"That's so," said Knowles. "I forgot to order them for him. I'm mighty sorry, Mr. Blake. But of course the little brown cuss didn't know what he was meddling with." "Jumping Jehosaphat!" ejaculated Gowan. "That shore is mighty hard luck! I reckon pulling that spike turns your line of levels adrift like knocking out the picket-pin of an uneasy hawss." Blake burst into a hearty laugh. "That's a fine metaphor, Mr. Gowan. But it does not happen to fit the case. It would not matter if the spike-hole had been pulled out and the post along with it, so far as concerns this line of levels." "It wouldn't?" muttered Gowan, his lean jaw dropping slack. He glowered as if chagrined at the engineer's laughter at his mistake. Without heeding the puncher's look, Blake began to tell Knowles the result of his day's work. While he was speaking, they went into the house after his wife and the girl, leaving Gowan and Ashton alone. Equally sullen and resentful, the rivals exchanged stares of open hostility. Ashton pointed a derisive finger at the spike-hole in the post. "'Hole ... and the post along with it!'" he repeated Blake's words. "On bridge work it might have caused some trouble. But a preliminary line of levels--_Mon Dieu_! A Jap should have known better--or even a yap!" With a supercilious shrug, he swung back into the buckboard and drove up to the corral. Gowan's right hand had dropped to his hip. Slowly it came up and joined the other hand in rolling a thick Mexican cigarette. But the puncher did not light his "smoke." He looked at the spike-hole in the post, scowled, and went back around the house. CHAPTER XVI METAL AND METTLE At dawn Blake and Ashton drove up to the waterhole on Dry Fork with their camp equipment. There they left the outfit in the buckboard and proceeded with the line of levels on up the creek bed into the gorge from which it issued. For more than a mile they carried the levels over the bowlders of the gradually sloping bottom of that stupendous gash in the mountain side. So far the work was fairly easy. At last, however, they came to the place where the bed of the gulch suddenly tilted upward at a sharp angle and climbed the tremendous heights to the top of High Mesa in sheer ascents and cliff-like ledges. Blake established a bench-mark at the foot of the acclivity, and came forward beside Ashton to peer up the Titanic chute between the dizzy precipices. From where they stood to the head of the gulch was fully four thousand feet. "What do you think of it?" asked the engineer. "I think this is where your line ends," answered Ashton, and he rolled a cigarette. He had been anything but agreeable since their start from the ranch. "We of course can't go up with the level and rod," said Blake, smiling at the absurdity of the suggestion. "Still, we might possibly chain it to the top." Ashton shrugged. "I fail to see the need of risking my neck to climb this goat stairway."