A Fool for Love Part 14

"My personal interest? Quite so; a mere matter of dollars and cents, you may say."

"If you should have another offer, from some other company--"

"That is not your argument; it is Mr. Darrah's. You know well enough what is involved: honor, integrity, good faith, everything a man values, or should value. I can't believe you would ask such a sacrifice of me--of any man.

"Indeed, I do not ask it, Mr. Winton. But it is only fair that you should have your warning. My uncle will leave no stone unturned to defeat you."

He was still looking into her eyes, and so had courage to say what came uppermost.

"I don't care: I shall fight him as hard as I can, but I shall always be his debtor for this evening. Do you understand?"

In a flash her mood changed and she laughed lightly.

"Who would think it of you, Mr. Winton. Of all men I should have said you were the last to care so much for the social diversions. Shall we go in?"

IX. THE BLOCK SIGNAL.

If Mr. John Winton, C. E., stood in need of a moral tonic, as Adams had so delicately intimated to Miss Bessie Carteret, it was administered in quant.i.ty sufficient before he slept on the night of dinner-givings.

For a clear-eyed theorist, free from all heart-trammelings and able to grasp the unsentimental fact, the enemy's new plan of campaign wrote itself quite legibly. With his pick and choice among the time-killing expedients the Rajah could scarcely have found one more to his purpose than the private car Rosemary, including in its pa.s.senger list a Miss Virginia Carteret.

All of which Adams, subst.i.tuting friendly frankness for the disciplinary traditions of the service, set forth in good Bostonian English for the benefit and behoof of his chief, and was answered according to his deserts with scoffings and deridings.

"I wasn't born yesterday, Morty, and I'm not so desperately asinine as you seem to think," was the besotted one's summing-up. "I know the Rajah doesn't split hairs in a business fight, but he is hardly unscrupulous enough to use Miss Carteret as a cat's-paw."

But Adams would not be scoffed aside so easily.

"You're off in your estimate of Mr. Darrah, Jack, 'way off. I know the tradition: that a Southern gentleman is all chivalry when it comes to a matter touching his womankind, and I don't controvert it as a general proposition. But the Rajah has been a fighting Western railroad magnate so long that his accent is about the only Southern a.s.set he has retained. If I'm any good at guessing, he will stick at nothing to gain his end."

Winton admitted the impeachment without prejudice to his own point of view.

"Perhaps you are right. But forewarned is forearmed. And Miss Virginia is not going to lend herself to any such nefarious scheme."

"Not consciously, perhaps; but you don't know her yet. If she saw a good chance to take the conceit out of you, she'd improve it--without thinking overmuch of the possible consequences to the Utah company."

"Pshaw!" said Winton. "That is another of your literary inferences.

I've met her only twice, yet I venture to say I know her better than you do. If she cared anything for me--which she doesn't--"

"Oh, go to sleep!" said Adams, who was not minded to argue further with a man besotted; and so the matter went by default for the time.

But in the days that followed, days in which the sun rose and set in cloudless winter splendor and the heavy snows still held aloof, Adams'

prediction wrought itself out into sober fact. After the single appeal to force, Mr. Darrah seemed to give up the fight. None the less, the departure of the Rosemary was delayed, and its hospitable door was always open to the Utah chief of construction and his a.s.sistant.

It was very deftly done, and even Adams, the clear-eyed, could not help admiring the Rajah's skilful finesse. Of formal dinner-givings there might easily have been an end, since the construction camp had nothing to offer in return. But the formalities were studiously ignored, and the two young men were put upon a footing of intimacy and encouraged to come and go as they pleased.

Winton took his welcome broadly, as what lover would not? and within a week was spending most of his evenings in the Rosemary--this at a time when every waking moment of the day and night was deeply mortgaged to the chance of success. For now that the Rajah had withdrawn his opposition, Nature and the perversity of inanimate things had taken a hand, and for a fortnight the work of track-laying paused fairly within sight of the station at Argentine.

