Terror-stricken and with sinking strength she made her way to the hotel and slipped up to the parlor. Throwing off her wraps she went to the window; Glover was coming up the street. There was only a moment in which to collect herself. She hastened to her bedroom, wet her forehead with cologne, and at her mirror her fingers ran tremblingly over the coils of her hair. She caught up a fresh handkerchief for her girdle, looked for an instant appealingly into her own eyes and closed them to think. Glover rapped.
She met him with a smile that she knew would stagger his fond eyes. She drugged his ear with a low-voiced greeting. "You are late, dearest."
He looked at her and caught her hands. As his head bent she let her lips lie in his kiss, and let his arm find her waist as he kissed her deeply again. They walked together toward the fireplace, and when she saw the sadness of his face fear in her heart gave way to pity. "What is it?" she whispered. "Tell me."
"The car has come with Doubleday and McGraw, Gertrude. The wreck was terribly fatal. Morris Blood must have jumped from the cab. The track I have told you is blasted there out of the cheek of the mountain, and it's impossible to tell what his fate may be: but if he is alive I must find him. There is a good hope, I believe, for Morris; he is a man to squeeze through on a narrow chance. And Gertrude—I couldn't tell you if I didn't think you had a right to know everything I know. It breaks my heart to speak of it—McGraw is dead."
"I am so glad you told me the truth," she trembled, "for I knew it——"
"Knew it?" She confessed, hastily, how her anxiety had led her to his office, and of the terrible shock she had brought on herself. "But now I know you would not deceive me," she added; "that is why I love you, because you are always honest and true. And do you love me, as you have told me, more than all the world?"
"More than all the world, Gertrude. Why do you look so? You are trembling."
"Have you come to say good-by?"
"Only for a day or two, darling: till I can find Morris, then I come straight back to you."
"You, too, may be killed?"
"No, no."
"But I heard the man telling you you would go to your death if you attempted to cross that hill with a plough. Be honest with me; you are risking your life."
"Only as I have risked it almost every day since I came into the mountains."
"But now—now—doesn't it mean something else? Think what it means to me—your life. Think what will become of me if you should be killed in trying to open that hill—if you should fall over a precipice as Morris Blood has fallen and lies now probably dead. Don't go. Don't go, this time. You have promised me you would leave the mountains, haven't you? Don't risk all, dearest, all I have on earth, in an attempt that may utterly fail and add one more precious life to the lives now sacrificed. You do heed me, darling, don't you?"
She had disengaged herself to plead; to look directly up into his perplexed eyes. He leaned an arm on the mantel, staggered. His eyes followed hers in every word she spoke, and when she ceased he stared blankly at the fire.
"Heed you?" he answered, haltingly. "Heed you? You are all in the world that I have to heed. My only wish is your happiness; to die for it, Gertrude, wouldn't be much——"
"All, all I ask is that you will live for it."
"Worthless as I am, I have asked you to put that happiness in my keeping—do you think your lightest word could pass me unheeded? But to this, my dearest Gertrude, every instinct of manhood binds me—to go to my friend in danger."
"If you go you will take every desperate chance to accomplish your end. Ah, I know you better than you know yourself. Ab, Ab, my darling, my lover, listen to me. Don't; don't go."
When he spoke she would not have known his voice. "Can I let him die there like a dog on the mountain side? Can't you see what I haven't words to explain as you could explain—the position it puts me in? Don't sob. Don't be afraid; look at me. I'll come back to you, darling."
She turned her tearless eyes to the mountains. "Back! Yes. I see the end. My lover will come back—come back dead. And I shall try to kiss his brave lips back to life and they will speak no more. And I shall stand when they take him from me, lonely and alone. My father that I have estranged—my foster-mother that I have withstood—my sister that I have repelled—will their tears flow for me then? And for this I broke from my traditions and cast away associations, gave up all my little life, stood alone against my family, poured out my heart to these deserts, these mountains, and now—they rob me of my all—and this is love!"
He stood like a broken man. "God help me, have I laid on your dear head the curse of my own life? Must you, too, suffer because our perils force us lightly to pawn our lives one for another? One night in that yard"—he pointed to the window—"I stood between the rails with a switch engine running me down. I knew nothing of it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. Better the engine had struck me then and spared you now——"
"No, I say, no!" she exclaimed, wildly. "Better this moment together than a lifetime apart!"
"—For me he threw himself in front of the drivers. This moment is mine and yours because he gave his right hand for it—shall I desert him now he needs me? And so a hundred times and in a hundred ways we gamble with death and laugh if we cheat it: and our poor reward is only sometimes to win where far better men have failed. So in this railroad life two men stand, as he and I have stood, luck or ill-luck, storm or fair weather, together. And death speaks for one; and whichever he calls it is ever the other must answer. And this—is duty."
"Then do your duty."
