“No, I don’t have to,” Keating answered, and his face lighted up as he leaned over and touched the road boss on the sleeve. “But, Spirlaw, it’s the greatest thing in all the world. Don’t you see? A man does something. _He builds_. I’m going to be a builder--a builder of bridges and roads and things like that. I want to do something some day--something that will be worth while. That’s why I’m going to be an engineer; because, all over the world from the beginning, the engineers have led the way and--and they’ve left something behind them. I think that’s the biggest thing they can say of any man when he dies--that he was a builder, that he left something behind him. I’d like to have them say that about me. Well, after I put in another year out here--I’m a heap better even now than when I came--I’m going back to finish my course, and then--well, you understand what I want to do, don’t you?” There were lots of talks like that, evening after evening, and they all of them ended in the same way--- Spirlaw would knock out his pipe against a stone or his boot heel, and “figur’ he’d stroll up the camp a bit an’ make sure all was right for the night.” A pretty hard man Spirlaw was, but under the rough and the brutal, the horny, thick-shelled exterior was another self, a strange side of self that he had never known until he had known Keating. It got into him pretty deep and pretty hard, the boy and his ambitions; and the irony of it, grim and bitter, deepened his pity and roused, too, a sense of fierce, hot resentment against the fate that mocked in its pitiless might so defenseless and puny a victim. To himself he came to call Keating “The Builder,” and one day when Harvey came down on an inspection trip, he told the division engineer about it--that’s how it got around. Carleton, when he heard it, didn’t say anything--just crammed the dottle in his pipe down with his forefinger and stared out at the switches in the yards. They were used to seeing the surface of things plowed up and the corners turned back in the mountains, there weren’t many days went by when something that showed the raw didn’t happen in one way or another, but it never brought callousness or indifference, only, perhaps, a truer sense of values.