Title: A Fool for Love
Author: Lynde, Francis
Language: English
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A FOOL FOR LOVE


By Francis Lynde

Author of “The Grafters,” “The Master of Appleby,” etc.


CONTENTS

    I In Which We Take Passage on the Limited
   II In Which an Engine is Switched
  III In Which an Itinerary is Changed
   IV The Crystalline Altitudes
    V The Landslide
   VI The Rajah Gives an Order
  VII The Majesty of the Law
 VIII The Greeks Bringing Gifts
   IX The Block Signal
    X Spiked Switches
   XI The Right of Way



I. IN WHICH WE TAKE PASSAGE ON THE LIMITED


It was a December morning,--the Missouri December of mild temperatures
and saturated skies,--and the Chicago and Alton’s fast train, dripping
from the rush through the wet night, had steamed briskly to its
terminal track in the Union Station at Kansas City.

Two men, one smoking a short pipe and the other snapping the ash from
a scented cigarette, stood aloof from the hurrying throngs on the
platform, looking on with the measured interest of those who are in
a melee but not of it.

“More delay,” said the cigarettist, glancing at his watch. “We are
over an hour late now. Do we get any of it back on the run to Denver?”

The pipe-smoker shook his head.

“Hardly, I should say. The Limited is a pretty heavy train to pick
up lost time. But it won’t make any particular difference. The western
connections all wait for the Limited, and we shall reach the seat
of war to-morrow night, according to the Boston itinerary.”

Mr. Morton P. Adams flung away the unburned half of his cigarette
and masked a yawn behind his hand.

“It’s no end of a bore, Winton, and that is the plain, unlacquered
fact,” he protested. “I think the governor owes me something. I
worried through the Tech because he insisted that I should have a
profession; and now I am going in for field work with you in a howling
winter wilderness because he insists on a practical demonstration.
I shall ossify out there in those mountains. It’s written in the
book.”

“Humph! it’s too bad about you,” said the other ironically. He was
a fit figure of a man, clean-cut and vigorous, from the steadfast
outlook of the gray eyes and the firm, smooth-shaven jaw to the square
fingertips of the strong hands, and his smile was of good-natured
contempt. “As you say, it is an outrage on filial complaisance. All
the same, with the right-of-way fight in prospect, Quartz Creek Canyon
may not prove to be such a valley of dry bones as--Look out, there!”

The shifting-engine had cut a car from the rear of the lately-arrived
Alton, and was sending it down the outbound track to a coupling with
the Transcontinental Limited. Adams stepped back and let it miss him
by a hand’s-breadth, and as the car was passing, Winton read the name
on the paneling.

“The Rosemary: somebody’s twenty-ton private outfit. That cooks our
last chance of making up any lost time between this and tomorrow--”

He broke off abruptly. On the square rear observation platform of
the private car were three ladies. One of them was small and
blue-eyed, with wavy little puffs of snowy hair peeping out under
her dainty widow’s cap. Another was small and blue-eyed, with wavy
masses of flaxen hair caught up from a face which might have served
as a model for the most exquisite bisque figure that ever came out
of France. But Winton saw only the third.

She was taller than either of her companions--tall and straight and
lithe; a charming embodiment of health and strength and beauty:
clear-skinned, brown-eyed--a very goddess fresh from the bath, in
Winton’s instant summing up of her, and her crown of red-gold hair
helped out the simile.

Now, thus far in his thirty-year pilgrimage John Winton, man and
boy, had lived the intense life of a working hermit, so far as the
social gods and goddesses were concerned. Yet he had a pang--of
disappointment or pointless jealousy, or something akin to both--when
Adams lifted his hat to this particular goddess, was rewarded by a
little cry of recognition, and stepped up to the platform to be
presented to the elder and younger Bisques.

So, as we say, Winton turned and walked away as one left out, feeling
one moment as though he had been defrauded of a natural right, and
deriding himself the next, as a sensible man should. After a bit he
was able to laugh at the “sudden attack,” as he phrased it, but later,
when he and Adams were settled for the day-long run in the Denver
sleeper, and the Limited was clanking out over the switches, he
brought the talk around with a carefully assumed air of lack-interest
to the party in the private car.

“She is a friend of yours, then?” he said, when Adams had taken the
baited hook open-eyed.

The Technologian modified the assumption.

“Not quite in your sense of the word, I fancy. I met her a number
of times at the houses of mutual friends in Boston. She was studying
at the Conservatory.”

“But she isn’t a Bostonian,” said Winton confidently.

“Miss Virginia?--hardly. She is a Carteret of the Carterets;
Virginia-born-bred-and-named. Stunning girl, isn’t she?”

“No,” said Winton shortly, resenting the slang for no reason that
he could have set forth in words.

Adams lighted another of the scented villainies, and his clean-shaven
face wrinkled itself in a slow smile.

“Which means that she has winged you at sight, I suppose, as she does
most men.” Then he added calmly, “It’s no go.”

“What is ‘no go’?”

Adams laughed unfeelingly, and puffed away at his cigarette.

“You remind me of the fable about the head-hiding ostrich. Didn’t
I see you staring at her as if you were about to have a fit? But it
is just as I tell you: it’s no go. She isn’t the marrying kind. If
you knew her, she’d be nice to you till she got a good chance to flay
you alive--”

“Break it off!” growled Winton.

“Presently. As I was saying, she would miss the chance of marrying
the best man in the world for the sake of taking a rise out of him.
Moreover, she comes of old Cavalier stock with an English earldom
at the back of it, and she is inordinately proud of the fact; while
you--er--you’ve given me to understand that you are a man of the
people, haven’t you?”

Winton nodded absently. It was one of his minor fads to ignore his
lineage, which ran decently back to a Colonial governor on his
father’s side, and to assert that he did not know his grandfather’s
middle name--which was accounted for by the very simple fact that
the elder Winton had no middle name.

“Well, that settles it definitely,” was the Bostonian’s comment.
“Miss Carteret is of the _sang azur_. The man who marries her will
have to know his grandfather’s middle name--and a good bit more
besides.”

Winton’s laugh was mockingly good-natured.

“You have missed your calling by something more than a hair’s-breadth,
Morty. You should have been a novelist. Give you a spike and a
cross-tie and you’d infer a whole railroad. But you pique my
curiosity. Where are these American royalties of yours going in the
Rosemary?”

“To California. The car belongs to Mr. Somerville Darrah, who is
vice-president and manager in fact of the Colorado and Grand River
road: the ‘Rajah,’ they call him. He is a relative of the Carterets,
and the party is on its way to spend the winter on the Pacific coast.”

“And the little lady in the widow’s cap: is she Miss Carteret’s
mother?”

“Miss Bessie Carteret’s mother and Miss Virginia’s aunt. She is the
chaperon of the party.”

Winton was silent while the Limited was roaring through a village
on the Kansas side of the river. When he spoke again it was not of
the Carterets; it was of the Carterets’ kinsman and host.

“I have heard somewhat of the Rajah,” he said half-musingly. “In
fact, I know him, by sight. He is what the magazinists are fond of
calling an ‘industry colonel,’ a born leader who has fought his way
to the front. If the Quartz Creek row is anything more than a stiff
bluff on the part of the C. G. R. it will be quite as well for us
if Mr. Somerville Darrah is safely at the other side of the
continent--and well out of ordinary reach of the wires.”

Adams came to attention with a half-hearted attempt to galvanize an
interest in the business affair.

“Tell me more about this mysterious jangle we are heading for,” he
rejoined. “Have I enlisted for a soldier when I thought I was only
going into peaceful exile as assistant engineer of construction on
the Utah Short Line?”

“That remains to be seen.” Winton took a leaf from his pocket
memorandum and drew a rough outline map. “Here is Denver, and here
is Carbonate,” he explained. “At present the Utah is running into
Carbonate this way over the rails of the C. G. R. on a joint track
agreement which either line may terminate by giving six months’
notice of its intention to the other. Got that?”

“To have and to hold,” said Adams. “Go on.”

“Well, on the first day of September the C. G. R. people gave the
Utah management notice to quit.”

“They are bloated monopolists,” said Adams sententiously. “Still I
don’t see why there should be any scrapping over the line in Quartz
Creek Canyon.”

“No? You are not up in monopolistic methods. In six months from
September first the Utah people will be shut out of Carbonate
business, which is all that keeps that part of their line alive.
If they want a share of that traffic after March first, they will
have to have a road of their own to carry it over.”

“Precisely,” said Adams, stifling a yawn. “They are building one,
aren’t they?”

“Trying to,” Winton amended. “But, unfortunately, the only practicable
route through the mountains is up Quartz Creek Canyon, and the canyon
is already occupied by a branch line of the Colorado and Grand River.”

“Still I don’t see why there should be any scrap.”

“Don’t you? If the Rajah’s road can keep the new line out of Carbonate
till the six months have expired, it will have a monopoly of all the
carrying trade of the camp. By consequence it can force every shipper
in the district to make iron-clad contracts, so that when the Utah
line is finally completed it won’t be able to secure any freight for
a year, at least.”

“Oho! that’s the game, is it? I begin to savvy the burro: that’s the
proper phrase, isn’t it? And what are our chances?”

“We have about one in a hundred, as near as I could make out from
Mr. Callowell’s statement of the case. The C. G. R. people are moving
heaven and earth to obstruct us in the canyon. If they can delay the
work a little longer, the weather will do the rest. With the first
heavy snow in the mountains, which usually comes long before this,
the Utah will have to put up its tools and wait till next summer.”

Adams lighted another cigarette.

“Pardon me if I seem inquisitive,” he said, “but for the life of me
I can’t understand what these obstructionists can do. Of course, they
can’t use force.”

Winton’s smile was grim. “Can’t they? Wait till you get on the ground.
But the first move was peaceable enough. They got an injunction from
the courts restraining the new line from encroaching on their right
of way.”

“Which was a thing that nobody wanted to do,” said Adams, between
inhalations.

“Which was a thing the Utah _had_ to do,” corrected Winton. “The
canyon is a narrow gorge--a mere slit in parts of it. That is where
they have us.”

“Oh, well,” returned Adams, “I suppose we took an appeal and asked
to have the injunction set aside?”

“We did, promptly; and that is the present status of the fight. The
appeal decision has not yet been handed down; and in the meantime
we go on building railroad, incurring all the penalties for contempt
of court with every shovelful of earth moved. Do you still think you
will be in danger of ossifying?”

Adams let the question rest while he asked one of his own.

“How do you come to be mixed up in it, Jack? A week ago some one
told me you were going to South America to build a railroad in the
Andes. What switched you?”

Winton shook his head. “Fate, I guess; that and a wire from President
Callowell of the Utah offering me this. Chief of Construction Evarts,
in charge of the work in Quartz Creek Canyon, said what you said a
few minutes ago--that he had not hired out for a soldier. He resigned,
and I’m taking his berth.”

Adams rose and buttoned his coat.

“By all of which it seems that we two are in for a good bit more
than the ossifying exile,” he remarked. And then: “I am going back
into the Rosemary to pay my respects to Miss Virginia Carteret. Won’t
you come along?”

“No,” said Winton, more shortly than the invitation warranted; and
the other went his way alone.



II. IN WHICH AN ENGINE IS SWITCHED


“‘Scuse me, sah; private cyah, sah.”

It was the porter’s challenge in the vestibule of the Rosemary. Adams
found a card.

“Take that to Miss Carteret--Miss Virginia Carteret,” he directed, and
waited till the man came back with his welcome.

The extension table in the open rear third of the private car was
closed to its smallest dimensions, and the movable furnishings were
disposed about the compartment to make it a comfortable lounging room.

Mrs. Carteret was propped among the cushions of a divan with a book.
Her daughter occupied the undivided half of a tete-a-tete chair with
a blond athlete in a clerical coat and a reversed collar. Miss
Virginia was sitting alone at a window, but she rose and came to greet
the visitor.

“How good of you to take pity on us!” she said, giving him her hand.
Then she put him at one with the others: “Aunt Martha you have met;
also Cousin Bessie. Let me present you to Mr. Calvert: Cousin Billy,
this is Mr. Adams, who is responsible in a way for many of my
Boston-learned gaucheries.”

Aunt Martha closed the book on her finger. “My dear Virginia!” she
protested in mild deprecation; and Adams laughed and shook hands with
the Reverend William Calvert and made Virginia’s peace all in the same
breath.

“Don’t apologize for Miss Virginia, Mrs. Carteret. We were very good
friends in Boston, chiefly, I think, because I never objected when she
wanted to--er--to take a rise out of me.” Then to Virginia: “I hope I
don’t intrude?”

“Not in the least. Didn’t I just say you were good to come? Uncle
Somerville tells us we are passing through the famous Golden
Belt,--whatever that may be,--and recommends an easy-chair and a
window. But I haven’t seen anything but stubble-fields--dismally wet
stubble-fields at that. Won’t you sit down and help me watch them go
by?”

Adams placed a chair for her and found one for himself.

“‘Uncle Somerville’--am I to have the pleasure of meeting Mr.
Somerville Darrah?”

Miss Virginia’s laugh was non-committal.

“_Quien sabe_?” she queried, airing her one Westernism before she was
fairly in the longitude of it. “Uncle Somerville is a law unto
himself. He had a lot of telegrams and things at Kansas City, and he
is locked in his den with Mr. Jastrow, dictating answers by the
dozen, I suppose.”

“Oh, these industry colonels!” said Adams. “Don’t their toilings make
you ache in sheer sympathy sometimes?”

“No, indeed,” was the prompt rejoinder; “I envy them. It must be fine
to have large things to do, and to be able to do them.”

“Degenerate scion of a noble race!” jested Adams. “What ancient
Carteret of them all would have compromised with the necessities by
becoming a captain of industry?”

“It wasn’t their _metier_, or the _metier_ of their times,” said Miss
Virginia with conviction. “They were sword-soldiers merely because
that was the only way a strong man could conquer in those days. Now it
is different, and a strong man fights quite as nobly in another
field--and deserves quite as much honor.”

“Think so? I don’t agree with you--as to the fighting, I mean. I like
to take things easy. A good club, a choice of decent theaters, the
society of a few charming young women like--”

She broke him with a mocking laugh.

“You were born a good many centuries too late, Mr. Adams; you would
have fitted so beautifully, into decadent Rome.”

“No--thanks. Twentieth-century America, with the commercial frenzy
taken out of it, is good enough for me. I was telling Winton a little
while ago--”

“Your friend of the Kansas City station platform?” she interrupted.
“Mightn’t you introduce us a little less informally?”

“Beg pardon, I’m sure--yours and Jack’s: Mr. John Winton, of New York
and the world at large, familiarly known to his intimates--and they
are precious few--as ‘Jack W.’ As I was about to say--”

But she seemed to find a malicious satisfaction in breaking in upon
him.

“‘Mr. John Winton’: it’s a pretty name as names go, but it isn’t as
strong as he is. He is an ‘industry colonel,’ isn’t he? He looks it.”

The Bostonian avenged himself at Winton’s expense for the unwelcome
interruption.

“So much for your woman’s intuition,” he laughed. “Speaking of idlers,
there is your man to the dotting of the ‘i’; a dilettante raised to
the _nth_ power.”

Miss Carteret’s short upper lip curled in undisguised scorn.

“I like men who do things,” she asserted with pointed emphasis;
whereupon the talk drifted eastward to Boston, and Winton was ignored
until Virginia, having exhausted the reminiscent vein, said, “You are
going on through to Denver?”

“To Denver and beyond,” was the reply. “Winton has a notion of
hibernating in the mountains--fancy it; in the dead of winter!--and he
has persuaded me to go along. He sketches a little, you know.”

“Oh, so he is an artist?” said Virginia, with interest newly aroused.

“No,” said Adams gloomily, “he isn’t an artist--isn’t much of
anything, I’m sorry to say. Worse than all, he doesn’t know his
grandfather’s middle name. Told me so himself.”

“That is inexcusable--in a dilettante,” said Miss Virginia mockingly.
“Don’t you think so?”

“It is inexcusable in anyone,” said the Technologian, rising to take
his leave. Then, as a parting word: “Does the Rosemary set its own
table? or do you dine in the dining-car?”

“In the dining-car, if we have one. Uncle Somerville lets us dodge the
Rosemary’s cook whenever we can,” was the answer; and with this bit of
information Adams went his way to the Denver sleeper.

Finding Winton in his section, poring over a blue-print map and making
notes thereon after the manner of a man hard at work, Adams turned
back to the smoking-compartment.

Now for Mr. Morton P. Adams the salt of life was a joke, harmless or
otherwise, as the tree might fall. So, during the long afternoon which
he wore out in solitude, there grew up in him a keen desire to see
what would befall if these two whom he had so grotesquely
misrepresented each to the other should come together in the pathway
of acquaintanceship.

But how to bring them together was a problem which refused to be
solved until chance pointed the way. Since the Limited had lost
another hour during the day there was a rush for the dining-car as
soon as the announcement of its taking-on had gone through the train.
Adams and Winton were of this rush, and so were the members of Mr.
Somerville Darrah’s party. In the seating the party was separated, as
room at the crowded tables could be found; and Miss Virginia’s fate
gave her the unoccupied seat at one of the duet tables, opposite a
young man with steadfast gray eyes and a firm jaw.

Winton was equal to the emergency, or thought he was. Adams was still
within call and he beckoned him, meaning to propose an exchange of
seats. But the Bostonian misunderstood wilfully.

“Most happy, I’m sure,” he said, coming instantly to the rescue. “Miss
Carteret, my friend signals his dilemma. May I present him?”

Virginia smiled and gave the required permission in a word. But for
Winton self-possession fled shrieking.

“Ah--er--I hope you know Mr. Adams well enough to make allowances for
his--for his--” He broke down helplessly and she had to come to his
assistance.