Distinctly, and terrifying in their unexpectedness, came the words from the farther end of the parlor. They turned, stunned. Gertrude's father was crossing the room. He raised his hand to dispel Glover's sudden angry look. "I was lying on the couch; your voices roused me and I could not escape. You have put clearly the case you stand in," he spoke to Glover, "and I have intervened only to spare both of you useless agony of argument. The question that concerns you two and me is not at this moment up for decision; the other question is, and it is for you, my daughter, now, to play the woman. I have tried as I could to shield you from rough weather. You have left port without consulting me, and the storms of womanhood are on you. Sir, when do you start?"
"My engine is waiting."
"Then ask your people to attach my car. You can make equally good time, and since for better or worse we have cut into this game we will see it out together."
Gertrude threw her arms around her father's neck with a happy sob as Glover left. "Oh daddy, daddy. If you only knew him!"
"There are mountains a man can do business with," muttered Bucks in the private car, his mustache drooping broadly above his reflecting words. "Mountains that will give and take once in a while, play fair occasionally. But Pilot has fought us every inch of the way since the day we first struck a pick into it. It is savage and unrelenting. I'd rather negotiate with Sitting Bull for a right of way through his private bathroom than to ask an easement from Pilot for a tamarack tie. I don't know why it was ever called Pilot: if I named it, it should be Sitting Bull. What the Sioux were to the white men, what the Spider Water is to the bridgemen, that, and more, Pilot has been to the mountain men.
"There was no compromise with Pilot even after we got in on it. Snowslides, washouts, bowlders, forest-fires—and yet the richest quartz mines in the world lie behind it. This little branch, Mr. Brock, forty-eight miles, pays the operating expenses of the whole mountain division, and has done so almost since the day it was opened. But I'd rather lose the revenue ten times every year than to lose Morris Blood." The second vice-president was talking to Mr. Brock. Their car was just rounding the curve into the gap in front of Mount Pilot.
"What do you think of Blood's chances?" asked Mr. Brock.
"I don't know. A mountain man has nine lives."
"What does Glover think?"
"He doesn't say."
"Who built this line?"
"Two pretty good men ran the first thirty miles, but neither of them could give me a practicable line south of the gap; this last eighteen miles up and down and around Pilot was Glover's first work in the mountains. It's engineering. Every trick ever played in the Rockies, and one or two of Brodie's old combinations in the Andes, they tell me, are crowded into these eighteen miles. There, there's old Sitting Bull in all his clouds and his glory."
Glover had left the car at Sleepy Cat, going ahead with the relief train. Picked men from every district on the division had been assembling all the afternoon to take up the search for the missing superintendent. Section men from the Sweetgrass wastes, and bridgemen from the foothills, roadmasters from the Heart Mountains—home of the storm and the snow—and Rat Cañon trackwalkers that could spot a break in the dark under twelve inches of ballast; Morgan, the wrecker, and his men, and the mountain linemen with their foreman, old Bill Dancing—fiend drunk and giant sober—were scattered on Mount Pilot, while a rotary ahead of a battery of big engines was shoved again and again up the snow-covered hill.
Anxious to get the track open in the belief that Blood could best be got at from beyond the S bridge, Glover, standing with the branch roadmaster, Smith Young, on the ledge above the engines directed the fight for the hill. He had promised Gertrude he would keep out of the cab, and far across the curve below he could see the Brock car, where Bucks was directing the search on the eastern side of the gulch.
Callahan and the linemen were spreading both ways through the timber on the plateau opposite, but the snow made the work extremely difficult, and the short day allowed hardly more than a start. On the hill Glover's men advanced barely a hundred feet in three hours: darkness spread over the range with no sign of the missing man, and with the forebodings that none could shake off of what the night's exposure, even if he were uninjured, might mean.
Supper was served to the men in the relief trains, and outside fires were forbidden by Glover, who asked that every foot of the track as far as the gap be patrolled all night.
It was nearly ten o'clock when Glover, supperless, reached the car with his dispositions made for the night. While he talked with the men, Clem, the star cook of the Brock family, under special orders grilled a big porterhouse steak and presently asked him back to the dining-table, where, behind the shaded candles, Gertrude waited.
They sat down opposite each other; but not until Glover saw there were two plates instead of one, and learned that Gertrude had eaten no dinner because she was waiting for him, did he mutter something about all that an American girl is capable of in the way of making a man grateful and happy. There was nothing to hurry them back to the other end of the car, and they did not rejoin Mr. Brock and Bucks, who were smoking forward, until eleven o'clock. Callahan came in afterward, and sitting together Mr. Brock and Gertrude listened while the three railroad men planned the campaign for the next day.
Parting late, Glover said good-night and left with Callahan to inspect the rotary. The fearful punishment of the day's work on the knives had shown itself, and since dark, relays of mechanics from the Sleepy Cat shops had been busy with the cutting gear, and the companion plough had already been ordered in from the eighth district.
