It seemed to Virginia that she had but just fallen asleep when she was
rudely awakened by the jar and grind of the Rosemary's wheels on
snow-covered rails. Drawing the curtain, she found that a new day was
come, gray and misty white in the gusty swirl of a mountain
snow-squall.
Without disturbing the sleeping Bessie, she dressed quickly and
slipped out to see what the early-morning change of base portended.
The common room was empty when she entered it, but before she could
cross to the door the Reverend Billy came in, stamping the snow from
his feet.
“What is it?” she asked eagerly. “Are we off for California?”
“No, it's some more of the war. Winton has outgeneraled us. During the
night he pushed his track up to the disputed crossing, 'rushed' the
guarded engine, and ditched it.”
Virginia felt that she ought to be decorously sorry for relationship's
sake, but the effort ended in a little paean of joy.
“But Uncle Somerville--what will he do?”
“He is with McGrath on the engine, getting himself--and us--to the
front in a hurry, as you perceive.”
“Isn't it too late to stop Mr. Winton now?”
“I don't know. From what I could overhear I gathered that the ditched
engine is still in the way; that they are trying to roll it over into
the creek. Bless me! McGrath is getting terribly reckless!”--this as a
spiteful lurch of the car flung them both across the compartment.
“Say Uncle Somerville,” she amended. “Don't charge it to Mr. McGrath.
Can't we go out on the platform?”
“It's as much as your life is worth,” he asserted, but he opened the
door for her.
The car was backing swiftly up the grade with the engine behind
serving as a “pusher.” At first the fiercely-driven snow-whirl made
Virginia gasp. Then the speed slackened and she could breathe and see.
The shrilling wheels were tracking around a curve into a scanty
widening of the canyon. To the left, on the rails of the new line, the
big octopod was heaving and grunting in the midst of an army of
workmen swarming thick upon the overturned guard engine.
“Goodness! it's like a battle!” she shuddered. As she spoke the
Rosemary stopped with a jerk and McGrath's fireman darted past to set
the spur-track switch.
The points were snow-clogged, and the fireman wrestled with the lever,
saying words. The delay was measurable in heart-beats, but it
sufficed. The big octopod coughed thrice like a mighty giant in a
consumption; the clustering workmen scattered like chaff to a ringing
shout of “Stand clear!” and the obstructing mass of iron and steel
rolled, wallowing and hissing, into the stream.
“Rails to the front! Hammermen!” yelled Winton; and the scattered
force rallied instantly.
But now the wrestling fireman had thrown the switch, and at the
Rajah's command the Rosemary shot out on the spur to be thrust with
locked brakes fairly into the breach left defenseless by the ditched
engine. With a mob-roar of wrath the infuriated track-layers made a
rush for the new obstruction. But Winton was before them.
“Hold on!” he shouted, bearing them back with outflung arms. “Hold on,
men, for God's sake! There are women in that car!”
The wrathful wave broke and eddied murmurous while a square-shouldered
old man with fierce eyes and huge white mustaches, and with an extinct
cigar between his teeth, clambered down from the Rosemary's engine to
say:
“Hah! a ratheh close connection, eh, Misteh Winton? Faveh me with a
match, if you please, seh. May I assume that you won't tumble my
private car into the ditch?”
Winton was white-hot, but he found a light for the Rajah's cigar,
easing his mind only as he might with Virginia looking on.
“I shall be more considerate of the safety of the ladies than you seem
to be, Mr. Darrah,” he retorted. “You are taking long chances in this
game, sir.”
The Rajah's laugh rumbled deep in his chest. “Not so vehy much longer
than you have been taking during the past fo'tnight, my deah seh. But
neveh mind; all's fair in love or war, and we appeah to be having a
little of both now up heah in Qua'tz Creek, hah?”
Winton flushed angrily. It was no light thing to be mocked before his
men, to say nothing of Miss Carteret standing within arm's reach on
the railed platform of the Rosemary.
“Perhaps I shall give you back that word before we are through, Mr.
Darrah,” he snapped. Then to the eddying mob-wave: “Tools up, boys. We
camp here for breakfast. Branagan, send the Two-fifteen down for the
cook's outfit.”
The Rajah dropped his cigar butt in the snow and trod upon it.
“Possibly you will faveh us with your company to breakfast in the
Rosemary, Misteh Winton--you and Misteh Adams. No? Then I bid you a
vehy good morning, gentlemen, and hope to see you lateh.” And he swung
up to the steps of the private car.
Half an hour afterward, the snow still whirling dismally, Winton and
Adams were cowering over a handful of hissing embers, drinking their
commissary coffee and munching the camp cook's poor excuse for a
breakfast.
“Jig's up pretty definitely, don't you think?” said Adams, with a
glance around at the idle track force huddling for shelter under the
lee of the flats and the octopod.
Winton shook his head and groaned. “I'm a ruined man, Morty.”
