Ma.s.sive mountains, dark green to the timber line and dazzling white above it, shut in the narrow valley to right and left. A mimic torrent, ice-bound in the quieter pools, drums and gurgles on its descent midway between two railway embankments, the one to which the station and side-tracks belong, old and well-settled, the other new and as yet unballasted. Just opposite the pygmy station a lateral gorge intersects the main canyon, making a deep gash in the opposing mountain bulwark, around which the new line has to find its way by a looping detour.
In a scanty widening of the main canyon a few hundred yards below the station a graders" camp of rude slab shelters is turning out its horde of wild-looking Italians; and on a crooked spur track fronting the shanties blue wood-smoke is curling lazily upward from the kitchen car of a construction train.
All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the st.u.r.diest of mountain-climbing locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened when the special was pa.s.sing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was--or thought she was--the first member of the party to dress and steal out upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the canyon.
But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently broken by a voice behind her--the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur Jastrow.
"What a howling wilderness, to be sure, isn"t it?" said the secretary, twirling his eyegla.s.ses by the cord and looking, as he felt, interminably bored.
"No, indeed; anything but that," she retorted warmly. "It is grander than anything I ever imagined. I wish there were a piano in the car.
It makes me fairly ache to set it in some form of expression, and music is the only form I know."
"I"m glad if it doesn"t bore you," he rejoined, willing to agree with her for the sake of prolonging the interview. "But to me it is nothing more than a dreary wilderness, as I say; a barren, rock-ribbed gulch affording an indifferent right of way for two railroads."
"For one," she corrected, in a quick upflash of loyalty for her kin.
The secretary shifted his gaze from the mountains to the maiden and smiled. She was exceedingly good to look upon--high-bred, queenly, and just now the fine fire of enthusiasm quickened her pulses and sent the rare flush to neck and cheek.
Jastrow the cold-eyed, the business automaton, set to go off with a click at Mr. Somerville Darrah"s touch, had ambitions not automatic.
Some day he meant to put the world of business under foot as a conqueror, standing triumphant on the apex of that pyramid of success which the Mr. Somerville Darrahs were so painstakingly uprearing. When that day should come, there would need to be an establishment, a menage, a queen for the kingdom of success. Summing her up for the hundredth time since the beginning of the westward flight, he thought Miss Carteret would fill the requirements pa.s.sing well.
But this was a divagation, and he pulled himself back to the askings of the moment, agreeing with her again without reference to his private convictions.
"For one, I should have said," he amended. "We mean to have it that way, though an unprejudiced onlooker might be foolish enough to say that there is a pretty good present prospect of two."
But Miss Carteret was in a contradictory mood. Moreover, she was a woman, and the way to a woman"s confidence does not lie through the neutral country of easy compliance.
"If you won"t take the other side, I will," she said. "There will be two."
Jastrow acquiesced a second time.
"I shouldn"t wonder. Our compet.i.tor"s road seems to be only a question of time--a very short time, judging from the number of men turning out in the track gang down yonder."
Virginia leaned over the railing to look past the car and the dovecote station shading her eyes to shut out the snow-blink from the sun-fired peaks.
"Why, they are soldiers!" she exclaimed. "At least, some of them have guns on their shoulders. And see--they are forming in line!"
The secretary adjusted his eye-gla.s.ses.
"By Jove! you are right; they have armed the track force. The new chief of construction doesn"t mean to take any chances of being shaken loose by main strength. Here they come."
The end of track of the new line was diagonally across the creek from the Rosemary"s berth and a short pistol-shot farther down stream. But to advance it to a point opposite the private car, and to gain the alt.i.tude of the high embankment directly across from the station, the new line turned short out of the main canyon at the mouth of the intersecting gorge, describing a long, U-shaped curve around the head of the lateral ravine and doubling back upon itself to reenter the canyon proper at the higher elevation.
The curve which was the beginning of this U-shaped loop was the morning"s scene of action, and the Utah track-layers, two hundred strong, moved to the front in orderly array, with armed guards as flankers for the handcar load of rails which the men were pushing up the grade.
Jastrow darted into the car, and a moment later his place on the observation platform was taken by a wrathful industry colonel fresh from his dressing-room--so fresh, indeed, that he was coatless, hatless, and collarless, and with the dripping bath-sponge clutched like a missile to hurl at the impudent invaders on the opposite side of the canyon.
"Hah! wouldn"t wait until a man could get into his clothes!" he rasped, apostrophizing the Utah"s new chief of construction. "Jastrow!
