Crouching under the mountains in the grip of the storm Medicine Bend slept battened in blankets and beds. All night at the Wickiup, O'Neill and Giddings, gray with anxiety, were trying to keep track of Glover's Special. It was the only train out that night on the mountain division. For the first hour or two they kept tab on her with little trouble, but soon reports began to falter or fail, and the despatchers were reduced at last to mere rumors. They dropped boards ahead of Special 1018, only to find to their consternation that she was passing them unheeded.
Once, at least, they knew that she herself had slipped by a night station unseen. Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and the wind.
Within two hours of division headquarters a train ran lost—lost as completely as if she were crossing the Sweetgrass plains on pony trails instead of steel rails. Not once but a dozen times McGraw and Glover, pawning their lives, left the cab with their lanterns in a vain endeavor to locate a station, a siding, a rock. Numbed and bitten at last with useless exposure they cast effort to the wind, gave the engine like a lost horse her head, and ran through everything for headquarters and life. Consultation was abandoned, worry put away, one good chance set against every other chance and taken in silence.
At five o'clock that morning despatchers and night men under the Wickiup gables, sitting moodily around the big stove, sprang to their feet together. From up the distant gorge, dying far on the gale, came the long chime blast of an engine whistle; it was the lost Special.
They crowded to the windows to dispute and listen. Again the heavy chime was sprung and a second blast, lasting and defiant, reached the Wickiup—McGraw was whistling for the upper yard and the long night of anxiety was ended. Unable to see a car length into the storm howling down the yard, save where the big arc-lights of the platform glared above the semaphores, the men swarmed to the windows to catch a glimpse of the belated engine. When the rays of its electric headlight pierced the Western night they shouted like boys, ran to the telephones, and while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by stiffening spray, rides at last, ice-bound, staggering, majestic, into port.
The moment they struck the mountain-path into the Bend, McGraw and Glover caught their bearings by the curves, and Glover, standing at Gertrude's elbow, told her they were safe.
Not until he had laughed into her ear something that the silent McGraw, lying on his back under the engine with a wrench, when he confessed he never expected to see Medicine Bend again, had said of her own splendid courage did the flood spring from her eyes.
When Glover added that they were entering the gorge, and laughingly asked if she would not like to sound the whistle for the yard limits, she smiled through tears and gave him her hand to be helped down, cramped and chilled, from her corner.
At the moment that she left the cab she faltered again. McGraw stripped his cap from his head as she turned to speak. She took from the breast of her blouse her watch, dainty as a jewel, and begged him to take it, but he would not.
She drew her glove and stripped from her finger a ring.
"This is for your wife," she said, pressing it into his hand.
"I have no wife."
"Your sister."
"Nor sister."
"Keep it for your bride," she whispered, retreating. "It is yours. Good-by, good-by!"
She sprang from the gangway to Glover's arms and the snow. The storm drove pitilessly down the bare street as she clung to his side and tried to walk the half block to the hotel. The wind, even for a single minute, was deadly to face. No light, no life was anywhere visible. He led her along the lee of the low street buildings, and mindful of the struggle it was to make headway at all turned half between her and the wind to give her the shelter of his shoulders, halting as she stumbled to encourage her anew. He saw then that she was struggling in the darkness for breath, and without a word he bent over her, took her up like a child and started on, carrying her in his arms.
If he frightened her she gave no sign. She held herself for an instant uncertain and aloof, though she could not but feel the heavy draught she made on his strength. The wind stung her cheeks; her breath caught again in her throat and she heard him implore her to turn her face, to turn it from the wind. He stumbled as he spoke, and as she shielded her face from the deadly cold, one hand slipped from her muff. Reaching around his head she drew his storm-cap more closely down with her fingers. When he thanked her she tried to speak and could not, but her glove rested an instant where the wind struck his cheek; then her head hid upon his shoulder and her arms wound slowly and tightly around his neck.
He kicked open the door of the hotel with one blow of his foot and set her down inside.
In the warm dark office, breathing unsteadily, they faced each other. "Can you, Gertrude, marry that man and break my heart?" He caught up her two hands with his words.
"No," she answered, brokenly. "Are you sure you are not frozen—ears or cheeks or hands?"
"You won't marry him, Gertrude, and break my heart? Tell me you won't marry him."
"No, I won't."
"Tell me again."
"Shall I tell you everything?"
