1 files changed, 4288 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/8073.txt b/8073.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7c49ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/8073.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4288 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Fool For Love, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Fool For Love
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8073]
+Posting Date: July 28, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FOOL FOR LOVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ketaki Chhabra and Wendy Crockett
+
+
+
+
+
+A FOOL FOR LOVE
+
+
+By Francis Lynde
+
+Author of "The Grafters," "The Master of Appleby," etc.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    I In Which We Take Passage on the Limited
+   II In Which an Engine is Switched
+  III In Which an Itinerary is Changed
+   IV The Crystalline Altitudes
+    V The Landslide
+   VI The Rajah Gives an Order
+  VII The Majesty of the Law
+ VIII The Greeks Bringing Gifts
+   IX The Block Signal
+    X Spiked Switches
+   XI The Right of Way
+
+
+
+
+
+I. IN WHICH WE TAKE PASSAGE ON THE LIMITED
+
+
+It was a December morning,--the Missouri December of mild temperatures
+and saturated skies,--and the Chicago and Alton's fast train, dripping
+from the rush through the wet night, had steamed briskly to its
+terminal track in the Union Station at Kansas City.
+
+Two men, one smoking a short pipe and the other snapping the ash from
+a scented cigarette, stood aloof from the hurrying throngs on the
+platform, looking on with the measured interest of those who are in
+a melee but not of it.
+
+"More delay," said the cigarettist, glancing at his watch. "We are
+over an hour late now. Do we get any of it back on the run to Denver?"
+
+The pipe-smoker shook his head.
+
+"Hardly, I should say. The Limited is a pretty heavy train to pick
+up lost time. But it won't make any particular difference. The western
+connections all wait for the Limited, and we shall reach the seat
+of war to-morrow night, according to the Boston itinerary."
+
+Mr. Morton P. Adams flung away the unburned half of his cigarette
+and masked a yawn behind his hand.
+
+"It's no end of a bore, Winton, and that is the plain, unlacquered
+fact," he protested. "I think the governor owes me something. I
+worried through the Tech because he insisted that I should have a
+profession; and now I am going in for field work with you in a howling
+winter wilderness because he insists on a practical demonstration.
+I shall ossify out there in those mountains. It's written in the
+book."
+
+"Humph! it's too bad about you," said the other ironically. He was
+a fit figure of a man, clean-cut and vigorous, from the steadfast
+outlook of the gray eyes and the firm, smooth-shaven jaw to the square
+fingertips of the strong hands, and his smile was of good-natured
+contempt. "As you say, it is an outrage on filial complaisance. All
+the same, with the right-of-way fight in prospect, Quartz Creek Canyon
+may not prove to be such a valley of dry bones as--Look out, there!"
+
+The shifting-engine had cut a car from the rear of the lately-arrived
+Alton, and was sending it down the outbound track to a coupling with
+the Transcontinental Limited. Adams stepped back and let it miss him
+by a hand's-breadth, and as the car was passing, Winton read the name
+on the paneling.
+
+"The Rosemary: somebody's twenty-ton private outfit. That cooks our
+last chance of making up any lost time between this and tomorrow--"
+
+He broke off abruptly. On the square rear observation platform of
+the private car were three ladies. One of them was small and
+blue-eyed, with wavy little puffs of snowy hair peeping out under
+her dainty widow's cap. Another was small and blue-eyed, with wavy
+masses of flaxen hair caught up from a face which might have served
+as a model for the most exquisite bisque figure that ever came out
+of France. But Winton saw only the third.
+
+She was taller than either of her companions--tall and straight and
+lithe; a charming embodiment of health and strength and beauty:
+clear-skinned, brown-eyed--a very goddess fresh from the bath, in
+Winton's instant summing up of her, and her crown of red-gold hair
+helped out the simile.
+
+Now, thus far in his thirty-year pilgrimage John Winton, man and
+boy, had lived the intense life of a working hermit, so far as the
+social gods and goddesses were concerned. Yet he had a pang--of
+disappointment or pointless jealousy, or something akin to both--when
+Adams lifted his hat to this particular goddess, was rewarded by a
+little cry of recognition, and stepped up to the platform to be
+presented to the elder and younger Bisques.
+
+So, as we say, Winton turned and walked away as one left out, feeling
+one moment as though he had been defrauded of a natural right, and
+deriding himself the next, as a sensible man should. After a bit he
+was able to laugh at the "sudden attack," as he phrased it, but later,
+when he and Adams were settled for the day-long run in the Denver
+sleeper, and the Limited was clanking out over the switches, he
+brought the talk around with a carefully assumed air of lack-interest
+to the party in the private car.
+
+"She is a friend of yours, then?" he said, when Adams had taken the
+baited hook open-eyed.
+
+The Technologian modified the assumption.
+
+"Not quite in your sense of the word, I fancy. I met her a number
+of times at the houses of mutual friends in Boston. She was studying
+at the Conservatory."
+
+"But she isn't a Bostonian," said Winton confidently.
+
+"Miss Virginia?--hardly. She is a Carteret of the Carterets;
+Virginia-born-bred-and-named. Stunning girl, isn't she?"
+
+"No," said Winton shortly, resenting the slang for no reason that
+he could have set forth in words.
+
+Adams lighted another of the scented villainies, and his clean-shaven
+face wrinkled itself in a slow smile.
+
+"Which means that she has winged you at sight, I suppose, as she does
+most men." Then he added calmly, "It's no go."
+
+"What is 'no go'?"
+
+Adams laughed unfeelingly, and puffed away at his cigarette.
+
+"You remind me of the fable about the head-hiding ostrich. Didn't
+I see you staring at her as if you were about to have a fit? But it
+is just as I tell you: it's no go. She isn't the marrying kind. If
+you knew her, she'd be nice to you till she got a good chance to flay
+you alive--"
+
+"Break it off!" growled Winton.
+
+"Presently. As I was saying, she would miss the chance of marrying
+the best man in the world for the sake of taking a rise out of him.
+Moreover, she comes of old Cavalier stock with an English earldom
+at the back of it, and she is inordinately proud of the fact; while
+you--er--you've given me to understand that you are a man of the
+people, haven't you?"
+
+Winton nodded absently. It was one of his minor fads to ignore his
+lineage, which ran decently back to a Colonial governor on his
+father's side, and to assert that he did not know his grandfather's
+middle name--which was accounted for by the very simple fact that
+the elder Winton had no middle name.
+
+"Well, that settles it definitely," was the Bostonian's comment.
+"Miss Carteret is of the _sang azur_. The man who marries her will
+have to know his grandfather's middle name--and a good bit more
+besides."
+
+Winton's laugh was mockingly good-natured.
+
+"You have missed your calling by something more than a hair's-breadth,
+Morty. You should have been a novelist. Give you a spike and a
+cross-tie and you'd infer a whole railroad. But you pique my
+curiosity. Where are these American royalties of yours going in the
+Rosemary?"
+
+"To California. The car belongs to Mr. Somerville Darrah, who is
+vice-president and manager in fact of the Colorado and Grand River
+road: the 'Rajah,' they call him. He is a relative of the Carterets,
+and the party is on its way to spend the winter on the Pacific coast."
+
+"And the little lady in the widow's cap: is she Miss Carteret's
+mother?"
+
+"Miss Bessie Carteret's mother and Miss Virginia's aunt. She is the
+chaperon of the party."
+
+Winton was silent while the Limited was roaring through a village
+on the Kansas side of the river. When he spoke again it was not of
+the Carterets; it was of the Carterets' kinsman and host.
+
+"I have heard somewhat of the Rajah," he said half-musingly. "In
+fact, I know him, by sight. He is what the magazinists are fond of
+calling an 'industry colonel,' a born leader who has fought his way
+to the front. If the Quartz Creek row is anything more than a stiff
+bluff on the part of the C. G. R. it will be quite as well for us
+if Mr. Somerville Darrah is safely at the other side of the
+continent--and well out of ordinary reach of the wires."
+
+Adams came to attention with a half-hearted attempt to galvanize an
+interest in the business affair.
+
+"Tell me more about this mysterious jangle we are heading for," he
+rejoined. "Have I enlisted for a soldier when I thought I was only
+going into peaceful exile as assistant engineer of construction on
+the Utah Short Line?"
+
+"That remains to be seen." Winton took a leaf from his pocket
+memorandum and drew a rough outline map. "Here is Denver, and here
+is Carbonate," he explained. "At present the Utah is running into
+Carbonate this way over the rails of the C. G. R. on a joint track
+agreement which either line may terminate by giving six months'
+notice of its intention to the other. Got that?"
+
+"To have and to hold," said Adams. "Go on."
+
+"Well, on the first day of September the C. G. R. people gave the
+Utah management notice to quit."
+
+"They are bloated monopolists," said Adams sententiously. "Still I
+don't see why there should be any scrapping over the line in Quartz
+Creek Canyon."
+
+"No? You are not up in monopolistic methods. In six months from
+September first the Utah people will be shut out of Carbonate
+business, which is all that keeps that part of their line alive.
+If they want a share of that traffic after March first, they will
+have to have a road of their own to carry it over."
+
+"Precisely," said Adams, stifling a yawn. "They are building one,
+aren't they?"
+
+"Trying to," Winton amended. "But, unfortunately, the only practicable
+route through the mountains is up Quartz Creek Canyon, and the canyon
+is already occupied by a branch line of the Colorado and Grand River."
+
+"Still I don't see why there should be any scrap."
+
+"Don't you? If the Rajah's road can keep the new line out of Carbonate
+till the six months have expired, it will have a monopoly of all the
+carrying trade of the camp. By consequence it can force every shipper
+in the district to make iron-clad contracts, so that when the Utah
+line is finally completed it won't be able to secure any freight for
+a year, at least."
+
+"Oho! that's the game, is it? I begin to savvy the burro: that's the
+proper phrase, isn't it? And what are our chances?"
+
+"We have about one in a hundred, as near as I could make out from
+Mr. Callowell's statement of the case. The C. G. R. people are moving
+heaven and earth to obstruct us in the canyon. If they can delay the
+work a little longer, the weather will do the rest. With the first
+heavy snow in the mountains, which usually comes long before this,
+the Utah will have to put up its tools and wait till next summer."
+
+Adams lighted another cigarette.
+
+"Pardon me if I seem inquisitive," he said, "but for the life of me
+I can't understand what these obstructionists can do. Of course, they
+can't use force."
+
+Winton's smile was grim. "Can't they? Wait till you get on the ground.
+But the first move was peaceable enough. They got an injunction from
+the courts restraining the new line from encroaching on their right
+of way."
+
+"Which was a thing that nobody wanted to do," said Adams, between
+inhalations.
+
+"Which was a thing the Utah _had_ to do," corrected Winton. "The
+canyon is a narrow gorge--a mere slit in parts of it. That is where
+they have us."
+
+"Oh, well," returned Adams, "I suppose we took an appeal and asked
+to have the injunction set aside?"
+
+"We did, promptly; and that is the present status of the fight. The
+appeal decision has not yet been handed down; and in the meantime
+we go on building railroad, incurring all the penalties for contempt
+of court with every shovelful of earth moved. Do you still think you
+will be in danger of ossifying?"
+
+Adams let the question rest while he asked one of his own.
+
+"How do you come to be mixed up in it, Jack? A week ago some one
+told me you were going to South America to build a railroad in the
+Andes. What switched you?"
+
+Winton shook his head. "Fate, I guess; that and a wire from President
+Callowell of the Utah offering me this. Chief of Construction Evarts,
+in charge of the work in Quartz Creek Canyon, said what you said a
+few minutes ago--that he had not hired out for a soldier. He resigned,
+and I'm taking his berth."
+
+Adams rose and buttoned his coat.
+
+"By all of which it seems that we two are in for a good bit more
+than the ossifying exile," he remarked. And then: "I am going back
+into the Rosemary to pay my respects to Miss Virginia Carteret. Won't
+you come along?"
+
+"No," said Winton, more shortly than the invitation warranted; and
+the other went his way alone.
+
+
+
+
+II. IN WHICH AN ENGINE IS SWITCHED
+
+
+"'Scuse me, sah; private cyah, sah."
+
+It was the porter's challenge in the vestibule of the Rosemary. Adams
+found a card.
+
+"Take that to Miss Carteret--Miss Virginia Carteret," he directed, and
+waited till the man came back with his welcome.
+
+The extension table in the open rear third of the private car was
+closed to its smallest dimensions, and the movable furnishings were
+disposed about the compartment to make it a comfortable lounging room.
+
+Mrs. Carteret was propped among the cushions of a divan with a book.
+Her daughter occupied the undivided half of a tete-a-tete chair with
+a blond athlete in a clerical coat and a reversed collar. Miss
+Virginia was sitting alone at a window, but she rose and came to greet
+the visitor.
+
+"How good of you to take pity on us!" she said, giving him her hand.
+Then she put him at one with the others: "Aunt Martha you have met;
+also Cousin Bessie. Let me present you to Mr. Calvert: Cousin Billy,
+this is Mr. Adams, who is responsible in a way for many of my
+Boston-learned gaucheries."
+
+Aunt Martha closed the book on her finger. "My dear Virginia!" she
+protested in mild deprecation; and Adams laughed and shook hands with
+the Reverend William Calvert and made Virginia's peace all in the same
+breath.
+
+"Don't apologize for Miss Virginia, Mrs. Carteret. We were very good
+friends in Boston, chiefly, I think, because I never objected when she
+wanted to--er--to take a rise out of me." Then to Virginia: "I hope I
+don't intrude?"
+
+"Not in the least. Didn't I just say you were good to come? Uncle
+Somerville tells us we are passing through the famous Golden
+Belt,--whatever that may be,--and recommends an easy-chair and a
+window. But I haven't seen anything but stubble-fields--dismally wet
+stubble-fields at that. Won't you sit down and help me watch them go
+by?"
+
+Adams placed a chair for her and found one for himself.
+
+"'Uncle Somerville'--am I to have the pleasure of meeting Mr.
+Somerville Darrah?"
+
+Miss Virginia's laugh was non-committal.
+
+"_Quien sabe_?" she queried, airing her one Westernism before she was
+fairly in the longitude of it. "Uncle Somerville is a law unto
+himself. He had a lot of telegrams and things at Kansas City, and he
+is locked in his den with Mr. Jastrow, dictating answers by the
+dozen, I suppose."
+
+"Oh, these industry colonels!" said Adams. "Don't their toilings make
+you ache in sheer sympathy sometimes?"
+
+"No, indeed," was the prompt rejoinder; "I envy them. It must be fine
+to have large things to do, and to be able to do them."
+
+"Degenerate scion of a noble race!" jested Adams. "What ancient
+Carteret of them all would have compromised with the necessities by
+becoming a captain of industry?"
+
+"It wasn't their _metier_, or the _metier_ of their times," said Miss
+Virginia with conviction. "They were sword-soldiers merely because
+that was the only way a strong man could conquer in those days. Now it
+is different, and a strong man fights quite as nobly in another
+field--and deserves quite as much honor."
+
+"Think so? I don't agree with you--as to the fighting, I mean. I like
+to take things easy. A good club, a choice of decent theaters, the
+society of a few charming young women like--"
+
+She broke him with a mocking laugh.
+
+"You were born a good many centuries too late, Mr. Adams; you would
+have fitted so beautifully, into decadent Rome."
+
+"No--thanks. Twentieth-century America, with the commercial frenzy
+taken out of it, is good enough for me. I was telling Winton a little
+while ago--"
+
+"Your friend of the Kansas City station platform?" she interrupted.
+"Mightn't you introduce us a little less informally?"
+
+"Beg pardon, I'm sure--yours and Jack's: Mr. John Winton, of New York
+and the world at large, familiarly known to his intimates--and they
+are precious few--as 'Jack W.' As I was about to say--"
+
+But she seemed to find a malicious satisfaction in breaking in upon
+him.
+
+"'Mr. John Winton': it's a pretty name as names go, but it isn't as
+strong as he is. He is an 'industry colonel,' isn't he? He looks it."
+
+The Bostonian avenged himself at Winton's expense for the unwelcome
+interruption.
+
+"So much for your woman's intuition," he laughed. "Speaking of idlers,
+there is your man to the dotting of the 'i'; a dilettante raised to
+the _nth_ power."
+
+Miss Carteret's short upper lip curled in undisguised scorn.
+
+"I like men who do things," she asserted with pointed emphasis;
+whereupon the talk drifted eastward to Boston, and Winton was ignored
+until Virginia, having exhausted the reminiscent vein, said, "You are
+going on through to Denver?"
+
+"To Denver and beyond," was the reply. "Winton has a notion of
+hibernating in the mountains--fancy it; in the dead of winter!--and he
+has persuaded me to go along. He sketches a little, you know."
+
+"Oh, so he is an artist?" said Virginia, with interest newly aroused.
+
+"No," said Adams gloomily, "he isn't an artist--isn't much of
+anything, I'm sorry to say. Worse than all, he doesn't know his
+grandfather's middle name. Told me so himself."
+
+"That is inexcusable--in a dilettante," said Miss Virginia mockingly.
+"Don't you think so?"
+
+"It is inexcusable in anyone," said the Technologian, rising to take
+his leave. Then, as a parting word: "Does the Rosemary set its own
+table? or do you dine in the dining-car?"
+
+"In the dining-car, if we have one. Uncle Somerville lets us dodge the
+Rosemary's cook whenever we can," was the answer; and with this bit of
+information Adams went his way to the Denver sleeper.
+
+Finding Winton in his section, poring over a blue-print map and making
+notes thereon after the manner of a man hard at work, Adams turned
+back to the smoking-compartment.
+
+Now for Mr. Morton P. Adams the salt of life was a joke, harmless or
+otherwise, as the tree might fall. So, during the long afternoon which
+he wore out in solitude, there grew up in him a keen desire to see
+what would befall if these two whom he had so grotesquely
+misrepresented each to the other should come together in the pathway
+of acquaintanceship.
+
+But how to bring them together was a problem which refused to be
+solved until chance pointed the way. Since the Limited had lost
+another hour during the day there was a rush for the dining-car as
+soon as the announcement of its taking-on had gone through the train.
+Adams and Winton were of this rush, and so were the members of Mr.
+Somerville Darrah's party. In the seating the party was separated, as
+room at the crowded tables could be found; and Miss Virginia's fate
+gave her the unoccupied seat at one of the duet tables, opposite a
+young man with steadfast gray eyes and a firm jaw.
+
+Winton was equal to the emergency, or thought he was. Adams was still
+within call and he beckoned him, meaning to propose an exchange of
+seats. But the Bostonian misunderstood wilfully.
+
+"Most happy, I'm sure," he said, coming instantly to the rescue. "Miss
+Carteret, my friend signals his dilemma. May I present him?"
+
+Virginia smiled and gave the required permission in a word. But for
+Winton self-possession fled shrieking.
+
+"Ah--er--I hope you know Mr. Adams well enough to make allowances for
+his--for his--" He broke down helplessly and she had to come to his
+assistance.
