steel mills, and there was a terrific accumulation of correspondence
awaiting him when he reached Denver. At the top of the pile was an
official circular appointing one George Z. Merriam, a man whom Ford
remembered, or seemed vaguely to remember, as one of the MacMorrogh
bookkeepers, general agent of the P. S-W., with headquarters at Portland,
Oregon. And at the bottom of the accumulation was a second official
printing, bearing the approval of the president, this; and Ford's eyes
gloomed angrily when he read it.
PACIFIC SOUTHWESTERN RAILWAY CO.
Office of the President.
NEW YORK, August 24.
To All Officials and Employees:
At a called meeting of the stock-holders of this company, held in
New York, August 23, Mr. John C. North was elected First
Vice-President and General Manager of all lines of this company,
operative and under construction. All officers and employees will
govern themselves accordingly.
By Order of the Executive Committee.
Approved:
SIDNEY J. COLBRITH, President.
XV
AN UNWILLING HOST
Standing in the Pacific portal of Plug Pass, on the old snow-crust
which, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten
thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of
mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space
against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and other
miles nearer the sunset.
It was an outlook both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic
grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of
the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic
littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its
immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this
to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing
eye-plunge from the lofty view-point.
"Yes; quite so," Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who
says what he must, rather than what he would like to say. "It is all the
things you have been saying, and more--when one has the time and the
mind to be enthusiastic about it."
Miss Adair stood up very straight, and her chin was a protest in
Praxitelean harmonies. She knew very well how reluctantly her companion
was doing the honors of the mountain vastnesses; how full of wrath he
was because President Colbrith had seen fit to precipitate the Nadia and
a private-car party into the midst of the strenuous building battle on
the western extension. But she argued that this was no reason why he
should be crustily impossible with her. Wherefore she said, merely to
see him boil over:
"I should think you would come up here often for this glorious view, Mr.
Ford. You do, don't you?"
"Come up here for the view? Oh, yes; I presume I have climbed up here a
hundred times, first and last, and always for the sake of the view. I
began it the first winter I spent in Saint's Rest, when the snow-shoeing
was at its best. Really to appreciate the scenery, you should take three
hours for the approach from the basin down yonder, dragging a pair of
Canadian raquettes by the toe-straps."
The young woman laughed inwardly at the broadsword slash of his sarcasm.
It was so like the man; big and vigorous and energetic, and quite
without regard for consequences or for the insignificance of the thing
to be obliterated. But she would not spare him.
"How enthusiastic you are!" she commented. "I don't believe I should be
equal to 'a hundred times, first and last,' or to the snow-shoes. But I
can admire such zeal in other people immensely."
"Do you really think so small of a man's work in the world, Miss Adair?"
he demanded, not very coherently. "I'm not saying that the scenery
doesn't move me. It does; and the first time I stood here on this
summit, I presume I felt just as you do now. But my comings and goings
have been chiefly concerned with this"--kicking the rail of the new
track which threaded the shallow valley of the pass. "I am trying to
build a railroad; to build it quickly, and as well as I can. When I get
it finished, I may have time to admire the scenery."
It was a little appeal for sympathy, apparent enough in spite of its
indirectness; but Miss Adair was still mindful of Ford's too evident
willingness to leave her behind at the deserted grading-camp half-way
down to Saint's Rest where the Nadia was temporarily side-tracked.
"Another ideal gone," she lamented, in mock despair. "All those
trampings and toilings up this magnificent mountain merely to prepare
for the laying of some logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron
to fasten them together!"
He smiled at her definition of his railroad, and the keen edge of his
annoyance was a little blunted. He had been telling himself that she
might be twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five; but evidently she was
only a child, with a child's appreciation of a very considerable
industrial triumph. Old engineers, one of them an assistant on his own
staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a
standard gauge railroad over Plug Pass was a sheer impossibility. Yet he
had done it.
"I suspect I owe you an apology," he said, yielding a little to the love
which was fighting with discouragement and righteous anger for the first
place in his heart. "I'm afraid I have been taking you too seriously,
all along."
Her laugh was a delicious little ripple of exultation. She had succeeded
in avenging herself.
"I can forgive you now," she said, and the blue eyes were dancing. "But
you must admit that you were the aggressor. I have _never_ been made so
pointedly unwelcome in all my life. I believe you were going to refuse
to let me walk up here with you if Uncle Sidney had not commanded you
to."
This time his smile was a grin, but it was not ill-natured.
"I should, indeed," he confessed quite frankly. "To be brutally candid,
I had a decided attack of the 'unwelcomes' when I received Mr.
Colbrith's wire announcing his intention of bringing his picnic party
out here into the midst of things. We have little time, and none of the
civilized conveniences, for entertaining company."
