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 cowboychaparejos, 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 comewith them by special train to Argentine. Revive all possible titlesto abandoned mining claims on line of the Utah Extension, and haveSheriff 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 thisA.M. with a prisoner. Have our attorneys see to it that the man ispromptly jailed in default of bond. If he is set at liberty, as heis likely to be, I shall trust you to arrange for his rearrest anddetention at all hazards.“D.”
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 capriciousingenueto 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 ofthem away with her, and I couldn't stop her without being rude. Youshouldn'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 letanyone else get you into trouble; by which I infer she means thatsome attempt will be made to keep you from returning on the eveningtrain.”
“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.
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, measuredslumphof 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.