A Fool for Love Part 8

"Oh, how comfortable!" she exclaimed, when he had shown her all the s.p.a.ce-saving contrivances of the field office. "And this is where you and Mr. Winton work?"

"It is where we eat and sleep," corrected Adams. "And speaking of eating: it is hopelessly the wrong end of the day,--or it would be in Boston,--but our Chinaman won't know the difference. Let me have him make you a dish of tea,"--and the order was given before she could protest.

"While we are waiting for Ah Foo I'll show you some of Jack's sketches," he went on, finding a portfolio and opening it upon the drawing-board.

"Are you quite sure Mr. Winton won't mind?" she asked.

"Mind? He'd give a month's pay to be here to show them himself. He is peac.o.c.k vain of his one small accomplishment, Winton is--bores me to death with it sometimes."

"Really?" was the mocking rejoinder, and they began to look at the sketches.

They were heads, most of them, impressionistic studies in pencil or pastel, with now and then a pen-and-ink bearing evidence of more painstaking after-work. They were made on bits of map paper, the backs of old letters, and not a few on leaves torn from an engineer's note-book.

"They don't count for much in an artistic way," said Adams, with the brutal frankness of a friendly critic, "but they will serve to show you that I wasn't all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you about Winton's proclivities the other day."

"I shouldn't apologize for that, if I were you," she retorted. "It is well past apology, don't you think?" And then: "What is this one?"

They had come to the last of the sketches, which was a rude map. It was penciled on the leaf of a memorandum, and Adams recognized it as the outline Winton had made and used in explaining the right-of-way entanglement.

"It is a map," he said; "one that Jack drew day before yesterday when he was trying to make me understand the situation up here. I wonder why he kept it? Is there anything on the other side?"

She turned the leaf, and they both went speechless for the moment. The reverse of the sc.r.a.p of cross-ruled paper held a very fair likeness of a face which Virginia's mirror had oftenest portrayed: a sketch setting forth in a few vigorous strokes of the pencil the impressionist's ideal of the "G.o.ddess fresh from the bath."

"By Jove!" exclaimed Adams, when he could find the word for his surprise. Then he tried to turn it off lightly. "There is a good bit more of the artist in Jack than I have been giving him credit for.

Don't you know, he must have got the notion for that between two half-seconds--when you recognized me on the platform at Kansas City.

It's wonderful!"

"So very wonderful that I think I shall keep it," she rejoined, not without a touch of austerity. Then she added: "Mr. Winton will probably never miss it. If he does, you will have to explain the best way you can." And Adams could only say "By Jove!" again, and busy himself with pouring the tea which Ah Foo had brought in.

In the nature of things the tea-drinking in the stuffy "d.i.n.key"

drawing-room was not prolonged. Time was flying. Virginia's errand of mercy was not yet accomplished, and Aunt Martha in her character of anxious chaperon was not to be forgotten. Also, Miss Carteret had a feeling that under his well-bred exterior Mr. Morton P. Adams was chafing like any barbarian industry captain at this unwarrantable intrusion and interruption.

So presently they all forthfared into the sun-bright, snow-blinding, out-of-door world, and Virginia gathered up her courage and took her dilemma by the horns.

"I believe I have seen everything now except that tent-place up there," she a.s.serted, groping purposefully for her opening.

Adams called up another smile of acquiescence. "That is our telegraph office. Would you care to see it?" He was of those who shirk all or shirk nothing.

"I don't know why I should care to, but I do," she replied, with charming and childlike wilfulness; so the three of them trudged up the slippery path to the operator's den on the slope.

Not to evade his hospitable duty in any part, Adams explained the use and need of a "front" wire, and Miss Carteret was properly interested.

"How convenient!" she commented. "And you can come up here and talk to anybody you like--just as if it were a telephone?"

"To anyone in the company's service," amended Adams. "It is not a commercial wire."

"Then let us send a message to Mr. Winton," she suggested, playing the part of the capricious _ingenue_ to the very upcast of a pair of mischievous eyes. "I'll write it and you may sign it."

Adams stretched his complaisance the necessary additional inch and gave her a pencil and a pad of blanks. She wrote rapidly:

"Miss Carteret has been here admiring your drawings. She took one of them away with her, and I couldn't stop her without being rude. You shouldn't have done it without asking her permission. She says--"

"Oh, dear! I am making it awfully long. Does it cost so much a word?"

"No," said Adams, not without an effort. He was beginning to be distinctly disappointed in Miss Virginia, and was inwardly wondering what piece of girlish frivolity he was expected to sign and send to his chief. Meanwhile she went on writing:

"--I am to tell you not to get into any fresh trouble--not to let anyone else get you into trouble; by which I infer she means that some attempt will be made to keep you from returning on the evening train."

"There, can you send all that?" she asked sweetly, giving the pad to her host.

Adams read the first part of the letter length telegram with inward groanings, but the generous purpose of it struck him like a whip-blow when he came to the thinly-veiled warning. Also it shamed him for his unworthy judgment of Virginia.

"I thank you very heartily, Miss Carteret," he said humbly. "It shall be sent word for word." Then, for the Reverend William's benefit: "Winton deserves all sorts of a snubbing for taking liberties with your portrait. I'll see he gets more when he comes back."

Here the matter rested; and, having done what she conceived to be her charitable duty, Virginia was as anxious to get away as heart--the heart of a slightly bored Reverend Billy, for instance--could wish.

So they bade Adams good-by and picked their way down the frozen embankment and across the ice-bridge; down and across and back to the Rosemary, where they found a perturbed chaperon in a flutter of solicitude arising upon their mysterious disappearance and long absence.

"It may be just as well not to tell any of them where we have been,"

said Virginia in an aside to her cousin. And so the incident of tea-drinking in the enemy's camp was safely put away like a little personal note in its envelop with the flap gummed down.

VI. THE RAJAH GIVES AN ORDER

While Adams was dispensing commissary tea in iron-stone china cups to his two guests in the "d.i.n.key" field office, his chief, taking the Rosemary's night run in reverse in the company of Town-Marshal Biggin, was turning the Rajah's coup into a small Utah profit.

Having come upon the ground late the night before, and from the opposite direction, he had seen nothing of the extension grade west of Argentine. Hence the enforced journey to Carbonate only antic.i.p.ated an inspection trip which he had intended to make as soon as he had seated Adams firmly in the track-laying saddle.

Not to miss his opportunity, at the first curve beyond Argentine he pa.s.sed his cigar-case to Biggin and asked permission to ride on the rear platform of the day-coach for inspection purposes.

"Say, pardner, what do you take me fer, anyhow?" was the reproachful rejoinder.

"For a gentleman in disguise," said Winton promptly.

"Sim'larly, I do you; savvy? You tell me you ain't goin' to stampede, and you ride anywhere you blame please. See? This here C. G. R. outfit ain't got no surcingle on me."

Winton smiled.

"I haven't any notion of stampeding. As it happens, I'm only a day ahead of time. I should have made this run to-morrow of my own accord to have a look at the extension grade. You will find me on the rear platform when you want me."

"Good enough," was the reply; and Winton went to his post of observation.

Greatly to his satisfaction, he found that the trip over the C. G. R.

answered every purpose of a preliminary inspection of the Utah grade beyond Argentine. For seventeen of the twenty miles the two lines were scarcely more than a stone's throw apart, and when Biggin joined him at the junction above Carbonate he had his note-book well filled with the necessary data.

"Make it, all right?" inquired the friendly bailiff.