Chapter 2

“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.”