+
+"For his imagination?" she suggested. "I do, indeed; we are quite old
+friends."
+
+Here was "well enough," but Winton was a man and could not let it
+alone.
+
+"I should be very sorry to have you think for a moment that I
+would--er--so far forget myself," he went on fatuously. "What I had
+in mind was an exchange of seats with him. I thought it would be
+pleasanter for you; that is, I mean, pleasanter for--" He stopped
+short, seeing nothing but a more hopeless involvement ahead; also
+because he saw signals of distress or of mirth flying in the brown
+eyes.
+
+"Oh, please!" she protested in mock humility. "Do leave my vanity just
+the tiniest little cranny to creep out of, Mr. Winton. I'll promise to
+be good and not bore you too desperately."
+
+At this, as you would imagine, the pit of utter self-abasement yawned
+for Winton, and he plunged headlong, holding the bill of fare wrong
+side up when the waiter asked for his dinner order, and otherwise
+demeaning himself like a man taken at a hopeless disadvantage. She
+took pity on him.
+
+"But let's ignore Mr. Adams," she went on sweetly. "I am much more
+interested in this," touching the bill of fare. "Will you order for
+me, please? I like--"
+
+When she had finished the list of her likings, Winton was able to
+smile at his lapse into the primitive, and gave the dinner order for
+two with a fair degree of coherence. After that they got on better.
+Winton knew Boston, and, next to the weather, Boston was the safest
+and most fruitful of the commonplaces. Nevertheless, it was not
+immortal; and Winton was just beginning to cast about for some other
+safe riding road for the shallop of small talk when Miss Carteret sent
+it adrift with malice aforethought.
+
+It was somewhere between the entrees and the fruit, and the point of
+departure was Boston art.
+
+"Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think
+of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I
+should think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like
+that."
+
+Winton stared--open-mouthed, it is to be feared.
+
+"I--I beg your pardon," he stammered, with the inflection which takes
+its pitch from blank bewilderment.
+
+Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled man
+of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy's phrase, she
+could make him "sit up."
+
+"I beg yours, I'm sure," she said demurely. "I didn't know it was a
+craft secret."
+
+Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was
+sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery
+eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.
+
+"I'd like to know what Adams has been telling you," he said.
+"Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly
+original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an
+original thing in all my life."
+
+For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic
+pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant.
+But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it
+was the lover who spoke when he went on.
+
+"That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make
+it--to have to confirm your poor opinion of me."
+
+"Did I say anything like that?" she protested.
+
+"Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been
+thinking it all along. Don't ask me how I know it: I couldn't explain
+it if I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way--you know
+you have."
+
+The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind as
+she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular
+experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that
+he had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go
+back.
+
+"There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,"
+she pleaded in extenuation.
+
+"And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true
+enough to hurt."
+
+She looked him fairly in the eyes. "What is lacking, Mr. Winton--the
+spur?"
+
+"Possibly," he rejoined. "There is no one near enough to care, or to
+say 'Well done!'"
+
+"How can you tell?" she questioned musingly. "It is not always
+permitted to us to hear the plaudits or the hisses--happily, I think.
+Yet there are always those standing by who are ready to cry '_Io
+triumphe_!' and mean it, when one approves himself a good soldier."
+
+The coffee had been served, and Winton sat thoughtfully stirring the
+lump of sugar in his cup. Miss Carteret was not having a monopoly of
+the new experiences. For instance, it had never before happened to
+John Winton to have a woman, young, charming, and altogether lovable,
+read him a lesson out of the book of the overcomers.
+
+He smiled inwardly and wondered what she would say if she could know
+to what battlefield the drumming wheels of the Limited were speeding
+him. Would she be loyal to her mentorship and tell him he must win, at
+whatever the cost to Mr. Somerville Darrah and his business
+associates? Or would she, womanlike, be her uncle's partizan and write
+one John Winton down in her blackest book for daring to oppose the
+Rajah?
+
+He assured himself it would make no jot of difference if he knew. He
+had a thing to do, and he was purposed to do it strenuously,
+inflexibly. Yet in the inmost chamber of his heart, where the
+barbarian ego stands unabashed and isolate and recklessly contemptuous
+of the moralities minor and major, he saw the birth of an influence
+which inevitably must henceforth be desperately reckoned with.
+
+Given a name, this new-born life-factor was love; love barely
+awakened, and as yet no more than a masterful desire to stand well in
+the eyes of one woman. None the less, he saw the possibilities: that a
+time might come when this woman would have the power to intervene;
+would make him hold his hand in the business affair at the very
+moment, mayhap, when he should strike the hardest.
+
+It was a rather unnerving thought, and when he considered it he was
+glad that their ways, coinciding for the moment, would presently go
+apart, leaving him free to do battle as an honest soldier in any cause
+must.
+
+The Rosemary party was rising, and Winton rose, too, folding the seat
+for Miss Virginia and carefully reaching her wrap from the rack.
+
+"I am so glad to have met you," she said, giving him the tips of her
+fingers and going back to the conventionalities as if they had never
+been ignored.
+
+But the sincerity in Winton's reply transcended the conventional form
+of it.
+
+"Indeed, the pleasure has been wholly mine, I assure you. I hope the
+future will be kind to me and let me see more of you."
+
+"Who knows?" she rejoined, smiling at him level-eyed. "The world has
+been steadily growing smaller since Shakespeare called it 'narrow.'"
+
+He caught quickly at the straw of hope. "Then we need not say
+good-by?"
+
+"No; let it be _auf Wiedersehen_," she said; and he stood aside to
+allow her to join her party.
+
+Two hours later, when Adams was reading in his section and Winton was
+smoking his short pipe in the men's compartment and thinking things
+unspeakable with Virginia Carteret for a nucleus, there was a series
+of sharp whistle-shrieks, a sudden grinding of the brakes, and a
+jarring stop of the Limited--a stop not down on the time-card.
+
+Winton was among the first to reach the head of the long train. The
+halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men
+were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up.
+A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a
+mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive sufficiently
+explained the accident.
+
+"Well, there's only the one thing to do," was the engineer's verdict.
+"That's for somebody to mog back to Arroyo to wire for the
+wreck-wagon."
+
+"Yes, by gum! and that means all night," growled the conductor.
+
+There was a stir in the gathering throng of half-alarmed and
+all-curious passengers, and a red-faced, white-mustached gentleman,
+whose soft southern accent was utterly at variance with his manner,
+hurled a question bolt-like at the conductor.
+
+"All night, you say, seh? Then we miss ouh Denver connections?"
+
+"You can bet to win on that," was the curt reply.
+
+"Damn!" said the ruddy-faced gentleman; and then in a lower tone: "I
+beg your pahdon, my deah Virginia; I was totally unaware of your
+presence."
+
+Winton threw off his overcoat.
+
+"If you will take a bit of help from an outsider, I think we needn't
+wait for the wrecking-car," he said to the dubious trainmen. "It's
+bad, but not so bad as it looks. What do you say?"
+
+Now, as everyone knows, it is not in the nature of operative railway
+men to brook interference even of the helpful sort. But they are as
+quick as other folk to recognize the man in essence, as well as to
+know the clan slogan when they hear it. Winton did not wait for
+objections, but took over the command as one in authority.
+
+"Think we can't do it? I'll show you. Up on the tank, one of you, and
+heave down the jacks and frogs. We'll have her on the steel again
+before you can say your prayers."
+
+At the hearty command, churlish reluctance vanished and everybody lent
+a willing hand. In two minutes the crew of the Limited knew it was
+working under a master. The frogs were adjusted under the derailed
+wheels, the jack-screws were braced to lift and push with the nicest
+accuracy, and all was ready for the attempt to back the engine in
+trial. But now the engineer shook his bead.
+
+"I ain't the artist to move her gently enough with all that string o'
+dinkeys behind her," he said unhopefully.
+
+"No?" said Winton. "Come up into the cab with and I'll show you how."
+And he climbed to the driver's footboard with the doubting engineer at
+his heels.
+
+The reversing-lever went over with a clash; the air whistled into the
+brakes; and Winton began to ease the throttle open. The steam sang
+into the cylinders, the huge machine trembling like a living thing
+under the hand of a master.
+
+Slowly and by almost imperceptible degrees the life of the pent-up
+boiler power crept into the pistons and out through the connecting
+rods to the wheels. With the first thrill of the gripping tires Winton
+leaned from the window to watch the derailed trucks climb by
+half-inches up the inclined planes of the frogs.
+
+At the critical instant, when the entire weight of the forward half of
+the engine was poising for the drop upon the rails, he gave the
+precise added impulse. The big ten-wheeler coughed hoarsely and spat
+fire; the driving-wheels made a quick half-turn backward; and a cheer
+from the onlookers marked the little triumph of mind over matter.
+
+Winton found Miss Carteret holding his overcoat when he swung down
+from the cab, and he fancied her enthusiasm was tempered with
+something remotely like embarrassment. But she suffered him to walk
+back to the private car beside her; and in this sudden retreat from
+the scene of action he missed hearing the comments of his fellow
+craftsmen.
+
+"You bet, he's no 'prentice," said the fireman.
+
+"Not much!" quoth the engineer. "He's an all-round artist, that's
+about what he is. Shouldn't wonder if he was the travelin' engineer
+for some road back in God's country."
+
+"Travelin' nothing!" said the conductor. "More likely he's a
+train-master, 'r p'raps a bigger boss than that. Call in the flag,
+Jim, and we'll be getting a move."
+
+Oddly enough, the comment on Winton did not pause with the encomiums
+of the train crew. When the Limited was once more rushing on its way
+through the night, and Virginia and her cousin were safe in the
+privacy of their state-room, Miss Carteret added her word.
+
+"Do you know, Bessie, I think it was Mr. Adams who scored this
+afternoon?" she said.
+
+"How so?" inquired _la petite_ Bisque, who was too sleepy to be
+over-curious.
+
+"I think he 'took a rise' out of me, as he puts it. Mr. Winton is
+precisely all the kinds of man Mr. Adams said he wasn't."
+
+
+
+
+III. IN WHICH AN ITINERARY IS CHANGED
+
+
+It was late breakfast time when the Transcontinental Limited swept
+around the great curve in the eastern fringe of Denver, paused for a
+registering moment at "yard limits," and went clattering in over the
+switches to come to rest at the end of its long westward run on the
+in-track at the Union Depot.
+
+Having wired ahead to have his mail meet him at the yard limits
+registering station, Winton was ready to make a dash for the telegraph
+office the moment the train stopped.
+
+"That is our wagon, over there on the narrow-gage," he said to Adams,
+pointing out the waiting mountain train. "Have the porter transfer our
+dunnage, and I'll be with you as soon as I can send a wire or two."
+
+On the way across the broad platform he saw the yard crew cutting out
+the Rosemary, and had a glimpse of Miss Virginia clinging to the
+hand-rail and enjoying enthusiastically, he fancied, her first view of
+the mighty hills to the westward.
+
+The temptation to let the telegraphing wait while he went to say good
+morning to her was strong, but he resisted it and hastened the more
+for the hesitant thought. Nevertheless, when he reached the telegraph
+office he found Mr. Somerville Darrah and his secretary there ahead of
+him, and he observed that the explosive gentleman who presided over
+the destinies of the Colorado and Grand River appeared to be in a more
+than usually volcanic frame of mind.
+
+Now Winton, though new to the business of building railroads for the
+Utah Short Line, was not new to Denver or Colorado. Hence when the
+Rajah, followed by his secretarial shadow, had left the office, Winton
+spoke to the operator as to a friend.
+
+"What is the matter with Mr. Darrah, Tom? He seems to be uncommonly
+vindictive this morning."
+
+The man of dots and dashes nodded.
+
+"He's always crankier this time than he was the other. He's a holy
+terror, the Rajah is. I wouldn't work on his road for a farm down
+East--not if my job took me within cussing distance of him. Bet a hen
+worth fifty dollars he is up in Mr. Colbert's office right now,
+raising particular sand because his special engine wasn't standing
+here ready to snatch his private car on the fly, so's to go on without
+losing headway."
+
+Winton frowned thoughtfully, and he let his writing hand pause while
+he said, "So he travels special from Denver, does he?"
+
+"On his own road?--well, I should smile. Nothing is too good for the
+Rajah; or too quick, when he happens to be in a hurry. I wonder he
+didn't have the T. C. pull him special from Kansas City."
+
+Winton handed in his batch of telegrams and went his way reflective.
+
+What was Mr. Somerville Darrah's particular rush? As set forth by
+Adams, the plans of the party in the Rosemary contemplated nothing
+more hasty than a leisurely trip to the Pacific coast--a pleasure
+jaunt with a winter sojourn in California to lengthen it. Why, then,
+this sudden change from Limited regular trains to unlimited specials?
+Was there fresh news from the seat of war in Quartz Creek Canyon?
+Winton thought not. In that case he would have had his budget as well;
+and so far as his own advices went, matters were still as they had
+been. A letter from the Utah attorneys in Carbonate assured him that
+the injunction appeal was not yet decided, and another from Chief of
+Construction Evarts concerned itself mainly with the major's desire to
+know when he was to be relieved.
+
+But if Winton could have been an eavesdropper behind the door of
+Superintendent Colbert's office on the second floor of the Union
+Depot, his doubts would have been resolved instantly.
+
+The telegraph operator's guess went straight to the mark. Mr. Darrah
+was "raising particular sand" because his wire order for a special
+engine had not been obeyed to the saving of the ultimate second of
+time. But between his objurgations on that score, he was rasping out
+questions designed to exhaust the chief clerk's store of information
+concerning the status of affairs at the seat of war.
+
+"Will you inform me, seh, why I wasn't wired that this beggahly appeal
+was going against us?" he demanded wrathfully. "What's that you say,
+seh? Don't tell me you couldn't know what the decision of the cou't
+was going to be before it was handed down: that's what you-all are
+heah for--to find out these things! And what is all this about Majah
+Eva'ts resigning, and the Utah's sending East for a professional
+right-of-way fighteh to take his place? Who is this new man? Don't
+know? Dammit, seh! it's your business to know! _Now when do you faveh
+me with my engine_?"
+
+Thus the Rajah; and the chief clerk, himself known from end to end of
+the Colorado and Grand River as a queller of men, could only point out
+of the window to where the Rosemary stood engined and equipped for the
+race, and say meekly: "I'm awfully sorry you've been delayed, Mr.
+Darrah; very sorry, indeed. But your car is ready now. Shall I go
+along to be on hand if you need me?"
+
+"No, seh!" stormed the irate master; and the chief clerk's face became
+instantly expressive of the keenest relief. "You stay right heah and
+see that the wires to Qua'tz Creek are kept open--wide open, seh. And
+when you get an ordeh from me--for an engine, a regiment of the
+National Gyua'd, or a train-load of white elephants--you fill it. Do
+you understand, seh?"
+
+Meantime, while this scene was getting itself enacted in the
+superintendent's office, a mild fire of consternation was alight in
+the gathering room of the Rosemary. As we have guessed, Winton's
+packet of mail was not the only one which was delivered by special
+arrangement that morning to the incoming Limited at the yard
+registering station. There had been another, addressed to Mr.
+Somerville Darrah; and when he had opened it there had been a volcanic
+explosion and a hurried dash for the telegraph office, as recorded.
+
+Sifted out by the Reverend Billy, and explained by him to Mrs.
+Carteret and Bessie, the firing spark of the explosion appeared to be
+some news of an untoward character from a place vaguely designated as
+"the front."
+
+"It seems that there is some sort of a right-of-way scrimmage going on
+up in the mountains between our road and the Utah Short Line," said
+the young man. "It was carried into the courts, and now it turns out
+that the decision has gone against us."
+
+"How perfectly horrid!" said Miss Bessie. "Now I suppose we shall have
+to stay here indefinitely while Uncle Somerville does things." And
+placid Mrs. Carteret added plaintively: "It's too bad! I think they
+might let him have one little vacation in peace."
+
+"Who talks of peace?" queried Virginia, driven in from her post of
+vantage on the observation platform by the smoke from the
+switching-engine. "Didn't I see Uncle Somerville charging across to
+the telegraph office with war written out large in every line of him?"
+
+"I am afraid you did," affirmed the Reverend Billy; and thereupon the
+explanation was rehearsed for Virginia's benefit.
+
+The brown eyes flashed militant sympathy.
+
+"Oh, I wish Uncle Somerville would go to 'the front,' wherever that
+is, and take us along!" she cried. "It would be ever so much better
+than California."
+
+The Reverend William laughed; and Aunt Martha put in her word of
+expostulation, as in duty bound.
+
+"Why, my dear Virginia--the idea! You don't know in the least what you
+are talking about. I have been reading in the papers about these
+right-of-way troubles, and they are perfectly terrible. One report
+said they were arming the laboring men, and another said the militia
+might have to be called out."
+
+"Well, what of it?" said Virginia, with all the hardihood of youth and
+unknowledge. "It's something like a burning building: one doesn't want
+to be hard-hearted and rejoice over other people's misfortunes; but
+then, if it has to burn, one would like to be there to see."
+
+Miss Bessie put a stray lock of the flaxen hair up under its proper
+comb.
+
+"I'm sure I prefer California and the orange-groves and peace," she
+asserted. "Don't you, Cousin Billy?"
+
+What Mr. Calvert would have replied is no matter for this history,
+since at this precise moment the Rajah came in, "coruscating," as
+Virginia put it, from his late encounter with the superintendent's
+chief clerk.
+
+"Give them the word to go, Jastrow, and let's get out of heah," he
+commanded. And when the secretary had vanished the Rajah made his
+explanations to all and sundry. "I've been obliged in a manneh to
+change ouh itinerary. Anotheh company is trying to fault us up in
+Qua'tz Creek Canyon, and I am in a meashuh compelled to be on the
+ground. We shall be delayed only a few days, I hope; at the worst only
+until the first snow-storm comes; and, in the meantime, Califo'nia
+won't run away."
+
+Virginia clapped her hands.
+
+"Then we are really to go to 'the front' and see a right-of-way fight?
+Oh, won't that be perfectly intoxicating!"
+
+The Rajah glared at her as if she had said something incendiary. The
+picturesque aspect of the struggle had evidently not appealed to him.
+But he smiled grimly when he said: "Now there spoke the blood of the
+fighting Carterets: hope you won't change your mind, my deah." And
+with that he dived into his working den, pushing the lately-returned
+secretary in ahead of him.
+
+Virginia linked arms with Bessie, the flaxen-haired, when the wheels
+began to turn.
+
+"We are off," she said. "Let's go out on the platform and see the last
+of Denver."
+
+It was while they were clinging to the hand-rail, and looking back
+upon the jumble of railway activities out of which they had just
+emerged that the Rosemary, gaining headway, overtook another moving
+train running smoothly on a track parallel to that upon which the
+private car was speeding. It was the narrow-gage mountain connection
+of the Utah line, and Winton and Adams were on the rear platform of
+the last car. So it chanced that the four of them were presently
+waving their adieus across the wind-blown interspace. In the midst of
+it, or rather at the moment when the Rosemary, gathering speed as the
+lighter of the two trains, forged ahead, the Rajah came out to light
+his cigar.
