Winton sent the Chinaman out for another cup of tea before he said, "Did Miss Carteret come here alone?"
"Oh, no; Calvert came with her."
"What brought them here?"
Adams spread his hands.
"What makes any woman do precisely the most unexpected thing?"
Winton was silent for a moment. Finally he said: "I hope you did what you could to make it pleasant for her."
"I did. And I didn"t hear her complain."
"That was low-down in you, Morty."
Adams chuckled reminiscently. "Had to do it to make my day-before-yesterday lie hold water. And she was immensely taken with the scrawls, especially with one of them."
Winton flushed under the bronze.
"I suppose I don"t need to ask which one."
Adams" grin was a measure of his complacence.
"Well, hardly."
"She took it away with her?"
"Took it, or tore it up, I forget which."
"Tell me, Morty, was she very angry?"
The other took the last hint of laughter out of his eyes before he said solemnly: "You"ll never know how thankful I was that you were twenty miles away."
Winton"s cup was full, and he turned the talk abruptly to the industrial doings and accomplishments of the day. Adams made a verbal report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but, strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the incident of the upward-climbing miners.
When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward he left the d.i.n.key ostensibly to do it, declining Adams" offer of company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator"s tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.
"That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?" he asked.
"No, go to sleep. I"ll write a wire and leave it for you to send in the morning."
He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief report of the day"s progress in track-laying for the general manager"s record. But when Carter"s regular breathing told him he was alone he pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.
"Um," he said, and his heart grew warm within him. "It"s just about as I expected: Morty didn"t have anything whatever to do with it--except to sign and send it as she commanded him to." And the penciled sheet was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.
The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the d.i.n.key. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the newly-laid track of the day.
Another half-hour had elapsed, and a waning moon was clearing the topmost crags of Pacific Peak when he came out on the high embankment opposite the Rosemary, having traversed the entire length of the lateral loop and inspected the trestle at the gulch head by the light of a blazing spruce-branch.
The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of the moon. The engine of the sheriff"s car was humming softly with a note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked piano floated out upon the frosty night air.
Winton turned to go back. The windows of the Rosemary were all dark, and there was nothing to stay for. So he thought, at all events; but if he had not been musing abstractedly upon things widely separated from his present surroundings, he might have remarked two tiny stars of lantern-light high on the placer ground above the embankment; or, failing the sight, he might have heard the dull, measured _slumph_ of a churn-drill burrowing deep in the frozen earth of the slope.
As it was, a pair of brown eyes blinded him, and the tones of a voice sweeter than the songs of Oberon"s sea-maid filled his ears. Wherefore he neither saw nor heard; and taking the short cut across the mouth of the lateral gulch back to camp, he boarded the d.i.n.key and went to bed without disturbing Adams.
The morning of the day to come broke clear and still, with the stars paling one by one at the pointing finger of the dawn, and the frost-rime lying thick and white like a snowfall of erect and glittering needles on iron and steel and wood.
Obedient to orders, the bridge-builders were getting out their hand-car at the construction camp, the wheels shrilling merrily on the frosted rails, and the men stamping and swinging their arms to start the sluggish night-blood. Suddenly, like the opening gun of a battle, the dull rumble of a mighty explosion trembled upon the still air, followed instantly by a sound as of a pa.s.sing avalanche.
Winton was out and running up the track before the camp was fairly aroused. What he saw when he gained the hither side of the lateral gulch was a sight to make a strong man weep. A huge landslide, starting from the frozen placer ground high up on the western promontory, had swept every vestige of track and embankment into the deep bed of the creek at a point precisely opposite Mr. Somerville Darrah"s private car.
VII. THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW
Virginia was up and dressed when the sullen shock of the explosion set the windows jarring in the Rosemary.
She hurried out upon the observation platform and so came to look upon the ruin wrought by the landslide while the dust-like smoke of the dynamite still hung in the air.
"Rather unlucky for our friends the enemy," said a colorless voice behind her; and she had an uncomfortable feeling that Jastrow had been lying in wait for her.
She turned upon him quickly.
"Was it an accident, Mr. Jastrow?"
"How could it be anything else?" he inquired mildly.
"I don"t know. But there was an explosion: I heard it."
"It is horribly unfair," she went on. "I understand the sheriff is here. Couldn"t he have prevented this?"
The secretary"s rejoinder was a plat.i.tude: "Everything is fair in love or war."
"But this is neither," she retorted.
"Think not?" he said coolly. "Wait, and you"ll see. And a word in your ear, Miss Carteret: you are one of us, you know, and you mustn"t be disloyal. I know what you did yesterday after you read those telegrams."
Virginia"s face became suddenly wooden. Until that moment it had not occurred to her that Jastrow"s motive in showing her the two telegrams might have been carefully calculated.
"I have never given you the right to speak to me that way, Mr.
Jastrow," she said, with the faintest possible emphasis on the courtesy prefix; and with that she turned from him to focus her field-gla.s.s on the construction camp below.
At the Utah stronghold all was activity of the fiercest. Winton had raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive with men cl.u.s.tering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the material-train to be taken to the front.
While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling the men were off and at work.
Virginia"s color rose and the brown eyes filled swiftly. One part of her ideal was courage of the sort that rises the higher for reverses. But at the instant she remembered the secretary, and, lest he should spy upon her emotion, she turned and took refuge in the car.