“As I say, I had to go, and I found that things were not quite as bad as they seemed--though they were bad enough. The girl had lately lost her mother, and she was keeping house in a little three-room shack for her father, a mechanic in the Murtrie Mine. I didn’t see him, of course, but from what Judith said I gathered that he had taken to drinking after the mother’s death. You’d say he must have gotten pretty low, to let his daughter earn money by playing the piano in a dance-hall.” David recalled the John Fallon he had known; a rough-cast, unlettered man, but a skilled mechanic and thrifty. “I knew him well,” he said; adding: “There was some trouble--family trouble, I think--before the Fallons moved away from Middleboro. I heard something about it when I was home for Christmas.” “It’s the conditions in Powder Can,” she averred; “and for those the new work on the railroad is responsible--an army of workmen with money to throw away. Judith, and probably her father, are neither better nor worse than other people with their point of view. It isn’t fair to such people to permit the conditions.” “I quite agree with you,” he rejoined hastily. “I don’t know how much I shall be able to do, as chief of construction, but from what you have been telling me it is evident that this plague spot right at our doors ought to be cleaned up with a strong hand.” “Does that mean that you are going to reform things out there, David?” “Whatever needs reforming, yes; if I can.” “I wish you might say that and mean it, knowing all that it implies,” she returned, half musingly. “What does it imply?” The card players were rising, and there was a sputtering rapid-fire of motors in the driveway. “That,” she said slowly, “is something you must find out for yourself, if you can--and will. Now I must go. People will want to be telling me what an exquisite time they’ve had. You say you are leaving early in the morning? Then I will say good-night and good-by. The hall man will show you your room. Give my love to your father and sister when you write, and don’t, for pity’s sake, drag them away out yonder to the ragged edge of nowhere!” IX Silas Plegg Powder Gap, a hill-studded basin where the Powder River, leaping down from the high watershed of the upper range, gathers itself for the swift rush to its emptying into the Timanyoni forty miles away, lies like a half-closed hand in a gorge of the Hophras, with the upturned fingers and thumb postulating the surrounding majesties of mountain peaks, and the forested hills and ridges figuring as the callouses in the palm.