NOVEMBER
They walked back to the parlors. Doctor Lanning and Marie were picking
up the rackets at the ping-pong table. Mrs. Whitney had gone into the
office for the evening mail.
Passing the piano, Gertrude sat down and swung around toward the keys.
Glover took music from the table. Unwilling to admit a trace of the
unusual in the beating of her heart, or in her deeper breathing, she
could not entirely control either; there was something too fascinating
in defying the light that she now knew glowed in the dull eyes at her
side. She avoided looking; enough that the fire was there without
directly exposing her own eyes to it. She drummed with one hand, then
with both, at a gavotte on the rack before her.
Overcome merely at watching her fingers stretch upon the keys he leaned
against the piano.
"Why did you ask me to come up?"
As he muttered the words she picked again and again with her right hand
at a loving little phrase in the gavotte. When it went precisely right
she spoke in the same tone, still caressing the phrase, never looking
up. "Are you sorry you came?"
"No; I'd rather be trod under foot than not be near you."
"May we not be friends without either of us being martyred? I shall be
afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in--assuming
it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this
evening?"
"No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know
it. Let me ask one last favor----"
The gavotte rippled under her fingers. "No."
He turned away. She swung on the stool toward him and looked very
kindly and frankly up. "You have been too courteous to all of us for
that. Ask as many favors as you like, Mr. Glover," she murmured, "but
not, if you please, a last one."
"It shall be the last, Miss Brock. I only----"
"You only what?"
"Will you let me know what day you are going, so I may say good-by?"
"Certainly I will. You will be at Medicine Bend in any case, won't
you?"
"No. I have fifteen hundred miles to cover next week."
"What for--oh, it isn't any of my business, is it?"
"Looking over the snowsheds. Will you telegraph me?"
"Where?"
"At the Wickiup; it will reach me."
"You might have to come too far. We shall start in a few days."
"Will you telegraph me?"
"If you wish me to."
Eight days later, when suspense had grown sullen and Glover had parted
with all hope of hearing from her, he heard. In the depths of the
Heart River range her message reached him.
Every day Giddings, hundreds of miles away at the Wickiup, had had his
route-list. Giddings, who would have died for the engineer, waited,
every point in the repeating covered, day after day for a Glen Tarn
message that Glover expected. For four days Glover had hung like a dog
around the nearer stretches of the division. But the season was
advanced, he dared not delegate the last vital inspection of the year,
and bitterly he retreated from shed to shed until he was buried in the
barren wastes of the eighth district.
The day in the Heart River mountains is the thin, gray day of the
alkali and the sage. On Friday afternoon Glover's car lay sidetracked
at the east end of the Nine Mile shed waiting for a limited train to
pass. The train was late and the sun was dropping into an ashen strip
of wind clouds that hung cold as shrouds to the north and west when the
gray-powdered engine whistled for the siding.
Motionless beside the switch Glover saw down the gloom of the shed the
shoes wringing fire from the Pullman wheels, and wondered why they were
stopping. The conductor from the open vestibule waved to him as the
train slowed and ran forward with the message.
"Giddings wired me to wait for your answer, Mr. Glover," said the
conductor.
Glover was reading the telegram:
"I may start Saturday.
"G. B."
There was one chance to make it; that was to take the limited train
then and there. Bidding the conductor wait he hastened to his car,
called for his gripsack, gave his assistant a volley of orders, and
boarded a Pullman. Not the preferred stock of the whole system would
have availed at that moment to induce an inspection of Nine Mile shed.
There were men that he knew in the sleepers, but he shunned
acquaintance and walked on till he found an empty section into which he
could throw himself and feast undisturbed on his telegram. He studied
it anew, tried to consider coolly whether her message meant anything or
nothing, and gloated over the magic of the letters that made her
initials: and when he slept, the word last in his heart was Gertrude.
In the morning he breakfasted late in the sunshine of the diner, passed
his friends again and secluded himself in his section. Never before
had she said "I"; always it had been "we." With eyes half-closed upon
the window he repeated the words and spoke her name after them, because
every time the speaking drugged him like lotus, until, yielding again
to the exhaustion of the week's work and strain, he fell asleep.
When he woke the car was dark; the train conductor, Sid Francis, was
sitting beside him, laughing.
"You're sleepy to-day, Mr. Glover."
"Sid, where are we?" asked Glover, looking at his watch; it was four
o'clock.
"Grouse Creek."
"Are we that late? What's the matter?"
The conductor nodded toward the window. "Look there."
The sky was gray with a driving haze; a thin sweep of snow flying in
the sand of the storm was whitening the sagebrush.
Glover, waking wide, turned to the window. "Where's the wind, Sid?"
"Northwest."
"What's the thermometer?"
"Thirty at Creston; sixty when we left MacDill at noon."
"Everything running?"