Adams found his cigarette case.
“I guess that's so,” he said quite heartlessly. Then: “Hello! what is
our friend the enemy up to now?”
McGrath's fireman was uncoupling the engine from the Rosemary, and Mr.
Somerville Darrah, complacently lighting his after breakfast cigar,
came across to the hissing ember fire.
“A word with you, gentlemen, if you will faveh me,” he began. “I am
about to run down to Argentine on my engine, and I propose leaving the
ladies in your cha'ge, Misteh Winton. Will you give me your word of
honeh, seh, that they will not be annoyed in my absence?”
Winton sprang up, losing his temper again.
“It's--well, it's blessed lucky that you know your man, Mr. Darrah!”
he exploded. “Go on about your business--which is to bring another
army of deputy-sheriffs down on us, I take it. You know well enough
that no man of mine will lay a hand on your car so long as the ladies
are in it.”
The Rajah thanked him, dismissed the matter with a Chesterfieldian
wave of his hand, climbed to his place in the cab, and the engine
shrilled away around the curve and disappeared in the snow-wreaths.
Adams rose and stretched himself.
“By Jove! when it comes to cheek, pure and unadulterated, commend me
to a Virginia gentleman who has acquired the proper modicum of Western
bluff,” he laughed. Then, with a cavernous yawn dating back to the
sleepless night: “Since there is nothing immediately pressing, I
believe I'll go and call on the ladies. Won't you come along for a
while?”
“No!” said Winton savagely; and the assistant lounged off by himself.
Some little time afterward Winton, glooming over his handful of
spitting embers, saw Adams and Virginia come out to stand together on
the observation platform of the Rosemary. They talked long and
earnestly, and when Winton was beginning to add the dull pang of
unreasoning jealousy to his other hurtings, Adams beckoned him. He
went, not unwillingly, or altogether willingly.
“I should think you might come and say 'Good morning' to me, Mr.
Winton. I'm not Uncle Somerville,” said Miss Carteret.
Winton said “Good morning,” not too graciously, and Adams mocked him.
“Besides being a bear with a sore head, Miss Carteret thinks you're
not much of a hustler, Jack,” he said coolly. “She knows the
situation; knows that you were stupid enough to promise not to lay
hands on the car when we could have pushed it out of the way without
annoying anybody. None the less, she thinks that you might find a way
to go on building your railroad without breaking your word to Mr.
Darrah.”
Winton put his sore-heartedness far enough behind him to smile and
say: “Perhaps Miss Virginia will be good enough to tell me how.”
“I don't know how,” she rejoined quickly. “And you'd only laugh at me
if I should tell you what I thought of.”
“You might try it and see,” he ventured. “I'm desperate enough to take
suggestions from anyone.”
“Tell me something first: is your railroad obliged to run straight
along in the middle of this nice little ridge you've been making for
it?”
“Why--no; temporarily, it can run anywhere. But the problem is to get
the track laid beyond this crossing before your uncle gets back with a
trainload of armed guards.”
“Any kind of track would do, wouldn't it?--just to secure the
crossing?”
“Certainly; anything that would hold the weight of the octopod. We
shall have to rebuild most of the line, anyway, as soon as the frost
comes out of the ground in the spring.”
The brown eyes became far-seeing.
“I was thinking,” she said musingly. “There is no time to make another
nice little ridge. But you have piles and piles of logs over
there,”--she meant the cross-ties,--“couldn't you build a sort of
cobhouse ridge with those between your track and Uncle's, and cross
behind the car? Don't laugh, please.”
But Winton was far enough from laughing at her. Why so simple an
expedient had not suggested itself instantly he did not stop to
inquire. It was enough that the Heaven-born idea had been given.
“Down out of that, Morty!” he cried. “It's one chance in a thousand.
Pass the word to the men; I'll be with you in a second.” And when
Adams was rousing the track force with the bawling shout of
“_Ev-erybody_!” Winton looked up into the brown eyes.
“My debt to you was already very great: I owe you more now,” he said.
But she gave him his quittance in a whiplike retort.
“And you will stand here talking about it when every moment is
precious? Go!” she commanded; and he went.
So now we are to conceive the maddest activity leaping into being in
full view of the watchers at the windows of the private car. Winton's
chilled and sodden army, welcoming any battle-cry of action, flew to
the work with a will. In a twinkling the corded piles of cross-ties
had melted to reappear in cobhouse balks bridging an angle from the
Utah embankment to that of the spur track in the rear of the
blockading Rosemary. In briefest time the hammermen were spiking the
rails on the rough-and-ready trestle, and the Italians were bringing
up the crossing-frogs.
But the Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself
defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise
contingency by leaving McGrath's fireman in mechanical command on the
Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car,
the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to
lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop
back down the grade just far enough to block the new crossing.
So it came about that this mechanical lieutenant waited, laughing in
his sleeve, until he saw the Italians coming with the crossing-frogs.