“For his imagination?” she suggested. “I do, indeed; we are quite old
friends.”

Here was “well enough,” but Winton was a man and could not let it
alone.

“I should be very sorry to have you think for a moment that I
would--er--so far forget myself,” he went on fatuously. “What I had
in mind was an exchange of seats with him. I thought it would be
pleasanter for you; that is, I mean, pleasanter for--” He stopped
short, seeing nothing but a more hopeless involvement ahead; also
because he saw signals of distress or of mirth flying in the brown
eyes.

“Oh, please!” she protested in mock humility. “Do leave my vanity just
the tiniest little cranny to creep out of, Mr. Winton. I’ll promise to
be good and not bore you too desperately.”

At this, as you would imagine, the pit of utter self-abasement yawned
for Winton, and he plunged headlong, holding the bill of fare wrong
side up when the waiter asked for his dinner order, and otherwise
demeaning himself like a man taken at a hopeless disadvantage. She
took pity on him.

“But let’s ignore Mr. Adams,” she went on sweetly. “I am much more
interested in this,” touching the bill of fare. “Will you order for
me, please? I like--”

When she had finished the list of her likings, Winton was able to
smile at his lapse into the primitive, and gave the dinner order for
two with a fair degree of coherence. After that they got on better.
Winton knew Boston, and, next to the weather, Boston was the safest
and most fruitful of the commonplaces. Nevertheless, it was not
immortal; and Winton was just beginning to cast about for some other
safe riding road for the shallop of small talk when Miss Carteret sent
it adrift with malice aforethought.

It was somewhere between the entrees and the fruit, and the point of
departure was Boston art.

“Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think
of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I
should think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like
that.”

Winton stared--open-mouthed, it is to be feared.

“I--I beg your pardon,” he stammered, with the inflection which takes
its pitch from blank bewilderment.

Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled man
of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy’s phrase, she
could make him “sit up.”

“I beg yours, I’m sure,” she said demurely. “I didn’t know it was a
craft secret.”

Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was
sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery
eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.

“I’d like to know what Adams has been telling you,” he said.
“Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly
original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an
original thing in all my life.”

For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic
pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant.
But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it
was the lover who spoke when he went on.

“That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make
it--to have to confirm your poor opinion of me.”

“Did I say anything like that?” she protested.

“Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been
thinking it all along. Don’t ask me how I know it: I couldn’t explain
it if I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way--you know
you have.”

The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind as
she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular
experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that
he had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go
back.

“There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,”
 she pleaded in extenuation.

“And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true
enough to hurt.”

She looked him fairly in the eyes. “What is lacking, Mr. Winton--the
spur?”

“Possibly,” he rejoined. “There is no one near enough to care, or to
say ‘Well done!’”

“How can you tell?” she questioned musingly. “It is not always
permitted to us to hear the plaudits or the hisses--happily, I think.
Yet there are always those standing by who are ready to cry ‘_Io
triumphe_!’ and mean it, when one approves himself a good soldier.”

The coffee had been served, and Winton sat thoughtfully stirring the
lump of sugar in his cup. Miss Carteret was not having a monopoly of
the new experiences. For instance, it had never before happened to
John Winton to have a woman, young, charming, and altogether lovable,
read him a lesson out of the book of the overcomers.

He smiled inwardly and wondered what she would say if she could know
to what battlefield the drumming wheels of the Limited were speeding
him. Would she be loyal to her mentorship and tell him he must win, at
whatever the cost to Mr. Somerville Darrah and his business
associates? Or would she, womanlike, be her uncle’s partizan and write
one John Winton down in her blackest book for daring to oppose the
Rajah?

He assured himself it would make no jot of difference if he knew. He
had a thing to do, and he was purposed to do it strenuously,
inflexibly. Yet in the inmost chamber of his heart, where the
barbarian ego stands unabashed and isolate and recklessly contemptuous
of the moralities minor and major, he saw the birth of an influence
which inevitably must henceforth be desperately reckoned with.

Given a name, this new-born life-factor was love; love barely
awakened, and as yet no more than a masterful desire to stand well in
the eyes of one woman. None the less, he saw the possibilities: that a
time might come when this woman would have the power to intervene;
would make him hold his hand in the business affair at the very
moment, mayhap, when he should strike the hardest.

It was a rather unnerving thought, and when he considered it he was
glad that their ways, coinciding for the moment, would presently go
apart, leaving him free to do battle as an honest soldier in any cause
must.

The Rosemary party was rising, and Winton rose, too, folding the seat
for Miss Virginia and carefully reaching her wrap from the rack.

“I am so glad to have met you,” she said, giving him the tips of her
fingers and going back to the conventionalities as if they had never
been ignored.

But the sincerity in Winton’s reply transcended the conventional form
of it.

“Indeed, the pleasure has been wholly mine, I assure you. I hope the
future will be kind to me and let me see more of you.”

“Who knows?” she rejoined, smiling at him level-eyed. “The world has
been steadily growing smaller since Shakespeare called it ‘narrow.’”

He caught quickly at the straw of hope. “Then we need not say
good-by?”

“No; let it be _auf Wiedersehen_,” she said; and he stood aside to
allow her to join her party.

Two hours later, when Adams was reading in his section and Winton was
smoking his short pipe in the men’s compartment and thinking things
unspeakable with Virginia Carteret for a nucleus, there was a series
of sharp whistle-shrieks, a sudden grinding of the brakes, and a
jarring stop of the Limited--a stop not down on the time-card.

Winton was among the first to reach the head of the long train. The
halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men
were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up.
A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a
mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive sufficiently
explained the accident.

“Well, there’s only the one thing to do,” was the engineer’s verdict.
“That’s for somebody to mog back to Arroyo to wire for the
wreck-wagon.”

“Yes, by gum! and that means all night,” growled the conductor.

There was a stir in the gathering throng of half-alarmed and
all-curious passengers, and a red-faced, white-mustached gentleman,
whose soft southern accent was utterly at variance with his manner,
hurled a question bolt-like at the conductor.

“All night, you say, seh? Then we miss ouh Denver connections?”

“You can bet to win on that,” was the curt reply.

“Damn!” said the ruddy-faced gentleman; and then in a lower tone: “I
beg your pahdon, my deah Virginia; I was totally unaware of your
presence.”

Winton threw off his overcoat.

“If you will take a bit of help from an outsider, I think we needn’t
wait for the wrecking-car,” he said to the dubious trainmen. “It’s
bad, but not so bad as it looks. What do you say?”

Now, as everyone knows, it is not in the nature of operative railway
men to brook interference even of the helpful sort. But they are as
quick as other folk to recognize the man in essence, as well as to
know the clan slogan when they hear it. Winton did not wait for
objections, but took over the command as one in authority.

“Think we can’t do it? I’ll show you. Up on the tank, one of you, and
heave down the jacks and frogs. We’ll have her on the steel again
before you can say your prayers.”

At the hearty command, churlish reluctance vanished and everybody lent
a willing hand. In two minutes the crew of the Limited knew it was
working under a master. The frogs were adjusted under the derailed
wheels, the jack-screws were braced to lift and push with the nicest
accuracy, and all was ready for the attempt to back the engine in
trial. But now the engineer shook his bead.

“I ain’t the artist to move her gently enough with all that string o’
dinkeys behind her,” he said unhopefully.

“No?” said Winton. “Come up into the cab with and I’ll show you how.”
 And he climbed to the driver’s footboard with the doubting engineer at
his heels.

The reversing-lever went over with a clash; the air whistled into the
brakes; and Winton began to ease the throttle open. The steam sang
into the cylinders, the huge machine trembling like a living thing
under the hand of a master.

Slowly and by almost imperceptible degrees the life of the pent-up
boiler power crept into the pistons and out through the connecting
rods to the wheels. With the first thrill of the gripping tires Winton
leaned from the window to watch the derailed trucks climb by
half-inches up the inclined planes of the frogs.

At the critical instant, when the entire weight of the forward half of
the engine was poising for the drop upon the rails, he gave the
precise added impulse. The big ten-wheeler coughed hoarsely and spat
fire; the driving-wheels made a quick half-turn backward; and a cheer
from the onlookers marked the little triumph of mind over matter.

Winton found Miss Carteret holding his overcoat when he swung down
from the cab, and he fancied her enthusiasm was tempered with
something remotely like embarrassment. But she suffered him to walk
back to the private car beside her; and in this sudden retreat from
the scene of action he missed hearing the comments of his fellow
craftsmen.

“You bet, he’s no ‘prentice,” said the fireman.

“Not much!” quoth the engineer. “He’s an all-round artist, that’s
about what he is. Shouldn’t wonder if he was the travelin’ engineer
for some road back in God’s country.”

“Travelin’ nothing!” said the conductor. “More likely he’s a
train-master, ‘r p’raps a bigger boss than that. Call in the flag,
Jim, and we’ll be getting a move.”

Oddly enough, the comment on Winton did not pause with the encomiums
of the train crew. When the Limited was once more rushing on its way
through the night, and Virginia and her cousin were safe in the
privacy of their state-room, Miss Carteret added her word.

“Do you know, Bessie, I think it was Mr. Adams who scored this
afternoon?” she said.

“How so?” inquired _la petite_ Bisque, who was too sleepy to be
over-curious.

“I think he ‘took a rise’ out of me, as he puts it. Mr. Winton is
precisely all the kinds of man Mr. Adams said he wasn’t.”



III. IN WHICH AN ITINERARY IS CHANGED


It was late breakfast time when the Transcontinental Limited swept
around the great curve in the eastern fringe of Denver, paused for a
registering moment at “yard limits,” and went clattering in over the
switches to come to rest at the end of its long westward run on the
in-track at the Union Depot.

Having wired ahead to have his mail meet him at the yard limits
registering station, Winton was ready to make a dash for the telegraph
office the moment the train stopped.

“That is our wagon, over there on the narrow-gage,” he said to Adams,
pointing out the waiting mountain train. “Have the porter transfer our
dunnage, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can send a wire or two.”

On the way across the broad platform he saw the yard crew cutting out
the Rosemary, and had a glimpse of Miss Virginia clinging to the
hand-rail and enjoying enthusiastically, he fancied, her first view of
the mighty hills to the westward.

The temptation to let the telegraphing wait while he went to say good
morning to her was strong, but he resisted it and hastened the more
for the hesitant thought. Nevertheless, when he reached the telegraph
office he found Mr. Somerville Darrah and his secretary there ahead of
him, and he observed that the explosive gentleman who presided over
the destinies of the Colorado and Grand River appeared to be in a more
than usually volcanic frame of mind.

Now Winton, though new to the business of building railroads for the
Utah Short Line, was not new to Denver or Colorado. Hence when the
Rajah, followed by his secretarial shadow, had left the office, Winton
spoke to the operator as to a friend.

“What is the matter with Mr. Darrah, Tom? He seems to be uncommonly
vindictive this morning.”

The man of dots and dashes nodded.

“He’s always crankier this time than he was the other. He’s a holy
terror, the Rajah is. I wouldn’t work on his road for a farm down
East--not if my job took me within cussing distance of him. Bet a hen
worth fifty dollars he is up in Mr. Colbert’s office right now,
raising particular sand because his special engine wasn’t standing
here ready to snatch his private car on the fly, so’s to go on without
losing headway.”

Winton frowned thoughtfully, and he let his writing hand pause while
he said, “So he travels special from Denver, does he?”

“On his own road?--well, I should smile. Nothing is too good for the
Rajah; or too quick, when he happens to be in a hurry. I wonder he
didn’t have the T. C. pull him special from Kansas City.”

Winton handed in his batch of telegrams and went his way reflective.

What was Mr. Somerville Darrah’s particular rush? As set forth by
Adams, the plans of the party in the Rosemary contemplated nothing
more hasty than a leisurely trip to the Pacific coast--a pleasure
jaunt with a winter sojourn in California to lengthen it. Why, then,
this sudden change from Limited regular trains to unlimited specials?
Was there fresh news from the seat of war in Quartz Creek Canyon?
Winton thought not. In that case he would have had his budget as well;
and so far as his own advices went, matters were still as they had
been. A letter from the Utah attorneys in Carbonate assured him that
the injunction appeal was not yet decided, and another from Chief of
Construction Evarts concerned itself mainly with the major’s desire to
know when he was to be relieved.

But if Winton could have been an eavesdropper behind the door of
Superintendent Colbert’s office on the second floor of the Union
Depot, his doubts would have been resolved instantly.

The telegraph operator’s guess went straight to the mark. Mr. Darrah
was “raising particular sand” because his wire order for a special
engine had not been obeyed to the saving of the ultimate second of
time. But between his objurgations on that score, he was rasping out
questions designed to exhaust the chief clerk’s store of information
concerning the status of affairs at the seat of war.

“Will you inform me, seh, why I wasn’t wired that this beggahly appeal
was going against us?” he demanded wrathfully. “What’s that you say,
seh? Don’t tell me you couldn’t know what the decision of the cou’t
was going to be before it was handed down: that’s what you-all are
heah for--to find out these things! And what is all this about Majah
Eva’ts resigning, and the Utah’s sending East for a professional
right-of-way fighteh to take his place? Who is this new man? Don’t
know? Dammit, seh! it’s your business to know! _Now when do you faveh
me with my engine_?”

Thus the Rajah; and the chief clerk, himself known from end to end of
the Colorado and Grand River as a queller of men, could only point out
of the window to where the Rosemary stood engined and equipped for the
race, and say meekly: “I’m awfully sorry you’ve been delayed, Mr.
Darrah; very sorry, indeed. But your car is ready now. Shall I go
along to be on hand if you need me?”

“No, seh!” stormed the irate master; and the chief clerk’s face became
instantly expressive of the keenest relief. “You stay right heah and
see that the wires to Qua’tz Creek are kept open--wide open, seh. And
when you get an ordeh from me--for an engine, a regiment of the
National Gyua’d, or a train-load of white elephants--you fill it. Do
you understand, seh?”

Meantime, while this scene was getting itself enacted in the
superintendent’s office, a mild fire of consternation was alight in
the gathering room of the Rosemary. As we have guessed, Winton’s
packet of mail was not the only one which was delivered by special
arrangement that morning to the incoming Limited at the yard
registering station. There had been another, addressed to Mr.
Somerville Darrah; and when he had opened it there had been a volcanic
explosion and a hurried dash for the telegraph office, as recorded.

Sifted out by the Reverend Billy, and explained by him to Mrs.
Carteret and Bessie, the firing spark of the explosion appeared to be
some news of an untoward character from a place vaguely designated as
“the front.”

“It seems that there is some sort of a right-of-way scrimmage going on
up in the mountains between our road and the Utah Short Line,” said
the young man. “It was carried into the courts, and now it turns out
that the decision has gone against us.”

“How perfectly horrid!” said Miss Bessie. “Now I suppose we shall have
to stay here indefinitely while Uncle Somerville does things.” And
placid Mrs. Carteret added plaintively: “It’s too bad! I think they
might let him have one little vacation in peace.”

“Who talks of peace?” queried Virginia, driven in from her post of
vantage on the observation platform by the smoke from the
switching-engine. “Didn’t I see Uncle Somerville charging across to
the telegraph office with war written out large in every line of him?”

“I am afraid you did,” affirmed the Reverend Billy; and thereupon the
explanation was rehearsed for Virginia’s benefit.

The brown eyes flashed militant sympathy.

“Oh, I wish Uncle Somerville would go to ‘the front,’ wherever that
is, and take us along!” she cried. “It would be ever so much better
than California.”

The Reverend William laughed; and Aunt Martha put in her word of
expostulation, as in duty bound.

“Why, my dear Virginia--the idea! You don’t know in the least what you
are talking about. I have been reading in the papers about these
right-of-way troubles, and they are perfectly terrible. One report
said they were arming the laboring men, and another said the militia
might have to be called out.”

“Well, what of it?” said Virginia, with all the hardihood of youth and
unknowledge. “It’s something like a burning building: one doesn’t want
to be hard-hearted and rejoice over other people’s misfortunes; but
then, if it has to burn, one would like to be there to see.”

Miss Bessie put a stray lock of the flaxen hair up under its proper
comb.

“I’m sure I prefer California and the orange-groves and peace,” she
asserted. “Don’t you, Cousin Billy?”

What Mr. Calvert would have replied is no matter for this history,
since at this precise moment the Rajah came in, “coruscating,” as
Virginia put it, from his late encounter with the superintendent’s
chief clerk.

“Give them the word to go, Jastrow, and let’s get out of heah,” he
commanded. And when the secretary had vanished the Rajah made his
explanations to all and sundry. “I’ve been obliged in a manneh to
change ouh itinerary. Anotheh company is trying to fault us up in
Qua’tz Creek Canyon, and I am in a meashuh compelled to be on the
ground. We shall be delayed only a few days, I hope; at the worst only
until the first snow-storm comes; and, in the meantime, Califo’nia
won’t run away.”

Virginia clapped her hands.

“Then we are really to go to ‘the front’ and see a right-of-way fight?
Oh, won’t that be perfectly intoxicating!”

The Rajah glared at her as if she had said something incendiary. The
picturesque aspect of the struggle had evidently not appealed to him.
But he smiled grimly when he said: “Now there spoke the blood of the
fighting Carterets: hope you won’t change your mind, my deah.” And
with that he dived into his working den, pushing the lately-returned
secretary in ahead of him.

Virginia linked arms with Bessie, the flaxen-haired, when the wheels
began to turn.

“We are off,” she said. “Let’s go out on the platform and see the last
of Denver.”

It was while they were clinging to the hand-rail, and looking back
upon the jumble of railway activities out of which they had just
emerged that the Rosemary, gaining headway, overtook another moving
train running smoothly on a track parallel to that upon which the
private car was speeding. It was the narrow-gage mountain connection
of the Utah line, and Winton and Adams were on the rear platform of
the last car. So it chanced that the four of them were presently
waving their adieus across the wind-blown interspace. In the midst of
it, or rather at the moment when the Rosemary, gathering speed as the
lighter of the two trains, forged ahead, the Rajah came out to light
his cigar.