"I think we all understand that," she made haste to say. "Aunt Hetty
tried to dissuade Uncle Sidney, but he was bent on showing us how modern
railroad building is rushed at the 'front'--is that the right word?--and
so here we are."
A small frown gathered between Ford's eyes. He was far enough from
suspecting that this was the outworking of Kenneth's "notion"; that Mr.
Colbrith's annual inspection tour over the Pacific Southwestern had been
extended to cover the new line at Kenneth's suggestion--a suggestion
arising out of purely reformatory motives. Nor would it have helped
matters much if he had known Kenneth's genuine distress when it
transpired that the suggestion bade fair to result in precipitating a
private car-load of pleasurers into the pandemonium of the
grading-camps.
But the pleasurers were as yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium,
and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong
enough to turn back the threatened invasion. There were reasons enough
why a party with women among its members should not be projected into
the grading and track-laying field. It was no place for women, Ford was
telling himself wrathfully; especially for the women of the president's
own household.
In the little interval of silence Miss Adair was focusing her
field-glass and trying to trace the line of the descending grade into
the headwater valley of the Pannikin. Ford did not mean to be ungracious
to her--what lover ever means to be curt to the one woman in all the
world? But it is not easy to be angry in nine parts and loving-kind in
the tenth--anger being one of the inclusive emotions. Nevertheless, he
made the effort, for her sake. However inconsiderate Mr. Colbrith was,
she was blameless.
"Let me show you," he said, taking the field-glass and adjusting it for
her. "Now hold it steadily and pick up the line in the great loop....
Have you found it?... Now follow it slowly until you come to the point
where it turns into the valley, and you can trace it for miles by the
cuts and fills."
She followed his directions until the line of the extension became a
vanishing thread in the distance, and then was content to let the glass
sweep the vastnesses beyond. When she spoke it was of the topographic
immensities.
"I heard you telling brother at the dinner-table in Chicago that you
were able to see more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to
make any one else see. Can I see it with the glass?"
"Hardly," he smiled. "I was trying to tell your brother of the
magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that
farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up. It was a
gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them
believed--not even your uncle."
"I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs," she said, adding:
"and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a
molecule--whichever is the smaller."
"Yet it is a new empire in the rough," he rejoined, with a touch of the
old enthusiasm, "waiting only for the coming of this"--putting his foot
again upon the steel of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at
has been called a part of the Great American Desert--the most forbidding
part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will
come a time when you can focus your glass here on this mountain and look
out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled
paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to
fasten them together' will bring it to pass."
There was a flash of the enthusiast's fire in the cool gray eyes to go
with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it. He had stood for her as
an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly
watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a
dreamer of dreams. Some part of her thought slipped into speech.
"No, I am not an enthusiast," he denied, in reply to her charge. "At
bottom, I'm only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads. But
I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn't tell
where it would be profitable to build them."
"Never mind: you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors
finally," she commented.
"No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders--meaning to
be," he objected. "They are after the present visible dollar in a
western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern. If we reach Green Butte
before our competitors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we
shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast."
"I understand," she said. "But yours is the higher ideal--the true
American ideal."
"It's business," he asserted.
"Well, isn't business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?"
she laughed.
This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment.
"I guess it is, in the last analysis," he said. And then: "I'm sorry to
keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia.
But I warned you beforehand. I must keep my appointment with Frisbie. Do
you see anything of him?" This because she was again sweeping the
western wilderness with the field-glass.
"What am I to look for?"
"The smoke of an engine."
She focused the glass on the gorge at the foot of the pass. "I see it!"
she cried. "A little black beetle of a thing just barely crawling. Now
it is turning into the first curve of the great loop."
"Then we shan't have very much longer to wait. Do you find the
ten-thousand-foot breeze chilly? Turn up the collar of your coat and
we'll walk a bit."
It was his first appreciable concern for her comfort, and she gave him
full credit. Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia's equipment, but no
woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be
transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be
brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat
and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up
and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a
different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner
in the dining-car on the night of purse-snatchings.
XVI
THE TRUTHFUL ALTITUDES
A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant
growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit. A moment
later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the
westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on
the engineer's side.
The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach. The big engine
came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a
fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its
cylinder-cocks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral
silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.
Ford glanced aside at his companion; her expressive face was a study in
delighted animation and he decided that he had again misjudged the
president's niece. She was beating time softly with her gloved hands and
singing the song of the locomotive:
"'With a michnai--ghignai--shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein--zwei--drei--Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin' michnai--ghignai--shtingal! Yah! Yah!'"
she quoted; and Ford's heart went out to her in new and comradely
outreachings.