Then, judging the time to be fully ripe, he ducked under the Rosemary
to “bleed” the air-brake.
Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry
clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting
glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from
beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman
had “bled” the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering
momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track
and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.
Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon
line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric
flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the
Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by
good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the
car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few
miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward
climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.
In unreasoning misery, he did the only thing that offered: ran blindly
down his own embankment, hoping nothing but that he might have one
last glimpse of Virginia clinging to the hand-rail before she should
be lost to him for ever.
But as he ran a thought white-hot from the furnace of despair fell
into his brain to set it ablaze with purpose. Beyond the litter of
activities the octopod was standing, empty of its crew. Bounding up
into the cab, he released the brake and sent the great engine flying
down the track of the new line.
In the measuring of the first mile the despair-born thought took shape
and form. If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop
the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the
Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling
himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to
help Calvert with the hand-brakes.
Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped
for that comes to pass. At Argentine, Winton's speed was a mile a
minute over a track rougher than a corduroy wagon-road; yet the
octopod held the rail and was neck and neck with the runaway. Whisking
past the station, Winton had a glimpse of a white-mustached old man
standing bareheaded on the platform and gazing horror-stricken at the
tableau; then man and station and lurching car were left behind, and
the fierce strife to gain the needed mile of lead went on.
Three miles more of the surging, racking, nerve-killing race and
Winton had his hand's-breadth of lead and had picked his place for the
million-chanced wrestle with death. It was at the C. G. R. station of
Tierra Blanca, just below a series of sharp curves which he hoped
might check a little the arrow-like flight of the runaway.
Twenty seconds later the telegraph operator at the lonely little way
station of Tierra Blanca saw a heroic bit of man-play. The
upward-bound Carbonate train was whistling in the gorge below when out
of the snow-wreaths shrouding the new line a big engine shot down to
stop with fire grinding from the wheels, and a man dropped from the
high cab to dash across to the station platform.
At the same instant a runaway passenger car thundered out of the
canyon above. The man crouched, flung himself at it in passing, missed
the forward hand-rail, caught the rear, was snatched from his feet and
trailed through the air like the thong of a whip-lash, yet made good
his hold and clambered on.
This was all the operator saw, but when he had snapped his key and run
out he heard the shrill squeal of the brakes on the car and knew that
the man had not risked his life for nothing.
And on board the Rosemary? Winton, spent to the last breath, was lying
prone on the railed platform, where he had fallen when the last twist
had been given to the shrieking brakes.
“Run, Calvert! Run ahead and--stop--the--up-train!” he gasped; then
the light went out of the gray eyes and Virginia wept unaffectedly and
fell to dabbling his forehead with handfuls of snow.
“Help me get him in to the divan, Cousin Billy,” said Virginia, when
all was over and the Rosemary was safely coupled in ahead of the
upcoming train to be slowly pushed back to Argentine.
But Winton opened his eyes and struggled to his feet unaided.
“Not yet,” he said. “I've left my automobile on the other side of the
creek; and besides, I have a railroad to build. My respects to Mr.
Darrah, and you may tell him I'm not beaten yet.” And he swung over
the railing and dropped off to mount the octopod and to race it back
to the front.
* * * * *
Three days afterward, to a screaming of smelter whistles and other
noisy demonstrations of mining-camp joy, the Utah Short Line laid the
final rail of its new Extension in the Carbonate yards.
The driving of the silver spike accomplished, Winton and Adams slipped
out of the congratulatory throng and made their way across the
C. G. R. tracks to a private car standing along the siding. Its railed
platform, commanding a view of the civic celebration, had its quota of
onlookers--a fierce-eyed old man with huge mustaches, an athletic
young clergyman, two Bisques, and a goddess.
“Climb up, Misteh Winton, and you, Misteh Adams; climb up and join
us,” said the fierce-eyed one heartily. “Virginia, heah, thinks we
ought to call one anotheh out, but I tell her--”
What the Rajah had told his niece is of small account to us. But what
Winton whispered in her ear when he had taken his place beside her is
more to the purpose of this history.
“I have built my railroad, as you told me to, and now I have come for
my--”
“Hush!” she said softly. “Can't you wait?”
“No.”
“Shameless one!” she murmured.
But when the Rajah proposed an adjournment to the gathering-room of
the car, and to luncheon therein, he surprised them standing
hand-in-hand and laughed.
“Hah, you little rebel!” he said. “Do you think you dese've that block
of stock I promised you when you should marry? Anseh me, my deah.”
She blushed and shook her head, but the brown eyes were dancing.
The Rajah opened the car door with his courtliest bow.
“Nevertheless, you shall have it, my deah Virginia, if only to remind
an old man of the time when he was simple enough to make a business
confederate of a cha'ming young woman. Straight on, Misteh Adams;
afteh you, Misteh Winton.”