+
+He took in the little tableau of the rear platforms at a glance, and
+when the slower train was left behind asked a question of Virginia.
+
+"Ah--wasn't one of those two the young gentleman who called on you
+yestehday afternoon, my deah?"
+
+Virginia admitted it.
+
+"Could you faveh me with his name?"
+
+"He is Mr. Morton P. Adams, of Boston."
+
+"Ah-h! and his friend--the young gentleman who laid his hand to ouh
+plow and put the engine on the track last night?"
+
+"He is Mr. Winton--a--an artist, I believe; at least, that is what I
+gathered from what Mr. Adams said of him."
+
+Mr. Somerville Darrah laughed, a slow little laugh, deep in his chest.
+
+"Bless youh innocent soul--he a picchuh--painteh? Not in a thousand
+yeahs, my deah Virginia. He is a railroad man, and a right good one at
+that. Faveh me with the name again; Winteh, did you say?"
+
+"No; Winton--Mr. John Winton."
+
+"D-d-devil!" gritted the Rajah, smiting the hand-rail with his
+clenched fist. "Hah! I beg your pahdon, my deahs--a meah slip of the
+tongue." And then, to the full as savagely: "By Heaven, I hope that
+train will fly the track and ditch him before eveh he comes within
+ordering distance of the work in Qua'tz Creek Canyon!"
+
+"Why, Uncle Somerville--how vindictive!" cried Virginia. "Who is he,
+and what has he done?"
+
+"He is Misteh John Winton, as you informed me just now; one of the
+brainiest constructing engineers in this entiah country, and the
+hardest man in this or any otheh country to down in a right-of-way
+fight--that's who he is. And it's not what he's done, my deah
+Virginia, it's what he is going to do. If I can't get him killed up
+out of ouh way,"--but here Mr. Darrah saw the growing terror in two
+pairs of eyes, and realizing that he was committing himself before an
+unsympathetic audience, beat a hasty retreat to his stronghold at the
+other end of the Rosemary.
+
+"Well!" said the flaxen-haired Bessie, catching her breath. But
+Virginia laughed.
+
+"I'm glad I'm not Mr. Winton," she said.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE CRYSTALLINE ALTITUDES
+
+
+Morning in the highest highlands of the Rockies, a morning clear,
+cold, and tense, with a bell-like quality in the frosty air to make
+the cracking of a snow-laden spruce-bough resound like a pistol-shot.
+For Denver and the dwellers on the eastern plain the sun is an hour
+high; but the hamlet mining-camp of Argentine, with its dovecote
+railway station and two-pronged siding, still lies in the steel-blue
+depths of the canyon shadow.
+
+Massive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white
+above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic
+torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its
+descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the
+station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new
+and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral
+gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing
+mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a
+looping detour.
+
+In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the
+station a graders' camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde
+of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the
+shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car
+of a construction train.
+
+All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the sturdiest of mountain-climbing
+locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the
+Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the
+mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the
+siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened
+when the special was passing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth
+curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of
+cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the
+inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was--or
+thought she was--the first member of the party to dress and steal out
+upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the
+canyon.
+
+But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently
+broken by a voice behind her--the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur
+Jastrow.
+
+"What a howling wilderness, to be sure, isn't it?" said the secretary,
+twirling his eyeglasses by the cord and looking, as he felt,
+interminably bored.
+
+"No, indeed; anything but that," she retorted warmly. "It is grander
+than anything I ever imagined. I wish there were a piano in the car.
+It makes me fairly ache to set it in some form of expression, and
+music is the only form I know."
+
+"I'm glad if it doesn't bore you," he rejoined, willing to agree with
+her for the sake of prolonging the interview. "But to me it is nothing
+more than a dreary wilderness, as I say; a barren, rock-ribbed gulch
+affording an indifferent right of way for two railroads."
+
+"For one," she corrected, in a quick upflash of loyalty for her kin.
+
+The secretary shifted his gaze from the mountains to the maiden and
+smiled. She was exceedingly good to look upon--high-bred, queenly, and
+just now the fine fire of enthusiasm quickened her pulses and sent the
+rare flush to neck and cheek.
+
+Jastrow the cold-eyed, the business automaton, set to go off with a
+click at Mr. Somerville Darrah's touch, had ambitions not automatic.
+Some day he meant to put the world of business under foot as a
+conqueror, standing triumphant on the apex of that pyramid of success
+which the Mr. Somerville Darrahs were so painstakingly uprearing. When
+that day should come, there would need to be an establishment, a
+menage, a queen for the kingdom of success. Summing her up for the
+hundredth time since the beginning of the westward flight, he thought
+Miss Carteret would fill the requirements passing well.
+
+But this was a divagation, and he pulled himself back to the askings
+of the moment, agreeing with her again without reference to his
+private convictions.
+
+"For one, I should have said," he amended. "We mean to have it that
+way, though an unprejudiced onlooker might be foolish enough to say
+that there is a pretty good present prospect of two."
+
+But Miss Carteret was in a contradictory mood. Moreover, she was a
+woman, and the way to a woman's confidence does not lie through the
+neutral country of easy compliance.
+
+"If you won't take the other side, I will," she said. "There will be
+two."
+
+Jastrow acquiesced a second time.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder. Our competitor's road seems to be only a question
+of time--a very short time, judging from the number of men turning out
+in the track gang down yonder."
+
+Virginia leaned over the railing to look past the car and the dovecote
+station shading her eyes to shut out the snow-blink from the sun-fired
+peaks.
+
+"Why, they are soldiers!" she exclaimed. "At least, some of them have
+guns on their shoulders. And see--they are forming in line!"
+
+The secretary adjusted his eye-glasses.
+
+"By Jove! you are right; they have armed the track force. The new
+chief of construction doesn't mean to take any chances of being shaken
+loose by main strength. Here they come."
+
+The end of track of the new line was diagonally across the creek from
+the Rosemary's berth and a short pistol-shot farther down stream. But
+to advance it to a point opposite the private car, and to gain the
+altitude of the high embankment directly across from the station, the
+new line turned short out of the main canyon at the mouth of the
+intersecting gorge, describing a long, U-shaped curve around the head
+of the lateral ravine and doubling back upon itself to reenter the
+canyon proper at the higher elevation.
+
+The curve which was the beginning of this U-shaped loop was the
+morning's scene of action, and the Utah track-layers, two hundred
+strong, moved to the front in orderly array, with armed guards as
+flankers for the handcar load of rails which the men were pushing up
+the grade.
+
+Jastrow darted into the car, and a moment later his place on the
+observation platform was taken by a wrathful industry colonel fresh
+from his dressing-room--so fresh, indeed, that he was coatless,
+hatless, and collarless, and with the dripping bath-sponge clutched
+like a missile to hurl at the impudent invaders on the opposite side
+of the canyon.
+
+"Hah! wouldn't wait until a man could get into his clothes!" he
+rasped, apostrophizing the Utah's new chief of construction. "Jastrow!
+Faveh me instantly, seh! Hustle up to the camp there and turn out the
+constable, town-marshal, or whatever he is. Tell him I have a writ for
+him to serve. Run, seh!"
+
+The secretary appeared and disappeared like a marionette when the
+string has been jerked by a vigorous hand, and Virginia smiled--this
+without prejudice to a very acute appreciation of the grave
+possibilities which were preparing themselves. But having her share of
+the militant quality which made her uncle what he was, she stood her
+ground.
+
+"Aren't you afraid you will take cold, Uncle Somerville?" she asked
+archly; and the Rajah came suddenly to a sense of his incompleteness
+and went in to finish his ablutions against the opening of the battle
+actual.
+
+At first Virginia thought she would follow him. When Mercury Jastrow
+should return with the officer of the law there would be trouble of
+some sort, and the woman in her shrank from the witnessing of it. But
+at the same instant the blood of the fighting Carterets asserted
+itself and she resolved to stay.
+
+"I wonder what uncle hopes to be able to do?" she mused. "Will a
+little town constable with a bit of signed paper from some lawyer or
+judge be mighty enough to stop all that furious activity over there?
+It's more than incredible."
+
+From that she fell to watching the activity and the orderly purpose of
+it. A length of steel, with men clustering like bees upon it, would
+slide from its place on the hand-car to fall with a frosty clang on
+the cross-ties. Instantly the hammermen would pounce upon it. One
+would fall upon hands and knees to "sight" it into place; two others
+would slide the squeaking track-gage along its inner edge; a quartet,
+working like the component parts of a faultless mechanism, would tap
+the fixing spikes into the wood; and then at a signal a dozen of the
+heavy pointed hammers swung aloft and a rhythmic volley of resounding
+blows clamped the rail into permanence on its wooden bed.
+
+Ahead of the steel-layers were the Italians placing the cross-ties in
+position to receive the track, and here the foreman's badge of office
+and scepter was a pick-handle. Above all the clamor and the shoutings
+Virginia could hear the bull-bellow of this foreman roaring out his
+commands--in terms happily not understandable to her; and once she
+drew back with a little cry of womanly shrinking when the pick-handle
+thwacked upon the shoulders of one who lagged.
+
+It was this bit of brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in
+the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with
+it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the
+bully's hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she
+could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her
+curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown
+off his coat to fall to work on the derailed engine of the Limited.
+
+"That was fine!" she said to herself. "Most men in his place wouldn't
+care, so long as the work was done, and done quickly. I wonder
+if--oh, you startled me!"
+
+It was Mr. Somerville Darrah again, clothed upon and in his right
+mind; otherwise the mind of a master of men who will brook neither
+defeat at the hands of an antagonist nor disobedience on the part of
+his following. He was scowling fiercely across at the Utah activities
+when she spoke, but at her exclamation the frown softened into a smile
+for his favorite niece.
+
+"Startled you, eh? Pahdon me, my deah Virginia. But as I am about to
+startle some one else, perhaps you would better go in to your aunt."
+
+She put a hand on his arm. "Please let me stay out here, Uncle
+Somerville," she said. "I'll be good and not get in the way."
+
+He shook his head, in deprecation rather than in refusal.
+
+"An officer will be here right soon now to make an arrest. There may
+be a fight, or at least trouble of a sort you wouldn't care to see, my
+deah."
+
+"Is it--is it Mr. Winton?" she asked.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"What has he been doing--besides being 'The Enemy'?"
+
+The Rajah's smile was ferocious.
+
+"Just now he is trespassing, and directing others to trespass, upon
+private property. Do you see that dump up there on the mountain?--the
+hole that looks like a mouth with a long gray beard hanging below it?
+That is a mine, and its claim runs down across the track where Misteh
+Winton is just now spiking his rails."
+
+"But, I don't understand," she began; then she stopped short and clung
+to the strong arm. A man in a wide-flapped hat and cowboy
+_chaparejos_, with a revolver on either hip, was crossing the stream
+on the ice-bridge to scramble up the embankment of the new line.
+
+"The officer?" she asked in an awed whisper.
+
+The Rajah made a sign of assent. Then, identifying Winton in the
+throng of workers, he forgot Virginia's presence. "Confound him!" he
+fumed. "I'd give a thousand dollars if he'd faveh me by showing fight
+so we could lock him up on a criminal count!"
+
+"Why, Uncle Somerville!" she cried.
+
+But there was no time for reproaches. The leather-breeched person
+parading as the Argentine town-marshal had climbed the embankment,
+and, singling out his man, was reading his warrant.
+
+Contrary to Mr. Darrah's expressed hope, Winton submitted quietly.
+With a word to his men--a word that stopped the strenuous labor-battle
+as suddenly as it had begun--he turned to pick his way down the rough
+hillside at the heels of the marshal.
+
+For some reason that she could never have set out in words Virginia
+was distinctly disappointed. It was no part of her desire to see the
+conflict blaze up in violence, but it nettled her to see Winton give
+up so easily. Some such thought as this had possession of her while
+the marshal and his prisoner were picking their way across the ice,
+and she was hoping that Winton would give her a chance to requite him,
+if only with a look.
+
+But it was Town-Marshal Peter Biggin, affectionately known to his
+constituents as "Bigginjin Pete," who gave her the coveted
+opportunity. Instead of disappearing decently with his captive, the
+marshal made the mistake of his life by marching Winton up the track
+to the private car, thrusting him forward, and saying: "Here's yer
+meat, Guv'nor. What-all 'ud ye like fer me to do with hit now I've
+got it?"
+
+Now it is safe to assume that the Rajah had no intention of appearing
+thus openly as the instigator of Winton's arrest. Hence, if a fierce
+scowl and a wordless oath could maim, it is to be feared that the
+overzealous Mr. Biggin would have been physically disqualified on the
+spot. As it was, Mr. Darrah's ebullient wrath could find no adequate
+speech forms, and in the eloquent little pause Winton had time to
+smile up at Miss Carteret and to wish her the pleasantest of
+good-mornings.
+
+But the Rajah's handicap was not permanent.
+
+"Confound you, seh!" he exploded. "I'm not a justice of the peace! If
+you've made an arrest, you must have had a warrant for it, and you
+ought to know what to do with your prisoneh."
+
+"I'm dashed if I do," objected the simple-hearted Mr. Biggin. "I
+allowed you wanted him."
+
+Winton laughed openly.
+
+"Simplify it for him, Mr. Darrah. We all know that it was your move to
+stop the work, and you have stopped it--for the moment. What is the
+charge, and where is it answerable?"
+
+The Rajah dropped the mask and spoke to the point.
+
+"The cha'ge, seh, is trespass, and it is answerable in Judge
+Whitcomb's cou't in Carbonate. The plaintiff in this particular case
+is John Doe, the supposable owneh of that mining claim up yondeh. In
+the next it will probably be Richa'd Roe. You are fighting a losing
+battle, seh."
+
+Winton's smile showed his teeth.
+
+"That remains to be seen," he countered coolly.
+
+The Rajah waved a shapely hand toward the opposite embankment, where
+the tracklayers were idling in silent groups waiting for some one in
+authority to tell them what to do.
+
+"We can do that every day, Misteh Winton. And each separate individual
+arrest will cost your company twelve hours, or such a matteh--the time
+required for you to go to Carbonate to give bond for your appearance."
+
+During this colloquy Virginia had held her ground stubbornly, this
+though she felt intuitively that it would be the greatest possible
+relief to all three of these men if she would go away.
+
+But now a curious struggle as of a divided allegiance was holding her.
+Of course, she wanted Mr. Somerville Darrah to win. Since he was its
+advocate, his cause must be righteous and just. But against this
+dutiful convincement there was a rebellious hope that Winton would not
+allow himself to be beaten; or, rather, it was a feeling that she
+would never forgive him if he should.
+
+So it was that she stood with face averted lest he should see her eyes
+and read the rebellious hope in them. And in spite of the precaution
+he both saw and read, and made answer to the Rajah's ultimatum
+accordingly.
+
+"Do your worst, Mr. Darrah. We have some twenty miles of steel to lay
+to take us into the Carbonate yards. That steel shall go down in spite
+of anything you can do to prevent it."
+
+Virginia waited breathless for her uncle's reply to this cool
+defiance. Quite contrary to all precedent, it was mildly
+expostulatory.
+
+"It grieves me, seh, to find you so determined to cou't failure," he
+began; and when the whistle of the upcoming Carbonate train gave him
+leave to go on: "Constable, you will find transpo'tation for yourself
+and one in the hands of the station agent. Misteh Winton, that is your
+train. I wish you good-morning and a pleasant journey. Come, Virginia,
+we shall be late to ouh breakfast."
+
+Winton walked back to the station at the heels of his captor,
+cudgeling his brain to devise some means of getting word to Adams.
+Happily the Technologian, who had been unloading steel at the
+construction camp, had been told of the arrest, and when Winton
+reached the station he found his assistant waiting for him.
+
+But now the train was at hand and time had grown suddenly precious.
+Winton turned short upon the marshal.
+
+"This is not a criminal matter, Mr. Biggin: will you give me a moment
+with my friend?"
+
+The ex-cowboy grinned. "Bet your life I will. I ain't lovin' that old
+b'iler-buster in the private car none too hard." And he went in to get
+the passes.
+
+"What's up?" queried Adams, forgetting his drawl for once in a way.
+
+"An arrest--trumped-up charge of trespass on that mining claim up
+yonder. But I've got to go to Carbonate to answer the charge and give
+bonds, just the same."
+
+"Any instructions?"
+
+"Yes. When the train is out of sight and hearing, you get back over
+there and drive that track-laying for every foot there is in it."
+
+Adams nodded. "I'll do it, and get myself locked up, I suppose."
+
+"No, you won't; that's the beauty of it. The majesty of the law--all
+there is of it in Argentine--goes with me to Carbonate in the person
+of the town-marshal."
+
+"Oh, good--succulently good! Well, so long. I'll look for you back on
+the evening train?"
+
+"Sure," was the confident reply, "if the Rajah doesn't order it to be
+abandoned on my poor account."
+
+Ten minutes later, when the train had gone storming on its way to
+Carbonate and the Rosemary party was at breakfast, the clank of steel
+and the chanteys of the hammermen on the other side of the canyon
+began again with renewed vigor. The Rajah threw up his head like a
+war-horse scenting the battle from afar and laid his commands upon the
+long-suffering secretary.
+
+"Faveh me, Jastrow. Get out there and see what they are doing, seh."
+
+The secretary was back in the shortest possible interval, and his
+report was concise and business-like.
+
+"Work under full headway again, in charge of a fellow who wears a
+billy-cock hat and smokes cigarettes."
+
+"Mr. Morton P. Adams," said Virginia, recognizing the description.
+"Will you have him arrested too, Uncle Somerville?"
+
+But the Rajah rose hastily without replying and went to his office
+state-room, followed, shadow-like, by the obsequious Jastrow.
+
+It was some little time after breakfast, and Virginia and the Reverend
+Billy were doing a constitutional on the plank platform at the
+station, when the secretary came down from the car on his way to the
+telegraph office.
+
+It was Virginia who stopped him. "What do we do next, Mr. Jastrow?"
+she said; "call in the United States Army?"
+
+For reply he handed her a telegram, damp from the copying press. It
+was addressed to the superintendent of the C. G. R. at Carbonate, and
+she read it without scruple.
+
+  "Have the Sheriff of Ute County swear in a dozen deputies and come
+   with them by special train to Argentine. Revive all possible titles
+   to abandoned mining claims on line of the Utah Extension, and have
+   Sheriff Deckert bring blank warrants to cover any emergency.
+
+       "DARRAH V.-P."
+
+"That's one of them," said the secretary. "I daren't show you the
+other."
+
+"Oh, please!" she said, holding out her hand, while the Reverend Billy
+considerately turned his back.
+
+Jastrow weighed the chances of detection. It was little enough he
+could do to lay her under obligations to him, and he was willing to do
+that little as he could. "I guess I can trust you," he said, and gave
+her the second square of press-damp paper.
