Empire Builders Part 21

"Yes; quite so," Ford acquiesced, in the unresponsive tone of one who says what he must, rather than what he would like to say. "It is all the things you have been saying, and more--when one has the time and the mind to be enthusiastic about it."

Miss Adair stood up very straight, and her chin was a protest in Praxitelean harmonies. She knew very well how reluctantly her companion was doing the honors of the mountain vastnesses; how full of wrath he was because President Colbrith had seen fit to precipitate the Nadia and a private-car party into the midst of the strenuous building battle on the western extension. But she argued that this was no reason why he should be crustily impossible with her. Wherefore she said, merely to see him boil over:

"I should think you would come up here often for this glorious view, Mr.

Ford. You do, don't you?"

"Come up here for the view? Oh, yes; I presume I have climbed up here a hundred times, first and last, and always for the sake of the view. I began it the first winter I spent in Saint's Rest, when the snow-shoeing was at its best. Really to appreciate the scenery, you should take three hours for the approach from the basin down yonder, dragging a pair of Canadian raquettes by the toe-straps."

The young woman laughed inwardly at the broadsword slash of his sarcasm.

It was so like the man; big and vigorous and energetic, and quite without regard for consequences or for the insignificance of the thing to be obliterated. But she would not spare him.

"How enthusiastic you are!" she commented. "I don't believe I should be equal to 'a hundred times, first and last,' or to the snow-shoes. But I can admire such zeal in other people immensely."

"Do you really think so small of a man's work in the world, Miss Adair?"

he demanded, not very coherently. "I'm not saying that the scenery doesn't move me. It does; and the first time I stood here on this summit, I presume I felt just as you do now. But my comings and goings have been chiefly concerned with this"--kicking the rail of the new track which threaded the shallow valley of the pa.s.s. "I am trying to build a railroad; to build it quickly, and as well as I can. When I get it finished, I may have time to admire the scenery."

It was a little appeal for sympathy, apparent enough in spite of its indirectness; but Miss Adair was still mindful of Ford's too evident willingness to leave her behind at the deserted grading-camp half-way down to Saint's Rest where the Nadia was temporarily side-tracked.

"Another ideal gone," she lamented, in mock despair. "All those trampings and toilings up this magnificent mountain merely to prepare for the laying of some logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together!"

He smiled at her definition of his railroad, and the keen edge of his annoyance was a little blunted. He had been telling himself that she might be twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five; but evidently she was only a child, with a child's appreciation of a very considerable industrial triumph. Old engineers, one of them an a.s.sistant on his own staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a standard gauge railroad over Plug Pa.s.s was a sheer impossibility. Yet he had done it.

"I suspect I owe you an apology," he said, yielding a little to the love which was fighting with discouragement and righteous anger for the first place in his heart. "I'm afraid I have been taking you too seriously, all along."

Her laugh was a delicious little ripple of exultation. She had succeeded in avenging herself.

"I can forgive you now," she said, and the blue eyes were dancing. "But you must admit that you were the aggressor. I have _never_ been made so pointedly unwelcome in all my life. I believe you were going to refuse to let me walk up here with you if Uncle Sidney had not commanded you to."

This time his smile was a grin, but it was not ill-natured.

"I should, indeed," he confessed quite frankly. "To be brutally candid, I had a decided attack of the 'unwelcomes' when I received Mr.

Colbrith's wire announcing his intention of bringing his picnic party out here into the midst of things. We have little time, and none of the civilized conveniences, for entertaining company."

"I think we all understand that," she made haste to say. "Aunt Hetty tried to dissuade Uncle Sidney, but he was bent on showing us how modern railroad building is rushed at the 'front'--is that the right word?--and so here we are."

A small frown gathered between Ford's eyes. He was far enough from suspecting that this was the outworking of Kenneth's "notion"; that Mr.

Colbrith's annual inspection tour over the Pacific Southwestern had been extended to cover the new line at Kenneth's suggestion--a suggestion arising out of purely reformatory motives. Nor would it have helped matters much if he had known Kenneth's genuine distress when it transpired that the suggestion bade fair to result in precipitating a private car-load of pleasurers into the pandemonium of the grading-camps.

But the pleasurers were as yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium, and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong enough to turn back the threatened invasion. There were reasons enough why a party with women among its members should not be projected into the grading and track-laying field. It was no place for women, Ford was telling himself wrathfully; especially for the women of the president's own household.

