"Hydrophoby--she must a bit herself!" Porcupine Jim was vigorously massaging his neck. The bride was sitting on the floor beating her heels, when Bruce put his head in the door cautiously: "If there's anything I can do--" Bertha renewed her screams at sight of him. "They is--" she shrieked--"Git out!" "You don't want to go near 'em when they're in a tantrum," advised the carpenter in an experienced tone. "But that's about the hardest one I ever see." Jennings, staggering manfully under his burden, bore the hysterical Amazon to her tent and it remained for Bruce to do her work. "That's a devil of a job for a General Manager," commented John Johnson sympathetically, as he stood in the doorway watching Bruce, with his sleeves rolled up, scraping assiduously at the bottom of a frying-pan. Bruce smiled grimly but made no reply. He had been thinking the same thing himself. Bruce often had watched an ant trying to move a bread-crumb many times its size, pushing with all its feet braced, rushing it with its head, backing off and considering and going at it again. Failing, running frantically around in front to drag and pull and tug. Trying it this way and that, stopping to rest for an instant then tackling it in fresh frenzy--and getting nowhere, until, out of pity, he gave it a lift. Bruce felt that this power-plant was his bread-crumb, and tug and push and struggle as he would he could not make it budge. The thought, too, was becoming a conviction that Jennings, who should have helped him push, was riding on the other side. "I wouldn't even mind his riding," Bruce said to himself ironically, "if he wouldn't drag his feet." He was hoping with all his heart that the much discussed cross-arms would hold, for when the wires were up and stretched across the river he would feel that the bread-crumb had at least _moved_. When Bruce crossed to the work the next morning, the "come-along" was clamped to the transmission wire and hooked to the block-and-tackle. Naturally Jennings had charge of the stretching of the wire and he selected Smaltz as his assistant. All the crew, intensely interested in the test, stood around as Jennings, taciturn and sour and addressing no one but Smaltz, puttered about his preparations. Finally he cried: "Ready-O!" The wire tightened and the slack disappeared under Smaltz's steady pull. The carpenter and the crew watched the cross-arm anxiously as the strain came upon it under the taut wire. Their faces brightened as it held. Smaltz looked at Jennings quizzically. "More?" "You ain't heard me tell you yet to stop," was the snarling answer. "Here goes, then." Smaltz's face wore an expressive grin as he put his strength on the rope of the block-and-tackle, which gave him the pull of a four-horse team. Bruce heard the cross-arm splinter as he came up the trail through the brush. Jennings turned to Woods and said offensively: "Old as you are, I guess I kin learn you somethin' yet."