+
+Like the first, it was addressed to the superintendent at Carbonate.
+But this time the brown eyes flashed and her breath came quickly as
+she read the vice-president's cold-blooded after-thought:
+
+  "Town-Marshal Biggin will arrive in Carbonate on Number 201 this
+   A.M. with a prisoner. Have our attorneys see to it that the man is
+   promptly jailed in default of bond. If he is set at liberty, as he
+   is likely to be, I shall trust you to arrange for his rearrest and
+   detention at all hazards.
+
+       "D."
+
+
+
+
+V. THE LANDSLIDE
+
+
+Virginia took the first step in the perilous path of the strategist
+when she handed the incendiary telegram back to Jastrow.
+
+"Poor Mr. Winton!" she said, with the real sympathy in the words made
+most obviously perfunctory by the tone. "What a world of possibilities
+there is masquerading behind that little word 'arrange.' Tell me more
+about it, Mr. Jastrow. How will they 'arrange' it?"
+
+"Winton's rearrest? Nothing easier in a tough mining-camp like
+Carbonate, I should say."
+
+"Yes, but how?"
+
+"I can't prophesy how Grafton will go about it, but I know what I
+should do."
+
+Virginia's smile was irresistible, but there was a look in the deepest
+depth of the brown eyes that was sifting Mr. Arthur Jastrow to the
+innermost sand-heap of his desert nature.
+
+"How would you do it, Mr. Napoleon Jastrow?" she asked, giving him the
+exact fillip on the side of gratified vanity.
+
+"Oh, I'd fix him. He is in a frame of mind right now; and by the time
+the lawyers are through drilling him in the trespass affair, he'll be
+just spoiling for a row with somebody."
+
+"Do you think so? Oh, how delicious! And then what?"
+
+"Then I'd hire some plug-ugly to stumble up against him and pick a
+quarrel with him. He'd do the rest--and land in the lock-up."
+
+Those who knew her best said it was a warning to be heeded in Miss
+Virginia Carteret when her eyes were downcast and her voice sank to
+its softest cadence.
+
+"Why, certainly; how simple!" she said, taking her cousin's arm again;
+and the secretary went in to set the wires at work in Winton's affair.
+
+Now Miss Carteret was a woman in every fiber of her, but among her
+gifts she might have counted some that were, to say the least,
+super-feminine. One of these was a measure of discretion which would
+have been fairly creditable in a past master of diplomacy. So, while
+the sympathetic part of her was crying out for a chance to talk
+Winton's threatened danger over with some one, she lent herself
+outwardly to the Reverend Billy's mood--which was one of scenic
+enthusiasm; this without prejudice to a growing determination to
+intervene in behalf of fair play for Winton if she could find a way.
+
+But the way obstinately refused to discover itself. The simple thing
+to do would be to appeal to her uncle's sense of justice. It was not
+like him to fight with ignoble weapons, she thought, and a tactful
+word in season might make him recall the order to the superintendent.
+But she could not make the appeal without betraying Jastrow. She knew
+well enough that the secretary had no right to show her the telegrams;
+knew also that Mr. Somerville Darrah's first word would be a demand to
+know how she had learned the company's business secrets. Regarding
+Jastrow as little as a high-bred young woman to whom sentiment is as
+the breath of life can regard a man who is quite devoid of it, she was
+still far enough from the thought of effacing him.
+
+To this expedient there was an unhopeful alternative: namely, the
+sending, by the Reverend Billy, or, in the last resort, by herself, of
+a warning message to Winton. But there were obstacles seemingly
+insuperable. She had not the faintest notion of how such a warning
+should be addressed; and again, the operator at Argentine was a
+Colorado and Grand River employee, doubtless loyal to his salt, in
+which case the warning message would never get beyond his
+waste-basket.
+
+"Getting too chilly for you out here? Want to go in?" asked the
+Reverend Billy, when the scenic enthusiasm began to outwear itself.
+
+"No; but I am tired of the sentry-go part of it--ten steps and a
+turn," she confessed. "Can't we walk on the track a little way?"
+
+Calvert saw no reason why they might not, and accordingly helped her
+over to the snow-encrusted path between the rails.
+
+"We can trot down and have a look at their construction camp, if you
+like," he suggested, and thitherward they went.
+
+There was not much to see, after all, as the Reverend Billy remarked
+when they had reached a coign of vantage below the curve. A string of
+use-worn bunk cars; a "dinkey" caboose serving as the home on wheels
+of the chief of construction and his assistant; a crooked siding with
+a gang of dark-skinned laborers at work unloading a car of steel.
+These in the immediate foreground; and a little way apart, perched
+high enough on the steep slope of the mountain side to be out of the
+camp turmoil, a small structure, half plank and half canvas--to wit,
+the end-of-track telegraph office.
+
+It was Virginia who first marked the boxed-up tent standing on the
+slope.
+
+"What do you suppose that little house-tent is for?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know," said Calvert. Then he saw the wires and ventured a
+guess which hit the mark.
+
+"I didn't suppose they would have a telegraph office," she commented,
+with hope rising again.
+
+"Oh, yes; they'd have to have a wire--one of their own. Under the
+circumstances they could hardly use ours."
+
+"No," she rejoined absently. She was scanning the group of
+steel-handlers in the hope that a young man in a billy-cock hat and
+with a cigarette between his lips would shortly reveal himself. She
+found him after a time and turned quickly to her cousin.
+
+"There is Mr. Adams down by the engine. Do you think he would come
+over and speak to us if he knew we were here?"
+
+The Reverend Billy's smile was of honest admiration.
+
+"How could you doubt it? Wait here a minute and I'll call him for
+you."
+
+He was gone before she could reply--across the ice-bridge spanning one
+of the pools, and up the rough, frozen embankment of the new line.
+There were armed guards here, too, as well as at the front, and one of
+them halted him at the picket line. But Adams saw and recognized him,
+and presently the two were crossing to where Virginia stood waiting
+for them.
+
+"Eheu! what a little world we live in, Miss Virginia! Who would have
+thought of meeting you here?" said Adams, taking her hand at the
+precise elevation prescribed by good form--Boston good form.
+
+"The shock is mutual," she laughed. "I must say that you and Mr.
+Winton have chosen a highly unconventional environment for your
+sketching-field."
+
+"I'm down," he admitted cheerfully; "please don't trample on me. But
+really, it wasn't all fib. Jack does do things with a pencil--other
+things besides maps and working profiles, I mean. Won't you come over
+and let me do the honors of the studio?"--with a grandiloquent
+arm-sweep meant to include the construction camp in general and the
+"dinkey" caboose-car in particular.
+
+It was the invitation she would have angled for, but she was too wise
+to assent too readily.
+
+"Oh, no; I think we mustn't. I'm afraid Mr. Winton might not like it."
+
+"Not like it? If you'll come he'll never forgive himself for not being
+here to 'shoot up' the camp for you in person. He is away, you know;
+gone to Carbonate for the day."
+
+"Ought we to go, Cousin Billy?" she asked, shifting, not the decision,
+but the responsibility for it, to broader shoulders.
+
+"Why not, if you care to?" said the athlete, to whom right-of-way
+fights were mere matters of business in no wise conflicting with the
+social ameliorations.
+
+Virginia hesitated. There was a thing to be said to Mr. Adams, and
+that without delay; but how could she say it with her cousin standing
+by to make an impossible trio out of any attempted duet confidential?
+A willingness to see that Winton had fair play need not carry with it
+an open desertion to the enemy. She must not forget to be loyal to her
+salt; and, besides, Mr. Somerville Darrah's righteous indignation was
+a possibility not lightly to be ignored.
+
+But, the upshot of the hesitant pause was a decision to brave the
+consequences--all of them; so she took Calvert's arm for the slippery
+crossing of the ice-bridge.
+
+Once on his own domain, Adams did the honors of the camp as thoroughly
+and conscientiously as if the hour held no care heavier than the
+entertainment of Miss Virginia Carteret. He explained the system under
+which the material was kept moving forward to the ever-advancing
+front; let her watch the rhythmic swing and slide of the rails from
+the car to the benches; took her up into the cab of the big "octopod"
+locomotive; gave her a chance to peep into the camp kitchen car; and
+concluded by handing her up the steps of the "dinkey."
+
+"Oh, how comfortable!" she exclaimed, when he had shown her all the
+space-saving contrivances of the field office. "And this is where you
+and Mr. Winton work?"
+
+"It is where we eat and sleep," corrected Adams. "And speaking of
+eating: it is hopelessly the wrong end of the day,--or it would be in
+Boston,--but our Chinaman won't know the difference. Let me have him
+make you a dish of tea,"--and the order was given before she could
+protest.
+
+"While we are waiting for Ah Foo I'll show you some of Jack's
+sketches," he went on, finding a portfolio and opening it upon the
+drawing-board.
+
+"Are you quite sure Mr. Winton won't mind?" she asked.
+
+"Mind? He'd give a month's pay to be here to show them himself. He is
+peacock vain of his one small accomplishment, Winton is--bores me to
+death with it sometimes."
+
+"Really?" was the mocking rejoinder, and they began to look at the
+sketches.
+
+They were heads, most of them, impressionistic studies in pencil or
+pastel, with now and then a pen-and-ink bearing evidence of more
+painstaking after-work. They were made on bits of map paper, the backs
+of old letters, and not a few on leaves torn from an engineer's
+note-book.
+
+"They don't count for much in an artistic way," said Adams, with the
+brutal frankness of a friendly critic, "but they will serve to show
+you that I wasn't all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you
+about Winton's proclivities the other day."
+
+"I shouldn't apologize for that, if I were you," she retorted. "It is
+well past apology, don't you think?" And then: "What is this one?"
+
+They had come to the last of the sketches, which was a rude map. It
+was penciled on the leaf of a memorandum, and Adams recognized it as
+the outline Winton had made and used in explaining the right-of-way
+entanglement.
+
+"It is a map," he said; "one that Jack drew day before yesterday when
+he was trying to make me understand the situation up here. I wonder
+why he kept it? Is there anything on the other side?"
+
+She turned the leaf, and they both went speechless for the moment. The
+reverse of the scrap of cross-ruled paper held a very fair likeness of
+a face which Virginia's mirror had oftenest portrayed: a sketch
+setting forth in a few vigorous strokes of the pencil the
+impressionist's ideal of the "goddess fresh from the bath."
+
+"By Jove!" exclaimed Adams, when he could find the word for his
+surprise. Then he tried to turn it off lightly. "There is a good bit
+more of the artist in Jack than I have been giving him credit for.
+Don't you know, he must have got the notion for that between two
+half-seconds--when you recognized me on the platform at Kansas City.
+It's wonderful!"
+
+"So very wonderful that I think I shall keep it," she rejoined, not
+without a touch of austerity. Then she added: "Mr. Winton will
+probably never miss it. If he does, you will have to explain the best
+way you can." And Adams could only say "By Jove!" again, and busy
+himself with pouring the tea which Ah Foo had brought in.
+
+In the nature of things the tea-drinking in the stuffy "dinkey"
+drawing-room was not prolonged. Time was flying. Virginia's errand of
+mercy was not yet accomplished, and Aunt Martha in her character of
+anxious chaperon was not to be forgotten. Also, Miss Carteret had a
+feeling that under his well-bred exterior Mr. Morton P. Adams was
+chafing like any barbarian industry captain at this unwarrantable
+intrusion and interruption.
+
+So presently they all forthfared into the sun-bright, snow-blinding,
+out-of-door world, and Virginia gathered up her courage and took her
+dilemma by the horns.
+
+"I believe I have seen everything now except that tent-place up
+there," she asserted, groping purposefully for her opening.
+
+Adams called up another smile of acquiescence. "That is our telegraph
+office. Would you care to see it?" He was of those who shirk all or
+shirk nothing.
+
+"I don't know why I should care to, but I do," she replied, with
+charming and childlike wilfulness; so the three of them trudged up the
+slippery path to the operator's den on the slope.
+
+Not to evade his hospitable duty in any part, Adams explained the use
+and need of a "front" wire, and Miss Carteret was properly interested.
+
+"How convenient!" she commented. "And you can come up here and talk to
+anybody you like--just as if it were a telephone?"
+
+"To anyone in the company's service," amended Adams. "It is not a
+commercial wire."
+
+"Then let us send a message to Mr. Winton," she suggested, playing the
+part of the capricious _ingenue_ to the very upcast of a pair of
+mischievous eyes. "I'll write it and you may sign it."
+
+Adams stretched his complaisance the necessary additional inch and
+gave her a pencil and a pad of blanks. She wrote rapidly:
+
+  "Miss Carteret has been here admiring your drawings. She took one of
+   them away with her, and I couldn't stop her without being rude. You
+   shouldn't have done it without asking her permission. She says--"
+
+"Oh, dear! I am making it awfully long. Does it cost so much a word?"
+
+"No," said Adams, not without an effort. He was beginning to be
+distinctly disappointed in Miss Virginia, and was inwardly wondering
+what piece of girlish frivolity he was expected to sign and send to
+his chief. Meanwhile she went on writing:
+
+  "--I am to tell you not to get into any fresh trouble--not to let
+   anyone else get you into trouble; by which I infer she means that
+   some attempt will be made to keep you from returning on the evening
+   train."
+
+"There, can you send all that?" she asked sweetly, giving the pad to
+her host.
+
+Adams read the first part of the letter length telegram with inward
+groanings, but the generous purpose of it struck him like a whip-blow
+when he came to the thinly-veiled warning. Also it shamed him for his
+unworthy judgment of Virginia.
+
+"I thank you very heartily, Miss Carteret," he said humbly. "It shall
+be sent word for word." Then, for the Reverend William's benefit:
+"Winton deserves all sorts of a snubbing for taking liberties with
+your portrait. I'll see he gets more when he comes back."
+
+Here the matter rested; and, having done what she conceived to be her
+charitable duty, Virginia was as anxious to get away as heart--the
+heart of a slightly bored Reverend Billy, for instance--could wish.
+
+So they bade Adams good-by and picked their way down the frozen
+embankment and across the ice-bridge; down and across and back to the
+Rosemary, where they found a perturbed chaperon in a flutter of
+solicitude arising upon their mysterious disappearance and long
+absence.
+
+"It may be just as well not to tell any of them where we have been,"
+said Virginia in an aside to her cousin. And so the incident of
+tea-drinking in the enemy's camp was safely put away like a little
+personal note in its envelop with the flap gummed down.
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE RAJAH GIVES AN ORDER
+
+
+While Adams was dispensing commissary tea in iron-stone china cups to
+his two guests in the "dinkey" field office, his chief, taking the
+Rosemary's night run in reverse in the company of Town-Marshal Biggin,
+was turning the Rajah's coup into a small Utah profit.
+
+Having come upon the ground late the night before, and from the
+opposite direction, he had seen nothing of the extension grade west of
+Argentine. Hence the enforced journey to Carbonate only anticipated an
+inspection trip which he had intended to make as soon as he had seated
+Adams firmly in the track-laying saddle.
+
+Not to miss his opportunity, at the first curve beyond Argentine he
+passed his cigar-case to Biggin and asked permission to ride on the
+rear platform of the day-coach for inspection purposes.
+
+"Say, pardner, what do you take me fer, anyhow?" was the reproachful
+rejoinder.
+
+"For a gentleman in disguise," said Winton promptly.
+
+"Sim'larly, I do you; savvy? You tell me you ain't goin' to stampede,
+and you ride anywhere you blame please. See? This here C. G. R. outfit
+ain't got no surcingle on me."
+
+Winton smiled.
+
+"I haven't any notion of stampeding. As it happens, I'm only a day
+ahead of time. I should have made this run to-morrow of my own accord
+to have a look at the extension grade. You will find me on the rear
+platform when you want me."
+
+"Good enough," was the reply; and Winton went to his post of
+observation.
+
+Greatly to his satisfaction, he found that the trip over the C. G. R.
+answered every purpose of a preliminary inspection of the Utah grade
+beyond Argentine. For seventeen of the twenty miles the two lines were
+scarcely more than a stone's throw apart, and when Biggin joined him
+at the junction above Carbonate he had his note-book well filled with
+the necessary data.
+
+"Make it, all right?" inquired the friendly bailiff.
+
+"Yes, thanks. Have another cigar?"
+
+"Don't care if I do. Say, that old fire-eater back yonder in the
+private car has got a mighty pretty gal, ain't he?"
+
+"The young lady is his niece," said Winton, wishing that Mr. Biggin
+would find other food for comment.
+
+"I don't care; she's pretty as a Jersey two-year-old."
+
+"It's a fine day," observed Winton; and then, to background Miss
+Carteret effectually as a topic: "How do the people of Argentine feel
+about the opposition to our line?"
+
+"They're red-hot; you can put your money on that. The C. G. R.'s a
+sure-enough tail-twister where there ain't no competition. Your
+road'll get every pound of ore in the camp if it ever gets through."
+
+Winton made a mental note of this up-cast of public opinion, and set
+it over against the friendly attitude of the official Mr. Biggin. It
+was very evident that the town-marshal was serving the Rajah's purpose
+only because he had to.
+
+"I suppose you stand with your townsmen on that, don't you?" he
+ventured.
+
+"Now you're shouting: that's me."
+
+"Then if that is the case, we won't take this little holiday of ours
+any harder than we can help. When the court business is settled--it
+won't take very long--you are to consider yourself my guest. We stop
+at the Buckingham."
+
+"Oh, we do, do we? Say, pardner, that's white--mighty white. If I'd
+'a' been an inch or so more'n half awake this morning when that old
+b'iler-buster's hired man routed me out, I'd 'a' told him to go to
+blazes with his warrant. Nex' time I will."
+
+Winton shook his head. "There isn't going to be any 'next time,'
+Peter, my son," he prophesied. "When Mr. Darrah gets fairly down to
+business he'll throw bigger chunks than the Argentine town-marshal at
+us."
+
+By this time the train was slowing into Carbonate, and a few minutes
+after the stop at the crowded platform they were making their way up
+the single bustling street of the town to the court-house.
+
+"Ever see so many tin-horns and bunco people bunched in all your
+round-ups?" said Biggin, as they elbowed through the uneasy shifting
+groups in front of the hotel.
+
+"Not often," Winton admitted. "But it's the luck of the big camps:
+they are the dumping-grounds of the world while the high pressure is
+on."
+
+The ex-range-rider turned on the courthouse steps to look the sidewalk
+loungers over with narrowing eyes.
+
+"There's Sheeny Mike and Big Otto and half a dozen others right there
+in front o' the Buckingham that couldn't stay to breathe twice in
+Argentine. And this town's got a po-lice!"--the comment with
+lip-curling scorn.
+
+"It also has a county court which is probably waiting for us," said
+Winton; whereupon they went in to appease the offended majesty of the
+law.
+
+As Winton had predicted, his answer to the court summons was a mere
+formality. On parting with his chief at the Argentine station
+platform, Adams' first care had been to wire news of the arrest to the
+Utah headquarters. Hence Winton found the company's attorney waiting
+for him in Judge Whitcomb's courtroom, and his release on an
+appearance bond was only a matter of moments.