He took in the little tableau of the rear platforms at a glance, and
when the slower train was left behind asked a question of Virginia.

“Ah--wasn’t one of those two the young gentleman who called on you
yestehday afternoon, my deah?”

Virginia admitted it.

“Could you faveh me with his name?”

“He is Mr. Morton P. Adams, of Boston.”

“Ah-h! and his friend--the young gentleman who laid his hand to ouh
plow and put the engine on the track last night?”

“He is Mr. Winton--a--an artist, I believe; at least, that is what I
gathered from what Mr. Adams said of him.”

Mr. Somerville Darrah laughed, a slow little laugh, deep in his chest.

“Bless youh innocent soul--he a picchuh--painteh? Not in a thousand
yeahs, my deah Virginia. He is a railroad man, and a right good one at
that. Faveh me with the name again; Winteh, did you say?”

“No; Winton--Mr. John Winton.”

“D-d-devil!” gritted the Rajah, smiting the hand-rail with his
clenched fist. “Hah! I beg your pahdon, my deahs--a meah slip of the
tongue.” And then, to the full as savagely: “By Heaven, I hope that
train will fly the track and ditch him before eveh he comes within
ordering distance of the work in Qua’tz Creek Canyon!”

“Why, Uncle Somerville--how vindictive!” cried Virginia. “Who is he,
and what has he done?”

“He is Misteh John Winton, as you informed me just now; one of the
brainiest constructing engineers in this entiah country, and the
hardest man in this or any otheh country to down in a right-of-way
fight--that’s who he is. And it’s not what he’s done, my deah
Virginia, it’s what he is going to do. If I can’t get him killed up
out of ouh way,”--but here Mr. Darrah saw the growing terror in two
pairs of eyes, and realizing that he was committing himself before an
unsympathetic audience, beat a hasty retreat to his stronghold at the
other end of the Rosemary.

“Well!” said the flaxen-haired Bessie, catching her breath. But
Virginia laughed.

“I’m glad I’m not Mr. Winton,” she said.



IV. THE CRYSTALLINE ALTITUDES


Morning in the highest highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear,
cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make
the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot.
For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour
high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote
railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue
depths of the canyon shadow.

Massive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white
above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic
torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its
descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the
station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new
and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral
gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing
mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a
looping detour.

In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the
station a graders’ camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde
of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the
shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car
of a construction train.

All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the sturdiest of mountain-climbing
locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the
Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the
mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the
siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened
when the special was passing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth
curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of
cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the
inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was--or
thought she was--the first member of the party to dress and steal out
upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the
canyon.

But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently
broken by a voice behind her--the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur
Jastrow.

“What a howling wilderness, to be sure, isn’t it?” said the secretary,
twirling his eyeglasses by the cord and looking, as he felt,
interminably bored.

“No, indeed; anything but that,” she retorted warmly. “It is grander
than anything I ever imagined. I wish there were a piano in the car.
It makes me fairly ache to set it in some form of expression, and
music is the only form I know.”

“I’m glad if it doesn’t bore you,” he rejoined, willing to agree with
her for the sake of prolonging the interview. “But to me it is nothing
more than a dreary wilderness, as I say; a barren, rock-ribbed gulch
affording an indifferent right of way for two railroads.”

“For one,” she corrected, in a quick upflash of loyalty for her kin.

The secretary shifted his gaze from the mountains to the maiden and
smiled. She was exceedingly good to look upon--high-bred, queenly, and
just now the fine fire of enthusiasm quickened her pulses and sent the
rare flush to neck and cheek.

Jastrow the cold-eyed, the business automaton, set to go off with a
click at Mr. Somerville Darrah’s touch, had ambitions not automatic.
Some day he meant to put the world of business under foot as a
conqueror, standing triumphant on the apex of that pyramid of success
which the Mr. Somerville Darrahs were so painstakingly uprearing. When
that day should come, there would need to be an establishment, a
menage, a queen for the kingdom of success. Summing her up for the
hundredth time since the beginning of the westward flight, he thought
Miss Carteret would fill the requirements passing well.

But this was a divagation, and he pulled himself back to the askings
of the moment, agreeing with her again without reference to his
private convictions.

“For one, I should have said,” he amended. “We mean to have it that
way, though an unprejudiced onlooker might be foolish enough to say
that there is a pretty good present prospect of two.”

But Miss Carteret was in a contradictory mood. Moreover, she was a
woman, and the way to a woman’s confidence does not lie through the
neutral country of easy compliance.

“If you won’t take the other side, I will,” she said. “There will be
two.”

Jastrow acquiesced a second time.

“I shouldn’t wonder. Our competitor’s road seems to be only a question
of time--a very short time, judging from the number of men turning out
in the track gang down yonder.”

Virginia leaned over the railing to look past the car and the dovecote
station shading her eyes to shut out the snow-blink from the sun-fired
peaks.

“Why, they are soldiers!” she exclaimed. “At least, some of them have
guns on their shoulders. And see--they are forming in line!”

The secretary adjusted his eye-glasses.

“By Jove! you are right; they have armed the track force. The new
chief of construction doesn’t mean to take any chances of being shaken
loose by main strength. Here they come.”

The end of track of the new line was diagonally across the creek from
the Rosemary’s berth and a short pistol-shot farther down stream. But
to advance it to a point opposite the private car, and to gain the
altitude of the high embankment directly across from the station, the
new line turned short out of the main canyon at the mouth of the
intersecting gorge, describing a long, U-shaped curve around the head
of the lateral ravine and doubling back upon itself to reenter the
canyon proper at the higher elevation.

The curve which was the beginning of this U-shaped loop was the
morning’s scene of action, and the Utah track-layers, two hundred
strong, moved to the front in orderly array, with armed guards as
flankers for the handcar load of rails which the men were pushing up
the grade.

Jastrow darted into the car, and a moment later his place on the
observation platform was taken by a wrathful industry colonel fresh
from his dressing-room--so fresh, indeed, that he was coatless,
hatless, and collarless, and with the dripping bath-sponge clutched
like a missile to hurl at the impudent invaders on the opposite side
of the canyon.

“Hah! wouldn’t wait until a man could get into his clothes!” he
rasped, apostrophizing the Utah’s new chief of construction. “Jastrow!
Faveh me instantly, seh! Hustle up to the camp there and turn out the
constable, town-marshal, or whatever he is. Tell him I have a writ for
him to serve. Run, seh!”

The secretary appeared and disappeared like a marionette when the
string has been jerked by a vigorous hand, and Virginia smiled--this
without prejudice to a very acute appreciation of the grave
possibilities which were preparing themselves. But having her share of
the militant quality which made her uncle what he was, she stood her
ground.

“Aren’t you afraid you will take cold, Uncle Somerville?” she asked
archly; and the Rajah came suddenly to a sense of his incompleteness
and went in to finish his ablutions against the opening of the battle
actual.

At first Virginia thought she would follow him. When Mercury Jastrow
should return with the officer of the law there would be trouble of
some sort, and the woman in her shrank from the witnessing of it. But
at the same instant the blood of the fighting Carterets asserted
itself and she resolved to stay.

“I wonder what uncle hopes to be able to do?” she mused. “Will a
little town constable with a bit of signed paper from some lawyer or
judge be mighty enough to stop all that furious activity over there?
It’s more than incredible.”

From that she fell to watching the activity and the orderly purpose of
it. A length of steel, with men clustering like bees upon it, would
slide from its place on the hand-car to fall with a frosty clang on
the cross-ties. Instantly the hammermen would pounce upon it. One
would fall upon hands and knees to “sight” it into place; two others
would slide the squeaking track-gage along its inner edge; a quartet,
working like the component parts of a faultless mechanism, would tap
the fixing spikes into the wood; and then at a signal a dozen of the
heavy pointed hammers swung aloft and a rhythmic volley of resounding
blows clamped the rail into permanence on its wooden bed.

Ahead of the steel-layers were the Italians placing the cross-ties in
position to receive the track, and here the foreman’s badge of office
and scepter was a pick-handle. Above all the clamor and the shoutings
Virginia could hear the bull-bellow of this foreman roaring out his
commands--in terms happily not understandable to her; and once she
drew back with a little cry of womanly shrinking when the pick-handle
thwacked upon the shoulders of one who lagged.

It was this bit of brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in
the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with
it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the
bully’s hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she
could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her
curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown
off his coat to fall to work on the derailed engine of the Limited.

“That was fine!” she said to herself. “Most men in his place wouldn’t
care, so long as the work was done, and done quickly. I wonder
if--oh, you startled me!”

It was Mr. Somerville Darrah again, clothed upon and in his right
mind; otherwise the mind of a master of men who will brook neither
defeat at the hands of an antagonist nor disobedience on the part of
his following. He was scowling fiercely across at the Utah activities
when she spoke, but at her exclamation the frown softened into a smile
for his favorite niece.

“Startled you, eh? Pahdon me, my deah Virginia. But as I am about to
startle some one else, perhaps you would better go in to your aunt.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Please let me stay out here, Uncle
Somerville,” she said. “I’ll be good and not get in the way.”

He shook his head, in deprecation rather than in refusal.

“An officer will be here right soon now to make an arrest. There may
be a fight, or at least trouble of a sort you wouldn’t care to see, my
deah.”

“Is it--is it Mr. Winton?” she asked.

He nodded.

“What has he been doing--besides being ‘The Enemy’?”

The Rajah’s smile was ferocious.

“Just now he is trespassing, and directing others to trespass, upon
private property. Do you see that dump up there on the mountain?--the
hole that looks like a mouth with a long gray beard hanging below it?
That is a mine, and its claim runs down across the track where Misteh
Winton is just now spiking his rails.”

“But, I don’t understand,” she began; then she stopped short and clung
to the strong arm. A man in a wide-flapped hat and cowboy
_chaparejos_, with a revolver on either hip, was crossing the stream
on the ice-bridge to scramble up the embankment of the new line.

“The officer?” she asked in an awed whisper.

The Rajah made a sign of assent. Then, identifying Winton in the
throng of workers, he forgot Virginia’s presence. “Confound him!” he
fumed. “I’d give a thousand dollars if he’d faveh me by showing fight
so we could lock him up on a criminal count!”

“Why, Uncle Somerville!” she cried.

But there was no time for reproaches. The leather-breeched person
parading as the Argentine town-marshal had climbed the embankment,
and, singling out his man, was reading his warrant.

Contrary to Mr. Darrah’s expressed hope, Winton submitted quietly.
With a word to his men--a word that stopped the strenuous labor-battle
as suddenly as it had begun--he turned to pick his way down the rough
hillside at the heels of the marshal.

For some reason that she could never have set out in words Virginia
was distinctly disappointed. It was no part of her desire to see the
conflict blaze up in violence, but it nettled her to see Winton give
up so easily. Some such thought as this had possession of her while
the marshal and his prisoner were picking their way across the ice,
and she was hoping that Winton would give her a chance to requite him,
if only with a look.

But it was Town-Marshal Peter Biggin, affectionately known to his
constituents as “Bigginjin Pete,” who gave her the coveted
opportunity. Instead of disappearing decently with his captive, the
marshal made the mistake of his life by marching Winton up the track
to the private car, thrusting him forward, and saying: “Here’s yer
meat, Guv’nor. What-all ‘ud ye like fer me to do with hit now I’ve
got it?”

Now it is safe to assume that the Rajah had no intention of appearing
thus openly as the instigator of Winton’s arrest. Hence, if a fierce
scowl and a wordless oath could maim, it is to be feared that the
overzealous Mr. Biggin would have been physically disqualified on the
spot. As it was, Mr. Darrah’s ebullient wrath could find no adequate
speech forms, and in the eloquent little pause Winton had time to
smile up at Miss Carteret and to wish her the pleasantest of
good-mornings.

But the Rajah’s handicap was not permanent.

“Confound you, seh!” he exploded. “I’m not a justice of the peace! If
you’ve made an arrest, you must have had a warrant for it, and you
ought to know what to do with your prisoneh.”

“I’m dashed if I do,” objected the simple-hearted Mr. Biggin. “I
allowed you wanted him.”

Winton laughed openly.

“Simplify it for him, Mr. Darrah. We all know that it was your move to
stop the work, and you have stopped it--for the moment. What is the
charge, and where is it answerable?”

The Rajah dropped the mask and spoke to the point.

“The cha’ge, seh, is trespass, and it is answerable in Judge
Whitcomb’s cou’t in Carbonate. The plaintiff in this particular case
is John Doe, the supposable owneh of that mining claim up yondeh. In
the next it will probably be Richa’d Roe. You are fighting a losing
battle, seh.”

Winton’s smile showed his teeth.

“That remains to be seen,” he countered coolly.

The Rajah waved a shapely hand toward the opposite embankment, where
the tracklayers were idling in silent groups waiting for some one in
authority to tell them what to do.

“We can do that every day, Misteh Winton. And each separate individual
arrest will cost your company twelve hours, or such a matteh--the time
required for you to go to Carbonate to give bond for your appearance.”

During this colloquy Virginia had held her ground stubbornly, this
though she felt intuitively that it would be the greatest possible
relief to all three of these men if she would go away.

But now a curious struggle as of a divided allegiance was holding her.
Of course, she wanted Mr. Somerville Darrah to win. Since he was its
advocate, his cause must be righteous and just. But against this
dutiful convincement there was a rebellious hope that Winton would not
allow himself to be beaten; or, rather, it was a feeling that she
would never forgive him if he should.

So it was that she stood with face averted lest he should see her eyes
and read the rebellious hope in them. And in spite of the precaution
he both saw and read, and made answer to the Rajah’s ultimatum
accordingly.

“Do your worst, Mr. Darrah. We have some twenty miles of steel to lay
to take us into the Carbonate yards. That steel shall go down in spite
of anything you can do to prevent it.”

Virginia waited breathless for her uncle’s reply to this cool
defiance. Quite contrary to all precedent, it was mildly
expostulatory.

“It grieves me, seh, to find you so determined to cou’t failure,” he
began; and when the whistle of the upcoming Carbonate train gave him
leave to go on: “Constable, you will find transpo’tation for yourself
and one in the hands of the station agent. Misteh Winton, that is your
train. I wish you good-morning and a pleasant journey. Come, Virginia,
we shall be late to ouh breakfast.”

Winton walked back to the station at the heels of his captor,
cudgeling his brain to devise some means of getting word to Adams.
Happily the Technologian, who had been unloading steel at the
construction camp, had been told of the arrest, and when Winton
reached the station he found his assistant waiting for him.

But now the train was at hand and time had grown suddenly precious.
Winton turned short upon the marshal.

“This is not a criminal matter, Mr. Biggin: will you give me a moment
with my friend?”

The ex-cowboy grinned. “Bet your life I will. I ain’t lovin’ that old
b’iler-buster in the private car none too hard.” And he went in to get
the passes.

“What’s up?” queried Adams, forgetting his drawl for once in a way.

“An arrest--trumped-up charge of trespass on that mining claim up
yonder. But I’ve got to go to Carbonate to answer the charge and give
bonds, just the same.”

“Any instructions?”

“Yes. When the train is out of sight and hearing, you get back over
there and drive that track-laying for every foot there is in it.”

Adams nodded. “I’ll do it, and get myself locked up, I suppose.”

“No, you won’t; that’s the beauty of it. The majesty of the law--all
there is of it in Argentine--goes with me to Carbonate in the person
of the town-marshal.”

“Oh, good--succulently good! Well, so long. I’ll look for you back on
the evening train?”

“Sure,” was the confident reply, “if the Rajah doesn’t order it to be
abandoned on my poor account.”

Ten minutes later, when the train had gone storming on its way to
Carbonate and the Rosemary party was at breakfast, the clank of steel
and the chanteys of the hammermen on the other side of the canyon
began again with renewed vigor. The Rajah threw up his head like a
war-horse scenting the battle from afar and laid his commands upon the
long-suffering secretary.

“Faveh me, Jastrow. Get out there and see what they are doing, seh.”

The secretary was back in the shortest possible interval, and his
report was concise and business-like.

“Work under full headway again, in charge of a fellow who wears a
billy-cock hat and smokes cigarettes.”

“Mr. Morton P. Adams,” said Virginia, recognizing the description.
“Will you have him arrested too, Uncle Somerville?”

But the Rajah rose hastily without replying and went to his office
state-room, followed, shadow-like, by the obsequious Jastrow.

It was some little time after breakfast, and Virginia and the Reverend
Billy were doing a constitutional on the plank platform at the
station, when the secretary came down from the car on his way to the
telegraph office.

It was Virginia who stopped him. “What do we do next, Mr. Jastrow?”
 she said; “call in the United States Army?”

For reply he handed her a telegram, damp from the copying press. It
was addressed to the superintendent of the C. G. R. at Carbonate, and
she read it without scruple.

  “Have the Sheriff of Ute County swear in a dozen deputies and come
   with them by special train to Argentine. Revive all possible titles
   to abandoned mining claims on line of the Utah Extension, and have
   Sheriff Deckert bring blank warrants to cover any emergency.

       “DARRAH V.-P.”

“That’s one of them,” said the secretary. “I daren’t show you the
other.”

“Oh, please!” she said, holding out her hand, while the Reverend Billy
considerately turned his back.

Jastrow weighed the chances of detection. It was little enough he
could do to lay her under obligations to him, and he was willing to do
that little as he could. “I guess I can trust you,” he said, and gave
her the second square of press-damp paper.

