Later, though, a certain comfort came to him from it. The whole scene
had impressed him and depressed him. He remembered what Madge Brierly
had said about the engineers with their blue paper plans and their
ability to read from them and work by them. He saw them at their work,
and the spectacle made him feel inferior, which had never happened in
his free, untrammeled life of mountain independence before. There were a
dozen men about the work of the same type as Layson's, and their calm
cocksureness as they directed all these mysteries amazed him,
overwhelmed him, made him feel a sense of littleness and unimportance
which was maddening. Why should they know all these things when he, Joe
Lorey, who had lived a decent life according to his lights, had labored
with his muscles as theirs could not labor if they tried to force them
to, had lived upon rough fare and in rough places while they had had
such "fancinesses" as he saw spread before them at their mess-tent
dinner (and crude fare enough it seemed to them, no doubt) knew none of
them? He could see no justice in such matters and resented them with
bitter heart. If their own infernal powder had killed one of them he
would not mourn. He tried to look back at the accident with
satisfaction.

Had he gone down to that crude construction camp without the jealousy
of Layson in his heart, he might, possibly, have merely gazed in wonder
at the cleverness of all this work, despite his mountaineer's resentment
of the coming of the interlopers; but, with that resentment in his heart
to nag and worry him, he achieved, before the day was over, a real
hatred of the class and of each individual in it. Layson had come up
there to his country to rob him of the girl he loved; now these men were
coming with their railroad to change the aspect of the land he had been
born to and grown up in, making it a strange place, unfamiliar,