"If you have mercy for me as I have love for you."
"I ran away from him to-night. He came out with the directors and telegraphed he would be at the Springs in the afternoon for his answer, and—I ran away. He has his answer long ago and I would not see him."
"Brave girl!"
"Oh, I wasn't brave, I was a dreadful coward. But I thought——"
"What?"
"—I could be brave, if I found as brave a man—as you."
"Gertrude, if I kiss you I never can give you up. Do you understand what that means? I never in life or death can give you up, Gertrude, do you understand me?"
She was crying on his shoulder. "Oh, yes, I understand," and he heard from her lips the maddening sweetness of his boy name. "I understand," she sobbed. "I don't care, Ab—if only—, you will be kind to me."
It was only a moment later—her head had not yet escaped from his arm, for Glover found for the first time that it is one thing to get leave to kiss a lovely woman and wholly another to get the necessary action on the conscience-stricken creature—she had not yet, I say, escaped, when a locomotive whistle was borne from the storm faintly in on their ears. To her it meant nothing, but she felt him start. "What is it?" she whispered.
"The ploughs!"
"The ploughs?"
"The snow-ploughs that followed us. Twenty minutes behind—twenty minutes between us and death, Gertrude, in that blizzard, think of it. That must mean we are to live."
The solemn thought naturally suggested, to Glover at least, a resumption of the status quo, but as he was locating, in the dark, there came from behind the stove a mild cough. The effect on the construction engineer of the whole blizzard was to that cough as nothing. Inly raging he seated Gertrude—indeed, she sunk quite faintly into a chair, and starting for the stove Glover dragged from behind it Solomon Battershawl. "What are you doing here?" demanded Glover, savagely.
"I'm night clerk, Mr. Glover—ow——"
"Night clerk? Very well, Solomon," muttered Glover, grimly, "take this young lady to the warmest room in the house at once."
"Every room's full, Mr. Glover. Trains were all tied up last night."
"Then show her to my room."
"Your room's occupied."
"My room occupied, you villain? What do you mean? Throw out whoever's in it instantly."
"Mr. Brock is in your room."
Gertrude had come over to the stove.
"Mr. Brock!"
"My father!"
"Yes, sir; yes, ma'am."
Gertrude and Glover looked at one another.
"Mr. Blood brought him up last night," said Solomon.
"Where's Mr. Blood?"
"He hasn't come up from the Wickiup. They said he was worried over a special from the Cat that was caught in the blizzard. Your laundry came in all right last night, Mr. Glover——"
"Hang the laundry."
"I paid for it."
"Will you cease your gabble? If Mr. Blood's room is empty take Miss Block up there and rouse a chambermaid instantly to attend her. Do you hear?"
"Shall I throw out Mr. Brock?"
"Let him alone, stupid. What's the matter with the lights?"
"The wires are down."
"Get a candle for Miss Brock. Now, will you make haste?" Solomon, when he heard the name, stared at Miss Brock—but when he recognized her he started without argument and was gone an unconscionably long time.
They sat down where they could feast on each other's eyes in the glow of the coal-stove.
"You have looked so worried all night," said Gertrude, in love's solicitude; "were you afraid we should be lost?"
"No, I didn't intend we should be lost."
"What was it? What is it that makes you so careworn?"
"Nothing special."
"But you mustn't have any secrets from me now. What is it?"
"Do you want to know?"
"Yes."
"I couldn't find time to get shaved before we left Sleepy Cat——"
She rose with both hands uplifted: "Shades of vain heroes! Have I wasted my sympathy all night on a man who has been saving my life with perfect calmness and worrying because he couldn't get shaved?"
"Can you dispassionately say that I don't need barbering?"
"No. But this is what I will say, silly fellow—you don't know much about a woman's heart, do you, Ab? When I first looked at you I thought you were the homeliest man I had ever seen, do you know that?"
Glover fingered his offending chin and looked at her somewhat pathetically.
"But last night"—her quick mouth was so eloquent—"last night I watched you. I saw your face lighted by the anger of the storm. I knew then what those heavy, homely lines below your eyes were for—strength. And I saw your eyes, to me so dull at first, wake and fill with such a light and burn so steadily hour after hour that I knew I had never seen eyes like yours. I knew you would save me—that is what made me so brave, goosie. Sit right where you are, please."
She slipped out of her chair; he pursued. "If you will say such things and then run into the dark corners," he muttered. But when Solomon appeared with a water-pitcher they were ready for him.