Like the first, it was addressed to the superintendent at Carbonate.
But this time the brown eyes flashed and her breath came quickly as
she read the vice-president’s cold-blooded after-thought:

  “Town-Marshal Biggin will arrive in Carbonate on Number 201 this
   A.M. with a prisoner. Have our attorneys see to it that the man is
   promptly jailed in default of bond. If he is set at liberty, as he
   is likely to be, I shall trust you to arrange for his rearrest and
   detention at all hazards.

       “D.”



V. THE LANDSLIDE


Virginia took the first step in the perilous path of the strategist
when she handed the incendiary telegram back to Jastrow.

“Poor Mr. Winton!” she said, with the real sympathy in the words made
most obviously perfunctory by the tone. “What a world of possibilities
there is masquerading behind that little word ‘arrange.’ Tell me more
about it, Mr. Jastrow. How will they ‘arrange’ it?”

“Winton’s rearrest? Nothing easier in a tough mining-camp like
Carbonate, I should say.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I can’t prophesy how Grafton will go about it, but I know what I
should do.”

Virginia’s smile was irresistible, but there was a look in the deepest
depth of the brown eyes that was sifting Mr. Arthur Jastrow to the
innermost sand-heap of his desert nature.

“How would you do it, Mr. Napoleon Jastrow?” she asked, giving him the
exact fillip on the side of gratified vanity.

“Oh, I’d fix him. He is in a frame of mind right now; and by the time
the lawyers are through drilling him in the trespass affair, he’ll be
just spoiling for a row with somebody.”

“Do you think so? Oh, how delicious! And then what?”

“Then I’d hire some plug-ugly to stumble up against him and pick a
quarrel with him. He’d do the rest--and land in the lock-up.”

Those who knew her best said it was a warning to be heeded in Miss
Virginia Carteret when her eyes were downcast and her voice sank to
its softest cadence.

“Why, certainly; how simple!” she said, taking her cousin’s arm again;
and the secretary went in to set the wires at work in Winton’s affair.

Now Miss Carteret was a woman in every fiber of her, but among her
gifts she might have counted some that were, to say the least,
super-feminine. One of these was a measure of discretion which would
have been fairly creditable in a past master of diplomacy. So, while
the sympathetic part of her was crying out for a chance to talk
Winton’s threatened danger over with some one, she lent herself
outwardly to the Reverend Billy’s mood--which was one of scenic
enthusiasm; this without prejudice to a growing determination to
intervene in behalf of fair play for Winton if she could find a way.

But the way obstinately refused to discover itself. The simple thing
to do would be to appeal to her uncle’s sense of justice. It was not
like him to fight with ignoble weapons, she thought, and a tactful
word in season might make him recall the order to the superintendent.
But she could not make the appeal without betraying Jastrow. She knew
well enough that the secretary had no right to show her the telegrams;
knew also that Mr. Somerville Darrah’s first word would be a demand to
know how she had learned the company’s business secrets. Regarding
Jastrow as little as a high-bred young woman to whom sentiment is as
the breath of life can regard a man who is quite devoid of it, she was
still far enough from the thought of effacing him.

To this expedient there was an unhopeful alternative: namely, the
sending, by the Reverend Billy, or, in the last resort, by herself, of
a warning message to Winton. But there were obstacles seemingly
insuperable. She had not the faintest notion of how such a warning
should be addressed; and again, the operator at Argentine was a
Colorado and Grand River employee, doubtless loyal to his salt, in
which case the warning message would never get beyond his
waste-basket.

“Getting too chilly for you out here? Want to go in?” asked the
Reverend Billy, when the scenic enthusiasm began to outwear itself.

“No; but I am tired of the sentry-go part of it--ten steps and a
turn,” she confessed. “Can’t we walk on the track a little way?”

Calvert saw no reason why they might not, and accordingly helped her
over to the snow-encrusted path between the rails.

“We can trot down and have a look at their construction camp, if you
like,” he suggested, and thitherward they went.

There was not much to see, after all, as the Reverend Billy remarked
when they had reached a coign of vantage below the curve. A string of
use-worn bunk cars; a “dinkey” caboose serving as the home on wheels
of the chief of construction and his assistant; a crooked siding with
a gang of dark-skinned laborers at work unloading a car of steel.
These in the immediate foreground; and a little way apart, perched
high enough on the steep slope of the mountain side to be out of the
camp turmoil, a small structure, half plank and half canvas--to wit,
the end-of-track telegraph office.

It was Virginia who first marked the boxed-up tent standing on the
slope.

“What do you suppose that little house-tent is for?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Calvert. Then he saw the wires and ventured a
guess which hit the mark.

“I didn’t suppose they would have a telegraph office,” she commented,
with hope rising again.

“Oh, yes; they’d have to have a wire--one of their own. Under the
circumstances they could hardly use ours.”

“No,” she rejoined absently. She was scanning the group of
steel-handlers in the hope that a young man in a billy-cock hat and
with a cigarette between his lips would shortly reveal himself. She
found him after a time and turned quickly to her cousin.

“There is Mr. Adams down by the engine. Do you think he would come
over and speak to us if he knew we were here?”

The Reverend Billy’s smile was of honest admiration.

“How could you doubt it? Wait here a minute and I’ll call him for
you.”

He was gone before she could reply--across the ice-bridge spanning one
of the pools, and up the rough, frozen embankment of the new line.
There were armed guards here, too, as well as at the front, and one of
them halted him at the picket line. But Adams saw and recognized him,
and presently the two were crossing to where Virginia stood waiting
for them.

“Eheu! what a little world we live in, Miss Virginia! Who would have
thought of meeting you here?” said Adams, taking her hand at the
precise elevation prescribed by good form--Boston good form.

“The shock is mutual,” she laughed. “I must say that you and Mr.
Winton have chosen a highly unconventional environment for your
sketching-field.”

“I’m down,” he admitted cheerfully; “please don’t trample on me. But
really, it wasn’t all fib. Jack does do things with a pencil--other
things besides maps and working profiles, I mean. Won’t you come over
and let me do the honors of the studio?”--with a grandiloquent
arm-sweep meant to include the construction camp in general and the
“dinkey” caboose-car in particular.

It was the invitation she would have angled for, but she was too wise
to assent too readily.

“Oh, no; I think we mustn’t. I’m afraid Mr. Winton might not like it.”

“Not like it? If you’ll come he’ll never forgive himself for not being
here to ‘shoot up’ the camp for you in person. He is away, you know;
gone to Carbonate for the day.”

“Ought we to go, Cousin Billy?” she asked, shifting, not the decision,
but the responsibility for it, to broader shoulders.

“Why not, if you care to?” said the athlete, to whom right-of-way
fights were mere matters of business in no wise conflicting with the
social ameliorations.

Virginia hesitated. There was a thing to be said to Mr. Adams, and
that without delay; but how could she say it with her cousin standing
by to make an impossible trio out of any attempted duet confidential?
A willingness to see that Winton had fair play need not carry with it
an open desertion to the enemy. She must not forget to be loyal to her
salt; and, besides, Mr. Somerville Darrah’s righteous indignation was
a possibility not lightly to be ignored.

But, the upshot of the hesitant pause was a decision to brave the
consequences--all of them; so she took Calvert’s arm for the slippery
crossing of the ice-bridge.

Once on his own domain, Adams did the honors of the camp as thoroughly
and conscientiously as if the hour held no care heavier than the
entertainment of Miss Virginia Carteret. He explained the system under
which the material was kept moving forward to the ever-advancing
front; let her watch the rhythmic swing and slide of the rails from
the car to the benches; took her up into the cab of the big “octopod”
 locomotive; gave her a chance to peep into the camp kitchen car; and
concluded by handing her up the steps of the “dinkey.”

“Oh, how comfortable!” she exclaimed, when he had shown her all the
space-saving contrivances of the field office. “And this is where you
and Mr. Winton work?”

“It is where we eat and sleep,” corrected Adams. “And speaking of
eating: it is hopelessly the wrong end of the day,--or it would be in
Boston,--but our Chinaman won’t know the difference. Let me have him
make you a dish of tea,”--and the order was given before she could
protest.

“While we are waiting for Ah Foo I’ll show you some of Jack’s
sketches,” he went on, finding a portfolio and opening it upon the
drawing-board.

“Are you quite sure Mr. Winton won’t mind?” she asked.

“Mind? He’d give a month’s pay to be here to show them himself. He is
peacock vain of his one small accomplishment, Winton is--bores me to
death with it sometimes.”

“Really?” was the mocking rejoinder, and they began to look at the
sketches.

They were heads, most of them, impressionistic studies in pencil or
pastel, with now and then a pen-and-ink bearing evidence of more
painstaking after-work. They were made on bits of map paper, the backs
of old letters, and not a few on leaves torn from an engineer’s
note-book.

“They don’t count for much in an artistic way,” said Adams, with the
brutal frankness of a friendly critic, “but they will serve to show
you that I wasn’t all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you
about Winton’s proclivities the other day.”

“I shouldn’t apologize for that, if I were you,” she retorted. “It is
well past apology, don’t you think?” And then: “What is this one?”

They had come to the last of the sketches, which was a rude map. It
was penciled on the leaf of a memorandum, and Adams recognized it as
the outline Winton had made and used in explaining the right-of-way
entanglement.

“It is a map,” he said; “one that Jack drew day before yesterday when
he was trying to make me understand the situation up here. I wonder
why he kept it? Is there anything on the other side?”

She turned the leaf, and they both went speechless for the moment. The
reverse of the scrap of cross-ruled paper held a very fair likeness of
a face which Virginia’s mirror had oftenest portrayed: a sketch
setting forth in a few vigorous strokes of the pencil the
impressionist’s ideal of the “goddess fresh from the bath.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Adams, when he could find the word for his
surprise. Then he tried to turn it off lightly. “There is a good bit
more of the artist in Jack than I have been giving him credit for.
Don’t you know, he must have got the notion for that between two
half-seconds--when you recognized me on the platform at Kansas City.
It’s wonderful!”

“So very wonderful that I think I shall keep it,” she rejoined, not
without a touch of austerity. Then she added: “Mr. Winton will
probably never miss it. If he does, you will have to explain the best
way you can.” And Adams could only say “By Jove!” again, and busy
himself with pouring the tea which Ah Foo had brought in.

In the nature of things the tea-drinking in the stuffy “dinkey”
 drawing-room was not prolonged. Time was flying. Virginia’s errand of
mercy was not yet accomplished, and Aunt Martha in her character of
anxious chaperon was not to be forgotten. Also, Miss Carteret had a
feeling that under his well-bred exterior Mr. Morton P. Adams was
chafing like any barbarian industry captain at this unwarrantable
intrusion and interruption.

So presently they all forthfared into the sun-bright, snow-blinding,
out-of-door world, and Virginia gathered up her courage and took her
dilemma by the horns.

“I believe I have seen everything now except that tent-place up
there,” she asserted, groping purposefully for her opening.

Adams called up another smile of acquiescence. “That is our telegraph
office. Would you care to see it?” He was of those who shirk all or
shirk nothing.

“I don’t know why I should care to, but I do,” she replied, with
charming and childlike wilfulness; so the three of them trudged up the
slippery path to the operator’s den on the slope.

Not to evade his hospitable duty in any part, Adams explained the use
and need of a “front” wire, and Miss Carteret was properly interested.

“How convenient!” she commented. “And you can come up here and talk to
anybody you like--just as if it were a telephone?”

“To anyone in the company’s service,” amended Adams. “It is not a
commercial wire.”

“Then let us send a message to Mr. Winton,” she suggested, playing the
part of the capricious _ingenue_ to the very upcast of a pair of
mischievous eyes. “I’ll write it and you may sign it.”

Adams stretched his complaisance the necessary additional inch and
gave her a pencil and a pad of blanks. She wrote rapidly:

  “Miss Carteret has been here admiring your drawings. She took one of
   them away with her, and I couldn’t stop her without being rude. You
   shouldn’t have done it without asking her permission. She says--”

“Oh, dear! I am making it awfully long. Does it cost so much a word?”

“No,” said Adams, not without an effort. He was beginning to be
distinctly disappointed in Miss Virginia, and was inwardly wondering
what piece of girlish frivolity he was expected to sign and send to
his chief. Meanwhile she went on writing:

  “--I am to tell you not to get into any fresh trouble--not to let
   anyone else get you into trouble; by which I infer she means that
   some attempt will be made to keep you from returning on the evening
   train.”

“There, can you send all that?” she asked sweetly, giving the pad to
her host.

Adams read the first part of the letter length telegram with inward
groanings, but the generous purpose of it struck him like a whip-blow
when he came to the thinly-veiled warning. Also it shamed him for his
unworthy judgment of Virginia.

“I thank you very heartily, Miss Carteret,” he said humbly. “It shall
be sent word for word.” Then, for the Reverend William’s benefit:
“Winton deserves all sorts of a snubbing for taking liberties with
your portrait. I’ll see he gets more when he comes back.”

Here the matter rested; and, having done what she conceived to be her
charitable duty, Virginia was as anxious to get away as heart--the
heart of a slightly bored Reverend Billy, for instance--could wish.

So they bade Adams good-by and picked their way down the frozen
embankment and across the ice-bridge; down and across and back to the
Rosemary, where they found a perturbed chaperon in a flutter of
solicitude arising upon their mysterious disappearance and long
absence.

“It may be just as well not to tell any of them where we have been,”
 said Virginia in an aside to her cousin. And so the incident of
tea-drinking in the enemy’s camp was safely put away like a little
personal note in its envelop with the flap gummed down.



VI. THE RAJAH GIVES AN ORDER


While Adams was dispensing commissary tea in iron-stone china cups to
his two guests in the “dinkey” field office, his chief, taking the
Rosemary’s night run in reverse in the company of Town-Marshal Biggin,
was turning the Rajah’s coup into a small Utah profit.

Having come upon the ground late the night before, and from the
opposite direction, he had seen nothing of the extension grade west of
Argentine. Hence the enforced journey to Carbonate only anticipated an
inspection trip which he had intended to make as soon as he had seated
Adams firmly in the track-laying saddle.

Not to miss his opportunity, at the first curve beyond Argentine he
passed his cigar-case to Biggin and asked permission to ride on the
rear platform of the day-coach for inspection purposes.

“Say, pardner, what do you take me fer, anyhow?” was the reproachful
rejoinder.

“For a gentleman in disguise,” said Winton promptly.

“Sim’larly, I do you; savvy? You tell me you ain’t goin’ to stampede,
and you ride anywhere you blame please. See? This here C. G. R. outfit
ain’t got no surcingle on me.”

Winton smiled.

“I haven’t any notion of stampeding. As it happens, I’m only a day
ahead of time. I should have made this run to-morrow of my own accord
to have a look at the extension grade. You will find me on the rear
platform when you want me.”

“Good enough,” was the reply; and Winton went to his post of
observation.

Greatly to his satisfaction, he found that the trip over the C. G. R.
answered every purpose of a preliminary inspection of the Utah grade
beyond Argentine. For seventeen of the twenty miles the two lines were
scarcely more than a stone’s throw apart, and when Biggin joined him
at the junction above Carbonate he had his note-book well filled with
the necessary data.

“Make it, all right?” inquired the friendly bailiff.

“Yes, thanks. Have another cigar?”

“Don’t care if I do. Say, that old fire-eater back yonder in the
private car has got a mighty pretty gal, ain’t he?”

“The young lady is his niece,” said Winton, wishing that Mr. Biggin
would find other food for comment.

“I don’t care; she’s pretty as a Jersey two-year-old.”

“It’s a fine day,” observed Winton; and then, to background Miss
Carteret effectually as a topic: “How do the people of Argentine feel
about the opposition to our line?”

“They’re red-hot; you can put your money on that. The C. G. R.’s a
sure-enough tail-twister where there ain’t no competition. Your
road’ll get every pound of ore in the camp if it ever gets through.”

Winton made a mental note of this up-cast of public opinion, and set
it over against the friendly attitude of the official Mr. Biggin. It
was very evident that the town-marshal was serving the Rajah’s purpose
only because he had to.

“I suppose you stand with your townsmen on that, don’t you?” he
ventured.

“Now you’re shouting: that’s me.”

“Then if that is the case, we won’t take this little holiday of ours
any harder than we can help. When the court business is settled--it
won’t take very long--you are to consider yourself my guest. We stop
at the Buckingham.”

“Oh, we do, do we? Say, pardner, that’s white--mighty white. If I’d
‘a’ been an inch or so more’n half awake this morning when that old
b’iler-buster’s hired man routed me out, I’d ‘a’ told him to go to
blazes with his warrant. Nex’ time I will.”

Winton shook his head. “There isn’t going to be any ‘next time,’
Peter, my son,” he prophesied. “When Mr. Darrah gets fairly down to
business he’ll throw bigger chunks than the Argentine town-marshal at
us.”

By this time the train was slowing into Carbonate, and a few minutes
after the stop at the crowded platform they were making their way up
the single bustling street of the town to the court-house.

“Ever see so many tin-horns and bunco people bunched in all your
round-ups?” said Biggin, as they elbowed through the uneasy shifting
groups in front of the hotel.

“Not often,” Winton admitted. “But it’s the luck of the big camps:
they are the dumping-grounds of the world while the high pressure is
on.”

The ex-range-rider turned on the courthouse steps to look the sidewalk
loungers over with narrowing eyes.

“There’s Sheeny Mike and Big Otto and half a dozen others right there
in front o’ the Buckingham that couldn’t stay to breathe twice in
Argentine. And this town’s got a po-lice!”--the comment with
lip-curling scorn.

“It also has a county court which is probably waiting for us,” said
Winton; whereupon they went in to appease the offended majesty of the
law.

As Winton had predicted, his answer to the court summons was a mere
formality. On parting with his chief at the Argentine station
platform, Adams’ first care had been to wire news of the arrest to the
Utah headquarters. Hence Winton found the company’s attorney waiting
for him in Judge Whitcomb’s courtroom, and his release on an
appearance bond was only a matter of moments.