Glover returned to the car at one o'clock. The lights were low, and Clem, a night-owl, fixed him in a chair near the door. For an hour everything was very still, then Gertrude, sleeping lightly, heard voices. Glover walked back past the compartments; she heard him asking Clem for brandy—Bill Dancing, the lineman, had come with news.
The negro brought forward a decanter and Glover poured a gobletful for the old man, who shook from the chill of the night air.
"The boys claim it's imagination," Dancing, steadied by the alcohol, continued, "but it's a fire way over below the second bridge. I've watched it for an hour; now you come."
They went away and were gone a long time. Glover returned alone—Clem had disappeared; a girlish figure glided out of the gloom to meet him.
"I couldn't sleep," she whispered. "I heard you leave and dressed to wait." She looked in the dim light as slight as a child, and with his hand at her waist he sunk on his knee to look up into her face. "How can I deserve it all?"
She blinded his upturned eyes in her hands, and not until she found her fingers were wet did she understand all he had tried to put into his words.
"Have you any news?" she murmured, as he rose.
"I believe they have found him."
She clasped her hands. "Heaven be praised. Oh, is it sure?"
"I mean, Dancing, the old lineman, has seen his fire. At least, we are certain of it. We have been watching it two hours. It's a speck of a blaze away across toward the mines. It never grows nor lessens, just a careful little campfire where fuel is scarce—as it is now with all the snow. We've lighted a big beacon on the hill for an answer, and at daybreak we shall go after him. The planning is all done and I am free now till we're ready to start."
She tried to make him lie down for a nap on the couch. He tried to persuade her to retire until morning, and in sweet contention they sat talking low of their love and their happiness—and of the hills a reckless girl romped over in old Allegheny, and of the shingle gunboats a sleepy-eyed boy launched in dauntless fleets upon the yellow eddies of the Mississippi; and of the chance that should one day bring boy and girl together, lovers, on the crest of the far Rockies.
Lights were moving up and down the hill when they rose from Clem's astonishing breakfast.
"You will be careful," she said. He had taken her in his arms at the door, and promising he kissed her and whispered good-by.
They had planned a quick relief with a small party, for every hour of exposure lessened the missing man's chances. Glover chose for his companions two men: Dancing—far and away the best climber in the telegraph corps, and Smith Young, roadmaster, a chainman of Glover's when he ran the Pilot line. Dancing and Glover were large men of unusual strength, and Young, lighter and smaller, had been known in a pinch to handle an ordinary steel rail. But above everything each—even Glover, the youngest—was a man of resource and experience in mountain craft.
They left the track near the twin bridges with only ropes and picks and skis, and carrying stimulants and food. Without any attempt to catch his trail from where they knew Blood must have started they made their way as directly as possible down the side of the mountain and in the direction of the gap. The stupendous difficulties of making headway across the eastern slope did not become apparent until the rescuing party was out of sight of those they had left, but from where they floundered in ragged washouts or spread in line over glassy escarpments they could see far up the mountain the rotary throwing a white cloud into the sunshine and hear the far-off clamor of the engines on the hill.
Below the snow-field which they crossed they found the superintendent's trail, and saw that his effort had been to cross the gap at that point and make his way out toward the western grade, where an easy climb would have brought him to the track; or where by walking some distance he could reach the track without climbing a foot, the grade there being nearly four per cent.
They saw, too, why he had been forced to give up that hope, for what would have been difficult for three fresh men with shoes was an impossibility for a spent man in the snow alone. They knew that what they had covered in two hours had probably cost him ten, for before they had followed him a dozen feet they saw that he was dragging a leg; farther, the snow showed stains and they crossed a field where he had sat down and bandaged his leg after it had bled for a hundred yards.
The trail began, as they went on, to lose its character. Whether from weakness or uncertainty Blood's steps had become wandering, and they noticed that he paid less attention to directness, but shunned every obstacle that called for climbing, struggling great distances around rough places to avoid them. They knew it meant that he was husbanding failing strength and was striving to avoid reopening his wound.
Twice they marked places in which he had sat to adjust his bandages, and the strain of what they read in the snow quickened their anxiety. Since that day Smith Young, superintendent now of the mountain division, has never hunted, because he could never afterward follow the trail of a wounded animal.
They found places where he had hunted for fuel, and firing signals regularly they reached the spot where he had camped the night before, and saw the ashes of his fire. He was headed south; not because there was more hope that way—there was less—but as if he must keep moving, and that were easiest. A quarter of a mile below where he had spent the night they caught sight of a man sitting on a fallen tree resting his leg. The next moment three men were in a tumbling race across the slope, and Blood, weakly hurrahing, fainted in Glover's arms.
