The long line of wagons wound into camp, and Carhart made it his first business to get his assistant undressed and comfortably settled on his cot. It would be a day or so before the young man would be able to resume his work. Then Carhart stepped out, walked part way down the knoll, and looked about him, and became conscious of an unusual stir about the job. Peering out through dusty spectacles, he saw that a party of strangers were coming up the slope toward him. At the head walked Old Van, in boiled shirt and city clothes, with a tall man in frock coat and top hat whom Carhart recognized as Vice-president Chambers. After them came a party of ladies and one or two young men to whom Tiffany was explaining the methods of construction. It seemed that Mr. Chambers had thought it worth while to adopt Tiffany’s suggestion that the vast quantities of dry bones in the desert be gathered up and shipped eastward to be ground up into fertilizer. Carhart was presented to Mrs. Chambers and to the two Misses Chambers and the other young women. He took them in with a glance, then looked down over his own outrageously attired person and restrained a smile. Tiffany was the one he wished to see, and he told him so with a barely perceptible motion of the head. Tiffany caught the signal, made his excuses, and walked off with this dusty, inconspicuous man on whose shoulders rested the welfare of the whole Sherman and Western system. He had observed that the young women drew instinctively away from the dingy figure, and his smile was not restrained. He was thinking of his first meeting with Paul Carhart, in Chicago,--it was at the farewell dinner to the Dutch engineers,--and of his distinguished appearance as he rose to speak, and of his delightfully humorous enumeration of the qualities required in an American engineer. Thinking of these things he almost spoke aloud: “And they never knew the difference,--not a blessed one of ’em! Even Mrs. Chambers don’t know a gentleman without he’s tagged. Ain’t it funny!” And the chief engineer of the S. & W., being a blunt, and not at all a subtle man, wisely gave up the eternal question. “Look here, Tiffany,” Carhart began, “something’s going to happen to this man Peet.” Tiffany plucked a straw from a convenient bale, and began meditatively to chew it. “I haven’t got a word to say, Carhart. You’ve got a clear case against us, and I guess I can’t object if you take it out of me.” “No; I understand the thing pretty well, Tiffany. You’re doing what you can, but Peet isn’t.” “Are you sure about that?” “Perfectly.” “He’s having the devil’s own time himself, Carhart. The mills are going back on us steady with the rails. They just naturally don’t ship ’em. I’m beginning to think they don’t want to ship ’em.” Carhart stopped short, plunged in thought. “Maybe you’re right,” he said after a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that before.”