The legal affair dismissed, there ensued a weary interval of
time-killing. There was no train back to Argentine until nearly five
o’clock in the afternoon, and the hours dragged heavily for the two,
who had nothing to do but wait. Biggin endured his part of it manfully
till the midday dinner had been discussed; then he drifted off with
one of Winton’s cigars between his teeth, saying that he should “take
poison” and shoot up the town if he could not find some more peaceful
means of keeping his blood in circulation.

It was a little after three o’clock, and Winton was sitting at the
writing-table in the lobby of the hotel elaborating his hasty notebook
data of the morning’s inspection, when a boy came in with a telegram.
The young engineer was not so deeply engrossed in his work as to be
deaf to the colloquy.

“Mr. John Winton? Yes, he is here somewhere,” said the clerk in answer
to the boy’s question; and after an identifying glance: “There he
is--over at the writing-table.”

Winton turned in his chair and saw the boy coming toward him; also he
saw the ruffian pointed out by Biggin from the court-house steps and
labeled “Sheeny Mike” lounging up to the clerk’s desk for a whispered
exchange of words with the bediamonded gentleman behind it.

What followed was cataclysmic in its way. The lounger took three
staggering lurches toward Winton, brushed the messenger boy aside, and
burst out in a storm of maudlin invective.

“Sign yerself ‘Winton’ now, do yet ye lowdown, turkey-trodden--”

“One minute,” said Winton curtly, taking the telegram from the boy and
signing for it.

“I’ll give ye more’n ye can carry away in less’n half that time--see?”
 was the minatory retort; and the threat was made good by an awkward
buffet which would have knocked the engineer out of his chair if he
had remained in it.

Now Winton’s eyes were gray and steadfast, but his hair was of that
shade of brown which takes the tint of dull copper in certain lights,
and he had a temper which went with the red in his hair rather than
with the gray in his eyes. Wherefore his attempt to placate his
assailant was something less than diplomatic.

“You drunken scoundrel!” he snapped. “If you don’t go about your
business and let me alone, I’ll turn you over to the police with a
broken bone or two!”

The bully’s answer was a blow delivered straight from the shoulder--too
straight to harmonize with the fiction of drunkenness. Winton saw the
sober purpose in it and went battle-mad, as a hasty man will. Being a
skilful boxer,--which his antagonist was not,--he did what he had to
do neatly and with commendable despatch. Down, up; down, up; down a
third time, and then the bystanders interfered.

“Hold on!”

“That’ll do!”

“Don’t you see he’s drunk?”

“Enough’s as good as a feast--let him go.”

Winton’s blood was up, but he desisted, breathing threatenings.
Whereat Biggin shouldered his way into the circle.

“Pay your bill and let’s hike out o’ this, _pronto_!” he said in a low
tone. “You ain’t got no time to fool with a Carbonate justice shop.”

But Winton was not to be brought to his senses so easily.

“Run away from that swine? Not if I know it. Let him take it into
court if he wants to. I’ll be there, too.”

The beaten one was up now and apparently looking for an officer.

“I’m takin’ ye all to witness,” he rasped. “I was on’y askin’ him to
cash up what he lost to me las’ night, and he jumps me. But I’ll stick
him if there’s any law in this camp.”

Now all this time Winton had been holding the unopened telegram
crumpled in his fist, but when Biggin pushed him out of the circle and
thrust him up to the clerk’s desk, he bethought him to read the
message. It was Virginia’s warning, signed by Adams, and a single
glance at the closing sentence was enough to cool him suddenly.

“Pay the bill, Biggin, and join me in the billiard-room, quick!” he
whispered, pressing money into the town-marshal’s hand and losing
himself in the crowd. And when Biggin had obeyed his instructions:
“Now for a back way out of this, if there is one. We’ll have to take
to the hills till train time.”

They found a way through the bar and out into a side street leading
abruptly up to the spruce-clad hills behind the town. Biggin held his
peace until they were safe from immediate danger of pursuit. Then his
curiosity got the better of him.

“Didn’t take you more’n a week to change your mind about pullin’ it
off with that tinhorn scrapper in the courts, did it?”

“No,” said Winton.

“‘Tain’t none o’ my business, but I’d like to know what stampeded
you.”

“A telegram,”--shortly. “It was a put-up job to have me locked up on a
criminal charge, and so hold me out another day.”

Biggin grinned. “The old b’iler-buster again. Say, he’s a holy terror,
ain’t he?”

“He doesn’t mean to let me build my railroad if he can help it.”

The ex-cowboy found his sack of chip tobacco and dexterously rolled a
cigarette in a bit of brown wrapping-paper.

“If that’s the game, Mr. Sheeny Mike, or his backers, will be most
likely to play it to a finish, don’t you guess?”

“How?”

“By havin’ a po-liceman layin’ for you at the train.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, I can think you out of it, I reckon. The branch train is a
‘commodation, and it’ll stop most anywhere if you throw up your hand
at it. We can take out through the woods and across the hills, and mog
up the track a piece. How’ll that do?”

“It will do for me, but there is no need of your tramping when you can
just as well ride.”

But now that side of Mr. Peter Biggin which endears him and his kind
to every man who has ever shared his lonely round-ups, or broken bread
with him in his comfortless shack, came uppermost.

“What do you take me fer?” was the way it vocalized itself; but there
was more than a formal oath of loyal allegiance in the curt question.

“For a man and a brother,” said Winton heartily; and they set out
together to waylay the outgoing train at some point beyond the danger
limit.

It was accomplished without further mishap, and the short winter day
was darkening to twilight when the train came in sight and the
engineer slowed to their signal. They climbed aboard, and when they
had found a seat in the smoker the chief of construction spoke to the
ex-cowboy as to a friend.

“I hope Adams has knocked out a good day’s work for us,” he said.

“Your pardner with the store hat and the stinkin’ cigaroots?--he’s all
right,” said Biggin; and it so chanced that at the precise moment of
the saying the subject of it was standing with the foreman of
track-layers at a gap in the new line just beyond and above the
Rosemary’s siding at Argentine, his day’s work ended, and his men
loaded on the flats for the run down to camp over the lately-laid
rails of the lateral loop.

“Not such a bad day, considering the newness of us and the bridge at
the head of the gulch,” he said, half to himself. And then more
pointedly to the foreman: “Bridge-builders to the front at the first
crack of dawn, Mike. Why wasn’t this break filled in the grading?”

“Sure, sorr, ‘tis a dhrain it is,” said the Irishman; “from the placer
up beyant,” he added, pointing to a washed-out excoriation on the
steep upper slope of the mountain. “Major Evarts did be tellin’ us
we’d have the lawyers afther us hot-fut again if we didn’t be lavin’
ut open the full width.”

“Mmph!” said Adams, looking the ground over with a critical eye. “It’s
a bad bit. It wouldn’t take much to bring that whole slide down on us
if it wasn’t frozen solid. Who owns the placer?”

“Two fellies over in Carbonate. The company did be thryin’ to buy the
claim, but the sharps wouldn’t sell--bein’ put up to hold ut by thim
C. G. R. divils. It’s more throuble we’ll be havin’ here, I’m
thinking.”

While they lingered a shrill whistle, echoing like an eldrich laugh
among the cliffs of the upper gorge, announced the coming of a train
from the direction of Carbonate. Adams looked at his watch.

“I’d like to know what that is,” he mused. “It’s an hour too soon for
the accommodation. By Jove!”

The exclamation directed itself at a one-car train which came
thundering down the canyon to pull in on the siding beyond the
Rosemary. The car was a passenger coach, well-lighted, and from his
post on the embankment Adams could see armed men filling the windows.
Michael Branagan saw them, too, and the fighting Celt in him rose to
the occasion.

“‘Tis Donnybrook Fair we’ve come to this time, Misther Adams. Shall I
call up the b’ys wid their guns?”

“Not yet. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

What happened was a peaceful sortie. Two men, each with a kit of some
kind borne in a sack, dropped from the car, crossed the creek, and
struggled up the hill through the unbridged gap. Adams waited until
they were fairly on the right of way, then he called down to them.

“Halt, there! you two. This is corporation property.”

“Not much it ain’t!” retorted one of the trespassers gruffly. “It’s
the drain-way from our placer up yonder.”

“What are you going to do up there at this time of night?”

“None o’ your blame business!” was the explosive counter-shot.

“Perhaps it isn’t,” said Adams mildly. “Just the same, I’m thirsting
to know. Call it vulgar curiosity if you like.”

“All right, you can know, and be cussed to you. We’re goin’ to work
our claim. Got anything to say against it?”

“Oh! no,” rejoined Adams; and when the twain had disappeared in the
upper darkness he went down the grade with Branagan and took his place
on the man-loaded flats for the run to the construction camp, thinking
more of the lately-arrived car with its complement of armed men than
of the two miners who had calmly announced their intention of working
a placer claim on a high mountain, without water, and in the dead of
winter! By which it will be seen that Mr. Morton P. Adams,
C. E. M. I. T. Boston, had something yet to learn in the matter of
practical field work.

By the time Ah Foo had served him his solitary supper in the dinkey he
had quite forgotten the incident of the mysterious placer miners.
Worse than this, it had never occurred to him to connect their
movements with the Rajah’s plan of campaign. On the other hand, he was
thinking altogether of the carload of armed men, and trying to devise
some means of finding out how they were to be employed in furthering
the Rajah’s designs.

The means suggested themselves after supper, and he went alone over to
Argentine to spend a half-hour in the bar of the dance-hall listening
to the gossip of the place. When he had learned what he wanted to
know, he forthfared to meet Winton at the incoming train.

“We are in for it now,” he said, when they had crossed the creek to
the dinkey and the Chinaman was bringing Winton’s belated supper. “The
Rajah has imported a carload of armed mercenaries, and he is going to
clean us all out to-morrow: arrest everybody from the gang foremen
up.”

Winton’s eyebrows lifted. “So? that is a pretty large contract. Has he
men enough to do it?”

“Not so many men. But they are sworn-in deputies, with the sheriff of
Ute County in command--a posse, in fact. So he has the law on his
side.”

“Which is more than he had when he set a thug on me this afternoon at
Carbonate,” said Winton sourly; and he told Adams about the
misunderstanding in the lobby of the Buckingham. His friend whistled
under his breath. “By Jove! that’s pretty rough. Do you suppose the
Rajah dictated any such Lucretia Borgia thing as that?”

Winton took time to think about it and admitted a doubt, as he had not
before. Believing Mr. Somerville Darrah fit for treasons, stratagems,
and spoils in his official capacity of vice-president of a fighting
corporation, he was none the less disposed to find excuses for Miss
Virginia Carteret’s uncle.

“I did think so at first, but I guess it was only the misguided zeal
of some understrapper. Of course, word has gone out all along the
C. G. R. line that we are to be delayed by every possible expedient.”

But Adams shook his head.

“Mr. Darrah dictated that move in his own proper person.”

“How do you know that?”

“You had a message from me this afternoon?”

“I did.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I thought you might have left out the first part of it; also that you
might have made the latter half a good bit more explicit.”

A slow smile spread itself over Adams’ impassive face.

“Every man has his limitations,” he said. “I did the best I could. But
the Rajah knew very well what he was about--otherwise there would have
been no telegram.”

Winton sent the Chinaman out for another cup of tea before he said,
“Did Miss Carteret come here alone?”

“Oh, no; Calvert came with her.”

“What brought them here?”

Adams spread his hands.

“What makes any woman do precisely the most unexpected thing?”

Winton was silent for a moment. Finally he said: “I hope you did what
you could to make it pleasant for her.”

“I did. And I didn’t hear her complain.”

“That was low-down in you, Morty.”

Adams chuckled reminiscently. “Had to do it to make my day-before-yesterday
lie hold water. And she was immensely taken with the scrawls, especially
with one of them.”

Winton flushed under the bronze.

“I suppose I don’t need to ask which one.”

Adams’ grin was a measure of his complacence.

“Well, hardly.”

“She took it away with her?”

“Took it, or tore it up, I forget which.”

“Tell me, Morty, was she very angry?”

The other took the last hint of laughter out of his eyes before he
said solemnly: “You’ll never know how thankful I was that you were
twenty miles away.”

Winton’s cup was full, and he turned the talk abruptly to the
industrial doings and accomplishments of the day. Adams made a verbal
report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when
he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but,
strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the
incident of the upward-climbing miners.

When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the
engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward
he left the dinkey ostensibly to do it, declining Adams’ offer of
company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator’s
tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in
his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.

“That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?” he asked.

“No, go to sleep. I’ll write a wire and leave it for you to send in
the morning.”

He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief
report of the day’s progress in track-laying for the general manager’s
record. But when Carter’s regular breathing told him he was alone he
pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until
he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at
the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.

“Um,” he said, and his heart grew warm within him. “It’s just about as
I expected: Morty didn’t have anything whatever to do with it--except
to sign and send it as she commanded him to.” And the penciled sheet
was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast
pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.

The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished
the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp
buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the
dinkey. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a
round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout
against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the
newly-laid track of the day.

Another half-hour had elapsed, and a waning moon was clearing the
topmost crags of Pacific Peak when he came out on the high embankment
opposite the Rosemary, having traversed the entire length of the
lateral loop and inspected the trestle at the gulch head by the light
of a blazing spruce-branch.

The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little
mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of
the moon. The engine of the sheriff’s car was humming softly with a
note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in
Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked
piano floated out upon the frosty night air.

Winton turned to go back. The windows of the Rosemary were all dark,
and there was nothing to stay for. So he thought, at all events; but
if he had not been musing abstractedly upon things widely separated
from his present surroundings, he might have remarked two tiny stars
of lantern-light high on the placer ground above the embankment; or,
failing the sight, he might have heard the dull, measured _slumph_
of a churn-drill burrowing deep in the frozen earth of the slope.

As it was, a pair of brown eyes blinded him, and the tones of a voice
sweeter than the songs of Oberon’s sea-maid filled his ears. Wherefore
he neither saw nor heard; and taking the short cut across the mouth of
the lateral gulch back to camp, he boarded the dinkey and went to bed
without disturbing Adams.

The morning of the day to come broke clear and still, with the stars
paling one by one at the pointing finger of the dawn, and the
frost-rime lying thick and white like a snowfall of erect and
glittering needles on iron and steel and wood.

Obedient to orders, the bridge-builders were getting out their
hand-car at the construction camp, the wheels shrilling merrily on the
frosted rails, and the men stamping and swinging their arms to start
the sluggish night-blood. Suddenly, like the opening gun of a battle,
the dull rumble of a mighty explosion trembled upon the still air,
followed instantly by a sound as of a passing avalanche.

Winton was out and running up the track before the camp was fairly
aroused. What he saw when he gained the hither side of the lateral
gulch was a sight to make a strong man weep. A huge landslide,
starting from the frozen placer ground high up on the western
promontory, had swept every vestige of track and embankment into the
deep bed of the creek at a point precisely opposite Mr. Somerville
Darrah’s private car.



VII. THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW


Virginia was up and dressed when the sullen shock of the explosion
set the windows jarring in the Rosemary.

She hurried out upon the observation platform and so came to look
upon the ruin wrought by the landslide while the dust-like smoke of
the dynamite still hung in the air.

“Rather unlucky for our friends the enemy,” said a colorless voice
behind her; and she had an uncomfortable feeling that Jastrow had
been lying in wait for her.

She turned upon him quickly.

“Was it an accident, Mr. Jastrow?”

“How could it be anything else?” he inquired mildly.

“I don’t know. But there was an explosion: I heard it.”

“It is horribly unfair,” she went on. “I understand the sheriff is
here. Couldn’t he have prevented this?”

The secretary’s rejoinder was a platitude: “Everything is fair in
love or war.”

“But this is neither,” she retorted.

“Think not?” he said coolly. “Wait, and you’ll see. And a word in
your ear, Miss Carteret: you are one of us, you know, and you mustn’t
be disloyal. I know what you did yesterday after you read those
telegrams.”

Virginia’s face became suddenly wooden. Until that moment it had not
occurred to her that Jastrow’s motive in showing her the two telegrams
might have been carefully calculated.

“I have never given you the right to speak to me that way, Mr.
Jastrow,” she said, with the faintest possible emphasis on the
courtesy prefix; and with that she turned from him to focus her
field-glass on the construction camp below.

At the Utah stronghold all was activity of the fiercest. Winton had
raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive
with men clustering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the
material-train to be taken to the front.

While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia
saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling
the men were off and at work.

Virginia’s color rose and the brown eyes filled swiftly. One part
of her ideal was courage of the sort that rises the higher for
reverses. But at the instant she remembered the secretary, and, lest
he should spy upon her emotion, she turned and took refuge in the
car.

In the Rosemary the waiter was laying the plates for breakfast, and
Bessie and the Reverend William were at the window, watching the
stirring industry battle now in full swing on the opposite slope.
Virginia joined them.

“Isn’t it a shame!” she said. “Of course, I want our side to win;
but it seems such a pity that we can’t fight fairly.”

Calvert said, “Isn’t what a shame?” thereby eliciting a crisp
explanation from Virginia in which she set well-founded suspicion
in the light of fact.

The Reverend Billy shook his head.

“Such things may be within the law--of business; but they will surely
breed bad blood--”

The interruption was the Rajah in his proper person, bustling out
fiercely to a conference with his Myrmidons. By tacit consent the
three at the window fell silent.

There was a hasty mustering of armed men under the windows of the
Rosemary, and they heard Sheriff Deckert’s low-voiced instructions
to his posse.

“Take it slow and easy, boys, and don’t get rattled. Now, then; guns
to the front! Steady!”

The Reverend Billy rose.