+
+The legal affair dismissed, there ensued a weary interval of
+time-killing. There was no train back to Argentine until nearly five
+o'clock in the afternoon, and the hours dragged heavily for the two,
+who had nothing to do but wait. Biggin endured his part of it manfully
+till the midday dinner had been discussed; then he drifted off with
+one of Winton's cigars between his teeth, saying that he should "take
+poison" and shoot up the town if he could not find some more peaceful
+means of keeping his blood in circulation.
+
+It was a little after three o'clock, and Winton was sitting at the
+writing-table in the lobby of the hotel elaborating his hasty notebook
+data of the morning's inspection, when a boy came in with a telegram.
+The young engineer was not so deeply engrossed in his work as to be
+deaf to the colloquy.
+
+"Mr. John Winton? Yes, he is here somewhere," said the clerk in answer
+to the boy's question; and after an identifying glance: "There he
+is--over at the writing-table."
+
+Winton turned in his chair and saw the boy coming toward him; also he
+saw the ruffian pointed out by Biggin from the court-house steps and
+labeled "Sheeny Mike" lounging up to the clerk's desk for a whispered
+exchange of words with the bediamonded gentleman behind it.
+
+What followed was cataclysmic in its way. The lounger took three
+staggering lurches toward Winton, brushed the messenger boy aside, and
+burst out in a storm of maudlin invective.
+
+"Sign yerself 'Winton' now, do yet ye lowdown, turkey-trodden--"
+
+"One minute," said Winton curtly, taking the telegram from the boy and
+signing for it.
+
+"I'll give ye more'n ye can carry away in less'n half that time--see?"
+was the minatory retort; and the threat was made good by an awkward
+buffet which would have knocked the engineer out of his chair if he
+had remained in it.
+
+Now Winton's eyes were gray and steadfast, but his hair was of that
+shade of brown which takes the tint of dull copper in certain lights,
+and he had a temper which went with the red in his hair rather than
+with the gray in his eyes. Wherefore his attempt to placate his
+assailant was something less than diplomatic.
+
+"You drunken scoundrel!" he snapped. "If you don't go about your
+business and let me alone, I'll turn you over to the police with a
+broken bone or two!"
+
+The bully's answer was a blow delivered straight from the shoulder--too
+straight to harmonize with the fiction of drunkenness. Winton saw the
+sober purpose in it and went battle-mad, as a hasty man will. Being a
+skilful boxer,--which his antagonist was not,--he did what he had to
+do neatly and with commendable despatch. Down, up; down, up; down a
+third time, and then the bystanders interfered.
+
+"Hold on!"
+
+"That'll do!"
+
+"Don't you see he's drunk?"
+
+"Enough's as good as a feast--let him go."
+
+Winton's blood was up, but he desisted, breathing threatenings.
+Whereat Biggin shouldered his way into the circle.
+
+"Pay your bill and let's hike out o' this, _pronto_!" he said in a low
+tone. "You ain't got no time to fool with a Carbonate justice shop."
+
+But Winton was not to be brought to his senses so easily.
+
+"Run away from that swine? Not if I know it. Let him take it into
+court if he wants to. I'll be there, too."
+
+The beaten one was up now and apparently looking for an officer.
+
+"I'm takin' ye all to witness," he rasped. "I was on'y askin' him to
+cash up what he lost to me las' night, and he jumps me. But I'll stick
+him if there's any law in this camp."
+
+Now all this time Winton had been holding the unopened telegram
+crumpled in his fist, but when Biggin pushed him out of the circle and
+thrust him up to the clerk's desk, he bethought him to read the
+message. It was Virginia's warning, signed by Adams, and a single
+glance at the closing sentence was enough to cool him suddenly.
+
+"Pay the bill, Biggin, and join me in the billiard-room, quick!" he
+whispered, pressing money into the town-marshal's hand and losing
+himself in the crowd. And when Biggin had obeyed his instructions:
+"Now for a back way out of this, if there is one. We'll have to take
+to the hills till train time."
+
+They found a way through the bar and out into a side street leading
+abruptly up to the spruce-clad hills behind the town. Biggin held his
+peace until they were safe from immediate danger of pursuit. Then his
+curiosity got the better of him.
+
+"Didn't take you more'n a week to change your mind about pullin' it
+off with that tinhorn scrapper in the courts, did it?"
+
+"No," said Winton.
+
+"'Tain't none o' my business, but I'd like to know what stampeded
+you."
+
+"A telegram,"--shortly. "It was a put-up job to have me locked up on a
+criminal charge, and so hold me out another day."
+
+Biggin grinned. "The old b'iler-buster again. Say, he's a holy terror,
+ain't he?"
+
+"He doesn't mean to let me build my railroad if he can help it."
+
+The ex-cowboy found his sack of chip tobacco and dexterously rolled a
+cigarette in a bit of brown wrapping-paper.
+
+"If that's the game, Mr. Sheeny Mike, or his backers, will be most
+likely to play it to a finish, don't you guess?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"By havin' a po-liceman layin' for you at the train."
+
+"I hadn't thought of that."
+
+"Well, I can think you out of it, I reckon. The branch train is a
+'commodation, and it'll stop most anywhere if you throw up your hand
+at it. We can take out through the woods and across the hills, and mog
+up the track a piece. How'll that do?"
+
+"It will do for me, but there is no need of your tramping when you can
+just as well ride."
+
+But now that side of Mr. Peter Biggin which endears him and his kind
+to every man who has ever shared his lonely round-ups, or broken bread
+with him in his comfortless shack, came uppermost.
+
+"What do you take me fer?" was the way it vocalized itself; but there
+was more than a formal oath of loyal allegiance in the curt question.
+
+"For a man and a brother," said Winton heartily; and they set out
+together to waylay the outgoing train at some point beyond the danger
+limit.
+
+It was accomplished without further mishap, and the short winter day
+was darkening to twilight when the train came in sight and the
+engineer slowed to their signal. They climbed aboard, and when they
+had found a seat in the smoker the chief of construction spoke to the
+ex-cowboy as to a friend.
+
+"I hope Adams has knocked out a good day's work for us," he said.
+
+"Your pardner with the store hat and the stinkin' cigaroots?--he's all
+right," said Biggin; and it so chanced that at the precise moment of
+the saying the subject of it was standing with the foreman of
+track-layers at a gap in the new line just beyond and above the
+Rosemary's siding at Argentine, his day's work ended, and his men
+loaded on the flats for the run down to camp over the lately-laid
+rails of the lateral loop.
+
+"Not such a bad day, considering the newness of us and the bridge at
+the head of the gulch," he said, half to himself. And then more
+pointedly to the foreman: "Bridge-builders to the front at the first
+crack of dawn, Mike. Why wasn't this break filled in the grading?"
+
+"Sure, sorr, 'tis a dhrain it is," said the Irishman; "from the placer
+up beyant," he added, pointing to a washed-out excoriation on the
+steep upper slope of the mountain. "Major Evarts did be tellin' us
+we'd have the lawyers afther us hot-fut again if we didn't be lavin'
+ut open the full width."
+
+"Mmph!" said Adams, looking the ground over with a critical eye. "It's
+a bad bit. It wouldn't take much to bring that whole slide down on us
+if it wasn't frozen solid. Who owns the placer?"
+
+"Two fellies over in Carbonate. The company did be thryin' to buy the
+claim, but the sharps wouldn't sell--bein' put up to hold ut by thim
+C. G. R. divils. It's more throuble we'll be havin' here, I'm
+thinking."
+
+While they lingered a shrill whistle, echoing like an eldrich laugh
+among the cliffs of the upper gorge, announced the coming of a train
+from the direction of Carbonate. Adams looked at his watch.
+
+"I'd like to know what that is," he mused. "It's an hour too soon for
+the accommodation. By Jove!"
+
+The exclamation directed itself at a one-car train which came
+thundering down the canyon to pull in on the siding beyond the
+Rosemary. The car was a passenger coach, well-lighted, and from his
+post on the embankment Adams could see armed men filling the windows.
+Michael Branagan saw them, too, and the fighting Celt in him rose to
+the occasion.
+
+"'Tis Donnybrook Fair we've come to this time, Misther Adams. Shall I
+call up the b'ys wid their guns?"
+
+"Not yet. Let's wait and see what happens."
+
+What happened was a peaceful sortie. Two men, each with a kit of some
+kind borne in a sack, dropped from the car, crossed the creek, and
+struggled up the hill through the unbridged gap. Adams waited until
+they were fairly on the right of way, then he called down to them.
+
+"Halt, there! you two. This is corporation property."
+
+"Not much it ain't!" retorted one of the trespassers gruffly. "It's
+the drain-way from our placer up yonder."
+
+"What are you going to do up there at this time of night?"
+
+"None o' your blame business!" was the explosive counter-shot.
+
+"Perhaps it isn't," said Adams mildly. "Just the same, I'm thirsting
+to know. Call it vulgar curiosity if you like."
+
+"All right, you can know, and be cussed to you. We're goin' to work
+our claim. Got anything to say against it?"
+
+"Oh! no," rejoined Adams; and when the twain had disappeared in the
+upper darkness he went down the grade with Branagan and took his place
+on the man-loaded flats for the run to the construction camp, thinking
+more of the lately-arrived car with its complement of armed men than
+of the two miners who had calmly announced their intention of working
+a placer claim on a high mountain, without water, and in the dead of
+winter! By which it will be seen that Mr. Morton P. Adams,
+C. E. M. I. T. Boston, had something yet to learn in the matter of
+practical field work.
+
+By the time Ah Foo had served him his solitary supper in the dinkey he
+had quite forgotten the incident of the mysterious placer miners.
+Worse than this, it had never occurred to him to connect their
+movements with the Rajah's plan of campaign. On the other hand, he was
+thinking altogether of the carload of armed men, and trying to devise
+some means of finding out how they were to be employed in furthering
+the Rajah's designs.
+
+The means suggested themselves after supper, and he went alone over to
+Argentine to spend a half-hour in the bar of the dance-hall listening
+to the gossip of the place. When he had learned what he wanted to
+know, he forthfared to meet Winton at the incoming train.
+
+"We are in for it now," he said, when they had crossed the creek to
+the dinkey and the Chinaman was bringing Winton's belated supper. "The
+Rajah has imported a carload of armed mercenaries, and he is going to
+clean us all out to-morrow: arrest everybody from the gang foremen
+up."
+
+Winton's eyebrows lifted. "So? that is a pretty large contract. Has he
+men enough to do it?"
+
+"Not so many men. But they are sworn-in deputies, with the sheriff of
+Ute County in command--a posse, in fact. So he has the law on his
+side."
+
+"Which is more than he had when he set a thug on me this afternoon at
+Carbonate," said Winton sourly; and he told Adams about the
+misunderstanding in the lobby of the Buckingham. His friend whistled
+under his breath. "By Jove! that's pretty rough. Do you suppose the
+Rajah dictated any such Lucretia Borgia thing as that?"
+
+Winton took time to think about it and admitted a doubt, as he had not
+before. Believing Mr. Somerville Darrah fit for treasons, stratagems,
+and spoils in his official capacity of vice-president of a fighting
+corporation, he was none the less disposed to find excuses for Miss
+Virginia Carteret's uncle.
+
+"I did think so at first, but I guess it was only the misguided zeal
+of some understrapper. Of course, word has gone out all along the
+C. G. R. line that we are to be delayed by every possible expedient."
+
+But Adams shook his head.
+
+"Mr. Darrah dictated that move in his own proper person."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"You had a message from me this afternoon?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"What did you think of it?"
+
+"I thought you might have left out the first part of it; also that you
+might have made the latter half a good bit more explicit."
+
+A slow smile spread itself over Adams' impassive face.
+
+"Every man has his limitations," he said. "I did the best I could. But
+the Rajah knew very well what he was about--otherwise there would have
+been no telegram."
+
+Winton sent the Chinaman out for another cup of tea before he said,
+"Did Miss Carteret come here alone?"
+
+"Oh, no; Calvert came with her."
+
+"What brought them here?"
+
+Adams spread his hands.
+
+"What makes any woman do precisely the most unexpected thing?"
+
+Winton was silent for a moment. Finally he said: "I hope you did what
+you could to make it pleasant for her."
+
+"I did. And I didn't hear her complain."
+
+"That was low-down in you, Morty."
+
+Adams chuckled reminiscently. "Had to do it to make my day-before-yesterday
+lie hold water. And she was immensely taken with the scrawls, especially
+with one of them."
+
+Winton flushed under the bronze.
+
+"I suppose I don't need to ask which one."
+
+Adams' grin was a measure of his complacence.
+
+"Well, hardly."
+
+"She took it away with her?"
+
+"Took it, or tore it up, I forget which."
+
+"Tell me, Morty, was she very angry?"
+
+The other took the last hint of laughter out of his eyes before he
+said solemnly: "You'll never know how thankful I was that you were
+twenty miles away."
+
+Winton's cup was full, and he turned the talk abruptly to the
+industrial doings and accomplishments of the day. Adams made a verbal
+report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when
+he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but,
+strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the
+incident of the upward-climbing miners.
+
+When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the
+engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward
+he left the dinkey ostensibly to do it, declining Adams' offer of
+company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator's
+tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in
+his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.
+
+"That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?" he asked.
+
+"No, go to sleep. I'll write a wire and leave it for you to send in
+the morning."
+
+He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief
+report of the day's progress in track-laying for the general manager's
+record. But when Carter's regular breathing told him he was alone he
+pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until
+he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at
+the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.
+
+"Um," he said, and his heart grew warm within him. "It's just about as
+I expected: Morty didn't have anything whatever to do with it--except
+to sign and send it as she commanded him to." And the penciled sheet
+was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast
+pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.
+
+The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished
+the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp
+buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the
+dinkey. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a
+round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout
+against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the
+newly-laid track of the day.
+
+Another half-hour had elapsed, and a waning moon was clearing the
+topmost crags of Pacific Peak when he came out on the high embankment
+opposite the Rosemary, having traversed the entire length of the
+lateral loop and inspected the trestle at the gulch head by the light
+of a blazing spruce-branch.
+
+The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little
+mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of
+the moon. The engine of the sheriff's car was humming softly with a
+note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in
+Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked
+piano floated out upon the frosty night air.
+
+Winton turned to go back. The windows of the Rosemary were all dark,
+and there was nothing to stay for. So he thought, at all events; but
+if he had not been musing abstractedly upon things widely separated
+from his present surroundings, he might have remarked two tiny stars
+of lantern-light high on the placer ground above the embankment; or,
+failing the sight, he might have heard the dull, measured _slumph_
+of a churn-drill burrowing deep in the frozen earth of the slope.
+
+As it was, a pair of brown eyes blinded him, and the tones of a voice
+sweeter than the songs of Oberon's sea-maid filled his ears. Wherefore
+he neither saw nor heard; and taking the short cut across the mouth of
+the lateral gulch back to camp, he boarded the dinkey and went to bed
+without disturbing Adams.
+
+The morning of the day to come broke clear and still, with the stars
+paling one by one at the pointing finger of the dawn, and the
+frost-rime lying thick and white like a snowfall of erect and
+glittering needles on iron and steel and wood.
+
+Obedient to orders, the bridge-builders were getting out their
+hand-car at the construction camp, the wheels shrilling merrily on the
+frosted rails, and the men stamping and swinging their arms to start
+the sluggish night-blood. Suddenly, like the opening gun of a battle,
+the dull rumble of a mighty explosion trembled upon the still air,
+followed instantly by a sound as of a passing avalanche.
+
+Winton was out and running up the track before the camp was fairly
+aroused. What he saw when he gained the hither side of the lateral
+gulch was a sight to make a strong man weep. A huge landslide,
+starting from the frozen placer ground high up on the western
+promontory, had swept every vestige of track and embankment into the
+deep bed of the creek at a point precisely opposite Mr. Somerville
+Darrah's private car.
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW
+
+
+Virginia was up and dressed when the sullen shock of the explosion
+set the windows jarring in the Rosemary.
+
+She hurried out upon the observation platform and so came to look
+upon the ruin wrought by the landslide while the dust-like smoke of
+the dynamite still hung in the air.
+
+"Rather unlucky for our friends the enemy," said a colorless voice
+behind her; and she had an uncomfortable feeling that Jastrow had
+been lying in wait for her.
+
+She turned upon him quickly.
+
+"Was it an accident, Mr. Jastrow?"
+
+"How could it be anything else?" he inquired mildly.
+
+"I don't know. But there was an explosion: I heard it."
+
+"It is horribly unfair," she went on. "I understand the sheriff is
+here. Couldn't he have prevented this?"
+
+The secretary's rejoinder was a platitude: "Everything is fair in
+love or war."
+
+"But this is neither," she retorted.
+
+"Think not?" he said coolly. "Wait, and you'll see. And a word in
+your ear, Miss Carteret: you are one of us, you know, and you mustn't
+be disloyal. I know what you did yesterday after you read those
+telegrams."
+
+Virginia's face became suddenly wooden. Until that moment it had not
+occurred to her that Jastrow's motive in showing her the two telegrams
+might have been carefully calculated.
+
+"I have never given you the right to speak to me that way, Mr.
+Jastrow," she said, with the faintest possible emphasis on the
+courtesy prefix; and with that she turned from him to focus her
+field-glass on the construction camp below.
+
+At the Utah stronghold all was activity of the fiercest. Winton had
+raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive
+with men clustering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the
+material-train to be taken to the front.
+
+While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia
+saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling
+the men were off and at work.
+
+Virginia's color rose and the brown eyes filled swiftly. One part
+of her ideal was courage of the sort that rises the higher for
+reverses. But at the instant she remembered the secretary, and, lest
+he should spy upon her emotion, she turned and took refuge in the
+car.
+
+In the Rosemary the waiter was laying the plates for breakfast, and
+Bessie and the Reverend William were at the window, watching the
+stirring industry battle now in full swing on the opposite slope.
+Virginia joined them.
+
+"Isn't it a shame!" she said. "Of course, I want our side to win;
+but it seems such a pity that we can't fight fairly."
+
+Calvert said, "Isn't what a shame?" thereby eliciting a crisp
+explanation from Virginia in which she set well-founded suspicion
+in the light of fact.
+
+The Reverend Billy shook his head.
+
+"Such things may be within the law--of business; but they will surely
+breed bad blood--"
+
+The interruption was the Rajah in his proper person, bustling out
+fiercely to a conference with his Myrmidons. By tacit consent the
+three at the window fell silent.
+
+There was a hasty mustering of armed men under the windows of the
+Rosemary, and they heard Sheriff Deckert's low-voiced instructions
+to his posse.
+
+"Take it slow and easy, boys, and don't get rattled. Now, then; guns
+to the front! Steady!"
+
+The Reverend Billy rose.
+
+"What are you going to do?" said Virginia.
+
+"I'm going to give Winton a tip if it's the last thing I ever do."
