It was a December morning—the Missouri December of mild temperatures and saturated skies—and the Chicago and Alton's fast train, dripping from the rush through the wet night, had steamed briskly to its terminal track in the Union Station at Kansas City.
Two men, one smoking a short pipe and the other snapping the ash from a scented cigarette, stood aloof from the hurrying throngs on the platform, looking on with the measured interest of those who are in a melee but not of it.
“More delay,” said the cigarettist, glancing at his watch. “We are over an hour late now. Do we get any of it back on the run to Denver?”
The pipe-smoker shook his head.
“Hardly, I should say. The Limited is a pretty heavy train to pick up lost time. But it won't make any particular difference. The western connections all wait for the Limited, and we shall reach the seat of war to-morrow night, according to the Boston itinerary.”
Mr. Morton P. Adams flung away the unburned half of his cigarette and masked a yawn behind his hand.
“It's no end of a bore, Winton, and that is the plain, unlacquered fact,” he protested. “I think the governor owes me something. I worried through the Tech because he insisted that I should have a profession; and now I am going in for field work with you in a howling winter wilderness because he insists on a practical demonstration. I shall ossify out there in those mountains. It's written in the book.”
“Humph! it's too bad about you,” said the other ironically. He was a fit figure of a man, clean-cut and vigorous, from the steadfast outlook of the gray eyes and the firm, smooth-shaven jaw to the square fingertips of the strong hands, and his smile was of good-natured contempt. “As you say, it is an outrage on filial complaisance. All the same, with the right-of-way fight in prospect, Quartz Creek Canyon may not prove to be such a valley of dry bones as—Look out, there!”
The shifting-engine had cut a car from the rear of the lately-arrived Alton, and was sending it down the outbound track to a coupling with the Transcontinental Limited. Adams stepped back and let it miss him by a hand's-breadth, and as the car was passing, Winton read the name on the paneling.
“The Rosemary: somebody's twenty-ton private outfit. That cooks our last chance of making up any lost time between this and tomorrow—”
He broke off abruptly. On the square rear observation platform of the private car were three ladies. One of them was small and blue-eyed, with wavy little puffs of snowy hair peeping out under her dainty widow's cap. Another was small and blue-eyed, with wavy masses of flaxen hair caught up from a face which might have served as a model for the most exquisite bisque figure that ever came out of France. But Winton saw only the third.
She was taller than either of her companions—tall and straight and lithe; a charming embodiment of health and strength and beauty: clear-skinned, brown-eyed—a very goddess fresh from the bath, in Winton's instant summing up of her, and her crown of red-gold hair helped out the simile.
Now, thus far in his thirty-year pilgrimage John Winton, man and boy, had lived the intense life of a working hermit, so far as the social gods and goddesses were concerned. Yet he had a pang—of disappointment or pointless jealousy, or something akin to both—when Adams lifted his hat to this particular goddess, was rewarded by a little cry of recognition, and stepped up to the platform to be presented to the elder and younger Bisques.
So, as we say, Winton turned and walked away as one left out, feeling one moment as though he had been defrauded of a natural right, and deriding himself the next, as a sensible man should. After a bit he was able to laugh at the “sudden attack,” as he phrased it, but later, when he and Adams were settled for the day-long run in the Denver sleeper, and the Limited was clanking out over the switches, he brought the talk around with a carefully assumed air of lack-interest to the party in the private car.
“She is a friend of yours, then?” he said, when Adams had taken the baited hook open-eyed.
The Technologian modified the assumption.
“Not quite in your sense of the word, I fancy. I met her a number of times at the houses of mutual friends in Boston. She was studying at the Conservatory.”
“But she isn't a Bostonian,” said Winton confidently.
“Miss Virginia?—hardly. She is a Carteret of the Carterets; Virginia-born-bred-and-named. Stunning girl, isn't she?”
“No,” said Winton shortly, resenting the slang for no reason that he could have set forth in words.
Adams lighted another of the scented villainies, and his clean-shaven face wrinkled itself in a slow smile.
“Which means that she has winged you at sight, I suppose, as she does most men.” Then he added calmly, “It's no go.”
“What is 'no go'?”
Adams laughed unfeelingly, and puffed away at his cigarette.
“You remind me of the fable about the head-hiding ostrich. Didn't I see you staring at her as if you were about to have a fit? But it is just as I tell you: it's no go. She isn't the marrying kind. If you knew her, she'd be nice to you till she got a good chance to flay you alive—”
“Break it off!” growled Winton.
“Presently. As I was saying, she would miss the chance of marrying the best man in the world for the sake of taking a rise out of him. Moreover, she comes of old Cavalier stock with an English earldom at the back of it, and she is inordinately proud of the fact; while you—er—you've given me to understand that you are a man of the people, haven't you?”