Faveh me instantly, seh! Hustle up to the camp there and turn out the constable, town-marshal, or whatever he is. Tell him I have a writ for him to serve. Run, seh!"
The secretary appeared and disappeared like a marionette when the string has been jerked by a vigorous hand, and Virginia smiled--this without prejudice to a very acute appreciation of the grave possibilities which were preparing themselves. But having her share of the militant quality which made her uncle what he was, she stood her ground.
"Aren"t you afraid you will take cold, Uncle Somerville?" she asked archly; and the Rajah came suddenly to a sense of his incompleteness and went in to finish his ablutions against the opening of the battle actual.
At first Virginia thought she would follow him. When Mercury Jastrow should return with the officer of the law there would be trouble of some sort, and the woman in her shrank from the witnessing of it. But at the same instant the blood of the fighting Carterets a.s.serted itself and she resolved to stay.
"I wonder what uncle hopes to be able to do?" she mused. "Will a little town constable with a bit of signed paper from some lawyer or judge be mighty enough to stop all that furious activity over there?
It"s more than incredible."
From that she fell to watching the activity and the orderly purpose of it. A length of steel, with men cl.u.s.tering like bees upon it, would slide from its place on the hand-car to fall with a frosty clang on the cross-ties. Instantly the hammermen would pounce upon it. One would fall upon hands and knees to "sight" it into place; two others would slide the squeaking track-gage along its inner edge; a quartet, working like the component parts of a faultless mechanism, would tap the fixing spikes into the wood; and then at a signal a dozen of the heavy pointed hammers swung aloft and a rhythmic volley of resounding blows clamped the rail into permanence on its wooden bed.
Ahead of the steel-layers were the Italians placing the cross-ties in position to receive the track, and here the foreman"s badge of office and scepter was a pick-handle. Above all the clamor and the shoutings Virginia could hear the bull-bellow of this foreman roaring out his commands--in terms happily not understandable to her; and once she drew back with a little cry of womanly shrinking when the pick-handle thwacked upon the shoulders of one who lagged.
It was this bit of brutality which enabled her to single out Winton in the throng of workers. He heard the blow, and the oath that went with it, and she saw him run forward to wrench the bludgeon from the bully"s hands and fling it afar. What words emphasized the act she could not hear, but the little deed of swift justice thrilled her curiously, and her heart warmed to him as it had when he had thrown off his coat to fall to work on the derailed engine of the Limited.
"That was fine!" she said to herself. "Most men in his place wouldn"t care, so long as the work was done, and done quickly. I wonder if--oh, you startled me!"
It was Mr. Somerville Darrah again, clothed upon and in his right mind; otherwise the mind of a master of men who will brook neither defeat at the hands of an antagonist nor disobedience on the part of his following. He was scowling fiercely across at the Utah activities when she spoke, but at her exclamation the frown softened into a smile for his favorite niece.
"Startled you, eh? Pahdon me, my deah Virginia. But as I am about to startle some one else, perhaps you would better go in to your aunt."
She put a hand on his arm. "Please let me stay out here, Uncle Somerville," she said. "I"ll be good and not get in the way."
He shook his head, in deprecation rather than in refusal.
"An officer will be here right soon now to make an arrest. There may be a fight, or at least trouble of a sort you wouldn"t care to see, my deah."
"Is it--is it Mr. Winton?" she asked.
He nodded.
"What has he been doing--besides being "The Enemy"?"
The Rajah"s smile was ferocious.
"Just now he is trespa.s.sing, and directing others to trespa.s.s, upon private property. Do you see that dump up there on the mountain?--the hole that looks like a mouth with a long gray beard hanging below it?
That is a mine, and its claim runs down across the track where Misteh Winton is just now spiking his rails."
"But, I don"t understand," she began; then she stopped short and clung to the strong arm. A man in a wide-flapped hat and cowboy _chaparejos_, with a revolver on either hip, was crossing the stream on the ice-bridge to scramble up the embankment of the new line.
"The officer?" she asked in an awed whisper.
The Rajah made a sign of a.s.sent. Then, identifying Winton in the throng of workers, he forgot Virginia"s presence. "Confound him!" he fumed. "I"d give a thousand dollars if he"d faveh me by showing fight so we could lock him up on a criminal count!"
"Why, Uncle Somerville!" she cried.
But there was no time for reproaches. The leather-breeched person parading as the Argentine town-marshal had climbed the embankment, and, singling out his man, was reading his warrant.
Contrary to Mr. Darrah"s expressed hope, Winton submitted quietly.