"You read _Naught-naught-seven_?" he said: "you are one woman in a
thousand."
"_Merci!_" she countered. "Small favors thankfully received. Brother
thinks there is only one person writing, nowadays, and the name of that
person is Kipling. I get a little of it by mere attrition."
The brakes of the big engine were still gripping the wheels when a small
man with wicked mustaches and goatee dropped from the gangway. His khaki
suit was weather-faded to a dirty green, and he was grimy and perspiring
and altogether unpresentable; but he pulled himself together and tried
to look pleasant when he saw that his chief had a companion, and that
the companion was a lady.
"I'm sorry if I have kept you waiting," he began. "Gallagher was
shifting steel for the track-layers when your wire found me, and the
engine couldn't be spared,"--this, of course, to Ford. Then, with an
apologetic side glance for the lady: "Riley's in hot water again--up to
his chin."
"What's the matter now?" gritted Ford; and Alicia marked the instant
change to masterful command.
"Same old score. The Italians are kicking again at the MacMorrogh
Brothers' commissary--because they have to pay two prices and get chuck
that a self-respecting dog wouldn't eat; and, besides, they say they
are quarrying rock--which is true--and getting paid by the MacMorroghs
for moving earth. They struck at noon to-day."
The chief frowned gloomily, and the president's niece felt intuitively
that her presence was a bar to free speech.
"It's straight enough about the rotten commissary and the graft on the
pay-rolls," said Ford wrathfully. "Is the trouble likely to spread to
the camps farther down?"
"I hope not; I don't think it will--without whisky to help it along,"
said Frisbie, with another apologetic side glance for Miss Adair.
"Yes; but the whisky isn't lacking--there's Pete Garcia and his stock of
battle, murder and sudden death at Paint Rock, a short half-mile from
Riley's," Ford broke in.
Frisbie's smile, helped out by the grime and the coal dust, was
triumphantly demoniacal.
"Not now there isn't," he amended; adding: "Any fire-water at Paint
Rock, I mean. When Riley told me what was doing, I made a bee line for
Garcia's wickiup and notified him officially that he'd have to go out of
business for the present."
"Oh, you did?" said Ford. "Of course he was quite willing to oblige you?
How much time did he give you to get out of pistol range?"
[Illustration: "Miss Adair, you must let me introduce my friend, Mr.
Richard Frisbie"]
Frisbie actually blushed--in deference to the lady.
"Why--er--it was the other way round. He double-quicked a little
side-trip down the gulch while I knocked in the heads of his whisky
barrels and wrecked his bar with a striking hammer I had brought along."
For the first time in the interview the chief's frown melted and he
laughed approvingly.
"Miss Adair, you must let me introduce my friend and first assistant,
Mr. Richard Frisbie. He is vastly more picturesque than anything else we
have to show you at this end of the Pacific Southwestern. Dick--Miss
Alicia Adair, President Colbrith's niece."
Frisbie took off his hat, and Miss Alicia gave him her most gracious
smile.
"Please go on," she said. "I'm immensely interested. What became of Mr.
Garcia afterward?"
"I don't know that," said Frisbie ingenuously. "Only, I guess I shall
find out when I go back. He is likely to be a little irritated, I'm
afraid. But there are compensations, even in Pete: like most Mexicans,
he can neither tell the truth nor shoot straight." Then again to Ford:
"What is to be done about the Riley mix-up?"
"Oh, the same old thing. Go down and tell the Italians that the company
will stand between them and the MacMorroghs, and they shall have
justice--provided always that every man of them is back on the job again
to-morrow morning. Who is Riley's interpreter now?"
"Lanciotto."
"Well, look out for him: he is getting a side-cut from the MacMorroghs
and is likely to translate you crooked, if it suits his purposes. Check
him by having our man Luigi present when he does the talking act. Any
word from Major Benson?"
"He was at the tie-camp on Ute Creek, yesterday. Jack Benson and Brissac
are lining the grade for the steel on M'Grath's section, and the bridge
men are well up to the last crossing of Horse Creek."
"That's encouraging. How about the grade work on the detour--your new
line into Copah?"
It was the assistant's turn to frown, but the brow-wrinkling was of
puzzlement.
"There's something a bit curious about that--you don't mind our talking
shop like a pair of floor-walkers, do you, Miss Adair? You know we
expected the MacMorroghs would kick on the change of route and the loss
of the big rock-cut in the canyon. There wasn't a word of protest. If I
hadn't known better, I should have said that old Brian MacMorrogh knew
all about it in advance. All he said was: 'Sure, 'tis your railroad, and
we'll be buildin' it anywheres you say, Misther Frisbie.' And the very
next day he had a little army of men on that detour, throwing dirt to
beat the band. It'll be ready for the steel by the time we can get to it
with the track-layers."