His story was short. He reminded his rescuers of the little spring on the hill at the point where the wreck had occurred. The ice that always spread across the track and over the edge of the gulch had been chopped out by the shovellers the afternoon before, but water trickling from the rock had laid a fresh trap for unwary feet during the night. In jumping from the gangway at the moment of the wreck Blood's heels had landed on smooth ice and he had tumbled and slid six hundred feet. Recovering consciousness at the bottom of a washout he found the calf of one leg ripped a little, as he put it. The loss of one side of his mustache, swept away in the slide, and leaving on his face a peculiarly forlorn expression, he did not take account of—declaring on the whole, as he smiled into the swimming eyes around him, that with the exception of tobacco he was doing very well.
They got him in front of a big fire, plied him with food and stimulants, and Glover, from a surgical packet, bandaged anew the wound in his leg. Then came the question of retreat.
They discussed two plans. The first to retrace their steps entirely; the second, to go back to where the gap could be attempted and the western track gained below the hill. Each meant long and severe climbing, each presented its particular difficulties, and three men of the four felt that if the torn artery opened once more their victory would be barren—that Blood needed surgical aid promptly if at all. But Dancing had a third plan.
It was while they still consulted at this point that their fire was seen on Pilot Hill and reported to Bucks at the Brock car, from which the rapidly moving party had been seen only at long intervals during the morning.
The fire was the looked-for signal that the superintendent had been reached, and the word went from group to group of men up the hill. Through the strong glass that Glover had left with her, Gertrude could see the smoke, and the storming signals of the panting engines above her made sweeter music after she caught with her eye the faint column in the distant gap. Even her father, feeling still something like a conscript, brightened up at the general rejoicing. He had produced his own glass and let Gertrude with eager prompting help him to find the smoke. The moment the position of Glover's party was made definite, Bucks ordered the car run down the Hog's Back to a point so much closer that across the broad cañon, flanking Pilot on the south, they could make out with their glasses the figures of the three men and, when they began to move, the smaller figure of Morris Blood.
Callahan had joined his chief to watch the situation, and they speculated as to how the four would get out of the gulf in which they were completely hemmed. Gertrude and her father stood near.
The eyes of the two bronzed railroad men at her side were like pilot guides to Gertrude. When she lost the wayfarers in the gullies or along the narrow defiles that gave them passage between towering rocks, their eyes restored the plodding line. Callahan was the first to detect the change from the expected course. "They are working east," said he, after a moment's careful observation.
"East?" echoed Bucks. "You mean west."
Callahan hung to his glass. "No," he repeated, "east—and south. Here."
Bucks took the glass and looked a long time. "I do not understand," said he; "they are certainly working east. What can they be after, east? Well, they can't go very far that way without bridging the Devil's Cañon. Callahan," he exclaimed, with sure instinct, "they will head south. Walt now till they appear again."
He relinquished the glass to explain to Mr. Brock where next to look for them. There was a long interval during which they did not reappear. Then the little file emerging from the shadow of a rock skirted a field of snow straight to the south. There were but three men in line. One, a little ahead, breaking path; following, two large men tramping close together, the foremost stooping under the weight of a man lying face upward on his back, while the man behind supported the legs under his arms.
"They are carrying Morris Blood. He is hurt—that was to be expected. What?" exclaimed Bucks, hardly a moment afterward, "they are crossing the snow. Callahan, by heaven, they are walking for the south side of Pilot, that's what it means. It is a forced march; they are making for the mines."
Mount Pilot, from the crest that divides at Devil's Gap, rises abruptly in a three-faced peak, the pinnacle of which lies to the south. Several hundred feet above the base lie the group of gold-mines behind the mountain, and a short railroad spur blasted across the southern face runs to them from Glen Tarn. Below, the mountain wall breaks in long steps almost vertically to the base, toward which Glover's party was heading.
The move made new dispositions necessary. Orders flew from Bucks like curlews, for it was more essential than ever to open the hill speedily.
The private car was run across the Hog's Back, and the news sent to the rotary crew with injunctions to push with all effort as far at least as the mine switch, that help might be sent out on the spur to meet the party on the climb.
The increased activity apparent far up and down the mountain as the word went round, the bringing up of the last reserve engines for the hill battery, the effort to get into communication by telegraph with the mine hospital and Glen Tarn Springs, the feverish haste of the officials in the car to make the new dispositions, all indicated to Gertrude the approach of a crisis—the imminence of a supreme effort to save one life if the endeavor enlisted the men and resources of the whole division. New gangs of shovellers strung on flat-cars were being pushed forward. Down the hill, spent and disabled engines were returning from the front, and while they took sidings, fresh engines, close-coupled, steamed slowly like leviathans past them up the hill.