+
+She shook her head and pointed eastward to the mouth of the lateral
+gulch. Under cover of a clump of evergreen-scrub a man in a
+wideflapped hat and leather breeches was climbing swiftly to the level
+of the new line, cautiously waving a handkerchief as a peace token.
+"That is the man who arrested Mr. Winton yesterday. This time he is
+going to fight on the other side. He'll carry the warning."
+
+"Think so?" said Calvert.
+
+"I am sure of it. Open the window, please. I want to see better."
+
+As yet there was no sign of preparation on the embankment. For the
+moment the rifles of the track force were laid aside, and every man
+was plying pick or shovel.
+
+Winton was in the thick of the pick-and-shovel melee, urging it on,
+when Biggin ran up.
+
+"Hi!" he shouted. "Fixin' to take another play-day in Carbonate?
+Lookee down yonder!"
+
+Winton looked and became alive to the possibilities in the turning
+of a leaf.
+
+"Guns!" he yelled; and at the word of command the tools were flung
+aside, and the track force, over two hundred strong, became an army.
+
+"Mulcahey, take half the men and go up the grade till you can rake
+those fellows without hitting the car. Branagan, you take the other
+half and go down till you can cross-fire with Mulcahey. Aim low, both
+of you; and the man who fires before he gets the word from me will
+break his neck at a rope's end. Fall in!"
+
+"By Jove!" said Adams. "Are you going to resist? That spells felony,
+doesn't it?"
+
+Winton pointed to the waiting octopod.
+
+"I'm going to order the Two-fifteen down out of the way: you may go
+with her if you like."
+
+"I guess not!" quoth the assistant, calmly lighting a fresh cigarette.
+And then to the water-boy, who was acting quartermaster: "Give me
+a rifle and a cartridge-belt, Chunky, and I'll stay here with the
+boss."
+
+"And where do I come in?" said Biggin to Winton reproachfully.
+
+"You'll stay out, if your head's level. You've done enough already
+to send you to Canyon City."
+
+"I ain't a-forgettin' nothing," said Peter cheerfully, casting himself
+flat behind a heap of earth on the dump-edge.
+
+While the sheriff's posse was picking its way gingerly over the loose
+rock and earth dam formed by the landslide, the window went up in
+the Rosemary and Winton saw Virginia. Without meaning to, she gave
+him his battle-word.
+
+"We are a dozen Winchesters to your one, Mr. Deckert, and we shall
+resist force with force. Order your men back or there will be
+trouble."
+
+Winton stood out on the edge of the cutting, a solitary figure where
+a few minutes before the earth had been flying from a hundred shovels.
+
+The sheriff's reply was an order, but not for retreat.
+
+"He's one of the men we want; cover him!" he commanded.
+
+Unless the public occasion appeals strongly to the sympathies or the
+passions, a picked-up sheriff's posse is not likely to have very good
+metal in it. Peter Biggin laughed.
+
+"Don't be no ways nervous," he said in an aside to Winton. "Them
+professional veniry chumps couldn't hit the side o' Pacific Peak."
+
+Winton held his ground, while the sheriff tried to drive his men up
+a bare slope commanded by two hundred rifles to right and left. The
+attempt was a humiliating failure. Being something less than soldiers
+trained to do or die, the deputies hung back to a man.
+
+Virginia could not forbear a smile. The sheriff burst into caustic
+profanity. Whereupon Mr. Peter Biggin rose up and sent a bullet to
+plow a little furrow in the ice within an inch of Deckert's heels.
+
+"Ex-cuse _me_, Bart," he drawled, "but no cuss words don't go."
+
+The sheriff ignored Peter Biggin as a person who could be argued with
+at leisure and turned to Winton.
+
+"Come down!" he bellowed.
+
+Winton laughed.
+
+"Let me return the invitation. Come up, and you may read your warrants
+to us all day."
+
+Deckert withdrew his men, and at Winton's signal the track-layers
+came in and the earth began to fly again.
+
+Virginia sighed her relief, and Bessie plucked up courage to go to
+the window, which she had deserted in the moment of impending battle.
+
+"Breakfast is served," announced the waiter as calmly as if the
+morning meal were the only matter of consequence in a world of
+happenings.
+
+They gathered about the table, a silent trio made presently a quartet
+by the advent of Mrs. Carteret, who had neither seen nor heard
+anything of the warlike episode with which the day had begun.
+
+Mr. Darrah was late, so late that when he came in, Virginia was the
+only one of the four who remained at table. She stayed to pour his
+coffee and to bespeak peace.
+
+"Uncle Somerville, can't we win without calling in these horrid men
+with their guns?"
+
+A mere shadow of a grim smile came and went in the Rajah's eyes.
+
+"An unprejudiced outsideh might say that the 'horrid men with their
+guns' were on top of that embankment, my deah--ten to ouh one," he
+remarked.
+
+"But I should think we might win in some other way," Virginia
+persisted undauntedly.
+
+Mr. Darrah pushed his plate aside and cleared his throat.
+
+"For business reasons which you--ah--wouldn't undehstand, we can't
+let the Utah finish this railroad of theirs into Carbonate this
+winteh."
+
+"So much I have inferred. But Mr. Winton seems to be very determined."
+
+"Mmph! I wish Mr. Callowell had favehed us with some one else--any
+one else. That young fellow is a bawn fighteh, my deah."
+
+Virginia had a bright idea, and she advanced it without examining
+too closely into its ethical part.
+
+"Mr. Winton is working for wages, isn't he?" she asked.
+
+"Of cou'se; big money, at that. His sawt come high."
+
+"Well, why can't you hire him away from the other people? Mr.
+Callowell might not be so fortunate next time."
+
+The Rajah sat back in his chair and regarded her thoughtfully.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing my deah--nothing at all. I was just wondering how a
+woman's--ah--sense of propo'tion was put togetheh. But your plan has
+merit. Do I understand that you will faveh me with your help?"
+
+"Why, ye-es, certainly, if I can," she assented, not without dubiety.
+"That is, I'll be nice to Mr. Winton."
+
+"That is precisely what I mean, my deah. We'll begin by having him
+heah to dinneh this evening, him and the otheh young man--what's his
+name?--Adams."
+
+And the upshot of the matter was a dainty note which found its way
+by the hands of the private-car porter to Winton, laboring manfully
+at his task of repairing the landslide damages.
+
+"Mr. Somerville Darrah's compliments to Mr. John Winton and Mr. Morton
+P. Adams, and he will be pleased if they will dine with the party
+in the car Rosemary at seven o'clock.
+
+"Informal.
+
+"Wednesday, December the Ninth."
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE GREEKS BRINGING GIFTS
+
+
+Adams said "By Jove!" in his most cynical drawl when Winton gave him
+the dinner-bidding to read: then he laughed.
+
+Winton recovered the dainty note, folding it carefully and putting it
+in his pocket. The handwriting was the same as that of the telegram
+abstracted from Operator Carter's sending-book.
+
+"I don't see anything to laugh at," he objected.
+
+"No? First the Rajah sends the sheriff's posse packing without
+striking a blow, and now he invites us to dinner."
+
+"You make me exceedingly tired at odd moments, Morty. Why can't you
+give Mr. Darrah the credit of being what he really is at bottom--a
+right-hearted Virginia gentleman of the old school?"
+
+"You don't mean that you are going to accept!" said Adams, aghast.
+
+"Certainly; and so are you."
+
+There was no more to be said, and Adams held his peace while Winton
+scribbled a line of acceptance on a leaf of his note-book and sent it
+across to the Rosemary by the hand of the water-boy.
+
+Their reception at the steps of the Rosemary was a generous proof of
+the aptness of that aphorism which sums up the status _post bellum_ in
+the terse phrase, "After war, peace." Mr. Darrah met them; was
+evidently waiting for them.
+
+"Come in, gentlemen; come in and be at home,"--this with a hand for
+each. "Virginia allowed you wouldn't faveh us, but I assured her she
+didn't rightly know men of the world: told her that a picayune
+business affair in which we are all acting as corporation proxies
+needn't spell out anything like a blood feud between gentlemen."
+
+For another man the informal table gathering might have been easily
+prohibitive of confidences _a deux_, even with a Virginia Carteret to
+help, but Winton was far above the trammelings of time and place. He
+had eyes and ears only for the sweet-faced, low-voiced young woman
+beside him, and some of his replies to the others were irrelevant
+enough to send a smile around the board.
+
+"How very absent-minded Mr. Winton seems to be this evening!" murmured
+Bessie from her niche between Adams and the Reverend Billy at the
+farther end of the table. "He isn't quite at his best, is he, Mr.
+Adams?"
+
+"No, indeed," said Adams, matching her undertone, "very far from it.
+He has been a bit off all day: touch of mountain fever, I'm afraid."
+
+"But he doesn't look at all ill," objected Miss Bessie. "I should say
+he is a perfect picture of rude health."
+
+The coffee was served, and Mrs. Carteret was rising. Whereupon Miss
+Virginia handed her cup to Adams, and so had him for her companion in
+the tete-a-tete chair, leaving Winton to shift for himself.
+
+The shifting process carried him over to the Rajah and the Reverend
+Billy, to a small table in a corner of the compartment, and the
+enjoyment of a mild cigar.
+
+Later, when Calvert had been eliminated by Miss Bessie, Winton looked
+to see the true inwardness of the dinner-bidding made manifest by his
+host.
+
+But Mr. Darrah chatted on, affably noncommittal, and after a time
+Winton began to upbraid himself for suspecting the ulterior motive.
+And when he finally rose to excuse himself on a letter-writing plea,
+his leave-taking was that of the genial host reluctant to part company
+with his guest.
+
+"I've enjoyed your conve'sation, seh; enjoyed it right much. May I
+hope you will faveh us often while we are neighbors?"
+
+Winton rose, made the proper acknowledgments, and would have crossed
+the compartment to make his adieus to Mrs. Carteret. But at that
+moment Virginia came between.
+
+"You are not going yet, are you, Mr. Winton? Don't hurry. If you are
+dying to smoke a pipe, as Mr. Adams says you are, we can go out on the
+platform. It isn't too cold, is it?"
+
+"It is clear and frosty, a beautiful night," he hastened to say. "May
+I help you with your coat?"
+
+So presently Winton had his heart's desire, which was to be alone with
+Virginia.
+
+She nerved herself for the plunge,--her uncle's plunge.
+
+"Your part in the building of this other railroad is purely a business
+affair, is it not?"
+
+"My personal interest? Quite so; a mere matter of dollars and cents,
+you may say."
+
+"If you should have another offer, from some other company--"
+
+"That is not your argument; it is Mr. Darrah's. You know well enough
+what is involved: honor, integrity, good faith, everything a man
+values, or should value. I can't believe you would ask such a
+sacrifice of me--of any man.
+
+"Indeed, I do not ask it, Mr. Winton. But it is only fair that you
+should have your warning. My uncle will leave no stone unturned to
+defeat you."
+
+He was still looking into her eyes, and so had courage to say what
+came uppermost.
+
+"I don't care: I shall fight him as hard as I can, but I shall always
+be his debtor for this evening. Do you understand?"
+
+In a flash her mood changed and she laughed lightly.
+
+"Who would think it of you, Mr. Winton. Of all men I should have said
+you were the last to care so much for the social diversions. Shall we
+go in?"
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE BLOCK SIGNAL.
+If Mr. John Winton, C. E., stood in need of a moral tonic, as Adams
+had so delicately intimated to Miss Bessie Carteret, it was
+administered in quantity sufficient before he slept on the night of
+dinner-givings.
+
+For a clear-eyed theorist, free from all heart-trammelings and able to
+grasp the unsentimental fact, the enemy's new plan of campaign wrote
+itself quite legibly. With his pick and choice among the time-killing
+expedients the Rajah could scarcely have found one more to his purpose
+than the private car Rosemary, including in its passenger list a Miss
+Virginia Carteret.
+
+All of which Adams, substituting friendly frankness for the
+disciplinary traditions of the service, set forth in good Bostonian
+English for the benefit and behoof of his chief, and was answered
+according to his deserts with scoffings and deridings.
+
+"I wasn't born yesterday, Morty, and I'm not so desperately asinine as
+you seem to think," was the besotted one's summing-up. "I know the
+Rajah doesn't split hairs in a business fight, but he is hardly
+unscrupulous enough to use Miss Carteret as a cat's-paw."
+
+But Adams would not be scoffed aside so easily.
+
+"You're off in your estimate of Mr. Darrah, Jack, 'way off. I know the
+tradition: that a Southern gentleman is all chivalry when it comes to
+a matter touching his womankind, and I don't controvert it as a
+general proposition. But the Rajah has been a fighting Western
+railroad magnate so long that his accent is about the only Southern
+asset he has retained. If I'm any good at guessing, he will stick at
+nothing to gain his end."
+
+Winton admitted the impeachment without prejudice to his own point of
+view.
+
+"Perhaps you are right. But forewarned is forearmed. And Miss Virginia
+is not going to lend herself to any such nefarious scheme."
+
+"Not consciously, perhaps; but you don't know her yet. If she saw a
+good chance to take the conceit out of you, she'd improve it--without
+thinking overmuch of the possible consequences to the Utah company."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Winton. "That is another of your literary inferences.
+I've met her only twice, yet I venture to say I know her better than
+you do. If she cared anything for me--which she doesn't--"
+
+"Oh, go to sleep!" said Adams, who was not minded to argue further
+with a man besotted; and so the matter went by default for the time.
+
+But in the days that followed, days in which the sun rose and set in
+cloudless winter splendor and the heavy snows still held aloof, Adams'
+prediction wrought itself out into sober fact. After the single appeal
+to force, Mr. Darrah seemed to give up the fight. None the less, the
+departure of the Rosemary was delayed, and its hospitable door was
+always open to the Utah chief of construction and his assistant.
+
+It was very deftly done, and even Adams, the clear-eyed, could not
+help admiring the Rajah's skilful finesse. Of formal dinner-givings
+there might easily have been an end, since the construction camp had
+nothing to offer in return. But the formalities were studiously
+ignored, and the two young men were put upon a footing of intimacy and
+encouraged to come and go as they pleased.
+
+Winton took his welcome broadly, as what lover would not? and within a
+week was spending most of his evenings in the Rosemary--this at a time
+when every waking moment of the day and night was deeply mortgaged to
+the chance of success. For now that the Rajah had withdrawn his
+opposition, Nature and the perversity of inanimate things had taken a
+hand, and for a fortnight the work of track-laying paused fairly
+within sight of the station at Argentine.
+
+First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into
+Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower
+canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate
+piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for
+the purpose--a process which effectually blocked the track for three
+entire days. Next it was another landslide (unhelped by dynamite,
+this) just above the station, a crawling cataract of loose, sliding
+shale which, painstakingly dug out and dammed with plank bulkhead
+during the day, would pour down and bury bulkhead, buttresses, and the
+very right of way in the night.
+
+In his right mind--the mind of an ambitious young captain of industry
+who sees defeat with dishonor staring him in the face--Winton would
+have fought all the more desperately for these hindrances. But,
+unfortunately, he was no longer an industry captain with an eye single
+to success. He was become that anomaly despised of the working
+world--a man in love.
+
+"It's no use shutting our eyes to the fact, Jack," said Adams one
+evening, when his chief was making ready for his regular descent upon
+the Rosemary. "We shall have to put night shifts at work on that
+shale-slide if we hope ever to get past it with the rails."
+
+"Hang the shale!" was the impatient rejoinder. "I'm no galley slave."
+
+Adams' slow smile came and went in cynical ripplings.
+
+"It is pretty difficult to say precisely what you are just now. But I
+can prophesy what you are going to be if you don't wake up and come
+alive."
+
+Having no reply to this, Adams went back to the matter of night
+shifts.
+
+"If you will authorize it, I'll put a night gang on and boss it
+myself. What do you say?"
+
+"I say you are no end of a good fellow, Morty. And that's the plain
+fact. I'll do as much for you some time."
+
+"I'll be smashed if you will--you'll never get the chance. When I let
+a pretty girl make a fool of me--"
+
+But the door of the dinkey slammed behind the outgoing one, and the
+prophet of evil was left to organize his night assault on the
+shale-slide, and to command it as best he could.
+
+So, as we say, the days, days of stubborn toil with the enthusiasm
+taken out, slipped away unfruitful. Of the entire Utah force Adams
+alone held himself up to the mark, and being only second in command,
+he was unable to keep the bad example of the chief from working like
+a leaven of inertness among the men. Branagan voiced the situation in
+rich brogue one evening when Adams had exhausted his limited
+vocabulary of abuse on the force for its apathy. "'Tis no use, ava,
+Misther Adams. If you was the boss himself 'twould be you as would put
+the comether on thim too quick. But it's 'like masther, like mon.' The
+b'ys all know that Misther Winton don't care a damn; and they'll not
+be hurtin' thimselves wid the wurrk."
+
+And the Rajah? Between his times of smoking high-priced cigars with
+Winton in the lounging-room of the Rosemary, he was swearing Jubilates
+in the privacy of his working-den state-room, having tri-daily weather
+reports wired to him by way of Carbonate and Argentine station, and
+busying himself in the intervals with sending and receiving sundry
+mysterious telegrams in cipher.
+
+Thus Mr. Somerville Darrah, all going well for him until one fateful
+morning when he made the mistake of congratulating his ally. Then--but
+we picture the scene: Mr. Darrah late to his breakfast, being just in
+from an early-morning reconnaissance of the enemy's advancings;
+Virginia sitting opposite to pour his coffee. All the others vanished
+to some limbo of their own.
+
+The Rajah rubbed his hands delightedly.
+
+"We are coming on famously, famously, my deah Virginia. Two weeks
+gone, heavy snows predicted for the mountain region, and nothing,
+practically nothing at all, accomplished on the otheh side of the
+canyon. When you marry, my deah, you shall have a block of C. G. R.
+preferred stock to keep you in pin-money."
+
+"I?" she queried. "But, Uncle Somerville, I don't understand--"
+
+The Rajah laughed.
+
+"That was a very pretty blush, my deah. Bless your innocent soul, if
+I were young Misteh Winton, I'm not sure but I should consideh the
+game well lost."
+
+She was gazing at him wide-eyed now, and the blush had left a pallor
+behind it.
+
+"You mean that I--that I--"
+
+"I mean that you are a helpeh worth having, Miss Carteret. Anotheh
+time Misteh Winton won't pay cou't to a cha'ming young girl and try to
+build a railroad at one and the same moment, I fancy. Hah!"
+
+The startled eyes veiled themselves swiftly, and Virginia's voice sank
+to its softest cadence.
+
+"Have I been an accomplice," she began, "in this--this despicable
+thing, Uncle Somerville?"
+
+Mr. Darrah began a little to see his mistake.
+
+"Ah--an accomplice? Oh, no, my deah Virginia, not quite that. The word
+smacks too much of the po-lice cou'ts. Let us say that Misteh Winton
+has found your company mo' attractive than that of his laborehs, and
+commend his good taste in the matteh."
