And the work progressed. Day by day the cut bored deeper into the stubborn mountain-side; day by day the Glacier River gurgled peacefully along over its treacherous sandy bed, one of the prettiest scenic effects on the system, so pretty that the company used it in the magazines; day by day regulars and extras, freights and passengers, east and west, snorted up and down the grade, the only visitations from the outside world; night after night Shanley played forty-five with McCann in the smoky, truckless box-car. Also the camp was dry, very dry, dryer than a sanatorium--that is, than _some_ sanatoriums. Carle-ton had been quite right. There was no opportunity for Shanley to hit the high joints quite as hard as he had that night in Big Cloud--there was no opportunity for him to hit the high joints _at all_. Shanley had not seen a bottle for three weeks. Therefore Shanley felt virtuous, which was proper. Some events follow others as the natural, logical outcome and conclusion of preceding ones; others, again, are apparently irrelevant, and the connection is not to be explained either by logic, conclusion, or otherwise. Rain, McCann’s departure for Big Cloud, and Pietro Maraschino’s birthday are an example of this. When it settles down for a storm in the mountains, it is, if the elements are really in earnest, torrential, and prolonged, and has the effect of tying up construction work tighter than a supreme court injunction could come anywhere near doing it. McCann had business in Big Cloud, whether personal or pertaining to the company is of no consequence, and the day the storm set in--the morning having demonstrated that its classification was not to be considered as transient--he seized the opportunity to flag the afternoon freight eastbound. This was natural and logical, and an opportunity not to be neglected. That this day, however, should be the anniversary of the day the padrone’s mother of blessed memory had given birth to Pietro Maraschino in sunny Naples fifty-three years before is, though apparently irrelevant, far from being so; and since its peculiar and coincident happening cannot be laid at the door of either logical, natural, scientific, or philosophical conclusions, and since it demands an explanation of some sort, it must, perforce, be attributed to the metaphysical--which is a name given to all things about which nobody knows anything. “Yez are in charge,” said McCann grandiloquently, waving his hand to Shanley as he swung into the caboose. “Yez are in charge av the work, me son. See to ut. I trust ye.” As the work at the moment was entirely at a standstill and bid fair to remain so until McCann’s return on the morrow, this was very good of McCann. But all men like words of appreciation, most of them whether they deserve them or not, so Shanley went back into the box-car out of the rain to ponder over the tribute McCann had paid him, and to ponder, too, over the new responsibility that had fallen to his lot.