“What are you going to do?” said Virginia.

“I’m going to give Winton a tip if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

She shook her head and pointed eastward to the mouth of the lateral
gulch. Under cover of a clump of evergreen-scrub a man in a
wideflapped hat and leather breeches was climbing swiftly to the level
of the new line, cautiously waving a handkerchief as a peace token.
“That is the man who arrested Mr. Winton yesterday. This time he is
going to fight on the other side. He’ll carry the warning.”

“Think so?” said Calvert.

“I am sure of it. Open the window, please. I want to see better.”

As yet there was no sign of preparation on the embankment. For the
moment the rifles of the track force were laid aside, and every man
was plying pick or shovel.

Winton was in the thick of the pick-and-shovel melee, urging it on,
when Biggin ran up.

“Hi!” he shouted. “Fixin’ to take another play-day in Carbonate?
Lookee down yonder!”

Winton looked and became alive to the possibilities in the turning
of a leaf.

“Guns!” he yelled; and at the word of command the tools were flung
aside, and the track force, over two hundred strong, became an army.

“Mulcahey, take half the men and go up the grade till you can rake
those fellows without hitting the car. Branagan, you take the other
half and go down till you can cross-fire with Mulcahey. Aim low, both
of you; and the man who fires before he gets the word from me will
break his neck at a rope’s end. Fall in!”

“By Jove!” said Adams. “Are you going to resist? That spells felony,
doesn’t it?”

Winton pointed to the waiting octopod.

“I’m going to order the Two-fifteen down out of the way: you may go
with her if you like.”

“I guess not!” quoth the assistant, calmly lighting a fresh cigarette.
And then to the water-boy, who was acting quartermaster: “Give me
a rifle and a cartridge-belt, Chunky, and I’ll stay here with the
boss.”

“And where do I come in?” said Biggin to Winton reproachfully.

“You’ll stay out, if your head’s level. You’ve done enough already
to send you to Canyon City.”

“I ain’t a-forgettin’ nothing,” said Peter cheerfully, casting himself
flat behind a heap of earth on the dump-edge.

While the sheriff’s posse was picking its way gingerly over the loose
rock and earth dam formed by the landslide, the window went up in
the Rosemary and Winton saw Virginia. Without meaning to, she gave
him his battle-word.

“We are a dozen Winchesters to your one, Mr. Deckert, and we shall
resist force with force. Order your men back or there will be
trouble.”

Winton stood out on the edge of the cutting, a solitary figure where
a few minutes before the earth had been flying from a hundred shovels.

The sheriff’s reply was an order, but not for retreat.

“He’s one of the men we want; cover him!” he commanded.

Unless the public occasion appeals strongly to the sympathies or the
passions, a picked-up sheriff’s posse is not likely to have very good
metal in it. Peter Biggin laughed.

“Don’t be no ways nervous,” he said in an aside to Winton. “Them
professional veniry chumps couldn’t hit the side o’ Pacific Peak.”

Winton held his ground, while the sheriff tried to drive his men up
a bare slope commanded by two hundred rifles to right and left. The
attempt was a humiliating failure. Being something less than soldiers
trained to do or die, the deputies hung back to a man.

Virginia could not forbear a smile. The sheriff burst into caustic
profanity. Whereupon Mr. Peter Biggin rose up and sent a bullet to
plow a little furrow in the ice within an inch of Deckert’s heels.

“Ex-cuse _me_, Bart,” he drawled, “but no cuss words don’t go.”

The sheriff ignored Peter Biggin as a person who could be argued with
at leisure and turned to Winton.

“Come down!” he bellowed.

Winton laughed.

“Let me return the invitation. Come up, and you may read your warrants
to us all day.”

Deckert withdrew his men, and at Winton’s signal the track-layers
came in and the earth began to fly again.

Virginia sighed her relief, and Bessie plucked up courage to go to
the window, which she had deserted in the moment of impending battle.

“Breakfast is served,” announced the waiter as calmly as if the
morning meal were the only matter of consequence in a world of
happenings.

They gathered about the table, a silent trio made presently a quartet
by the advent of Mrs. Carteret, who had neither seen nor heard
anything of the warlike episode with which the day had begun.

Mr. Darrah was late, so late that when he came in, Virginia was the
only one of the four who remained at table. She stayed to pour his
coffee and to bespeak peace.

“Uncle Somerville, can’t we win without calling in these horrid men
with their guns?”

A mere shadow of a grim smile came and went in the Rajah’s eyes.

“An unprejudiced outsideh might say that the ‘horrid men with their
guns’ were on top of that embankment, my deah--ten to ouh one,” he
remarked.

“But I should think we might win in some other way,” Virginia
persisted undauntedly.

Mr. Darrah pushed his plate aside and cleared his throat.

“For business reasons which you--ah--wouldn’t undehstand, we can’t
let the Utah finish this railroad of theirs into Carbonate this
winteh.”

“So much I have inferred. But Mr. Winton seems to be very determined.”

“Mmph! I wish Mr. Callowell had favehed us with some one else--any
one else. That young fellow is a bawn fighteh, my deah.”

Virginia had a bright idea, and she advanced it without examining
too closely into its ethical part.

“Mr. Winton is working for wages, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Of cou’se; big money, at that. His sawt come high.”

“Well, why can’t you hire him away from the other people? Mr.
Callowell might not be so fortunate next time.”

The Rajah sat back in his chair and regarded her thoughtfully.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing my deah--nothing at all. I was just wondering how a
woman’s--ah--sense of propo’tion was put togetheh. But your plan has
merit. Do I understand that you will faveh me with your help?”

“Why, ye-es, certainly, if I can,” she assented, not without dubiety.
“That is, I’ll be nice to Mr. Winton.”

“That is precisely what I mean, my deah. We’ll begin by having him
heah to dinneh this evening, him and the otheh young man--what’s his
name?--Adams.”

And the upshot of the matter was a dainty note which found its way
by the hands of the private-car porter to Winton, laboring manfully
at his task of repairing the landslide damages.

“Mr. Somerville Darrah’s compliments to Mr. John Winton and Mr. Morton
P. Adams, and he will be pleased if they will dine with the party
in the car Rosemary at seven o’clock.

“Informal.

“Wednesday, December the Ninth.”



VIII. THE GREEKS BRINGING GIFTS


Adams said “By Jove!” in his most cynical drawl when Winton gave him
the dinner-bidding to read: then he laughed.

Winton recovered the dainty note, folding it carefully and putting it
in his pocket. The handwriting was the same as that of the telegram
abstracted from Operator Carter’s sending-book.

“I don’t see anything to laugh at,” he objected.

“No? First the Rajah sends the sheriff’s posse packing without
striking a blow, and now he invites us to dinner.”

“You make me exceedingly tired at odd moments, Morty. Why can’t you
give Mr. Darrah the credit of being what he really is at bottom--a
right-hearted Virginia gentleman of the old school?”

“You don’t mean that you are going to accept!” said Adams, aghast.

“Certainly; and so are you.”

There was no more to be said, and Adams held his peace while Winton
scribbled a line of acceptance on a leaf of his note-book and sent it
across to the Rosemary by the hand of the water-boy.

Their reception at the steps of the Rosemary was a generous proof of
the aptness of that aphorism which sums up the status _post bellum_ in
the terse phrase, “After war, peace.” Mr. Darrah met them; was
evidently waiting for them.

“Come in, gentlemen; come in and be at home,”--this with a hand for
each. “Virginia allowed you wouldn’t faveh us, but I assured her she
didn’t rightly know men of the world: told her that a picayune
business affair in which we are all acting as corporation proxies
needn’t spell out anything like a blood feud between gentlemen.”

For another man the informal table gathering might have been easily
prohibitive of confidences _a deux_, even with a Virginia Carteret to
help, but Winton was far above the trammelings of time and place. He
had eyes and ears only for the sweet-faced, low-voiced young woman
beside him, and some of his replies to the others were irrelevant
enough to send a smile around the board.

“How very absent-minded Mr. Winton seems to be this evening!” murmured
Bessie from her niche between Adams and the Reverend Billy at the
farther end of the table. “He isn’t quite at his best, is he, Mr.
Adams?”

“No, indeed,” said Adams, matching her undertone, “very far from it.
He has been a bit off all day: touch of mountain fever, I’m afraid.”

“But he doesn’t look at all ill,” objected Miss Bessie. “I should say
he is a perfect picture of rude health.”

The coffee was served, and Mrs. Carteret was rising. Whereupon Miss
Virginia handed her cup to Adams, and so had him for her companion in
the tete-a-tete chair, leaving Winton to shift for himself.

The shifting process carried him over to the Rajah and the Reverend
Billy, to a small table in a corner of the compartment, and the
enjoyment of a mild cigar.

Later, when Calvert had been eliminated by Miss Bessie, Winton looked
to see the true inwardness of the dinner-bidding made manifest by his
host.

But Mr. Darrah chatted on, affably noncommittal, and after a time
Winton began to upbraid himself for suspecting the ulterior motive.
And when he finally rose to excuse himself on a letter-writing plea,
his leave-taking was that of the genial host reluctant to part company
with his guest.

“I’ve enjoyed your conve’sation, seh; enjoyed it right much. May I
hope you will faveh us often while we are neighbors?”

Winton rose, made the proper acknowledgments, and would have crossed
the compartment to make his adieus to Mrs. Carteret. But at that
moment Virginia came between.

“You are not going yet, are you, Mr. Winton? Don’t hurry. If you are
dying to smoke a pipe, as Mr. Adams says you are, we can go out on the
platform. It isn’t too cold, is it?”

“It is clear and frosty, a beautiful night,” he hastened to say. “May
I help you with your coat?”

So presently Winton had his heart’s desire, which was to be alone with
Virginia.

She nerved herself for the plunge,--her uncle’s plunge.

“Your part in the building of this other railroad is purely a business
affair, is it not?”

“My personal interest? Quite so; a mere matter of dollars and cents,
you may say.”

“If you should have another offer, from some other company--”

“That is not your argument; it is Mr. Darrah’s. You know well enough
what is involved: honor, integrity, good faith, everything a man
values, or should value. I can’t believe you would ask such a
sacrifice of me--of any man.

“Indeed, I do not ask it, Mr. Winton. But it is only fair that you
should have your warning. My uncle will leave no stone unturned to
defeat you.”

He was still looking into her eyes, and so had courage to say what
came uppermost.

“I don’t care: I shall fight him as hard as I can, but I shall always
be his debtor for this evening. Do you understand?”

In a flash her mood changed and she laughed lightly.

“Who would think it of you, Mr. Winton. Of all men I should have said
you were the last to care so much for the social diversions. Shall we
go in?”



IX. THE BLOCK SIGNAL.
If Mr. John Winton, C. E., stood in need of a moral tonic, as Adams
had so delicately intimated to Miss Bessie Carteret, it was
administered in quantity sufficient before he slept on the night of
dinner-givings.

For a clear-eyed theorist, free from all heart-trammelings and able to
grasp the unsentimental fact, the enemy’s new plan of campaign wrote
itself quite legibly. With his pick and choice among the time-killing
expedients the Rajah could scarcely have found one more to his purpose
than the private car Rosemary, including in its passenger list a Miss
Virginia Carteret.

All of which Adams, substituting friendly frankness for the
disciplinary traditions of the service, set forth in good Bostonian
English for the benefit and behoof of his chief, and was answered
according to his deserts with scoffings and deridings.

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Morty, and I’m not so desperately asinine as
you seem to think,” was the besotted one’s summing-up. “I know the
Rajah doesn’t split hairs in a business fight, but he is hardly
unscrupulous enough to use Miss Carteret as a cat’s-paw.”

But Adams would not be scoffed aside so easily.

“You’re off in your estimate of Mr. Darrah, Jack, ‘way off. I know the
tradition: that a Southern gentleman is all chivalry when it comes to
a matter touching his womankind, and I don’t controvert it as a
general proposition. But the Rajah has been a fighting Western
railroad magnate so long that his accent is about the only Southern
asset he has retained. If I’m any good at guessing, he will stick at
nothing to gain his end.”

Winton admitted the impeachment without prejudice to his own point of
view.

“Perhaps you are right. But forewarned is forearmed. And Miss Virginia
is not going to lend herself to any such nefarious scheme.”

“Not consciously, perhaps; but you don’t know her yet. If she saw a
good chance to take the conceit out of you, she’d improve it--without
thinking overmuch of the possible consequences to the Utah company.”

“Pshaw!” said Winton. “That is another of your literary inferences.
I’ve met her only twice, yet I venture to say I know her better than
you do. If she cared anything for me--which she doesn’t--”

“Oh, go to sleep!” said Adams, who was not minded to argue further
with a man besotted; and so the matter went by default for the time.

But in the days that followed, days in which the sun rose and set in
cloudless winter splendor and the heavy snows still held aloof, Adams’
prediction wrought itself out into sober fact. After the single appeal
to force, Mr. Darrah seemed to give up the fight. None the less, the
departure of the Rosemary was delayed, and its hospitable door was
always open to the Utah chief of construction and his assistant.

It was very deftly done, and even Adams, the clear-eyed, could not
help admiring the Rajah’s skilful finesse. Of formal dinner-givings
there might easily have been an end, since the construction camp had
nothing to offer in return. But the formalities were studiously
ignored, and the two young men were put upon a footing of intimacy and
encouraged to come and go as they pleased.

Winton took his welcome broadly, as what lover would not? and within a
week was spending most of his evenings in the Rosemary--this at a time
when every waking moment of the day and night was deeply mortgaged to
the chance of success. For now that the Rajah had withdrawn his
opposition, Nature and the perversity of inanimate things had taken a
hand, and for a fortnight the work of track-laying paused fairly
within sight of the station at Argentine.

First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into
Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower
canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate
piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for
the purpose--a process which effectually blocked the track for three
entire days. Next it was another landslide (unhelped by dynamite,
this) just above the station, a crawling cataract of loose, sliding
shale which, painstakingly dug out and dammed with plank bulkhead
during the day, would pour down and bury bulkhead, buttresses, and the
very right of way in the night.

In his right mind--the mind of an ambitious young captain of industry
who sees defeat with dishonor staring him in the face--Winton would
have fought all the more desperately for these hindrances. But,
unfortunately, he was no longer an industry captain with an eye single
to success. He was become that anomaly despised of the working
world--a man in love.

“It’s no use shutting our eyes to the fact, Jack,” said Adams one
evening, when his chief was making ready for his regular descent upon
the Rosemary. “We shall have to put night shifts at work on that
shale-slide if we hope ever to get past it with the rails.”

“Hang the shale!” was the impatient rejoinder. “I’m no galley slave.”

Adams’ slow smile came and went in cynical ripplings.

“It is pretty difficult to say precisely what you are just now. But I
can prophesy what you are going to be if you don’t wake up and come
alive.”

Having no reply to this, Adams went back to the matter of night
shifts.

“If you will authorize it, I’ll put a night gang on and boss it
myself. What do you say?”

“I say you are no end of a good fellow, Morty. And that’s the plain
fact. I’ll do as much for you some time.”

“I’ll be smashed if you will--you’ll never get the chance. When I let
a pretty girl make a fool of me--”

But the door of the dinkey slammed behind the outgoing one, and the
prophet of evil was left to organize his night assault on the
shale-slide, and to command it as best he could.

So, as we say, the days, days of stubborn toil with the enthusiasm
taken out, slipped away unfruitful. Of the entire Utah force Adams
alone held himself up to the mark, and being only second in command,
he was unable to keep the bad example of the chief from working like
a leaven of inertness among the men. Branagan voiced the situation in
rich brogue one evening when Adams had exhausted his limited
vocabulary of abuse on the force for its apathy. “‘Tis no use, ava,
Misther Adams. If you was the boss himself ‘twould be you as would put
the comether on thim too quick. But it’s ‘like masther, like mon.’ The
b’ys all know that Misther Winton don’t care a damn; and they’ll not
be hurtin’ thimselves wid the wurrk.”

And the Rajah? Between his times of smoking high-priced cigars with
Winton in the lounging-room of the Rosemary, he was swearing Jubilates
in the privacy of his working-den state-room, having tri-daily weather
reports wired to him by way of Carbonate and Argentine station, and
busying himself in the intervals with sending and receiving sundry
mysterious telegrams in cipher.

Thus Mr. Somerville Darrah, all going well for him until one fateful
morning when he made the mistake of congratulating his ally. Then--but
we picture the scene: Mr. Darrah late to his breakfast, being just in
from an early-morning reconnaissance of the enemy’s advancings;
Virginia sitting opposite to pour his coffee. All the others vanished
to some limbo of their own.

The Rajah rubbed his hands delightedly.

“We are coming on famously, famously, my deah Virginia. Two weeks
gone, heavy snows predicted for the mountain region, and nothing,
practically nothing at all, accomplished on the otheh side of the
canyon. When you marry, my deah, you shall have a block of C. G. R.
preferred stock to keep you in pin-money.”

“I?” she queried. “But, Uncle Somerville, I don’t understand--”

The Rajah laughed.

“That was a very pretty blush, my deah. Bless your innocent soul, if
I were young Misteh Winton, I’m not sure but I should consideh the
game well lost.”

She was gazing at him wide-eyed now, and the blush had left a pallor
behind it.

“You mean that I--that I--”

“I mean that you are a helpeh worth having, Miss Carteret. Anotheh
time Misteh Winton won’t pay cou’t to a cha’ming young girl and try to
build a railroad at one and the same moment, I fancy. Hah!”

The startled eyes veiled themselves swiftly, and Virginia’s voice sank
to its softest cadence.

“Have I been an accomplice,” she began, “in this--this despicable
thing, Uncle Somerville?”

Mr. Darrah began a little to see his mistake.

