Speedily enough, the town lost its first curious interest in the newcomers. Indeed, there was about them nothing calculated to hold the public interest long. They played no guitars, wore no handkerchief headdresses, offered to kidnap no small children, and were in no respect a picturesque race of beings. They talked their own outlandish language, dined on their own mysterious messes, slept in their bunks in the long barracks the company knocked together for them in the hollow down by the Old Fort, hived their savings, dealt with their employers through a paid translator, and beautifully minded their own business, which was the putting through of the Boaz Ridge Extension. Sundays a few came clunking in their brogans to early mass in Father Minor's church; the rest of the time they spent at the doing of their daily stint or in camp at their own peculiar devices. Tony Palassi, who ran the biggest fruit stand in town, paid them one brief visit--and one only--and came away, spitting his disgust on the earth. It appeared that they were not his kind of people at all, these being but despised Sicilians and he by birth a haughty Roman, and by virtue of naturalisation processes a stalwart American; but everybody knew already, without being told, that there was a difference, and a big difference. A blind man could see it. Tony, now, was a good fellow--one with sporting blood in his veins. Tony was a member of the Elks and of the Knights of Columbus. He owned and he drove one of the smartest trotting horses in the county. He played a brisk game of poker. Once a month he sent a barrel of apples or a bunch of bananas or a box of oranges, as a freewill offering, to the children out at the Home for the Friendless--in short, Tony belonged. Nobody ever thought of calling Tony a Dago, and nobody ever had--more than once; but these other fellows, plainly, were Dagos and to be regarded as such. For upward of a month now their presence in the community had meant little or nothing to the community, one way or the other, until one of them so far forgot himself as to carve up Beaver Yancy. The railroad made a big mistake when it hired Northern bosses to handle black natives; it made another when it continued to retain Beaver Yancy, of our town, in its employ after the Sicilians came, he being a person long of the arm and short of the temper. Even so, things might have gone forward to a conclusion without misadventure had it not been that on the day before the snow fell the official padrone of the force, who was likewise the official interpreter, went North on some private business of his own, leaving his countrymen without an intermediary during his absence. It came to pass, therefore, that on the December morning when this account properly begins, Beaver Yancy found himself in sole command of a battalion whose tongue he did not speak and whose ways he did not know.