Winton nodded absently. It was one of his minor fads to ignore his lineage, which ran decently back to a Colonial governor on his father's side, and to assert that he did not know his grandfather's middle name—which was accounted for by the very simple fact that the elder Winton had no middle name.
“Well, that settles it definitely,” was the Bostonian's comment. “Miss Carteret is of the sang azur. The man who marries her will have to know his grandfather's middle name—and a good bit more besides.”
Winton's laugh was mockingly good-natured.
“You have missed your calling by something more than a hair's-breadth, Morty. You should have been a novelist. Give you a spike and a cross-tie and you'd infer a whole railroad. But you pique my curiosity. Where are these American royalties of yours going in the Rosemary?”
“To California. The car belongs to Mr. Somerville Darrah, who is vice-president and manager in fact of the Colorado and Grand River road: the 'Rajah,' they call him. He is a relative of the Carterets, and the party is on its way to spend the winter on the Pacific coast.”
“And the little lady in the widow's cap: is she Miss Carteret's mother?”
“Miss Bessie Carteret's mother and Miss Virginia's aunt. She is the chaperon of the party.”
Winton was silent while the Limited was roaring through a village on the Kansas side of the river. When he spoke again it was not of the Carterets; it was of the Carterets' kinsman and host.
“I have heard somewhat of the Rajah,” he said half-musingly. “In fact, I know him, by sight. He is what the magazinists are fond of calling an 'industry colonel,' a born leader who has fought his way to the front. If the Quartz Creek row is anything more than a stiff bluff on the part of the C. G. R. it will be quite as well for us if Mr. Somerville Darrah is safely at the other side of the continent—and well out of ordinary reach of the wires.”
Adams came to attention with a half-hearted attempt to galvanize an interest in the business affair.
“Tell me more about this mysterious jangle we are heading for,” he rejoined. “Have I enlisted for a soldier when I thought I was only going into peaceful exile as assistant engineer of construction on the Utah Short Line?”
“That remains to be seen.” Winton took a leaf from his pocket memorandum and drew a rough outline map. “Here is Denver, and here is Carbonate,” he explained. “At present the Utah is running into Carbonate this way over the rails of the C. G. R. on a joint track agreement which either line may terminate by giving six months' notice of its intention to the other. Got that?”
“To have and to hold,” said Adams. “Go on.”
“Well, on the first day of September the C. G. R. people gave the Utah management notice to quit.”
“They are bloated monopolists,” said Adams sententiously. “Still I don't see why there should be any scrapping over the line in Quartz Creek Canyon.”
“No? You are not up in monopolistic methods. In six months from September first the Utah people will be shut out of Carbonate business, which is all that keeps that part of their line alive. If they want a share of that traffic after March first, they will have to have a road of their own to carry it over.”
“Precisely,” said Adams, stifling a yawn. “They are building one, aren't they?”
“Trying to,” Winton amended. “But, unfortunately, the only practicable route through the mountains is up Quartz Creek Canyon, and the canyon is already occupied by a branch line of the Colorado and Grand River.”
“Still I don't see why there should be any scrap.”
“Don't you? If the Rajah's road can keep the new line out of Carbonate till the six months have expired, it will have a monopoly of all the carrying trade of the camp. By consequence it can force every shipper in the district to make iron-clad contracts, so that when the Utah line is finally completed it won't be able to secure any freight for a year, at least.”
“Oho! that's the game, is it? I begin to savvy the burro: that's the proper phrase, isn't it? And what are our chances?”
“We have about one in a hundred, as near as I could make out from Mr. Callowell's statement of the case. The C. G. R. people are moving heaven and earth to obstruct us in the canyon. If they can delay the work a little longer, the weather will do the rest. With the first heavy snow in the mountains, which usually comes long before this, the Utah will have to put up its tools and wait till next summer.”
Adams lighted another cigarette.
“Pardon me if I seem inquisitive,” he said, “but for the life of me I can't understand what these obstructionists can do. Of course, they can't use force.”
Winton's smile was grim. “Can't they? Wait till you get on the ground. But the first move was peaceable enough. They got an injunction from the courts restraining the new line from encroaching on their right of way.”
“Which was a thing that nobody wanted to do,” said Adams, between inhalations.
“Which was a thing the Utah had to do,” corrected Winton. “The canyon is a narrow gorge—a mere slit in parts of it. That is where they have us.”
“Oh, well,” returned Adams, “I suppose we took an appeal and asked to have the injunction set aside?”