The moment the track was clear, the private car was backed again down the ridge. Following the serpentine winding of the right of way, the general manager was able to run the car far around the mountain, and it stopped opposite the southern face, which rose across the broad cañon. When the party in the car got their glasses fixed, the little company beyond the gulf had begun their climb and were strung like marionettes up the base of Pilot.
The south face of the mountain, sheer for nearly a thousand feet, is broken by narrow ledges that make an ascent possible, and not until the peak passes the timber does snow ordinarily find lodgment upon that side. Swept by the winds from the Spanish Sinks, the vertical reaches above the base usually offer no obstruction to a rapid climb, though except perhaps by early prospectors, the arête had never been scaled. Glover, however, in locating, had covered every stretch of the mountain on each of its sides, and Dancing's poles and brackets, like banderillas stung into the tough hide of a bull, circled Pilot from face to face. These two men were leading the ascent; below them could be distinguished the roadmaster and the injured superintendent.
Stripped to the belt and lashed in the party rope, the leader, gaunt and sinewy, stretched like an earthworm up the face of the arête—crossing, recrossing, climbing, retreating, his spiked feet settling warily into fresh holes below, his sensitive hands spreading like feelers high over the smooth granite for new holds above. Slowly, always, and with the deliberate reserve that quieted with confidence the feverish hearts watching across the gulf, the leaders steadily scaled the height that separated them from the track. Like sailors patiently warping home, the three men in advance drew and lifted the fourth, who doughtily helped himself with foot and hand as chance allowed and watched patiently from below while his comrades disputed with the sheer wall for a new step above.
Bucks and Callahan, following every move, mapped the situation to their companions as its features developed. With each triumph on the arête, bursts of commendation and surprise came from the usually taciturn men watching the struggle with growing wonder. Bucks, apprehensive of delays in the track-opening on the hill, sent Callahan back in the car with instructions to pick a gang of ten men and pack them somewhom across the snow to the mine spur, that they might be ready to meet the climbing party and carry the superintendent down to the mine hospital.
Thirty feet below the mine track and as far above where Glover at that moment was sitting—his rope made fast and his legs hanging over a ledge, while his companions reached new positions—a granite wall rises to where the upper face has been blasted away from the roadbed. To the east, this wall hangs without a break up or down for a hundred feet, but to the west it roughens and splits away from the main spur, forming a crevice or chimney from two to three feet wide, opening at the top to ten feet, where a small bridge carries the track across it. This chimney had been Dancing's quest from the moment the ascent began, for he had lost a man in that chimney when stringing the mine wires, and knew precisely what it was.
The chimney once gained, Dancing figured that the last thirty feet should be easy work, and he had made but one miscalculation—when he had descended it to pull up his lineman, it was summer. Without extraordinary difficulty, Glover gained the ledge where the chimney opened and waited for his companions to ascend. When all were up, they rested a few moments on their dizzy perch, and, while Bill Dancing investigated the chimney, Glover took the chance to renew once more Morris Blood's bandages, which, strained by the climbing, caused continual anxiety.
Bucks, with the party in his glass, could see every move. He saw Dancing disappear into the rock while his comrades rested, and made him out, after some delay, reappearing from the cleft. What he could not make out was the word that Dancing brought back; the chimney was a solid mass of ice.
Standing with the two men, Gertrude used her glass constantly. Frequently she asked questions, but frequently she divined ahead of her companions the directions and the movements. The hesitation that followed Dancing's return did not escape her. Up and down the narrow step on which they stood, the three men walked, scanning anxiously the wall that stretched above them.
So, hounds at fault on a trail double on their steps and move uneasily to and fro, nosing the missing scent. As lions flatten behind their cagebars, the climbers laid themselves against the rock and pushed to the right and the left seeking an avenue of escape. They had every right to expect that help would already have reached them, but on the hill, through haste and confusion of orders, the new rotary had stripped a gear, and an hour had been lost in getting in the second plough. For safety, the climbers had in their predicament nothing to fear. The impelling necessity for action was the superintendent's condition; his companions knew he could not last long without a surgeon.
When suspense had become unbearable, Dancing re-entered the chimney. He was gone a long time. He reappeared, crawling slowly out on an unseen footing, a mere flaw in the smooth stretch of granite half way up to the track. By cutting his rope and throwing himself a dozen times at death, old Bill Dancing had gained a foothold, made fast a line, and divided the last thirty feet to be covered. One by one, his companions disappeared from sight—not into the chimney, but to the side of it where Dancing had blazed a few dizzy steps and now had a rope dangling to make the ascent practicable.
One by one, Gertrude saw the climbers, reappearing above, crawl like flies out on the face of the rock and, with craning necks and cautious steps, seek new advantage above. They discovered at length the remains of a scrub pine jutting out below the railroad track. The tree had been sawed off almost at the root, when the roadbed was levelled, and a few feet of the trunk was left hugging upward against the granite wall.