First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for the purpose--a process which effectually blocked the track for three entire days. Next it was another landslide (unhelped by dynamite, this) just above the station, a crawling cataract of loose, sliding shale which, painstakingly dug out and dammed with plank bulkhead during the day, would pour down and bury bulkhead, b.u.t.tresses, and the very right of way in the night.

In his right mind--the mind of an ambitious young captain of industry who sees defeat with dishonor staring him in the face--Winton would have fought all the more desperately for these hindrances. But, unfortunately, he was no longer an industry captain with an eye single to success. He was become that anomaly despised of the working world--a man in love.

"It's no use shutting our eyes to the fact, Jack," said Adams one evening, when his chief was making ready for his regular descent upon the Rosemary. "We shall have to put night shifts at work on that shale-slide if we hope ever to get past it with the rails."

"Hang the shale!" was the impatient rejoinder. "I'm no galley slave."

Adams' slow smile came and went in cynical ripplings.

"It is pretty difficult to say precisely what you are just now. But I can prophesy what you are going to be if you don't wake up and come alive."

Having no reply to this, Adams went back to the matter of night shifts.

"If you will authorize it, I'll put a night gang on and boss it myself. What do you say?"

"I say you are no end of a good fellow, Morty. And that's the plain fact. I'll do as much for you some time."

"I'll be smashed if you will--you'll never get the chance. When I let a pretty girl make a fool of me--"

But the door of the d.i.n.key slammed behind the outgoing one, and the prophet of evil was left to organize his night a.s.sault on the shale-slide, and to command it as best he could.

So, as we say, the days, days of stubborn toil with the enthusiasm taken out, slipped away unfruitful. Of the entire Utah force Adams alone held himself up to the mark, and being only second in command, he was unable to keep the bad example of the chief from working like a leaven of inertness among the men. Branagan voiced the situation in rich brogue one evening when Adams had exhausted his limited vocabulary of abuse on the force for its apathy. "'Tis no use, ava, Misther Adams. If you was the boss himself 'twould be you as would put the comether on thim too quick. But it's 'like masther, like mon.' The b'ys all know that Misther Winton don't care a d.a.m.n; and they'll not be hurtin' thimselves wid the wurrk."

And the Rajah? Between his times of smoking high-priced cigars with Winton in the lounging-room of the Rosemary, he was swearing Jubilates in the privacy of his working-den state-room, having tri-daily weather reports wired to him by way of Carbonate and Argentine station, and busying himself in the intervals with sending and receiving sundry mysterious telegrams in cipher.

Thus Mr. Somerville Darrah, all going well for him until one fateful morning when he made the mistake of congratulating his ally. Then--but we picture the scene: Mr. Darrah late to his breakfast, being just in from an early-morning reconnaissance of the enemy's advancings; Virginia sitting opposite to pour his coffee. All the others vanished to some limbo of their own.

The Rajah rubbed his hands delightedly.

"We are coming on famously, famously, my deah Virginia. Two weeks gone, heavy snows predicted for the mountain region, and nothing, practically nothing at all, accomplished on the otheh side of the canyon. When you marry, my deah, you shall have a block of C. G. R.

preferred stock to keep you in pin-money."

"I?" she queried. "But, Uncle Somerville, I don't understand--"

The Rajah laughed.

"That was a very pretty blush, my deah. Bless your innocent soul, if I were young Misteh Winton, I'm not sure but I should consideh the game well lost."

She was gazing at him wide-eyed now, and the blush had left a pallor behind it.

"You mean that I--that I--"

"I mean that you are a helpeh worth having, Miss Carteret. Anotheh time Misteh Winton won't pay cou't to a cha'ming young girl and try to build a railroad at one and the same moment, I fancy. Hah!"

The startled eyes veiled themselves swiftly, and Virginia's voice sank to its softest cadence.

"Have I been an accomplice," she began, "in this--this despicable thing, Uncle Somerville?"

Mr. Darrah began a little to see his mistake.