"They've been getting the freights into division since noon. There'll
be something doing to-night on the range. They sent stock warnings
everywhere this morning, but they can't begin to protect the stock
between here and Medicine in one day. Pulling hard, isn't she? We're
not making up anything."
The porter was lighting the lamps. While they talked it had grown
quite dark. Losing time every mile of the way, the train,
frost-crusted to the eyelids, got into Sleepy Cat at half-past six
o'clock; four hours late.
The crowded yard, as they pulled through it, showed the tie-up of the
day's traffic. Long lines of freight cars filled the trackage, and
overloaded switch engines struggled with ever-growing burdens to avert
the inevitable blockade of the night. Glover's anxiety, as he left the
train at the station, was as to whether he could catch anything on the
Glen Tarn branch to take him up to the Springs that night, for there he
was resolved to get before morning if he had to take an engine for the
run.
As he started up the narrow hall leading to the telegraph office he
heard the rustle of skirts above. Someone was descending the stairway,
and with his face in the light he halted.
"Oh, Mr. Glover."
"Why--Miss Brock!" It was Gertrude.
"What in the world--" he began. His broken voice was very natural, she
thought, but there was amazement in his utterance. He noticed there
was little color in her face; the deep boa of fur nestling about her
throat might account for that.
"What a chance that I should meet you!" she exclaimed, her back hard
against the side wall, for the hall was narrow and brought them face to
face. She spoke on. "Did you get my----?"
"Did I?" he echoed slowly; "I have travelled every minute since
yesterday afternoon to get here----"
Her uneasy laugh interrupted him. "It was hardly worth while, all
that."
"--and I was just going up to find out about getting to Glen Tarn."
"Glen Tarn! I left Glen Tarn this afternoon all alone to go to
Medicine Bend--papa is there, did you know? He came yesterday with all
the directors. Our car was attached for me to the afternoon train
coming down." She was certainly wrought up, he thought. "But when we
reached here the train I should have taken for Medicine Bend had not
come----"
"It is here now."
"Thank heaven, is it?"
"I came in on it."
"Then I can start at last! I have been so nervous. Is this our train?
They said our car couldn't be attached to this train, and that I should
have to go down in one of the sleepers. I don't understand it at all.
Will you have the car sent back to Glen Tarn in the morning, Mr.
Glover? And would you get my handbag? I was nearly run over a while
ago by some engine or other. I mustn't miss this train----"
"Never fear, never fear," said Glover.
"But I _cannot_ miss it. Be very, very sure, won't you?"
"Indeed, I shall. The train won't start for some time yet. First let
me take you to your car and then make some inquiries. Is no one down
with you?"
"No one; I am alone."
"Alone?"
"I expected to have been with papa by this time. It takes so little
time to run down, you know, and I telegraphed papa I should come on to
meet him. Isn't it most disagreeable weather?"
Glover laughed as he shielded her from the wind. "I suppose that's a
woman's name for it."
The car, coupled to a steampipe, stood just east of the station, and
Glover, helping her into it, went back after a moment to the telegraph
office. It seemed a long time that he was gone, and he returned
covered with snow. She advanced quickly to him in her wraps. "Are
they ready?"
He shook his head. "I'm afraid you can't get to Medicine to-night."
"Oh, but I must."
"They have abandoned Number Six."
"What does that mean?"
"The train will be held here to-night on account of the storm. There
will be no train of any kind down before morning; not then if this
keeps up."
"Is there danger of a blockade?"
"There is a blockade."
"Then I must get to papa to-night." She spoke with disconcerting
firmness.
"May I suggest?" he asked.
"Certainly."
"Would it not be infinitely better to go back to the Springs?"
"No, that would be infinitely worse."
"It would be comparatively easy--an engine to pull your car up on a
special order?"
"I will not go back to the Springs to-night, and I will go to Medicine
Bend," she exclaimed, apprehensively. "May I not have a special there
as well as to the Springs?"
Until that moment he had never seen anything of her father in her; but
her father spoke in every feature; she was a Brock.
Glover looked grave. "You may have, I am sure, every facility the
division offers. I make only the point," he said, gently, "that it
would be hazardous to attempt to get to the Bend to-night. I have just
come from the telegraph office. In the district I left this morning
the wires are all down to-night. That is where the storm is coming
from. There is a lull here just now, but----"
"I thank you, Mr. Glover, believe me, very sincerely for your
solicitude. I have no choice but to go, and if I must, the sooner the
better, surely. Is it possible for you to make arrangements for me?"
"It is possible, yes," he answered, guardedly.
"But you hesitate."
"It is a terrible night."
"I like snow, Mr. Glover."
"The danger to-night is the wind."
"Are you afraid of the wind?" There was a touch of ridicule in her
half-laughing tone.
"Yes," he answered, "I am afraid of the wind."
"You are jesting."
She saw that he flushed just at the eyes; but he spoke still gently.
"You feel that you must go?"
"I must."
"Then I will get orders at once."