Dunsmuir had protested in vain against the issuing of contracts which called for this early delivery of water. He had submitted his own plan of the dam-excavation till solid rock should be reached, that the masonry might rise in one coherent mass from a permanent and homo- . geneous foundation. But such construction demanded more time than the contracts were giving him.

"What's the matter with piles and concrete?" Norrisson had asked; and he mentioned several dams with pile foundations that were doing their duty. While in Denver, soon afterward, he took the occasion of meeting a friend, an engineer of reputation, to put the case of the Wallula dam, and asked his opinion. The engineer gave it, unofficially, on the facts as Norrisson presented them; he said that a pile foundation would serve. Norrisson quoted him triumphantly to Dunsmuir, who was unshaken, though considerably irritated by Norrisson's methods of warfare. If he had wanted a consulting engineer, why had he not retained one and got his report after a personal examination?

Such an order from the manager to the chief engineer precisely indicated the relation between them, as Norrisson intended it should. The chief's resignation was in order, else he would remain as the servant of the company, not the responsible agent of the work. In his first outburst of indignation Dunsmuir wrote such an answer as the situation demanded. It was some consolation to watch Philip's face while he read it aloud to him with satisfied emphasis.

"Understand, I don't make it personal." Dunsmuir looked kindly, almost fondly, at Philip, who had not a word to say. "It is the old issue that parted us the first time. It has parted better friends than your father and I ever pretended to be; and I don't say the alternative is of his contriving. I was my own promoter some weary years; I should know something of the difficulties on that side. But my choice is plain. I must stick to the first principle in our profession, Philip: the honest builder can wait, he can fail, he can starve; he cannot botch his work. I speak for myself, who am the only one accountable."

"I shall leave the work when you do." "I don't see that you need; and I should be as jealous for you as for my son."

"I shall go with you, sir, for the sake of adding my protest, and because of what you have just said."

"There are moments of defeat worth more than many a victory," said Dunsmuir.

But in the silence of night, when consequences obtrude, he revised his decision. No man may be captive, even to his own will, for as long as Dunsmuir, without suffering the prison change. If Norrisson's company owned the scheme, the scheme owned Dunsmuir; and he knew it now. He thought of his debts; of his children, restless and half-educated; of his forsaken connections in the world that no longer knew him. A morbid dread of change had grown upon him; his fixed life had singularly, appealingly unfitted him for a fresh start. He had lost the habit of society; he was out of touch with the new movements in his profession; he had no elasticity, no imagination,

no conviction left for any new work so long as he was chained to this. He knew his bondage at last, and his soul cried out against it; yet he could not go forth, a penniless, broken man, with the scars of failure upon him. He had worn out his powers of waiting. A specious victory had granted him the respite

of three months of action in command of forces he called his own; he could not bear now to feel the screws take hold again in the same old shrinking places.

Then followed those lower considerations that lie in wait for moments of irresolution to worry the doubting heart. The truth concerning his resignation would never be known. Gossip would have it, in circles where an engineer's reputation is discussed, that here was a presumptuous dreamer who fancied himself called to a great work, who, after more than a decade spent in contemplating it, was found unequal to the initial problem of its fulfilment. How he hated that word theorist! there was nothing he so loved as to be considered practical. Now, the practical man would be his successor. He would reap the honors should the dam stand; if it went out, how easily the blame might be shifted back upon the theorist. Dunsmuir was well acquainted with the dark side of his profession- the long waitings, the jealousies, the wrested honors, and the bitter rewards. He knew how a man's one mistake may follow him to his grave, while his successes are forgotten or credited to another man.

At daybreak, when the wind fell, and with it a silence upon the sleeping house, he stole out from his bedroom to the office, and abstracted his letter of resignation from the post-bag. His decision was already reversed, yet he hesitated before the act that should cancel all that brave talk of the night before.

