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first saw this curious elongation in the eye of the man behind the desk he was minded to step into the shop and see what it was, but the project faded from his thoughts, and thereafter the grayish head with the magnifier screwed into its eye became simply a part of the dusty window and held no human interest whatsoever.
The construction which Railroad Jones had set going so prosperously was best displayed at the L. & N. depot, for Irontown already was on a main-line railroad, and the Lane County magnate meant to form a junction with this system as an outlet for his own jerkwater road. At the depot was a confusion of gasoline caterpillars, graders, traction ploughs, rock crushers, dirt scoops, and what not. It was extraordinary how the hillmen laid hold of these huge and unfamiliar machines and, after a brief experimental stage, launched themselves into the task of cutting a level thoroughfare through the full-bosomed hills.
Abner Teeftallow found a job of driving a team of mules hitched to a dirt scoop. He and some thirty or forty other teamsters drove their scoops around and around in a great ellipse, moving ploughed dirt forward down a declivity, emptying it at a designated place and then turning and climbing up the hill to the ploughed ground again. Under the ardour of a July sun this was melting work; the steadying of the scoop handles to dip the loose earth, the heave to upset it and spread it down the declivity, the effort of walking in the soft dirt, and above all the nervousness and irritability of the mules. When one mule danced or kicked in the great ellipse the whole string was disorganized. This caused a continual outpour of profanity and whip-cracking from the teamsters. The bitterest qualifications, the lewdest objurgations were repeated endlessly.
For several days Abner refrained from the use of such language, but after a while, when the afternoons reached their greatest heat, and his mules their worst impishness, it seemed to Abner as if a sort of fury arose up inside of him in response to his bouncing scoop and fighting mules. He