"Now what has kept you all this time?" glared Glover, insincerely.
"I couldn't find any ice-water."
"Ice-water!"
"Every pipe is froze solid, but I chopped up some ice and brought that."
"Ice-water, you double-dyed idiot! Go get your candle."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't be so cross," whispered Gertrude. "You were so short with that poor fireman to-night, and he told me such a pitiful story about being ordered out and having to go or lose his position——"
"Did Foley tell you that?"
"Yes."
"Surely, nerve runs in his family as well as his cousin's. The rascal came because I hung up a little purse for a fireman at the roundhouse, and he nearly had a fight with another fellow that wanted to cut him out of the job."
"Such a cheat! How much did you offer him?"
"Not very much."
"But how much?"
"Twenty-five dollars, and, by heavens, he dunned me for it just after we started."
"But his poor wife hung to his neck when he left——"
"No doubt. She has pulled all the hair out of his head twice that I know of——"
"And I gave him my purse with all the money I had in it."
"How much?"
"About three hundred dollars."
"Three hundred dollars! Foley will lay off two months and take the whole family back to Pittsburg. Now, here's your candle and chopped ice and Mr. Battershawl."
Gertrude turned for a last whisper—"What should you say if papa came down?"
"What should I say? He would probably say, 'Mr. Glover, I have your room.' 'Don't mention it,' I should reply, 'I have your daughter.'" But Mr. Brock did not come down.
Barely half an hour later, while Glover waited with anxiety at the foot of the stairs, Gertrude reappeared, and with her loveliness all new, walked shyly and haltingly down each step toward him.
Not a soul about the hotel office had stirred, and Glover led her to the retired little parlor, which was warm and dim, to reassure himself that the fluttering girl was all his own. Unable to credit the fulness of their own happiness they sat confiding to each other all the sweet trifles, now made doubly sweet, of their strange acquaintance. Before six o'clock, and while their seclusion was still their own, a hot breakfast was served to them where they sat, and day broke on storm without and lovers within.
What shapes the legends of the Wickiup? Is it because in the winter night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgrass the night he sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth as many seconds? Could the night that laid the horse and the hunter side by side in the Spider Park drift have been wildest of all wild mountain nights? Or is it because Gertrude Brock and her railroad lover rode out its storm together that mountain men say there was never a storm like that? What shapes the Wickiup legends?
For three days Medicine Bend did not see the sun. Veering uneasily, springing from every quarter at once, the wind wedged the gray clouds up the mountain sides only to roll them like avalanches down the ragged passes. At the end of the week snow was falling.
Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to protect its winter traffic—for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had been overhauling and assembling the old and the new bucking equipment. But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the passes, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the cuts.
The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict Morgan, got after it with a crew together.
Between the C bridge and Potter's Gap they spent two days with a rotary and a flanger and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks.
In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend, waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast. The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock's word to join him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her.
To the joy of the conspirators, Bucks held Glover closely at headquarters, keeping him closeted for long periods on the estimates that were in final cooking for the directors; and so dense are great people and so keen the simple, that Gertrude held her lone seat of honor beside her father, at the table of the great financiers in the dining-room, without the remotest suspicion on their parts that the superb woman meeting them three times a day was carrying on a proudly-hidden love affair with the muscular, absorbed-looking man who sat alone across the aisle.
But the asthmatic old pastry cook, who weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds and had not even seen the inside of the dining-room for three years, was thoroughly posted on every observable phase of the affair down to the dessert orders; and no one acquainted with the frank profanity of a mountain meat cook will doubt that the best of everything went hot from the range to Glover and Gertrude. Dollar tips and five-dollar tips from Eastern epicures could not change this, for the meals were served by waitresses who felt a personal responsibility in the issue of the pretty affair of the heart.
The whole second floor of the little hotel had been reserved for the directors' party, and among the rooms was the parlor. There Glover called regularly every evening on Mr. Brock, who, somewhat at a loss to understand the young man's interest, excused himself after the first few minutes and left Gertrude to entertain the gentleman who had been so kind to everybody that she could not be discourteous even if he was somewhat tedious.
One night after a particularly happy evening near the piano for Gertrude and Glover, Mr. Brock, re-entering the parlor, found the somewhat tedious gentleman bending very low, as his daughter said good-night, over her hand; in fact, the gentleman that had been so kind to everybody was kissing it.
