The air shimmered and danced
above the gray monotone of flat country, Conniston's eyeballs were
burning with it. And back and arms and shoulders ached together. He
had hoped that they would quit work at five o'clock. Five o'clock came
and went, and the red-headed man said no word of stopping. Half-past
five, six o'clock. And still they tightened wires, hammered burning
staples, dug endless post-holes. Conniston's hands were torn with the
sharp staples, blistered with the work. Half-past six, and he was
ready to throw down his tools and quit. But a glance at his
companion's face, sweat-covered but showing nothing of the fatigue of
the day, and Conniston held doggedly to his work, ashamed to stop.
And, together with the breathless heat of the still afternoon, the
ache and dizziness returned to his head where Brayley's gun had struck
him; a new and growing nausea told him that a man is not knocked
unconscious one day to forget all about it the next. As he
straightened up from bending over the lowest wire, nausea and
faintness together threatened to make him throw up his hands and
acknowledge himself unfit for the new sort of existence into which he
had rushed carelessly. He was not certain why, in spite of all that he
felt, he held on. He knew only that as the son of William Conniston he
must be the superior in all things to the man who worked at his side
like a machine; he knew that in spite of his liking for Lonesome Pete
he held the cowboy in a mild contempt, and that he must not be outdone
by him.
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