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, ennuyé 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.