+
+So much he said by way of damping down the fire he had so rashly
+lighted. Then Jastrow came in with one of the interminable cipher
+telegrams and Virginia was left alone.
+
+For a time she sat at the deserted breakfast-table, dry-eyed,
+hot-hearted, thinking such thoughts as would come crowding thickly
+upon the heels of such a revelation. Winton would fail: a man with
+honor, good repute, his entire career at stake, as he himself had
+admitted, would go down to miserable oblivion and defeat, lacking some
+friendly hand to smite him alive to a sense of his danger. And, in her
+uncle's estimation, at least, she, Virginia Carteret, would figure as
+the Delilah triumphant.
+
+She rose, tingling to her finger-tips with the shame of it, went to
+her state-room, and found her writing materials. In such a crisis her
+methods could be as direct as a man's. Winton was coming again that
+evening. He must be stopped and sent about his business.
+
+So she wrote him a note, telling him he must not come--a note man-like
+in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even
+the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come.
+And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon
+to undertake its delivery.
+
+When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss
+Carteret's mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the
+Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling
+on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new
+line.
+
+Truth to tell, Virginia's messenger was not unwilling to spend a
+little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was
+beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss
+Bessie, ennuye on the one hand and despondent on the other.
+
+Why could not the Cousin Bessies see, without being told in so many
+words, that the heart of a man may have been given in times long past
+to another woman?--to a Cousin Virginia, let us say. And why must the
+Cousin Virginias, passing by the lifelong devotion of a kinsman lover,
+throw themselves--if one must put it thus brutally--fairly at the head
+of an acquaintance of a day?
+
+So questioning the immensities, the Reverend Billy came out after some
+little time in a small upland valley where the two lines, old and new,
+ran parallel at the same level, with low embankments less than a
+hundred yards apart.
+
+Midway of the valley the hundred-yard interspace was bridged by a
+hastily-constructed spur track starting from a switch on the Colorado
+and Grand River main line, and crossing the Utah right of way at a
+broad angle. On this spur, at its point of intersection with the new
+line, stood a heavy locomotive, steam up, and manned in every inch of
+its standing-room by armed guards.
+
+The situation explained itself, even to a Reverend Billy. The Rajah
+had not been idle during the interval of dinner-givings and social
+divagations. He had acquired the right of way across the Utah's line
+for his blockading spur; had taken advantage of Winton's inalertness
+to construct the track; and was now prepared to hold the crossing with
+a live engine and such a show of force as might be needful.
+
+Calvert turned back from the entrance of the valley, and was minded,
+in a spirit of fairness, to pass the word concerning the new
+obstruction on to the man who was most vitally concerned. But alas!
+even a Reverend Billy may not always arise superior to his hamperings
+as a man and a lover. Here was defeat possible--nay, say rather defeat
+probable--for a rival, with the probability increasing with each hour
+of delay. Calvert fought it out by length and by breadth a dozen times
+before he came in sight of the track force toiling at the shale-slide.
+Should he tell Winton, and so, indirectly, help to frustrate Mr.
+Darrah's well-laid plan? Or should he hold his peace and thus,
+indirectly again, help to defeat the Utah company?
+
+He put it that way in decent self-respect. Also he assured himself
+that the personal equation as between two lovers of one and the same
+woman was entirely eliminated. But who can tell which motive it was
+that prompted him to turn aside before he came to the army of toilers
+at the slide: to turn and cross the stream and make as wide a detour
+as the nature of the ground would permit, passing well beyond call
+from the other side of the canyon?
+
+The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not
+take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down
+the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of
+Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath
+the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought
+him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally
+toward the station and the private car.
+
+"I can't do it: I can't turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat.
+And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have
+no right to go: it is not for me to pass upon the justice of this
+petty war between rival corporations."
+
+Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far
+subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you
+may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where
+a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious
+ointment?
+
+The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to
+the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond
+Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia
+from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the
+evening.
+
+But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the
+time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again,
+of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's
+blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about
+Calvert had betrayed the Rajah's secret--which was also the secret of
+the cipher telegrams.
+
+Miss Carteret said little--said nothing, indeed, that an anxious
+kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she
+donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform,
+whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.
+
+But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage---or fewer
+scruples. When Miss Carteret let herself out of the rear door, Jastrow
+disappeared in the opposite direction, passing through the forward
+vestibule and dropping cat-like from the step to inch his way silently
+over the treacherous snow-crust to a convenient spying place at the
+other end of the car.
+
+Unfortunately for the spying purpose, the shades were drawn behind the
+two great windows and the glass door, but the starlight sufficed to
+show the watcher a shadowy Miss Virginia standing motionless on the
+side which gave her an outlook down the canyon, leaning out, it might
+be, to anticipate the upcoming of some one from the construction camp
+below.
+
+The secretary, shivering in the knife-like wind slipping down from the
+bald peaks, had not long to wait. By the time his eyes were fitted to
+the darkness he heard a man coming up the track, the snow crunching
+frostily under his steady stride. Jastrow ducked under the platform
+and gained a viewpoint on the other side of the car. The crunching
+footfalls had ceased, and a man was swinging himself up to the forward
+step of the Rosemary. At the instant a voice just above the spy's head
+called softly, "Mr. Winton!" and the new-comer dropped back into the
+snow and came tramping to the rear.
+
+It was an awkward moment for Jastrow; but he made shift to dodge
+again, and so to be out of the way when the engineer drew himself up
+and climbed the hand-rail to stand beside his summoner.
+
+The secretary saw him take her hand and heard her exclamation, half
+indignant, wholly reproachful:
+
+"You had my note: I told you not to come!"
+
+"So you did, and yet you were expecting me," he asserted. He was still
+holding her hand, and she could not--or did not--withdraw it.
+
+"Was I, indeed!" There was a touch of the old-time raillery in the
+words, but it was gone when she added: "Oh, why will you keep on
+coming and coming when you know so well what it means to you and your
+work?"
+
+"I think you know the answer to that better than anyone," he rejoined,
+his voice matching hers for earnestness. "It is because I love you;
+because I could not stay away if I should try. Forgive me, dear; I did
+not mean to speak so soon. But you said in your note that you would be
+leaving Argentine immediately--that I should not see you again: so I
+had to come. Won't you give me a word, Virginia?--a waiting word, if
+it must be that?"
+
+Jastrow held his breath, hope dying within him and sullen ferocity
+crouching for the spring if her answer should urge it on. But when she
+spoke the secretary's anger cooled and he breathed again.
+
+"No: a thousand times, no!" she burst out passionately; and Winton
+staggered as if the suddenly-freed hand had dealt him a blow.
+
+
+
+
+X. SPIKED SWITCHES
+
+
+For a little time after Virginia's passionate rejection of him Winton
+stood abashed and confounded. Weighed in the balance of the
+after-thought, his sudden and unpremeditated declaration could plead
+little excuse in encouragement. And yet she had been exceedingly kind
+to him.
+
+"I have no right to expect a better answer," he said finally, when he
+could trust himself to speak. "But I am like other men: I should like
+to know why."
+
+"You can ask that?" she retorted. "You say you have no right: what
+have you done to expect a better answer?"
+
+He shrugged. "Nothing, I suppose. But you knew that before."
+
+"I only know what you have shown me during the past three weeks, and
+it has proved that you are what Mr. Adams said you were--though he was
+only jesting."
+
+"And that is?"
+
+"A _faineant_, a dilettante; a man with all the God-given ability to
+do as he will and to succeed, and yet who will not take the trouble to
+persevere."
+
+Winton smiled, a grim little smile.
+
+"You are not quite like any other woman I have ever known--not like
+any other in the world, I believe. Your sisters, most of them, would
+take it as the sincerest homage that a man should neglect his work for
+his love. Do you care so much for success, then?"
+
+"For the thing itself--nothing, less than nothing. But--but one may
+care a little for the man who wins or loses."
+
+He tried to take her hand again, tried and failed.
+
+"Virginia!--is that my word of hope?"
+
+"No. Will you never see the commonplace effrontery of it, Mr. Winton?
+Day after day you have come here, idling away the precious hours that
+meant everything to you, and now you come once again to offer me a
+share in what you have lost. Is that your idea of chivalry, of true
+manhood?"
+
+Again the grim smile came and went.
+
+"An unprejudiced onlooker might say that you have made me very
+welcome."
+
+"Mr. Winton! Is that generous?"
+
+"No; perhaps it is hardly just. Because I counted the cost and have
+paid the price open-eyed. You may remember that I told you that first
+evening I should come as often as I dared. I knew then, what I have
+known all along: that it was a part of your uncle's plan to delay my
+work."
+
+"His and mine, you mean; only you are too kind--or not quite brave
+enough--to say so."
+
+"Yours? Never! If I could believe you capable of such a thing--"
+
+"You may believe it," she broke in. "It was I who suggested it."
+
+He drew a deep breath, and she heard his teeth come together with a
+click. It was enough to try the faith of the loyalest lover: it tried
+his sorely. Yet he scarcely needed her low-voiced, "Don't you despise
+me as I deserve, now?" to make him love her all the more.
+
+"Indeed, I don't. Resentment and love can hardly find room in the same
+heart at the same time, and I have said that I love you," he rejoined
+quickly.
+
+She went silent at that, and when she spoke again the listening
+Jastrow tuned his ear afresh to lose no word.
+
+"As I have confessed, I suggested it: it was just after I had seen
+your men and the sheriff's ready to fly at one another's throats. I
+was miserably afraid, and I asked Uncle Somerville if he could not
+make terms with you in some other way. I didn't mean--"
+
+He made haste to help her.
+
+"Please don't try to defend your motive to me; it is wholly
+unnecessary. It is more than enough for me to know that you were
+anxious about my safety."
+
+But she would not let him have the crumb of comfort undisputed.
+
+"There were other lives involved besides yours. I didn't say I was
+specially afraid for you, did I?"
+
+"No, but you meant it. And I thought afterward that I should have
+given you a hint in some way, though the way didn't offer at the time.
+There was no danger of bloodshed. I knew--we all knew--that Deckert
+wouldn't go to extremities with the small force he had."
+
+"Then it was only a--a--"
+
+"A bluff," he said, supplying the word. "If I had believed there was
+the slightest possibility of a fight, I should have made my men take
+to the woods rather than let you witness it."
+
+"You shouldn't have let me waste my sympathy," she protested
+reproachfully.
+
+"I'm sorry; truly, I am. And you have been wasting it in another
+direction as well. To-night will see the shale-slide conquered
+definitely, I hope, and three more days of good weather will send us
+into the Carbonate yards."
+
+She broke in upon him with a little cry of impatient despair.
+
+"That shows how unwary you have been! Tell me: is there not a little
+valley just above here--an open place where your railroad and Uncle
+Somerville's run side by side?"
+
+"Yes, it is a mile this side of the canyon head. What about it?"
+
+"How long is it since you have been up there?" she queried.
+
+Winton stopped to think. "I don't know--a week, possibly."
+
+"Yet if you had not been coming here every evening, you or Mr. Adams
+would have found time to go--to watch every possible chance of
+interference, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Perhaps. That was one of the risks I took, a part of the price-paying
+I spoke of. If anything had happened, I should still be unrepentant."
+
+"Something _has_ happened. While you have been taking things for
+granted, Uncle Somerville has been at work day and night. He has built
+a track right across yours in that little valley, and he keeps a train
+of cars or something, filled with armed men, standing there all the
+time!"
+
+Winton gave a low whistle. Then he laughed mirthlessly.
+
+"You are quite sure of this?" he asked. "There is no possibility of
+your being mistaken?"
+
+"None at all," she replied. "And I can only defend myself by saying
+that I didn't know about it until a few minutes ago. What is to be
+done? But stop; you needn't tell me. I am not worthy of your
+confidence."
+
+"You are; you have just proved it. But there isn't anything to be
+done. The next thing in order is the exit of one John Winton in
+disgrace. That spur track and engine means a crossing fight which can
+be prolonged indefinitely, with due vigilance on the part of Mr.
+Darrah's mercenaries. I'm smashed, Miss Carteret, thoroughly and
+permanently. Ah, well, it's only one more fool for love. Hadn't we
+better go in? You'll take cold standing out here."
+
+She drew herself up and put her hands behind her.
+
+"Is that the way you take it, Mr. Winton?"
+
+The acrid laugh came again.
+
+"Would you have me tear a passion to tatters? My ancestors were not
+French."
+
+Trying as the moment was, she could not miss her opportunity.
+
+"How can you tell when you don't know your grandfather's middle name?"
+she said, half crying.
+
+His laugh at this was less acrid. "Adams again? My grandfather had no
+middle name. But I mustn't keep you out here in the cold talking
+genealogies."
+
+His hand was on the door to open it for her. Like a flash she came
+between, and her fingers closed over his on the door-knob.
+
+"Wait," she said. "Have I done all this--humbled myself into the very
+dust--to no purpose?"
+
+"Not if you will give me the one priceless word I am thirsting for."
+
+"Oh, how shameless you are!" she cried. "Will nothing serve to arouse
+the better part of you?"
+
+"There is no better part of any man than his love for a woman. You
+have aroused that."
+
+"_Then prove it by going and building your railroad_, Mr. Winton. When
+you have done that--"
+
+He caught at the word as a drowning man catches at a straw.
+
+"When I have won the fight--Virginia, let me see your eyes--when I
+have won, I may come back to you?"
+
+"I didn't say anything of the kind! But I will say what I said to Mr.
+Adams. I like men who _do_ things. Good night." And before he could
+reply she had made him open the door for her, and he was left alone on
+the square-railed platform.
+
+In the gathering-room of the private car Virginia found an atmosphere
+surcharged with electrical possibilities, felt it and inhaled it,
+though there was nothing visible to indicate it. The Rajah was buried
+in the depths of his particular easy-chair, puffing his cigar; Bessie
+had the Reverend Billy in the tete-a-tete contrivance; and Mrs.
+Carteret was reading under the Pintsch drop-light at the table.
+
+It was the chaperon who applied the firing spark to the electrical
+possibilities.
+
+"Didn't I hear you talking to some one out on the platform, Virginia?"
+she asked.
+
+"Yes, it was Mr. Winton. He came to make his excuses."
+
+Mr. Somerville Darrah awoke out of his tobacco reverie with a start.
+
+"Hah!" he said fiercely. Then, in his most courteous phrase: "Did I
+undehstand you to say that Misteh Winton would not faveh us to-night,
+my deah Virginia?"
+
+"He could not. He has come upon--upon some other difficulty, I
+believe," she stammered, steering a perilous course among the rocks of
+equivocation.
+
+"Mmph!" said the Rajah, rising. "Ah--where is Jastrow?"
+
+The obsequious one appeared, imp-like, at the mention of his name, and
+received a curt order.
+
+"Go and find Engineer McGrath and his fireman. Tell him I want the
+engine instantly. Move, seh!"
+
+Virginia retreated to her state-room. In a few minutes she heard her
+uncle go out; and shortly afterward the Rosemary's engine shook itself
+free of the car and rumbled away westward. At that, Virginia went back
+to the others and found a book. But if waiting inactive were
+difficult, reading was blankly impossible.
+
+"Goodness!" she exclaimed impatiently at last. "How hot you people
+keep it in here! Cousin Billy, won't you take a turn with me on the
+station platform? I can't breathe!"
+
+Calvert acquiesced eagerly, scenting an opportunity. But when they
+were out under the frosty stars he had the good sense to walk her up
+and down in the healing silence and darkness for five full minutes
+before he ventured to say what was in his mind.
+
+When he spoke it was earnestly and to the purpose, not without
+eloquence. He loved her; had always loved her, he thought. Could she
+not, with time and the will to try, learn to love him?--not as a
+cousin?
+
+She turned quickly and put both hands on his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, Cousin Billy--_don't_!" she faltered brokenly; and he, seeing at
+once that he had played the housebreaker where he would fain have been
+the welcome guest, took his punishment manfully, drawing her arm in
+his and walking her yet other turns up and down the long platform
+until his patience and the silence had wrought their perfect work.
+
+"Does it hurt much?" she asked softly, after a long time.
+
+"You would have to change places with me to know just how much it
+hurts," he answered. "And yet you haven't left me quite desolate,
+Virginia. I still have something left--all I've ever had, I fancy."
+
+"And that is--"
+
+"My love for you, you know. It isn't at all contingent upon your yes
+or no; or upon possession--it never has been, I think. It has never
+asked much except the right to be."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "Cousin Billy, I do
+believe that you are the best man that ever lived. And I am
+ashamed--ashamed!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"If I have spoiled you, ever so little, for some truer, worthier
+woman."
+
+"You haven't," he responded; "you mustn't take that view of it. I am
+decently in love with my work--a work that not a few wise men have
+agreed could best be done alone. I don't think there will be any other
+woman. You see, there is only one Virginia. Shall we go in now?"
+
+She nodded, but when they reached the Rosemary the returning engine
+was rattling down upon the open siding. Virginia drew back.
+
+"I don't want to meet Uncle Somerville just now," she confessed.
+"Can't we climb up to the observation platform at the other end of the
+car?"
+
+He said yes, and made the affirmative good by lifting her in his arms
+over the high railing. Once safely on the car, she bade him leave her.
+
+"Slip in quietly and they won't notice," she said. "I'll come
+presently."
+
+Calvert obeyed, and Virginia stood alone in the darkness. Down in the
+Utah construction camp lights were darting to and fro; and before long
+she heard the hoarse puffs of the big octopod, betokening activities.
+
+She was shivering a little in the chill wind sliding down from the
+snow-peaks, yet she would not go in until she had made sure. In a
+little time her patience was rewarded. The huge engine came storming
+up the grade on the new line, pushing its three flat-cars, which were
+black with clinging men. On the car nearest the locomotive, where the
+dazzling beam of the headlight pricked him out for her, stood Winton,
+braced against the lurchings of the train over the uneven track.
+
+"God speed you, my--love!" she murmured softly; and when the gloom of
+the upper canyon cleft had engulfed man and men and storming engine
+she turned to go in.
+
+She was groping for the door-knob in the darkness made thicker by the
+glare of the passing headlight when a voice, disembodied for the
+moment, said: "Wait a minute, Miss Carteret; I'd like to have a word
+with you."
+
+She drew back quickly.
+
+"Is it you, Mr. Jastrow? Let me go in, please."
+
+"In one moment. I have something to say to you--something you ought to
+hear."
+
+"Can't it be said on the other side of the door? I am cold--very cold,
+Mr. Jastrow."
+
+It was his saving hint, but he would not take it.
+
+"No, it must be said to you alone. We have at least one thing in
+common, Miss Carteret--you and I: that is a proper appreciation of the
+successful realities. I--"
+
+She stopped him with a quick little gesture of impatience.
+
+"Will you be good enough to stand aside and let me go in?"
