"Ah--an accomplice? Oh, no, my deah Virginia, not quite that. The word smacks too much of the po-lice cou'ts. Let us say that Misteh Winton has found your company mo' attractive than that of his laborehs, and commend his good taste in the matteh."

So much he said by way of damping down the fire he had so rashly lighted. Then Jastrow came in with one of the interminable cipher telegrams and Virginia was left alone.

For a time she sat at the deserted breakfast-table, dry-eyed, hot-hearted, thinking such thoughts as would come crowding thickly upon the heels of such a revelation. Winton would fail: a man with honor, good repute, his entire career at stake, as he himself had admitted, would go down to miserable oblivion and defeat, lacking some friendly hand to smite him alive to a sense of his danger. And, in her uncle's estimation, at least, she, Virginia Carteret, would figure as the Delilah triumphant.

She rose, tingling to her finger-tips with the shame of it, went to her state-room, and found her writing materials. In such a crisis her methods could be as direct as a man's. Winton was coming again that evening. He must be stopped and sent about his business.

So she wrote him a note, telling him he must not come--a note man-like in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come.

And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon to undertake its delivery.

When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss Carteret's mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new line.

Truth to tell, Virginia's messenger was not unwilling to spend a little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss Bessie, ennuye on the one hand and despondent on the other.

Why could not the Cousin Bessies see, without being told in so many words, that the heart of a man may have been given in times long past to another woman?--to a Cousin Virginia, let us say. And why must the Cousin Virginias, pa.s.sing by the lifelong devotion of a kinsman lover, throw themselves--if one must put it thus brutally--fairly at the head of an acquaintance of a day?

So questioning the immensities, the Reverend Billy came out after some little time in a small upland valley where the two lines, old and new, ran parallel at the same level, with low embankments less than a hundred yards apart.

Midway of the valley the hundred-yard inters.p.a.ce was bridged by a hastily-constructed spur track starting from a switch on the Colorado and Grand River main line, and crossing the Utah right of way at a broad angle. On this spur, at its point of intersection with the new line, stood a heavy locomotive, steam up, and manned in every inch of its standing-room by armed guards.

The situation explained itself, even to a Reverend Billy. The Rajah had not been idle during the interval of dinner-givings and social divagations. He had acquired the right of way across the Utah's line for his blockading spur; had taken advantage of Winton's inalertness to construct the track; and was now prepared to hold the crossing with a live engine and such a show of force as might be needful.

Calvert turned back from the entrance of the valley, and was minded, in a spirit of fairness, to pa.s.s the word concerning the new obstruction on to the man who was most vitally concerned. But alas!

even a Reverend Billy may not always arise superior to his hamperings as a man and a lover. Here was defeat possible--nay, say rather defeat probable--for a rival, with the probability increasing with each hour of delay. Calvert fought it out by length and by breadth a dozen times before he came in sight of the track force toiling at the shale-slide.

Should he tell Winton, and so, indirectly, help to frustrate Mr.

Darrah's well-laid plan? Or should he hold his peace and thus, indirectly again, help to defeat the Utah company?

He put it that way in decent self-respect. Also he a.s.sured himself that the personal equation as between two lovers of one and the same woman was entirely eliminated. But who can tell which motive it was that prompted him to turn aside before he came to the army of toilers at the slide: to turn and cross the stream and make as wide a detour as the nature of the ground would permit, pa.s.sing well beyond call from the other side of the canyon?

The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally toward the station and the private car.

"I can't do it: I can't turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat.

And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have no right to go: it is not for me to pa.s.s upon the justice of this petty war between rival corporations."

Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious ointment?

The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the evening.

But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again, of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about Calvert had betrayed the Rajah's secret--which was also the secret of the cipher telegrams.

Miss Carteret said little--said nothing, indeed, that an anxious kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform, whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.

But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage---or fewer scruples. When Miss Carteret let herself out of the rear door, Jastrow disappeared in the opposite direction, pa.s.sing through the forward vestibule and dropping cat-like from the step to inch his way silently over the treacherous snow-crust to a convenient spying place at the other end of the car.

Unfortunately for the spying purpose, the shades were drawn behind the two great windows and the gla.s.s door, but the starlight sufficed to show the watcher a shadowy Miss Virginia standing motionless on the side which gave her an outlook down the canyon, leaning out, it might be, to antic.i.p.ate the upcoming of some one from the construction camp below.

The secretary, shivering in the knife-like wind slipping down from the bald peaks, had not long to wait. By the time his eyes were fitted to the darkness he heard a man coming up the track, the snow crunching frostily under his steady stride. Jastrow ducked under the platform and gained a viewpoint on the other side of the car. The crunching footfalls had ceased, and a man was swinging himself up to the forward step of the Rosemary. At the instant a voice just above the spy's head called softly, "Mr. Winton!" and the new-comer dropped back into the snow and came tramping to the rear.

It was an awkward moment for Jastrow; but he made shift to dodge again, and so to be out of the way when the engineer drew himself up and climbed the hand-rail to stand beside his summoner.

The secretary saw him take her hand and heard her exclamation, half indignant, wholly reproachful:

"You had my note: I told you not to come!"

"So you did, and yet you were expecting me," he a.s.serted. He was still holding her hand, and she could not--or did not--withdraw it.

"Was I, indeed!" There was a touch of the old-time raillery in the words, but it was gone when she added: "Oh, why will you keep on coming and coming when you know so well what it means to you and your work?"

"I think you know the answer to that better than anyone," he rejoined, his voice matching hers for earnestness. "It is because I love you; because I could not stay away if I should try. Forgive me, dear; I did not mean to speak so soon. But you said in your note that you would be leaving Argentine immediately--that I should not see you again: so I had to come. Won't you give me a word, Virginia?--a waiting word, if it must be that?"

Jastrow held his breath, hope dying within him and sullen ferocity crouching for the spring if her answer should urge it on. But when she spoke the secretary's anger cooled and he breathed again.

"No: a thousand times, no!" she burst out pa.s.sionately; and Winton staggered as if the suddenly-freed hand had dealt him a blow.

X. SPIKED SWITCHES

For a little time after Virginia's pa.s.sionate rejection of him Winton stood abashed and confounded. Weighed in the balance of the after-thought, his sudden and unpremeditated declaration could plead little excuse in encouragement. And yet she had been exceedingly kind to him.

"I have no right to expect a better answer," he said finally, when he could trust himself to speak. "But I am like other men: I should like to know why."

"You can ask that?" she retorted. "You say you have no right: what have you done to expect a better answer?"

He shrugged. "Nothing, I suppose. But you knew that before."

"I only know what you have shown me during the past three weeks, and it has proved that you are what Mr. Adams said you were--though he was only jesting."

"And that is?"

"A _faineant_, a dilettante; a man with all the G.o.d-given ability to do as he will and to succeed, and yet who will not take the trouble to persevere."

Winton smiled, a grim little smile.

"You are not quite like any other woman I have ever known--not like any other in the world, I believe. Your sisters, most of them, would take it as the sincerest homage that a man should neglect his work for his love. Do you care so much for success, then?"

"For the thing itself--nothing, less than nothing. But--but one may care a little for the man who wins or loses."

He tried to take her hand again, tried and failed.

"Virginia!--is that my word of hope?"

"No. Will you never see the commonplace effrontery of it, Mr. Winton?

Day after day you have come here, idling away the precious hours that meant everything to you, and now you come once again to offer me a share in what you have lost. Is that your idea of chivalry, of true manhood?"

Again the grim smile came and went.