The Daughter of a Magnate Part 25

"But his poor wife hung to his neck when he left----"

"No doubt. She has pulled all the hair out of his head twice that I know of----"

"And I gave him my purse with all the money I had in it."

"How much?"

"About three hundred dollars."

"Three hundred dollars! Foley will lay off two months and take the whole family back to Pittsburg. Now, here's your candle and chopped ice and Mr. Battershawl."

Gertrude turned for a last whisper--"What should you say if papa came down?"

"What should I say? He would probably say, 'Mr. Glover, I have your room.' 'Don't mention it,' I should reply, 'I have your daughter.'"

But Mr. Brock did not come down.

Barely half an hour later, while Glover waited with anxiety at the foot of the stairs, Gertrude reappeared, and with her loveliness all new, walked shyly and haltingly down each step toward him.

Not a soul about the hotel office had stirred, and Glover led her to the retired little parlor, which was warm and dim, to rea.s.sure himself that the fluttering girl was all his own. Unable to credit the fulness of their own happiness they sat confiding to each other all the sweet trifles, now made doubly sweet, of their strange acquaintance. Before six o'clock, and while their seclusion was still their own, a hot breakfast was served to them where they sat, and day broke on storm without and lovers within.

CHAPTER XIX

SUSPENSE

What shapes the legends of the Wickiup? Is it because in the winter night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgra.s.s the night he sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth as many seconds? Could the night that laid the horse and the hunter side by side in the Spider Park drift have been wildest of all wild mountain nights? Or is it because Gertrude Brock and her railroad lover rode out its storm together that mountain men say there was never a storm like that? What shapes the Wickiup legends?

For three days Medicine Bend did not see the sun. Veering uneasily, springing from every quarter at once, the wind wedged the gray clouds up the mountain sides only to roll them like avalanches down the ragged pa.s.ses. At the end of the week snow was falling.

Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to protect its winter traffic--for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had been overhauling and a.s.sembling the old and the new bucking equipment.

But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the pa.s.ses, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the cuts.

The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict Morgan, got after it with a crew together.

Between the C bridge and Potter's Gap they spent two days with a rotary and a f.l.a.n.g.er and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks.

In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend, waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast.

The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock's word to join him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her.

To the joy of the conspirators, Bucks held Glover closely at headquarters, keeping him closeted for long periods on the estimates that were in final cooking for the directors; and so dense are great people and so keen the simple, that Gertrude held her lone seat of honor beside her father, at the table of the great financiers in the dining-room, without the remotest suspicion on their parts that the superb woman meeting them three times a day was carrying on a proudly-hidden love affair with the muscular, absorbed-looking man who sat alone across the aisle.

But the asthmatic old pastry cook, who weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds and had not even seen the inside of the dining-room for three years, was thoroughly posted on every observable phase of the affair down to the dessert orders; and no one acquainted with the frank profanity of a mountain meat cook will doubt that the best of everything went hot from the range to Glover and Gertrude. Dollar tips and five-dollar tips from Eastern epicures could not change this, for the meals were served by waitresses who felt a personal responsibility in the issue of the pretty affair of the heart.

The whole second floor of the little hotel had been reserved for the directors' party, and among the rooms was the parlor. There Glover called regularly every evening on Mr. Brock, who, somewhat at a loss to understand the young man's interest, excused himself after the first few minutes and left Gertrude to entertain the gentleman who had been so kind to everybody that she could not be discourteous even if he was somewhat tedious.

One night after a particularly happy evening near the piano for Gertrude and Glover, Mr. Brock, re-entering the parlor, found the somewhat tedious gentleman bending very low, as his daughter said good-night, over her hand; in fact, the gentleman that had been so kind to everybody was kissing it.

When Glover recovered his perpendicular the cold magnate of the West End stood between the folding doors looking directly at him. If the owner of several trunk lines expected his look to inspire consternation he was disappointed. Each of the lovers feared but one person in the world; that was the other. Gertrude, with perhaps an extra touch of dignity, put her compromised hand to her belt for her handkerchief.

Glover finished the sentence he was in the middle of--"If I am not ordered out. Good-night."

But when Mr. Brock had turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared between the portieres they certainly did look at one another.

"Have I got you into trouble now?" murmured Glover, penitently.

Uneasiness was apparent in her expression, but with her back to the piano Gertrude stood steadfast.

"Not," she said, with serious tenderness, "just now. Don't you know?