In the little interval of silence Miss Adair was focusing her field-gla.s.s and trying to trace the line of the descending grade into the headwater valley of the Pannikin. Ford did not mean to be ungracious to her--what lover ever means to be curt to the one woman in all the world? But it is not easy to be angry in nine parts and loving-kind in the tenth--anger being one of the inclusive emotions. Nevertheless, he made the effort, for her sake. However inconsiderate Mr. Colbrith was, she was blameless.

"Let me show you," he said, taking the field-gla.s.s and adjusting it for her. "Now hold it steadily and pick up the line in the great loop....

Have you found it?... Now follow it slowly until you come to the point where it turns into the valley, and you can trace it for miles by the cuts and fills."

She followed his directions until the line of the extension became a vanishing thread in the distance, and then was content to let the gla.s.s sweep the vastnesses beyond. When she spoke it was of the topographic immensities.

"I heard you telling brother at the dinner-table in Chicago that you were able to see more in this wilderness than you have ever been able to make any one else see. Can I see it with the gla.s.s?"

"Hardly," he smiled. "I was trying to tell your brother of the magnificent possibilities of the country lying between this and that farthest mountain range; the country we are going to open up. It was a gospel I had been trying to preach to the directors, but none of them believed--not even your uncle."

"I see nothing but vastness and cold gray grandeurs," she said, adding: "and the very bigness of it makes me feel like a mere atom, or a molecule--whichever is the smaller."

"Yet it is a new empire in the rough," he rejoined, with a touch of the old enthusiasm, "waiting only for the coming of this"--putting his foot again upon the steel of the new railroad line. "What you are looking at has been called a part of the Great American Desert--the most forbidding part, in the stories of the early explorers. Notwithstanding, there will come a time when you can focus your gla.s.s here on this mountain and look out over what the promoters will then be advertising as a 'peopled paradise,' and these 'logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together' will bring it to pa.s.s."

There was a flash of the enthusiast's fire in the cool gray eyes to go with the words, and Miss Adair wondered at it. He had stood for her as an embodiment of things practical and prosaic; as one too keenly watchful and alert on the purely industrial side to be in any sense a dreamer of dreams. Some part of her thought slipped into speech.

"No, I am not an enthusiast," he denied, in reply to her charge. "At bottom, I'm only an engineer, with an ambition to build railroads. But I should have learned no more than half of my trade if I couldn't tell where it would be profitable to build them."

"Never mind: you seem to have convinced Uncle Sidney and the directors finally," she commented.

"No; your uncle and the directors are not empire builders--meaning to be," he objected. "They are after the present visible dollar in a western outlet for the Pacific Southwestern. If we reach Green b.u.t.te before our compet.i.tors can broaden their narrow gauge to that point, we shall have a practicable line from Chicago to the Pacific coast."

"I understand," she said. "But yours is the higher ideal--the true American ideal."

"It's business," he a.s.serted.

"Well, isn't business the very heart and soul of the American ideal?"

she laughed.

This time he laughed with her, forgetting his troubles for the moment.

"I guess it is, in the last a.n.a.lysis," he said. And then: "I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long, if you are anxious to get back to the Nadia.

But I warned you beforehand. I must keep my appointment with Frisbie. Do you see anything of him?" This because she was again sweeping the western wilderness with the field-gla.s.s.

"What am I to look for?"

"The smoke of an engine."

She focused the gla.s.s on the gorge at the foot of the pa.s.s. "I see it!"

she cried. "A little black beetle of a thing just barely crawling. Now it is turning into the first curve of the great loop."

"Then we shan't have very much longer to wait. Do you find the ten-thousand-foot breeze chilly? Turn up the collar of your coat and we'll walk a bit."

It was his first appreciable concern for her comfort, and she gave him full credit. Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia's equipment, but no woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pa.s.s, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car on the night of purse-s.n.a.t.c.hings.

XVI

THE TRUTHFUL ALt.i.tUDES

A low, tremulous shudder was beginning to lift itself, like the distant growling of thunder, upon the tinnient air of the high summit. A moment later a heavy construction engine shot around the final curve in the westward climb, with Michael Gallagher hanging out of the cab window on the engineer's side.

The two at the summit faced about to watch the approach. The big engine came lumbering and lurching dangerously over the unsurfaced track in a fierce spurt for the mountain-top, its stack vomiting fire, its cylinder-c.o.c.ks hissing shrilly, and its exhaust ripping the spheral silences like the barking detonations of a machine-gun.