Chapter 4

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.