The Daughter of a Magnate Part 20

"No, that would be infinitely worse."

"It would be comparatively easy--an engine to pull your car up on a special order?"

"I will not go back to the Springs to-night, and I will go to Medicine Bend," she exclaimed, apprehensively. "May I not have a special there as well as to the Springs?"

Until that moment he had never seen anything of her father in her; but her father spoke in every feature; she was a Brock.

Glover looked grave. "You may have, I am sure, every facility the division offers. I make only the point," he said, gently, "that it would be hazardous to attempt to get to the Bend to-night. I have just come from the telegraph office. In the district I left this morning the wires are all down to-night. That is where the storm is coming from. There is a lull here just now, but----"

"I thank you, Mr. Glover, believe me, very sincerely for your solicitude. I have no choice but to go, and if I must, the sooner the better, surely. Is it possible for you to make arrangements for me?"

"It is possible, yes," he answered, guardedly.

"But you hesitate."

"It is a terrible night."

"I like snow, Mr. Glover."

"The danger to-night is the wind."

"Are you afraid of the wind?" There was a touch of ridicule in her half-laughing tone.

"Yes," he answered, "I am afraid of the wind."

"You are jesting."

She saw that he flushed just at the eyes; but he spoke still gently.

"You feel that you must go?"

"I must."

"Then I will get orders at once."

CHAPTER XVI

NIGHT

Glover looked at his watch; it was Giddings' trick at Medicine Bend, and he made little doubt of getting what he asked for. He walked to the eating-house and from there directly across to the roundhouse, and started a hurry call for the night foreman. He found him at a desk talking with Paddy McGraw, the engineer that was to have taken out Number Six.

"Paddy," said Glover, "do you want to take me to Medicine to-night?"

"They've just cancelled Number Six."

"I know it."

"You don't have to go to-night, do you?"

"Yes, with Mr. Brock's car. This isn't as bad as the night you and I and Jack Moore bucked snow at Point of Rocks," said Glover, significantly. "Do you remember carrying me from the number seven culvert clean back to the station after the steampipe broke?"

"You bet I do, and I never thought you'd see again after the way your eyes were cooked that night. Well, of course, if you want to go to-night, it's go, Mr. Glover. You know what you're about, but I'd never look to see you going out for fun a night like this."

"I can't help it. Yet I wouldn't want any man to go out with me to-night unwillingly, Paddy."

"Why, that's nothing. You got me my first run on this division. I'd pull you to h.e.l.l if you said so."

Glover turned to the night foreman. "What's the best engine in the house?"

"There's the 1018 with steam and a plough."

Glover started. "The 1018?"

"She was to pull Six." The mountain man picked up the telephone, and getting the operators, sent a rush message to Giddings. Leaving final instructions with the two men he returned to the telegraph office.

When Giddings's protest about ordering a train out on such a night came, Glover, who expected it, choked it back--a.s.suming all responsibility--gave no explanations and waited. When the orders came he inspected them himself and returned to the car. Gertrude, in the car alone, was drinking coffee from a hotel tray on the card table.

"It was very kind of you to send this in," she said, rising cordially.

"I had forgotten all about dinner. Have you succeeded?"

"Yes. Could you eat what they sent?"

"Pray look. I have left absolutely nothing and I am very grateful. Do I not seem so?" she added, searchingly. "I want to because I am."

He smiled at her earnestness. Two little chairs were drawn up at the table, and facing each other they sat down while Gertrude finished her coffee and made Glover take a sandwich.

When the train conductor came in ten minutes later Glover talked with him. While the men spoke Gertrude noticed how Glover overran the dainty chair she had provided. She scrutinized his rough-weather garb, the heavy hunting boots, the stout reefer b.u.t.toned high, and the leather cap crushed now with his gloves in his hand. She had been asking him where he got the cap, and a moment before, while her attention wandered, he had told her the story of a company of Russian n.o.blemen and engineers from Vladivostok, who, during the summer, had been his guests, nominally on a bear hunt, though they knew better than to hunt bears in summer. It was really to pick up points on American railroad construction. He might go, he thought, the following spring to Siberia himself, perhaps to stay--this man that feared the wind--he had had a good offer. The cap was a present.

The two men went out and she was left alone. A flagman, hat in hand, pa.s.sed through the car. The shock of the engine coupler striking the buffer hardly disturbed her reverie; for her the night meant too much.

Glover was with the operators giving final instructions to Giddings for ploughs to meet them without fail at Point of Rocks. Hastening from the office he looked again at the barometer. It promised badly and the thermometer stood at ten degrees above zero.

He had made his way through the falling snow to where they were coupling the engine to the car, watched narrowly, and going forward spoke to the engineer. When he re-entered the car it was moving slowly out of the yard.

Gertrude, with a smile, put aside her book. "I am so glad," she said, looking at her watch. "I hope we shall get there by eleven o'clock; we should, should we not, Mr. Glover?"

"It's a poor night for making a schedule," was all he said. The arcs of the long yard threw white and swiftly pa.s.sing beams of light through the windows, and the warmth within belied the menace outside.

At the rear end of the car the flagman worked with one of the tail-lights that burned badly, and the conductor watched him. Gertrude laid aside her furs and threw open her jacket. Her hat she kept on, and sitting in a deep chair told Glover of her father's arrival from the East on Wednesday and explained how she had set her heart on surprising him that evening at Medicine Bend. "Where are we now?" she asked, as the rumble of the whirling trucks deepened.

"Entering Sleepy Cat Canon, the Rat River----"

"Oh, I remember this. I ride on the platform almost every time I come through here so I may see where you split the mountain. And every time I see it I ask myself the same question. How came he ever to think of that?"

It needed even hardly so much of an effort to lull her companion's uneasiness. He was a man with no concern at best for danger, except as to the business view of it, and when personally concerned in the hazard his scruples were never deep. Not before had he seen or known Gertrude Brock, for from that moment she gave herself to bewilderment and charm.

The great engine pulling them made so little of its load that they could afford to forget the night; indeed, Gertrude gave him no moments to reflect. From the quick play of their talk at the table she led him to the piano. When, sitting down, she drew off her gloves. She drew them off lazily. When he reminded her that she still had on her jacket she did not look up, but leaning forward she studied the page of a song on the rack, running the air with her right hand, while she slowly extended her left arm toward him and let him draw the tight sleeve over her wrist and from her shoulder. Then his attempt to relieve her of the second sleeve she wholly ignored, slipping it lightly off and pursuing the song with her left hand while she let the jacket fall in a heap on the floor. By the time Glover had picked it up and she had frowned at him she might safely have asked him, had the fancy struck her, to head the engine for the peak of Sleepy Cat Mountain.