When Glover recovered his perpendicular the cold magnate of the West End stood between the folding doors looking directly at him. If the owner of several trunk lines expected his look to inspire consternation he was disappointed. Each of the lovers feared but one person in the world; that was the other. Gertrude, with perhaps an extra touch of dignity, put her compromised hand to her belt for her handkerchief. Glover finished the sentence he was in the middle of—"If I am not ordered out. Good-night."
But when Mr. Brock had turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared between the portières they certainly did look at one another.
"Have I got you into trouble now?" murmured Glover, penitently. Uneasiness was apparent in her expression, but with her back to the piano Gertrude stood steadfast.
"Not," she said, with serious tenderness, "just now. Don't you know? It was the first, the very first, day you looked into my eyes, dear, that you got me into trouble."
Her pathetic sweetness moved him. Then he flamed with determination. He would take the burden on himself—would face her father at once, but she hushed him in real alarm and said, that battle she must fight unaided; it was after all only a little one, she whispered, after the one she had fought with herself. But he knew she glossed over her anxiety, for when he withdrew her eyes looked tears though they shed none.
In the morning there were two vacancies at the breakfast table; neither Gertrude nor her father appeared. When Glover returned to the hotel at five o'clock the first person he saw was Mrs. Whitney. She and Marie, with the doctor and Allen Harrison, had arrived on the first train out of the Springs in four days, and Mrs. Whitney's greeting of Glover in the office was disconcerting. It scarcely needed Gertrude's face at dinner, as she tried to brave the storm that had set in, or her reluctant admission when she saw him as she passed up to her room that she and her father had been up nearly the whole of the night before, to complete his depression.
Every effort he made during the evening to speak to Gertrude was balked by some untoward circumstance, but about nine o'clock they met on the parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie, the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.
They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram. It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the Heart Mountains.
Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds. Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the mountains.
Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think—and to think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.
Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.
His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an instant on his outstretched arm—it had never before been hard to go; then he turned and walked softly away.
At the breakfast table and at the dinner table the talk was of the snow. The evening paper contained a column of despatches concerning the blockade, now serious, in the eighth district. Half the first page was given to alarming reports from the cattle ranges. Two mail-carriers were reported lost in the Sweetgrass country, and a ski runner from Fort Steadman, which had been cut off for eight days, told of thirty-five feet of snow in the Whitewater hills.
Sleepy Cat reported eighteen inches of fresh snow, and a second delayed despatch under the same date-line reported that a bucking special from Medicine Bend, composed of a rotary, a flanger, and five locomotives had passed that point at 9 A.M. for the eighth district.
Gertrude found no interest in the news or the discussion. She could only wonder why she did not see Glover during the day, and when he made no appearance at dinner she grew sick with uncertainty. Leaving the dining-room ahead of the party in some vague hope of seeing him, Solomon hurried up with the note that Glover had left to be given her in the morning. The boy had gone off duty before she left her room and had over-slept, but instead of waiting for his apologies she hastened to her room and locked her door to devour her lover's words. She saw that he had written her in the dead of night to explain his going, and to say good-by. Bucks' message he had enclosed. "But I shall work very hard every hour I am gone to get back the sooner," he promised, "and if you hear of the snow flying over the peaks on the West End you will know that I am behind it and headed straight for you."
When Marie and Mrs. Whitney came up, Gertrude sat calmly before the grate fire, but the note lay hidden over her heart, for in it he had whispered that while he was away every night at eight o'clock and every morning, no matter where she should be, or what doing, he should kiss her lips and her eyes as he had kissed them that first morning in the dark, warm office. When eight o'clock came her aunt and her sister sat with her; but Gertrude at eight o'clock, musing, was with her lover and her lips and eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow. Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two passenger trains were stalled, and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep on the level.
When the doctor had gone and Marie had retired, Gertrude's aunt talked to her seriously about her father, whose almost frantic condition over what he called Gertrude's infatuation was alarming.
Her aunt explained how her final refusal of Allen Harrison, a connection on which her father had set his heart, might result in the total disruption of the plans which held so mighty interests together; and how impossible it was that he should ever consent to her throwing herself away on an obscure Western man.
Only occasionally would Gertrude interrupt. "Don't strip the poor man of everything, auntie. If it must come to family—the De Gallons and Cirodes and Glovers were lords of the Mississippi when our Hessian forefathers were hiding from Washington in the Trenton hazelbushes."