Glover, Young, and Dancing consulted a moment. The thing was not impossible; the superintendent was bleeding to death.
Spectators across the gap saw movements they could not quite comprehend. Safety lines were overhauled for the last time, the picks put in the keeping of Morris Blood, who lay flat on the ledge. Glover and Bill Dancing, facing outward, planted themselves side by side against the rocky wall. Smith Young, facing inward, flattened himself in Glover's arms, passed across him and, pushing his safety-girdle well up under his arms, stood a moment between the two big men. Glover and Dancing, getting their hands through the belt from either side, gripped him, and Young uncoiled from his right hand a rope noosed like a lariat. Steadied by his companions and swinging his arms in a cautious segment on the wall, he tried to hitch the noose over the trunk of the pine.
With the utmost skill and patience, he coaxed the loop up again and again into the air overhead, but the brush of the short branches against the rock defeated every attempt to get a hold.
He rested, passed the rope into his other hand, and with the same collected persistence endeavored to throw it over from the left.
Sweat beaded Bucks' forehead as he looked. Gertrude's father, the man of sixty millions, with nerves bedded in ice, crushed an unlighted cigar between his teeth, and tried to steady the glass that shook in his hand. Gertrude, resting one hand on a bowlder against which she steadied herself, neither spoke nor moved. The roadmaster could not land his line.
The two men released him and, with arms spread wide, he slipped over to where Morris Blood lay, took from him the two picks, and cautiously rejoined his comrades. Two of the men reversing their positions, faced the rock wall. They fixed a pick into a cranny between their heads, crouched together, and the third, planting his feet first on their knees and then their shoulders, was raised slowly above them.
The glasses turned from afar caught a sheen of sunshine that spread for an instant across the face of the mountain and sharply outlined the flattened form high on the arête. The figure seemed brought by the dazzling light startlingly near, and those looking could distinguish in his hand a pick, which, with his right arm extended, he slowly swung up and up the face of the rock until he should swing it high to hook through the roots of the pine.
Gertrude asked Bucks who it was that spread himself above his comrades, and he answered, Dancing; but it was Glover.
Deliberately his extended arm rose and fell in the arc he was following, higher and higher, till the pick swung above his head and lodged where he sent it among the pine-tree roots. At the very moment, one of the men supporting him moved—the pick had dislodged a heavy chip of granite; in falling it struck his crouching supporter on the head. The man steadied himself instantly, but the single instant cost the balance of the upmost figure. With a suppressed struggle, heartbreaking half a mile away, the man above strove to right himself. Like light his second hand reached for the pick handle; he could not recover it. The pyramid wavered and Glover, helpless, spread his hands wide.
By an instinct deeper than life, she knew him then, and cried out and out in agony. But the pyramid was dissolving before his eyes, and she saw a strange figure with outstretched arms, a figure she no longer knew, slowly slipping headlong down a blood-red wall that burned itself into her brain.
Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after the fall on the south arête the hill blockade had been broken. With word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost, effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief train run in on the mine track.
Morris Blood, unconscious, was lifted from the narrow shelf at four o'clock and put under a surgeon's care in time to save his life. To rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them before sunset.
Last to come up, because he still gave the orders, Glover, cushioned and strapped in the tackle, was lifted out of the blackness of the night into the streaming glare of the headlights. Very carefully he was swung down to the mattresses piled on the track, and, before all that looked and waited, a woman knelt and kissed his sunken eyes. Not then did the men, dim in the circle about them, show what they felt, though they knew, to the meanest trackhand, all it meant; not when, after a bare moment of hesitation, Gertrude's father knelt opposite on the mattress-pile, did they break their silence, though they shrewdly guessed what that meant.
But when Glover pulled together his disordered members and at Gertrude's side walked without help to the step of the car, the murmur broke into a cheer that rang from Pilot to Glen Tarn.
"It was more than half my fault," he breathed to her, after his broken arms had been set and the long gash on his head stitched. "I need not have lost my balance if I had kept my head. Gertrude, I may as well admit it—I'm a coward since I've begun to love you. I've never told you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper. But it came back to me just as Dancing's shoulder slipped—that's why I went. I'm done forever with long chances." And she, silent, tried only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from Pilot together.
"Do you know what day to-morrow is?" Gertrude was opening a box of flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover, plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the hotel parlor.
"To-morrow?" he echoed. "Sunday."
"Sunday! Why do you always guess Sunday when I ask you what day it is?"
"You would think every day Sunday if you had had as good a time as I have for six weeks."
"The doctor does say you're doing beautifully. I asked him yesterday how soon you would be well and he said you never had been so well since he knew you. But what is to-morrow?"
"Thanksgiving."
"Thanksgiving, indeed! Yes, every day is Thanksgiving for us. But it's not especiallythat."
"Christmas."
"Nonsense! To-morrow is the second anniversary of our engagement."
