men. If you'd like a job I'll take yuh on, and take chances on
licking yuh into shape. Maybe the wages won't appeal to yuh,
but I'm willing to throw in heaps uh valuable experience that
won't cost yuh a cent." He lowered an eyelid toward the
cook-tent, although no one was visible.

Thurston studied the matter while he coiled his rope, and no
longer. Secretly he had wanted all along to be a part of the
life instead of an onlooker. "I'll take the job, Park--if you
think I can hold it down." The speech would doubtless have
astonished Reeve-Howard in more ways than one; but Reeve-Howard
was already a part of the past in Thurston's mind. He was for
living the present.

"Well," Park retorted, "it'll be your own funeral if yuh get
fired. Better stake yourself to a pair uh chaps; you'll need
'em on the trip."

"Also a large, rainbow-hued silk handkerchief if I want to look
the part," Thurston bantered.

"If yuh don't want your darned neck blistered, yuh mean," Park
flung over his shoulders. "Your wages and schooling start in
to-morrow at sunup."

It was early in the morning when the first train arrived,
hungry, thirsty, tired, bawling a general protest against fate
and man's mode of travel. Thurston, with a long pole in his
hand, stood on the narrow plank near the top of a chute wall and
prodded vaguely at an endless, moving incline of backs.