Yet why assume that it was a betrayal of the work? What are the risks that success will not justify? It was well enough known in the history of engineering that there is an heroic margin outside the beaten track of precedent which bold spirits yet may tread. He was half angry with Philip, now, as he thought of their conversation, that the younger man should have seen no way out of the difficulty but his chief's resignation. Decidedly Philip was too conservative. Of what use to be twenty-three and an American! The letter was torn into bits and went into the waste-basket, and Dunsmuir sat out the dawn, and heard the house awake, scarcely moving, face to face with the first deep, secret humiliation of his life. By breakfast-time he had got his most presentable arguments in order. He sat working them, in silence, during the meal, and when it was over he summoned Philip into the office, and said to him coldly:

"I have called a halt, Norrisson. It is too

late now to back out of the work; it would be desertion. I do not give orders here, it seems, but that is the fortune of war. They have captured my scheme by the strong arm. They can make what hash of it they please; but for better or worse I stay with it, and pride may go to the dogs. My pride shall consist in making the dam as strong as their infernal meddling will let me. If it goes, at least I shall know all was done that could be done with such a management in the saddle. I know no fathers or fathers' sons in this business. It's a fight, and they have won. Let them make the most of it."

There was little Philip could say not seeming to remind Dunsmuir of his recantation. Dunsmuir understood him. They spent a bad day, each inside his defenses. The pause in the work left them conscious of each other's presence as a burden in the room where they had labored and argued together harmoniously. Philip brought on the explosion by a restless allusion to Dolly. He was always trying the ice of Dunsmuir's doubtful sanction, boy-fashion, to know when it would bear. To-day he ventured too far; it cracked without warning; it thundered from shore to shore.

Philip had hazarded a nervous expression of the hope that, whatever grinds or hitches should come to the work, the peace of the relation might stand; and since men do not usually mean each other when they talk in this strain, Dunsmuir became fidgety and Philip

more nervous.

He had never had a home life before, he awkwardly expatiated, unsupported by a sign of encouragement from Dunsmuir, even for as long as he had lived in the cañon; never known a girl in her home as he had been privileged to know

He paused, and Dunsmuir growled: "I don't know where you got the privilege. The home is one thing, the office is another."

Philip, seated on the table-ledge, thrust his hands into his pockets to hide that they were trembling. "The distinction comes a trifle late," he said.

"I will thank you to take note of it now. We have worked together well enough; my daughter is another matter."

"She is to me."

"What is she to you?"

"She is the girl I hope, with your leave, to marry."

"And how long have you had this hope?" "I hardly know," said Philip, white with stress of feeling. "I have been trying, for some time, to speak to you."

"I don't know what has prevented you. Are you sure you have not spoken to her?" Dunsmuir laid his keen blue eyes on Philip's conscious face.

"Ye have spoken! Deny it if you can." His big voice rang as clear as a sheet of iron under the hammer.

"Why should I wish to deny it? It is the American way to speak to the girl first; her answer is the only one any man would take."

"I know nothing of your American ways. But if you have spoken to my motherless child before that you spoke to me, ye have done me a treachery worthy your father's son; and you may quit my house!"

Philip jumped to his feet, and the table recoiled with a loud jar; for a moment there was no other sound in the room. Then he said, striving for self-control: "I don't know whether you consider yourself in a position to insult my father; but I am in no position to answer you as your words deserve. As my father's son, or as anybody's son, my record is before you. By heaven! I don't know why fathers should be so arrogant. A father is not a god. If you are the one appointed to look after Dolly, it's not my fault if you have neglected your business. No, sir; I will finish now. I found her here where you had fixed her, at the mercy of your scheme. I was first, and I took no advantage that was not simply a man's. If I don't deserve her, do men generally deserve the girls they marry? None the less I mean to make her love me, if I can. I am not called traitor for nothing. I shall take all the chances now, whatever comes."

Dunsmuir listened coolly to this explicit though somewhat mixed defiance, and smiled to himself, "The lad has spirit, after all." His eyebrows went up like clouds after a storm; a gleam of humor tugged at the corners of his grim mustache. He held, with most short-tempered men, that you cannot make a doubledealer forsake his guard; anger being like drink, in that it exposes a man. When, therefore, he had seen this smooth-mannered son of the "commissioner " in a fine, loose-tongued rage,

with his jacket off, so to speak,- his own tall mood unconsciously subsided. Presumably the charge of treachery had not come from very deep.

"We have taken a hot day for it," he remarked, with moderation, while Philip's mental reflection was that he would be happy to punch his much-desired father-in-law's head.

Dunsmuir filled his pipe, thrust his hands into the pockets of his loose riding-breeches, and strode out upon the blazing porch, where the western sun, barred by shadows of the pillars, lay half across the floor. The seat of his wooden chair was as hot as a hearthstone; he kicked it away, and took a canvas one, stretching his long length on it, with a loud, obtrusive yawn. He was in one of his man-childish moods, not so lovely and pleasant as he might