"My Lord, Gertrude, have we been engaged two years? Why, at that rate I can't possibly marry you till I'm forty-four."
"It isn't two years, it's two months. And to-night they have their memorial services for poor Paddy McGraw. And, do you know, your friend Mr. Foley has our engine now? Yes; he came up the other day to ask about you, but in reality to tell me he had been promoted. I think he ought to have been, after I spoke myself to Mr. Archibald about it. But what touched me was, the poor fellow asked if I wouldn't see about getting some flowers for the memorial at the engineer's lodge to-night—and he didn't want his wife to know anything about it, because she would scold him for spending his money—see what you are coming to! So I suggested he should let me provide his flowers and ours together, and when I tried to find out what he wanted, he asked if a throttle made of flowers would be all right."
"Your heart would not let you say no?"
"I told him it would be lovely, and to leave it all to me."
She brought forward the box she was opening. "See how they have laid this throttle-bar of violets across these Galax leaves—and latched it with a rose. Here, Solomon," she exiled the boy from an adjoining room, "take this very carefully. No. There isn't any card. Oh," she exclaimed, as he left, and she clasped her lifted hands, "I am glad, I am glad we are leaving these mountains. Do you know papa is to be here to-morrow? And that your speech must be ready? He isn't going to give his consent without being asked."
"I suppose not," said Glover, dejectedly.
"What are you going to say?"
"I shall say that I consider him worthy of my confidence and esteem."
"I think you would make more headway, dearest, if you should tell him you considered yourself worthy ofhisconfidence and esteem."
"But, hang it, I don't."
"Well, couldn't you, for once, fib a little? Oh, Ab; I'll tell you what I wish youcoulddo."
"Pray what?"
"Talk a little business to him. I feel sure, if you could only talk business awhile, papa would beallright."
"Business! If it's only a question of talking business, the thing's as good as done. I can't talk anything but business."
"Can't you, indeed! I like that. Pray what did you talk to me on the platform of my father's own car?"
"Business."
"You talked the silliest stuff I ever listened to——"
"Not reflecting on anyone present, of course."
"And, Ab——"
"Yes."
"If you could take him aback somehow—nothing would give him such an idea of you. I think that was what—well, I was socompletelyovercome by your audacity——"
"You seemed so," commented Glover, rather grimly. "Very well, if you want him taken aback, I will take him aback, even if I have to resort to force." He withdrew his right arm from its sling and began unwrapping the bandages and throwing the splints Into the fire.
"What in the world are you doing?" asked Gertrude, in consternation.
"There's no use carrying these things any longer. My right arm is just as strong as it ever was—and to tell the truth——"
"Now keep your distance, if you please."
"To tell the truth, I never could play ball left-handed, anyway, Gertrude. Now, let's begin easy. Just shake hands with me."
"I'll do nothing of the sort. It's bad form, anyway. You may just shake hands with yourself. All things considered, I think you have good reason to."
"I understand you were chief engineer of this system at one time," began Mr. Brock, at the very outset of the dreaded interview.
"I was," answered Glover.
"And that you resigned voluntarily to take an inferior position on the Mountain Division?"
"That is true."
"Railroad men with ambition," commented Mr. Brock, dryly, "don't usually turn their faces from responsibility in that way. They look higher, and not lower."
"I thought I was looking higher when I came to the mountains."
"That may do for a joke, but I am talking business."
"I, too; and since I am, let me explain to you why I resigned a higher position for a lower one. The fact is well known; the reason isn't. I came to this road at the call of your second vice-president, Mr. Bucks. I have always enjoyed a large measure of his confidence. We saw some years ago that a reorganization was inevitable, and spent many nights discussing the different features of it. This is what we determined: That the key to this whole system with its eight thousand miles of main line and branches is this Mountain Division. To operate the system economically and successfully means that the grades must be reduced and the curvature reduced on this division. Surely, with you, I need not dwell on the A B C's of twentieth century railroading. It is the road that can handle the tonnage cheapest that will survive. All this we knew, and I told him to put me out on this division. It was during the receivership and there was no room for frills.
"I have worked here on a small salary and done everything but maul spikes to keep down expenses on the division, because we had to make some showing to whoever wanted to buy our junk. In this way I took a roving commission and packed my bag from an office where I could acquire nothing I did not already know to a position where I could get hold of the problem of mountain transportation and cut the coal bills of the road in two."
"Have you done it?"
"Have I cut the coal bills in two? No; but I have learned how. It will cost money to do that——"
"How much money?"
"Thirty millions of dollars."
"A good deal of money."
"No."
"No?"
"No. Don't let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them. I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear Dance—yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains."
"Go ahead."
"Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him—Callahan, Blood and the rest of us—are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily," Glover bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, "he isn't; but he might have been——"
"I see."
"We were prepared for that."