+
+The keen breath of the snow-caps was summer-warm in comparison with
+the chilling iciness of her manner; but the secretary went on unmoved:
+
+"Success is the only thing worth while in this world. Winton will
+fail, but I shan't. And when I do succeed, I shall marry a woman who
+can wear the purple most becomingly."
+
+"I hope you may, I'm sure," she answered wearily. "Yet you will excuse
+me if I say that I don't understand how it concerns me, or why you
+should keep me out here in the cold to tell me about it."
+
+"Don't you? It concerns you very nearly. You are the woman, Miss
+Carteret."
+
+"Indeed? And if I decline the honor?"
+
+The contingency was one for which the suitor seemed not entirely
+prepared. Yet he evinced a willingness to meet the hypothesis in a
+spirit of perfect candor.
+
+"You wouldn't do that, definitely, I fancy. It would be tantamount to
+driving me to extremities."
+
+"If you will tell me how I can do it 'definitely,' I shall be most
+happy to drive you to extremities, or anywhere else out of my way,"
+she said frigidly.
+
+"Oh, I think not," he rejoined. "You wouldn't want me to go and tell
+Mr. Darrah how you have betrayed him to Mr. Winton. I had the singular
+good fortune to overhear you conversation--yours and Mr. Winton's, you
+know; and if Mr. Darrah knew, he would cut you out of his will with
+very little compunction, don't you think? And, really, you mustn't
+throw yourself away on that sentimental Tommy of an engineer, Miss
+Virginia. He'll never be able to give you the position you're fitted
+for."
+
+Since French was a dead language to Mr. Arthur Jastrow, he never knew
+what it was that Miss Carteret named him. But she left him in no doubt
+as to her immediate purpose.
+
+"If that be the case, we would better go and find my uncle at once,"
+she said in her softest tone; and before he could object she had led
+the way to the Rajah's working-den state-room.
+
+Mr. Darrah was deep in one of the cipher telegrams when they entered,
+and he looked up to glare fiercely at one and then the other of the
+intruders. Virginia gave her persecutor no time to lodge his
+accusation.
+
+"Uncle Somerville, Mr. Winton was here an hour ago, as you know, and I
+told him what you had done--what I had helped you do. Also, I sent him
+about his business; which is to win his railroad fight if he can. Mr.
+Jastrow overheard the conversation, purposely, and as he threatens to
+turn informer, I am saving him the trouble. Perhaps I ought to add that
+he offered to hold his peace if I would promise to marry him."
+
+What the unlucky Jastrow might have said in his own behalf is not to
+be here set down in peaceful black and white. With the final word of
+Virginia's explanation the fierce old master of men was up and
+clutching for the secretary's throat, and the working complement of
+the Rosemary suffered instant loss.
+
+"You'll spy upon a membeh of my family, will you, seh!" he stormed.
+"Out with you, bag and baggage, befo' I lose my tempeh and forget what
+is due to this young lady you have insulted, seh, with your infamous
+proposals! Faveh me instantly, while you have a leg to run with! Go!"
+
+Jastrow disappeared; and when the door closed behind him Virginia
+faced her irate clan-chief bravely.
+
+"He was a spy, and he would have been a traitor. But I am little
+better. What will you do to me?"
+
+The Rajah's wrath evaporated quickly, and a shrewd smile, not
+unkindly, wrinkled the ruddy old face.
+
+"So it was a case of the trappeh trapped, was it, my deah? I'm
+sorry--right sorry. I might have known how it would be; a youngeh man
+would have known. But you have done no unpahdonable mischief: Misteh
+Winton would have found out for himself in a few hours, and we are
+ready for him now."
+
+"Oh, dear! Then he will be beaten?"
+
+"Unquestionably. Faveh me by going to bed, my deah. Your roses will
+suffeh sadly for all this excitement, I feah. Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE RIGHT OF WAY
+
+
+It seemed to Virginia that she had but just fallen asleep when she was
+rudely awakened by the jar and grind of the Rosemary's wheels on
+snow-covered rails. Drawing the curtain, she found that a new day was
+come, gray and misty white in the gusty swirl of a mountain
+snow-squall.
+
+Without disturbing the sleeping Bessie, she dressed quickly and
+slipped out to see what the early-morning change of base portended.
+The common room was empty when she entered it, but before she could
+cross to the door the Reverend Billy came in, stamping the snow from
+his feet.
+
+"What is it?" she asked eagerly. "Are we off for California?"
+
+"No, it's some more of the war. Winton has outgeneraled us. During the
+night he pushed his track up to the disputed crossing, 'rushed' the
+guarded engine, and ditched it."
+
+Virginia felt that she ought to be decorously sorry for relationship's
+sake, but the effort ended in a little paean of joy.
+
+"But Uncle Somerville--what will he do?"
+
+"He is with McGrath on the engine, getting himself--and us--to the
+front in a hurry, as you perceive."
+
+"Isn't it too late to stop Mr. Winton now?"
+
+"I don't know. From what I could overhear I gathered that the ditched
+engine is still in the way; that they are trying to roll it over into
+the creek. Bless me! McGrath is getting terribly reckless!"--this as a
+spiteful lurch of the car flung them both across the compartment.
+
+"Say Uncle Somerville," she amended. "Don't charge it to Mr. McGrath.
+Can't we go out on the platform?"
+
+"It's as much as your life is worth," he asserted, but he opened the
+door for her.
+
+The car was backing swiftly up the grade with the engine behind
+serving as a "pusher." At first the fiercely-driven snow-whirl made
+Virginia gasp. Then the speed slackened and she could breathe and see.
+
+The shrilling wheels were tracking around a curve into a scanty
+widening of the canyon. To the left, on the rails of the new line, the
+big octopod was heaving and grunting in the midst of an army of
+workmen swarming thick upon the overturned guard engine.
+
+"Goodness! it's like a battle!" she shuddered. As she spoke the
+Rosemary stopped with a jerk and McGrath's fireman darted past to set
+the spur-track switch.
+
+The points were snow-clogged, and the fireman wrestled with the lever,
+saying words. The delay was measurable in heart-beats, but it
+sufficed. The big octopod coughed thrice like a mighty giant in a
+consumption; the clustering workmen scattered like chaff to a ringing
+shout of "Stand clear!" and the obstructing mass of iron and steel
+rolled, wallowing and hissing, into the stream.
+
+"Rails to the front! Hammermen!" yelled Winton; and the scattered
+force rallied instantly.
+
+But now the wrestling fireman had thrown the switch, and at the
+Rajah's command the Rosemary shot out on the spur to be thrust with
+locked brakes fairly into the breach left defenseless by the ditched
+engine. With a mob-roar of wrath the infuriated track-layers made a
+rush for the new obstruction. But Winton was before them.
+
+"Hold on!" he shouted, bearing them back with outflung arms. "Hold on,
+men, for God's sake! There are women in that car!"
+
+The wrathful wave broke and eddied murmurous while a square-shouldered
+old man with fierce eyes and huge white mustaches, and with an extinct
+cigar between his teeth, clambered down from the Rosemary's engine to
+say:
+
+"Hah! a ratheh close connection, eh, Misteh Winton? Faveh me with a
+match, if you please, seh. May I assume that you won't tumble my
+private car into the ditch?"
+
+Winton was white-hot, but he found a light for the Rajah's cigar,
+easing his mind only as he might with Virginia looking on.
+
+"I shall be more considerate of the safety of the ladies than you seem
+to be, Mr. Darrah," he retorted. "You are taking long chances in this
+game, sir."
+
+The Rajah's laugh rumbled deep in his chest. "Not so vehy much longer
+than you have been taking during the past fo'tnight, my deah seh. But
+neveh mind; all's fair in love or war, and we appeah to be having a
+little of both now up heah in Qua'tz Creek, hah?"
+
+Winton flushed angrily. It was no light thing to be mocked before his
+men, to say nothing of Miss Carteret standing within arm's reach on
+the railed platform of the Rosemary.
+
+"Perhaps I shall give you back that word before we are through, Mr.
+Darrah," he snapped. Then to the eddying mob-wave: "Tools up, boys. We
+camp here for breakfast. Branagan, send the Two-fifteen down for the
+cook's outfit."
+
+The Rajah dropped his cigar butt in the snow and trod upon it.
+
+"Possibly you will faveh us with your company to breakfast in the
+Rosemary, Misteh Winton--you and Misteh Adams. No? Then I bid you a
+vehy good morning, gentlemen, and hope to see you lateh." And he swung
+up to the steps of the private car.
+
+Half an hour afterward, the snow still whirling dismally, Winton and
+Adams were cowering over a handful of hissing embers, drinking their
+commissary coffee and munching the camp cook's poor excuse for a
+breakfast.
+
+"Jig's up pretty definitely, don't you think?" said Adams, with a
+glance around at the idle track force huddling for shelter under the
+lee of the flats and the octopod.
+
+Winton shook his head and groaned. "I'm  a ruined man, Morty."
+
+Adams found his cigarette case.
+
+"I guess that's so," he said quite heartlessly. Then: "Hello! what is
+our friend the enemy up to now?"
+
+McGrath's fireman was uncoupling the engine from the Rosemary, and Mr.
+Somerville Darrah, complacently lighting his after breakfast cigar,
+came across to the hissing ember fire.
+
+"A word with you, gentlemen, if you will faveh me," he began. "I am
+about to run down to Argentine on my engine, and I propose leaving the
+ladies in your cha'ge, Misteh Winton. Will you give me your word of
+honeh, seh, that they will not be annoyed in my absence?"
+
+Winton sprang up, losing his temper again.
+
+"It's--well, it's blessed lucky that you know your man, Mr. Darrah!"
+he exploded. "Go on about your business--which is to bring another
+army of deputy-sheriffs down on us, I take it. You know well enough
+that no man of mine will lay a hand on your car so long as the ladies
+are in it."
+
+The Rajah thanked him, dismissed the matter with a Chesterfieldian
+wave of his hand, climbed to his place in the cab, and the engine
+shrilled away around the curve and disappeared in the snow-wreaths.
+
+Adams rose and stretched himself.
+
+"By Jove! when it comes to cheek, pure and unadulterated, commend me
+to a Virginia gentleman who has acquired the proper modicum of Western
+bluff," he laughed. Then, with a cavernous yawn dating back to the
+sleepless night: "Since there is nothing immediately pressing, I
+believe I'll go and call on the ladies. Won't you come along for a
+while?"
+
+"No!" said Winton savagely; and the assistant lounged off by himself.
+
+Some little time afterward Winton, glooming over his handful of
+spitting embers, saw Adams and Virginia come out to stand together on
+the observation platform of the Rosemary. They talked long and
+earnestly, and when Winton was beginning to add the dull pang of
+unreasoning jealousy to his other hurtings, Adams beckoned him. He
+went, not unwillingly, or altogether willingly.
+
+"I should think you might come and say 'Good morning' to me, Mr.
+Winton. I'm not Uncle Somerville," said Miss Carteret.
+
+Winton said "Good morning," not too graciously, and Adams mocked him.
+
+"Besides being a bear with a sore head, Miss Carteret thinks you're
+not much of a hustler, Jack," he said coolly. "She knows the
+situation; knows that you were stupid enough to promise not to lay
+hands on the car when we could have pushed it out of the way without
+annoying anybody. None the less, she thinks that you might find a way
+to go on building your railroad without breaking your word to Mr.
+Darrah."
+
+Winton put his sore-heartedness far enough behind him to smile and
+say: "Perhaps Miss Virginia will be good enough to tell me how."
+
+"I don't know how," she rejoined quickly. "And you'd only laugh at me
+if I should tell you what I thought of."
+
+"You might try it and see," he ventured. "I'm desperate enough to take
+suggestions from anyone."
+
+"Tell me something first: is your railroad obliged to run straight
+along in the middle of this nice little ridge you've been making for
+it?"
+
+"Why--no; temporarily, it can run anywhere. But the problem is to get
+the track laid beyond this crossing before your uncle gets back with a
+trainload of armed guards."
+
+"Any kind of track would do, wouldn't it?--just to secure the
+crossing?"
+
+"Certainly; anything that would hold the weight of the octopod. We
+shall have to rebuild most of the line, anyway, as soon as the frost
+comes out of the ground in the spring."
+
+The brown eyes became far-seeing.
+
+"I was thinking," she said musingly. "There is no time to make another
+nice little ridge. But you have piles and piles of logs over
+there,"--she meant the cross-ties,--"couldn't you build a sort of
+cobhouse ridge with those between your track and Uncle's, and cross
+behind the car? Don't laugh, please."
+
+But Winton was far enough from laughing at her. Why so simple an
+expedient had not suggested itself instantly he did not stop to
+inquire. It was enough that the Heaven-born idea had been given.
+
+"Down out of that, Morty!" he cried. "It's one chance in a thousand.
+Pass the word to the men; I'll be with you in a second." And when
+Adams was rousing the track force with the bawling shout of
+"_Ev-erybody_!" Winton looked up into the brown eyes.
+
+"My debt to you was already very great: I owe you more now," he said.
+
+But she gave him his quittance in a whiplike retort.
+
+"And you will stand here talking about it when every moment is
+precious? Go!" she commanded; and he went.
+
+So now we are to conceive the maddest activity leaping into being in
+full view of the watchers at the windows of the private car. Winton's
+chilled and sodden army, welcoming any battle-cry of action, flew to
+the work with a will. In a twinkling the corded piles of cross-ties
+had melted to reappear in cobhouse balks bridging an angle from the
+Utah embankment to that of the spur track in the rear of the
+blockading Rosemary. In briefest time the hammermen were spiking the
+rails on the rough-and-ready trestle, and the Italians were bringing
+up the crossing-frogs.
+
+But the Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself
+defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise
+contingency by leaving McGrath's fireman in mechanical command on the
+Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car,
+the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to
+lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop
+back down the grade just far enough to block the new crossing.
+
+So it came about that this mechanical lieutenant waited, laughing in
+his sleeve, until he saw the Italians coming with the crossing-frogs.
+Then, judging the time to be fully ripe, he ducked under the Rosemary
+to "bleed" the air-brake.
+
+Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry
+clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting
+glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from
+beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman
+had "bled" the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering
+momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track
+and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.
+
+Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon
+line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric
+flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the
+Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by
+good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the
+car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few
+miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward
+climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.
+
+In unreasoning misery, he did the only thing that offered: ran blindly
+down his own embankment, hoping nothing but that he might have one
+last glimpse of Virginia clinging to the hand-rail before she should
+be lost to him for ever.
+
+But as he ran a thought white-hot from the furnace of despair fell
+into his brain to set it ablaze with purpose. Beyond the litter of
+activities the octopod was standing, empty of its crew. Bounding up
+into the cab, he released the brake and sent the great engine flying
+down the track of the new line.
+
+In the measuring of the first mile the despair-born thought took shape
+and form. If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop
+the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the
+Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling
+himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to
+help Calvert with the hand-brakes.
+
+Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped
+for that comes to pass. At Argentine, Winton's speed was a mile a
+minute over a track rougher than a corduroy wagon-road; yet the
+octopod held the rail and was neck and neck with the runaway. Whisking
+past the station, Winton had a glimpse of a white-mustached old man
+standing bareheaded on the platform and gazing horror-stricken at the
+tableau; then man and station and lurching car were left behind, and
+the fierce strife to gain the needed mile of lead went on.
+
+Three miles more of the surging, racking, nerve-killing race and
+Winton had his hand's-breadth of lead and had picked his place for the
+million-chanced wrestle with death. It was at the C. G. R. station of
+Tierra Blanca, just below a series of sharp curves which he hoped
+might check a little the arrow-like flight of the runaway.
+
+Twenty seconds later the telegraph operator at the lonely little way
+station of Tierra Blanca saw a heroic bit of man-play. The
+upward-bound Carbonate train was whistling in the gorge below when out
+of the snow-wreaths shrouding the new line a big engine shot down to
+stop with fire grinding from the wheels, and a man dropped from the
+high cab to dash across to the station platform.
+
+At the same instant a runaway passenger car thundered out of the
+canyon above. The man crouched, flung himself at it in passing, missed
+the forward hand-rail, caught the rear, was snatched from his feet and
+trailed through the air like the thong of a whip-lash, yet made good
+his hold and clambered on.
+
+This was all the operator saw, but when he had snapped his key and run
+out he heard the shrill squeal of the brakes on the car and knew that
+the man had not risked his life for nothing.
+
+And on board the Rosemary? Winton, spent to the last breath, was lying
+prone on the railed platform, where he had fallen when the last twist
+had been given to the shrieking brakes.
+
+"Run, Calvert! Run ahead and--stop--the--up-train!" he gasped; then
+the light went out of the gray eyes and Virginia wept unaffectedly and
+fell to dabbling his forehead with handfuls of snow.
+
+"Help me get him in to the divan, Cousin Billy," said Virginia, when
+all was over and the Rosemary was safely coupled in ahead of the
+upcoming train to be slowly pushed back to Argentine.
+
+But Winton opened his eyes and struggled to his feet unaided.
+
+"Not yet," he said. "I've left my automobile on the other side of the
+creek; and besides, I have a railroad to build. My respects to Mr.
+Darrah, and you may tell him I'm not beaten yet." And he swung over
+the railing and dropped off to mount the octopod and to race it back
+to the front.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days afterward, to a screaming of smelter whistles and other
+noisy demonstrations of mining-camp joy, the Utah Short Line laid the
+final rail of its new Extension in the Carbonate yards.
+
+The driving of the silver spike accomplished, Winton and Adams slipped
+out of the congratulatory throng and made their way across the
+C. G. R. tracks to a private car standing along the siding. Its railed
+platform, commanding a view of the civic celebration, had its quota of
+onlookers--a fierce-eyed old man with huge mustaches, an athletic
+young clergyman, two Bisques, and a goddess.
+
+"Climb up, Misteh Winton, and you, Misteh Adams; climb up and join
+us," said the fierce-eyed one heartily. "Virginia, heah, thinks we
+ought to call one anotheh out, but I tell her--"
+
+What the Rajah had told his niece is of small account to us. But what
+Winton whispered in her ear when he had taken his place beside her is
+more to the purpose of this history.
+
+"I have built my railroad, as you told me to, and now I have come for
+my--"
+
+"Hush!" she said softly. "Can't you wait?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Shameless one!" she murmured.
+
+But when the Rajah proposed an adjournment to the gathering-room of
+the car, and to luncheon therein, he surprised them standing
+hand-in-hand and laughed.
+
+"Hah, you little rebel!" he said. "Do you think you dese've that block
+of stock I promised you when you should marry? Anseh me, my deah."
+
+She blushed and shook her head, but the brown eyes were dancing.
+
+The Rajah opened the car door with his courtliest bow.
+
+"Nevertheless, you shall have it, my deah Virginia, if only to remind
+an old man of the time when he was simple enough to make a business
+confederate of a cha'ming young woman. Straight on, Misteh Adams;
+afteh you, Misteh Winton."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Fool For Love, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FOOL FOR LOVE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 8073.txt or 8073.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/8/0/7/8073/
+
+Produced by Ketaki Chhabra and Wendy Crockett
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.