“Ah--an accomplice? Oh, no, my deah Virginia, not quite that. The word
smacks too much of the po-lice cou’ts. Let us say that Misteh Winton
has found your company mo’ attractive than that of his laborehs, and
commend his good taste in the matteh.”

So much he said by way of damping down the fire he had so rashly
lighted. Then Jastrow came in with one of the interminable cipher
telegrams and Virginia was left alone.

For a time she sat at the deserted breakfast-table, dry-eyed,
hot-hearted, thinking such thoughts as would come crowding thickly
upon the heels of such a revelation. Winton would fail: a man with
honor, good repute, his entire career at stake, as he himself had
admitted, would go down to miserable oblivion and defeat, lacking some
friendly hand to smite him alive to a sense of his danger. And, in her
uncle’s estimation, at least, she, Virginia Carteret, would figure as
the Delilah triumphant.

She rose, tingling to her finger-tips with the shame of it, went to
her state-room, and found her writing materials. In such a crisis her
methods could be as direct as a man’s. Winton was coming again that
evening. He must be stopped and sent about his business.

So she wrote him a note, telling him he must not come--a note man-like
in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even
the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come.
And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon
to undertake its delivery.

When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss
Carteret’s mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the
Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling
on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new
line.

Truth to tell, Virginia’s messenger was not unwilling to spend a
little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was
beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss
Bessie, ennuye on the one hand and despondent on the other.

Why could not the Cousin Bessies see, without being told in so many
words, that the heart of a man may have been given in times long past
to another woman?--to a Cousin Virginia, let us say. And why must the
Cousin Virginias, passing by the lifelong devotion of a kinsman lover,
throw themselves--if one must put it thus brutally--fairly at the head
of an acquaintance of a day?

So questioning the immensities, the Reverend Billy came out after some
little time in a small upland valley where the two lines, old and new,
ran parallel at the same level, with low embankments less than a
hundred yards apart.

Midway of the valley the hundred-yard interspace was bridged by a
hastily-constructed spur track starting from a switch on the Colorado
and Grand River main line, and crossing the Utah right of way at a
broad angle. On this spur, at its point of intersection with the new
line, stood a heavy locomotive, steam up, and manned in every inch of
its standing-room by armed guards.

The situation explained itself, even to a Reverend Billy. The Rajah
had not been idle during the interval of dinner-givings and social
divagations. He had acquired the right of way across the Utah’s line
for his blockading spur; had taken advantage of Winton’s inalertness
to construct the track; and was now prepared to hold the crossing with
a live engine and such a show of force as might be needful.

Calvert turned back from the entrance of the valley, and was minded,
in a spirit of fairness, to pass the word concerning the new
obstruction on to the man who was most vitally concerned. But alas!
even a Reverend Billy may not always arise superior to his hamperings
as a man and a lover. Here was defeat possible--nay, say rather defeat
probable--for a rival, with the probability increasing with each hour
of delay. Calvert fought it out by length and by breadth a dozen times
before he came in sight of the track force toiling at the shale-slide.
Should he tell Winton, and so, indirectly, help to frustrate Mr.
Darrah’s well-laid plan? Or should he hold his peace and thus,
indirectly again, help to defeat the Utah company?

He put it that way in decent self-respect. Also he assured himself
that the personal equation as between two lovers of one and the same
woman was entirely eliminated. But who can tell which motive it was
that prompted him to turn aside before he came to the army of toilers
at the slide: to turn and cross the stream and make as wide a detour
as the nature of the ground would permit, passing well beyond call
from the other side of the canyon?

The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not
take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down
the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of
Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath
the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought
him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally
toward the station and the private car.

“I can’t do it: I can’t turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat.
And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have
no right to go: it is not for me to pass upon the justice of this
petty war between rival corporations.”

Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far
subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you
may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where
a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious
ointment?

The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to
the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond
Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia
from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the
evening.

But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the
time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again,
of a woman’s determination to know pitted against a truthful man’s
blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about
Calvert had betrayed the Rajah’s secret--which was also the secret of
the cipher telegrams.

Miss Carteret said little--said nothing, indeed, that an anxious
kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she
donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform,
whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.

But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage---or fewer
scruples. When Miss Carteret let herself out of the rear door, Jastrow
disappeared in the opposite direction, passing through the forward
vestibule and dropping cat-like from the step to inch his way silently
over the treacherous snow-crust to a convenient spying place at the
other end of the car.

Unfortunately for the spying purpose, the shades were drawn behind the
two great windows and the glass door, but the starlight sufficed to
show the watcher a shadowy Miss Virginia standing motionless on the
side which gave her an outlook down the canyon, leaning out, it might
be, to anticipate the upcoming of some one from the construction camp
below.

The secretary, shivering in the knife-like wind slipping down from the
bald peaks, had not long to wait. By the time his eyes were fitted to
the darkness he heard a man coming up the track, the snow crunching
frostily under his steady stride. Jastrow ducked under the platform
and gained a viewpoint on the other side of the car. The crunching
footfalls had ceased, and a man was swinging himself up to the forward
step of the Rosemary. At the instant a voice just above the spy’s head
called softly, “Mr. Winton!” and the new-comer dropped back into the
snow and came tramping to the rear.

It was an awkward moment for Jastrow; but he made shift to dodge
again, and so to be out of the way when the engineer drew himself up
and climbed the hand-rail to stand beside his summoner.

The secretary saw him take her hand and heard her exclamation, half
indignant, wholly reproachful:

“You had my note: I told you not to come!”

“So you did, and yet you were expecting me,” he asserted. He was still
holding her hand, and she could not--or did not--withdraw it.

“Was I, indeed!” There was a touch of the old-time raillery in the
words, but it was gone when she added: “Oh, why will you keep on
coming and coming when you know so well what it means to you and your
work?”

“I think you know the answer to that better than anyone,” he rejoined,
his voice matching hers for earnestness. “It is because I love you;
because I could not stay away if I should try. Forgive me, dear; I did
not mean to speak so soon. But you said in your note that you would be
leaving Argentine immediately--that I should not see you again: so I
had to come. Won’t you give me a word, Virginia?--a waiting word, if
it must be that?”

Jastrow held his breath, hope dying within him and sullen ferocity
crouching for the spring if her answer should urge it on. But when she
spoke the secretary’s anger cooled and he breathed again.

“No: a thousand times, no!” she burst out passionately; and Winton
staggered as if the suddenly-freed hand had dealt him a blow.



X. SPIKED SWITCHES


For a little time after Virginia’s passionate rejection of him Winton
stood abashed and confounded. Weighed in the balance of the
after-thought, his sudden and unpremeditated declaration could plead
little excuse in encouragement. And yet she had been exceedingly kind
to him.

“I have no right to expect a better answer,” he said finally, when he
could trust himself to speak. “But I am like other men: I should like
to know why.”

“You can ask that?” she retorted. “You say you have no right: what
have you done to expect a better answer?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, I suppose. But you knew that before.”

“I only know what you have shown me during the past three weeks, and
it has proved that you are what Mr. Adams said you were--though he was
only jesting.”

“And that is?”

“A _faineant_, a dilettante; a man with all the God-given ability to
do as he will and to succeed, and yet who will not take the trouble to
persevere.”

Winton smiled, a grim little smile.

“You are not quite like any other woman I have ever known--not like
any other in the world, I believe. Your sisters, most of them, would
take it as the sincerest homage that a man should neglect his work for
his love. Do you care so much for success, then?”

“For the thing itself--nothing, less than nothing. But--but one may
care a little for the man who wins or loses.”

He tried to take her hand again, tried and failed.

“Virginia!--is that my word of hope?”

“No. Will you never see the commonplace effrontery of it, Mr. Winton?
Day after day you have come here, idling away the precious hours that
meant everything to you, and now you come once again to offer me a
share in what you have lost. Is that your idea of chivalry, of true
manhood?”

Again the grim smile came and went.

“An unprejudiced onlooker might say that you have made me very
welcome.”

“Mr. Winton! Is that generous?”

“No; perhaps it is hardly just. Because I counted the cost and have
paid the price open-eyed. You may remember that I told you that first
evening I should come as often as I dared. I knew then, what I have
known all along: that it was a part of your uncle’s plan to delay my
work.”

“His and mine, you mean; only you are too kind--or not quite brave
enough--to say so.”

“Yours? Never! If I could believe you capable of such a thing--”

“You may believe it,” she broke in. “It was I who suggested it.”

He drew a deep breath, and she heard his teeth come together with a
click. It was enough to try the faith of the loyalest lover: it tried
his sorely. Yet he scarcely needed her low-voiced, “Don’t you despise
me as I deserve, now?” to make him love her all the more.

“Indeed, I don’t. Resentment and love can hardly find room in the same
heart at the same time, and I have said that I love you,” he rejoined
quickly.

She went silent at that, and when she spoke again the listening
Jastrow tuned his ear afresh to lose no word.

“As I have confessed, I suggested it: it was just after I had seen
your men and the sheriff’s ready to fly at one another’s throats. I
was miserably afraid, and I asked Uncle Somerville if he could not
make terms with you in some other way. I didn’t mean--”

He made haste to help her.

“Please don’t try to defend your motive to me; it is wholly
unnecessary. It is more than enough for me to know that you were
anxious about my safety.”

But she would not let him have the crumb of comfort undisputed.

“There were other lives involved besides yours. I didn’t say I was
specially afraid for you, did I?”

“No, but you meant it. And I thought afterward that I should have
given you a hint in some way, though the way didn’t offer at the time.
There was no danger of bloodshed. I knew--we all knew--that Deckert
wouldn’t go to extremities with the small force he had.”

“Then it was only a--a--”

“A bluff,” he said, supplying the word. “If I had believed there was
the slightest possibility of a fight, I should have made my men take
to the woods rather than let you witness it.”

“You shouldn’t have let me waste my sympathy,” she protested
reproachfully.

“I’m sorry; truly, I am. And you have been wasting it in another
direction as well. To-night will see the shale-slide conquered
definitely, I hope, and three more days of good weather will send us
into the Carbonate yards.”

She broke in upon him with a little cry of impatient despair.

“That shows how unwary you have been! Tell me: is there not a little
valley just above here--an open place where your railroad and Uncle
Somerville’s run side by side?”

“Yes, it is a mile this side of the canyon head. What about it?”

“How long is it since you have been up there?” she queried.

Winton stopped to think. “I don’t know--a week, possibly.”

“Yet if you had not been coming here every evening, you or Mr. Adams
would have found time to go--to watch every possible chance of
interference, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps. That was one of the risks I took, a part of the price-paying
I spoke of. If anything had happened, I should still be unrepentant.”

“Something _has_ happened. While you have been taking things for
granted, Uncle Somerville has been at work day and night. He has built
a track right across yours in that little valley, and he keeps a train
of cars or something, filled with armed men, standing there all the
time!”

Winton gave a low whistle. Then he laughed mirthlessly.

“You are quite sure of this?” he asked. “There is no possibility of
your being mistaken?”

“None at all,” she replied. “And I can only defend myself by saying
that I didn’t know about it until a few minutes ago. What is to be
done? But stop; you needn’t tell me. I am not worthy of your
confidence.”

“You are; you have just proved it. But there isn’t anything to be
done. The next thing in order is the exit of one John Winton in
disgrace. That spur track and engine means a crossing fight which can
be prolonged indefinitely, with due vigilance on the part of Mr.
Darrah’s mercenaries. I’m smashed, Miss Carteret, thoroughly and
permanently. Ah, well, it’s only one more fool for love. Hadn’t we
better go in? You’ll take cold standing out here.”

She drew herself up and put her hands behind her.

“Is that the way you take it, Mr. Winton?”

The acrid laugh came again.

“Would you have me tear a passion to tatters? My ancestors were not
French.”

Trying as the moment was, she could not miss her opportunity.

“How can you tell when you don’t know your grandfather’s middle name?”
 she said, half crying.

His laugh at this was less acrid. “Adams again? My grandfather had no
middle name. But I mustn’t keep you out here in the cold talking
genealogies.”

His hand was on the door to open it for her. Like a flash she came
between, and her fingers closed over his on the door-knob.

“Wait,” she said. “Have I done all this--humbled myself into the very
dust--to no purpose?”

“Not if you will give me the one priceless word I am thirsting for.”

“Oh, how shameless you are!” she cried. “Will nothing serve to arouse
the better part of you?”

“There is no better part of any man than his love for a woman. You
have aroused that.”

“_Then prove it by going and building your railroad_, Mr. Winton. When
you have done that--”

He caught at the word as a drowning man catches at a straw.

“When I have won the fight--Virginia, let me see your eyes--when I
have won, I may come back to you?”

“I didn’t say anything of the kind! But I will say what I said to Mr.
Adams. I like men who _do_ things. Good night.” And before he could
reply she had made him open the door for her, and he was left alone on
the square-railed platform.

In the gathering-room of the private car Virginia found an atmosphere
surcharged with electrical possibilities, felt it and inhaled it,
though there was nothing visible to indicate it. The Rajah was buried
in the depths of his particular easy-chair, puffing his cigar; Bessie
had the Reverend Billy in the tete-a-tete contrivance; and Mrs.
Carteret was reading under the Pintsch drop-light at the table.

It was the chaperon who applied the firing spark to the electrical
possibilities.

“Didn’t I hear you talking to some one out on the platform, Virginia?”
 she asked.

“Yes, it was Mr. Winton. He came to make his excuses.”

Mr. Somerville Darrah awoke out of his tobacco reverie with a start.

“Hah!” he said fiercely. Then, in his most courteous phrase: “Did I
undehstand you to say that Misteh Winton would not faveh us to-night,
my deah Virginia?”

“He could not. He has come upon--upon some other difficulty, I
believe,” she stammered, steering a perilous course among the rocks of
equivocation.

“Mmph!” said the Rajah, rising. “Ah--where is Jastrow?”

The obsequious one appeared, imp-like, at the mention of his name, and
received a curt order.

“Go and find Engineer McGrath and his fireman. Tell him I want the
engine instantly. Move, seh!”

Virginia retreated to her state-room. In a few minutes she heard her
uncle go out; and shortly afterward the Rosemary’s engine shook itself
free of the car and rumbled away westward. At that, Virginia went back
to the others and found a book. But if waiting inactive were
difficult, reading was blankly impossible.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed impatiently at last. “How hot you people
keep it in here! Cousin Billy, won’t you take a turn with me on the
station platform? I can’t breathe!”

Calvert acquiesced eagerly, scenting an opportunity. But when they
were out under the frosty stars he had the good sense to walk her up
and down in the healing silence and darkness for five full minutes
before he ventured to say what was in his mind.

When he spoke it was earnestly and to the purpose, not without
eloquence. He loved her; had always loved her, he thought. Could she
not, with time and the will to try, learn to love him?--not as a
cousin?

She turned quickly and put both hands on his shoulders.

“Oh, Cousin Billy--_don’t_!” she faltered brokenly; and he, seeing at
once that he had played the housebreaker where he would fain have been
the welcome guest, took his punishment manfully, drawing her arm in
his and walking her yet other turns up and down the long platform
until his patience and the silence had wrought their perfect work.

“Does it hurt much?” she asked softly, after a long time.

“You would have to change places with me to know just how much it
hurts,” he answered. “And yet you haven’t left me quite desolate,
Virginia. I still have something left--all I’ve ever had, I fancy.”

“And that is--”

“My love for you, you know. It isn’t at all contingent upon your yes
or no; or upon possession--it never has been, I think. It has never
asked much except the right to be.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “Cousin Billy, I do
believe that you are the best man that ever lived. And I am
ashamed--ashamed!”

“What for?”

“If I have spoiled you, ever so little, for some truer, worthier
woman.”

“You haven’t,” he responded; “you mustn’t take that view of it. I am
decently in love with my work--a work that not a few wise men have
agreed could best be done alone. I don’t think there will be any other
woman. You see, there is only one Virginia. Shall we go in now?”

She nodded, but when they reached the Rosemary the returning engine
was rattling down upon the open siding. Virginia drew back.

“I don’t want to meet Uncle Somerville just now,” she confessed.
“Can’t we climb up to the observation platform at the other end of the
car?”

He said yes, and made the affirmative good by lifting her in his arms
over the high railing. Once safely on the car, she bade him leave her.

“Slip in quietly and they won’t notice,” she said. “I’ll come
presently.”

Calvert obeyed, and Virginia stood alone in the darkness. Down in the
Utah construction camp lights were darting to and fro; and before long
she heard the hoarse puffs of the big octopod, betokening activities.

She was shivering a little in the chill wind sliding down from the
snow-peaks, yet she would not go in until she had made sure. In a
little time her patience was rewarded. The huge engine came storming
up the grade on the new line, pushing its three flat-cars, which were
black with clinging men. On the car nearest the locomotive, where the
dazzling beam of the headlight pricked him out for her, stood Winton,
braced against the lurchings of the train over the uneven track.

“God speed you, my--love!” she murmured softly; and when the gloom of
the upper canyon cleft had engulfed man and men and storming engine
she turned to go in.

She was groping for the door-knob in the darkness made thicker by the
glare of the passing headlight when a voice, disembodied for the
moment, said: “Wait a minute, Miss Carteret; I’d like to have a word
with you.”

She drew back quickly.

“Is it you, Mr. Jastrow? Let me go in, please.”

“In one moment. I have something to say to you--something you ought to
hear.”

“Can’t it be said on the other side of the door? I am cold--very cold,
Mr. Jastrow.”

It was his saving hint, but he would not take it.

“No, it must be said to you alone. We have at least one thing in
common, Miss Carteret--you and I: that is a proper appreciation of the
successful realities. I--”

She stopped him with a quick little gesture of impatience.

“Will you be good enough to stand aside and let me go in?”