She could meet her aunt's fears with jests and her tears with smiles until the worried lady chancing on a deeper chord disarmed her. "You know you are my pet, Gertrude. I am your foster-mother, dear, and I have tried to be mother to you and Marie, and sister to my brother every day of my life since your mother died. And if you——"
Then Gertrude's arms would enfold her and her head hide on her aunt's shoulder, and they would part utterly miserable.
One morning when Gertrude woke it was snowing and Medicine Bend was cut completely off from the western end of the division. The cold in the desert districts had made it impossible to move freights. During the night they had been snowed in on sidings all the way from Sleepy Cat east. By night every wire was down; the last message in was a private one from Glover, with the ploughs, dated at Nine Mile.
Solomon brought the telegram up to Gertrude with the intimation that, confidentially, Mr. Blood's assistant, in charge of the Wickiup, would be glad to hear any news it might contain about the blockade, as communication was now cut entirely off.
Gertrude told the messenger only that she understood the blockade in the eighth district had been lifted and that the ploughs were headed east. Then as the lad looked wonderingly at her, she started. Have I, she asked herself, already become a part of this life, that they come to me for information? But she did not add that the signer of the message had promised to be with her in twenty-four hours.
That day for the first time in eighteen years, no trains ran in or out of Medicine Bend, and an entire regiment of cavalry bound for the Philippines was known to be buried in a snowdrift near San Pete. The big hotel swarmed with snow-bound travellers. The snow fell all day, but to Gertrude's relief her father and the men of the party were at the Wickiup with Bucks, who had come in during the night with reinforcements from McCloud. Unfortunately, the batteries that followed him were compelled to double about next morning to open the line back across the plains.
The gravity of the situation about her, the spectacle of the struggle, now vast and all absorbing, made by the operating department to cope with the storm and cold, and the anxieties of her own position plunged Gertrude into a gloom she had never before conceived of. Her aunt's forebodings and tears, her father's unbending silence and aloofness, made escape from her depression impossible. When Solomon appeared she besought him surreptitiously for news, but though Solomon fairly staggered with the responsibilities of his position he could supply nothing beyond rumors—rumors all tending to magnify the reliance placed on Glover's capabilities in stress of this sort, but not at the moment definitely locating him.
Next morning the creeping eastern light had not yet entered her room when a timid rap aroused her. Solomon was outside the door with news. "The ploughs will be here in an hour," he whispered.
"The ploughs?"
Solomon couldn't resist the low appeal for more definite word. He had no information more than he had given, but he bravely journalized, "Mr. Glover and everybody, ma'am."
"Oh, thank you, Solomon."
She rose, with wings beating love across the miles that separated him from her. Day with its perplexities may beset, the stars bring sometimes only grief; but to lovers morning brings always joy, because it brings hope. She detained Solomon a moment. A resolve fixed itself at once in her heart; to greet her lover the instant he arrived. She could dress and slip down to the station and back before the others awoke even. It was hazardous, but what venture is less attractive for a hazard if it bring a lover? She made her rapid toilet with affection in her supple fingers, and welcome glowing in her quick eyes, and she left her room with the utmost care. Enveloped in the Newmarket, because he loved it, her hands in her big muff, and her cheeks closely veiled, she joined Solomon in the reception room downstairs.
The morning was gray with a snow fog hanging low, and feathery flakes were sinking upon the whitened street. "Listen!" cried the boy, excitedly, as they neared the Wickiup. From somewhere in the sky came the faint scream of a locomotive whistle. "That's them, all right. Gee! I'd like to buck snow."
"Would you?"
"Would I? Wouldn't you?"
A hundred men were strung along the platform, and a sharper blast echoed across the upper flat. "There they are!" cried Solomon, pressing forward. Gertrude saw a huge snow-covered monster swing heavily around the yard hill. The ploughs were at hand. The head engine whistled again, those in the battery took up the signal, and heeled in snow they bore down on the Wickiup whistling a chorus. Before the long battery had halted, the men about Gertrude were running toward the cabs, cheering. Many men poured out of the battered ice-bound cars at the end of the string. While Gertrude's eyes strained with expectation a collie dog shot headlong to the platform from the steps of the hind caboose, and wheeling about, barked madly until, last of three men together, Glover, carrying his little bag, swung down, and listening to his companions, walked leisurely forward.