It was the first, the very first, day you looked into my eyes, dear, that you got me into trouble."

Her pathetic sweetness moved him. Then he flamed with determination.

He would take the burden on himself--would face her father at once, but she hushed him in real alarm and said, that battle she must fight unaided; it was after all only a little one, she whispered, after the one she had fought with herself. But he knew she glossed over her anxiety, for when he withdrew her eyes looked tears though they shed none.

In the morning there were two vacancies at the breakfast table; neither Gertrude nor her father appeared. When Glover returned to the hotel at five o'clock the first person he saw was Mrs. Whitney. She and Marie, with the doctor and Allen Harrison, had arrived on the first train out of the Springs in four days, and Mrs. Whitney's greeting of Glover in the office was disconcerting. It scarcely needed Gertrude's face at dinner, as she tried to brave the storm that had set in, or her reluctant admission when she saw him as she pa.s.sed up to her room that she and her father had been up nearly the whole of the night before, to complete his depression.

Every effort he made during the evening to speak to Gertrude was balked by some untoward circ.u.mstance, but about nine o'clock they met on the parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie, the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.

They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram.

It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the Heart Mountains.

Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds.

Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the mountains.

Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think--and to think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.

Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could not make up his mind to leave without pa.s.sing her room.

His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an instant on his outstretched arm--it had never before been hard to go; then he turned and walked softly away.

At the breakfast table and at the dinner table the talk was of the snow. The evening paper contained a column of despatches concerning the blockade, now serious, in the eighth district. Half the first page was given to alarming reports from the cattle ranges. Two mail-carriers were reported lost in the Sweetgra.s.s country, and a ski runner from Fort Steadman, which had been cut off for eight days, told of thirty-five feet of snow in the Whitewater hills.

Sleepy Cat reported eighteen inches of fresh snow, and a second delayed despatch under the same date-line reported that a bucking special from Medicine Bend, composed of a rotary, a f.l.a.n.g.er, and five locomotives had pa.s.sed that point at 9 A.M. for the eighth district.

Gertrude found no interest in the news or the discussion. She could only wonder why she did not see Glover during the day, and when he made no appearance at dinner she grew sick with uncertainty. Leaving the dining-room ahead of the party in some vague hope of seeing him, Solomon hurried up with the note that Glover had left to be given her in the morning. The boy had gone off duty before she left her room and had over-slept, but instead of waiting for his apologies she hastened to her room and locked her door to devour her lover's words. She saw that he had written her in the dead of night to explain his going, and to say good-by. Bucks' message he had enclosed. "But I shall work very hard every hour I am gone to get back the sooner," he promised, "and if you hear of the snow flying over the peaks on the West End you will know that I am behind it and headed straight for you."

When Marie and Mrs. Whitney came up, Gertrude sat calmly before the grate fire, but the note lay hidden over her heart, for in it he had whispered that while he was away every night at eight o'clock and every morning, no matter where she should be, or what doing, he should kiss her lips and her eyes as he had kissed them that first morning in the dark, warm office. When eight o'clock came her aunt and her sister sat with her; but Gertrude at eight o'clock, musing, was with her lover and her lips and eyes again were his to do with what he would. Later Doctor Lanning came in and she roused to hear the news about the snow.

Between Sleepy Cat and Bear Dance two pa.s.senger trains were stalled, and on Blackbird hill the snow was reported four feet deep on the level.

When the doctor had gone and Marie had retired, Gertrude's aunt talked to her seriously about her father, whose almost frantic condition over what he called Gertrude's infatuation was alarming.

Her aunt explained how her final refusal of Allen Harrison, a connection on which her father had set his heart, might result in the total disruption of the plans which held so mighty interests together; and how impossible it was that he should ever consent to her throwing herself away on an obscure Western man.

Only occasionally would Gertrude interrupt. "Don't strip the poor man of everything, auntie. If it must come to family--the De Gallons and Cirodes and Glovers were lords of the Mississippi when our Hessian forefathers were hiding from Washington in the Trenton hazelbushes."

She could meet her aunt's fears with jests and her tears with smiles until the worried lady chancing on a deeper chord disarmed her. "You know you are my pet, Gertrude. I am your foster-mother, dear, and I have tried to be mother to you and Marie, and sister to my brother every day of my life since your mother died. And if you----"

Then Gertrude's arms would enfold her and her head hide on her aunt's shoulder, and they would part utterly miserable.