The Daughter of a Magnate Part 18

"I meant what I said in every sense, either to take the pain or--the other. I couldn't make fun of you. Do you never make fun of me, Miss Brock?"

"No, Mr. Glover, I do not. If you would be sensible we should do very well. You have been so kind, and we are to leave the mountains so soon, we ought to be good friends."

"Will you tell me one thing, Miss Brock--are you engaged?"

"I don't think you should ask, Mr. Glover. But I am not engaged--unless that in a sense I am," she added, doubtfully.

"What sense, please?"

"That I have given no answer. Are you still complaining of the cold, Aunt Jane?" she cried, in desperation, turning toward Mrs. Whitney. "I find it quite warm over here. Mr. Glover and I are still watching the freight train. Come over, do."

Going back, Glover rode near to Gertrude, who had grown restless and imperious. To hunt this queer mountain-lion was recreation, but to have the mountain-lion hunt her was disquieting.

She complained again of her wounded hand, but refused all suggestions, and gave him no credit for riding between her and the th.o.r.n.y trees through the canon. It was midnight when the party reached the hotel, and when Gertrude stepped across the parlor to the water-pitcher, Glover followed. "I must thank you for your thoughtfulness of my little sister to-night," she was saying.

He was so intent that he forgot to reply.

"May I ask one question?" he said.

"That depends."

"When you make answer may I know what it is?"

"Indeed you may not."

CHAPTER XV

NOVEMBER

They walked back to the parlors. Doctor Lanning and Marie were picking up the rackets at the ping-pong table. Mrs. Whitney had gone into the office for the evening mail.

Pa.s.sing the piano, Gertrude sat down and swung around toward the keys.

Glover took music from the table. Unwilling to admit a trace of the unusual in the beating of her heart, or in her deeper breathing, she could not entirely control either; there was something too fascinating in defying the light that she now knew glowed in the dull eyes at her side. She avoided looking; enough that the fire was there without directly exposing her own eyes to it. She drummed with one hand, then with both, at a gavotte on the rack before her.

Overcome merely at watching her fingers stretch upon the keys he leaned against the piano.

"Why did you ask me to come up?"

As he muttered the words she picked again and again with her right hand at a loving little phrase in the gavotte. When it went precisely right she spoke in the same tone, still caressing the phrase, never looking up. "Are you sorry you came?"

"No; I'd rather be trod under foot than not be near you."

"May we not be friends without either of us being martyred? I shall be afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in--a.s.suming it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this evening?"

"No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know it. Let me ask one last favor----"

The gavotte rippled under her fingers. "No."

He turned away. She swung on the stool toward him and looked very kindly and frankly up. "You have been too courteous to all of us for that. Ask as many favors as you like, Mr. Glover," she murmured, "but not, if you please, a last one."

"It shall be the last, Miss Brock. I only----"

"You only what?"

"Will you let me know what day you are going, so I may say good-by?"

"Certainly I will. You will be at Medicine Bend in any case, won't you?"

"No. I have fifteen hundred miles to cover next week."

"What for--oh, it isn't any of my business, is it?"

"Looking over the snowsheds. Will you telegraph me?"

"Where?"

"At the Wickiup; it will reach me."

"You might have to come too far. We shall start in a few days."

"Will you telegraph me?"

"If you wish me to."

Eight days later, when suspense had grown sullen and Glover had parted with all hope of hearing from her, he heard. In the depths of the Heart River range her message reached him.

Every day Giddings, hundreds of miles away at the Wickiup, had had his route-list. Giddings, who would have died for the engineer, waited, every point in the repeating covered, day after day for a Glen Tarn message that Glover expected. For four days Glover had hung like a dog around the nearer stretches of the division. But the season was advanced, he dared not delegate the last vital inspection of the year, and bitterly he retreated from shed to shed until he was buried in the barren wastes of the eighth district.

The day in the Heart River mountains is the thin, gray day of the alkali and the sage. On Friday afternoon Glover's car lay sidetracked at the east end of the Nine Mile shed waiting for a limited train to pa.s.s. The train was late and the sun was dropping into an ashen strip of wind clouds that hung cold as shrouds to the north and west when the gray-powdered engine whistled for the siding.

Motionless beside the switch Glover saw down the gloom of the shed the shoes wringing fire from the Pullman wheels, and wondered why they were stopping. The conductor from the open vestibule waved to him as the train slowed and ran forward with the message.

"Giddings wired me to wait for your answer, Mr. Glover," said the conductor.

Glover was reading the telegram:

"I may start Sat.u.r.day.

"G. B."

There was one chance to make it; that was to take the limited train then and there. Bidding the conductor wait he hastened to his car, called for his gripsack, gave his a.s.sistant a volley of orders, and boarded a Pullman. Not the preferred stock of the whole system would have availed at that moment to induce an inspection of Nine Mile shed.