Swayed by the excitement which she did not fully understand all about her, Gertrude, with swimming eyes, saw Solomon dash toward Glover and catch his bag. As the boy spoke to him she saw Glover's head lift in the deliberate surprise she knew so well. She felt his wandering eyes bend upon her, and his hand rose in suppressed joyfulness.
Doubt, care, anxiety, fled before that gesture. Stumah, wild with delight, bounded at her, and before she could greet him, Glover, a giant in his wrappings, was bending over her, his eyes burning through the veil that hid her own. She heard without comprehending his words; she asked questions without knowing she asked, because his hand so tightly clasped hers.
They walked up the platform and he stopped but once; to speak to the snugly clad man that got down from the head engine. Gertrude recognized the good-natured profile under the long cap; Paddy McGraw lifted his visor as she advanced and with a happy laugh greeted him.
Smiling at her welcome he drew off his glove and took from an inner pocket her ring and held it out on his hand. "I am taking good care of my souvenir."
"I hope you are taking good care of yourself," Gertrude responded, "because every time I ride in the mountains, Mr. McGraw, I want you for engineer."
Glover was saying something to her as they turned away together, but she gave no heed to his meaning. She caught only the low, pretty uncertainty in his utterance, the unfailing little break that she loved in his tone.
He was saying, "Yes—some of it thirty feet. Morris Blood is tunnelling on the Pilot branch this morning; it's bad up there, but the main line is clear from end to end. Surely, you never looked so sweet in your life. Gertrude, Gertrude, you're a beautiful girl. Do you know that? What are those fellows shouting about? Me? Not at all. They're cheering you."
The stolen interview of the early morning was the consolation of the day. Gertrude confided a resolve to Glover. She had thought it all out and he must, she said, talk to her father. Nothing would ever ever come of a situation in which the two never met. The terrible problem was how to arrange the interview. Her father had already declined to meet Glover at all. Moreover, Mr. Brock had a fund of silence that approximated absolute zero, and Gertrude dreaded the result if Glover, in presenting his case, should stop at any point and succumb to the chill.
During such intervals as they managed to meet, the lovers could discuss nothing but the crisis that confronted them. The definite clearing of the line meant perhaps an early separation and something must be done, if ever, at once.
In the evening Gertrude made a long appeal to her aunt to intercede for her, and another to Marie, who, softening somewhat, had spent half an hour before dinner in discussing the situation calmly with Glover; but over the proposed interview Marie shook her head. She had great influence with her father, but candidly owned she should dread facing him on a matter he had definitely declined to discuss.
They parted at night without light on their difficulties. In the morning Glover made several ineffectual efforts to see Gertrude early. He had an idea that they had forgotten the one who could advise and help them better than any other—his friend and patron, Bucks.
The second vice-president was now closer in a business way to Mr. Brock than anyone else in the world. They were friends of very early days, of days when they were laying together the foundations of their careers. It was Bucks who had shown Mr. Brock the stupendous possibilities in reorganizing the system, who was responsible for his enormous investment, and each reposed in the other entire confidence. Gertrude constantly contended that it was only a question of her father's really knowing Glover, and that if her lover could be put, as she knew him, before her father, he must certainly give way. Why not, then, take Bucks into their confidence?
It seemed like light from heaven to Glover, and he was talking to Gertrude when there came a rap at the door of the parlor and a messenger entered with a long despatch from Callahan at Sleepy Cat.
The message was marked delayed in transmission. Glover walked with it to the window and read:
"Doubleday's outfit wrecked early this morning on Pilot Hill while bucking. Head engine, the 927, McGraw, partly off track. Tender crushed the cab. Doubleday instantly killed and McGraw badly hurt. Morris Blood is reported to have been in the cab also, but cannot be found. Have sent Doubleday and McGraw to Medicine Bend in my car and am starting with wrecking crew for the Hill."
"What is it?" murmured Gertrude, watching her lover's face. He studied the telegram a long time and she came to his side. He raised his eyes from the paper in his hand and looked out of the window. "What is it?" she whispered.
"Pilot Hill."
"I do not understand, dearest."
"A wreck."
"Oh, is it serious?"
His eyes fell again on the death message. "Morris Blood was in it and they can't find him."
"Oh, oh."
"A bad place; a bad, bad place." He spoke, absently, then his eyes turned upon her with inexpressible tenderness.