The keen breath of the snow-caps was summer-warm in comparison with
the chilling iciness of her manner; but the secretary went on unmoved:

“Success is the only thing worth while in this world. Winton will
fail, but I shan’t. And when I do succeed, I shall marry a woman who
can wear the purple most becomingly.”

“I hope you may, I’m sure,” she answered wearily. “Yet you will excuse
me if I say that I don’t understand how it concerns me, or why you
should keep me out here in the cold to tell me about it.”

“Don’t you? It concerns you very nearly. You are the woman, Miss
Carteret.”

“Indeed? And if I decline the honor?”

The contingency was one for which the suitor seemed not entirely
prepared. Yet he evinced a willingness to meet the hypothesis in a
spirit of perfect candor.

“You wouldn’t do that, definitely, I fancy. It would be tantamount to
driving me to extremities.”

“If you will tell me how I can do it ‘definitely,’ I shall be most
happy to drive you to extremities, or anywhere else out of my way,”
 she said frigidly.

“Oh, I think not,” he rejoined. “You wouldn’t want me to go and tell
Mr. Darrah how you have betrayed him to Mr. Winton. I had the singular
good fortune to overhear you conversation--yours and Mr. Winton’s, you
know; and if Mr. Darrah knew, he would cut you out of his will with
very little compunction, don’t you think? And, really, you mustn’t
throw yourself away on that sentimental Tommy of an engineer, Miss
Virginia. He’ll never be able to give you the position you’re fitted
for.”

Since French was a dead language to Mr. Arthur Jastrow, he never knew
what it was that Miss Carteret named him. But she left him in no doubt
as to her immediate purpose.

“If that be the case, we would better go and find my uncle at once,”
 she said in her softest tone; and before he could object she had led
the way to the Rajah’s working-den state-room.

Mr. Darrah was deep in one of the cipher telegrams when they entered,
and he looked up to glare fiercely at one and then the other of the
intruders. Virginia gave her persecutor no time to lodge his
accusation.

“Uncle Somerville, Mr. Winton was here an hour ago, as you know, and I
told him what you had done--what I had helped you do. Also, I sent him
about his business; which is to win his railroad fight if he can. Mr.
Jastrow overheard the conversation, purposely, and as he threatens to
turn informer, I am saving him the trouble. Perhaps I ought to add that
he offered to hold his peace if I would promise to marry him.”

What the unlucky Jastrow might have said in his own behalf is not to
be here set down in peaceful black and white. With the final word of
Virginia’s explanation the fierce old master of men was up and
clutching for the secretary’s throat, and the working complement of
the Rosemary suffered instant loss.

“You’ll spy upon a membeh of my family, will you, seh!” he stormed.
“Out with you, bag and baggage, befo’ I lose my tempeh and forget what
is due to this young lady you have insulted, seh, with your infamous
proposals! Faveh me instantly, while you have a leg to run with! Go!”

Jastrow disappeared; and when the door closed behind him Virginia
faced her irate clan-chief bravely.

“He was a spy, and he would have been a traitor. But I am little
better. What will you do to me?”

The Rajah’s wrath evaporated quickly, and a shrewd smile, not
unkindly, wrinkled the ruddy old face.

“So it was a case of the trappeh trapped, was it, my deah? I’m
sorry--right sorry. I might have known how it would be; a youngeh man
would have known. But you have done no unpahdonable mischief: Misteh
Winton would have found out for himself in a few hours, and we are
ready for him now.”

“Oh, dear! Then he will be beaten?”

“Unquestionably. Faveh me by going to bed, my deah. Your roses will
suffeh sadly for all this excitement, I feah. Good night.”



XI. THE RIGHT OF WAY


It seemed to Virginia that she had but just fallen asleep when she was
rudely awakened by the jar and grind of the Rosemary’s wheels on
snow-covered rails. Drawing the curtain, she found that a new day was
come, gray and misty white in the gusty swirl of a mountain
snow-squall.

Without disturbing the sleeping Bessie, she dressed quickly and
slipped out to see what the early-morning change of base portended.
The common room was empty when she entered it, but before she could
cross to the door the Reverend Billy came in, stamping the snow from
his feet.

“What is it?” she asked eagerly. “Are we off for California?”

“No, it’s some more of the war. Winton has outgeneraled us. During the
night he pushed his track up to the disputed crossing, ‘rushed’ the
guarded engine, and ditched it.”

Virginia felt that she ought to be decorously sorry for relationship’s
sake, but the effort ended in a little paean of joy.

“But Uncle Somerville--what will he do?”

“He is with McGrath on the engine, getting himself--and us--to the
front in a hurry, as you perceive.”

“Isn’t it too late to stop Mr. Winton now?”

“I don’t know. From what I could overhear I gathered that the ditched
engine is still in the way; that they are trying to roll it over into
the creek. Bless me! McGrath is getting terribly reckless!”--this as a
spiteful lurch of the car flung them both across the compartment.

“Say Uncle Somerville,” she amended. “Don’t charge it to Mr. McGrath.
Can’t we go out on the platform?”

“It’s as much as your life is worth,” he asserted, but he opened the
door for her.

The car was backing swiftly up the grade with the engine behind
serving as a “pusher.” At first the fiercely-driven snow-whirl made
Virginia gasp. Then the speed slackened and she could breathe and see.

The shrilling wheels were tracking around a curve into a scanty
widening of the canyon. To the left, on the rails of the new line, the
big octopod was heaving and grunting in the midst of an army of
workmen swarming thick upon the overturned guard engine.

“Goodness! it’s like a battle!” she shuddered. As she spoke the
Rosemary stopped with a jerk and McGrath’s fireman darted past to set
the spur-track switch.

The points were snow-clogged, and the fireman wrestled with the lever,
saying words. The delay was measurable in heart-beats, but it
sufficed. The big octopod coughed thrice like a mighty giant in a
consumption; the clustering workmen scattered like chaff to a ringing
shout of “Stand clear!” and the obstructing mass of iron and steel
rolled, wallowing and hissing, into the stream.

“Rails to the front! Hammermen!” yelled Winton; and the scattered
force rallied instantly.

But now the wrestling fireman had thrown the switch, and at the
Rajah’s command the Rosemary shot out on the spur to be thrust with
locked brakes fairly into the breach left defenseless by the ditched
engine. With a mob-roar of wrath the infuriated track-layers made a
rush for the new obstruction. But Winton was before them.

“Hold on!” he shouted, bearing them back with outflung arms. “Hold on,
men, for God’s sake! There are women in that car!”

The wrathful wave broke and eddied murmurous while a square-shouldered
old man with fierce eyes and huge white mustaches, and with an extinct
cigar between his teeth, clambered down from the Rosemary’s engine to
say:

“Hah! a ratheh close connection, eh, Misteh Winton? Faveh me with a
match, if you please, seh. May I assume that you won’t tumble my
private car into the ditch?”

Winton was white-hot, but he found a light for the Rajah’s cigar,
easing his mind only as he might with Virginia looking on.

“I shall be more considerate of the safety of the ladies than you seem
to be, Mr. Darrah,” he retorted. “You are taking long chances in this
game, sir.”

The Rajah’s laugh rumbled deep in his chest. “Not so vehy much longer
than you have been taking during the past fo’tnight, my deah seh. But
neveh mind; all’s fair in love or war, and we appeah to be having a
little of both now up heah in Qua’tz Creek, hah?”

Winton flushed angrily. It was no light thing to be mocked before his
men, to say nothing of Miss Carteret standing within arm’s reach on
the railed platform of the Rosemary.

“Perhaps I shall give you back that word before we are through, Mr.
Darrah,” he snapped. Then to the eddying mob-wave: “Tools up, boys. We
camp here for breakfast. Branagan, send the Two-fifteen down for the
cook’s outfit.”

The Rajah dropped his cigar butt in the snow and trod upon it.

“Possibly you will faveh us with your company to breakfast in the
Rosemary, Misteh Winton--you and Misteh Adams. No? Then I bid you a
vehy good morning, gentlemen, and hope to see you lateh.” And he swung
up to the steps of the private car.

Half an hour afterward, the snow still whirling dismally, Winton and
Adams were cowering over a handful of hissing embers, drinking their
commissary coffee and munching the camp cook’s poor excuse for a
breakfast.

“Jig’s up pretty definitely, don’t you think?” said Adams, with a
glance around at the idle track force huddling for shelter under the
lee of the flats and the octopod.

Winton shook his head and groaned. “I’m  a ruined man, Morty.”

Adams found his cigarette case.

“I guess that’s so,” he said quite heartlessly. Then: “Hello! what is
our friend the enemy up to now?”

McGrath’s fireman was uncoupling the engine from the Rosemary, and Mr.
Somerville Darrah, complacently lighting his after breakfast cigar,
came across to the hissing ember fire.

“A word with you, gentlemen, if you will faveh me,” he began. “I am
about to run down to Argentine on my engine, and I propose leaving the
ladies in your cha’ge, Misteh Winton. Will you give me your word of
honeh, seh, that they will not be annoyed in my absence?”

Winton sprang up, losing his temper again.

“It’s--well, it’s blessed lucky that you know your man, Mr. Darrah!”
 he exploded. “Go on about your business--which is to bring another
army of deputy-sheriffs down on us, I take it. You know well enough
that no man of mine will lay a hand on your car so long as the ladies
are in it.”

The Rajah thanked him, dismissed the matter with a Chesterfieldian
wave of his hand, climbed to his place in the cab, and the engine
shrilled away around the curve and disappeared in the snow-wreaths.

Adams rose and stretched himself.

“By Jove! when it comes to cheek, pure and unadulterated, commend me
to a Virginia gentleman who has acquired the proper modicum of Western
bluff,” he laughed. Then, with a cavernous yawn dating back to the
sleepless night: “Since there is nothing immediately pressing, I
believe I’ll go and call on the ladies. Won’t you come along for a
while?”

“No!” said Winton savagely; and the assistant lounged off by himself.

Some little time afterward Winton, glooming over his handful of
spitting embers, saw Adams and Virginia come out to stand together on
the observation platform of the Rosemary. They talked long and
earnestly, and when Winton was beginning to add the dull pang of
unreasoning jealousy to his other hurtings, Adams beckoned him. He
went, not unwillingly, or altogether willingly.

“I should think you might come and say ‘Good morning’ to me, Mr.
Winton. I’m not Uncle Somerville,” said Miss Carteret.

Winton said “Good morning,” not too graciously, and Adams mocked him.

“Besides being a bear with a sore head, Miss Carteret thinks you’re
not much of a hustler, Jack,” he said coolly. “She knows the
situation; knows that you were stupid enough to promise not to lay
hands on the car when we could have pushed it out of the way without
annoying anybody. None the less, she thinks that you might find a way
to go on building your railroad without breaking your word to Mr.
Darrah.”

Winton put his sore-heartedness far enough behind him to smile and
say: “Perhaps Miss Virginia will be good enough to tell me how.”

“I don’t know how,” she rejoined quickly. “And you’d only laugh at me
if I should tell you what I thought of.”

“You might try it and see,” he ventured. “I’m desperate enough to take
suggestions from anyone.”

“Tell me something first: is your railroad obliged to run straight
along in the middle of this nice little ridge you’ve been making for
it?”

“Why--no; temporarily, it can run anywhere. But the problem is to get
the track laid beyond this crossing before your uncle gets back with a
trainload of armed guards.”

“Any kind of track would do, wouldn’t it?--just to secure the
crossing?”

“Certainly; anything that would hold the weight of the octopod. We
shall have to rebuild most of the line, anyway, as soon as the frost
comes out of the ground in the spring.”

The brown eyes became far-seeing.

“I was thinking,” she said musingly. “There is no time to make another
nice little ridge. But you have piles and piles of logs over
there,”--she meant the cross-ties,--“couldn’t you build a sort of
cobhouse ridge with those between your track and Uncle’s, and cross
behind the car? Don’t laugh, please.”

But Winton was far enough from laughing at her. Why so simple an
expedient had not suggested itself instantly he did not stop to
inquire. It was enough that the Heaven-born idea had been given.

“Down out of that, Morty!” he cried. “It’s one chance in a thousand.
Pass the word to the men; I’ll be with you in a second.” And when
Adams was rousing the track force with the bawling shout of
“_Ev-erybody_!” Winton looked up into the brown eyes.

“My debt to you was already very great: I owe you more now,” he said.

But she gave him his quittance in a whiplike retort.

“And you will stand here talking about it when every moment is
precious? Go!” she commanded; and he went.

So now we are to conceive the maddest activity leaping into being in
full view of the watchers at the windows of the private car. Winton’s
chilled and sodden army, welcoming any battle-cry of action, flew to
the work with a will. In a twinkling the corded piles of cross-ties
had melted to reappear in cobhouse balks bridging an angle from the
Utah embankment to that of the spur track in the rear of the
blockading Rosemary. In briefest time the hammermen were spiking the
rails on the rough-and-ready trestle, and the Italians were bringing
up the crossing-frogs.

But the Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself
defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise
contingency by leaving McGrath’s fireman in mechanical command on the
Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car,
the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to
lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop
back down the grade just far enough to block the new crossing.

So it came about that this mechanical lieutenant waited, laughing in
his sleeve, until he saw the Italians coming with the crossing-frogs.
Then, judging the time to be fully ripe, he ducked under the Rosemary
to “bleed” the air-brake.

Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry
clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting
glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from
beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman
had “bled” the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering
momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track
and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.

Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon
line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric
flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the
Reverend Billy’s ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by
good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the
car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few
miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward
climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.

In unreasoning misery, he did the only thing that offered: ran blindly
down his own embankment, hoping nothing but that he might have one
last glimpse of Virginia clinging to the hand-rail before she should
be lost to him for ever.

But as he ran a thought white-hot from the furnace of despair fell
into his brain to set it ablaze with purpose. Beyond the litter of
activities the octopod was standing, empty of its crew. Bounding up
into the cab, he released the brake and sent the great engine flying
down the track of the new line.

In the measuring of the first mile the despair-born thought took shape
and form. If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop
the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the
Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling
himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to
help Calvert with the hand-brakes.

Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped
for that comes to pass. At Argentine, Winton’s speed was a mile a
minute over a track rougher than a corduroy wagon-road; yet the
octopod held the rail and was neck and neck with the runaway. Whisking
past the station, Winton had a glimpse of a white-mustached old man
standing bareheaded on the platform and gazing horror-stricken at the
tableau; then man and station and lurching car were left behind, and
the fierce strife to gain the needed mile of lead went on.

Three miles more of the surging, racking, nerve-killing race and
Winton had his hand’s-breadth of lead and had picked his place for the
million-chanced wrestle with death. It was at the C. G. R. station of
Tierra Blanca, just below a series of sharp curves which he hoped
might check a little the arrow-like flight of the runaway.

Twenty seconds later the telegraph operator at the lonely little way
station of Tierra Blanca saw a heroic bit of man-play. The
upward-bound Carbonate train was whistling in the gorge below when out
of the snow-wreaths shrouding the new line a big engine shot down to
stop with fire grinding from the wheels, and a man dropped from the
high cab to dash across to the station platform.

At the same instant a runaway passenger car thundered out of the
canyon above. The man crouched, flung himself at it in passing, missed
the forward hand-rail, caught the rear, was snatched from his feet and
trailed through the air like the thong of a whip-lash, yet made good
his hold and clambered on.

This was all the operator saw, but when he had snapped his key and run
out he heard the shrill squeal of the brakes on the car and knew that
the man had not risked his life for nothing.

And on board the Rosemary? Winton, spent to the last breath, was lying
prone on the railed platform, where he had fallen when the last twist
had been given to the shrieking brakes.

“Run, Calvert! Run ahead and--stop--the--up-train!” he gasped; then
the light went out of the gray eyes and Virginia wept unaffectedly and
fell to dabbling his forehead with handfuls of snow.

“Help me get him in to the divan, Cousin Billy,” said Virginia, when
all was over and the Rosemary was safely coupled in ahead of the
upcoming train to be slowly pushed back to Argentine.

But Winton opened his eyes and struggled to his feet unaided.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’ve left my automobile on the other side of the
creek; and besides, I have a railroad to build. My respects to Mr.
Darrah, and you may tell him I’m not beaten yet.” And he swung over
the railing and dropped off to mount the octopod and to race it back
to the front.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three days afterward, to a screaming of smelter whistles and other
noisy demonstrations of mining-camp joy, the Utah Short Line laid the
final rail of its new Extension in the Carbonate yards.

The driving of the silver spike accomplished, Winton and Adams slipped
out of the congratulatory throng and made their way across the
C. G. R. tracks to a private car standing along the siding. Its railed
platform, commanding a view of the civic celebration, had its quota of
onlookers--a fierce-eyed old man with huge mustaches, an athletic
young clergyman, two Bisques, and a goddess.

“Climb up, Misteh Winton, and you, Misteh Adams; climb up and join
us,” said the fierce-eyed one heartily. “Virginia, heah, thinks we
ought to call one anotheh out, but I tell her--”

What the Rajah had told his niece is of small account to us. But what
Winton whispered in her ear when he had taken his place beside her is
more to the purpose of this history.

“I have built my railroad, as you told me to, and now I have come for
my--”

“Hush!” she said softly. “Can’t you wait?”

“No.”

“Shameless one!” she murmured.

But when the Rajah proposed an adjournment to the gathering-room of
the car, and to luncheon therein, he surprised them standing
hand-in-hand and laughed.

“Hah, you little rebel!” he said. “Do you think you dese’ve that block
of stock I promised you when you should marry? Anseh me, my deah.”

She blushed and shook her head, but the brown eyes were dancing.

The Rajah opened the car door with his courtliest bow.

“Nevertheless, you shall have it, my deah Virginia, if only to remind
an old man of the time when he was simple enough to make a business
confederate of a cha’ming young woman. Straight on, Misteh Adams;
afteh you, Misteh Winton.”





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