“We did, promptly; and that is the present status of the fight. The appeal decision has not yet been handed down; and in the meantime we go on building railroad, incurring all the penalties for contempt of court with every shovelful of earth moved. Do you still think you will be in danger of ossifying?”
Adams let the question rest while he asked one of his own.
“How do you come to be mixed up in it, Jack? A week ago some one told me you were going to South America to build a railroad in the Andes. What switched you?”
Winton shook his head. “Fate, I guess; that and a wire from President Callowell of the Utah offering me this. Chief of Construction Evarts, in charge of the work in Quartz Creek Canyon, said what you said a few minutes ago—that he had not hired out for a soldier. He resigned, and I'm taking his berth.”
Adams rose and buttoned his coat.
“By all of which it seems that we two are in for a good bit more than the ossifying exile,” he remarked. And then: “I am going back into the Rosemary to pay my respects to Miss Virginia Carteret. Won't you come along?”
“No,” said Winton, more shortly than the invitation warranted; and the other went his way alone.
“'Scuse me, sah; private cyah, sah.”
It was the porter's challenge in the vestibule of the Rosemary. Adams found a card.
“Take that to Miss Carteret—Miss Virginia Carteret,” he directed, and waited till the man came back with his welcome.
The extension table in the open rear third of the private car was closed to its smallest dimensions, and the movable furnishings were disposed about the compartment to make it a comfortable lounging room.
Mrs. Carteret was propped among the cushions of a divan with a book. Her daughter occupied the undivided half of a tete-a-tete chair with a blond athlete in a clerical coat and a reversed collar. Miss Virginia was sitting alone at a window, but she rose and came to greet the visitor.
“How good of you to take pity on us!” she said, giving him her hand. Then she put him at one with the others: “Aunt Martha you have met; also Cousin Bessie. Let me present you to Mr. Calvert: Cousin Billy, this is Mr. Adams, who is responsible in a way for many of my Boston-learned gaucheries.”
Aunt Martha closed the book on her finger. “My dear Virginia!” she protested in mild deprecation; and Adams laughed and shook hands with the Reverend William Calvert and made Virginia's peace all in the same breath.
“Don't apologize for Miss Virginia, Mrs. Carteret. We were very good friends in Boston, chiefly, I think, because I never objected when she wanted to—er—to take a rise out of me.” Then to Virginia: “I hope I don't intrude?”
“Not in the least. Didn't I just say you were good to come? Uncle Somerville tells us we are passing through the famous Golden Belt—whatever that may be—and recommends an easy-chair and a window. But I haven't seen anything but stubble-fields—dismally wet stubble-fields at that. Won't you sit down and help me watch them go by?”
Adams placed a chair for her and found one for himself.
“'Uncle Somerville'—am I to have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Somerville Darrah?”
Miss Virginia's laugh was non-committal.
“Quien sabe?” she queried, airing her one Westernism before she was fairly in the longitude of it. “Uncle Somerville is a law unto himself. He had a lot of telegrams and things at Kansas City, and he is locked in his den with Mr. Jastrow, dictating answers by the dozen, I suppose.”
“Oh, these industry colonels!” said Adams. “Don't their toilings make you ache in sheer sympathy sometimes?”
“No, indeed,” was the prompt rejoinder; “I envy them. It must be fine to have large things to do, and to be able to do them.”
“Degenerate scion of a noble race!” jested Adams. “What ancient Carteret of them all would have compromised with the necessities by becoming a captain of industry?”
“It wasn't their metier, or the metier of their times,” said Miss Virginia with conviction. “They were sword-soldiers merely because that was the only way a strong man could conquer in those days. Now it is different, and a strong man fights quite as nobly in another field—and deserves quite as much honor.”
“Think so? I don't agree with you—as to the fighting, I mean. I like to take things easy. A good club, a choice of decent theaters, the society of a few charming young women like—”
She broke him with a mocking laugh.
“You were born a good many centuries too late, Mr. Adams; you would have fitted so beautifully, into decadent Rome.”
“No—thanks. Twentieth-century America, with the commercial frenzy taken out of it, is good enough for me. I was telling Winton a little while ago—”
“Your friend of the Kansas City station platform?” she interrupted. “Mightn't you introduce us a little less informally?”
“Beg pardon, I'm sure—yours and Jack's: Mr. John Winton, of New York and the world at large, familiarly known to his intimates—and they are precious few—as 'Jack W.' As I was about to say—”
But she seemed to find a malicious satisfaction in breaking in upon him.
“'Mr. John Winton': it's a pretty name as names go, but it isn't as strong as he is. He is an 'industry colonel,' isn't he? He looks it.”
The Bostonian avenged himself at Winton's expense for the unwelcome interruption.
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