"How?"
"I shouldn't speak of this if I did not know you were Mr. Bucks' closest friend. Even he doesn't know it, but six months of my own time—not the company's—I put in on a matter that concerned my friends and myself, and I have the notes for a new line to parallel this if it were needed—and Blood and I have the only pass within three hundred miles north or south to run it over. These were some of the reasons, Mr. Brock, why I came to the mountains."
"I understand. I understand perfectly. Mr. Glover, what is your age, sir?"
The time seemed ripe to put Gertrude's second hint into play.
"That is a subject I never discuss with anyone, Mr. Brock."
He waited just a moment to let the magnate get his breath, and continued, "May I tell you why? When the road went into the receivership, I was named as one of the receivers on behalf of the Government. The President, when I first met him during my term, asked for my father, thinking he was the man that had been recommended to him. He wouldn't believe me when I assured him I was his appointee. 'If I had known how young you were, Glover,' said he to me, afterward, 'I never should have dared appoint you.' The position paid me twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; but the incident paid me better than that, for it taught me never to discuss my age."
"I see. I see. A fine point. You have taughtmesomething. By the way, about the pass you spoke of—I suppose you understand the importance of getting hold of a strategic point like that to—a—forestall—competition?"
"I have hold of it."
"I do not mind saying to you, under all the circumstances, that there has been a little friction with the Harrison people. Do you see? And, for reasons that may suggest themselves, there may be more. They might conclude to run a line to the coast themselves. The young man has, I believe, been turned down——"
"I understood the—the slate had been—changed slightly," stammered Glover, coloring.
"There might be resentment, that's all. Blood is loyal to us, I presume."
"There's no taint anywhere in Morris Blood. He is loyalty itself."
"What would you think of him as General Manager? Callahan goes to the river as Traffic Manager. Mr. Bucks, you know, is the new President; these are his recommendations. What do you think of them?"
"No better men on earth for the positions, and I'm mighty glad to see them get what they deserve."
"Our idea is to leave you right here in the mountains." It was hard to be left completely out of the new deal, but Glover did not visibly wince. "With the title," added Mr. Brock, after he knew his arrow had gone home, "with the title of Second Vice-president, which Mr. Bucks now holds. That will give you full swing in your plans for the rebuilding of the system. I want to see them carried out as the estimates I've been studying this winter show. Don't thank me. I did not know till yesterday they were entirely your plans. You can have every dollar you need; it will rest with you to produce the results. I guess that's all. No, stop. I want you to go East with us next week for a month or two as our guest. You can forward your work the faster when you get back, and I should like you to meet the men whose money you are to spend. Were you waiting to see Gertrude?"
"Why—yes, sir—I——"
"I'll see whether she's around."
Gertrude did not appear for some moments, then she half ran and half glided in, radiant. "I couldn't get away!" she exclaimed. "He's talking about you yet to Aunt Jane and Marie. He says you're charged with dynamite—Iknew that—a most remarkable young man. How did you ever convince him you knew anything? I am confident you don't. You must have taken him somehow aback, didn't you?"
"If you want to give your father a touch of asthma," suggested Glover, "ask him how old I am; but he had me scared once or twice," admitted the engineer, wiping the cold sweat from his wrists.
"Didhe give his consent?"
"Why—hang it—I—we got to talking business and I forgot to——"
"So like you, dear. However, it must be all right, for he said he should need your help in buying the coast branches and The Short Line."
"The Short Line," gasped Glover. "Well, I haven't inventoried lately. If we marry in June——"
"Don't worry about that, for we sha'n't marry in June, my love."
"But when we do, we shall need some money for a wedding-trip——"
"We certainly shall; a lot of it, dearie."
"I may have ten or twelve hundred left after that is provided for. But my confidence in your father's judgment is very great, and if he's going to make up a pool, my money is at his service, as far as it will go, to buy The Short Line—or any other line he may take a fancy to."
"Why, he's just telling Marie about your making a hundred thousand dollars in four years by being wonderfully shrewd——"
"But that confounded mine that I told you about——"
"You dear old stupid. Never mind, you have made a real strike to-day. But if you ever again delude papa into thinking you know more than I do, I shall expose you without mercy."
The train, a private car special, carrying Mr. Brock, chairman of the board, and his family, the new president and the second vice-president elect, was pulling slowly across the long, high spans of the Spider bridge. Glover and Gertrude had gone back to the observation platform. Leaning on his arm, she was looking across the big valley and into the west. The sun, setting clear, tinged with gold the far snows of the mountains.
"It is less than a year," she was murmuring, "since I crossed this bridge; think of it. And what bridges have I not crossed since! See. Your mountains are fading away——"
"My mountains faded away, dear heart, don't you know, when you told me I might love you. As for those"—his eyes turned from the distant ranges back to her eyes—"after all, they brought me you."