"Where? In Cuba?"

"Oh, no; I am not going to Cuba. I am going to live the simple life; building dams and digging ditches in Arcadia."

He was well used to her swiftly changing moods. What Miss Elsa's critics, who were chiefly of her own s.e.x, spoke of disapprovingly as her flightiness, was to Ballard one of her characterizing charms. Yet he was quite unprepared for her grave and frankly reproachful question:

"Why aren't you going to Cuba? Didn't Mr. La.s.sley telegraph you not to go to Arcadia?"

"He did, indeed. But what do you know about it?--if I may venture to ask?"

For the first time in their two years' acquaintance he saw her visibly embarra.s.sed. And her explanation scarcely explained.

"I--I was with the La.s.sleys in New York, you know; I went to the steamer to see them off. Mr. La.s.sley showed me his telegram to you after he had written it."

They had come to the little coffees, and the other members of Miss Craigmiles's party had risen and gone rearward to the sleeping-car.

Ballard, more mystified than he had been at the Boston moment when La.s.sley's wire had found him, was still too considerate to make his companion a reluctant source of further information. Moreover, Mr.

Lester Wingfield was weighing upon him more insistently than the mysteries. In times past Miss Craigmiles had made him the target for certain little arrows of confidence: he gave her an opportunity to do it again.

"Tell me about Mr. Wingfield," he suggested. "Is he truly Jack Forsyth's successor?"

"How can you question it?" she retorted gayly. "Some time--not here or now--I will tell you all about it."

"'Some time,'" he repeated. "Is it always going to be 'some time'? You have been calling me your friend for a good while, but there has always been a closed door beyond which you have never let me penetrate. And it is not my fault, as you intimated a few minutes ago. Why is it? Is it because I'm only one of many? Or is it your att.i.tude toward all men?"

She was knotting her veil and her eyes were downcast when she answered him.

"A closed door? There is, indeed, my dear friend: two hands, one dead and one still living, closed it for us. It may be opened some time"--the phrase persisted, and she could not get away from it--"and then you will be sorry. Let us go back to the sleeping-car. I want you to meet the others." Then with a quick return to mockery: "Only I suppose you will not care to meet Mr. Wingfield?"

He tried to match her mood; he was always trying to keep up with her kaleidoscopic changes of front.

"Try me, and see," he laughed. "I guess I can stand it, if he can."

And a few minutes later he had been presented to the other members of the sight-seeing party; had taken Mrs. Van Bryck's warm fat hand of welcome and Dosia's cool one, and was successfully getting himself contradicted at every other breath by the florid-faced old campaigner, who, having been a major of engineers, was contentiously critical of young civilians who had taken their B.S. degree otherwhere than at West Point.

III

THE REVERIE OF A BACHELOR

It was shortly after midnight when the "Overland Flyer" made its unscheduled stop behind a freight train which was blocking the track at the blind siding at Coyote. Always a light sleeper, Ballard was aroused by the jar and grind of the sudden brake-clipping; and after lying awake and listening for some time, he got up and dressed and went forward to see what had happened.

The accident was a box-car derailment, caused by a broken truck, and the men of both train crews were at work trying to get the disabled car back upon the steel and the track-blocking train out of the "Flyer's" way.

Inasmuch as such problems were acutely in his line, Ballard thought of offering to help; but since there seemed to be no special need, he sat down on the edge of the ditch-cutting to look on.

The night was picture fine; starlit, and with the silent wideness of the great upland plain to give it immensity. The wind, which for the first hundred miles of the westward flight had whistled shrilly in the car ventilators, was now lulled to a whispering zephyr, pungent with the subtle soil essence of the gra.s.s-land spring.

Ballard found a cigar and smoked it absently. His eyes followed the toilings of the train crews prying and heaving under the derailed car, with the yellow torch flares to pick them out; but his thoughts were far afield, with his dinner-table companion to beckon them.

"Companion" was the word which fitted her better than any other. Ballard had found few men, and still fewer women, completely companionable. Some one has said that comradeship is the true test of affinity; and the Kentuckian remembered with a keen appreciation of the truth of this saying a summer fortnight spent at the Herbert La.s.sleys' cottage on the North Sh.o.r.e, with Miss Craigmiles as one of his fellow-guests.

Margaret La.s.sley had been kind to him on that occasion, holding the reins of chaperonage lightly. There had been sunny afternoons on the breezy headlands, and blood-quickening mornings in Captain Tinkham's schooner-rigged whale-boat, when the white horses were racing across the outer reef and the water was too rough to tempt the other members of the house-party.

He had monopolised Elsa Craigmiles crudely during those two weeks, glorying in her beauty, in her bright mind, in her triumphant physical fitness. He remembered how st.u.r.dily their comradeship had grown during the uninterrupted fortnight. He had told her all there was to tell about himself, and in return she had alternately mocked him and pretended to confide in him; the confidences touching such sentimental pa.s.sages as the devotion of the Toms, the d.i.c.ks, and the Harrys of her college years.

Since he had sometimes wished to be sentimental on his own account, Ballard had been a little impatient under these frivolous appeals for sympathy. But there is a certain tonic for growing love even in such bucketings of cold water as the loved one may administer in telling the tale of the predecessor. It is a cold heart, masculine, that will not find warmth in anything short of the ice of indifference; and whatever her faults, Miss Elsa was never indifferent. Ballard recalled how he had groaned under the jesting confidences. Also, he remembered that he had never dared to repel them, choosing rather to clasp the thorns than to relinquish the rose.

