Chapter 5

“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.