"But why can't they find him, dearest?"
"The track is blasted out of the mountain side for half a mile. Bucks said it would be a graveyard, but I couldn't get to the mines in any other way. Gertrude, I must go to the Wickiup at once to get further news. This message has been delayed, the wires are not right yet."
"Will you come back soon?"
"Just the minute I can get definite news about Morris. In half an hour, probably."
She tried to comfort him when he left her. She knew of the deep attachment between the two men, and she encouraged her lover to hope for the best. Not until he had gone did she fully realize how deeply he was moved. At the window she watched him walk hurriedly down the street, and as he disappeared, reflected that she had never seen such an expression on his face as when he read the telegram.
The half hour went while she reflected. Going downstairs she found the news of the wreck had spread about the hotel, and widely exaggerated accounts of the disaster were being discussed. Mrs. Whitney and Marie were out sleighriding, and by the time the half hour had passed without word from Glover, Gertrude gave way to her restlessness. She had a telegram to send to New York—an order for bonbons—and she determined to walk down to the Wickiup to send it; she might, she thought, see Glover and hear his news sooner.
When she approached the headquarters building unusual numbers of railroad men were grouped on the platform, talking. Messengers hurried to and from the roundhouse. A blown engine attached to a day coach was standing near and men were passing in and out of the car. Gertrude made her way to the stairs unobserved, walked leisurely up to the telegraph office and sent her message. The long corridors of the building, gloomy even on bright days, were quite dark as she left the operators' room and walked slowly toward the quarters of the construction department.
The door of the large anteroom was open and the room empty. Gertrude entered hesitatingly and looked toward Glover's office. His door also was ajar, but no one was within. The sound of voices came from a connecting room and she at once distinguished Glover's tones. It was justification: with her coin purse she tapped lightly on the door casing, and getting no response stepped inside the office and slipped into a chair beside his desk to await him. The voices came from a room leading to Callahan's apartments.
Glover was asking questions, and a man whose voice she could now hear breaking with sobs, was answering. "Are you sure your signals were right?" she heard Glover ask slowly and earnestly; and again, patiently, "how could you be doubled up without the flanger's leaving the track?" Then the man would repeat his story.
"You must have had too much behind you," Glover said once.
"Too much?" echoed the man, frantically. "Seven engines behind us all day yesterday. Paddy told him the minute he got in the cab she wouldn't never stand it. He told him it as plain as a man could tell a man. Then because we went through a thousand feet in the gap like cheese he ordered us up the hill. When we struck the big drift it was slicing rock, Mr. Glover. Paddy told him she wouldn't never stand it. The very first push we let go in a hundred feet with the engine churning her damned drivers off. We went into it twice that way. I could see it was shoving the tender up in the air every time and told Doubleday—oh, if you'd been there! The next time we sent the plough through the first crust and drove a wind-pocket maybe forty or fifty yards and hit the ice with the seven engines jamming into us. My God! she doubled up like a jack-knife—Pat, Pat, Pat."
"Can you recollect where Blood was standing when you buckled?"
"In the right gangway." There was a pause. "He must have dropped," she heard Glover say.
"Then he'll never drop again, Mr. Glover, for if he slipped off the ties he'd drop a thousand feet."
"The heaviest snow is right at the top of the hill?"
"Yes, sir."
"If we can cross the hill we can find him anyway."
"Don't try to get across that hill till you put in five hundred shovellers, Mr. Glover."
"That would take a week. If he's alive we must get him within twenty-four hours. He may freeze to death to-night."
"Don't try to cross that hill with a plough, Mr. Glover. Mind my words. It's no use. I've bucked with you many a time—you know that."
"Yes."
"You're going to your death when you try that."
"There's the doctor now, Foley," Glover answered. "Let him look you over carefully. Come this way."
The voices receded. Listening to the talk, little of which she understood, a growing fear had come over Gertrude. Her eyes had pierced the gray light about her, and as she heard Glover walk away she rose hurriedly and stepped to the doorway to detain him. Glover had disappeared, but before her, stretched on the couch back of the table, lay McGraw. She knew him instantly, and so strangely did the gloom shroud his features that his steady eyes seemed looking straight at her. She divined that he had been brought back hurt. A chill passed over her, a horror. She hesitated a moment, and, fascinated, stepped closer; then she knew she was staring at the dead.