From the sentimental journey past to the present stage of the same was but a step; but the present situation was rather perplexingly befogged.

Why had Elsa Craigmiles changed her mind so suddenly about spending the summer in Europe? What could have induced her to subst.i.tute a summer in Colorado, travelling under Mrs. Van Bryck's wing?

The answer to the queryings summed itself up, for the Kentuckian, in a name--the name of a man and a playwright. He held Mr. Lester Wingfield responsible for the changed plans, and was irritably resentful. In the after-dinner visit with the sight-seeing party in the Pullman there had been straws to indicate the compa.s.s-point of the wind. Elsa deferred to Wingfield, as the other women did; only in her case Ballard was sure it meant more. And the playwright, between his posings as a literary oracle, a.s.sumed a quiet air of proprietorship in Miss Craigmiles that was maddening.

Ballard recalled this, sitting upon the edge of the ditch-cutting in the heart of the fragrant night, and figuratively punched Mr. Wingfield's head. Fate had been unkind to him, throwing him thus under the wheels of the opportune when the missing of a single train by either the sight-seers or himself would have spared him.

Taking that view of the matter, there was grim comfort in the thought that the mangling could not be greatly prolonged. The two orbits coinciding for the moment would shortly go apart again; doubtless upon the morning's arrival in Denver. It was well. Heretofore he had been asked to sympathise only in a subjective sense. With another lover corporeally present and answering to his name, the torture would become objective--and blankly unendurable.

Notwithstanding, he found himself looking forward with keen desire to one more meeting with the beloved tormentor--to a table exchange of thoughts and speech at the dining-car breakfast which he masterfully resolved not all the playmakers in a mumming world should forestall or interrupt.

This determination was shaping itself in the Kentuckian's brain when, after many futile backings and slack-takings, the ditched car was finally induced to climb the frogs and to drop successfully upon the rails. When the obstructing freight began to move, Ballard flung away the stump of his cigar and climbed the steps of the first open vestibule on the "Flyer," making his way to the rear between the sleeping emigrants in the day-coaches.

Being by this time hopelessly wakeful, he filled his pipe and sought the smoking-compartment of the sleeping-car. It was a measure of his abstraction that he did not remark the unfamiliarity of the place; all other reminders failing, he should have realised that the fat negro porter working his way perspiringly with brush and polish paste through a long line of shoes was not the man to whom he had given his suit-cases in the Council Bluffs terminal.

But thinking pointedly of Elsa Craigmiles, and of the joy of sharing another meal with her in spite of the Lester Wingfields, he saw nothing, noted nothing; and the reverie, now frankly traversing the field of sentiment, ran on unbroken until he became vaguely aware that the train had stopped and started again, and that during the pause there had been sundry clankings and jerkings betokening the cutting off of a car.

A hasty question fired at the fat porter cleared the atmosphere of doubt.

"What station was that we just pa.s.sed?"

"Short Line Junction, sah; whah we leaves the Denver cyar--yes, sah."

"What? Isn't this the Denver car?"

"No, indeed, sah. Dish yer cyar goes on th'oo to Ogden; yes, sah."

Ballard leaned back again and chuckled in ironic self-derision. He was not without a saving sense of humour. What with midnight prowlings and sentimental reveries he had managed to sever himself most abruptly and effectually from his car, from his hand-baggage, from the prefigured breakfast, with Miss Elsa for his _vis-a-vis_; and, what was of vastly greater importance, from the chance of a day-long business conference with President Pelham!

"Gardiner, old man, you are a true prophet; it isn't in me to think girl and to play the great game at one and the same moment," he said, flinging a word to the a.s.sistant professor of geology across the distance abysses; and the fat porter said: "Sah?"

"I was just asking what time I shall reach Denver, going in by way of the main line and Cheyenne," said Ballard, with cheerful mendacity.

"Erbout six o'clock in the evenin', sah; yes, sah. Huccome you to get lef', Cap'n Boss?"

"I didn't get left; it was the Denver sleeper that got left," laughed the Kentuckian. After which he refilled his pipe, wrote a telegram to Mr. Pelham, and one to the Pullman conductor about his hand-baggage, and resigned himself to the inevitable, hoping that the chapter of accidents had done its utmost.

Unhappily, it had not, as the day forthcoming amply proved. Reaching Cheyenne at late breakfast-time, Ballard found that the Denver train over the connecting line waited for the "Overland" from the West; also, that on this day of all days, the "Overland" was an hour behind her schedule. Hence there was haste-making extraordinary at the end of the Boston-Denver flight. When the delayed Cheyenne train clattered in over the switches, it was an hour past dark. President Pelham was waiting with his automobile to whisk the new chief off to a hurried dinner-table conference at the Brown Palace; and what few explanations and instructions Ballard got were sandwiched between the _consomme au gratin_ and the dessert.

Two items of information were grateful. The Fitzpatrick Brothers, favourably known to Ballard, were the contractors on the work; and Loudon Bromley, who had been his friend and loyal understudy in the technical school, was still the a.s.sistant engineer, doing his best to push the construction in the absence of a superior.