Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards the production of an even and level thoroughfare, without protuberance or depression, and in the course of our ride to Dan Dunn's camp on the Kootenay we saw the rapidly developing railroad in each phase of its evolution from the rough surface of the wilderness. Now we would come upon a long reach of finished road-bed on comparatively level ground all ready for the rails, with carpenters at work in little gullies which they were spanning with timber trestles. Next we would see a battalion of men and dump-carts cutting into a hill of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and symmetrical wall of earth-work, with sloping sides and level top, to bridge the gap between hill and hill. Again, we came upon places where men ran towards us shouting that a "blast" was to be fired. Here was what was called "rockwork," where some granite rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was being blown to flinders with dynamite. And so, through all these scenes upon the pack-trail, we came at last to a white camp of tents hidden in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest, and nestling beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water flecked with the foam from an eternal battle with a myriad of sunken rocks. It was Dunn's headquarters--the construction camp. Evening was falling, and the men were clambering down the hill-side trails from their work. There was no order in the disposition of the tents, nor had the forest been prepared for them. Their white sides rose here and there wherever there was a space between the trees, as if so many great white moths had settled in a garden. Huge trees had been felled and thrown across ravines to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and at the river's edge two or three tents seemed to have been pushed over the steep bluff to find lodgement on the sandy beach beside the turbulent stream. There were other camps on the line of this work, and it is worth while to add a word about their management and the system under which they were maintained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be the outfit of a contractor. The whole work of building a railroad is let out in contracts for portions of five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great jobs of seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one piece, it is customary for the contractor to divide his task and sublet it. But a fairly representative bit of mountain work is that which I found Dan Dunn superintending, as the factotum of the contractor who undertook it. If a contractor acts as "boss" himself, he stays upon the ground; but in this case the contractor had other undertakings in hand. Hence the presence of Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. Dunn is a man of means, and is himself a contractor by profession, who has worked his way up from a start as a laborer.