Ford nodded approvingly. "Speed is what we are paying for, and we're
thankful to get it whenever, and wherever, we can. Is the bridge timber
coming down all right now?"
"Yes; and we are getting plenty of ties since the major put on his
war-paint and went after the MacMorrogh subs in the tie-camps. It is the
rock work that is holding us back."
Ford nodded again. Then he tried a little shot in the dark.
"The president's car is just below--at the basin switch. He wants to
have it taken to the front, and I have been trying to dissuade him. Is
the track safe for it?"
Frisbie guessed what kind of answer was desired, and stretched the truth
a little.
"I should say not. It's something fierce, even for the construction
trains."
Miss Alicia's smile was seraphic.
"You two gentlemen needn't tell fibs for the possible effect on me," she
said, with charming frankness. "Nothing I could say would carry any
weight with Uncle Sidney."
"Stung!" said Frisbie, half to himself; and the two men laughed
shamefacedly.
"Will it disarrange things so very much if the Nadia is taken to the
'front'?" asked Miss Adair.
"Well, rather," said Frisbie bluntly. Then he tried to excuse himself
and made a mess of it.
"Just why?" she persisted. "Forget the conventions, Mr. Frisbie, and
talk to me as you have been talking to Mr. Ford. Is there any good
reason, apart from the inconvenience, why our little pleasure party
shouldn't see your new railroad? I am appealing to you because Mr. Ford
won't tell me the truth."
Ford stood aloof and let Frisbie worry with it alone.
"There are a dozen reasons, Miss Adair; the track is fearfully
rough--really, you know, it isn't safe for a big car like the Nadia.
There are only a few sidings, and what there are, are filled up with
construction stuff and camp cars, and--"
She was shaking her head and laughing at his strivings.
"Never mind," she said; "you can't tell the truth, either, with Mr. Ford
looking on. But I shall find it out."
Frisbie looked horrified.
"You--you certainly will, Miss Adair; if Mr. Colbrith insists upon
having his car dragged over the range." Then, being quite willing to
make his escape, he turned to his chief. "Is there anything else? If
not, I'll be getting back to the Riley mix-up before the trouble has
time to grow any bigger."
Ford shook his head, and Frisbie lifted his hat to Miss Adair and
turned to climb to his engine cab. But at the moment of brake-releasings
Ford halted him.
"One minute," he said; and turning to his charge: "I'll borrow Dick's
engine and take you down to the Nadia's siding, if you'd rather ride
than walk."
"Oh, will you? That would be fine! But oughtn't Mr. Frisbie to get back
to his work?"
"Y-yes," Ford admitted. "Time is rather important, just now."
"Then we'll walk," she said with great decision.
"That's all, Dick," Ford called. "Keep an eye open for Garcia. He might
make a fluke and shoot straight, for once in a way."
They stood in silence on the wind-swept summit until the curving
down-rush of the western grade had swallowed the retreating engine. Miss
Alicia was the first to speak when the iron clamor was distance-drowned.
"I like your Mr. Frisbie," she said reflectively. "Isn't he the kind of
man who would have taken the message to the other Garcia?"
"He is the kind of man who would stop a bullet for his friend, and think
nothing of it--if the bullet should happen to leave him anything to
think with," he returned warmly. And then he added, half absently: "He
saved my life four years ago last summer."
There was genuine human interest in her voice when she said gently:
"Would you mind telling me about it?"
"It was up in the Minnesota pineries, where we were building a branch
railroad through the corner of an Indian reservation. A half-breed
pot-hunter for the game companies had a right-of-way quarrel with the
railroad people, and he pitched upon me as the proper person to kill. It
was a knife rush in the moonlight; and Dick might have shot him, only he
was too tender-hearted. So he got between us."
"Well?" she prompted, when it became evident that Ford thought he had
finished.
"That was all; except that it was touch and go with poor Dick for the
next six weeks, with no surgeon worthy of the name nearer than St.
Paul."
Miss Alicia was more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared
to have her companion suspect. Her world was a world of the commonplace
conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and
she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly
that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.
"Shall we go back now?" she asked; and they were half-way down to the
siding and the private car before she spoke again. It took some little
time to compass sufficient humility to make amends, and even then the
admission came to no more than four words.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Ford."
"What for?" he asked, knowing only that he was coming to love her more
blindly with every added minute of their companionship.
"For--for trying to be hateful." It was a humbler thing than any she had
ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and
association was beginning to get into her blood.
"If it comes to that, there were two of us," he rejoined, matching her
frankness. "And, as you remarked a while back, I was certainly the
aggressor. Shall we call it a truce for the present?"
"If you will be generous enough."